Emoji Legends
On Domesticating Emoji & Making Them Work for You
This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.
Modern life is full of text. And text has two major problems: it’s slow, and it’s flat.
It’s slow because before you can use written information, you must decode it sequentially—word by word, sentence by sentence—so that you can reconstruct meaning as you go. And it’s flat because we’re fundamentally built to navigate 3D space, but 2D text lacks helpful spatial cues, making it harder to orient yourself or remember where things are.
Text on screens is even worse. When I picked up Harry Potter as a kid, I at least got tangible pages. The heft told me how many pages remained, and the texture gave me tactile feedback. But nowadays on my eReader? I can't riffle through pages, can't feel how much remains, can't thumb-mark important spots. What little spatial context the analog text provided vanished entirely.
We have definitely been trying to escape textual flatland. We structure written information with headings, paragraphs, bullets, and nested lists. We create indices, summarize key points, highlight them in color, and format important points in bold and italics. We even started building wikis—whole “networks” of text with bidirectional links.1
But how much have we really gained? In all of these annotations, we're essentially marking up text with more text. And while they are helpful when applied carefully, all of them are hard to search for, impossible to reuse across tools, and destined to become clutter. They are imperfect patches for the navigational traces we actually need.
Enter the emoji.
Unlike letters, which only represent sounds, emojis are more like logograms. Logograms are compact visual symbols that carry meaning independent of language. The emoji 🔥 means “fire” whether you read English, Mandarin, or Arabic. But what’s more, emojis can enrich text with emotions. Wikipedia writes:
The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation.
An emoji not only gives you more meaning per pixel, but it also adds emotional context that you can leverage. And not only that. Logograms also operate at a different perceptual level than text. Your visual system processes them quasi-instantly, without the need for sequential (word-by-word) decoding like text.2 You surely spotted the fire emoji above long before reading a single word surrounding it. And your eye may keep returning to it even now, that you have long passed it. This pre-attentive recognition of emoji becomes increasingly powerful as the text you’re navigating grows longer or denser—exactly when you need visual navigation most.
The most important advantage of logograms over traditional structuring, such as bold or highlights, is that emojis are universally available, searchable, and portable. Nowadays, emojis work identically across platforms and digital tools;3 they are increasingly becoming a universal abstraction, something we can use everywhere and anywhere in cyberspace.
Put another way, emojis survive digital context switches across your entire digital life. You can use the same emoji in a text message, a calendar entry, a file name, an entry in your mobile task manager, or a bullet point in your notes—and it works the same way everywhere. This is powerful because it enables conceptual integration across tools.
Many people, in an attempt to bridge multiple digital tools, use all kinds of technical or manual approaches to deal with fragmented information. This often involves API keys, finicky workflows, manual copy & paste, and lots of cross-app links that are begging to break. With the emoji, you can, in certain cases, skip all of this and instead rely on protocols to conceptually (mentally) integrate tools. When the visual marker 🔥 in your calendar means the same thing as a 🔥 in your task list, you can create a connection between the two across tools and platforms without any technical overhead. This is useful in both accidentally fragmented and deliberately modular productivity systems, as it simplifies and speeds up text-heavy workflows.
Hashtags, you might argue, were designed to do something similar. You can standardize them and— theoretically—use them everywhere, since they are just text. But that’s exactly their problem: they are just text—they require the same sequential decoding that slows everything down. More importantly, tag support varies wildly across platforms. Try using #tags in file names, calendar entries, or most note-taking apps. What’s more, many tagging approaches suffer from the death of inflation as they are too versatile.4
Unlike hashtags, emojis just work everywhere and don’t suffer from inflation because they are limited to a fixed set. Currently, there are roughly 1,400 base emojis available (4,000 with variants like skin tones). And there is no way for you to add new emojis to the mix. As standardized logograms, emojis aren’t as versatile as letters—you can’t write whole passages with them. And what if the concept you want to express doesn’t have an emoji?5
The point here isn't to replace text with emojis. Text is here to stay (for a very, very long time). The point is to sometimes augment text with visual markers that your eye instantly catches, rather than relying on traditional synthesis, structuring, and markup. And emojis let you do that. They let you add highly personal navigational signals to text. In my system, for instance, the fire emoji maps to “Work in Progress.” Wherever I want to explicitly contrast something as WIP from the surrounding context, I add 🔥 to it. This gives me instant visual filtering—I can spot active work at a glance, and it works across every tool I use.
