Live Timers

Explain the problem as you see it

The UX for mapping knowledge and tasks to time could be so much more. Calendar integration is a good start, but it's clunky, and requires a good amount of cognitive overhead. There are a lot of manual touches required in recording Start and End times if you want to accurately track the time of things in Tana.

Why is this a problem for you?

I completely use daily pages, and track all of my notes, meetings, tasks in that day's page.

I often find myself:

• Starting a task, but not knowing exactly when I will be finished
• Planning a task, and estimating the amount of time it will take
• Getting lost during a task, wishing I had structure to keep me on-plan

Suggest a solution

TaskTXT is a similar app that excels in this area.

Tana should have a concept of "adding" a timer to a node. The UX should be like Tana AI. You type a time at the end of the node, and Tana automatically suggests "Start Timer". Then a live stopwatch appears next to the node.

The starts and stops are recorded automatically as part of the node's metadata. Tracking that history has the added benefit of helping teams make better estimates (in terms of improving accuracy over time, and in terms of more granular estimates). The timer data can be surfaced and analyzed with Searches, leading to findings that only Tana is suited to capture:

• "XYZ Planning meeting tends to go ₂₀ minutes over the allocated time, we should extend its length."
• "I notice that I tend to under-estimate design tasks - let me adjust my plan accordingly."
• "On days where I finish my tasks within my original estimations, I can see in my journal I feel happier."
• "Something ad-hoc just came up, let me quickly start a node to track this portion of work."