My Task Management Workflow in Tana

Last week, I shared a tutorial which encompassed an approach to managing tasks in Tana. While that video was a simplified tutorial for beginners, I thought I would share my current workflow as it’s a bit different. When I first came across Tana in October of last year, it was their use case for task management that made me say “I absolutely need to try this app.” Here we are three months later and Tana is now my digital home base.

The Task Supertag

This contains a node for subtasks as well as 4 fields:

• Status
• Queue – the task inbox, everything tagged with task will automatically have this status as the default value
• Next up – tasks that I plan to work on in the upcoming week, similar to in-progress tasks
• Done – tasks completed for the week
• Archive – all completed tasks
• Day of the week
• 2-hour time blocks from 6 am to 10 pm
• Project instance showing nodes tagged with the project supertag

Toggling on done-state mapping allows Tana to match checked nodes to the Status values that I assign. In this case, I want all checked or completed tasks to be automatically assigned the status Done or Archive. That way, the tasks move along the Kanban pipeline without manual changing of the status.

Step 1

I add tasks to the daily node as they come up throughout – you guessed it – the day.

If it’s a task that I want to get done either on the current day or an upcoming day in the week, I add it directly to my weekly schedule which also lives in the day supertag.

The weekly schedule shows me all events and tasks that have the Status: Next up. I also keep tasks marked as Done in this view so that I feel some semblance of accomplishment at the end of the day.

Step 2

During my weekly review, usually on a Sunday, I review the tasks for the week and change the status of those marked as Done to Archive by selecting all nodes and setting the status to Archive using the command bar (Cmd-K).

Step 3

I begin planning the tasks that I want to focus on for the upcoming week by dragging them from Queue to the Next up column.

Step 4

Lastly, I schedule those tasks using a table view by adding the day of the week that I want to work on it as well as a general time block and that’s it.

I now have a weekly schedule that I reference daily with the tasks that I need to get done each day.

This is the system that has been working for me thus far and I’m extremely happy with it right now. I’m sure that there will be changes to come as I learn more about Tana but the most important thing is that it’s simple and it works (for me).