Tags

Tags are Finalist's highlighters. Give a task a tag and a compact colored chip appears with its other details, making the tag easy to read without competing with the task itself. A small set of colors you actually remember beats an elaborate system: maybe "quick" for under-5-minute tasks, "deep" for focused work, "errands" for out-of-the-house stops. Five to seven tags is plenty.

Creating tags

Open the Tags sheet from the main app menu. Its first page lists every tag you have, each with a line saying where it currently sits (open tasks, notes, habits, whatever it is attached to), and a field at the bottom for adding another. Tap Reorder to drag them into the order you want, which carries into every tag list in the app. You don't have to plan ahead, though. Every tags menu ends with New Tag..., so you can invent a tag the moment you need it. It applies right away with a color picked for you (a fresh one each time, so your first several tags come out in different families), and you can change that later.

A tag's own page

Tap a tag to open it on its own page. The name is editable in place, and under it is the ink box: twenty named colors in four families (warm, green, cool, and the quiet pinks and neutrals), chosen to hold up both as a small mark and as the wash under a tagged task, in light and dark alike, and spaced far enough apart that no two tags read as the same color. If none of them is the color you had in mind, the well at the bottom of the box opens the full color picker and the tag keeps whatever you mix. Under the colors, Show Tag in Lens decides whether the tag appears in Lens and in Daily's Tags section; turning it off leaves the tag on everything it's attached to. Below that is a full read of where the tag has ended up: open and completed tasks, notes, journal entries, habits, calendar events, reminders, and any tasks or files in connected markdown folders carrying the matching hashtag. A tag that feeds a Score goal shows its point value and the weekly targets it counts toward, and the last few things you tagged are listed at the bottom. Deleting a tag from this page takes the tag off everything it was on. The tasks, notes, and habits themselves stay where they are.

Time spent on a tag

The tag's page keeps a running read of how much time went to it, over the past 7, 30, 90, or 365 days (30 by default, and the window you pick sticks). Pick Custom range instead and two date fields appear, so you can total up a particular fortnight, a month that already ended, or the run of a project. The headline is the total, and under it is where the minutes came from. A small chart below lays those minutes out across the window, one bar per day in the tag's color, so you can see when the time actually happened; longer windows total the bars up by week or by month.

What counts is anything carrying the tag that has both a length and a finish:

• Tasks you've completed that had a length on the timeline, or that you penciled a block for in Plan My Day.
• Habits with a duration set, once for every day you completed them.
• Calendar events that have ended. All-day events are left out, since they mark a day rather than measure work.
• Reminders you've completed, but only where you penciled a block on the reminder's due day. A reminder carries no length of its own, so one you never sized doesn't count.
• Tasks in connected markdown files, on the same penciled-block rule.

Nothing else is estimated or guessed. A completed task with no length at all contributes nothing, which is the honest answer rather than a made-up one.

What can be tagged

Everything on your day, each through its long-press menu:

• Tasks: long-press a task and open Tags, or tap the tag icon in the task editor.
• Habits: the same long-press menu, or the Tags row in the habit editor. The tag belongs to the habit itself, so it shows the color on every day the habit appears.
• Notes: long-press a note in any list, or use the Tag pill in the note editor.
• Journal entries: through the entry's editor.
• Reminders and calendar events: these live outside Finalist, so the tag is stored on Finalist's side (and synced with everything else); the reminder or event itself is never touched. Tagging a recurring event tags the whole series.
• Tasks in connected markdown files: matched by name. A task carrying #meal-prep in the file counts as your "Meal Prep" tag (spaces read as hyphens), and toggling a tag in Finalist writes or removes the #tag on that line, so the file stays the source of truth. Hashtags that don't match one of your tags stay ordinary text.

Where tags show up

On the Daily page, tagged tasks and habits show compact tag chips beside their time, list, and other details. Turn on Highlight tagged tasks in Settings if you also prefer the original full-row brushstroke. The Broadsheet design speaks its own dialect: tagged rows underline the title in the tag's ink, and a tagged journal letter inks its drop cap. Notes show their tag colors in note lists next to the date, and journal entries list theirs beneath the entry.

The Tags section: focus the day on one color

Your day can carry a Tags section (off to begin with; turn it on and place it in Customize, like any section). It only appears on days where something tagged is still open, and a tag leaves it once everything carrying it is done (a tag you're focused on stays until you tap it off). Daybook shows the day's tags as chips with an open/total count; Broadsheet prints them as a small legend with dotted leaders, like a map key.

Tap a tag to focus the day on it: everything not carrying that tag is hidden, so the page reads as just that color's plan. Tap the same tag again to bring the whole day back. The same tags sit in a row in Lens, so you can focus even with the Tags section turned off. A focus stays on as you flip between days and carries over to the Planner, and the Lens ring fills with the tag's color while it's on, so a thinner page always shows why.

A tag's own swimlanes

Long-press a tag in the Tags section and choose Show Swimlanes to see everything carrying that tag laid out over time: its tasks, reminders, events, and matched markdown tasks. Wherever the task timeline appears, grouping by tag draws each lane in the tag's real color, in your Tags-sheet order.

Tags and habits: the day-of pattern

A habit repeats, but the work around it changes daily. Tag the habit once ("meal prep", green), then give today's one-off tasks the same tag ("buy onions"). They share a color on the page, the Tags section counts them together, and focusing the tag shows the habit and its day's errands as one plan, without touching the habit itself.

Browsing by tag

The Lists tab gathers your tags into a tappable cloud, and you can pin a tag to the sidebar as its own tab. Search can narrow to a tag, too.

Related: Lists · Your Daily Page · Habits