The key leap here is that in your personal system, emoji meanings aren’t fixed. The popular meaning6 of an emoji—as it appears in the wild—doesn’t constrain you in your personal setup. You can domesticate emoji and interpret them however you want. For you, 🔥 can mean heat, urgency, passion, or something completely personal like chimney at my holiday home. And that’s exactly where the scale-smart power lies…
Once you explicitly define what an emoji means to you, it stops being decoration and becomes a reusable unit of meaning—a visual anchor with consistent navigational power. Define enough of these, and you've built yourself an emoji legend.
I deal with an awful lot of text every day, and I’ve been using my emoji legend for several years now to speed up navigation and reduce the need for technical integration. If I’m tracking a personal program or a long-running project across multiple tools—notes in Obsidian, task artifacts in Todoist, files on my desktop—I often pick an emoji that represents that effort and use it everywhere I need a visual anchor. In my core house renovation program, for instance, I used 🏡. When exploring a new topic, I choose an emoji to connect all related work. I mark all LLM-generated output with a 🤖, and all things I wrote in my own words are marked with 💬 to distinguish certain parts in larger texts. Progress indicators are another big use case for me. I already mentioned 🔥, but I also use 💤 for pending items and ✅ for done. I’m sure you can find many more use cases.
Here are some tips to get started on your own legend:
Start minimal. You’ll be tempted to use emojis everywhere at first—it’ll get noisy. That’s normal. Gradually, you’ll find the right density. Err on the side of fewer symbols with clearer meanings.
Keep your legend accessible. Store it somewhere you can quickly reference, especially early on. In my ±PEAKER org method, it belongs to Protocols.
Map what already exists in your head. If 🐱 already means “work in progress” to you intuitively, start there. Don’t impose arbitrary meanings—document the associations that already feel natural.
Avoid ambiguity. If you keep confusing two emojis, find better ones. A symbol that needs constant explanation isn’t working.
Speed up insertion. Learn your OS emoji picker (⌃⌘␠ on macOS). Create text expansion snippets for frequent ones (I type
!wip→ 🔥). Consider tools like Rocket or Raycast for faster access.
Emojis are one of the few truly universal elements in digital systems—they work identically everywhere without any setup. Creating an emoji legend helps you build a personal vocabulary that serves as a lightweight visual anchor map, traveling with you across every tool you use. It's a small intervention, a simple scale-smart move, with outsized navigational returns if used consistently and long-term.7
So go. Build your legend. And see those navigational gains compound over time.
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Also, if you want to dive into a whole catalogue of scale-smart tactics, operations, and strategies, check out my book Scale-Smart.
There have been, of course, attempts to supersede the medium of text completely. Most notably, with video. Videos can package a lot more information in a given amount of time than text can. But they come with their own challenges. For instance, they are hard to navigate, distill, and repurpose.
Cognitive psychology distinguishes between serial processing (reading word by word) and parallel/preattentive processing (recognizing shapes and colors). Emojis function as “pop-out” stimuli, which the visual cortex processes in roughly 200 milliseconds—far faster than the time required to read a word like “urgent.”
Introduced in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita in the late 1990s, emojis started as tiny symbols (12×12 pixels) with a very specific niche use case. It was only in the 2010s that emojis were standardized under The Unicode Standard (TUS). Many of the old cautions about using emojis in file names and similar places trace back to earlier days when Unicode support was newer, and software bugs were more common. Today, those issues are not impossible, but they are much rarer. And I’d argue you can safely make use of emoji now wherever they are officially supported.
When I was writing Scale-Smart, I, for whatever reason, neglected my own approach, which I will share with you today, and tagged all my book efforts with the shorthand “fps” (fractal productivity system). I did this simply because it was mentally visible. Often, opting for mental visibility is super useful. However, in my case, combined with tagging, it didn’t go so well. I ended up with “fps” tag in most places, but there were also occurrences of “FPS,” “fps-book,” and similar variants across my system. In retrospect, I should have used an emoji like 📚 instead to reduce a whole category of potential spelling & variation errors.
People always request more and new emojis, some of which are more useful than others. It’s a fun exercise to browse this curated catalog of formally rejected emoji proposals.
Wikipedia states:
The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system.
One last thing: LLMs may unlock new uses for emoji legends. As AI agents increasingly search through our notes and files, emojis could serve as anchors that help retrieval systems surface the most relevant information. A RAG system scanning your notes for “work in progress” items would instantly recognize 🔥 across thousands of documents. This use case is speculative, but the foundation you build now—a consistent emoji vocabulary—would compound in value as these tools mature.