Tana is a total game-changer. I’ve been one of the many participants in Tana’s closed beta and have been an avid user for around 18 months. I have never used anything before that so perfectly fits the description “tool for thought”. I truly believe that it represents a new paradigm in how we create, use, and retrieve information.
Tana’s novelty is not immediately apparent because it adopts a great many familiar UI elements: an outliner, daily journals, calendars. But underneath the hood Tana is an innovative and user-friendly graph database. Everything is a node in a graph, and Tana can represent relationships between nodes in multiple ways. Nodes can be displayed as lists, tables, cards grouped into columns, or as items on a calendar.
Crucial to understanding how Tana works are two things: (1) supertags and fields; and (2) live queries.
The fundamental thing to grasp is that Tana’s supertags are not tags, or they’re not intended to be anyway. Tana won’t stop you from using them like normal tags, but you won’t really understand the power of Tana if you do. Supertags represent types of entities, very much like a class in object-oriented programming. If you find yourself creating a supertag which is a proper noun (the name of a single thing), or an adjective (a property of a thing), then you are almost certainly doing it wrong. Effectively, when you create a new supertag you are creating a new database table: an entire table. A node with that supertag is a row of that table.
One supertag can extend another (like inheritance in OOP), or indeed more than one (multiple-inheritance), and a node can have more than one supertag.
The fields of a supertag are the columns of the table. Field values can be other nodes, representing a relationship between two nodes. A field can be defined in such a way that its value is always a node with a particular supertag, thereby representing a relation between tables.
Of course, because Tana is also an outliner, simple relationships can be represented hierarchically. Simple relationships between arbitrary parts of the graph are possible by referencing another node. Fields allow for named relationships with semantic features. This unlocks extraordinary possibilities for knowledge representation. And, because dates constitute a special type of node in Tana, it also excels as a productivity tool, allowing one to plan, schedule, and manage tasks, projects, meetings, and other events.
This does require that users learn some new habits, and un-learn workflows from other applications. You could just tag something “urgent” like one would with normal tags, and just reference other nodes in a node name, but if you adjust to using fields to represent properties and relationships instead you unlock the extraordinary power of Tana’s live queries (search nodes). These update live as you work, and can be embedded as part of the default content of a supertag template. The query builder contains a very large number of search operators housed in an elegant and user-friendly UI allowing you to construct queries with complex logic. The possibilities these allow for are endless, from showing what’s due today (or overdue), to showing all other nodes related to the same things the current node is, or all the tasks for a project, or all previous discussions with the attendees of a meeting, etc.
Most database applications require that users adopt an architectural mindset, deciding in advance in a top-down fashion how to structure their work. But Tana allows users to build bottom-up, imposing structure as they go and only as it is needed. I cannot begin to describe how liberating this is.
Is Tana difficult to learn? No, I really don't think so. As I said at the beginning, Tana is a new paradigm. Once you grasp the fundamental concepts a lot of other things fall into place rather naturally. I’m often reminded of how VisiCalc must have seemed when it first appeared. We all take spreadsheets completely for granted now, but when they first came on the scene they were revolutionary. I do not doubt that some computer users at the time struggled to “get” how to use them — there is nothing inherently complex about using a spreadsheet but it was an unfamiliar paradigm. Having been involved in the closed beta programme, I’ve witnessed something similar with new users of Tana. There is sometimes some initial confusion closely followed by a “lightbulb moment”. Once that happens users are more likely to marvel at how user-friendly Tana is whilst simultaneously being so incredibly powerful.
And there is so much more. I wanted to explain as best I could how the core features of Tana make for something truly distinctive, but I haven’t even touched on its many other features. Like command nodes which allow you to automate actions and which can triggered by user events. Or how AI is deeply integrated into Tana at many different levels. Or the revolutionary work they are doing with voice input in the mobile application. There really is so much to love in this extraordinary application, and this is just the beginning.
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