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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

#171

Post by MisterBastahrd »

thiago_fm wrote: post #106
lemiffe wrote: post #100

Absolutely love Notion for the aspects mentioned in the article; I love how I can cluster everything together (work, life, etc.) From short term planning (templates for my week which I copy every Sunday to start a fresh week - these templates are a 7 day todo list (in columns) with a link to my main calendar, project 'kanban' boards, and a linked "general todo" list for things that don't fit in the week and keep drag…

Basically from what you've written, you are still addicted to scheduling everything, but now you do it in notion. If you need to constantly drag items you didn't complete to the next day, it means you are either a professional procrastinator, which TODO lists just make it worse, or you are over committing and need to either find a way to delegate, or just don't do it. I bet that if you maintain literally 1 file with…

Or maybe it's the best way for this person to stay on track. You seem awfully judgmental over a relatively basic strategy to complete tasks. Have you ever considered that some people do things because it's the best way for THEM to accomplish tasks?

I've got ADHD. I either (a) complete the task immediately, (b) have anxiety over the task and procrastinate, (c) completely forget about the task altogether until its important. I don't create lists for fun. I create them because I accomplish things faster when I have a list of things to knock out.

Virtually everyone who has ever gone through something like this has already DONE what you described, and it didn't meet their needs. If you've got time to waste on HN, then you're clearly not as hyper-efficient as you like to think you are.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#172

Post by Macha »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #159
spzb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done. Same, except it's Jira and Confluence. Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint and show a impressive looking graph in retrospectives.

As long as you use Jira and Confluence to track what you are doing and make handy reference notes, they work super good. About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results. Also story points estimations/tracking (as opposed to time in real world units) : never saw it work in practice.…

I would argue that the performance of Jira being what it is along makes it pretty unsuitable for just taking reference notes. Our onprem hosted instance is pretty slow, which you might blame on server provisioning, except last time I used Jira cloud it was even worse with an empty instance (compared to our at least multiple million tickets instance)

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#173

Post by PascLeRasc »

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…

I see a therapist who specializes in OCD. They believe that the mood journal trend around 2010-2015 led to a lot of people - nearly all of their patients including me - having a compulsion to write down and re-think/overvalue every passing thought.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#174

Post by majormajor »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #49
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.…

This is one of the lowest hanging fruits for generative AI in the workplace: let the language model rewrite people's notes into the structured form.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#175

Post by majormajor »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #159
spzb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done. Same, except it's Jira and Confluence. Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint and show a impressive looking graph in retrospectives.

As long as you use Jira and Confluence to track what you are doing and make handy reference notes, they work super good. About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results. Also story points estimations/tracking (as opposed to time in real world units) : never saw it work in practice.…

> About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results.

If your management can't understand these charts - including when you get results you don't want - I think your management is failing.

E.g. if you don't realize "whoa there's a lot more ambiguity here than we expected and it's causing big delay" until the project goes sideways trying to find clarity, then you missed something big in your earlier planning and estimation.

And whether or not it was important to spend the time to try to get a more accurate estimate vs just start building should be a business-requirement and project-specific decision, but it should be a conscious one.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#176

Post by tombert »

leoedin wrote: post #168
tombert wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Notion, but I kind of fell down the similar Obsidian rabbit hole. Obsidian is interesting because it makes you really feel like you're being productive, creating links and little "mini wikis", but it didn't seem like I was actually accomplishing more. I still use the app for notes, but now I mostly use it for just a "relatively easy to search" notes app.

Obsidian makes a big deal of their graph view, but in the time I've been using it I've never touched it. I really like the WYSIWYG-ish markdown editor and the search seems to actually work. Those are the killer features for me. I tend to just make a new working note every week, copying last week's outstanding to-dos on Monday morning.

I'm more or less in the same boat. I like that app a lot, I even pay for it, but I think the graph view is largely a novelty.

I very occasionally utilize the "linking" features with the [[]], but I only really do it when there's an obvious link, not because I care much about a mind map.

