I’ve long since had a love affair with tags and tag indexes. Today I’d like to narrow things down and talk about using tag indexes to easily access “contexts within contexts”… and announce that fate and fortune have favored all of WorkFlowydom – by giving us a way to automate the creation of these tag indexes: rawbytz has just come out – deus ex machina – with his TagIndex bookmarklet. I suggested the name IndexFlowy… but hey, it’s not my brainchild.
Contexts within contexts
Last year I wrote a post on how I used WorkFlowy to help with the behind-the-scenes of moving apartments.
I needed to draw up a mega list of most of my possessions and organize them into discrete contexts that I could act upon. I wanted to do this systematically, room by room – yet also be able to easily view that same list according to specific categories, such as the things that I wanted to throw out, the things I needed to disassemble, donate, measure, etc.
I created my main parent list… and under that, a tag index of all the actions I had to take:
Next, a separate list for each room:
With my iPhone in hand it took just a wee bit over an hour to whiz through the apartment, room by room, and complete my list – most of the action decisions being made on the spot. I used iOS’ dictation to speak my list out item by item in WorkFlowy, including the hashtag (#) command when creating tags. Here’s a portion of my “Classroom” list:
Now with a full inventory of tagged items, I could then go ahead and hit any of the tags in my tag index and filter for like tags dispersed across my sublists. In so doing, I was able to batch my tasks and focus on like tasks one at a time… and still have them listed by room:
You can drill down to more specifics if you give your items more than one tag and then subsequently filter by 2 or more of those tags:
Oh the power of having a simple tag index!
A WorkFlowy blog tag index
There are relatively few tag “categories” in the tag index pictured above, so the setup is not that much of a headache. You’ll also notice that the tags are not in any particular order. But how about a significantly larger tag index? I dunno… how about this one:
That right there is an alphabetized tag index of topics from all the WorkFlowy blog posts since day one. You can take a look at it right here.
I put together a really smart workflow to create that tag index. Originally, it took quite a bit of elbow grease to set up. Recently I decided to update that outline… and take rawbytz’s TagIndex bookmarklet for a spin. You know how long it took to recreate an updated tag index from scratch? … The time it took for me to click on the TagIndex bookmarklet.
Rawbytz’s TagIndex bookmarklet
- Follow this link and set up your bookmarklet (drag and drop).
- Zoom into whatever context you want to gather all tags from.
- Hit the TagIndex Bookmarklet.
- Copy the string of tags generated in your WorkFlowy search box and paste them into a note (or a list) just below a zoomed-in parent list.
- The TagIndex bookmarklet will grab all tags from a zoomed-in list’s outline – even from those children lists that are collapsed.
- The TagIndex bookmarklet is also designed to grab only visible tags once you’ve already initiated a search… so, for example, if you’re already filtering for all tags that are prefixed with “#2016-09-”, the bookmarklet will only grab those. That way you get to be more selective.
- You can change the “|” delimiter (separator) to anything you want. I went with “::”.
- As it says on rawbytz’s TagIndex bookmarklet page: “For instructions: Create an empty bullet in WorkFlowy, zoom on it, and click the bookmarklet.”
You can follow rawbytz on twitter and give him some love for the dozens of WorkFlowy tools he’s created that have boosted our workflows significantly.
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