Let’s Build a Time Capsule in Tana

I began capturing memorable moments in Tana as a way to look back on memories in my monthly review. 2022 came to an end and it was great to see the highlights of the year in one place. Today, I store memorable moments along with journal entries in my Time Capsule.

This simple set-up contains 2 supertags with only 3 fields.

Let’s begin by building our supertags on the today page.

Creating the journal and moment supertags

The journal supertag has the following fields:

1. Calendar date from day → System field that uses the date from the ancestor day node. This means that if I write my journal entry on the today page, the calendar date for that day will be used.
2. Year → Options field for easily filtering entries by year (2022, 2023 etc).
3. Photos → Plain field to insert a photo of the day (optional)

Journal supertag configuration

The moment supertag has the following fields:

1. Date → System field
2. Photos
3. Year

Moment supertag configuration

Now that we have our supertags, let’s create our Time Capsule dashboard which consists of 4 live search nodes.

Journal

A list of all journal entries in descending order.

• Live query search expression: all nodes tagged journal
• View: list
• Display: calendar date from day
• Sort: calendar date from day → descending

This Year

The current year’s moments as photos in ascending order.

• Live query search expression: There are 2 ways to show all moments of the current year. The first is using the search expression below which will show all moments between 1st January 2023 and 31st December 2023 using the greater than and lesser than search operators. I use this one because I don’t always fill in the year field. The second way would be to only use the search expression to find all moments and then to use a filter for the Year field → 2023.

• View: cards
• Display: photos, date
• Sort: date → ascending

Gallery

A collection of all moments as photos in ascending order

• Live query search expression: all nodes tagged moment
• View: cards
• Display: photos, date
• Sort: date → ascending

Archive

A list of all moments grouped by year

• Live query search expression: all nodes tagged moment
• View: list
• Display: Calendar date from day
• Sort: date → ascending
• Group: year field

My Workflow

Journal

• I’m pretty terrible at journaling consistently but recently I’ve been entering 1–2 lines about the day and that has been working to begin the habit. I don’t do it everyday so there isn’t that pressure but whenever I feel to, I can easily type a few words, tag as journal and that’s it.

Moments

• I enter moments in bulk, towards the end of the quarter. I like this as it allows me to review memories and is a nice mood booster on tougher days. I go through the pictures on my phone, favourite the memories that I want to add to the time capsule then send those to my laptop where I upload them to Tana with the date.