Creating a Reading List in Tana — My Learnings (from Overwhelmed to Zen)

After struggling a little with how best to create a reading list / book list, I took a step back and started from the basics. I think I was trying to do too much. I learned a great deal from the experience so I wanted to share it with you.

It all starts with me being a bit (?) of a numbers and data nerd. I love a spreadsheet or any table to track almost everything in my life. One of these things is the books I read / want to read. In Excel, I would simply have a list of books going down and whatever metrics I wanted to track going across. Easy-peasy, but it does not give me everything.

I wanted to move my reading list (and most of my tracking) to Tana for the quantitative information. I don’t only want to be able to track metrics like date read, finished, author, etc. I also want to see my notes on the books — yes, you could do this in a cell in Excel, but life is too short.

So, how did we get here?

Step 1. Recreate a Spreadsheet in Tana

I tried to recreate a copy of my book spreadsheet in Tana and have to say it worked relatively well (going via GoogleSheets to keep the formatting). The structure was imported, but then I needed to work on the tags, dates, book cover etc., so it was quite a task.