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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

#321

Post by swalling »

whats_a_quasar wrote: post #244
DerCed wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gotcha. I think I never dug into it because normal people generally don’t want to write in Markdown. The effort in doing that and manually managing cloud sync isn’t worth it. Apple needs to build it with WYSIWYG and have it work out of the box with iCloud.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#322

Post by epolanski »

huehehue wrote: post #247
epolanski wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ideally a good tech lead with a pulse of his team and stack should be able to do it alone. When estimations are crucial they can be further analyzed with more people.

It's the beaurocratic gamification aspect I despise.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#323

Post by epolanski »

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…

I think it's okay, I use it because it was the first polished app I could read and edit notes from so many devices.

But the idea Notion is a 100M business, let alone a 10B valued company is madness.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#324

Post by epolanski »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #251
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…

Weird that nobody’s mentioned it yet, but the main value proposition of Notion is that is uses mini-relational databases instead of tables. It’s like Airtable baked inside of a note app. It has a ton of downsides like being slow, not having offline access, and no E2E encryption, but there are few tools that execute well on the approachable database concept. I wish there were more, because the standard approach of doi…

Could you expand in more details?

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#325

Post by jabroni_salad »

IceWreck wrote: post #233

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…

I'll throw tiddlywiki into the ring for the 'list of things to try', it is pretty neat and I like how it is all contained in a single file and it's really fun to explore inside of it.

But I also landed on bookstack. Weird how it turned out that formatting my stuff like a book would be the best format as opposed to all the super cool different ways of thinking that are possible with new-gen apps. I'm not sure if books are just superior or if I just personally am really wired to books, but I landed on it after evernote, onenote, obsidian, joplin, and Notion.

Basically I am using tiddly as a zettelkastan where appropriate and bookstack for things that are more finalized.

I really wish my team would switch to BS instead of the unorganized knowledgebase soup with inconsistent tagging, zero curation, and bad search engine (servicenow knowledge). omg what if we had an actual procedure manual instead of just hoping people will enter the right search terms to land on KBs they dont even know to search for. now THAT would be revolutionary.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#326

Post by epolanski »

waboremo wrote: post #230
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…

> the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all

why?

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#327

Post by jdougan »

jitl wrote: post #272
shafyy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Semantically our data model is an infinitely nested hierarchical tree of lists, although the UI might not look or feel like "just a list". Our editor is more like an "outliner" than a traditional word processor, and before January 2022, you could't even select text across multiple blocks. We rebuilt the editor to work like both an outliner and a traditional word processor at the same time. You can still "feel" the tr…

Ah, so it mirrors the NLS internals

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#328

Post by VladimirGolovin »

IceWreck wrote: post #233

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…

Maybe try Obsidian? It works completely offline, it's free, and its stores your data as a folder of markdown files. It should cover your personal wiki / Zettelkasten needs, plus, if you're willing to spend some time on learning the Tasks plugin, you can implement a pretty decent GTD-like system on it.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#329

Post by epolanski »

gms7777 wrote: post #239
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…

I use Notion as a personal work notebook. I like it for its lack of rigidity and fixed structure. I've always struggled with tools like Trello because they have a specific model that you need to fit your usage into. Then again, I'm not a Notion power user, nor do I make heavy use of templates outside of a few I've designed myself, so I'm definitely not one of the "hype"rs

You and I I believe are the same type of user.

I barely ever used databases. I have a journal with my daily work todos, notes about technology, company, people I want to keep. It's god for that I can share content with my friends/coworkers, it does already way too many things for me.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#330

Post by calf »

jitl wrote: post #240
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…

(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…

I'm confused, people have said Notion is a relational database. Is that not the same as "trees of lists"?

I thought a relational database like MySQL or whatever is formally more powerful than trees and list structures.

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