[Music] When you first open Tana as a new user, you're likely to see something that looks a little bit like this. This is the today page. T might refer to it as the today node, but we're just going to call it pages to simplify. And that's the first basic concept of Tana, is that every day gets a page. Every time you open this, you'll have a new page for today. And the general concept is you sort of just like take notes on the stuff that happened during that day. And we'll go through some of the other features that help you organize that information. But the key piece of basic thing to know is that it doesn't actually matter where you put stuff. And I think this is one very key differentiator between T and other apps that allow you to have sort of like tables and databases about stuff in your life. And most other apps, you need to think about where to put something before you can enter it. And that's a huge barrier if you're sort

of just like I want to track this thing um you have to get then go either create a table or remember where you put the table, and it's really easy to duplicate information um etc. And in Tana, that all of that is totally unnecessary. The core interaction with Tana is very simple. It's really just bullets so you can say stuff like eat lunch with Joe at Cafe Press and read 30 pages of demon Copperhead. Right, these are sort of normal things you might journal about in your day, and you can take notes unlimited notes about whatever you want in your life in this manner. Um, and this would basically put you on par with like Apple notes or a very simple note-taking app where you're sort of just like logging things, uh, writing notes, things you might not want to forget. And if this was all I did, it would be a very nice clean note-taking app, um, but I don't think it would make it the most powerful app in the world or maybe the world is too strong, but the

most powerful note-taking app that I've encountered so far. Um, and so let's go through these examples and enrich them with some things that will help us see the power of Tana a little bit better. There are three basic concepts in Tana that we need to understand first before we can understand, uh, and go deeper here. So, the first concept is, uh, references. The next is super tags, and the next are fields. References are essentially creating pages for anything that you can think of that you would like to create. So right now, these are all just bullets or nodes as T would call them on your today page. Um, and a reference to something that might live somewhere else that you can reference. And so, an example of a reference would be Baltimore. Right, let's just first thing that popped into my mind is a reference. This is a thing. Um, this now lives somewhere else and I can reference it here anywhere. Um, right. And so you now have this concept of Baltimore that is now referenceable throughout, uh, throughout the throughout your workspace. And so any

time you want to refer to Baltimore you just basically inside of a bullet um you would say at Baltimore if you I can spell that would be helpful um and and you can reference it right so that's pretty simple uh and so that's references it's a really simple concept it's basically just saying I can refer to stuff from other places in my workspace by the way there's no reason you have to create something as a reference first before you can refer to it and so we'll see here if I wanted to refer to this bullet here where I ate lunch with Joe at Cafe Press all I do is type at at lunch and now I've created a reference to this bullet right here and so this might not seem significant yet but we'll understand in a few minutes why this matters quite a bit the next concept are super tags super tags really are could also just be called Tags uh this is essentially a way of tagging information in your uh in your workspace uh and categorizing it by sort of a theme or something that is uh

is what that thing is um. And so the way T the way Tana suggests thinking about super tags is it's something with a is a relationship. And so if we keep using our Baltimore example um, and here I'll just open it uh. Baltimore is a city, right? And so to tag Baltimore as a city, we'd come to the end of the row of Baltimore. We'd type pound City, and we're creating a new tag. And so we're going to hit create and apply, or I can just hit enter, and I've now created a super tag called city, right? And now that's all it did is right now it's categorized it as a city, but that helps us start to organize our information a little bit better. And again, we'll see in a bit why that matters and how that is really cool, um. Other things that might be super tags, uh, so we just saw one way to create a super tag where we have, you know, let's say Boston is another city, um, you know, Cleveland is another city. Let's just

make a couple of these um, and then, you know, that's so. Those are ways we can like create and apply tags that either are new or already exist. Um, and then let's, we wanted to create another Super tag. Um, uh, for example, we already did one above. Let's say we want to do restaurant, right? And so we had Cafe Press. I can call it a restaurant. And now this is a restaurant. And you'll notice this Cafe Press is not connected to this Cafe Press, not yet, but we'll look at that in a moment. Um, I can also create a super tag by simply, um, let's say state, right? I can type it in here. And then I can do command K and convert it to Super tag. And now I have state. And so if I want to say Maryland is a state, and now that's tagged as a state with this tag that we already created. All right. The third concept to understand in Tana before we can dive into our real-life example are Fields. Fields are a way of structuring data.

