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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

#82
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first got into Linux it seemed like a lot of people mostly used Linux to configure desktop environments and Conky to take screenshots of. There's a Buddhist parable about someone spending their whole life building a boat to cross a small river and dying before they made it across.

I think you're referring to "The Parable of the Raft", which describes a man who has built a raft and crossed a river with it debating whether to hold on to the raft or not.

That sounds right, thank you for the reference.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

We tried it where I work and had the same result - we've since gone back to boring old Redmine. I do think it's great for personal use though - I use for everything from shopping lists to dream journals (don't judge me ;) ) to 5 year plans.

Redmine is amazing! Way underrated. https://www.redmine.org/

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#85
Shameless plug, but if anyone here enjoys Notion but finds it a bit overwhelming for managing their life, we designed Supernotes[1] to be a bit more settled / less trying to be "the everything app". We just released a new version yesterday that includes some fun features like "view depth" which might appeal to HNers. It's also markdown based, so less lock-in to a proprietary JSON format than Notion (though still not OSS – recommend Logseq if that's what you're looking for).

[1] https://supernotes.app/changelog/

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#86

I started doing this for a while but quickly switched to Obsidian. Obviously it doesn't have the same features but it serves the same purpose for me at least. The data format is much simpler and portable too, I just store the vault in iCloud and sync it to my phone.

I just wish obsidian was better at lists, especially on the mobile client. It's really painful moving things around tab levels, reordering items, etc. I can't even manage a grocery list without it devolving into complete chaos and broken markdown. There are extensions that help but extensions on mobile are really bad (just an enormous toolbar to scroll through, no real UI... the whole mobile app feels designed to be used with a keyboard which defeats the point of mobile).

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#87

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…

Now this is a fascinating take, as exactly that thought was discussed in a concurrent thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35670129

The phenomenon you describe (the configurators instead of doers) can be found in the upper right corner of the schema in the linked post.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#88

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…

There was just a post about the distinction between being someone who fiddled with tuning a bike, versus someone who rides a bike - and how ultimately complete devotion to one must preclude the other. (Or the more charitable version, there was only really time in most people’s lives for the serious practice of one side of the hobby, not the other - you can’t be taking apart your bike and putting it back together and be riding it all at the same time)

Tinkering with tooling and ‘process’ with software seems like it could be another realm of that principle. You can either spend the next week playing with syncing, hosting, processing, making sure your extensions and utilities all hook seamlessly into eachother… or you could have spent that week writing using just notepad and already have X-thousand words down.

(There’s probably a happy medium for everyone though)

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#89
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.

Same, except s/notepad/vim. One big file. Easy to keep in version control (I keep it in my dot files repo), easy to search/grep, Currently has 10 years worth of stuff (well over 10,000 lines) but is still instantaneous to open and search. I've recently started trying out Logseq and there's a chance I may actually switch, but the single-text-file approach has served me very well for a long time.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#90

> 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

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