Date-Based Analysis

When was the last time you added a contact? How many notes did you create last month? Your Tana data has timestamps on everything, and the query command can filter by them. Let’s unlock time-based analysis.

Understanding your knowledge creation patterns helps you spot trends, find recent work, and analyze productivity.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to use date filters to analyze activity over any time period.

Date Fields Available

Every Tana node has automatic timestamps:

# Find recently created todos
supertag query "find todo where created > 7d"

# Find things modified today
supertag query "find * where updated > 1d"

These fields exist even if you don’t see them in Tana’s UI.

Relative Date Syntax

Use relative time expressions:

# Created in the last week
supertag query "find meeting where created > 1w"

# Created in the last month
supertag query "find note where created > 1m"

# NOT modified in 3 months (stale content)
supertag query "find project where updated < 3m"

Date Ranges

Combine operators for date ranges:

# Created between 1 month and 1 week ago (last month, excluding this week)
supertag query "find note where created > 1m AND created < 7d"

# This quarter's completed tasks
supertag query "find task where Status = Done AND created > 3m"

Practical patterns:

• This week: created > 1w
• Last week: created > 2w AND created < 1w
• This month: created > 1m
• This quarter: created > 3m
• This year: created > 1y

Absolute Dates

Use ISO-8601 format for specific dates:

# Everything created after January 1st, 2025
supertag query "find * where created > 2025-01-01"

# Notes created before March 2025
supertag query "find note where created < 2025-03-01"

# Meetings in Q1 2025
supertag query "find meeting where created > 2025-01-01 AND created < 2025-04-01"

Querying a single day requires a date range (there’s no = for dates):

# Everything created on January 15th, 2025
supertag query "find * where created > 2025-01-14 AND created < 2025-01-16"

# All meetings on a specific date
supertag query "find meeting where created > 2025-03-19 AND created < 2025-03-21"

Use the day before and after to capture a single day’s content.

Ordering by Date

Sort results chronologically by adding order by to your query:

# Most recent first
supertag query "find note where created > 1m order by -created"

# Oldest first (no minus sign)
supertag query "find task order by created"

# Most recently updated
supertag query "find project order by -updated"

The minus sign (-) means descending (newest first).

Practice

Exercise: Your Activity Timeline

1. Find everything created this week: supertag query "find * where created > 1w"
2. Find all meetings from the last month: supertag query "find meeting where created > 1m"
3. Find stale projects (not updated in 3 months): supertag query "find project where updated < 3m"

Checkpoint

✅ You can filter your Tana data by any time period.

How would you find all todos created more than 30 days ago that haven’t been completed?

Answer: supertag query "find todo where created < 30d AND Status != Done"

Key Takeaways

1. created and updated timestamps are always available
2. Use relative syntax: 1d, 1w, 1m, 1y
3. Add order by to your query to sort chronologically

What’s Next

We’ll aggregate your data to discover patterns — counts, groupings, and statistics.