I decided to spend a bit of time over my recent break playing around with an app called Tana. I have heard a lot of good things about it wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. So, here are my first impressions of the app.
Please note, this is not a deep dive nor is it an in depth review of all the features and functions. I used the app for a couple of hours and went through their pre-built tutorials to try and get to grips with the various features and functions.
Conclusions
I will start at the end. I do not think Tana is for me. I have two main reasons for this. The most important is that it is an app that does not work the way I tend to think. The second is that, I think for what it is, it is incredibly expensive.
I would also add that the pre-built tutorial seems very ‘light’ considering all the different features of the app, as is their documentation. You need third party input to understand this app fully
Tana – what is it and how does it work
Tana is effectively an outliner app. The way these basically work, for those not familiar, is that you have a kind of bulleted outline. Each bullet or sub-bullet (no matter how deep you go) can be opened up separately as it’s own page. Once you open it up as it’s own page any content that is underneath that bullet or sub bullet is then visible without any other content that is not a direct descendent of that point.
But, if you go back to you top level, then any and all content within your Tana workspace is visible as part of that one single outline.
This is pretty much the case with the two other big players in the Outliner app market – Workflowy and Dynalist.
Tana stands out because of something called Super Tags.
Super Tags can be used to work just like normal tags. So any bullet or sub-bullet you apply a super tag to then becomes linked and it makes searching and filtering a whole lot easier. But Super Tags have super powers.
When you create a Super Tag, you can define a whole host of characteristics, properties and fields that get applied to any bullet with that Super Tag. For example, the two main pre-built ones would be ‘Project’ and ‘Task’. By default the ‘Task’ Super Tag applies properties like ‘Status’, and ‘Due Date’ to your item.
What’s more, when you click the Super Tag itself, you can also define various different views for how items with these tags are to be shown to you. So, click the ‘Task’ Super Tag and you can display all items with this Super Tag in a list view, Table View, Board View or Calender View etc. It is very reminiscent here of something like the different views that can offered by Notion or ClickUp.
What is good about this app
Hopefully you will begin to see some of the advantages here. As an outliner, the focus is all on speed and simplicity of entering information into it. And, it is incredibly easy to add a Super Tag to something (just using the # key). Then, because of the whole approach behind Super Tags, these can be viewed and displayed in variety of different ways.
I find it easiest to illustrate this by comparison.
Suppose I used Notion for Everything (I don’t, and personally do not recommend this). In a random note for today (or as a part of anything else) I end up noting something that is actually a relevant task for a project I am working. My method at this point becomes to either duplicate this ‘block’ in Notion, or move it, into my ‘Tasks’ Database and then relate it to the project in question. So, you either duplicate the information or you have to move it out of the note you are in, which may not be helpful. And, there is a bit of manual labour in this process.
With Tana, just by adding the Super Tag, the noted item will show up in all relevant task views and your current note. Plus, a couple of clicks and this task can be related to the relevant project and it remains related to the note you are writing. Much simpler and faster.
I won’t major on this today but I also like that the app comes with a whole host of editor options for changing basic things like colour of text, highlights, quotes etc. Giving notes visual impact is really important to me and so I like that Tana allows this.
Why I won’t be switching to Tana any time soon.
The most obvious reason is price. Tana does come with a free plan but that limits you to 5 custom Supertags. This is really quite limiting for app that only stands out due to Supertags. The Plus plan (first level of paid subscription), costs $8 per month, or $96 per year. To me this seems quite steep. Prices for productivity software are increasing and obviously Tana bills itself as being a viable replacement for several apps you might have. Even so, it is too steep for me.
Which brings me to my second point. Whilst the Supertags idea is pretty neat and it is powerful, Tana is still an outliner app at heart. Personally, this is not my thing.
I tend to find that apps like this, that try to cover many bases by adding power to a core function, don’t do as a good of a job as a dedicated app would. This means you have to compromise, develop and employ work-arounds and other small sacrifices. Therefore, you end up paying a lot of money for a weak version of everything.
Supertags mean that Tana can be used as a task and project manager. But, Tana is not a task manager nor a project manager. Other apps are built for this and to replicate basic functionality in Tana, is not always straightforward. I accept, Tana has some plus points (as stated above) when it comes to task and project management. These however are not enough to make it a viable app for this in my view. Things like quick capture (from outside the app) and ease of organising (like you get in Tick Tick or Todoist) are not there.
So, I will not be switching to Tana anytime soon.
