Adventures in Tana: Planning and Reviewing: Part 1

It’s that time of the year; calendars and diaries are on their last pages and new ones are being offered in some shops for those who like to track the passing of time with paper prompts on the wall. There’s a sense of Auld Lang Syne, of things ending, of the old year dying and perhaps dreaded New Year’s resolutions on the horizon.

I’ve seen other users of Tana: the Everything OS chatting in the stream about planning, so I thought I’d jot down a few of my own thoughts on process. It’s very much work in progress but I think it valuable to record one’s learning and development in any field but especially in these intriguing and powerful digital tools.

So, for anyone keen to begin planning your 2023 in Tana could I suggest that before you set up your template structure in Tana with appropriate tags, those amazing supertags and fields, that you design your system to be flexible enough to track your efforts and to assist you to stay in touch with what supports your life’s business and all the energy you pour into it. Begin with a review of your 2022 to provide a foundation or rationale for your efforts. Scope the year that’s just gone or is about to, as I’m doing now. I will check my achievements and output against my values, aspirations, and goals. Everything I do flows back or has a relationship to my value system.

I’ve adapted my approach from the work of August Bradley whose review and planning cycles are well articulated in two videos which are well worth watching to get a sense of how his system works.

Consider and write what you value – your aspirations which define your purpose, perhaps. From this point, you can break this down further and further into actionable items: projects, habits, and routines so you get a sense that what you do is contributing to your overall life’s aspirations.

August Bradley

This approach is absolutely fundamental to my own system of planning and reviewing.

I’ve been doing this now for a little over a year using Roam Research and Smart Blocks. In Part 2, I’ll write about my own way of using Tana to plan and review.

I’d love to hear from you about any of this, your own approach and feedback. Thanks for reading.