How I Use Notion

Interesting to see this super sophisticated setup. I have basically given up trying to track my life like this, it always ends up that I spend more time fooling around getting "organized' than actually doing the work I'm tracking. Doesn't seem like a problem the author here has. Tracking personal projects, blog posts, collaboration, media store, etc. I'd be happy if I could consistently do one of those things lol

As the writer points out, there are dozens of good note taking apps.<p>I tend to use markdown to store notes but the strength here seems to be the ability to mix formats. In particular, the author seems to use kanban a lot as the main other style (other than plain old lists and folders).<p>I wonder what it is that makes mixing these two styles of notes so useful. I think it’s because it kanban immediately suggests an action, and a long list suggests storage.<p>I suspect this reduces or eliminates the time spent thinking about what to work on next but still retains the memory&#x2F;archival quality of the other notes.<p>To put it another way: you want one style of notes for doing and another style for remembering.

The thing that stops me from moving to Notion seems to be tied to their business limit and technical limit: offline mode and latency. Any note taking&#x2F;knowledge base platform needs to be able to open quickly. The UI taking a couple of seconds to load when VIM or &lt;insert ANY editor&gt; is only constrained by how fast you can click Alt+Tab. That small annoyance can be enough to kill whatever idea&#x2F;flow in the meeting.<p>Offline mode. Notion have so far went down twice, longer than 8h. Loosing ALL your notes and knowledge bits with 0 backup plan, all in the mercy of a small company was the first true moment I realized how much &quot;put stuff in the cloud&quot; was a stupid idea unless it&#x27;s on a too big to fail platform (Google&#x2F;Apple)<p>Bugs my mind why their reactions to above often complained features have been &quot;meh&quot;. All I can deduce is that their business model relies on keeping it online &#x2F; central and how the tech is set up, it&#x27;s not trivial to do it offline

Notion is such a great tool and the UX is very nice, apart from some performance improvements that could be done.<p>My only 2 problems with Notion is the limited offline functionality and data ownership&#x2F;privacy.<p>For a PKM-system, some might say “second brain”, encryption at rest is not enough IMO. You should be comfortable to release any thoughts of your real brain into your digital one and the thought that any employee of Notion or some government agency could read them makes me uncomfortable.<p>It seems like Notion wants to become more of a project management and company wiki application anyways, so I guess I’ll just search on for the perfect “second brain”.

I use Obsidian similar to how author wrote the summary except I write complete notes for each chapter focusing on the bits that I want to remember (e.g. for the Docker book I&#x27;m reading, I add example commands and explanations). That helps me to stop at a given point and before I resume (which could be weeks later), I don&#x27;t need to read the previous chapter in the book - I just revise my concise notes and then resume the book.<p>Edit: I thought Obsidian didn&#x27;t have a Kanban board plugin but then found this[0]. Seems to be working well except when I open the board in &quot;Preview&quot; mode, it shows it as a nested list instead of a Kanban board (opening the node directly opens it correctly).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mgmeyers&#x2F;obsidian-kanban" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mgmeyers&#x2F;obsidian-kanban</a>

The article concerns =&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m in the process of founding an educational startup with a non-technical co-founder, and we&#x27;re actually using Notion as our content database. I&#x27;ve structured everything (categories, subcategories, quizzes, etc...) with databases, which are linked together via the Relation property, page templates to enforce some structure, page properties as &quot;columns&quot;, and page content for more complex data. And I can have the content creation guide right next to it. Then I wrote some property validators to transform the returned data from Notion&#x27;s API, wrapped the calls into a couple of Firebase functions to merge it with user data, and it&#x27;s done.<p>It was a perfect fit for our MVP, since I don&#x27;t have to code an admin page (which would take as long the project itself), use a paid alternative, or expect the non-technical co-founder to be POSTing JSON data. It&#x27;s a very clunky design, definitely has some considerable user latency, but it me took no time to build it, it&#x27;s free, has a nice UX, and it&#x27;s allowing us to iterate very quickly.

I&#x27;m wondering why every notion related article has screenshots full of emojis. Does notion automatically add those ?<p>Or does it provide some sort of layout to make them easy ?<p>Personally I&#x27;d never find the time to open up my OS&#x27;s character selector, copy-paste the emoji and continue.

The company I worked for uses Notion, so I use it quite a lot. Howver, I still haven&#x27;t reached the point where I look at it as a &quot;org mode for the emacs challenged&quot;. I&#x27;m probably just having some kind of Stockholm syndrome.

My biggest gripe with Notion for business usage is that *basic* security features are gated behind their enterprise tier and the business tier is basically an accident waiting to happen.<p>I mean, just look at this list of &quot;Enterprise&quot; only features:<p>---<p>&gt; Prevent members from sharing pages publicly<p>&gt; This will disable the Share to web option in the Share menu on every page in this workspace.<p>&gt;<p>&gt; Prevent members from changing the Workspace section<p>&gt; This disables the ability for members to create, move, reorder, and delete top-level Workspace pages.<p>&gt;<p>&gt; Disable guests<p>&gt; This prevents anyone from inviting people outside the workspace to any page.<p>&gt;<p>&gt; Disable moving or duplicating pages to other workspaces<p>&gt; This prevents anyone from moving or duplicating pages to other workspaces via the Move To or Duplicate To action.<p>&gt;<p>&gt; Disable export<p>&gt; This prevents anyone from exporting as Markdown, CSV, or PDF.<p>&gt;<p>&gt; Prevent members from installing new third party integrations<p>&gt; This prevents any members from installing new third party integrations on this workspace with their Notion account. Admins can always remove existing integrations in the Integrations section.<p>---<p>For context, team pricing is $10&#x2F;user&#x2F;month while enterprise is $25&#x2F;user&#x2F;month

I feel like I&#x27;m the only one still using Evernote. I&#x27;ve tried all these newer apps but in the end I just want a bunch of notes with plain text. Everything else feels like fluff that I will never use.

