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
> I spend more time fooling around getting "organized' than actually doing the work
Some people like an 'exobrain' that they can browse when feeling creative. Many productive people have some sort of journaling system, whether it's post-it notes stuck to their fridge, or even a basic TODO list on their phone. I would be lost without the Notes app on iOS.
Typically I write notes when I'm falling asleep and my mind races. For some reason my best ideas happen at night, not when I've had my coffee in the morning when apparently people are at their 'peak'. But then I can execute on those notes I wrote last night when I'm full of energy so it's a win.
Agreed. I just tell myself that we sent a man to the moon using computers less powerful than the average smartphone. Sometimes having constraints isn't always a bad thing. But to each their own.
It doesn’t have to be hard. I started by writing down one thing that I had learned and that I might need to do again, but not soon enough that I was likely to remember. I think my first document was a bulleted list of 5 items or so. That first page or two is often the hardest to get started on. Then I added another page, and another. Now I have hundreds of documents in my own notes and hundreds more in my notes at work.
I do similar things using Trello (for todo’s), Markdown files (for more complete info), Ponder (my own browser based scratch pad), and a notebook for Stray Thoughts (for capturing thoughts at bedtime or throughout the day).
The productive write the most about productivity, it turns out.
I'll say that for me, I hopped across note and productivity apps until I switched to emacs/org-mode. It has not made me wildly more productive, but it has (or can have) any feature other programs offer, so there is no productivity FOMO when I learn about new programs.
See, in my opinion, the issue with every org-mode suggestion is that it assumes productivity is only tied to being sitting down on your computer. Would I really need to grab my laptop to note that I did grocery or cleaned my house?
I've tried a bunch of these and the one thing that has stuck (ironically since I've had the device for years and barely used it) is Notability and an ipad/pencil.
Having infinite digital paper - maps the one thing that worked for me A4 5mm Square Paper and a pen.
I've settled on something similar and just use Apple Notes. I find note taking to be a lot like a camera, use the thing you have on you. For me this means it must be easy to take a note from any device at any time.
I know it's locked into Apple, etc..., but being able to draw notes on the iPad, quick type notes from my iPhone, or type (and search) across all of those from my Mac is what finally made it 'stick' for me.
Notion looks interesting, but too flexible can often be a problem. The danger is it's easy to slip into the thought that organizing equates to getting things done.
Nice thing is the iPad has thumb recognition on the home button, so I just placing thumb turns it on and notability is already on screen.
It’s really close to the utility of paper with few of the downsides, the one thing I miss is resistance when using the pencil, I keep thinking about a remarkable 2 because they apparently have a closer to paper feeling but they cost as much as a new iPad does and the iPad is a more capable device generally.
As the writer points out, there are dozens of good note taking apps.
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).
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.
I suspect this reduces or eliminates the time spent thinking about what to work on next but still retains the memory/archival quality of the other notes.
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/knowledge base platform needs to be able to open quickly. The UI taking a couple of seconds to load when VIM or <insert ANY editor> is only constrained by how fast you can click Alt+Tab. That small annoyance can be enough to kill whatever idea/flow in the meeting.
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 "put stuff in the cloud" was a stupid idea unless it's on a too big to fail platform (Google/Apple)
Bugs my mind why their reactions to above often complained features have been "meh". All I can deduce is that their business model relies on keeping it online / central and how the tech is set up, it's not trivial to do it offline
> Loosing ALL your notes and knowledge bits with 0 backup plan
Shameless plug: Since Notion has released their API, I've been working on a tool to automatically back up workspaces. I use Notion a lot, both personally and professionally, and it low-key scares me that it could all be gone.
It's still in beta (as Notion's API), and there's a lot of work to be done, but at least for me, it's better than hoping it all won't blow up one day (and I'm too disorganized to regularly export workspaces).
Nice tool, I've signed up. Question: I've selected the pages that I need backed up (i.e. all of them). When I add more pages in Notion, will they automatically be backed up too?
Nice job! You should limit that $6 a month based on the # of blocks. I could see some more "enterprise" type customers using this and you'd want a way to push them in to a much higher price point.
I see your point and agree with your assessment. I simply decided to release it early to get feedback and squash bugs, hence the single discounted plan.
I do plan on having at least two tiers and yearly subscriptions once the product matures.
Regarding latency, when is the last time you tried notion? I used it a couple years ago, but stopped because I found it too slow. Recently I read a blog post from them about how they have been addressing the latency issues so I tried it out again. It feels significantly faster. Pages open up instantly for me now. Might be worth trying it out again, unless the offline issues are a deal breaker for you
Perhaps it depends on your frame of reference. For me speed is still a detracting factor. I'm using the mac standalone app, just clicked around a bit, and many pages (with nothing more than 1 page of text) still get a loading spinner. Typing 3 letters in search also takes ~1s to see the first result.
I suspect actually this is the same issue as the offline thing: every interaction has networking.
