Emoji Tags in Workflow

I love the Workflow app. It’s simply the most powerful automation tool on iOS. Workflow, along with Working Copy and 1Writer, are what keeps my blog going. But there is a small problem. When you have a ton of workflows, finding them can be a chore. That’s where Emoji Tags come in.

Emoji Tags

What are Emoji Tags, you ask? Well, they’re a thing I made up to get my crap organized. The Workflow app doesn’t support folders or tagging, so I started tagging things using Emoji. They’re quick, descriptive, and only one unicode character. Pretty efficient, if you ask me.

My System

I have a few emoji tags in my system.

• 🖊 The pen emoji tags all of my blog related workflows
• 📷 The camera emoji tags all of my image related workflows
• ⭐️ The star emoji tags all my Markdown workflows
• 🏋 The weightlifter tags my fitness stuff

There are more I’m working on, but these are the big ones. So how does it work?

Well, I just add an emoji to the end of a Workflow name. I can add multiple emoji if I want. For instance, I have several that have 🖊 and 📷 in the name. These are image workflows I use on my blog. This, in my opinion, is way better than folders. I can multi-tag workflows so they show up in different areas.

In Use

As you can see from the screenshots above, I use the widget to start a lot of things. By tagging my workflows with emoji I can use another workflow to give me a list of the workflows that belong to a tag group. This is done by just using the “Get My Workflows” action and limiting the results to those with a matching emoji.

Get the Workflow for Markdown here

It’s pretty slick in practice, and you can copy that workflow and just replace the emoji in the “if” statement to get a list matching that Emoji Tag.