I'm looking for some note taking software with multidimensional tagging

March 3, 2023 11:37 AM

I'm looking for some software that will help my ADHD brain keep track of notes from meetings. I'm sure the software must exist, but I can't find it or even the search terms to find it.

Imagine a physical book for a moment. And a load of those coloured flags that stick out the side.

If I have a meeting about a site redesign with Bert, I can put a red flag on the top of the page for redesign and a green one for Bert.

Then, if I have a team meeting where I have notes on ten subjects, I can put a red tag on the side of the page where the redesign is mentioned, and a green one where Bert's appraisal is mentioned.

That's fine with a physical notepad. But what I would like is to be able to tell a system "give me everything about Bert, and have it present me with the documents with the top tag, and the lines from other documents with the side tag.

At the moment I'm using vscode with folders doing the job of the top tag, and then the todotree extension to spot keywords. It works, but I'm effectively limited to each document only having one top tab, and each line only having one side tab.

I'm really hoping this analogy makes sense.

Windows or web based preferably.

posted by sodium lights the horizon to Technology (8 answers total)

Obsidian does some of what you suggest, especially multi-dimensional tagging in which you can make diagrams or lists. Here is an article about it.
posted by zachxman at 11:41 AM on March 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

That link just goes to the Obisidian home page.
posted by mecran01 at 11:58 AM on March 3, 2023

It looks like you can do this with Microsoft OneNote (here's one article) if you follow the instructions to create your own custom tags
posted by TimHare at 12:07 PM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

You can tag documents in MacOS.
posted by oceanjesse at 1:16 PM on March 3, 2023

Just to clarify on the obsidian link: you can add multiple tags to a document and then reference back their relationships in a graph view and also there are automatic back links (so that other documents you link get links back to the linker-document). There are lots of plugins to make further use of these document-connections.
posted by zachxman at 3:01 PM on March 3, 2023

At work I use Dovetail, a web application designed for people who conduct user research interviews, customer feedback sessions, etc, and need to draw patterns out of them. It allows pretty robust tagging and various metadata things that you might like.
posted by dreamyshade at 1:08 PM on March 4, 2023

Response by poster: These all look like great tools, but (unless I'm missing something) they don't have the line-tagging options I was hoping for.

I'll dig in to obsidian some more though as there's so many plugins something might do what I want.

Thank you all!
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 11:04 AM on March 6, 2023

It looks like you might be able to do that with Notion. Their example is more hierarchical than yours but with the parent/subordinate designations, you might be able to do it.
posted by dawkins_7 at 1:01 PM on March 6, 2023