Fixes that worked once for Notion Tana and Obsidian workflows

Fixes that worked once for Notion Tana and Obsidian workflows

ByUS Stacked

1. Rebuilding a daily tracker in Notion without losing your mind

I’ve rebuilt my Notion daily tracker maybe seven times. Not exaggerated. Every time I change one property — say, adding a checkbox for “intentional break taken” — something else breaks. Either the Today filter disappears because it’s trying to resolve a non-existent date property, or everything sorts upside down for no reason until I remove and reapply the filter.

The current version uses a template button to create a new page in a linked database. That button used to also insert a checklist block for the daily shutdown routine. Last week it stopped doing that. Literally nothing changed — I hadn’t touched the template. I had to clone the button, re-add the checklist, and suddenly it worked again.

Undocumented edge-case: When a Notion button has blocks and database templates combined, if the underlying DB template is deleted or renamed, the blocks silently fail to render — no error, no warning.

I finally landed on this flow:

  • Use one master “Daily Log” database filtered by a “Date is today” formula
  • Add a sync block from another page with recurring tasks (manual control wins over zombie automation)
  • Attach tracked properties: sleep hours (number), focus rating (select), and reflection (text)
  • Embed a filtered linked view of past seven days below the current log (helps catch duplicate entries)

The only reliable way to keep a Notion tracker working long-term is to treat it like a pet: hands-on maintenance, no sudden changes, and assume it gets moody when you’re in a rush.

2. Making Tana actually clickable from mobile is harder than expected

I really want to love Tana. The tree structure kind of ruins you for flat notes. But on mobile, half the time I tap a node, it just selects the text. No expansion. No toggle. Just a blue box, like it’s judging me.

This wasn’t even a bug, technically. Turns out tapping the left margin is how you open a node — tapping the text just selects it. That behavior makes perfect sense in desktop with a mouse. On mobile? Almost unusable one-handed, especially if you’re holding coffee.

I worked around this by creating a custom “Today” node with a shortcut field that jumps directly into a pre-expanded branch. That required going into the SuperTag config and exposing the wrong default field that was hiding under “Advanced Options.” Which I still don’t fully understand.

Real quote from the moment it worked: “Oh. That’s the field it’s been using this whole time. Neat.”

Now I use this Today node like a pseudo-daily dashboard:

  • Auto-created at midnight via Tana Paste JSON and a Zapier trigger
  • Pre-fills with recurring todos, tagging structure, and a focus zone node
  • Includes an empty #log node at the bottom with a timestamped insert on Siri trigger
  • Contains a link to “Yesterday” that I drag into the new daily at breakfast

The only issue is that when you have autofill turned on inside a SuperTag, hitting backspace sometimes removes the entire block, not just the field. If this happens once, just know it’ll happen again — I started duplicating the whole day node before making edits, just in case.

3. Using Obsidian Daily Notes without future-dating your tasks forever

I got into this cycle where every unchecked task in my Obsidian daily notes would be echoed in the next day’s note using a “Backlink unresolved tasks” embed. Felt smart at first. Until I looked up and had two weeks’ worth of copied-over undone items. The productivity shame loop got real.

The fix wasn’t technical — it was visibility. I added a dashboard view that uses the Tasks plugin to filter for anything:


not done
AND due before today

This throws all overdue stuff into one block. Turns out, things I don’t tick today often didn’t deserve to exist. I prune there first before starting the day. The real win: this stopped my notes from stacking three duplicate versions of “email Sarah re: Tuesday.”

Platform quirk: The Tasks plugin will parse ANY line with a dash and bracket as a task, even inside code blocks unless you explicitly turn off code parsing.

I also discovered that when using the Calendar plugin, double-clicking a date sometimes opens a new note with incorrectly formatted frontmatter — instead of:

---
date: 2024-05-03
---

it’ll sometimes produce just:

# 2024-05-03

No template headers, no tags, just a heading. If your automations rely on proper YAML frontmatter, watch for this, especially when opening notes manually vs. through a hotkey-triggered template call.

