On this week's post I'm going to show you how I use Tana to be the most productive I have ever been, allowing me to focus on a single task at a time and never forgetting things I have to do. If you still don't have access to Tana and would like to give it a go, I believe you can still get an invite when joining the community Slack.
Without further ado, let's jump straight into my daily page template (see screenshot below), which is where everything happens in my Tana workspace. When looked at it with the list view, you can see I probably have way too many things there and it doesn't quite look like a very peaceful place to take notes without getting distracted. Throughout the two years I have been using Tana, I have added a couple of things to my daily template that I thought would be nice to have, like journaling prompts, a quick view at the week we're at, Greek words and sentences to help with learning the language, a quick look at any subscription that may be due today, a random highlight from Readwise, and a note I would like to be reminded of (usually ideas).
So, the first thing I do every day after having quickly gone through the Greek words, and Readwise highlight and the reminder, I switch the today node into the side menu view. This is when I get serious. As soon as I do that, Tana shows me the first of the pages on my side view (any node that isn't a field of the template will be shown here), which is the "mega query" of todos. In fact, it will show me any todos I have scheduled for today, so I cannot miss them. As you can see, I have a number of different queries here: scheduled for today, do now, created in the last 3 days, etc.
Because I am usually on top of my work, I check what's scheduled for today and what is set to be done now, and then check the list with all the todos. On this list, the todos are grouped by project or deliverable, so it is very easy to know the context of every task on the list. From there, I choose the tasks I want to work on today using ⌘ C and pasting into the Daily log page under a node that says "Today I want to do:".
If you would like to use this same setup to manage your projects and tasks, you can download the template I use, which was created by Tana navigator Emmanuel Galanos and is available here.
Once I have chosen a few todos for the day, I am almost ready to focus on getting them done. But first, I have a look at my calendar (as I mentioned last week, I use Amie) and add any meetings I have to the daily log. How? Using the little + button I have under today's date. This button adds a node tagged log to the daily log, which comes with 3 different buttons and 2 fields.
If I'm adding a meeting to the log, I write who I'm meeting with in the What field, and I add the tag #meeting to the node. This tag adds 3 more fields to the node: one for a link to the agenda, another one to add action items, and a final one to link the meeting to a project. I take notes about the meeting on the blank node at the bottom. To add the time and duration of the meeting I click on the node in the Date field and add it there.
When I have added all my meetings (these are really the only things I have a fixed time for), it is time to focus on getting things done. First, I click on the + button to add a new log node. I choose one of the tasks I previously listed at the top of the daily log and I copy it over to the What field of the new node. Then, I click on the first of the three buttons the node has, which adds the starting time to the Date field and I fully focus on getting the task done. This is what I call a "focus block", where I am fully focused on the task and I minimize distractions. I don't do anything else until I have finished the task or it is time to move on to something else like cooking or taking a meeting. When that happens and I am done with the focus block, I click on the second button, which adds the ending time to the Date field. Finally, I click on the third button to send this information to my Google Calendar, so I can easily see where I spend my time every day. I take notes about the task itself either in the log node or in the task's node. It doesn't really matter because Tana will take care of tracking all the references, which means the notes are never lost and can easily be found in the future.
At the end of the day, hopefully I have finished all the tasks and the daily log looks like a long list of logs. This is not the greatest view of how my day has gone, which is why I added the Agenda page, where I can have an accurate, to-the-minute view of how I have spent the time today. This view should be very similar to the day view on the calendar of your choice if you were to add all these focus blocks to it.
Finally, I use the Inbox page to add any thoughts, ideas, links, etc. I come up with throughout the day. This allows me to brain dump and still link these notes with today's date in case they are useful in the future. I also have a daily goals page that I'm trying to use as a habit tracker of sorts, but I still haven't found a way to reduce the friction of clicking on it to check the boxes. I think that will be the next thing I work on to improve my daily page template.
So, this is how I go about managing projects and tasks, and making sure I get things done. It is a very simple, yet effective workflow that has allowed me to stay on top of my work across different projects and deliverables. Let me know what you think of it and make sure to reach out if you want me to share the template with you.
