Project management with Tana, a real-world example
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Tana is a tool I love to play with, but I always use it to test features, going forward click after click with no real purpose. All my work files and processes are still managed in Obsidian.
So to dive into Tana and find how it handles everyday life in real conditions, I decided to manage a project in it. A real project, real situations, real use case.
My goal is to create a simple system to track my projects, notes, and task-related. I don’t need to track more complex things like workload, time spent or budget.
I’ll explain to you here the setup I created with supertags, and how it worked on a daily basis.
First things first, what is Tana ?
Tana is an online note-taking application equipped with a range of features that promote organization and productivity, making it a great option for a Personal Knowledge management and/or note-taking app.
Mainly, it’s designed to help you create and centralize your content, as they promote: The Everything OS. The platform offers a suite of tools for managing notes, tasks, and projects.
Main structure
When it came to setting up project management in Tana, I wanted to keep things simple and only include what I absolutely needed. That’s why I turned to the KISS acronym — Keep It Stupid Simple! For my purposes, I needed to be able to refer to projects, people/companies, tasks, and project notes. Fortunately, Tana has a great feature called Supertags that makes it easy to tag and categorize content while also defining data models to add attributes.
Setting up the supertags
Tana provides several attributes to create a data model that helps you create the right structure. 3 of them a particularly interesting: text, dates and references.
The text attribute allows you to write some text as it indicates.
The Reference attribute can constrain to reference an existing supertags. This can help to create relations.
To define a data model for a Supertags, I needed first to tag something, so I started with the companies.
