Organize & Categorize

After you've added items, you may want to categorize them with tags and attributes or organize them using lists. This can make a world of difference when looking for your next action.


Add or delete item tags and attributes

Assigning tags and attributes to your items is a great way to clarify and organize your stuff. Here’s how to add details such as these:

Assign tags and attributes


Good to know: Reference items and project actions inherit the tags of the project or reference list itself. You can add tags and attributes to project actions or reference items individually. However, if you want to delete an inherited tag from the item, you’ll need to remove it from the project or reference list itself.

Manage your tags

You can add, delete, and modify your tags easily in Nirvana.

Good to know: The free version allows you 2 area tags and the Pro version allows you an unlimited amount.

Add contacts to tasks

Contacts can be managed and added to items in the same way as other tags, but there are 2 differences:

  • They can be added to your tasks as “waiting for” contacts or as regular tags.
  • In the web app, you can associate your contact with an email address.

Add contacts like regular tags

When you assign a contact to an item as a tag, the item stays in its original list. You’re just adding the contact for organization purposes. If any action is going to take place, it’s your move.

Add “waiting for” contacts:

When you change an action’s state to Waiting, you’ll be asked to associate a contact with the task. This is the person who needs to do something. By looking in the Waiting list, you can see which tasks are pending and with whom you should follow up.

Create reference lists

If your items are not really actions, you’ll want to put them in a reference list. To create one, you can:

Give the reference list a name and add any relevant tags.

Add items to the reference list

  • You can create reference items by clicking New Item or tapping the from within the reference list or with keyboard shortcut N .
  • You can also move items from one reference list to the another.

Use tags with reference lists

As with project actions, reference items inherit the tags of the reference list itself. You can also add tags to reference items individually. However, if you want to delete an inherited tag from the item, you’ll need to remove it from the reference list itself.

Convert items

Nirvana allows you to convert an item into an action, project, reference list, or reference item. Here’s how:


Good to know: Converting an item with action-related attributes, such as a task or a project, to a non-actionable item, like a reference list or item, will remove the action-related attributes.

Move items to other lists

Depending on whether you’re using the mobile or web app, there are several ways that you can move an item to a new action list, project, or reference list.

Change multiple items at once with lasso

Using the web app, you can batch-edit several items at once. Here’s how:

Select the items to change

  • Click to the top-left of the first task you want to edit.
  • Hold the mouse and drag until you’ve selected the last task you want to edit.
  • You’ll notice that the dots on the left side of the selected tasks will be highlighted in grey.
  • Press and hold CTRL or COMMAND to add another group of items to the selection.

Edit the selected items

  • Change the state or parent list by dragging your items to an another action list, project, or reference list.
  • You can also right-click the items and select the desired tags, time, energy, due date, or action state from the context menu.
You can see the total time at the top of the context menu and modify multiple items.

See the total estimated time

Lasso multiple items, right-click, and you’ll see the total amount of time to complete the selected items.