Native Readwise to Tana Export!

A native Readwise-to-Tana integration now syncs every Readwise highlight and note into Tana automatically, tagged and formatted so it can plug straight into a second-brain workflow. The practical payoff is speed and structure: once the integration is set up, highlights land in Tana as nodes with consistent metadata (title, source, URL, date, authors, and custom fields), while notes are imported alongside them—ready for search, organization, and AI actions.

Getting the sync working starts with creating a Tana API token, then pasting it into Readwise’s Tana export settings. The setup matters because it determines how multi-line highlights are handled and how Readwise’s templating language maps Readwise fields into Tana fields. The recommended configuration uses “compact layout” so highlights with line breaks concatenate into a single node. It also uses custom formatting so each imported highlight becomes a pairing node labeled with the full source title, with the highlight text indented beneath it.

The import template is built with Readwise’s templating syntax (double curly braces) to place highlight text, highlight location URLs, and highlight note text into specific Tana fields. A key design choice is how tags translate across systems: Readwise tags behave like descriptors of content, while Tana “super tags” behave more like relationships that define the structure of nodes. To keep topics usable in Tana, the workflow converts each Readwise highlight tag into a topics field (rather than trying to map Readwise tags directly onto Tana’s relationship-style tags). Highlights and notes also receive different super tags—highlights get a “highlight” super tag and notes get a “note” super tag.

Before running a full export, the guidance is to test with a small selection of sources to avoid importing everything in a messy state. Readwise can “reset sync status,” which re-imports items as new—useful for debugging formatting, but it can create duplicates in Tana. After import, highlights appear under a Readwise library node, and each highlight includes fields like URL, date, title, authors, category (article/book/tweet/video), plus the configured “read-wise location” field.

For day-to-day use, the workflow recommends building live searches in Tana based on the Readwise-created tags, such as pulling highlights from the last seven days into a daily note. If an export needs fixing, the process is to convert the live search results into plain nodes, convert references into nodes, and delete the original library nodes—then re-run export.

A major complication comes from Tana API limitations in early access: Readwise can’t see existing Tana tags and fields already present in a workspace. The workaround is to merge Readwise-created super tags and fields into the corresponding existing ones (always merging into the tag/field that Readwise already created, so Readwise keeps populating the right IDs). This merging applies to both super tags (e.g., highlight vs highlight) and fields (e.g., authors), ensuring live searches work across both imported and manually created content.

Finally, the integration becomes more than storage through an AI template installed into Tana. With AI commands wired to highlight super tags, users can generate topics from highlights, draft real-life applications, suggest who might be interested (for sharing or outreach), and produce analogies (e.g., “Swiss army knife” or “magic wand”) to deepen understanding. Users can tune creativity via temperature (0–2) and switch models (default GPT 3.5 turbo, or GPT-4) to change output style.