How to Organize Notes in Notion with Automated Tags

Intro:The speaker introduces the topic of how they structure tags in a video tutorial.

How I Structure Tags:The speaker discusses their personal method for organizing tags in a system.

Parent/Child Relations:The speaker explains the concept of parent and child relationships in their tagging system and how it affects the organization of the tags.

Tagging Syntax:The speaker covers the syntax they use when creating and organizing tags.

Automate Drawer Tag:The speaker demonstrates how to use a formula to automatically sort and organize tags in a drawer.

Filter Drawers:The speaker shows how to create filters to quickly locate specific tags in a drawer.

Outro:The speaker concludes the video and provides any final thoughts or information.

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I want to show you how I organize my notes inside of Notion. I've been using this tagging method or this tagging strategy for a while now. It isn't exclusive to Notion, so if you don't use Notion, this video can still be of value. Honestly, I do want to not just exclusively make Notion content, but this strategy that I use is really, really useful inside of Notion, especially with sorting. My system is pretty simple. It consists of two factors: tagging and relating. When faced with a new note, my tagging and relating sort of follows this XYZ assessment: Is the note about X? If not, can it be filed in drawer Y? And what note Z is it related to?

Starting with X, this is what I call a focus tag. For example, "time management" would be under the umbrella of productivity. Productivity is the drawer Y in question. If the X tag has been used previously, the Y tag is automatically assumed. However, if a note falls only under productivity and no focus tag (and this can happen), it will only be tagged with a Y, aka a broad tag.

From here, I sort my notes within this productivity drawer. We have notes that are just about productivity templates, endnotes that are about time management, or maybe mental models or task discipline that directly relate to productivity.

Now, when it comes to the Z element, this is what I use to sort the drawers. If a note has five different relations and it is filed under productivity (just a Y tag and no other note), the next one down has four, and the next one down has two relations, the one with five will be at the front of the drawer and the one with two at the back. Now, I'll show you how I execute this and figure the sorting in Notion. So, I went ahead and created a mock-up of my notes strictly in regards to tagging. I have my note 1, the children of note 1, and the parents of note 1. If I go down to note 7, note 1 should be apparent.

Yeah, so really quickly if you're not familiar with Notion relations, the way you make this simple child-parent relation is like this: You're going to create a property called "children" and go down to relation. Make sure you choose the database that you are currently in. So this one is called "Automating tags in Notion" and I'm going to make sure it says "sync both ways" and it should populate with a parent over here.I would just rename this to "parent".Now, as for tagging, let's go into note 1 and I'm going to add a property called "tags". I do make sure that for tags I'm not using more than one, but in some instances it might be the case, but I really try to restrict myself to just one. So I create a multi-select property.Now let's say note 1, like the example, is "time management. productivity". I don't want to make this purple. All right, so I already have my focus tag and my broad tag in one place. What I'm going to do with this formula is extract this "productivity" part of this tag so I can know that this note is in the "productivity" drawer.Let me actually put "x" here and this would be instance "y". After I extract "productivity" from this tag, I want to return how many children this note has. Put it at the front of the drawer name.So let's say note 2 is just about "productivity". Make sure it's all caps and I will also make sure it's purple just for consistency.So the first instance I have is that if property "x" is empty, I want to make sure this drawer is empty. If empty property tags "x" and empty space. If not, let's say not empty to test it. These indeed are not empty. Okay, delete that real quick.And the next instance is that if in a property "x" (spell that correctly) contains a period and children is empty. So if it contains a period, that means it is an "x" tag, and if children is empty (empty property children) I want it to say "a.0" plus replace all in property "x" replace all lowercase "a" through "z" and you can do that with this matrix and replace it with an empty space.Now let's see how this works so far. The only instances we have are if children is empty, so let's empty that. It looks like it's a little bit messed up and I am going to fix that right now. Instead of replacing just "a" through "z", I'm going to replace "a" through "z" with the dot and the underscore and add a space here.Now in the next instance, if in that property contains again a period (so that means it is an "x" tag) and the length of property children is greater than zero (that means children is not empty) I want it to say "a.+".Now instead of saying "a.0" because in that other instance it said "a.0" because "a" signifies that it is an "x" tag and "0" signifies that there are no child relation. Now I want this to count the child relation, so it's going to go "a.+" give me a number to do that.

Plus, replace all in property x. Replace all lowercase a through z and you can do that with this matrix and replace it with an empty space. Now, let's see how this works so far. The only instances we have are if children is empty, so let's empty that. It looks like it's a little bit messed up, and I am going to fix that right now.

Instead of replacing just a through z, I'm going to replace a through z with the dot and the underscore and add a space here. Now, in the next instance, if in that property contains again a period, that means it is an x tag and the length of property children is greater than zero. That means children is not empty. I want it to say a dot plus.

Now, instead of saying a dot 0 because in that other instance it said a dot 0, because a signifies that it is an x tag and 0 signifies that there are no child relation. Now I want this to count the child relation, so it's going to go a dot plus and give me a number to do that. I'm going to format the length of the following formula: replace all in property children, anything that is not so using this carrot (not a). Sorry, the carrot should be inside (not a), comma. Anything that's not a comma will be replaced with an empty space plus one plus an empty space, and I'll go over this in a moment. Don't worry, plus I'm going to replace all in property x that is lowercase letters plus period plus an underscore with an empty space.

[Music]

Now we have a dot 2 because it is an x tag and two children are in this property. If I were to take away note 4, it should say a1. Take away note 2, it should say a0. If there are 3, it should say a3.

Now, how did I find the number of relations in this property? I'll show you this formula isolated over here if you're curious. Let me show you what property children looks like on its own. We have note 5, note 3, and no 14 separated by commas. So what I'm doing is saying get rid of everything in here that is not a comma. I want to be left with these two commas here and then I want to count the number of commas and then add one. The reason I'm adding one is because if I say give me the number of commas, it would say two down here it would say one. To do this, I'm going to say replace all in property children using this here: go carrot comma and replace this with an empty space.

Now we have all these commas here. Find the length of these commas. Now that's giving us how many commas there were and then what I want to do is add one, so that's giving me how many relations are in that property. Now if I want to format it into text, I would put format at the beginning and that's what you're seeing in here with format length replace all prop children: everything that is not a comma plus one.

So now we have every instance that works for an x tag. We have an instance that is 0, 1, 2, and 3 and so on. Let's do the same thing with tags just labeled with productivity. For this, I'm going to use pretty much the same arrangement.

In this video, the speaker demonstrates how to sort and filter a drawer. They want all items labeled as "productivity" to be at the front of the drawer, with the files in the back. Within the Notion productivity items, they want them to be sorted by the number of children, with the most children at the top. To do this, the speaker first sorts the drawer in descending order and then adds a condition to filter for items labeled as "productivity" that have a certain number of children. They also show how to create a filter for a different category, "diet," and demonstrate how to include a tag in the properties to ensure it is sorted correctly. Finally, they provide a link to the formula they used and a formula for counting relations.