Smarkerapp — How readers capture, tag and retrieve | smarkerapp.com
The tagging workflow in detail: how many labels to keep, when to tag on the spot versus later, and how to avoid minting a second word for a tag you already have.
The question this page answers is narrower than it looks: not how to tag, but how to tag so the label you pick today is the label you search for next month. The failure mode has a name — the near-duplicate tag — and a cause: a flat label list that grew past the 10-12 entries working memory can juggle, per Miller's 1956 estimate of 7 ± 2 items.
Start with eight to ten labels, not fifty. Write each as a single lowercase word, one idea per label. A small list feels underpowered for the first week; by the second month it is the reason a search returns one tidy set of highlights instead of three overlapping ones.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Tag on the spot only when the label already exists. Typing the first three letters and picking from autocomplete takes five to ten seconds and guarantees you reuse the existing word. When no label fits, do not invent one mid-session — leave the highlight untagged and let the monthly audit decide whether the theme deserves a new label at all.
The audit is where new labels are born and duplicates die. Once a month, fifteen to twenty minutes: sort the export by tag, merge pairs that mean the same thing, and only then add a label for a theme that appeared repeatedly. Merging two labels in one sitting is a one-minute job; discovering the split across six months of exports is an afternoon.
Two neighbouring pages carry the rest of the load. The storage and formats page explains why the export is what makes this audit possible, and the highlighting-versus-recall page explains which few highlights deserve to become question notes instead of mere tags.
Further reading