auto-tagging without the work
february 2026
tagging is one of those things that sounds useful in theory and never happens in practice.
you tell yourself you'll tag all your notes. you do it for three days. then you stop. then you have 500 untagged notes and 12 tagged ones.
relatable? yeah.
the manual tagging trap
here's why manual tagging fails:
1. it's friction at the worst time (when you're trying to capture a thought)
2. you have to decide categories before you know if they're useful
3. you forget which tags you've already created
4. you end up with #work, #work-stuff, #job, #office all meaning the same thing
by the time tagging would be useful (finding old notes), your system is already chaos.
what if it just happened
jottie tags automatically. you write a note, it extracts useful information without you doing anything.
write "coffee with sarah about the q3 launch at blue bottle on monday" and jottie sees:
- sarah (matched to your contacts)
- q3 launch (project/topic)
- blue bottle (location, linked to maps)
- monday (resolved to the actual date)
you didn't tag anything. you just wrote naturally. the structure emerged from the content.
how it actually works
apple's natural language framework can extract entities from text. people, places, organizations, dates.
when you save a note, jottie runs this extraction locally on your device. no server, no internet needed.
for people, it checks against your contacts. so "sarah" becomes "sarah chen from work" if that's who's in your phone.
for places, it uses the maps framework. "blue bottle" becomes a real location you can tap to open in maps.
for dates, it resolves relative terms. "monday" becomes the actual date. "next week" becomes a date range.
location auto-tagging
this one's my favorite.
jottie can tag notes with where you wrote them. not the precise gps coordinates - that would be creepy - but the general location. home, work, the coffee shop, wherever.
later you can search by place. "what did i write at work this week?" "notes from the conference?" "stuff i wrote at home?"
context matters. sometimes you remember where you were more than what you wrote.
contact integration
when jottie finds a name in your note, it tries to match it to your contacts.
this is useful because you probably know multiple sarahs. the tagging links to the specific person so you can find all notes about that sarah.
it also means you can search by contact. tap someone in your contacts and see all notes that mention them.
calendar connection
jottie knows about your calendar. so when you write a note on the day of a meeting, it can suggest linking the note to that event.
this works in reverse too. look at a past calendar event and see notes from that day.
context flows both ways.
the tags you didn't know you needed
the interesting thing about auto-tagging is that it surfaces patterns you wouldn't have noticed.
oh i write a lot of notes at coffee shops. huh i mention sarah way more than i thought. weird how all my good ideas happen on thursdays.
you can't get these insights from manual tagging because you'd never tag consistently enough.
it's not perfect
i'm not gonna pretend auto-tagging catches everything. it misses stuff. it sometimes tags the wrong person. it doesn't understand context as well as you do.
but here's the thing: imperfect auto-tagging that happens 100% of the time is way more useful than perfect manual tagging that happens 10% of the time.
consistency beats accuracy when it comes to organization.
the point
you shouldn't have to think about organization. just write. the structure should emerge from the content.
that's what auto-tagging does. it turns your unstructured thoughts into searchable, connected notes without you doing any work.
finally, a tagging system that doesn't require willpower.