Fabio Bracht

Explain the problem as you see it

Tana doesn’t offer a dedicated way to view steps to a checklist or workflow, one at a time.

Why is this a problem for you?

I’d like to have a better interface for following the ideas on Atul Gawande's book "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right".

Suggest a solution

Inspired by Atul Gawande's book "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right", I felt the need to have a sort of “View as Checklist” option available in my nodes.

When viewed as a checklist, a node would display one child node at a time, in order. The children nodes would then act as Steps for the checklist. A Step node should be viewed as close to “full screen” as possible, with Tana hiding everything that isn’t part of that node.

Additionally, a button or some other sort of navigation interface should be implemented to mark the current step as completed and display the next step in order. When doing this for the last step, the parent node (the checklist or workflow itself) could be marked as completed.

I tried to replicate this sort of experience using View as Tabs for the parent node and treating each tab as a Step. It kinda works, but feels like a jerry-rig; and it lacks the easy “mark as complete and move the next” action.

Explain the problem as you see it

Changes made to how the #day node is structured apply to all past nodes.

Why is this a problem for you?

Because it discourages changes to the #day node, out of fear that it will "disfigure" my past #day nodes.

In Bullet Journaling, there's this idea that the journaling process is intended to "remember the past, organize the present, and plan the future". Not everyone uses Tana similarly to how one would use a Bullet Journal, but I think we can agree the #day node fundamentally serves a journaling purpose.

In journaling, the structure is often as important as the content: today, I'm primarily focused on using Tana as a work tool in my job, so my #day structure (the collection and ordering of the fields I use) reflects that; in the future, I might instead be more interested in using Tana for a different purpose, and my #day structure should reflect that. However, any changes made then will retroactively impact and disfigure all my #day nodes, impairing my ability to look back and properly "remember the past".

Suggest a solution

As each day goes by, #day nodes for dates in the past should have their field structure preserved, as well as the content.

Of course, it should always be possible to delete and edit nodes, and references should update normally. But if I use a "Weight" field to track weight loss daily for a month, for example, in the future I should still be able to go back in time and see that field, even if by that time it's not part of my #day node anymore.