New Year, New Beginnings in Tana (2024)
🪞 The beginning of December was for Annual Reviews: reflecting on the year that was, the good and not-so-good, the surprises and the challenges, and the highlights of grace and gratitude.
🔭 With only a few days remaining in 2023, it is a great time to take a moment to look ahead and calibrate our personal operating systems as we enter 2024. And lucky for you, we have collected so many ways to help you get started, whether it is in Tana, in life, or both!
🎯 We have an incredibly talented community of Tana Ambassadors, Navigators, power users and patient teachers who have lots of tips and guidance to share. The first section covers great practices for starting the new year strong and with conviction. Dig in for tips on setting goals, improving on systems and processes, and setups for consistent habit tracking and reviews.
🌱 The new year is also a time to try new things, so for anyone who is giving Tana a try in the new year, the second section is a collection of resources for you who is just starting out in Tana. Enjoy a mix of learning the fundamentals and reading how others started building their systems from scratch.
🗺️ Annual planning in Tana
Still unsure about how to plan for the new year, what system to implement, how to set yourself up for success in the future? This collection of articles, guides, and templates from our talented Tana community members give you a sampling of what is possible. Some are focused on implementations in Tana specifically, others are more general in nature. Scroll further to take a deep dive into the knowledge and experiences of our Tana community and start mapping out a successful and productive year ahead.
🧑🚀 Maciej's Annual Roles Reminder
Inspired by RJ Nestor's presentation during our Annual Review/Tana Team AMA event on orienting your life around roles, Maciej Smoła set out to integrate this into his Tana system with a very simple but powerful setup that consists of a supertag and a field (yes, that's it!), and using contextual nodes for capturing the highlights every day.
This setup is compact enough that it can fit into any existing system, so it's just a matter of implementing and being consistent!
For more on Maciej's Roles Reminder, install the template and read the instructions.
Install the Tana Template (link opens Tana)
🏛️ Kamara's PPV system in Tana
Kamara Simpson has been using PPV - Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults, an integrated productivity system by August Bradley - in Tana for a year now and has finally released a video on how she set this up in Tana! PPV is very suitable for implementing in Tana, which she showcases in her instructional video.
She was also inspired by RJ's presentation and had adjusted her PPV to accommodate for Roles in her life as well. She demonstrates how easy it is to make this change in Tana, to suit her personal needs and preferences.
The video comes with a Tana Template, linked in the description of the video.
Link to Kamara Simpson's video on Youtube
P.S. If you are curious about PPV and whether it might fit in your life, we encourage you to watch Bradley's video on this, where he explains everything. While he primarily uses Notion for PPV, the principles can be implemented wherever you have relational databases (at a minimum) or a knowledge graph (like Tana).
🧭 Renée's New Year Planning in Tana
Renée De Four has written a wonderful piece on her annual planning process this year, where she intentionally decided to take a kinder route with herself, one that prioritizes substance over style, momentum over vanity streaks, progress over perfection - and is much more flexible to boot.
She walks us through the high-level categories of Vision, Values and Personal Philosophy, all the way down to her daily habit-tracking methods. Plus, she includes her review process (where she stops doing this one thing to be more effective at them) and Time Capsule, which is her bank of memories - everything in Tana.
Her dashboard where all of this lives is called 2024 Compass, and is pinned to her sidebar for easy access.
Link to Renee de Four's article on Medium
🧠² Fis' 2024 Intentional Planning in Tana
As an official BASB Facilitator in Cohort 17 and holding a Master degree in Information Science, Fis Fraga knows a thing or two about the theory and practice of implementing Second Brains and PKMs.
Fis is here with a gem of an article to impress upon you the importance of planning and how it can relate to your Second Brain. You will learn 1. why he doesn't like SMART goals, 2. why a Plan is not a blueprint, but rather a commitment, and 3. a set of 4 simple questions that is at the foundation of his Intentional Planning process.
On top of this, he shows the power of integrating your intentions and your implementation with screenshots of his Tana setup to inspire you to build your own.
Link to Fis Fraga's newsletter article
🔮 Ev's Yearly Planning Rituals 2024
For someone who used to hate yearly planning, Ev Chapman has created a beautiful ritual for herself that, similar to Fis' approach, focuses on intentions rather than goals.
By planning around her intentions, she is able to stay more motivated and focused on the right things. This approach allows her to be more granular in her goal setting that spans weeks and months rather than a whole year, so she can easily pivot goals to adjust without being misaligned with her intentions.