about a particular node um and giving it some some yeah extra data extra information, and so let's look through a couple of examples of what fields are um. So to do this, I'm going to actually drag Cleveland down here, indent it into Fields, just so we know that that's where we're working. And if I open, by the way, every node can be expanded or collapsed using command up or command down um, and to create a field, you do this um shift period button or open carrot button, and you've now created a field um, and so for a city like Cleveland, we might want to say, you know, there's really any any number of things we might want to track here, but we can say population. This is a type of field we might want to create and um Tana has different field types that we can use, so these are all the options that we have right now, and for population, we would choose number and we would say the population of Cleveland is I actually have no idea, but let's just say it's 800,000 right, uh, maybe that's

close, maybe that's not, um, okay. So that's cool, uh, what else do we want to know about Cleveland? Well, we know that Cleveland is part of a state, and so this field doesn't exist yet either, um, and we might change this to something called an instance field. Instance meaning it's an instance of a super tag. And so we have to do something here, uh, called configure field, and select that this is supposed to be an instance of State. Don't worry if this is feeling like too much in the deep end. We're not really worried about this right now, um, but the idea here is that we have now Cleveland is part of Ohio, uh, with a population of 800,000. Now, um, there are plenty of other field types that we could use. Maybe we could say, you know, visit date, right? Let's say we visited Cleveland, uh, we want to call this a date. Let's just say maybe dates because you had multiple. And we could say we visited it from, you know, November 6th till November 20th, right? We did a nice two-week trip to

Cleveland, and okay, so this is pretty good on fields. The general idea here is you just have some information about a node, and you want to track it. Now, where this gets really interesting, in my opinion, is that you can add these fields to the city template. And so, right now, if I expanded Boston, let's bring Boston down here as well, and I expanded Boston, Boston has no fields, and we would have to like go through all this process again just to add the same information to Boston. But if we took each of these fields and we clicked always show field on all like pound City, that basically is saying the anything that you tag with City should automatically show these three fields, and that's super powerful because now every time you tag a city, these three fields show up. There's a whole bunch of like Advanced configurations that we won't go through on this video, but we could say, you know, Boston maybe has a million people. It's part of, is that a million? I think I did 10 million, definitely not that. It's part of

massachusetts, which hopefully I'm spelling correctly. Um, and maybe I haven't visited it yet, right? And okay, so that's just some examples of how you would use fields and put them on the super tags. Um, at the end of this video, we'll go through, sort of like, okay, cool, you have this information, what can you actually do with that? Uh, but we're not there yet, so I think now that we've gotten the basics of references, super tags, and fields, we're ready to start working through these examples and seeing what differentiates Tana from a regular note-taking app. Um, at the time of entering these notes, you can sort of annotate them with some of this stuff, enrich the data, and then be able to use it for many, many different purposes. Okay, so going back to our examples, right? We ate lunch with Joe at Cafe Press, and we've read 30 pages of Demon Copperhead. Uh, let's think through what we might want to do with these things. So I think the first thing we

would want to do is pick out anything that we think might be a sort of like reference candidate. Something we might think is like we should have a page for this. We might want to reuse this in the future um and refer to it in other pages and other days in the future um and so I'm just going to go through and bold all the things that I can think of um that you know that you can argue maybe lunch should be one. Maybe reading should be one which you certainly could do um but in the meantime I think it's the very clear ones are like Joe Cafe Press and Demon Copperhead so let's go through each of these and show what we might do with them. So for Joe basically if you highlight any of this text and then hit shift at or shift two I should say um it prompts you to either find a reference that already exists or to create a new one and so in this case Joe does not exist and so we're just going to create it um. Cafe Press if I look for this one

we actually did this earlier in the example so I'm going to reference that one. You can see it's got the color green because it's been tagged with restaurant. And then if you go into right-click and configure this tag, you can actually choose the color for this super tag, and whatever you pick will stick, which is pretty cool. Or maybe it's green for other reasons, but anyway, and then this one, we will create demon cover head as well that has not yet been created. And so let's first work through Cafe Press. I'm going to open the node for Cafe Press on a sidebar here and move my head out of the way. And we know that this is a restaurant, and so now the question is what Fields would we maybe want to create on this restaurant. And so I think the first might be a city, right? We have Cuisine, we have maybe rating. I think those are three pretty interesting possible fields for restaurants. And so City we need to configure to be an

instance field Cuisine. We're going to make an option field, and I'll show you what that means in a moment. And then rating, I'm also going to make an option field. Let's go through and configure all this. So City, we know, should be an instance of a super tag that we've already created called City. And Cafe Press happens to be a restaurant that has actually closed, but it's a city restaurant from Seattle. And if I open Seattle, we know that there's already these tags that we created earlier. And the only one I'm going to add right now is Washington and tag that as a state. And so now we know that there's Cafe Press in Seattle. Cuisine, I'm sorry, we're going to configure this one again here. And this is options. And basically, with options, what this is saying is show me a set of options for each time this field is used that's sort of like predetermined or you know you have some different options here. For now, I'm actually not going to add any.

