Explain the problem as you see it
As I watched the recent AMA Founders two weeks ago, I liked to hear Grim talk about his vision of Tana being a tool for working in the loop of gathering data - making sense of it - acting on the data. (09:13)
I think this captures well what most of us are using these tools for.
One thing that is still a big gap in the loop for me, is the part where you make sense and understand your captured data.
One usually captures data in a low level and we can use computing to generate meaning for an individual out of it.
Example: We capture time spend on a project (exercise) by simply setting start and finish times and what we are working on (low level, easy to do).
In oder to make sense of it one can then:
- calculate the time spend on this project
- Putting it into context with comparing it to time spend on other projects giving us fractions
- visualise it in a diagram
This is the high level output we humans can most quickly process and want as the basis for our actions. (e.g realise I should spend more time exercising and taking the action to change this in the next week)
I see the power in tools like Tana to automate the capturing and analysing part of the low level data we put in, so we can focus on the actions we take.
Right now, I capture a large pile of low level data, but they are stuck in the loop since there are limited calculating and no visualising options.
I think Grim briefly replied to the question on formula fields and from his answer it seemed to me that this isn't a priority for Tana right now.
My aim is to see if other people and the Tana team think too that is a crucial part missing in the gather-sense-action workflow and to hopefully raise this issue on the devs priority.
Why is this a problem for you?
I see it as important that we have the most meaningful data for taking good action in the world :)
Suggest a solution
I see two options:
- Having build in Tana tools for basic data analysis and visualisation.
- An easy .csv export of table views or API access on the data, so we can use other tools for it
Big thanks to the Tana Team for creating this magical tool for us. It's such a pleasure to use!