Can someone explain the notion hype to me?<p>On producthunt atleast one notion-related product makes it to the frontpage each day. I tried it out multiple times and to me it looked like a markdown editor with templates and sharing.<p>Is that really such a breakthrough? Don&#x27;t evernote etc. do the same?

It is a huge liability to rely on virus definitions and heuristics engines. They are often too little, too late. The trend toward rapid development and advanced threats started about 15 years ago, and it has been making antimalware applications increasingly irrelevant.<p>Ad- and script-blocking helps, but those are targeted primarily at web browsing, and that is certainly not the only attack vector.<p>Whitelisting and mandatory access controls (e.g., SELinux) are the only truly effective measures, and they require a lot more work than antivirus. Antivirus is a simple 5-minute installation with automatic updates thereafter---and some even refuse to do that much. There is little hope that most home users will implement anything better.<p>There are adequate solutions, but they raise the bar in terms of the expertise, expense, and effort required. Even if a company addressed the &quot;expense&quot; issue by releasing a consumer-priced whitelisting application for Windows, there is no clear way to eliminate the other requirements.<p>In light of all this, I see things getting worse before they get better. It takes a lot of problems before home users pony up their time and money.

I really enjoy Notion. But for anyone concerned about lack of offline, latency issues and &quot;my data in a great big silo&quot; concerns I can recommend keeping an eye on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anytype.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anytype.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

I hope OP has kept his Uranium related shares, the market went strongly up in the last months

This looks neat, but having such important work locked into proprietary systems seems like a really bad idea. Are there any open source systems this good? I know about org mode, Joplin, and some others, but this seems nicer and more capable.

I stopped investing in SaaS&#x2F;Cloud silos in 2015 by deleting my Dropbox. At the time markdown and folders were sufficient to organize my processes. After a while I got tired of the clutter and invested some time to familiarize myself with Emacs and Org-mode. This and Synology sync (or any self-hosted cloud solution) are adequate and future-proof way of managing, collecting and working with information. Org-mode can be simple and quick, you can export to markdown, pdf, html at any time. Org-mode can be extended and complicated. And all of this without giving a dime to SaaS bonanza.:)

&gt; This post is a fairly comprehensive discussion of how I use Notion (a free personal knowledge management app)<p>Is this a paid article? Notion is not free it has a very limited free tier. The paragraph is misleading.<p>BTW, looking for a practical wiki... the old good wikis have a lot of issues (e.g. DokuWiki is almost abandoned, it does not work with Python 3 and even the Python 2 version has wrong setup instructions). Thinking about returning to Swiki in Squeak, is there a more modern version in Pharo? MediaWiki is ugly, too complex for people outside tech. Any idea?

My personal knowledge base is zim wiki. Completely offline and text based. Excellent search and simple syntax, brilliant plugins. I&#x27;m yet to be convinced with any online solutions.

It is great how author is making the most of Notion. I have tried various such systems in vain to keep up with ever increasing efforts required to organize them neatly. I stick to simple .txt&#x2F;.md files fired up by two keystrokes (mapped &quot;&lt;leader&gt;n&quot; for new text file created in a specific folder) all of which are saved in a Dropbox folder which can be accessed from any of my devices.<p>Wish I could be as proficient in using Notion, seems like a wonderful tool.

So much work to structure and insert information to stay at the whim and custody of some company. What are you going to do if Notion goes under? Do you have a safe, complete, up to date backup? Can you utilize your backup without severe penalty or discomfort? Do you you have a no private data policy, or are you absolutely sure only people you authorize has access to it (i.e. encrypted with keys that verifiably never leave your machines)?

Notion is great, I particularly like the database concept with multiple views and how easy it is to to embed different views on different pages. I also like the rich formatting options that make it easy to create aesthetically pleasing pages. However, I miss the flexibility that a text only system like vimwiki (offline use, speed, interoperability) gives which is keeping me away from switching completely to notion.

There are so many little apps that do one part of managing personal knowledge well. It&#x27;s hard to find something that really manages it all well... the way YOU want to manage YOUR knowledge. Todo lists, messaging, calendar, notes, bookmarks all seem to fit... as does some kind of project management. So many tries over the years, and every time, some part is so bad that you end up throwing out the whole.

For a long time I wanted to create a daily dev journal, but really wanted something super low friction. At one point I was just using markdown and putting in a git repo, but the process of saving was tedious. I was able to quickly import all the markdown files into Notion, and aside from giving each entry a title that has little semantic value, it&#x27;s met and exceeded all my expectations.

I think with time things settle down. I used obsidian for notes earlier, now I use vim and text file suits me well.

Still think Not-ion whenever I see &quot;Notion&quot; and keep thinking, &quot;There still are dozens of us!&quot;<p>alas...

I&#x27;ve been using both Google docs and notion for documentation. Personally, Notion has more UX in terms of formatting.

Apple Notes is spectacular these days.

Could you make this a template we can duplicate? :)

I tired to use it, but the apps are far too slow.

I mean...<p>life is to short to spend time in notion. F*ck it.