Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I use Notion to manage everything

notionthings.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#41

Post by rchaud »

gnuj3 wrote: post #32
jamesgill wrote: post #11

I just cannot imagine investing this amount of effort into managing my life's details. I feel an energy drain just reading it. But, maybe much younger people think this is how to live a good life. More simply: I'm pretty sick of productivity porn, and the empty promises it makes.

I feel exactly the same. How the hell people have time foe all this? It’s procrastinating in a fashionable way to make yourself feel like you’re productive.

Check out Hobonichi. It's a whole cottage industry dedicated to making your notebook/planner look nice. I like looking at the designs, but, like most people, I never have a need to re-open notebooks, so there's no point in trying to convert my idea scratchpad into art.

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#42

Post by ackatz »

I like Notion but every time I come back and try it I find it very clunky and that key feature is missing. For example, I wanted to make a recurring notification on Mondays. Nope – not possible. A lot of other apps have these features and are free... so it just seems odd given the rest of the features.

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#43

Post by paxys »

seanw444 wrote: post #37

I'm going to leave the obligatory "Org-mode better" comment that inevitably pops up on these posts. I used to enjoy Notion. But it's closed-source, tiered and feature-limited, needs internet, and runs like a sloth. If what you need is a collaborative environment, Notion obviously wins. If you need a first-class mobile app, Notion wins. If you don't check either of those boxes, Org-mode is awesome. Genuinely one of th…

I don't see how there even is a comparison between the two. Regardless of internet connectivity, collaboration, mobile apps or a hundred other features (which are all pretty important in themselves), Notion will still appeal more to 99% of people looking for a note taking app than org mode just for its basic interface.

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#44

Post by parasti »

seanw444 wrote: post #37

I'm going to leave the obligatory "Org-mode better" comment that inevitably pops up on these posts. I used to enjoy Notion. But it's closed-source, tiered and feature-limited, needs internet, and runs like a sloth. If what you need is a collaborative environment, Notion obviously wins. If you need a first-class mobile app, Notion wins. If you don't check either of those boxes, Org-mode is awesome. Genuinely one of th…

Org mode is always one of the first/highest rated comments I see on these submissions, which really makes me wonder about the number of people using Emacs. This creates a weird sort of oxymoron in my head: in a world where seemingly most people use VS Code, most people also seem to be using Org mode.

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#45

Post by gnuj3 »

seanw444 wrote: post #37

I'm going to leave the obligatory "Org-mode better" comment that inevitably pops up on these posts. I used to enjoy Notion. But it's closed-source, tiered and feature-limited, needs internet, and runs like a sloth. If what you need is a collaborative environment, Notion obviously wins. If you need a first-class mobile app, Notion wins. If you don't check either of those boxes, Org-mode is awesome. Genuinely one of th…

Org mode isnt something an average user can manage no matter how many times comments like that are written

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#46

Post by scrollaway »

rchaud wrote: post #29
Semaphor wrote: post #2

I guess I might as well ask here. I tried notion 1-2 years [0] ago, and the features were great. I'd even have considered paying for it. But the performance was atrocious. It made Gmail seem fast. Have things Improved on that front? [0] I've always been bad at remembering how much time passed, but COVID really didn't help … So those numbers might be off. Edit: Thanks everyone, sounds like I'll at least give it anothe…

Notion is known for being a laggy web app. It's partially why local-first, Markdown-based solutions like Obsidian and Logseq have exploded in popularity. Logseq is amazing and truly shows the power of backlinked text with a query interface. And the whole thing is FOSS, at least for now.

I was turned off by Obsidian because, much as it is local first, it doesn’t have the more notion like mode where I can invite a team and use it as a shared wiki.

Did I miss something? For me, being able to edit things from multiple devices seamlessly and share it with my coworkers so they can edit it too, that is critical.

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#47

Post by yamtaddle »

ttul wrote: post #33
jamesgill wrote: post #11

I just cannot imagine investing this amount of effort into managing my life's details. I feel an energy drain just reading it. But, maybe much younger people think this is how to live a good life. More simply: I'm pretty sick of productivity porn, and the empty promises it makes.

Yes, I'd like to see how this tool would function under the weight of three kids, an aging brain, and a few life-crises.

That's pretty much a perfect description of me, and my only planning/organizational tool I use as a regular part of my life is setting alarms, timers, and reminders on my phone so I remember I was supposed to do a thing. Usually I just rely on myself to figure out why the hell my phone's bugging me, don't even bother to record what it is. It's working pretty well for me.

Every other tool I've tried to use has been about 20x more effort than it's worth, and remembering to keep whatever-thing with me or to check it is harder than the entire rest of what I'm trying to accomplish with it. I always have my phone, and I don't need to check it because it'll scream at me when it's time for something. "WTF is that noise? Wait, what time is it? Oh shit, time to get so-and-so ready for practice!"

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#48

Post by jitl »

mrjh wrote: post #28

Its bugs are gradually being fixed (like the ability to just arrow-key straight out of a comment box and be deposited at the end of the document), but I still wince every time I have to use Notion… for work… every day. Silly things like opening a Notion page in a background tab doesn’t actually load its page title, which requires a reload to fix. And the page-nesting (instead of the traditional documents-in-folders a…

> opening a Notion page in a background tab doesn’t actually load its page title, which requires a reload to fix.

I think we fixed that one a while ago; I can't reproduce it anymore (Chrome 109.0.5414.119 arm64 on macOS)

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#49

Post by savanaly »

scrollaway wrote: post #46
rchaud wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notion is known for being a laggy web app. It's partially why local-first, Markdown-based solutions like Obsidian and Logseq have exploded in popularity. Logseq is amazing and truly shows the power of backlinked text with a query interface. And the whole thing is FOSS, at least for now.

I was turned off by Obsidian because, much as it is local first, it doesn’t have the more notion like mode where I can invite a team and use it as a shared wiki. Did I miss something? For me, being able to edit things from multiple devices seamlessly and share it with my coworkers so they can edit it too, that is critical.

Obsidian just uses whatever files are in the directory you point it at. So you could just pair obsidian with any folder syncing product that does everything you need as far as ability to invite team members. OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

Re: How I use Notion to manage everything

#50

Post by jitl »

ackatz wrote: post #42

I like Notion but every time I come back and try it I find it very clunky and that key feature is missing. For example, I wanted to make a recurring notification on Mondays. Nope – not possible. A lot of other apps have these features and are free... so it just seems odd given the rest of the features.

You can do this now; although you need to use a database: https://www.notion.so/releases/2022-11-08
Post reply on HN