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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

#281

Post by tough »

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…

Thanks for letting us know about the details, honestly not being able to select text between blocks was wan of the UX deal-breakers for me, seemed like a way to avoid -exporting- your docs or whatever not allowing to copy the document fully easily. Glad its solved

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#282

Post by bovermyer »

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…

Atlassian's Confluence is apparently launching databases as a feature soon. The screenshots I've seen look very similar to Notion.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#283

Post by shafyy »

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…

Thanks for the detailed explanation. But you do understand that from an enduser view, this doesn't really matter? What the original commenter meant that they like the simplicity of Trello, because it's just a kanban board. Notion is much more flexible than that as a user.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#284

Post by jeron »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #271
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Be sure to mention that if you dare venture down the path of learning about this mysterious mini-relational database, emerging with useful knowledge will cost you three quarters of your sanity and the soul of your firstborn. It’s not quite that bad, but every. Single. Time. that I’ve been intrigued about notion’s advanced features, I’ve slapped myself two hours later and said “get back to work; you could spend your w…

For me it's one of those learn it once and get it over with. They really are powerful and if you spend one weekend on learning, it should be enough to go a long way.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#285

Post by iamthirsty »

tomrod wrote: post #275
waboremo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I envy the person who has been able to avoid Notion advertising in the past ~5 years.

Rare is it that I am envied. Obsidian I've enjoyed, but find it difficult to become fluent with it.

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 at this point.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#286

Post by greenie_beans »

i've tried so many different apps like this and i consistently return to my notes app on my macbook.

i'm not a fan of the UX or how it feels, but i can write notes all i want and add "keywords" or "tags" that i can search for and go through. todos, dates, important things, brainstorming, drafts, etc.

for example, for a book project, i'll write the word "preacher" at the top and then write some words that were in my brain. then i'll have 100 notes with the word "preacher" that i can search for and go through when i need to draft the idea. i can combine tags too, like adding "denny" to "preacher".

or for a work project, write the name of the project as the tag, some todos, meeting notes, design docs, resources, etc

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#287

Post by aaronharnly »

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…

The best thing about Notion is that it’s not just (EAV) relational databases — it’s that freely mixed with unstructured rich text, including collaboration features like love editing and comments.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#288

Post by jitl »

koliber wrote: post #80
mtsolitary wrote: post #4

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

I am. I export my Notion to HTML regularly. I can do a plain text search on it. I actually do regularly go back and search my notes and journals within Notion. Knowing that I will be able to do it if I ever leave Notion is comforting. P.S. If anyone at Notion is reading this, please work on your search. It could be so much more useful.

We know, and we are!

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#289

Post by jitl »

HPsquared wrote: post #5
mtsolitary wrote: post #4

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

I wonder if they offer an option to export the data in some usable format.

(I work at Notion)

We support Markdown/CSV "plain text" export, a semantically-rich HTML export, and a PDF export which is just the HTML export rendered as a PDF.

https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#290

Post by pbueckle »

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 place where you want them to be.

- The basic table is very limited (e.g. no pictures/formatting inside cells, no ability to reorder/sort - vs a Google Docs/Sheets based table)

- It grinds to a halt in long docs and databases over 100 rows. Can't stress this enough.

- Timezone support is completely messed up (you can e.g. create a database with a time column and specify the timezone, but the calendar view will always map all events in the timezone you're in, making it useless because events are getting shifted to other days)

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