Tana is my productivity powerhouse.
I spent six years running GTD in Todoist, then two and a half years managing notes and tasks in Roam Research. Both are solid apps, but Todoist’s structure is too prescriptive for me. And while Roam was great for emergent work and ideas, it lacked the features to capture my structure—the way I think and work—in a reusable way.
For me, Tana is the promised land. I can work bottom-up, letting action and ideas emerge organically, and I can capture what’s reusable about that work—refining and optimizing my workflows until they fit me perfectly.
I’m a productivity coach, so I’ve thought, written, and taught a lot about this process. Almost everything in productivity boils down to capture and surface: Can I get information into my system in such a way that it shows up everywhere—and every-when—I need it? Even the most complex workflows are really just interwoven combinations of small, powerful capture/surface patterns.
This is where Tana shines. Getting information into Tana is effortless (especially with its incredible voice capture), and it’s just as easy to configure it to surface exactly when and where I need it. And if I ever need that information in a new place or viewed differently? It takes maybe 30 seconds to create new “surface area” for information that’s already in my workspace.
I won’t dig into the mechanics here (though I do in my Essential Tana Skills YouTube playlist). But once you understand nodes, fields, supertags, and searches—and how they complement each other—Tana becomes surprisingly straightforward to shape into your tailor-made productivity powerhouse.
I laugh sometimes when I compare what I pay for Netflix to what Tana costs. I get 100x more value from Tana—and yet it costs less (and there’s even a free version!).
Tana isn’t just five stars for me—it’s more like 15 out of 5. It's easily the most valuable app, or tool of any type, that I've ever used. And it keeps getting better all the time! I love Tana!
![Nick [Strategic Design]](https://ph-avatars.imgix.net/3854295/original.jpeg?auto=compress&codec=mozjpeg&cs=strip&auto=format&w=48&h=48&fit=crop&frame=1)