Though to be honest, the thing that gets 99% usage is "just a place to copy and paste stuff so I don't lose it".

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#177

Post by huehehue »

spzb wrote: post #62
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #49

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.…

> It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done. Same, except it's Jira and Confluence. Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint and show a impressive looking graph in retrospectives.

> Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint

If you have a manager that's treating N points as a target, then you just have a bad manager. Sprint points are just a signal for how over/under your estimates are on average, to help inform future planning. If someone goes on vacation, how do I know how much work the remaining team can handle? It's also a good signal for measuring the impact of team/process changes (to be clear, the idea here is post hoc analysis and not +N points as a target).

That said, how would you prefer to handle capacity planning? Points aren't perfect, but trends should stabilize over time (you can have predictability/consistency without precision). You can even map point values to ranges of time (e.g. 1 point = [2, 8] hours) if it helps.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#178

Post by PascLeRasc »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #24

This just seems like so much work. The obsessive tracking of ever little thing. Does anyone really use this data in any meaningful way other that just admire its detail? What happens if you miss period, does this cause anxiety?

I just got home yesterday from a 2 week vacation. I was feeling especially relaxed during the trip, much more than usual. I thought this was due to how good I had gotten at thought exercises and managing anxiety, and I didn't want to forget what I was doing that led to this so I bought a notebook. After I started writing I lost the sense of detachment that was so pleasant and couldn't get it back the rest of the trip.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#179

Post by SkyMarshal »

apozem wrote: post #131
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #69

I built minimal.app as the antithesis of over-planning, over-documenting, over-organizing, and over-thinking. The feature that keeps the mind open is the Note Lifetime, whereby notes die when you don’t engage with them [1]. This is in contrast to notion, evernote, et al where writers collect stuff and live in these information silos, trapped by the confines of their tools. Of course many (most?) thoughtful people can…

> notes die when you don’t engage with them That is an interesting idea, but not something I would ever want in a notes app. A note may be important but never opened. For example, I have a note in Craft with my bike serial number and a picture of me standing next to it. If my bike is ever stolen and recovered, this note is proof of ownership. I have not opened this note since creating it, because my bike has not been…

The minimal.app idea would make more sense for a ToDo list app than a note app, I think. ToDo items that aren’t either checked off or interacted with after a time are likely not either urgent or important and can be auto-deleted.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#180

Post by jldugger »

rho4 wrote: post #67

I use Trello to organize my life. At the moment I cannot imagine what kind of features an alternative would have to offer for me to consider switching.

I use Trello for a lot of things. I'm not saying notion is this thing, but customizing the dessign to the workflow works better than One App To Rule Them All.

My go to example here is grocery lists. Most "productivity" apps have a checklist feature, but thats super bare bones. I used to use Cinnamon, but its been taken off the store (anylist is a my current meager replacement). What made it _good_ was that instead of "done/not done" state checklists offer was that it modeled an inventory flow. Pantry -> Buy List -> Shopping cart -> Pantry.

The shopping process is simple and repeatable. I start with the Pantry list, which describes all the stuff I expect in a well-stocked pantry, and step one is to confirm I have them. Anything I don't have (or need more of) I move to the buy list. Later, at the store, the Buy list is my guide to what goes in the shopping cart.

This is very similar to the original intention of Kanban, but:

- the UI is much smoother than trello. Just swiping, no drag and drop. And there's an undo button - the metadata is customized to the process, and can decorate the UI with info. Prices forecast your total at the checkout register, grouping by aisle or location makes it easier to grab the right stuff and confirm you've grabbed all the stuff in one go. - after a period of inactivity all items in the cart move back to the pantry automatically

Trello, at its core is designed for team project management, with many tasks occurring in parallel. The UI is designed to visualize the amount of work being done and where the bottlenecks live. It's very good at this! It even lets you design custom workflows to model the exact work being done. But there's always going to be a tensions in place working against it -- making apps that work for everything usually end up great at nothing, and its product market fit seems to be agile software development, so thats where its UI and feature set lean towards.

So IDK if you switch as much as slowly add to the pile of apps.

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