Here's how you can put a little bit of creative serendipity into your Tana workspace
Want to see a couple of random fleeting notes from your Zettelkasten as daily inspiration, for example?
Here's how to set it up!
One convenient way to get prompted with random notes from your workspace is in your daily page.
Open up your #day-tag configuration and add a new field >Random Zettel
In the next step, we'll configure this field:
To configure the >Random Zettel field, click on the little icon on the left.
Then you select Field Type: "Instance" and look for the "zettel" supertag (or whatever else you use)
Then: check the "Auto initialize to random node with this supertag" & select how many nodes you want
And that's all there is to it!
Now on every new day you get a random selection of zettels that can prompt your thinking and serve as entry points into your Zettelkasten.
Super neat and useful!
If you'd like to learn more about Tana follow me @cortexfutura – more threads like this coming!
And also check out Tanarian Brain, my completely done-for-you Second Brain template for Tana: cortexfutura.com/tanarian-brain
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Here's a little trick that can help you keep a sense of what's what in your Tana systems: when you're creating new fields, think about whether it's a generic field or a local field.
The "Topic(s)" field in Tanarian Brain (my Second Brain template for Tana), for example, is used all over the place!
Quotes, fleeting and permanent notes, questions, claims, sources...they all refer to the same "Topic(s)" field.
That makes it a generic field.
The "Location" field in the quote supertag, in contrast, is a "local" (heh) field: it is only used in that one supertag and has a specific meaning (the page number or Kindle location where a quote is from).
I do most of my reading in @ReadwiseReader, and so it's super important for me to get my highlights from there into Tana.
Let me show you how to do that using the Raycaster "Readwise-to-Tana" plugin!
Once you have installed the plugin and entered your Readwise API token, you get the "Search Highlights" option in Raycaster.
This is your entry point into ALL your Readwise highlights:
Here's my current collection of recently highlighted books and articles as an example.
For any source you can show the highlights by just hitting enter – very quick.
Cmd+k gives you more actions. Here is where you can set up your export template. I'll show you in the next tweet!
One @tana_inc feature I take full advantage of every single day is the day-supertag.
It's the perfect place to configure a daily dashboard, and I've built a very powerful collection of live searches for it into Tanarian Brain:
Tanarian Brain comes with a fully-featured GTD Dashboard for your Daily Node:
Do Next – anything you've marked "In Progress"
Due Today – Due Date is today
Overdue – Due Date is in the past
Upcoming Tasks – Due Date is in the future
You also get a dashboard/live search for your most important projects:
Every project comes with a checkbox "Priority". Select this checkbox, and as long as the project remains undone, it'll show up on your daily node.