predetermined options, and I'm just going to make sure that this includes auto-collected values is selected. And what this does is this says whenever you add stuff here, it allows you know future time future restaurants to use this option as well. Um, for rating, on the other hand, I'm going to configure it with predetermined options, and I'm just going to use a stock, and I'm going to make some basic options, and I'm going to say do not allow auto-collected values, which means these are going to be the only options that we have. And so for Cafe Press, when you come in here, now I keep hitting tab, I'm sorry, and I hit space, now I have these options, and I'm going to pick five, um, so that's great, and now we can do the same thing we did before and promote these fields onto the super tag. So now anything we ever tag as restaurant ever again, we'll get these same options, and we'll just demonstrate that right now by showing Cafe barjo tag it as a restaurant and

Voila, we have options. You can see French is an option here. Um, this is maybe more like American, and rating can be five stars, right? Amazing. So that's restaurant. Um, I'm going to go to Joe next, and we have to do some new stuff to him because he's not a restaurant. He's actually a, let's say, he's a friend, right? So friend is a new tag now, and friend would also get some fields. We might have birthday, right? Let's just say, um, and change this to a date and say Joe is born. Let's just pick any random date. Um, we can have another field for how we met, um, college, right? And this can be just a plain field because this might have like a whole wide array of, you know, I met through so and so or whatever, so it might not be something you standardize, um, so and so on and so forth. Um, you could say city, right? You can actually, so this is the first time we're going to actually reuse a field, which I think is very useful.

you know, we had um, we had um, city in the restaurants field. Sorry, city was a field on the restaurant super tag, and now we can actually reuse this same exact one and pick a city for him and say that he lives in Washington, DC. Let's just say and make sure that Washington, DC is tagged is a state which sour subject um all these things can go on to friend and next time you have another experience with a friend you can tag um had coffee with somebody and now voila you can then populate this stuff about this friend as well. All right, cool. So we've worked through that and then finally demon Copperhead is a book. So for books and by the way the way I'm opening these in a separate tab is I'm just hovering over it clicking command uh while I'm clicking um so this thing is a book and books should probably have authors uh books could have genres you know books could have a lot of other things we're not going to add right now actually books can have ratings right.

and the restaurants had ratings, and so this book can also have a rating. Um, and so author, we actually need to create something for author. U because this doesn't exist, but we might want to say author and then convert this to Super tag. And then when we configure this field, we would say this is an instance of author. And then genre, we might say this is options, and we can configure this one to say this should have the options, you know, maybe uh fiction, non-fiction, maybe you want to get more specific than that. I don't know. Um, and I'm going to unselect this for now. And so when I do author and I want to say Barbara Kings tag her as an author, genre is fiction, and rating is whatever. Um, you can see that now I've got all this really cool data about all these different things in my life. Um, and I didn't ever have to think about, oh, where do I make this table or what page should I put this on, uh, etc. So now that we have some basic amounts of information in our in our

workspace, and we have some things kind of structured. I think this is where stuff starts to get really interesting because now automatically Tana has created tables and databases for you about certain things in your life that you might care about. Um, so let's see a couple of examples of that. And I have created none of this. This is like out of the box from Tana. Um, there's way more to go into here that we'll do in future videos. Um, but if I go into any of these super tags and click on it, you'll see all of a sudden here now is a table which pulls all the restaurants that we've ever added to the database. And if I open the display options, I can create this really beautiful table already from doing nothing. Um, that just shows me all this stuff. And so let's just say I wanted to, you know, maybe in the future I wanted to say, hey, show me all the restaurants in Seattle. Well, in this case, you know, um, I don't have to because they're all Seattle, but let's add let's

say like rers hour is a restaurant in Washington, which I already have as a city, and it's Italian, and it's also pretty damn good. Um, but I can now create another. I can filter this table and say, only show me, um, restaurants from Seattle, right? For example, uh, maybe I only want restaurants from Seattle that are like four and five stars, right? So I can have this table, that's my like top Seattle restaurants. It can be, it can live anywhere in my workspace, and I can refer to it anytime I want, um, and you can do this with any of the other data types. I'm not going to go through too many more examples because, uh, this video is already getting quite long, um, but I hope this shows how this is like a little bit different than a standard noing app. You're using some really basic, uh, annotations to your data to then create this sort of like possibility of visualizing and tracking your data in really interesting ways, um, there's so much more to go into with it, but I think this is sort of like all you

really need to know to get started. I would say if you start taking notes and you make sure to tag things, honestly don't even worry about the fields just yet. Um, that's off, you're off to a great start because then all your stuff is sort of going into a system. Eventually, if you get more comfortable or want to invest the time to like annotate everything with Fields, uh, you can do that and everything will sort of already be in the right place. Um, so hopefully that gives you a sense for what this app is and why it's pretty cool. Um, and check out my other videos to get into some specific use cases of how I like to use Tana, uh, some more advanced features, um, and a whole lot more.

Tana note taking tutorial for complete beginners

I'm a bit of a nut when it comes to productivity software. On this channel I'm sharing things I'm learning and tools I'm building to help you unlock next level productivity!

Tana note taking tutorial for complete beginners

Tana note taking tutorial for complete beginners

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