Much of the writing I do these days has tags but not much in the way of categories. There are a few very broad categories that things can go into, but not much in the way of narrow ones, and the world of tags means that you can always think up one more new tag to apply rather than revisiting an old one.
In some ways I miss the regular reinforcement obtained by the reminders that I've written on items in a category previously in the past. This blog has a "garlic mustard" tag, which signals that I should write about that at least once a year; without that reminder, somehow I might miss that opportunity to refresh that annual recipe opportunity. The category list is long, but finite, and it's idiosyncratic to reflect some peculiar sense of evolved focus.
Tags are much harder, especially in a world of tags shared across a team. There are enough variant spellings and punctuation in an 8000 unit tag cloud to make it tough to see which of those tags are most useful. Perhaps I can carve out 20 or 30 to make my own, items to revisit repeatedly, but the system as a system does not constrain me as such.
It's very useful to have a bucket that can be usefully refilled periodically. At the cycle of once per year, the cumulative knowledge of paczki rituals or cudighi recipes makes each successive year easier. Monthly rituals leave room to breathe between attempts, and weekly cycles build up a substantial body of work in just a year.
In many ways this is the mindless mindfulness approach to sustained productivity; don't decide what of 1000s of things you might do, simply have one picked for you and then go at it with a strict deadline to get you to where you need to go until the next time. The effort can be impromptu and doesn't require much explicit preparation, since you've primed the pump with previous work.
