When I moved my notes database from Roam Research to Obsidian earlier this year, I expected I’d stay there for quite a while. Obsidian is a great tool, and I spoke about the reasons for my move in that earlier post.
Now, more quickly than I expected, I’m moving everything over to Tana. What is Tana, and why would I do that?
At its core, Tana is another note-taking app, but it does it in a way that hasn’t really been seen before. Until Tana came around, there were really three types of note-taking apps:
- Simple note apps, like Google Keep and Apple Notes.
- Graph-style apps like Roam Research and Obsidian, that helped to interconnect your notes.
- Data-focused apps like Notion and Airtable that let you build powerful tables and charts.
While Google Keep will likely be my “quick notes” app of choice for years to come, Tana is the first great app I’ve seen that tries to combine the graph and data types of notes. There are a lot of videos out there that show how it works, but this one from Shu Omi is a solid overview:
Ultimately, Tana can handle everything that I was doing in Obsidian with books, people and blog posts, and then allows me to do a lot more. It’s easier for me to research quotes from books, track daily workouts, and just have an easier way to connect my thoughts. Ultimately, it should help me have a slightly easier time putting together my notes for posts on this blog, so we’ll see what happens.
Tana is invite-only for now, but if it interests you at all I encourage you to visit their site and put your name on the waiting list. As Shu mentioned in the video above, the product hasn’t been officially released yet but already feels incredibly polished.
Whether or not I stick with Tana in the long run, I’m very excited to see the direction these apps are taking and the benefits they can bring to all of us.
So, the potentially awkward question: how did you migrate your data? (Poor migration is why I still have tons of stuff in Evernote, OneNote, and a tremendous history in Outlook!)
Slowly and painfully, but intentionally. It’s such a different structure that I’ll need to rethink how I set things up.
On one hand, this gives me a chance to really clean up and make everything tighter and more useful. On the other hand, this is becoming a bigger chore each time, and I’ll be weeks to get things moved this time. For now, I got the key pieces moved so I can work day-to-day out of Tana, and then I’ll be moving other pieces as time allows or as needed for my workflow.
They have an import tool, and I tried it. It works well, but just didn’t benefit me much. I’d either need to copy/paste/format/remove from the import, or just do it from Obsidian, so I’m just doing it from Obsidian.
It’d almost be cool to have a digital clean-up day; a bunch of us get together in person and just spend a day cleaning up our digital tools, migrating to the storage of our choice, getting inboxes under control, etc. That could be interesting.
I like the digital clean-up day. I’ll join that community!