Articles/Organising

Folders, tags or nothing: how to organise what you save

Updated 13 October 2026. 2 minute read.

Anyone who saves things has tried to organise them, and most people have tried more than once. Folders, then tags, then a new app with both. Each system works for about a month. The reason is not a lack of discipline. It is that organising costs effort at the moment of saving, which is exactly when you have none to spare.

Folders

A folder answers one question: where does this go? That is fine when the answer is obvious. It breaks down when a thing belongs in two places. An article about the tax rules for a home office is both "Taxes" and "Home". You pick one, and six months later you look in the other.

Folders also invite depth. Home / Renovation / Kitchen / Appliances feels thorough and guarantees that you will never click that far.

Good for: a small number of clear, stable areas of your life.

Tags

Tags fix the two-places problem. One item can be "taxes" and "home" at once. They create a different problem: you have to remember your own vocabulary. Was it "recipe" or "recipes"? "diy" or "home-improvement"? A tag system slowly fills with near-duplicates, and a search for one misses the items filed under the other.

Tags also take the most effort per save. Typing three tags on a phone, every time, is the kind of chore people stop doing in week two.

Good for: people who enjoy the upkeep, and collections where precision matters.

Nothing at all

The third option is to save everything into one pile and rely on search. It sounds lazy and works better than expected, on one condition: search has to understand what an item is about, not only what it is called. Without that, a pile is a pile.

What is actually enough

For most people the answer is a little structure and a lot of search:

• A handful of broad categories. Eight is plenty. Recipes, Work, Travel, Home, Reading. If you need to think about which one, they are too narrow.
• Filing that happens by itself. The moment of saving should cost nothing.
• Search that reads content. This carries most of the weight.

This is how Stashy is built. Categories are tiles in the Library. When you save something, it is read on your device and filed into one of the categories you already keep. When something genuinely fits nowhere, Stashy suggests a new one. You can rename categories, change their emoji, or leave them alone. Search then looks through titles, summaries and hidden keywords across all of them.

How to tell your system is too heavy

• You hesitate before saving because you would have to file it.
• You have a category called "Misc" or "To sort" with more in it than any other.
• You cannot remember the last time you found something by browsing a folder.

If any of these is true, delete structure. Merge categories until each one is obvious. See also why saved things rarely get reread.