Recently, I’ve been on a maddening quest to find a new notes app. I will share more about that later, but one in particular piqued my interest – Tana.
The idea and the promise are that you write and add supertags (yes, Tana comes with a huge amount of vocabulary specific to it) and the app just links everything and organises content for you. There are multiple options for the type of content you can add: plain text, to-do items, images, videos and much more.
In Notion and Craft the smallest unit is a block, in Tana it’s a node, which is basically a bullet. I was actually reading “The Bullet Journal Method”, and my mind immediately started thinking about parallels in both approaches. What makes it so powerful, is you can create anything with those supertags. The easiest way to describe is – think about databases in Notion, but they are created dynamically based on the nodes scattered all over the space.
I first installed Tana a couple of weeks ago, went through the tutorial, tried to make some notes, and uninstalled it, thinking it was one of the worst software products in the PKM space. But I’ve kept seeing people using it and even being fans, so I’ve decided to give it another try. This time, something clicked. I started small and for about a week, I just kept writing in the daily note. I’ve added supertags to all the nodes to add some structure. It became a bit clearer, but this steep learning curve, I think, will discourage most people from using it.
The other huge issue is the lack of mobile apps. There is Tana Capture, but it is just that — a tool for capturing notes on the go (it is good at that, but still extremely limited). Since Tana wants to be almost everything, including your to-do app, it is unimaginable to have it only on a PC.
Lastly, it is still in invite-only beta, so they still have to prove themselves to the public at large. If they don’t change the whole vocabulary and maybe streamline the number of features a bit, I think it will be difficult to break out. I’m confident they’ll have a vocal minority of super fans, but not a big audience.
You also can’t export your notes. And looking at the structure, I don’t think it would be an easy problem to solve for the developers, or you might not be able to import this data somewhere else.
For now, I’ve decided to go with some different tools as my PKM, but I’ll be closely following the progress of the company and checking the app from time to time.
