Live data from Hacker News

People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

technologyreview.com

381–390 of 416 posts

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#381
post #228

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 he…

I find obsidian great because along with all your files being stored in .md format, you can also make and use user-created extensions, instead of the limited functionality notion provides

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#382
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…

Been using Apple Notes for 8 years now and can't imagine using any other tool at this point. Everything else is too complicated and with distracting thrills, or is too barebones. Notes is the perfect balance, and I like that the notes can be totally offline. The only thing that needs improvement is the search function. EDIT: Another thing I really like about Notes is how notes can be password protected, which include…

Maybe you know about this but one of the things that helped me with Apple Notes search was discovering there was a 'Find Notes' shortcut action. It allows you to filter by folder while searching by name, body, date created, etc...

It works out to be just about as efficient as if it was built into the app since you can use Siri to run it by saying/typing the shortcut name.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#383
post #380

Also - Obsidian - Logseq And the great grandaddy of all obsessive note taking apps, Emacs Org mode. Before this Engineers kept copious notes in journals.

> Emacs Org mode. And org-roam. Org-roam is trully great and if it dies, I'll die with it.

Or you could likely become the maintainer and fix any issues yourself with the least bit of programming experience.

It's a relatively thin set of elisp code atop sqlite as of org-roam v2!

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#384
post #380

Also - Obsidian - Logseq And the great grandaddy of all obsessive note taking apps, Emacs Org mode. Before this Engineers kept copious notes in journals.

> Emacs Org mode. And org-roam. Org-roam is trully great and if it dies, I'll die with it.

As far as org-roam versus Notion, Obsidian, etc... it's very reiliable and predictable. Sometimes it requires more effort to say learn to use table.el to have the poor mans ascii table equivalent of a kanban board that doesn't mess up with long lines... but... it works and keeps working.

Plus transparent support for gpg by naming files something.org.gpg or even making all of your org roam files encrypted by default is great. However beware, the sqlite database is still not encrypted. So be okay with that, delete the (easily regeneratable from org source files) database on logout/shutdown, or figure something else out.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#385
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs Org mode. And org-roam. Org-roam is trully great and if it dies, I'll die with it.

Or you could likely become the maintainer and fix any issues yourself with the least bit of programming experience. It's a relatively thin set of elisp code atop sqlite as of org-roam v2!

Yes, and I even really enjoy writing elisp. But that wouldn't sound nearly as dramatic.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#387
Great article! I absolutely love Notion and use it to track my tasks and create a second brain for myself. Notion is a beast for personal productivity. However, I think a lot more businesses have started using Notion to manage their products. When I talked to some of these businesses, I came across some common issues with Notion databases which pushed me to build NotionApps (https://www.notionapps.com), a tool to create apps on top of Notion databases. These are the problems I'm looking to solve: - Better user experience when using Notion databases on mobile - Notion is slow to use with large databases - Missing granular permissions when sharing data with others - Ability to share internal data with external users

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#389

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 flash…

Yeah I felt this too. IME non-engineers love Notion, but engineers hate it because it's a pretty bad version of the system they're probably already using to organize themselves. Maybe this is too dismissive but I can't help but feel like it's just the latest "find a UNIX service/app (Vim/Emacs), make a worse SaaS version, $$$".

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 flash…

As much as Atlassian stuff is hated on, Confluence Cloud editing feels butter smooth and very simple. The slash commands are a nice addition and it's improved quite a lot since the early days of confluence.

Now Atlassian only needs to fix the absolutely awful search bar that never finds what you want and the dreadful performance that makes even a developer's machine lag when navigating.
Post reply on HN