Building a Digital Brain in Notion or Tana Without Losing Yours
1. Choosing Between Tana and Notion Actually Breaks the Workflow
If you’re trying to build a digital brain and you’re oscillating between Tana and Notion, the friction isn’t theoretical — it’s literally in your muscle memory. I kept flipping back and forth trying to recreate my spaced repetition hub in both. Spoiler: it sucked on both sides for different reasons.
In Tana, the friction shows up when you reference a node from another day and it auto-nests itself under your current journal node — without warning. So your data ≠ where you left it. Notion, meanwhile, makes basic block typing feel like writing in cement. Bullet habits don’t translate well from Tana either — tabbing doesn’t always indent as expected when pasting copied outlines. You think you’re copying structure, but Notion pastes a brick wall of text.
Worst part? I built the same capture flow in both systems and the content diverged within 48 hours because Notion’s mobile sync bug dropped two notes. Literally never arrived. Later I found them duplicated (but empty) in the page history. Still no idea how.
2. Using Notion Databases for Thinking Is Slower Than Expected
There’s something deeply satisfying about tagging a thought as #idea, #project, or #thread, then watching filters light up. Unless Notion decides to forget your formula field exists — which happened to me two weeks into building a schema-heavy priority dashboard.
“The formula references a property that could not be found.” — Notion error toast, while hovering over its exact property.
This wasn’t a typo or rename issue. I retyped, reconnected, even re-duplicated the database. Eventually I realized it was reacting to a relation property being filtered via a formula — and failing silently until reload. Zero indication except that formulas stopped updating.
Humans interact with databases differently than forms. We scan, jump columns, flip filters — but Notion reacts optimistically. You drag something to a board and it might not update your aggregate view until you reload twice. If that board connects to a dashboard via linked views, good luck explaining why your tag isn’t reflecting.
Quick dirty tips inside Notion:
- Use title fields as a summary, not for titles (forces you to keep thinking clear)
- Avoid rollups for anything mission-critical unless you test them on mobile
- Always duplicate the database before editing views linked inside sidebars
- Formulas often calculate correctly but display the previous state — not a joke
- Icon-based buttons (like [+] list item) sometimes don’t fire at all — especially in templates
3. Tana Date Nodes Feel Magical Until the Query Ghosts You
I once built a Tana query to surface every note tagged #review from the last five days. It worked for about a week. Then it started skipping days randomly. Turned out anything created via the mobile Quick Add and then edited on desktop wasn’t actually timestamped the way I assumed.
You’d think “July 14” nested under a Journal node would guarantee proper dating. Nope. You must explicitly use the [[Today]] node or Tana doesn’t register it in temporal queries. Logically you see a day. But technically it’s just a label until Tana parses it fully.
The actual aha moment was when I noticed two nearly identical notes — one returned, one not — and found this buried in their node JSON:
"dateCreated": nullIf you’re building any sort of time-based logic (weekly recaps, retros, spaced review), test the query using raw JSON views. The dateOf field is not reliably inferred from position. Also: check if the item was created on mobile, then edited on desktop. That was what broke mine every time.
4. Interoperability Between Notion and Tana Hits a Sync Wall
There are solid sync tools out there, but syncing between Notion and Tana in real time is like trying to translate two languages where one uses folders and the other uses time. I tried stitching them with Make-based flows and again using GPT-based rewriters via Zapier — neither stuck.
What fails most often: formatting structures. Tana throws inline tags into any unordered list, which Notion turns into plaintext. Meanwhile, Notion checklists synced to Tana convert into child nodes with no actual state storage (no way to say “completed” that Tana can act on).
It also gets weird with backlinked references. You think sending a #topic from Notion to Tana as a tag will let you query it later, but if the generated Tana node contains Markdown-inspired hashes (e.g. #header1), Tana auto-promotes it to a node title. That breaks your query structure.
Not a theoretical issue — I had 90+ notes from a writing project sync from Notion into Tana and accidentally overwrite seven carefully organized Tana outlines because the incoming nodes had IDs that Tana merged under the same parent. Like they were the same file. Gone. Forever.
5. Nested Capture Workflows Can Create Infinite Loops in Tana
This one took me two nights to debug: I built a Tana Capture Template that called a Smart Parent tagged #daily, which referenced another Smart Parent tagged #project. When running it twice, the node spawned itself recursively and exploded into a nest of 78 nodes.
Turns out: if a Smart Parent calls another Smart Parent that includes the caller as a reference or return — it loops. Not visually, initially. It nests once. But if you re-run capture within the child node (which I did out of habit), it doubles again. You can create ghost nodes without seeing them until you zoom out.
The worse issue: once that happens, any query filtering by #daily or #project now grabs all 78 clones. Good luck figuring out which were real. You’d think the graph would reveal this — but typeahead indexing hides ghost children.
I ended up exporting node IDs via Tana’s developer console and comparing them outside to catch it. Nothing in UI gives you a warning. It just replicates forever.
6. Autofill Templates Fail If You Duplicate Within Shared Spaces
Someone in my workspace copied my spaced review structure (in Notion) without realizing that duplicating live databases in shared spaces results in disconnected templates. That database had a “Next Review Date” formula tied to a template button. After the copy, it stopped calculating.
Here’s the flaw: Notion doesn’t maintain internal references on copy. If your template depends on a relation — even if it’s exact replica — the new database has no state awareness until every relation is manually reconnected. Formula fields silently fail. Buttons disable themselves.
This feels like it wasn’t designed for team-level knowledge graphs at all. One person builds. Everyone else gets brittle read-only dashboards unless they re-do the logic from scratch. It’s a hidden cost of Notion’s flexibility — and completely undocumented.
The workaround: clone at the root level only. Don’t duplicate filtered views. Don’t copy inside collapsed toggles. Anything that flattens structure breaks relations. If your team relies on onboarding checklists, keep capture separated from dashboards entirely.
7. Daily Logs Work Better When Protocols Stay Stupid
I spent a week trying to build a protocol-based AI daily log generator in Notion using GPT autofill formulas. The idea: type /daily-start and get your focus, top priorities, and GPT-filled energy forecast. It broke immediately.
First, GPT autofills do not run reliably on template creation — only on first edit. Second, Notion doesn’t expose that behavior via the UI. You just get a blank block until you type something else first. Think about what that looks like to a new teammate. Confusing as hell.
In Tana, I tried something similar using Smart Templates with conditional logic. If time = morning, populate X. But conditionals can’t reference system time unless manually added. So you end up retroactively editing each log to meet the logic structure and then re-applying the state — which defeats the whole idea of auto generation.
I gave up and moved to stupid checklists with embedded GPT suggestions as callouts. No logic. Just frozen helpers. Because:
- They render the same on mobile and desktop
- They don’t require API triggers or JSON injections
- They don’t break if someone duplicates the page
- You know exactly what teammates will see
Sometimes to make a smart note system work, everything inside has to act dumb.