Tana - Put your notes to work with voice and AI

Tana is the one app in the PKM space that I just can’t quit. And as someone with ADHD, that is a sad truth about me: I am forever on a quest for “the perfect app”. I have tried them all, and will continue to do so, because I cannot stop myself. But I’ve been using Tana for 2 years now during its early development, a personal record. I can't exactly explain why, either…just feels right for me. The community is great, the developers are fun and truly listen to the community, and the app is so vast I keep finding new things to try. I’ve always been drawn to systems like Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal, or apps embraced by the ADHD community like Amazing Marvin. Tana falls into the latter category, and the Tana Slack channel has connected me with fellow neurodivergent folks who have become friends. We meet every couple of weeks to share our Tana (and non-Tana) adventures…our meetups are sheer chaos, as you can imagine. We each use Tana differently, and that’s the beauty of it—it adapts to our unique brains and ever-changing needs. Tana is designed to be used from the “bottom up,” similar to Heptabase, Capacities, or Obsidian. Unlike Notion, you don’t have to start by building folders and databases. This is Tana’s magic for me. I know myself well enough to realize that if I don’t capture something immediately, it’s likely gone forever. With Tana, I jot things down via voice or text and do not worry about organizing them right away; I don't need to think of the proper Database for the task or note. That job can be for Future Matt. Every new input in Tana is treated as a “node,” starting with a bullet. It might take a bit to get used to, but once you do, you’ll see how flexible it is. You can “supertag” nodes, giving them magical powers, but you don't have to—you’re not locked into any structure. Need to change, re-tag, or un-tag something later? No problem. This level of fine-tuning is essential for me, allowing me to adapt and find better connections. I cannot tell you how many times I have re-named and changed the properties of my "Project" supertag. Why? Only my therapist knows. But I love that I can, and love that in doing so, nothing gets lost; I'm just changing the "outfit" those nodes are wearing. In Notion, this is a punishing nightmare. Tana’s AI implementation is one of the cleanest and most powerful I’ve seen. The developers are constantly adding new features and have a great relationship with users. They know the app is dense and are always working to make onboarding easier. Despite its complexity, Tana’s releases are solid and reliable. How many apps do you use on a daily basis that you love, but can be completely borked by a software update (hi, Descript!)? Tana don't play that. Tana probably isn't for everyone. If you’re looking for traditional folders and file systems, genuinely love to spend weeks building databases before you add your first note to your PKM, or are triggered by bullets, it might not be your cup of tea. I'm secretly envious of your organizational skillz. But try it anyway. Join the Slack community (especially the #adhd-autism-nd channel!), take the time to explore its powerful deep nerdery, simple beauty, and experience the joy of capturing your thoughts on the go for Future You. You might find that you won't be able to quit it, either. 😁

I've been amazed at how many other productivity tools I've been able to build an equal-or-better version of in Tana. And at how responsive and accessible the Tana team are. And at how smart and, well, communal the community are. The more time I invest in building exactly what I need inside Tana, the more of my other productivity tools end up being redundant. My productivity stack is gradually becoming Tana. And I know the Tana of six months from now or a year from now, will be vastly better. Because that's been the trend so far.

My Tana journey - what can I say, its been almost a year since i started my adventure and I havnt looked back, even for a second. Tana has become such a big part of my day-to-day operations that I almost forgot that it has been in Beta until recently. Tana is so unique in its approach that it allows me to almost do anything I need to organize myself. With the launch of the recent app on android, this has been elevated even futher. As a designer, i use Tana to improve and assist with my organization, knowledge bank, workflow, idea generation, concept development, Client relations and much more. It has begun to take on more and more of my day-to-day operations through automations, templates and streamlines my work considerably. Keep up the great work Tana - Im very excited to see where you can take it from here.

Tana is amazing. I’ve just almost all of the modern „bi-directional data“ and „it doesn’t matter where you put your content tools“ out there. Tana is the only one that’s gets to the core of the issue, has an incredibly active community and product team and provides constant updates. There is still room to improve (obviously) but I have been aboard the Tana vessel long enough to fully trust the team and their mission!

What are the LLM(s) are you guys using?

Absolutely love Tana. The whole team is amazing, the app has so much potential to get even better (though it is amazing right now). Really feel like Tana will increasingly become my one stop solution for notetaking etc and be the main integrating app in my set up.

Tana is an amazing tool. I’m so excited to see where this tool goes as its development continues. I really think it’s going to change the way people work in a meaningful way!

Having spent some serious time with a variety of PKM's, I think I found Tana by accident. Pretty soon however, I noticed it had the potential to become extremely powerful, bearing in mind it was mostly just pages, supertags, supertag fields and a knowledge-graph (without the visual knowledge graph, never missed that...). In recent months, I have seen the application or platform become much more mature, and I've become much more enthusiastic about it in return, to the point where I've started to write about it, shown it to friends and colleagues, etc. By now, Tana is my go-to-app for storing all things information ranging from investment documentation, my writing app, my business meetings, my 1-1's, my what's-for-dinner-list, my Canada-holiday-planning, my annual reviews, my Youtube library (+AI, obviously...), and my training schedule for the half marathon. I even considered building my company's marketing plan in it! Add to that Tana's now available on mobile (iOS is live, Android in beta), they've added AI throughout the platform and their 'commands' have become both powerful and incredibly fun to play with. I am pretty much sold on it and still feel I have a long way to go to extend the scope of the app in my life to become more productive while having to remember less. This is truly just the end of the beginning!

Tana is an incredible application whose flexibility, power and usefullnes is without peer. I have been using Tana for over a year and it enables many workflows for me, and serves as the central core of my day-to-day, mid term and long term planning and execution source of record and analysis system

I've been using Tana as my main workspace for organizing my life, tasks, projects, calendar, notes, and even recipes and invoices for a year and a half. I regularly experiment with combinations of other tools for a few days to see how I would manage if Tana didn't exist. The simple answer is: I couldn't. The way Tana works has permanently changed how my mind works, and everything else is a source of frustration. No other app gives you this level of freedom. While the AI and voice features are, admittedly, very nice to have (I initially didn't think I'd use voice input, but it turned out to be a need I didn't know I had), Tana's core strength is its frictionless nature. You simply write and tag. You don't need to have structures already in place for emerging uses: Tana allows you to build whatever properties and searches you need on the fly. Everything is simple, fluid, and easy. And if you want to go all out with commands and AI, you can. I can't express how central this tool has become in my life, and I can't recommend it enough.