Moving from Obsidian to Tana?
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.