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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

#391

Post by tomrod »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #370
iamthirsty wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone who's been able to become aware of & use a niche app like Obsidian has never come across Notion. Obsidian is definitely a power-user tool, which one would usually use after considering the other options, with Notion being almost as default as a choice as Evernote once was. Additionally, a lot of apps now are even using it as their support bases. It almost feels unavoidable…

Could you explain obsidian to me? It just looks like a markdown editor with hyperlinks to me

That is my take too. For R&D/tech transfer I have found it useful, but I haven't had my socks blown away yet.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#392

Post by thecleaner »

Jackevansevo wrote: post #30

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 actually found YC advice on startups to work great in real life as well. Afaik YC is all for execution and thus write great material for getting things done. Best advice ever for me was the whole single metric thing - pick a metric, makes sure it goes up x-% every week.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#394

Post by kirso »

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…

I use obsidian, but it can never trump the databases approach of notion in some cases. Its still pretty useless for TODOs IMO whilst being great at local first MD editor.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#395

Post by iamthirsty »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #315
iamthirsty wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone who's been able to become aware of & use a niche app like Obsidian has never come across Notion. Obsidian is definitely a power-user tool, which one would usually use after considering the other options, with Notion being almost as default as a choice as Evernote once was. Additionally, a lot of apps now are even using it as their support bases. It almost feels unavoidable…

This is equally bizarre to me, and I haven't used either. I definitely hear about Obsidian more on HN and at work because coworkers use it. But knowing what Obsidian is and not Notion is sort of like knowing what Markdown is but having never heard of Microsoft Word.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Seems kind of weird to me, but if the poster is telling the truth, it's like buying an iPhone and never hearing about the iPad.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#396

Post by skinnymuch »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #343
atleastoptimal wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What it gives is a step up from spreadsheets for managing everything from projects to customers. You can build a trivial CRM with a few tables. Earlier today I thought, I need a quickie CRM. Each customer has contacts, Each customer has logged events (phone calls). I could build a CRUD app to do this. I built it in notion in about 10 minutes. And the thing is - a company like mine already has things like internal por…

Are you making a page per customer or the database feature? Would Airtable work better for this? I use Airtable for stuff like this personally. I use Notion for some simple work stuff too like as a CMS

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#397

Post by mark_l_watson »

I tried Notion about a month ago, and at first it looked very good. I copied over materials for a book I was writing and liked the idea of one environment for research materials and manuscript artifacts. Bottom line: Notion had horrible support for creating a PDF for a book project. This is perhaps simply not their market?

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#398

Post by codethief »

electrondood wrote: post #138
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #69

I built minimal.app as the antithesis of over-planning, over-documenting, over-organizing, and over-thinking. The feature that keeps the mind open is the Note Lifetime, whereby notes die when you don’t engage with them [1]. This is in contrast to notion, evernote, et al where writers collect stuff and live in these information silos, trapped by the confines of their tools. Of course many (most?) thoughtful people can…

I just use Sublime and a notes folder containing text files groups in folders by topic. The search function is excellent, and I don't need anything more.

Which search function are you referring to? I can only search file names.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#399

Post by uptownfunk »

protortyp wrote: post #190
uptownfunk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks good. Couple questions: 1/ how do you support hierarchical organization. The links let you show relationships but how do you get to a hierarchical representation 2/ at some point this knowledge graph must become large and unwieldy, how do you manage that?

I primarily use folders and the dataview plugin [1] for 1). E.g. when I am managing a course, I have a structure like so: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mbcuu2pyy7eb3o/folder-structure.p... I usually have a top-level note for a course, here the "Computational Surgineering.md". In there, I use the dataview plugin to simply create a dynamic table of all entries in the meetings subfolder: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wk8jjldlo…

I guess what I was wondering is, do we have any tools that help extract a hierarchical structure from the inputted information. Rather than having the user specify the hierarchical structure.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#400

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

pbowyer wrote: post #252
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #76

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.

Have they added any way to have multiple root nodes? After using Workflowy for a decade on and off my tree is cluttered with notes and I want to start afresh but not lose them all. Keeping 1500+ nodes hanging around also slows the app down.

They have multiple root nodes with parent_id null.

I usually prune my tree every few years. But 1500 nodes should be pretty OK.

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