General tasks for all projects

Hi all,

Curious to hear other people’s workflow when you have often recurring tasks that you want to view in the reports section. For instance, my field of work is industrial automation, and my projects almost always consist of software engineering, hardware engineering, panel building, connecting, testing / start up. These are recurring tasks. I would be interested in seeing how much time per week I spend on software vs hardware engineering etc… If I add tasks to my projects then it will become nearly impossible to filter all the software task when I have a lot of projects. Therefore using tags would probably be a better idea.

What are the possible downsides of using tags instead of tasks, and does anybody have any other solutions?