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People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

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Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#41

Post by winstonprivacy »

karles wrote: post #2

As a Notion-user, this just seems excessive to me. I love Notion because it gives me the ability to make "lightweight" notes/pads fast. I've since learned to utilize the linked database features which makes it easier to organize notes, tasks and projects. At some point however, it feels like it just becomes busy-work to make new boxes to check, new links, relations and what-not. To me the beauty is in the simplicity,…

My secret weapon is a "to do" list in notepad.

One list which has everything. No apps, no workflow, no SaaS fees. Works better than anything else I've tried.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#42

Post by darkteflon »

mabbo wrote: post #33

The software that's running my life right now is ToDoist. I have daily chores, I need to remember to do at different times of the day. Other things are every 3 days. Others are on specific days. Others are every k weeks. If I need to remember to do something, it goes on the list with a specific day and time I want to do it by. At the end of every day I review what's left and either do it or postpone it. Cleaning a ch…

I’ve been a paid Todoist user for years - probably 6 or 7 years I would guess. I like almost everything about it but it drives me crazy that they won’t add blocking/blocked by flags and the ability to assign a task to more than one project - both of which, incidentally, Notion can do.

I’ll keep using Todoist for personal stuff but for shared work projects Notion works better for me. It feels like they just fundamentally chose a great set of abstractions. I do wish their mobile UX was better, though.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#43

Post by darkteflon »

bayindirh wrote: post #29
figassis wrote: post #27

I think after using so many of these organization apps, I used plaintext note taking apps, sublime text, trello, more structured note taking apps (evernote, Agenda for Mac, etc), Todo apps (so many of them, incl pomodoro style), then went back to trello and I think I'm staying there.

Everybody is different, and Trello is a great application (I use it for longer-term planning with my partner), but after starting to use Pagico, I'm completely sold. Being able to plan things as projects, and putting them to a unified or independent gantt charts is a great way to visualize daily and long term load.

Pagico looks interesting, would you mind saying a few more words on what you like about it?

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#44

Post by connordoner »

prmoustache wrote: post #28
dt3ft wrote: post #17

Isn’t this entire article just marketing? Why mention specific app/saas provider?

I was about to say that. It is just a badly disguised paid ad.

Is there any evidence that it's paid? I mean, it does strike me as an ad, but I can't see anything factual to confirm that it's paid.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#45

Post by rchaud »

Jackevansevo wrote: post #30

The 23 minute video linked on the "ultimate notion setup for 2023" sounds like a great trap to fall into to not actually get anything done. I get the impression some people spend more time configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being productive. Although I admit I've been guilty the same thing, perfecting my .vimrc instead of actually working on projects. Messing around with static site blog generat…

It's also a very good example of why search engines suck today. Everything is stuffed to the gills with right keywords, to get the maximum number of clicks on the affiliate link that is almost certainly embedded in the video description.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#46

Post by dmd »

Jackevansevo wrote: post #30

The 23 minute video linked on the "ultimate notion setup for 2023" sounds like a great trap to fall into to not actually get anything done. I get the impression some people spend more time configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being productive. Although I admit I've been guilty the same thing, perfecting my .vimrc instead of actually working on projects. Messing around with static site blog generat…

Over the last 20 years or so I've tried: index cards, wunderlist, todo.txt, remember the milk, Asana, Any.do, Evernote, Google Notebook, Simplenote, Trello, Workflowy, Google Keep, Bear Notes, org-mode, and probably a dozen others. Three years ago I started using Apple Notes and told my wife "if you see me trying anything else at all, yell at me". I've been pretty happy with it and am much more productive just using something rather than trying to find some magic new tool.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#47

Post by blantonl »

hobo_mark wrote: post #31

> Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. But is he? I mean his linkedin is, and I mean this with no malice whatsoever, quite average compared to the effort that goes into maintaining such a system?

You judge people's productivity based on their LinkedIn?

This might be peak /r/LinkedInLunatics

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#48

Post by rchaud »

mtsolitary wrote: post #4

Are these people not worried about storing their entire lives in some SaaS company's proprietary format on their cloud servers?

Notion's biggest market is students that have grown up with Google Docs. The idea of local storage is long gone for the "digital natives" generation. There was even this story from a couple of years ago from an engineering professor who had to change how she taught basic concepts because her students weren't familiar with folder-based file systems [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#49

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Jackevansevo wrote: post #30

The 23 minute video linked on the "ultimate notion setup for 2023" sounds like a great trap to fall into to not actually get anything done. I get the impression some people spend more time configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being productive. Although I admit I've been guilty the same thing, perfecting my .vimrc instead of actually working on projects. Messing around with static site blog generat…

The same thing happens in the workplace, too. My last two jobs have had groups that adopted Notion and tried to use heaps of rules and templates and emojis that they wanted everyone to use to structure and document everything in Notion.

It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done.

The Product Management group at my last company was the worst at this. They had hundreds of Notion pages that supposedly collected everything and show them in meetings, slide decks, and at every chance they had as proof that they were on top of things. Yet they could barely do any product management work that we needed to ship product because their whole world revolves around building Notion pages rather than building products.

The sad part was that it worked, at least for a while. Executives would praise the team for being so organized and always having so much to show in presentations. Eventually people started to realize that they were lost in the process of writing Notion docs rather than focusing on getting work done, but it took a long time.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#50

Post by bayindirh »

darkteflon wrote: post #43
bayindirh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody is different, and Trello is a great application (I use it for longer-term planning with my partner), but after starting to use Pagico, I'm completely sold. Being able to plan things as projects, and putting them to a unified or independent gantt charts is a great way to visualize daily and long term load.

Pagico looks interesting, would you mind saying a few more words on what you like about it?

Of course.

First of all, Pagico is really cross platform. It has clients for macOS, Linux and Windows, plus iOS (I use it on macOS, iOS and Linux). It allows me to group the tasks either in a free floating Inbox, or in their respective projects.

I can combine all these projects' tasks in a single view, or see them in their independent contexts. This allows me to see my whole workload (private + professional) and plan my life accordingly, even for future.

Every project can have its lists, notes, files and schedule. This allows me to take small notes and track my projects and carry these notes everywhere. Hence, I don't lose my mental state about a project. It also tracks project progress and your working patterns, like which days you're more active on the projects by analyzing your activity on said project.

Tasks can be added pretty quickly while planning, even with some NLP support. "Do this. Next tuesday" automatically scheduled, and the date string is automatically stripped. NLP is done locally, on the app.

You can export these notes as HTML pages if you want, but I generally move notes to Evernote or the prıoject's public Wiki, if I chose to close the project, but that's not a given. Sometimes I just leave them in.

Pagico provides a sync capability through its servers, yet you don't have to use it. It can work nicely over Dropbox for example, but mobile clients won't be able to sync with it.

The application is designed very neatly. Actually, it's just a web view with a dedicated/specialized PHP server running as a different process. It's much more lighter than Electron, yet it works very well.

The developer is also very responsive to bug reports and feedback. They are developing the thing for a very long time and they know what they're doing.

The app is not perfect, of course, but it works very well for what it does. I bought it during pandemic, and it's now my de-facto planning tool.

However, I still use Trello for even-longer term planning and Evernote for "eternal" documents. All three works pretty well for me. I spend maybe ~10 minutes every night to plan for the next day, and I'm happy.

I also want to note that I don't use many of the collaboration features of the app, and it has much more features than I actively use.

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