My Tana System

My name is Andre Foeken, and I am part of the leadership team of a Dutch Healthtech company called Nedap Healthcare. I started there in 2006, just after finishing my Master in Computer Science, and have stuck around for the last 17 years.

The years have gone by fast; I have had a vartiety of roles and responsibilities, but I had always been able to manage everything without too much external organisational structure. My mantra was always: if it is important, it will pop up again.

But, as my responsibilities increased, this did not always have the most desired effect. I started to notice that keeping everything in my head was costing more and more energy, and forgetting small stuff was starting to become more frequent. I needed something to help me organise.

Over the years, as many of us have, I had tried a multitude of todo apps and productivity hacks, but nothing stuck around for more than a month or so. I always either forgot I was using them or started to actively dislike them.

The key to long-term effectiveness for these systems for me lies in how they are embedded in my daily routine. It cannot be a tool I pick up as needed, it needs to be where everything lives.

This month marks my one year anniversairy with Tana and I use it to manage my entire professional life. I currently spend around two to eight hours a day in Tana. Most of that time is spent taking notes during meetings, but I also spend quite a chunk of time preparing, journalling, and reflecting in Tana.

This document, and the accompanying videos, will go into how I use Tana, and how to get it set up just the way you want. For me, customization is important, it needs to feel like my own, tailored to exactly what I need, and fluid enough to adapt to whatever comes up. I will periodically update this to reflect updates to how I work.

Each of us has different organisational needs. The important part is to find your core loop, where in your routine can you reap the benefits and where will you need to spend energy to enable this. It is always a give and take, no system works without you investing some sort of effort into it.

My earlier attempts always failed when the amount of energy a system took to maintain outweighed its usefulness. Energy does not equal effort. I spent a ton of effort into customizing Tana to work exactly the way I want it to work, but I enjoy it, so it takes much less energy, and I built it up over time. Slowly adding layer after layer.

My core loop is simple. My need is to be prepared and reliable. This means I need to be able to remember what I discuss during meetings and track all my tasks that come up.

I take notes during all of my meetings in Tana, when a task pops up, I write it down as a todo item. Once a week, I make a weekly plan using my todo items and calendar. Once a day, I go through the plan and my Inbox, and start ticking them off.

It sounds ridiculously simple and obvious, but let’s go into the parts and see why they are important (and how to set them up).

I am constantly trying new things in Tana, but I also make a point of removing the things that don’t stick. My system expands and contracts, and I only keep the best parts. I tend to favor the less is more ideology.