What is naming categories?

Example: You manage a task list with hundreds of items. Some are urgent. Some are important but not urgent. Some are neither. You've never written down what 'urgent' means to you — you just feel it. One week, a client email feels urgent. The next week, an identical email doesn't. The inconsistency isn't a mood problem — it's a classification problem. You're sorting by implicit categories that shift with your emotional state. The moment you write down 'urgent = requires response within 4 hours or a commitment is broken,' the category becomes stable, debatable, and improvable. You can now ask: is that threshold right? Should it be 2 hours? 24 hours? You couldn't ask that question before because the category didn't exist as an object.

This concept is part of Classification and Typing in the How to Think curriculum.