She outlines 5 specific practices that help her set a powerful intention for how she wants to show up throughout the year. They are fun exercises, simple to do, and a great way to spend an afternoon completing in a cozy cafe. And they guide all of her activities, goals, habits & how she shows up on a daily basis.
👩🏫 Monica's Master Classroom: Reflections & Roadmap 2023
Dr. Monica Rysavy, COO of Forte Labs, twice Doctorate, current law school student and Tana power user (what does she not do) is leading an immersive course designed to convert your past year's insights into a dynamic plan for the future. This community-supported online program is designed for knowledge workers, educators, and students who want to supercharge their approach to digital information and productivity through a blend of self-reflection and strategic planning.
Step into this journey with Monica and transform into an adept knowledge warrior, armed with the insights and systematic methodologies necessary to effectively review your 2023 experiences and confidently prepare for a successful 2024.
🤖 Andrea's Mastering Yearly Planning in Tana
Andrea (Tana Nodes) makes annual planning look like a breeze in Tana. Using Calendar nodes as his backbone for planning different intervals (for more on that, read his piece on the power of Calendar nodes in the next section) he's able to easily set his resolutions, goals, milestones and habits to specific time periods, be it the year, a month, or even a quarter.
On top of this, he uses AI to calculate and tell him whether he's on track or not.
BONUS: Andrea is hosting a workshop on December 29, 2023 called AI-powered habit tracker build-along! To attend, check out the link below.
💎 Theo's Gain Clarity in your PKM Practice for the New Year
Theo Køppen has been very popular in the community with his SN(A)CK System for doing Zettelkasten work out-of-the-box in Tana. For the new year he is sharing a 3-step build-along in Tana that will enable you to quickly reflect on your PKM practice, build a view of the top connections in your graph, and get clarity about your interests.
It's a wonderful practice if you do zettelkasten-type or LYT-style work in your notes.
Also: this is his inaugural post on his brand new Substack! If you like his work, be sure to like and subscribe to support the new content creators in our community 🫶
Link to Theo's full article on Substack
🎬 Get started in Tana
Want to try Tana as your main driver in the new year? Here are a list of resources that cover different facets of Tana fundamentals and quick ways to get started. Some have shared big resource documents, others have created quick start guides based on what worked for them.
💌 Dee's guide: I got a Tana invite, now what?
Dee Todd has been a pillar in the Tana Community since she joined, and continues to lead many community efforts to share her knowledge about Tana through her work on the publicly-available Tana Community Resource Hub, and her in-depth newsletter Tana Deconstructed.
With her most recent piece, I got a Tana invite, now what?, I'm sure she's reading every new Tana user's mind. Her article is targeted at the Tana novice, gathering a plethora of content sorted by feature and showing both official and community-made resources in one place. An invaluable resource for anyone starting out in Tana and who wants to learn more from a breadth of sources.
Link to Dee's extensive resource
🗓️ Andrea's guide: Unlocking the power of calendar nodes in Tana
The calendar nodes in Tana recently got an upgrade, and Andrea (creator of Tana Nodes) immediately saw the value of this and pounced at adjusting all his supertags to make use of this change.
He showcased his Year in Review dashboard during our Annual Review/Tana Team AMA event, highlighting the power of searches in calendar nodes. This was further elaborated in a Tana Jam event where he provided a detailed walk-through of his system, demonstrating its simplicity.
In this article, he has written down the principles of how to implement this powerful chronological summarization in Tana, explaining how it works and making it easy for anyone to copy his setup and make their own.
🧵 Andre's Tana 101 threads
When he's not being a CTO and heads down creating advanced workflows in Tana using AI, APIs and automations for himself, Andre Foeken is sharing his talents with the wider community through his Youtube, X and LinkedIn channels.
But for this season, he's returning back to basics and has written up several pieces on how to get started in Tana, a Tana 101 if you may, based on his lessons learned and having converted many people around him to use Tana just by being an inspiring user himself.
He goes through his thought process step by step, like as if you're starting with a blank Tana account and he's walking you through how he built his core systems and habits within Tana - node by node, tag by tag.
He has graciously converted his treads to a single Tana Publish Page so all this wisdom can be enjoyed in one go.
🎢 Have fun with it, and don't forget to enjoy the ride!
This rich offering is a true gift from the community, to the community.
Thanks to all the contributors who made this resource possible! In the spirit of the new year, we hope you embrace the new with enthusiasm and determination, and aspire to make this year the best one yet.
—The Tana Team
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