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Sascha Meier

Sascha Meier

Joined May 22, 2024 Last seen Jan 22, 2025
Posts 2 Comments 2

⁨Sascha Meier⁩'s Posts

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Sascha Meier Sascha Meier Jul 17, 2024

Automatic task scheduling (like Motion, not Notion)

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Explain the problem as you see it

Creating and managing tasks in Tana is quick, easy, and extremely flexible with all the options we have available with fields, queries, commands, operators, etc.

Scheduling and rescheduling tasks on the other hand, especially across multiple calendars, is very inconvenient or not even possible due to limited integrations with external calendar tools.

Why is this a problem for you?

Over the years I've tried all kinds of different tools and platforms to build a system of task planning and scheduling that works for me and the way I live, work and think. A system that covers all the tasks in all areas of my life. Be it complex tasks belonging to a work project, general business tasks, tasks related to my video content creation process, private long-term tasks, quick everyday to-dos, a bucket list - basically everything that I know I must do, want to do, maybe will do one day...

And ideally, this should be a one-tool solution only, which has always been an additional challenge.

No system or tool that I've used so far has come close to what I had in mind - until I found Motion (not Notion).

Until now, this tool has turned out to be the best way by far to schedule all my tasks as just described.

It takes away all the increasing overload and the overwhelming feeling of having endless task lists of different areas, which ultimately trigger my procrastination and decision fatigue.

In the end, this is what makes me abandon one tool after the next. I had high hopes for Notion, but that was not it - especially because their slow and buggy Android app has never really been usable.

While Motion may seem like an 'AI boss' that is now telling me what I have to do by when, it's still all my tasks. It's everything I have to do or want to do. But instead of me wasting my time to do the planning and rescheduling, it's now an automatic system that plans and optimizes my schedule across all my calendars with all the data I provide.

And this is exactly what makes my life much easier and saves me a lot of time.

Tana is amazing and I love to use it for taking and capturing notes, especially with the simple and fast Tana Capture app and having a blank page every day to just jot down everything that comes to mind.

But I know that I can't use Tana to start setting up a task scheduling system that works for me. So I'd still be stuck with a two-tool solution, which is not ideal.

But I also know that Tana already is extremely powerful, and I definitely see that it is actually the first tool that has the massive potential to offer automatic task scheduling just like Motion, because that's exactly what Tana is being built for - the interaction of AI and humans to make our lives easier.

Suggest a solution

The ideal solution would be to have an 'automatic task scheduling' feature like Motion's in Tana, built on Tana's available commands and the use of AI.

Motion's process of capturing tasks and defining how they can or must be (re)scheduled by the AI is great. Using the different priorities, different deadlines (soft, hard, asap, no deadline), allowing the system to break up longer tasks into chunks of a defined minimum length and reschedule them independently, setting up task dependencies, subtasks, recurring tasks etc., really makes it the best task planning / scheduling tool that I've ever used.

I'd like to mention again that this is how it works for me, and these are my thoughts and suggestions. Everyone works and thinks differently 😊

I'm aware that is fairly complex and might take some time to build, but just this feature alone would get me to upgrade to a paid Tana plan instantly. The current implementation of AI in Tana surely is very useful for so many people, but there's currently no use case of Tana's AI features for me.

If there won't be a native implementation of such a feature, maybe someone would be able to build and offer a free (or paid; you're welcome 😉) template if that's even possible, given the complexity.

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Sascha Meier Sascha Meier Jul 4, 2024

Option to close desktop app to notification area

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Explain the problem as you see it

I'm talking about the Windows app of Tana. Many apps that I want to keep running in the background have an option in the settings that makes it possible to minimize the app to the notification area instead of closing it when clicking on the 'X' window control, which normally closes a window or an app.

But most apps that are intended to be kept running in the background (Slack, Spotify, password managers, antivirus apps, Skype, Zoom, and so on...) don't shut down/close when clicking 'X'. They are minimized to the notification area and keep running.

Why is this a problem for you?

When I use apps in their web form, i.e. in the browser, it's normal for me to minimize the browser window to the taskbar by clicking the '-' control in the top right of the window.

When I use apps in their desktop form, it's normal for me to minimize the app to the notification area by clicking the 'X' control in the top right of the window so that they don't take up space in the taskbar.

So now when I click the 'X' in the Tana desktop app, the app closes. I wish it would work like all (most) of the other desktop apps and that a click on 'X' would minimize it to the notification area.

Suggest a solution

Add an option in the desktop app settings to enable/disable the 'minimize to notification area'.

Example: in the Slack desktop app it's under Preferences > Advanced > Other options > Leave app running in notification area when the window is closed (last option at the bottom).

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