Name it, don't tag it

A couple of people I've shown Haumm to asked the same thing almost right away: where are the tags? Fair question. Every notes app has them. And both times my first reaction was, man, we don't need tags in a journal anymore.

It's not that I don't care about finding things. I've kept a journal for fifteen years. Back in 2024 I was in a really heavy writing stretch, more than 200,000 words across 308 entries that year alone, and at some point I remember thinking, man, I've been writing for so long and I don't even know where it all went.

So capturing things matters to me. A few years ago, tags would've been the answer. But there's a whole new world out there now, with AI that can do that part for us.

The problem with journal tags is the setup

Tags ask you to make a decision before you've even finished the thought. Is this "travel" or "Colombia" or "someday"? Do I already have a tag for that, or did I call it something else last March?

And if you've ever used some of the other apps out there (I won't name any), you know it doesn't stop at tags. There are a million things to set up: templates, databases, folders inside folders, little properties on every page. I can't count how many times I've built one of those systems from scratch. Every time, it broke. I'd skip a few weeks, or change what a word meant to me, and the whole thing quietly stopped being worth anything, because by then I'd changed.

It's a hard thing to admit, but part of it was me. The entrepreneur in me, the OCD in me, the ADHD in me, the controlling part of me: they all want to name and track everything, and those apps feed that. Before long I wasn't writing anymore. I was running a filing system. In my humble opinion, that's what made journaling feel heavy for a lot of people.

Write it out, figure out the rest later

Where I've found the most liberty is in just writing. Sit down, get it all out of my system, and let myself process and metabolize whatever's in there. The sorting can wait.

If I spend all my time setting up systems, I never get to the really good part, which is working through my inner world. That's what a journal is for. Everything else should get out of the way.

Name things the way you'd say them

When something is worth finding later, I don't file it. I just call it what it is, right there in the entry.

Places to visit: Ciudad Perdida

That's it. No menu, no little colored chip. Next month it might be "places I want to go: Oaxaca" or "trip ideas — the Big Bend loop." It doesn't matter that I didn't write it the same way twice.

Same with lists. I'll write "Grocery list" and put the oats and coffee under it. Or "Home Depot run" with whatever I need for the sink. Or I'll lay out a decision as "Stay or go" with pros and cons underneath. A name at the top of a line is enough of a handle to grab it later.

People have kept notebooks this way forever. You wrote a word at the top of the page and underlined it. What's different now is what can read it back to you.

Let search and AI do the pulling

There are two ways I get things back out.

Search is the simple one. If I'm consistent-ish (I usually say "places to visit"), I type it in and every entry with those words shows up, with its date.

When I'm not consistent, which is most of the time, that's where AI earns its keep. I connect Claude to my journal and ask something like, "pull every place I've said I want to visit." It doesn't care that I wrote "places to visit" once, "trip ideas" another time, and "I really want to see Cartagena someday" in the middle of a long entry about something else. It gets the idea, and it comes back with the list and the date I wrote each one.

That part still kind of blows my mind. Connecting ideas across years was the whole promise of tags, and AI just does it after the fact, without you planning for it. You could literally ask it to build you a tagging system from your whole journal. You just don't have to keep one up yourself.

A few naming habits that help

None of these are rules. They're just what's worked for me.

• Name first, then a colon. "Places to visit: Ciudad Perdida" is easy for you and a search box to spot.
• Use your own words. If it's your "someday list," call it that. Nobody else has to get it.
• Close enough is close enough. You don't have to match last time.
• Title an entry when it's about one thing. A title like "Notes on the kitchen build" stands out among a hundred untitled days.
• Name your entries, if you want. Mine are all called Field Notes.
• Bookmark the ones you'll come back to. That's a second handle that costs one tap.

People are fluid

A journal should bend around you, not the other way around. Life doesn't come pre-sorted. Some weeks are grocery lists and to-dos. Some weeks are a three-page entry about something you're still figuring out.

And we change: our minds, our words, what matters to us, sometimes week to week. For a long time, keeping track of a life meant building systems rigid enough to hold all of that, then bending yourself to fit them just to say what you wanted to say. A system that makes you decide what everything is before you write it is asking the wrong question at the wrong time.

AI flips that. You can show up as you are, write the way you think, and let it support you in the background, through the writing and through whatever stretch of life you're in. It doesn't write for you. It just helps you find your way back through what you wrote.

That's how Haumm works. Every entry has its date, search finds any word you wrote, and if you connect Claude, it can follow a thread across years for you. No filing, before or after you write.

So write first. Call things what they are. Sort it out later, when you actually need to.

See how finding things works →

— Kit