My favorite Tana "LEGO® block"

Folks often think of Tana as having a "steep learning curve." And I get where that comes from—it's flexible and powerful, so there are a lot of different ways to set up workflows. But there's a specific relationship between supertags, fields, and searches that is simple to learn that I consider my fundamental Tana LEGO® block.

It works like this. If I want to see how two things relate—say, books and authors—I first create supertags for both. Then within the #book supertag I create a field called "Author" that draws its options from instances of the #author supertag. And in the #author supertag, I create a search called Books that finds all books by whatever author you're looking at.

It sets up something like this:

A Tale of Two Cities #book
- Author:: Charles Dickens #author

and

Charles Dickens #author
- Books by this Author (<- search)
  - A Tale of Two Cities #book (<- search result)
  - David Copperfield #book (<- search result)

The syntax of the search inside the #author supertag is
- #book
- Author:: PARENT

As in, find all books where the author is whatever author you're currently looking at.

This pattern is powerful, because its how I connect tasks to projects (Project field in #task, Tasks search in #project), or quotes to sources (Source field in #quote, Quotes search in #source), or discussion points to people (Person field in #discussion point, Topics to Discuss search in #person), etc.

The pattern is simple to learn, but many complicated-looking dashboards in Tana are little more than just a lot of these simple relationships working together.

I actually have a video coming out on Friday about how to set this up. It will be the culmination of my free Essential Tana Skills YouTube playlist, which you can check out here if you want: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGL797U3UcfO2bQm5tzJSny62qdVpj5bi.

Are there any simple Tana workflows—or even more detailed ones—that are especially valuable for you?