Avoiding Filter Hell When Using Tags in Your Workflows

Avoiding Filter Hell When Using Tags in Your Workflows

ByUS Stacked

1. Why your filtered views keep hiding the wrong things

I spent fifteen minutes yelling at a Notion database because a task I’d definitely tagged wasn’t showing up anywhere. Turns out I was filtering for “Tasks” using a view copy-pasted from another page, and it had an AND rule looking for another tag I hadn’t added. No warning, no hint — just a blank screen and me second-guessing my whole memory.

Filtering logic across tools like Notion, Coda, Airtable, and even Trello gets weird when you stack ANDs and ORs in the same group. The interface usually lets you nest conditions, but it doesn’t show you *how* they’re grouped unless you click in and expand. In Notion, dragging filter conditions looks like you’re “reordering” them — but behind the scenes, it’s reorganizing logic trees.

“When two filters are on separate levels in Notion’s filter UI, it assumes OR logic between them. Group them, it becomes AND.”

That’s also why a view that works on one board can act totally differently when duplicated — it keeps structure, not live logic. Airtable’s guilty of this too. If you use a shared view published via URL and someone applies a filter on their end, it doesn’t override yours — it just layers invisible filters over existing logic. That’s not exposed visually unless you dig into the sharing config.

The trick? Before panicking, try briefly turning off all filters. If your thing shows up, filter order or grouping is messing with you — not your data.

2. Using tags without ending up with 200 slightly different ones

Trello’s tag system gives you a false sense of control. You start neatly with “Urgent,” “Blocked,” “Needs Review.” Two weeks later someone adds “Needs-review,” someone else adds “blocked,” lowercase — and you’re halfway to chaos with no autocomplete enforcement.

Airtable and Notion both do this cleaner by using single-select or multi-select fields, which act like powered tags with dropdowns. But even there, I’ve seen subtle breakage:

  • If you import data via CSV into Airtable, nothing stops it from creating duplicates for similar-looking options.
  • Notion auto-adds new tag options when pasting from spreadsheet data — no warning.
  • In Make (formerly Integromat), if you’re syncing tags via API, any mismatch defaults to creating a new tag silently unless you explicitly check values against a list.

The best workaround I’ve found? In Notion, keep a synced block on every relevant page that contains the master list of tags your team should use. When someone creates a new tag, it gets logged there first before being used anywhere. Dumb, but incredibly effective.

3. Don’t rely on Zapier filters unless you know how paths behave

Zaps with multiple paths are a trap. I built one that triggered from a Google Sheet edit and then used a Filter block to check a tag field for “High Priority.” It worked… most of the time. But some edits passed through unfiltered and triggered downstream actions even when they shouldn’t.

Why? Zapier’s Filters catch the data at the moment the Zap is triggered. Not after formatting or fallback steps. If the field isn’t already populated with the expected tag — even if it’s updated seconds later — the Zap path won’t filter properly.

{
  "trigger": {
    "Tag": null
  },
  "filter": {
    "logic": "Tag == High Priority"
  }
}

I found this by comparing execution logs side-by-side — one had the field empty, the other didn’t. Zapier doesn’t delay Zaps based on content readiness. It just runs when it runs.

You’ve basically got two choices:

  • Store the data first, then trigger the Zap from that storage (like an Airtable view that only shows complete data rows).
  • Use delays inside the Zap, but that gets sloppy fast and sometimes re-triggers unexpectedly if the source tool pushes updates again.

4. Tag-based views break when multiple fields collide in Airtable

I set up an Airtable interface with custom buttons for tag-based filtering — the idea was to let my client quickly switch between “Urgent,” “Finance,” or “Backlog” views. But every time they clicked a button, the resulting view filtered wrong, or just didn’t update at all.

This happens when multiple filters depend on different field types, but one record holds values that logically qualify for more than one. Airtable’s filter buttons can’t merge across interfaces correctly if a record spans tags that belong to two conflicting logic sets.

It behaves like a UI race condition. The visual filters highlight, but if record A has Tag 1 and Tag 2, and you filter Tag 1, only records with just Tag 1 show up. Dual-tagged records vanish, even though Tag 1 still applies.