4. Triggering Notion templates via Zapier is unreliable after page nesting

This one cost me a whole frustrated afternoon: I had a Zapier flow where opening a new Contact in Pipedrive would insert a new onboarding doc into a Notion database. It worked until I added a group-level dashboard inside Notion and dragged those docs underneath it for context. Suddenly the Zap kept throwing “page not found” errors — even though I could open the page manually.

Turns out when you move a Notion database page under another page, Zapier can sometimes lose its reference ID. It’s not about permissions — it just doesn’t update the lookup properly because it’s referencing a previous path, not the page UUID directly.

One of the successful attempts used the actual database ID pulled from a manually created Notion API token — not via Zapier detect — which bypassed the issue.

Even better (worse?): if you later move the parent page, it sometimes starts working again. Entire automation flows hinging on the invisible relationships between top-level and nested pages. I ended up re-creating the Zap from scratch using the direct database ID — copy-pasted from the backend — and it hasn’t crumbled yet.

5. Backlinking in Tana behaves differently depending on node depth

This is subtle, but it matters: if you backlink a reference in Tana from within a node that’s nested more than three levels deep (say: Today → Projects → Client ABC → Tasks), the backlink sometimes only shows the top-level node in the result, not the actual reference.

Meaning: You might see “Client ABC” as the backlink text, but can’t click directly into the task itself. This is especially maddening when you think your browsing context will pull up the exact entry, but instead it jumps back to the broader node and expands… nothing.

Workaround: Promote task-level notes to two-level depth inside your daily outline. I moved most project-specific entries to their own daily branches rather than burying them inside nested trees.

There’s no documentation around this — just trial-and-error. I suspect it’s about how Tana resolves node paths dynamically depending on which part of the graph is currently loaded. But until someone at Tana confirms that, the working theory is: the deeper you nest, the more likely it breaks.

6. Unexpected behaviors from Obsidian plugins when combined with Live Preview

There’s a weird edge case that hits when you’re using the Dataview and Kanban plugins together, while also having Live Preview turned on. If a Kanban board is embedded as part of a note that also renders a Dataview query, sometimes the board won’t load properly — it looks like a collapsed header block, nothing rendered, no error.

Turned out this happened when the Live Preview rendering order triggered before Dataview had resolved the query results — so the Kanban plugin tried to mount an empty block, failed, and just… gave up trying. Switching to source mode refreshes the Dataview manually, and suddenly the board pops into existence.

This ate around an hour while building my weekly project review dashboard. Final setup:

  • One “Weekly Review” note triggered by Calendar plugin on Sundays
  • Includes a DataviewJS block that lists all tasks created that week
  • Below it, an embedded Kanban board living inside an included note reference
  • Extension created via the Home plugin to auto-load this template on Obsidian launch each Sunday

Now I preview in source mode first, wait until Dataview loads, then flip back to Live Preview. Ugly fix. Works every time.

7. Zapier throttles multiple triggers touching Notion at midnight

This one took days to nail down: I had three Zaps firing at midnight — one logging daily health stats, one cloning a Notion journal template, and one pulling weather data. Sometimes only one would run. Sometimes none. The task history just said “Skipped by Zapier — rate limit reached.” Zero explanation, and all manually replayed attempts worked fine.

Eventually learned that Zapier batches Notion requests with tighter internal limits than the public quotas suggest. If you run too many triggers at the top of the hour (especially midnight), they queue unpredictably. Some complete out of order, which breaks downstream dependencies. One of my templates expected a page to exist before appending to it. It didn’t.

The fix: Offset each Zap’s trigger by a few minutes via a delay step — one at 12:00 AM, one at 12:03 AM, one at 12:07 AM. Ever since, flow’s been stable. Notion may not love bulk writes at once; Zapier definitely doesn’t.