File your tasks once, then never again

Categories are useful right up to the moment they become a chore. You add a task, then pick a category. Twenty times a week, forever. Miss a few and the report has a hole in it.

So most people stop picking, and end up with a report that is one enormous slice called Other.

A rule you write once beats a decision you make twenty times a week.

Teach a category its words

On the Categories page, every category has a row of keywords. Type a word, press Enter. Paste several separated by commas and you get one chip each.

• Health — gym, yoga, physio, run
• Meetings — standup, sync, review, 1:1
• Learning — course, study, read, notes

Now type a task as normal:

“Morning gym session at 7 am for 45 mins”

It files itself under Health. You did not choose. You taught it once, weeks ago.

The rules it follows

• Whole words only. “meet” never claims “meeting the deadline”. A word buried inside another word is almost never what you meant.
• The longest keyword wins. If a category asked for “standup review” and another asked for “review”, the longer rule takes it. It is the one you thought harder about.
• Anything you say on the day beats it. Picking a category, using a #tag, or starting the line with Category Work - all outrank a keyword. A standing rule should never argue with a decision you just made.

Start with the ones you type most

You do not need a keyword for everything. Look at a week of your own tasks and you will find four or five words that keep coming back. Those five will file most of your week.

Adding twenty guesses is worse than adding five real ones, because a rule that fires on the wrong thing is harder to notice than no rule at all.

You can see it before it happens

When you paste a list of twenty tasks, each line shows where it will land before you press the button. in Health, in Meetings, or nothing at all.

Anything with no category is counted as Other on your report rather than quietly left out. A big Other is a hint about which keyword to add next.