The fix I used: Build a roll-up field that concatenates tags into a single string, then use a formula field to say something like FIND("Urgent", {Tags_String}). Doesn’t scale beautifully, but avoids the collision issue in filtered views.

5. Grouping by tag often forces alphabetical nonsense by default

Notion sorts grouped tags alphabetically. There’s no way to tell it that “High Priority” should show up first. So if you have tags like “Later,” “Maybe Soon,” “Now,” and “Urgent,” your highest priority items will show up at the bottom unless you prefix them manually.

Yes, you could rename them to “1-Urgent,” “2-Now,” etc., but this breaks any external systems relying on the raw tag name — like automations in n8n or Make.

“Coda allows manual group order on table views, but only if you manually drag the column after grouping. If you refresh, it reverts.”

I spent half an hour wondering why my view “shuffled” itself randomly. Turned out someone edited a row, and the system reloaded the default view behavior — which was, of course, alpha-order.

If visual grouping matters, you’re better off adding a priority index field or color-based flag and sorting on that. Don’t rely on tag values controlling display order unless you’ve defined the whole stack end-to-end.

6. Filter logic inside Notion templates does not inherit predictably

This burned me twice before I noticed it. I had a project page template in Notion with a linked database filtered to only show tasks assigned to “Current Project.” Looked perfect inside the template. But when I created a new page from that template — boom, no tasks.

The logic in Notion filters doesn’t always inherit where the template was created. If your filter points to a property of the parent page — like a relation back to “Project X” — it stays locked to the template version. So the new page points to “Template Default” instead of “New Project.”

The workaround: add a formula field that references the parent dynamically, then filter off that. Messy, but more reliable. Something like:

if(prop("Project").name == parent.name, true, false)

Then you can filter the view on that formula returning true. I hate that I have to do this. But otherwise you end up with views that always show the wrong tasks and confuse everyone until someone manually resets the filter.

7. Trying to filter by tag across synced databases is a gamble

If you sync a Notion database into another workspace or another page using the “Synced Database” feature, you can’t fully trust tag filtering anymore.

First issue: filters apply only to visible fields. If your Tags column isn’t shown in the synced view, you can’t filter by it at all, even though the data is there. No error — just “Field not found.”

Second issue: if the base database uses emojis or non-standard spacing in tag names (hello, “🚨 Urgent” vs “🚨 Urgent” with a double space), filtering silently fails due to value mismatch. The UI doesn’t catch this unless you check the exact spelling.

Third problem: synced views don’t auto-refresh their filters if the original tag list changes. So if you add “Blocked” as a new tag in the source database, your synced copies won’t pick it up unless you edit and re-save the filter.

Checking tag values manually led me to this log:

"Applied Filter": { "Tag": "🚨  Urgent" }
"Result": 0 records found
"Available Tags": ["🚨 Urgent"]

You cannot see the extra space unless you copy-paste into a text editor. Insane. My fix? Remove all emoji from tag identifiers, and use a second property for visuals.

8. Workarounds when filters fail silently and return empty sets

Sometimes you apply a filter and the whole view just goes blank — no error, nothing. This is one of the worst UX sins in productivity tools. Notion, Airtable, Coda, ClickUp… they all do it.

Most of the time it’s because you combined a filter on a hidden or empty field. But the platform doesn’t tell you that. So you’re left poking at dropdowns and toggling views back and forth, hoping something will pop.

In one case, I had a Coda view that showed nothing until I removed a tag filter. Turned out the tag existed, but a sync delay on the row source meant it hadn’t populated yet — the filter kicked in too early.

Useful hacks for catching bad filters quickly:

  • Temporarily flip the filter from “is” to “is not” — see what shows up.
  • Add a second view with no filters and compare row counts live.
  • Remove one filter at a time from the stack, starting from the newest.
  • Use formula fields to expose raw field values as strings — helps catch hidden characters or whitespace.
  • Paste tag names into a monospace editor to check for Unicode bugs or spacing mismatches.

For one project, I set up a debug view in Airtable that uses a rollup to expose filtered-out records from the main view. Kind of a bypass, but it helped me spot category mismatches that were otherwise invisible to the client.