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Tag lists grow without anyone deciding to. A few conventions keep yours readable, and one rule keeps it small.
The rule that keeps it small
Only create a tag that something reads. A rule, a view, or a report. A tag added because it seemed useful, that nothing acts on, is a note nobody will ever see.
Apply that once and most of the growth stops, because most tags fail it.
Conventions worth adopting
- Prefix by purpose. sla-, src-, auto-. The list sorts itself and you can see at a glance what a tag is for.
- One word separator. Hyphens or underscores, not both. Mixing them doubles your list silently.
- Lower case, always. Tags are matched exactly.
- Singular or plural, pick one. Both is how you end up with refund and refunds meaning the same thing.
- No dates or names. They stop meaning anything within a year.
Fields, not tags, for categories
The most valuable distinction. Anything you want to count belongs in a drop-down field: fixed list, no typos, clean reporting. Tags are for marking that something happened.
Accounts that categorise with tags have reporting nobody believes, and the fix is expensive because it means touching history.
Write it down
Two paragraphs in your internal help centre naming the prefixes and the rule about what earns a tag. Without that, the scheme lives in one admin's head and dissolves when they change jobs.
A useful yearly exercise. Sort your tags by usage and look at the bottom. Everything used fewer than ten times in a year is a typo, an abandoned experiment, or something that should have been a field.
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