How do you take notes in Tana?

Tana has two main areas for note-taking: the daily scratchpad, and the wikis/dashboards.

Daily scratchpad

  • Plan your days, do braindumps, send yourself reminders - all on your daily notes. This place is the catch-all for anything that needs to be written down and recorded on a daily basis.
  • From the notes you take today, not everything is important tomorrow, let alone in the long run. For the stuff that is important, apply supertags to give it structure and importance in Tana. Using supertags is the first step to building your knowledge graph.

Wiki/dashboards

  • The best place for your knowledge-base to be is in the more permanent area of the Workspace Home. This place doesn't shift with time like the calendar nodes do. This is also the first thing you see when clicking on a workspace in the sidebar, making it a good entry point.
  • Use the outline to structure your content. Make references to content that should be repeated.
  • Use views like Side menu and Tabs to make sections navigable.
  • Remember that it's easy to move and rename things as you go, so don't be afraid to commit now and change later.
  • For everything you've added a supertag to, you can make search nodes that gather them in one place. These become your dynamic task board, meeting notes, project overview, media library, recipe collection... showing you what you've collected in your graph that is worthy of keeping. If you need to see your information in many different ways, make as many search nodes querying the same data as you need. That's the beauty of a knowledge graph with a powerful search functionality.

These two modes in Tana form the backbone of all note-taking in Tana.