Workspaces

Last updated: October 29, 2024

Overview

A workspace in Tana is a space where you have control over who has access, what is contained within it, and what is allowed to show up in other workspaces. You can have workspaces that are completely separate from other workspaces, or they can exist in near parallel with your private workspace such as an archive of highlights. They can exist for your own personal use, or they can be used for collaborative efforts with other Tana users.

Basics

• Everything you create in Tana is in a workspace: The workspace is a node with settings such as a list of its members, avatar, move targets, separate daily notes, library, trash, and workspace publish settings.
• Everyone has a private workspace: all nodes that live here can only be seen by you and no one else.
• Other workspaces can be places where big projects and collaborative efforts happen: Workspaces allow you to create separation between efforts that require their own space and schema in Tana.
• See your workspaces in the sidebar: Workspaces have a separate section in the sidebar. You can also manage workspaces there and you can reorder the list as you like.
• Add members to collaborate: Workspaces have rudimentary collaboration tools like adding members to a workspace, seeing the edit history is (time and user), and being able to notify users within a workspace of a node.
• Workspaces can be published as read-only: This allows any Tana user with a HTML link to a node in this workspaces top open and view it.

Details

General workspace features and options

Workspace nodes

All workspaces come with the following nodes of their own:

• Home
• Daily notes*
• Schema
• Library
• Settings
• Trash

—Home node

The home node is the first node of every workspace. It's the place you end up when you click on any of the workspaces in the sidebar, or if you click on the avatar of your workspace in the breadcrumbs.

Curious to know how others organize their home nodes? Check out the Home node showcase showing different entries from the community!

—Daily notes

Your private workspace has Daily notes created by default. New workspaces you create have the option to activate Daily notes.

You can navigate to your private daily notes by:

• Going to Today in the sidebar
• Using the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+D

See Create daily notes on how to set them up in new workspaces.

—Schema

The schema node is the place Tana will store any supertags and fields that are created ad-hoc, or sent to be "discoverable". It's a bit of a legacy node at this point, and the conventions for how to use this are currently in flux.

To go to the schema node:

• Option 1: On the home node, go to the node options (ellipsis ⋯ button) > Open Schema
• Option 2: Run the command Open schema

—Library

The library node is used for nodes that don't have a "place", either under the Home node or the Calendar nodes. Also, nodes are created in the Library if they're made inline using @-mention and they don't exist yet.

To go to the library node:

• Option 1: On the home node, go to the node options (ellipsis ⋯ button) > Open Library
• Option 2: Run the command Open library

—Settings

Each workspace has settings of their own.

To go to the workspace settings:

• Option 1: On the home node, go to the node options (the ellipsis ⋯ button) > Open settings
• Option 2: Run the command line Open settings

—Trash

Each workspace has its own trash.

To go to the trash of the workspace:

• Option 1: On the home node, go to the node options (ellipsis ⋯ button) > Open Trash
• Option 2: Run the command Open trash (deleted)

Allow content from...

This controls which adjacent workspaces can populate the results of search nodes and autocomplete actions like @-mentions within a particular workspace context. This setting can be custom set from all workspaces. Examples:

• You can set it so all content from every workspace you're a member of is available to you from within your private workspace by allowing content from everything there.
• You can keep Workspace A completely isolated from retrieving anything from other workspaces you're a member of by unchecking everything there, while allowing Workspace B to find things from Workspace A still.

Export workspace as JSON

Each workspace can be exported in JSON format. To export the JSON of a workspace:

• On the home node, go to the node options (ellipsis ⋯ button) > Export workspace as JSON. It will immediately prompt you to enter a name for the file and will proceed to download if you accept.

This is a raw JSON export of your workspace. For technical reasons, there is currently no way for users to import these files back into Tana again. They can be used by our engineers to restore a workspace if need be, but our servers also take frequent backups of all workspaces so even if you don't download a JSON of your workspace and think that data has gone missing that used to be there, we can look at backups to find it again.

Your private workspace

Your private workspace is also called your "root" workspace. All settings and many user-related features are tied to this workspace, such as Inbox, Quick Add, your timezone, keyboard shortcuts and much more.

If you look at the Workspaces section in your sidebar, you can always see your private workspace at the top. This is your workspace, and content that lives here cannot be accessed by anyone else, even if you leave references to your private content on shared workspaces.

