Tana Tour with Andrea Grimsdatter Stallvik: Simple Student Workflows

A biotechnology master’s student credits Tana with replacing a messy sprawl of notes across Google Docs, OneNote, and paper—turning scattered lectures, textbook reading, tasks, and meeting records into a single, searchable system. The biggest payoff isn’t fancy organization; it’s speed. Notes get captured during class or lab work, then tagged just enough to retrieve the right things later, including “questions I need to ask” and “read more” items.

Before Tana, the student relied heavily on Google Docs for intensive group-lab work. Each morning’s brainstorming produced new documents, and the result was a pile of “Untitled” files with no reliable way to extract the useful figures and decisions afterward. That frustration pushed an afternoon of learning Tana’s structure and tags—after which the system immediately felt more usable than juggling many separate documents. The same problem showed up in other formats too: handwritten notes in math were hard to find later, and Word/Docs files for different sessions created fragmentation without a clean way to bring everything together.

In Tana, the student organizes around a “today” node for active work, then builds class-specific decks and collections under it. During lectures, notes land in the relevant lecture node, while questions get tagged as they arise. A live search then pulls all tagged questions from within a specific lecture subtree, producing a condensed checklist for breaks or end-of-class follow-ups. The student also uses tags like “read more” to capture curiosity that doesn’t fit the moment—sometimes tied to overlapping topics across courses.

Task tracking follows the same efficiency-first philosophy. Instead of maintaining separate task apps, tasks are written directly during lectures as they come up, with a lightweight requirement to assign each task to a project. For study and thesis work, tags also act as retrieval hooks: papers get tagged so their abstracts and notes stay structured, and reading plans or chapter notes get grouped for exam revision.

Beyond academics, Tana supports extracurricular workflows, especially recurring meetings. A “meeting” tag organizes rigidly structured weekly sessions, with notes under agenda/outcome points and practical details like who to email, when, and what response was needed. After meetings, the student exports meeting information into HTML to paste into emails—turning Tana’s notes into actionable communication.

The student deliberately avoids over-structuring. They don’t want to spend lecture time filling out many fields, and they question whether linking people and references is worth the effort versus the payoff. Inline references are used more in writing and research than in everyday note capture, and unlinked mentions are acknowledged as an untapped feature. Overall, the system’s value comes from low friction—capturing thoughts quickly—paired with just enough tagging to make later retrieval effortless. The advice to new users is to start simple: use a small set of tags that support searches, then expand only if it genuinely saves time.