My Pocket Tags

The Art of Tagging


Tech | Useful

After six years of auditioning apps for clipping articles, Pocket has emerged as the cleanest tool for my use cases. It's not feature laden like Evernote. It's not sharp like Flipboard. It's a bit awkward, kinda web 1.95-ish. And it does the one thing I really can't do without: help me tag my finds. Other apps can do it, but I get lost in their promise of annotating and building fabulous presentations.

Bah. I like the promise, but so far the workflows have eluded me. I'm still practicing the rudiments. So Pocket it is.

My tags are intentionally simplified. They sometimes miss the mark. I try to stick with my choices and trust my own architecture.

A new wrinkle has emerged: tag combinations give a sense of which way articles fall. For instance, Sustainability plus Tech = green technologies. Sustainability plus Decisions = good business. Sustainability plus Mental Health = good living bordering on spirituality.

The Tags

in Alphabetical Order
Arch Tech
Fresh insights into how we make shelter.
Arts
Illustration, graphic design, architecture, storytelling, music, performance. Fresh perspectives on our world.
Decisions
Insights on executive function.
Experience
A slight twist on mental health and marketing. Experience is the interface of the senses and our internal life.
Learning
Techniques and insights about how to learn better.
Legible Cities
Articles about large scale public tech deployments.
Marketing
Applied lessons from the world of persuasion.
Mental Health
As strange as space time and ocean floors, insights into the land of the head.
Sustainability
An attempt to rescue clarity from the mudpit of catchy SEO, environmental and management consulting blather. It specifically refers to three kinds of sustainability: 1) the traditional business term of a viable, long lasting business venture; 2) the contemporary sense of long-term ecological stability; 3) the mental health/spiritual practice of balanced living.
Tech
New school computer sciences and old school applied sciences as well. We make stuff that makes something work better: techniques and technology. Because of my practice, architectural tech - stuff for buildings - has its own tag.

Tagging challenges me to be concise, meaningful and useful.