Settings in your private workspace

The settings in your private workspace are a mix of workspace and global user settings. Usually they contain the following:

• Journaling: For managing the tags applied to your journal/calendar nodes
• Date/time settings: To save your default timezone, time format and first day of the week preferences
• Private keyboard shortcuts: If you have made a custom keyboard shortcut, they will appear here
• Preferences: Global user settings are located here
• Move targets: A legacy setting. If you have set move targets, they will appear here.

There are other settings that might appear here for Tana Core users, or for experimental purposes.

Multiple workspaces

You can create additional workspaces, and they will appear underneath your private workspace.

Creating a new workspace

To create a workspace:

• Option 1: In the sidebar, go to Manage workspaces and click on Create workspace.
• Option 2: On any node, use the command Convert to workspace. All nodes that are owned by this node will be associated with this new workspace.

There are some considerations to keep in mind when working with multiple workspaces:

Create daily notes

New workspaces come without the default daily notes. You can create them by

• Option 1: from your private day node. Go to Switch workspace and select the new workspace to navigate there. By virtue of having navigated there, Tana will create the necessary structure for the daily notes to exist in that workspace.
• Option 2: command line. On the workspace title, run the command Set up calendar for workspace

Then, you may want to create a new default day tag. On a day node, press the ellipsis ⋯ button > Create default day tag

Schema setup

You just created a new workspace and now you want to use the same #task tag from your private workspace in this new shared environment. First let's talk about what not to do:

Why is it not simple to move supertags over from one workspace to another? When you create new supertags and fields, there are many hidden dependencies that get created in the background. This links them to the current workspace context. It's very hard and time-consuming to ferret them all out by deleting them or bringing them to live within the container of the supertag/field. In most cases it is easier and faster to recreate the supertags and fields in the new workspace.

If you really want to try to move an existing supertag, read this FAQ for some guidance.

Date/Time settings (timezones)

A new workspace will be set to the timezone of the user that created the workspace. This means that if other members are added that are in other timezones, the way the dates and times appear to them will be adjusted based on their local timezone.

Example: If a workspace is set to an APAC timezone, 5pm EST will still appear as "Today" in AMER timezones even though it is technically "Tomorrow" in APAC time.

Workspace limitations

Currently you can only use Input API on a workspace that has less than 500k nodes. See this for more. While the Input API won't work on this workspace, you can still continue entering content into the workspace using the keyboard, AI or live transcription.

Merging two workspaces

There is no simple way of doing this. The work is basically to manually move nodes from one workspace to another, and then leaving/deleting the one you don't want anymore.

Deleting a workspace

Your private workspace: You are not able to delete your main private workspace. You can, however, swap your old private workspace with a new one, and then you can delete it like a regular workspace. To do this:

• Create a new workspace, and in the title of the workspace, run the command Set [workspace name] as new root workspace

Any default tags and setups you had in your old workspace will not be brought over to the new workspace.

The old workspace can still be accessed via the sidebar.

Other/shared workspaces: You can delete a workspace by being the last person to leave it. It becomes completely unavailable, nobody has access to the encrypted data and it is queued for deletion.

Working collaboratively in a workspace

Workspace membership

You can invite members to a workspace you create:

• Go to the workspace home, then click on the "members" in the top right. You can invite another Tana user here.

Node access and visibility across workspaces

Everyone who is a member of a workspace can access the nodes that are owned by that workspace. This also applies if the reference appears in a different workspace that you also are a member of.

For example: let's say your company has a company workspace for all staff, and one for management only. If a manager copies meeting notes from the management workspace into her standup in the company workspace:

• Managers will be able to see it because they are members of the management workspace. Meanwhile,
• Staff will only see an alias of the node. They can't open or interact with it because it is owned by a workspace that they're not a member of.

In summary, whether a user can see a node depends on 1. where the node lives, and 2. if the user is a member of that workspace. Anything that lives inside your private workspace can never be referenced to anyone else.

How nodes flow from private to shared workspaces

This is how most of the Tana team collaborates in Tana:

1. For a fluid work experience, we make sure that our private workspace has Allow content from... the team workspace we work collaboratively in. This means that all content from the team workspace is available to be referenced from within our private workspace.
2. We use supertags from the team workspace to draft nodes in private. On your Today page, start with the supertag (like, your team's task/meeting/bug/standup tag) and fill what you need. When ready, select the node to bring up the node editor toolbar (it's sometimes easier to toggle selection with Esc). The first suggestion should be to Move to [workspace]:

This is the basic flow going from private to the shared workspace, and very handy for those of us who work primarily from our private spaces.. You can of course go to the shared workspace and work from there too, which means you don't need to move anything to make your work visible to your teammates.