Been with Tana now for just shy of a week and it was until last night when my brain could finally grasp the concept of not having files. Nodes, nodes, nodes.
It worried me so much that I had a hard time inputting anything into it in fear I would lose it or something goofy like that.
The concept of Supertags (despite all I’ve read prior to having access) was not a hurdle but a mountain I had to train for, pack properly for, and approach with great patience to detail in order to make any sense of it all.
You’re either about the bullet-point life or you’re not. If you can’t get behind the idea of bullet-points, Tana is going to be a rough, rocky road for you. When I left Dynalist back in the day, I had a really hard time with regular text editors again. My first six months of Daily Notes in Obsidian are all bullet-points. Dynalist had this feature where you could “zoom in” to a bullet point and make it appear as if it was its own file.
Now it is the opposite, and I recognize a lot people consider tinkering around with their data in Obsidian to be a hassle but with almost two years of utilizing non-Vault breaking plugins to help get the jobs done easier to me it all comes naturally. Highlighting text in one of my Daily Notes and sending it off to live in another file is something that can be done without lifting my hands off the keyboard.
There is a lot of keyboard excellency in Tana, but adjusting the workspace and moving things around seems to lean on the mouse quite a bit. I could be completely wrong with some of these assumptions because we’re on Linux and keyboard shortcuts never work the way they do for the rest of the world. So a lot of the nicest shortcuts in Tana I don’t really have an ability to perform because of that. It makes things slightly annoying as a Black Belt Keyboard Cowboy.
The idea of my data in a place that I will never see with my own two eyes will be a forever problem for me. As much as I depend on my Obsidian Vault, the need for me to access it from my phone is very minimal. My Vault is more of a functioning Commonplace book, so anything that may need to be referenced out in the wild, I more than likely have somewhere in Drafts or Apple Notes or my Telegram Saved Messages (that click to copy code blocks 🤘). It’s very worrisome to think about my data not being in files that I could put on a thumb drive or make a zip file and email to myself. Yes, you can download your data from Tana as a Jason file, but even with a few days of test data, my downloaded file was a LOT of data that I’m not sure will have much use in any other app.
Having said that, the power of Tana is absolutely out of this world. Once I started toying with Supertags and started tagging multiple things together and then starting making “Live Queries”, the power under the hood was getting hard to conceal. Things I’ve tried tirelessly to do in Notion came with a quick execution in Tana. Bouncing around between the different views really turns things on its head as well.
There isn’t enough data of mine in Tana yet to make proper use out of the filtering and sorting options of the live queries, but the video with Maggie Appleton shows how in-depth that can get.
If I had to speculate on how much Tana is going to cost, I might be in the minority here, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s almost double the price of Roam. If it rivals the cost of Roam, I’m not sure how interested I would be in continuing my usage. The only thing I can see happening is over a long enough timeline finding this thing I’m able to do in Tana that would make doing it in other places seem non-sensical. I use Notion for work, and it’s nothing all that complicated, and these things I could download apps for on the App Store, but there’s always that sense of “I made this myself” thing that gets PKM people all fired up. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
The template system behind Supertags is absolutely mind blowing. I made a template for #day tag which assigns itself to everyday on your calendar. Doing so really helped me grasp the concept behind Supertags.
That word everyone was talking about Twitter a month or two ago is now something I find myself looking into more: Ontologies.
The single most useful line of advice received about Supertags came by way of an email from one of the very helpful onboarding emails from Tana. They said:
A good way to check if a supertag is right, is thinking “is a” when adding the tag:
- John Doe (is a) #person
- Acme Inc. (is a) #client
- Order new tires (is a) #Todo
- This (is a) #meeting
Very guilty of firing from the hip regarding using tags. I realized how bad I am about this when after only three days of using Tana my schema page was already scrollable. Monday morning I went in and deleted every piece of information and started fresh with the newly attained knowledge I had learned. Things are working out much easier now.
The way you can make a change in Tana in a single place and have it change globally across all the nodes is something that makes complicated matters quick and easy. I’m about 500 Pokémon in out of 900, building a Pokedex in Obsidian. For about a half hour, I entered this information into Tana and the rate at which I could input data and get everything organized was truly impressive. When it comes to doing intensive stuff in Tana, it doesn’t have to “think about it” the same way Notion sometimes does.
It is very easy to see how a person could set themselves up with a very nice Task Management system within Tana. The combination of Supertags, the reminder system and it’s command palette make for a powerful combination. For someone who might be in an office all day or near devices with screens for a majority of a day, Tana poses great threat to those peoples favorite apps. I’m immune to this threat, as proud Todoist blood flows thru my veins. I’m always open to trying new things and completely re-working the system, but Task Management is a domain uncontested with Todoist for me.
This might appear odd to someone not fully embraced by the love of music, but I’m always listening to music online and often will take notes of particular songs that stick out to me. This leads me to having entire directories of screenshots that I dump into Google Keep and use its OCR technology to pull the text off the images. Then I would dump these into Obsidian and search these songs out to add them to playlists or purchase on Bandcamp. As a test, I’ve turned to Tana to take over this burden. The screenshots I take are tiny, typically just big enough to get the text of the artist and track title. Instead of letting them pile up in my screenshot directory, I’ve been putting them directly into Tana and Supertagging them. This supertag (Music Heart on Internet Radio) has a template that provides with fields for things like:
- Artist
- Track Name
- URL (YouTube)
- URL 2 (Bandcamp)
- Notes
So what it looks like in the real world is me dropping a screenshot in Tana, tagging it and that’s it. When I feel like it’s time go thru them, I not only have all these collected screenshots served back to me with a live query but I can also make use of the work I put in while finding the songs. This would prove beneficial to me in the event I wanted to share a song with someone who doesn’t mess with Bandcamp or have any interest in listening to SomaFM (weird, I know!) This data piles up rather quickly (I’ve taken five in the last two hours) so I look forward to seeing how the execution plays out.
It’s been less than a week so it’s still too early to make any hard judgements. I can make some rather bold statement that will remain true about Tana living under the same roof as Obsidian. As sure as night turns to day, Obsidian’s safety and well-being will never be called into question when faced with having to co-exist with Tana. Obsidian has a very big purple heart and loves to engage with anyone. I’m not sure Tana feels the same way, but again it’s too early. ■
EDIT Also keep in mind that there is a high probability that something happens immediately after this post goes up that makes me fall in love with Tana. It is why I committed myself by slapping “Part 1” on the post title. Obligations to keep this journey updated for anyone paying attention.