Tags are the broadest of the facets, too. Sometimes called labels as well, they are really for anything about a task that doesn’t have its own dedicated field, and once you get going you’ll find plenty of uses for them. There are a lot of tags you might eventually want, and we’ll get into the fuller range later. For now we’re going to focus on one use, because it has the clearest immediate payoff: tagging what a task requires of you. These kinds of tags are about where or what you need access to in order to work on the task such as your computer, a phone, being at the store, being at your desk, etc. It’s about whether you can physically do it right now, where you are, with what you’ve got. “Register for next semester” needs a computer. “Pick up milk” needs you to be out running errands. “Call the dentist” needs a phone.

The power shows up when you filter by a tag. Picture yourself at a coffee shop with nothing but your laptop and an hour to kill. You don’t want to see “clean gutters”, you can’t do it from here. You want to see only the tasks you can do: the computer ones. Filter to the computer tag and your list collapses to only what’s possible right now, still ordered by which of those matters most. That combination, “only what I can do here, and among those, what matters most”, is the thing that makes a task system feel less like a static list and more like an assistant.

In a spreadsheet, you can accomplish this with an extra column and a filter, and for tasks with a single context it works well enough. But tasks often have more than one, “Schedule dentist appointment” is a phone task and a business-hours task, and the moment a task needs two or three tags at once, spreadsheet columns get ugly fast. I’ve built it. I made it work. But it was a nightmare and broke all the time. So here’s the honest tradeoff: in your spreadsheet version you can have tags, but keep them simple, one per task, and know that the richer this gets, the more the spreadsheet fights you. Even in a plain paper system, it’s worth jotting down whatever tags seem to apply. When you’re reviewing your task list to decide what to work on, a tag lets you see at a glance which ones you can actually do where you are and which you can’t, instead of working that out from scratch on every pass. The full version of this, many tags per task, filtered instantly, and the results still ranked by what matters most, is exactly the kind of thing a spreadsheet can’t do but a purpose-built tool does without breaking a sweat. It’s the clearest line yet between what you can build by hand and where a real system takes over. We’ll get there in Part 6.