It’s probably not the best thing to put the conclusion of the article you’re about to read straight up in the title. However, I like to be open and frank. Yes, I’m a fan and no I don’t mind people knowing that. If you want why though, you’ll have to continue reading.
An Introduction into PKM
Some years ago, I stumbled across Roam Research. I can’t recall exactly, but I do know I was intrigued straight away. Mostly by its ability to do bi-directional links, enabling you to essentially built your own wiki’s. Second, whenever you opened the (web)app on a new day, it would present you with a daily note. That last point enabled me to build daily journals and overviews of what I did and who I talked to on particular days. Together with the bi-directional linking, I was able to build a neural database of nodes. I really enjoyed the workflowy-style structure I was able to work with and was excited to see my visual graph grow, assuming it meant I was really building a second brain. Given it was a web app, with a mobile counterpart after a while, all I had to do was log on to a website to obtain access to that brain, regardless of the device I was using. Splendid! Little did I know though.
From Roam to Obsidian
Unfortunately, as time passed, it looked like the Roam team lost their mojo. For reasons unknown to me, the pace at which they delivered new features and made the product more mature decreased. When asked about it on Twitter (yes, it was Twitter back then), their founder responded furiously with all kinds of philosophical responses, frankly just pushing people out of their community at an increasing pace. And the same applied to me.
Where I had not lost interest though was in the domain of Personal Knowledge Management or PKM. Through Roam, I had come to appreciate the ability to always recall what I had discussed with whom, even though it was mostly done through navigating and less about smart searches, let alone AI chats. So, as I came to dislike Roam more and more, and started looking for alternatives, I stumbled across Obsidian. And I still today really like Obsidian.
They took a completely different approach, evangelizing a your-data-is-yours-always gospel, and connected that with local clients that dialed into locally stored databases with tons of markdown files. What Obsidian stood out at was their plugin community. There were just soo many plugins and themes available. Installing and updating them was seamless.
My biggest frustration with Obsidian was the amount of work it took on my end to keep the thing afloat. Back then, I was using the tool on a series of devices (one iMac, one Windows device, one iPad Pro and one iPhone) and I was always busy syncing stuff, either using Onedrive or iCloud. And even their built-in, paid sync feature, did not take away some of the challenges. It might just have been me, though I am generally pretty good with computers.
One other thing I disliked about Obsidian was the fact it was much less focused on daily notes, something I relied on heavily for my daily job and other life domains. Yes, there was a plugin that solved that, but it didn’t feel seamless enough, even though I am not 100% sure why.
World, meet Tana. Tana, meet the world
I still remember I was massively frustrated the moment I a) learnt about Tana and b) figured out the product was not yet widely available. It was these things that did it for me:
- Back to a web app, accessible anywhere. Only requiring a browser plus login credentials. No more hassle with installing local clients on all my devices and keeping them up to date subsequently.
- Supertags. I didn’t know I needed those until I saw a super quick intro / demo movie where supertags supercharged the nodes they were connected too. As I figured out ways to get access to early versions of Tana quicker, Obsidian also started to built things in that space, including ‘fields’. However, their implementation never felt as natural as it came with Tana.
- Strong focus on daily nodes. Tana is very much focused around your daily node, which really works for me. I use it less as a scientific reference system. I am not even syncing my Readwise nodes to it these days, which was something I actively used with Obsidian. Tana for me is all about building a second brain and enhancing my productivity. And for me, since I live and breath through my agenda, that daily-node-first-focus really works for me.
- The active community. Obtaining access to the company’s community Slack channels only encouraged me Tana would fit me better than the other tools I had lived in. It remains interesting to see that key members of the team are actively contributing to the community, helping out where they can with quick feedback and useful insights.
- Okay, I also like them because they’re from Norway. Now, my surname is all about another Scandinavian country. That however is not the driver. I’m just really happy to see a company with a crew this seasoned, being founded in, and grown from, a European country. I have wondered many times in recent years why the were so few successful European tech scale-ups that were able to convert themselves into really global tech companies. Spotify, Booking.com and Adyen are nice examples but that’s about it. Let’s see if Tana can take a place among these.
- It’s flexibility. Tana pretty much enables you to build everything you can imagine. You might argue it’s built as a framework, rather than a ready-to-digest app. I love that though. I want a system that fits my workflow for the full 100% or I know I’ll remain frustrated. Tana enables me to do that.
To be honest, there are more reasons but hey, let’s save some of that for later. Let’s just say I was really happy when I got invited into the app and have been very happy ever since. Yes, they have a world to win but they made some significant progress in 2024 and are set up for much bigger success in 2025.
Now What?
As I started using the app more and more, I started to extend the scope of ‘things’ I do in the app. By now, I am actively using Tana to structure meetings, 1:1’s, the projects I work on and various use cases. I even have a special DevOps-like project where I keep track of my personal Tana backlog, containing all things I want to build, want to learn more about or need to fix. Can you imagine?
Now, there’s much more to tell but I believe this is a nice start. Pretty sure there will be more Tana-focused content in the future!
