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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

#181

Post by waboremo »

runjake wrote: post #68
dmd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there an easy way to link other notes in Apple Notes? I've used Obsidian for years now. Mainly because it's frictionless, I can easily link notes, and just Markdown files. I don't spend time looking for cool new plugins or new methodologies, so I don't have those temptations. I wish there were a better mobile app, though.

Easy way? No. You can create a weird workaround though, on both mac and ios you share the link invite yourself, and then in share options you copy the link and then paste it in your note.

However, I don't really recommend this as now you have a bunch of icloud links littering your notes and can become confused easily trying to determine which notes are actually shared and which ones were just shared with yourself.

It's one of the biggest weaknesses of Apple Notes, and the only reason I (tried) searching for alternatives.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#182

Post by snissn »

yesterday i started using gpt4 as a todo list manager and it's pretty amazing. I can brain dump thoughts and tasks into it and it automatically prioritizes things and will let me be conversational around my tasks... i used a super basic prompt that could be improved, but so far it's really nice:

Hi! you are my secretary and todolist manager! I will generally ask you to add things to my todo list, organize the todo list by time and topic and subject, ask you to remind me of my list and also ask you to help priotiize things, soudn good?

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#183

Post by baron321 »

A tool should be simple with good defaults requiring little to no configuration but offering enough flexibility to get your work done and no more. Anything more or less is just noise.

More often than not, your work does not require complex tools with unlimited flexibility and configurability. Notion is an amazing tool but it can get in your way. It was designed to be shaped and transformed by each user in the way they want. That should be a good thing but only a few people actually need that level of control.

Even for team-based workflows, I have personally been more productive when using simple tools with good defaults. Whenever there is talk of setting up things and learning curves outside of your actual work, know that it is most probably unnecessary.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#184

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

As of recently, I use telegram for any of that stuff. For example, we setup a "ToDo" private channel where me and my partner edit a text message that contains all the todo items. I have another private channel for myself to keep photos, notes etc. One can send messages scheduled in the future, this serves for reminders. A few news channels, including HN, an RSS bot, and I need nothing more.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#185

Post by [deleted] »

dmd wrote: post #46
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…

[deleted]

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#186

Post by dymk »

ayewo wrote: post #134
apozem wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's an interesting use case. Why not just include a photo of the receipt as proof of ownership?

Why not just keep a searchable note of it in a notes app?

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#187

Post by idlephysicist »

Maybe I am the weird one but I use a diary / planner what ever you want to call it. I'll never get locked out of it, I don't have to pay a monthly fee. Personally I think that I have enough screen time as it is.

Ok yeah the search feature is somewhat lacking but from the sounds of it most of these organise your life SaaS products have the same issue.

Sure I could lose it but I'd argue that losing your access to Notion et al. is worse because you know where your data is but you're not allowed in.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#188

Post by raybb »

I have been quite happy with Obsidian + Tasks.org (synced via nextcloud). I don't connect them in any way.

I used TickTick for several years and quite liked it (still recommend it) but at some point they started nerfing the free version and I became more concerned about privacy and supportively of open source so tried a few alternatives and found them to be great.

I mostly use Todo list to keep track of things I need to follow up on (like volunteer work) and homework.

Unfortunately, I still use Notion for a few things like Wikipedia page ideas because I simply don't like the way "databases" feel to edit in Obsidian with the available plugins.

Obsidian for me is mostly a daily journal plus a few pages that are like notes about cities I visited or my thoughts on the language learning apps I've experimented with.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#189

Post by alwaysbeconsing »

sveme wrote: post #87
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…

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.

Excellent cross-link, thank you! That was not on my front pages and I would have missed it.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#190

Post by protortyp »

uptownfunk wrote: post #170
protortyp wrote: post #121

To me, Obsidian really became the killer app overall. I used Notion and Foam before and while the interface there is much more beautiful, I like having my files locally (synced via Syncthing) and being able to write my own plugins easily. The existing plugin ecosystem with instances like Dataview or Templater makes Obsidian such a great solution for personal and work planning, and as a knowledge base. The only thing…

It looks good. Couple questions: 1/ how do you support hierarchical organization. The links let you show relationships but how do you get to a hierarchical representation 2/ at some point this knowledge graph must become large and unwieldy, how do you manage that?

I primarily use folders and the dataview plugin [1] for 1). E.g. when I am managing a course, I have a structure like so:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mbcuu2pyy7eb3o/folder-structure.p...

I usually have a top-level note for a course, here the "Computational Surgineering.md". In there, I use the dataview plugin to simply create a dynamic table of all entries in the meetings subfolder:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wk8jjldlohg6bf3/dataview.png?dl=0

Another option I use is nested tags[2], like #cs/meeting for the above use-case.

As for 2) I don't really use the global graph that much. It looks quite cool, but I primarily just look at a local graph with a maximum depth of 2-3 to quickly hop around.

[1] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview

[2] https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Tags

Edit: Formatting is horrible on HN. I posted screenshots instead.

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