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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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with text files in Notepad, then learnt from a friend how to use Freemind to organise notes as hierarchical mindmaps instead. It worked great, but search was broken (DFS but only able to find results in one treepath?!). Years passed, and I needed something to take notes with on mobile, and Google Keep was the simplest fit. But Freemind and Keep were both still too inconvenient on desktop, so at some point I…

I'm using Logseq for the same reasons. .txt was never going to cut it for me, I always include images like drawings, photos and screenshots etc. Logseq is open source, reasonable file format, stable, extensible, has a reasonable plan for funding itself without lock ins, and, for me, is among the smoothest I have used. Notably missing from old OneNote 2016: - shared notebooks w/indication of updates - smoother syncing…

> As for the modern version of OneNote, I have given it up. It almost isn't comparable.

Agreed, that's why I'm happy they basically kicked "onenote for windows 10" to the curb and leaned back into the win32 style full desktop application on Windows, AKA onenote 2021. It even has full dark mode and dictation now!

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#342
post #297

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…

I've put some thought into how cool it would be to have a feature similar to Notion databases within Obsidian; probably not integrated into the markdown document, but similar to their new Canvas feature, separate files next to markdown documents which map to SQLite databases with a standard schema that you can browse right within Obsidian. Feels like something an add-on could exist for, but doesn't; and/or I hope its…

Make.md is trying to solve this, you could take a look, I tried it, but it's still not stable for my use case, but apparently they have people who use it successfully.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#343

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…

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 portals to do all sorts of stuff. Instead of a business admin asking the developers for a new field on X, he can just go build it out - but it has two killer features to excel/docs

1. Global search. I cant stand having a million different excel sheets where nothing is linked. Even if notion search can be slow - typing in something and getting an answer is a breath of relief

2. Has way better structured data, templates and plugins out of the box ( I can just do remote data to jira, bitbucket, etc).

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Especially since you can share notion webs publically per page. Perfect for latest documentation, job postings, etc.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ideally a good tech lead should share stuff like that with the team to take into account opinions of team members.

Having 2 meetings. 1 for task presentation and 1 for task estimation next day is really great

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#346

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…

I love Notion.

There I said it.

Their features suit my needs in a clean and satisfying way. Props to the team.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#347
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article reads like an ad. Perhaps I live under a tech rock, but I have not heard of notion before today. And I don't like that it is being shilled.

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

I had never even heard of Notion before I started looking at Obsidian.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#348

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…

You would have loved filemaker back in the day.

Filemaker is underrated. Long ago they came out with Bento which was supposed to be Filemaker for personal use. But it didn't last long.

Both Filemaker and Bento both lacked the out-of-the-box document writing feature. It makes Notion very easy to start using. In fairness both Filemaker and Bento were aimed at very different use cases.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#349
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We're inspired by the greats (https://www.notion.so/about). Our Github code review bot is named doug-engelbot

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#350

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…

> Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most.

This always used to be Access and Filemaker's appeal, but they've been so widely and thoroughly derided over the years you wouldn't know it.

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