One of the things I’m trying to do is to create documentation of things I do rarely – once a month, quarter, year, etc. – for future Robin to appreciate. I think I’ve stumbled upon a reasonably easy way to do this that fits in with my work as I’m doing it. Right now, I’m working on setting up Tana (www.tana.inc) to manage projects and various other to-dos and it is a pretty powerful system that allows you to build upon it’s linked data/AI/daily notes sort of foundation to create what is essentially an application that you get to customize to fit your working style.
Currently, I am using Tana to manage a project that I do every year, setting up a retreat for new directors in Kansas to kick off our APPLE program for training new public library directors. We travel to a reasonably central spot in KS, spend 25 hours together (eating no fewer than 7 times during those hours – when the brain is being worked, it’s best to feed it!) and then head back to our respective libraries, full of new contacts and information and (hopefully) ready to tackle a year of learning how to be the best director you can be. It includes 4 meals, an overnight stay, a keynote address of a couple of hours, several information sessions on community awareness, library planning, board relations, library policy management, and more. All of this needs to be set up, planned for, budgeted, reserved, undertaken, and then paid for from our APPLE budget.
This year, as I start to work on any part of that group of tasks (most recently it was putting together an info packet for students to learn about the location we’d be staying at and the schedule for the event, among other things), I’ve been turning on Tana’s “live transcription” feature and talking through the process of what I’m doing out loud. Once the transcript is ready, I run a command that takes that transcript, runs it through an AI (ChatGPT to be precise) service to pull out the step-by-step procedures I’ve just narrated, and gives me a numbered list of steps that are needed to complete the task I just did. Those steps are added to the project node and I move on to the next task.
This is a very customized setup (but I’ve come to realize that all productivity setups have to be pretty custom or they just don’t work well) that involves specialized software and some knowledge of how to create commands and other bits and pieces of Tana functionality (though, of course, ChatGPT can be helpful there, too). That being said, it’s also the best way I’ve found of documenting what I do so that next year, I’ll have a list of steps contained within each task that I have to do to set up the APPLE 2026-27 retreat, based on what I did this year to make the APPLE 20205-26 retreat happen.
The biggest point of failure here is my ability to remember to turn on the live transcription service (a simple right click in the task on Tana, it’s not hard to do). I talk through what I’m doing half the time anyway, because I am my own favorite conversationalist… so that part is generally fine, but only if I turn on Tana’s ability to listen to my babbling. Once that transcript is done, the rest is pretty easy and automatic – start a command, transfer the transcript to it, copy the results into the task node and move on. Easy peasy. If you have all the building blocks.
That being said, this wouldn’t require using Tana and ChatGPT – it’s possible that you could use Google and NotebookLM or Gemini to get the same kind of functionality using the tools you are familiar with!