Set up tags and segments that still make sense in two years

Tagging fails the same way for almost everyone: it starts enthusiastically and ends as a sprawl of forty tags, half of them used once, none of them trusted. The root cause is tagging on impulse - creating a new tag in the moment for whatever feels relevant that day - so the system grows faster than your memory of what each tag means. Six months later you have "important", "vip", and "key" tags that all mean roughly the same thing, plus a dozen project tags for projects that ended. A tag system only stays useful if it's small, stable, and built on dimensions that don't change every week.

The trick to durable tags is choosing dimensions that are still true in two years. The most stable is how you know someone - work, university, family, a specific community, a particular city. These almost never change; you'll always have met someone through a given context. Contrast that with fleeting dimensions - "currently helping me with X", "interested in the new product", "warm lead" - which are true for a few weeks and then quietly wrong forever. Build your tag set from the stable dimensions and use the conversation log or life events for the fleeting state. A tag should answer a question you'll still be asking in two years, like "who do I know in Berlin" or "who's from my old company".

The instinct is that more tags means more findability. The opposite is true: fewer tags used consistently are far more useful than many tags used once. A tag only helps if you trust that it's applied everywhere it should be - and you can only maintain that trust across a small set. A practical ceiling for a personal network is somewhere around ten to fifteen tags. When you're tempted to add a new one, first check whether an existing tag already covers it; "college" and "university" don't need to coexist. The discipline isn't in creating tags - it's in resisting the create button and reusing what you have.

A segment is just a saved view - the answer to a question you ask repeatedly, like "work contacts in Berlin I haven't spoken to this year". Segments earn their keep when they combine a stable tag with a live signal: the tag tells the tool who counts, the overdue status tells it who needs attention. That's where tagging pays off - not as decoration, but as the filter that turns your whole network into a short, actionable list for a specific moment. The thing a segment is not for is broadcast. The moment you find yourself building a segment to message everyone in it the same thing, you've drifted from a personal relationship tool into a marketing list, and the warmth goes with it. Segments are for finding the right few people to reach out to individually, not for blasting a group.

Even a good tag system drifts over time - a tag stops being used, two tags converge in meaning, a project tag outlives its project. The maintenance habit that keeps it healthy is a short quarterly review: scan the tag list, merge any that have come to mean the same thing, and retire the ones nothing is filed under anymore. Fifteen minutes every few months keeps the set small and trusted indefinitely. Contact Book keeps tags as a flat, reusable set you can filter and combine into saved views, and because it surfaces overdues against any filter, your stable tags plus the live cadence give you exactly the actionable segments that matter - without the set ever sprawling into a junk drawer you stop trusting.