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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

#331

Post by Slow_Hand »

pbueckle wrote: post #290

I've been using Notion at my new workplace and was excited at first, but having used it now for many months I came to hate it. They constantly announce new features but are completely neglecting the basics: - Copy and paste is completely broken. Good luck trying to paste a table. - The drag & drop feature is equally annoying, it just never works and doesn't select the things you intend to select or drop them in the p…

For me the thing that made me give up using Notion was the “feel” of the basic text editing. There was a latency and lagginess to the way it responded that made it so unsatisfying and, at worst, irritating to use that I couldn’t go on.

Typing this, it feels weird to give up because of such a subtle thing, but there were probably a dozen more details lacking in this way that eroded all of the goodwill won by the flashy features.

In something as seemingly simple as a text editor it turns out that if it’s not built on a solid foundation of usability then I very quickly sour on the rest of it.

Currently using Obsidian and am very pleased. I’m happy with how “light” it feels.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#332

Post by atleastoptimal »

pbueckle wrote: post #290

I've been using Notion at my new workplace and was excited at first, but having used it now for many months I came to hate it. They constantly announce new features but are completely neglecting the basics: - Copy and paste is completely broken. Good luck trying to paste a table. - The drag & drop feature is equally annoying, it just never works and doesn't select the things you intend to select or drop them in the p…

Notion is a greatest common denominator of the general form on how to make a successful company out of nothing really new or groundbreaking.

It's no better than the alternatives, but invites a sort of appetite for using it that keeps it afloat and to any company mired in the complexity of their enterprise productivity solutions, offers a simple, one-stop-shop to everything, even if its promises are vacuous.

> Create an "ecosystem" generic enough to potentially offer unlimited tacked on features and unlimited scope creep

> Make it very minimalist and user friendly so there's no adoption cost

> Create the impression that there's some ideal harmony of workflow available to any user who uses it the "right way". Apple heavily leans into this in their marketing. If it doesn't work for you then you must not be using it right

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#333

Post by ssddanbrown »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #325
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…

> 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.

BookStack dev here. When originally building BookStack, I did initially built it with infinitely nestable pages since it seemed like the "technically better" approach that didn't limit user content, but in use it just made UX and discovery a pain, especially for the mixed-technical-skill workplace environment I was targeting, which is when I landed on the book > [chapter >] page setup (With shelves being a late awkward addition based upon demand). Good to hear that works for you. Is often the love-it-or-hate-it factor of the platform.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#334

Post by Gigachad »

prima-facie wrote: post #276
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…

Can I ask what determined you to move away from Zim? I'm currently using it and finding it quite good.

The MacOS app was unusable when I tried it

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#335

Post by yawnxyz »

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's definitely seen a lot of bloat in the last few years. I used it since the "2.0 relaunch" and it's gone kind of downhill after each release. Stuff that used to work well don't work as well or fast anymore.

Still better than anything else on the market though.

Apple Notes is great for my own stuff — but good luck trying to get multiple collaborators to use it.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#336

Post by carimura »

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…

That's exactly how I felt about Salesforce over many years of customizing it to basically be a UI on top of a relational DB with a nice import tool and some workflows built in.

But apparently it's out of vogue now and Notion and others are the "web 2" versions of that with more Javascript.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#337

Post by porridgeraisin »

Most of my notes are just... Unstructured text and images. So I just put it on WhatsApp in a group with just me. Searchable, any device, offline on mobile, the lots.

I screenshot excalidraw diagrams and put them in there as well, if I wanna do that.

Personally, rarely do I have the need to store a structured and queryable table/list as part of my notes.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#338

Post by Gigachad »

iamacyborg wrote: post #191
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?

Slightly different context, but similar enough. I wear a Garmin sportswatch so keep an eye on the subreddit. If you go there you’ll see daily threads about arbitrary metrics like “sleep score”, “body battery”, hrv and vo2 max. People obsess over the numbers without really thinking to take a step back and thinking about how accurate the data is and whether or not it’s actually meaningful in any real terms. Definitely…

I have the Apple Watch and I hardly ever check the stats but every few months it pings me with something like "Over the last 5 days, your resting heart rate dropped" which was a period I was on holidays, made me wonder if it was the lack of access to coffee, or just a more inactive period where I sat in a car most of the time.

The long term data can be interesting. Moved apartments and saw my elevation climbed stat went up as the local area was not so flat

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#339

Post by jitl »

prmoustache wrote: post #28
dt3ft wrote: post #17

Isn’t this entire article just marketing? Why mention specific app/saas provider?

I was about to say that. It is just a badly disguised paid ad.

(I work at Notion)

We didn't pay for this or incentivize it, it's an original story from the press.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#340

Post by makeitdouble »

pbueckle wrote: post #290

I've been using Notion at my new workplace and was excited at first, but having used it now for many months I came to hate it. They constantly announce new features but are completely neglecting the basics: - Copy and paste is completely broken. Good luck trying to paste a table. - The drag & drop feature is equally annoying, it just never works and doesn't select the things you intend to select or drop them in the p…

As softsound says, even with its limits, just having basic tables now feels like such a win. It took so long.

I think they always kinda hated tables, and simple or databases ones, editing and formatting wise it's still the worse part to deal with in Notion.

At the same time the whole product got so much slower. I regularly see the "click here to see latest version" head banner as my browser local version falls out of sync, when online collaboration and quasi-realtime sync was the whole point of Notion.

Adding to timezones: the new date shortcuts (@today etc.) are so close, yet so frustrating to deal with on auto-generated pages on regular schedules. Say you schedule a report page to be created on friday morning so you get to fill it for the monday meeting, good luck with dynamically setting the dates.

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