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People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

technologyreview.com

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Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#221

Post by fogoflove »

mrkwse wrote: post #213
ralfd wrote: post #195

… His secret is the workspace app Notion… … the reason Notion has such a devoted fan base is its flexibility… … Notion’s most devoted fans say they’re unlikely to jump ship to any other promising platforms anytime soon… Is Notion so good, or is this product placement PR? See: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I'm someone who has used and paid for Notion for several years at this point. What I would say is that it's very versatile. It has almost Atlassian Jira levels of features (and arguably of bloat), and it's possible to reasonably organise a lot of thoughts/knowledge/tasks in a wide range of ways. I think the reason why it's so popular and oft lauded is because the range of capability allows people to really engineer w…

Notion is a good product, imo. But it's not unique -- there are other products like it out there, most notably Microsoft Loop, which is a clone.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#222

Post by ryanlime »

As someone who has tried a variety of productivity tools: Trello, Jira, Notepad, religious google calendar-ing, Notion, I've only really stuck with two things: notepad and Notion.

Notepad just allows me to get simple thoughts down and easily reorganize information. I then adapted that workflow with Notion and have been pretty happy with it so far: tracking daily todos, trip plans, workout routines.

What I've enjoyed most about notion is that it lets me do something as simple as my daily routines but also helps me plan/track things for technical side projects as well. I really think the flexibility, which many other tools don't have, is what I'm drawn to here

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#223

Post by tombert »

gherkinnn wrote: post #212
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.

At the end of the day, Obsidian is a specialised file explorer operating on text files, links, and images. It is about as simple as it can get. It doesn’t offer a fraction of what Notion does. The rabbit hole is so much shallower.

Sort of? There's a bunch of plugins for Obsidian that really do augment the hell out of it, so it's still a reasonably deep rabbit hole.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#224

Post by ChildOfChaos »

I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.

Even worse, is you go on product hunt and there are nonstop 'product' launches which are just notion templates named 'operating systems' being sold at crazy prices for what they are.

I don't get what I am missing. I personally love and use Trello, because it's basically just a bunch of lists that I can drag and drop too, i have a boards named 'spark board, where i keep lists of things I am interested in, it's a list of movies, tv shows, games to play, things to eat, things i might want to buy, even lists for different people and things they mentioned so i have gifts for them when it comes time to buy, whenever i need anything I just go there, search the list and find something, but notion is just annoying to me, I hate the UI and i don't see the point in it.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#225

Post by bbkane »

bnjms wrote: post #207

I need a replacement for MS OneNote for reasons including it feels too rigid. And I know people here have tested most things. The only important feature I need is ability to paste screenshots into it. Then an easy way to mark text for monospaced fonts for text copied from a terminal and back for notes. A quick overview of all of these makes it look like only OneNote does that well and the rest are text only.

This was almost exactly my requirements - https://www.bbkane.com/blog/how-i-take-notes/

I landed on https://typora.io/ and I've been pretty happy ever since

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#226

Post by tomrod »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #224

I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it. Even worse, is you go on product hunt and there are nonstop 'product' launches which are just notion templates named 'operating systems' being sold at crazy prices for what they are. I don't get what I am missing. I personally love and use Trello, because it's basically just a bunch of lists that I can drag and drop too, i have a boards named 'spark board, where i ke…

This article reads like an ad.

Perhaps I live under a tech rock, but I have not heard of notion before today. And I don't like that it is being shilled.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#227

Post by charles_f »

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…

Can't you just use a file share as your common vault for the team to use?

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#228

Post by sofixa »

idlephysicist wrote: post #187

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 Notio…

You don't have to use a SaaS, you can use a modern "note taking"++ tool like Obsidian (not affiliated, just a huge fan) or Logseq (FOSS). In both cases files are fully local, sync is optional (for Obsidian there's a paid service or you can just use Dropbox/GDrive/Git/etc.), and you get a ton of advanced features like complex search, smart references, etc.

For instance I use Obsidian for meeting notes, and with the help of a plugin I link all previous meeting notes on this topic/customer and can at a glance see the history I have with this subject. Furthermore, I also link the associated Jira ticket and the Jira ticket history matching the labels, again for history purposes. I also use the Excalidraw integration to get diagrams that I can embed in my notes. There's also a Kanban plugin, Map view plugin (e.g. if planning a trip), etc. etc. The sky is the limit!

Overall, I'd strongly recommend.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#229

Post by idlephysicist »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #199
idlephysicist wrote: post #187

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 Notio…

There is nothing weird about it. I have been doing it, and many others I personally know have done it since forever. It seems for boarding school folks, at least around where I am from, diary is really a companion right from the beginning; for me it has been since really young. However I also happily use one or two clean/simple note taking apps and it is on my phone at any given time (paid or free; but strictly non-s…

Yeah I've also had a similar experience with a school diary or as we called them homework journals. Though no boarding school experience.

I do also use the reminders app on the iPhone if I need a reminder at a specific time.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#230

Post by waboremo »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #224

I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it. Even worse, is you go on product hunt and there are nonstop 'product' launches which are just notion templates named 'operating systems' being sold at crazy prices for what they are. I don't get what I am missing. I personally love and use Trello, because it's basically just a bunch of lists that I can drag and drop too, i have a boards named 'spark board, where i ke…

This isn't an endorsement for Notion, I also dislike it and use other tools. I can see why some do however, it's a solid second brain organizational tool, somewhere to place things "long term" and keep them. It's a less "active" tool, which is also why for some people I think Notion is the wrong solution but for others works great. Think: internal team documents in one central place (less active) vs updating your app's documentation multiple times an hour (more active), the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all. Also I will say, with their API you can technically hook up whatever databases you have within Notion for use, so it can easily become a place to store your blog notes and use them without copying/pasting. But again, blog notes are rarely changing so you see the pattern here I hope.

I also don't get the notion template hype on gumroad/etsy/producthunt/etc. You can create them yourself within seconds, but that's the nature of the "productivity industry", you get big bucks for the mere idea that your product will make their life easier/faster.

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