I am trying to piece together a very tangled tale of corporate greed, theft, unethical behavior, and lawyers gone wild. A mind map of the misdeeds would test Escher’s sanity.
Turning off “exclude groups from tagging” seems to be making the whole incestuous mess a lot easier to sort out. I don’t think I’ve used that feature much because it seemed messy. In this case, it’s working nicely and acting like back-linking.
The idea is that every person, place, thing, or event has a group even if at the moment there’s only one note I want to create, or even if there are no notes I want to write. A person who is a member of an organization gets tagged with the organization’s enclosing group. Mentions in the note for things in other notes get tagged with the other note, mentions of groups or people get those tags applied to the note.
Groups containing nothing but groups can be individually excluded from tagging. That keeps the tag lists shorter if I want groups for People, Places, and Events, for example.
If I add a container group’s tag to another container group, for instance tagging the Wile E. Coyote group with Acme, then Wile E. appears as a subgroup under Acme.
When I write a note about something I tag it with every tag that matters, and, it’s true. The navigation pane with all the groups and member documents replicated willy-nilly looks hopeless, but it’s actually so hopeless it makes sense.
Between “Reveal tag” on any particular tag and the option to open a group in a separate window on double-click it’s pretty easy to fly through the notes despite the cousins-marrying-cousins complexity of the corporate family trees.
No matter how I navigate to a note, I can edit it and the updates are everywhere. It’s either a single instance of a note or it’s automatically a replicant.
If I wrote a book about this, not likely but nice to dream about, I would create tags for chapter 1, chapter 2, etc., and tag the notes and groups with the chapter I wanted them to appear in. Set the sort order to “unsorted” so documents and groups can be rearranged, both in the conventional groups and in the tags area.
Organization by connections, solved, organization for linear story-telling accomplished in the same file. Cool.
As a rule, I don’t like to include groups for tagging. In this case, it’s how Escher meets his match.