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People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

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241–250 of 416 posts

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#242

Workflowy is what I have been using for almost a decade. I think the reason it works so well is because it is simple. Anti features are so powerful in an app like this otherwise you can spend all your time tweaking and coming up with the perfect system.

I liked Workflowy a lot, but the idea of paying $60 a year for drop down lists inspires a deep, deep revulsion. I wouldn't even pay that for the full app to own for life.

It's $49 annually. If you use it for everything, it is totally worth it.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#243

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.

I think it's a different sort of rabbit hole. If you lean in to the graph-based organization and try to build a mind-map, it can get pretty deep. I had to restrain myself when I found organizing every market segment and competitor in my industry, or every technical topic I'd ever come across.

In Notion I think the rabbit hole is overly-complicated documents. In Obsidian it's going crazy with the graph and volume. That and finding the optimal set of plugins.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#244
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s true that the organizational model of the file system and desktop metaphor should be usable for this. There’s another huge gap though: documents in your local machine don’t have easy to use hypertext. Apple Notes app is very nice, but neither it nor TextEdit nor Pages can do what a Notion document can do. The OS needs a HyperCard to make it adopt Web-native tools for thinking.

Hence, Obsidian.md

Yeah, to expand Obsidian is almost exactly what you're describing. It's a wiki-like software that works entirely on markdown and data on the file system. Has similar functionality to Notion but feels more like an IDE

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#245
Notion's strength lies in its ability to combine different types of content in a single, customizable workspace.Trello is a great choice if you want a simple, visual way to manage your tasks and projects. It's particularly well-suited for teams that are focused on task management and want a clear, easy-to-use interface

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#246

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 work for Notion)

This is certainly a trap with any tool with exciting possibilities.

I personally don't use any templates; I'm of the "brutalist Notion" school of thought. When I want to use Notion for something, I start with the simplest possible approach that could work. Then I add Notion features if they prove necessary. So for something like household chores, I started a Notion page called "chores" and just add to-do checkboxes there when there's a new task, and at-mention myself or my partner to assign things if needed. This is instead of making a database with status, assign property etc.

We do use some separate databases for shopping, meal planning/recipes, and make larger pages for specific trips. Keeping things simple initially and adding complexity where it's needed means you never over-invest in a system that's not necessary. Plus, every column you add to a database is one more bit of work you need to do to "file" something completely. I find it discouraging to add friction to stuff I already consider a chore that I want to avoid.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've never ever seen this estimation game lead to any better planning, ever.

I can't think of any healthy team dynamic that doesn't require some form of deliverability estimates (this is not limited to engineering), and am very curious how you approach this.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#248

I am quite obsessed with keeping a personal wiki, like some of these people described in the article. However, I simply cannot imagine doing that in an application that isn't controlled by me or doesn't work completely offline. I dont want my life to be organized around an application that charges a subscription and my workflow is at the whim of a corporation. I went from Zim to Dokuwiki to Bookstack (where I've been…

Notion still does have pretty bad performance, although I believe they’ve recently upgraded the search. It’s quite good at least in my experience.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#249
post #240

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…

(I work for Notion) Notion is also "basically just a bunch of lists", plus titles. Pages in Notion are a title, and a list of blocks. Text blocks are a title (the text of the block) and a list, it's indented children. We also have boards like Trello, and you can drag and drop list items between boards, pages, paragraphs, everywhere. Maybe you could see it as everything you like about Trello, but applied to more modal…

What are you talking about? Notion is clearly not just a bunch of lists like Trello is.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#250

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

They probably don't care or think they have nothing to hide or probably never stumbled across numerous self hosted alternatives https://selfhosting.quest/search?q=wiki

The average person is not capable of self-hosting software and SaaS is much nicer looking / more fully features 99% of the time. I say this as someone who loves self-hosting and self hosts most of my own stuff.
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