Tags
A tag in Tareea isn't a word typed into a document. It's a named idea that lives at the workspace level, independent of any note, task, or project.
Why tags usually fail
Folders make sense — they mirror physical space, everything has a home, the structure is predictable. But a folder has one fatal constraint: something can only live in one place at a time. Tags are supposed to solve that. In practice, most tag systems slowly collapse. You create them with good intentions and months later you have forty of them, half overlapping, a quarter meaningless. The problem isn't the idea of tags — it's that most tools give you the feature without solving for what makes it fail.
Reified, not denormalized
Your notes and tasks simply point to a tag — the tag exists on its own. Rename it once and it updates everywhere instantly, without touching your notes. Merge two tags that drifted too close together in one action. Delete a tag cleanly.
This also matters for privacy. Tareea is end-to-end encrypted — your notes are sealed. A tag system that lived inside the text of your notes would require unsealing every document just to change a word. Because tags live outside that sealed layer, your organization and your privacy work together.
One-way inheritance
When a thought in a note becomes a task, the task inherits the note's tags automatically. This only flows one direction — tags move from note to task, not backwards. If you mark a task #urgent, that urgency belongs to the task. It doesn't reach back and stamp #urgent onto the note it came from, or onto every other task the note generated.
If you unlink a task from its note, its inherited tags no longer flow from that source. The task stays in its Folio — home doesn't disappear when context changes.
Folios vs. tags
| Folio | Tag |
|---|---|
| Where something belongs | What something is about |
| One per item | Many per item |
| Has color, structural | No color, associative |
See the full Folios page for how the two systems work as a pair.
Finding threads across your workspace
Because each note lives in one Folio, projects stay clean and contained. But thinking doesn't always respect project boundaries. Search by tag and Tareea pulls everything connected to that thread together, across every Folio at once, without moving anything or breaking any structure.
The Connection Map responds too
Select a tag and the Connection Map responds in sync with the note list. Matching nodes stay vivid. Everything else recedes quietly. The map and the list are always showing the same picture at the same time.
What's not in tags
There are three things you can do with a tag: rename it, merge it, or delete it. No colors, no icons, no descriptions, no nested hierarchies, no favorites.
Every additional capability is an invitation to turn a tag into something it isn't. The moment a tag looks like a container, people start using it as one — and two organizational systems that blur into each other is worse than one clear system.