Using Notion Tana and Obsidian to Untangle Remote Routines

1. Building a morning capture brain dump that does not stall

The idea was dead simple: open the laptop, type junk thoughts, tag anything urgent, push to task system. Getting that to work consistently between Notion, Obsidian, and Tana… not simple. The blocker wasn’t the tools—it was the weird friction that shows up when the brain fires before the workflows do.

In Notion, the capture widget (using a synced block on a daily template) would sometimes lag fully 4–5 seconds right after startup. On slower connections, the daily template wouldn’t load, so it would drop random notes into last week’s page. In Obsidian, QuickAdd worked better locally, but I had to remember to open today’s daily note before triggering it, otherwise it wrote into blank.md. Tana’s quick capture was snappier, but everything defaulted to inbox—you had to manually tag it #today to show up in your actual day node.

Found this in console once: {"error":"page not found","route":"/daily/2023-12-27"}. It was December 28.

The move that fixed most of this: installed a tiny AppleScript tied to Keyboard Maestro that opens Obsidian directly to today’s daily.md, types a preset header, then pauses two seconds before tabbing to Notion (already set to open on my daily dashboard). Tana auto-launches in the background, so I’ll check #inbox later. Janky? Absolutely. But the friction is lower now. I don’t think about startup anymore.

2. Tagging structures that actually survive your own brain fog

The problem with tagging stuff in any of these tools is that it always makes sense on day one—and by day eight you’ve got #maybe and #someday and #notnow and you’re not sure what any of them mean. Especially when you revisit week-old tasks wondering why you tagged a half-baked idea with both #research and #urgent.

Notion makes it worse when you’re editing inline. You type #wait and accidentally hit space too fast and it becomes plain text. Good luck refinding that. Tana is better structurally by forcing nodes, but I’ve accidentally duplicated tags many times (#today and #Today are not the same). Obsidian tag auto-completion helps—but if you sync across devices, sometimes there’s a weird tag cache mismatch where one vault doesn’t see the new tag until you reopen the app.

Some tag principles that survived more than two weeks:

• Use a special character convention: I prefix process tags with . (e.g. .reading, .writing), and topical tags are plain (e.g. crm, backup).
• Limit daily-use tags to five max: mine are #today, #log, .thinking, .done, and one rotating based on active priority.
• Every weekly review involves dragging dead tags to a special page or node called “Retired Tags” so they stop autopopulating.

This sounds elaborate. It’s not. It started because I found myself typing #thisweek and then wondering if I meant this actual week or next sprint.

3. Connecting calendars without dragging lines between boxes

I kept trying to line up events from different layers—actual calendar, personal goals, work tasks—but nothing stuck. Notion’s calendar ignores system time zones unless you specify it. Tana’s calendar-like views don’t plug into anything native. Obsidian’s plugins like Full Calendar took too much fiddling with .ics files and still didn’t pull updates properly from Apple Calendar without a third-party sync system.

What started working was setting up read-only syncs. I subscribed to my Google Calendar from within the native Mac Calendar app. Then, in Notion, I embedded a shared view of my Google Calendar via a tool like Indify—but only for reference. Tasks and intentions lived separately. It reduced the urge to drag tasks onto hours they didn’t belong in.

In Tana, I made a node query that pulled anything tagged #scheduled + had a @time attribute set—pseudo-events. These showed up cleanly in a day table. Obsidian I left out altogether. The friction wasn’t worth it. Syncing across all of them caused more confusion than clarity.

At one point I had an event show up five times at different hours, once per tool. None of them were the right one.

4. Routing finished notes where they can still do something useful

Finishing a note is satisfying. The part after that—finding the note later—is where things broke. I’d daily-capture in Obsidian, meeting-log in Notion, create idea trees in Tana. But I couldn’t remember where anything ended up.

So I tried a routing system. It broke instantly. One automation via Zapier sent an “article idea” from Tana into Notion as a new page—but without the tags. Another Obsidian plugin sent daily notes to GPT-4 for summarization then pasted those into Notion… which started erasing properties from the linked database. I’d open Notion to check a summary and see “Type: Unknown” and “Date: null”. Headache trigger.

Things that finally stuck by week three:

• Any note ending with ## Done got picked up by an Obsidian plugin that wrote the file name into a dedicated log.md file.
• In Tana, I used a one-click command to send any node with tag #ready-for-review into a queue node. That queue surfaced each morning on the Today page.
• Notion had a dedicated “incoming” database. I used Make to dump anything emailed to a custom address into that DB. No auto-routing. Manual triage only.

I have no end-to-end system. Just three duct-taped routing lanes that send things in the general direction of usefulness.

5. Handling recurring tasks when nobody remembers where they live

Recurring tasks sound simple until they don’t. One of my self-imposed weekly tasks is “nuke old drafts and archive open loops.” Nearly every tool messed this up in some way.

In Notion, I set it up in a task database with a Repeat Weekly tag. Problem: if I checked off the task Monday but opened the page Tuesday, it didn’t show back up the next week unless I un-checked and rechecked it. That was… not obvious. Tana could technically do recurring nodes via extension, but the community scripts I found occasionally ran twice. I’d wake up and have “Review Obsidian plugins” twice on the same day.

Obsidian ticked the box once you ran the template, but left no indication you’d done it other than the markdown file timestamp. I once re-did my entire weekly review by accident because I opened the wrong note. Confusingly, the task looked identical.

What kind of worked involved a combo:

IF weekly.md exists AND contains '#done-this-week', don't trigger task automation.
ELSE create weekly.md from template and add '#done-this-week'.

I put this logic inside a local script that checks every day at 7AM. Not pretty, but better than seeing three versions of “Reflect on team decisions” back to back across tools.

6. Using Tana queries without accidentally deleting your own timeline

Tana has this magical query system where you can assemble filters and conditions that surface what you’re working on today. But I wiped out half a week’s worth of nodes after mistaking a query block for editable content. Turns out, if you nest commands inside a live query view, and delete the parent node, the children go with it. Poof.

I couldn’t Ctrl-Z either because Tana doesn’t undo past node deletion unless you catch it via the trash view, which isn’t enabled by default. Had to re-create four notes from vague memory and one screenshot I luckily saved for a tweet.

Realizations after that incident:

• Never write inside a live query block. Use it only for surfacing.
• Set the query to “uneditable” in the node options—yes, that tiny gear at the top right.
• Create a daily snapshot node that stores today’s working query, then archive it by midnight using a command node workflow.
• Enable Tana’s version history. It’s not on by default on new workspaces.

Still like the queries. Just not when they eat data I thought I was viewing.

7. Maintaining context across tools when your brain jumps mid-thought

This one’s personal. I tend to jump tools in the middle of writing—not intentionally. A tab flashes an update, or someone comments, and suddenly I’m responding in Notion while the real idea is half-buried in Tana, or locked in a local Obsidian tab.

So I started copying active fragments into a dedicated scratch node. Titled it !!context-lost. Anytime I left an app with something half-formed, I dumped the current sentence or outline bullet into that node before tabbing away. I even set a hotkey (⌘⇧C) to append under today’s node in Tana or Obsidian, depending on which one was open.

Sample auto-appended entry from last month:

- 14:42 started thread re: team task pursuit clarity -- context lost after Slack ping

It’s not pretty. It’s not synced. But skimming that scratch section at the end of the day often reminds me what I got yanked out of mid-thought—better than lost threads multiplying quietly.