How (and why) I use multiple workspaces in Tana

My workspaces are like this:

The arrows indicate which workspaces can access one another’s content (the “allow content from” relation). My personal workspace can access all the others and they can access it. (None of my workspaces are shared with others.)

I have a separate “Work” workspace (which is not named “Work” but is actually named after my employer). The main reason for this is that I want some separation here. I work remotely quite a lot but I also work on site. When I’m in the office I switch to my work workspace’s “Today” page. It’s an open plan office and I don’t want people who glance over at my screen to see personal stuff.

Another reason to have a separate work workspace is because employment relations change. I don’t plan to part ways with my current employer and I hope they don’t plan to part ways with me, but it happens. A new employer would have different arrangements, different bug tracking systems, different ways of working, and so I would create a whole new workspace for that with new tags, and I can cleanly archive the old work workspace without losing any information.

The other three workspaces are separate because they are quite self-contained information silos that really don’t have any bearing on one another. They are effectively knowledge bases, but with their own structures. Academia reflects my ongoing interests in philosophy, politics, and economics. Music concerns my hobby as an amateur musician. Computing is all things related to programming and computing platforms. Obviously that is relevant to my work, so the work workspace has access to that.

Mostly, except when I am in the office, I work in my personal workspace. That is where I organise my time. But as I create items related to work, or related to computing or academia or music, I do a cmd-K Move and leave reference to <workspace> Today. It’s an extra step, but worth it for me.