One thing Notion has going for it is: it's quite easy to backup all notes, with a single click you can request a zip of everything in readable form. I do this monthly, but you could do it more often obviously.
This is something Evernote has broken lately, there no way (I know of) to backup everything at once there, and I fear that every VC-backed app will sooner or later see that as a way to improve lock-in....
Notion is such a great tool and the UX is very nice, apart from some performance improvements that could be done.
My only 2 problems with Notion is the limited offline functionality and data ownership/privacy.
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.
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'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't need to read the previous chapter in the book - I just revise my concise notes and then resume the book.
Edit: I thought Obsidian didn't have a Kanban board plugin but then found this[0]. Seems to be working well except when I open the board in "Preview" mode, it shows it as a nested list instead of a Kanban board (opening the node directly opens it correctly).
I'm in the process of founding an educational startup with a non-technical co-founder, and we're actually using Notion as our content database. I'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 "columns", 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's API, wrapped the calls into a couple of Firebase functions to merge it with user data, and it's done.
It was a perfect fit for our MVP, since I don'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's a very clunky design, definitely has some considerable user latency, but it me took no time to build it, it's free, has a nice UX, and it's allowing us to iterate very quickly.
I'd be interested in reading a blog post where you dive into this process. It sounds like a really effective way to build certain kinds of apps. I'm also interested in your project. If you have an email list, I'd love to sign up.
Pages in Notion have an icon you can set. The icon for a new, empty page is a blank piece of paper, and the icon for a page with content is a paper with line on it. We also allow setting an emoji as a page icon (using our emoji picker menu), or uploading or linking to an image file like an SVG.
There’s a button to apply a random emoji as a page icon but it’s not a default behavior.
It never happened to me, there's always default page icon unless I click at this icon to change it. I write in polish, maybe they're trying to deduce from the title what the note is about and this works only for english?
The company I worked for uses Notion, so I use it quite a lot.
Howver, I still haven't reached the point where I look at it as a "org mode for the emacs challenged". I'm probably just having some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
We also use Notion in my company. The editor is horrendous. It's absolutely crazy how bad it is for my use of writing documentation. I'm also biased, I do love emacs with evil and markdown modes, and I use neovim as my main editor again nowadays. Notion just gets in your way, and I also prefer the classic 80 characters a row, clean RFC format over whatever notion gives with emojis and colors.
Some things I really don't like with Notion:
- Markdown import has been broken the whole two years I needed to store stuff in Notion. I prefer writing in emacs and importing to Notion. Always problems with that.
- The editor is just always having some problems when you use `code` blocks or other formatting.
- The search is unusable.
- It is slow and I either need to install an Electron app or use it from browser.
How I cope with it nowadays is I just write my text in emacs using markdown mode, then paste it to Notion in one code block to keep at least some of my formatting and forget my text into the black hole of Notion where I cannot find anything after a few weeks.
Edit: What would be cool is an API that plugs into the editor, such as vim or emacs, that allows me to organize my texts in the editor and upload from there to the Notion server without me needing to open their app. I could see all my documents from this mode, edit them and so on...
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.
I mean, just look at this list of "Enterprise" only features:
---
> Prevent members from sharing pages publicly
> This will disable the Share to web option in the Share menu on every page in this workspace.
>
> Prevent members from changing the Workspace section
> This disables the ability for members to create, move, reorder, and delete top-level Workspace pages.
>
> Disable guests
> This prevents anyone from inviting people outside the workspace to any page.
>
> Disable moving or duplicating pages to other workspaces
> This prevents anyone from moving or duplicating pages to other workspaces via the Move To or Duplicate To action.
>
> Disable export
> This prevents anyone from exporting as Markdown, CSV, or PDF.
>
> Prevent members from installing new third party integrations
> 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.
---
For context, team pricing is $10/user/month while enterprise is $25/user/month
I feel like I'm the only one still using Evernote. I'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.
Evernote is a great tool and a lot of people use it daily, like you and me. But it is not fashionable anymore, so people don't talk about it, they just use it and pay every month.
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.
Is that really such a breakthrough? Don't evernote etc. do the same?
My guess is they spend a ton of money to promote their product. Many influencers on Youtube (adressing students) make several promoted videos a month (!) about how to use Notion. They have a ton of money to spend. Their latest valuation was ten billions, and they raised > 100m money.
I also feel like they have a ton of (paid) ambassadors promoting the product aggressively on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms.
It‘s a decent product, reminds me of Confluence, but with easy setup.
Search is their biggest problem. You hit Command+P, open the universal search window, type something and wait literally seconds before something shows up.
I would be surprised they pay people when so many people are willing to talk about Notion for free. So yeah they started hiring Notion ambassadors (and paying them) recently, but much of the growth they had was without paying.
I think they never paid for an ad, they only have a handful of people working in marketing, about 5 according to Linkedin.
The reality is people who love Notion want to shout it everywhere and as a result you see content about Notion everywhere
I'm not going to claim it's revolutionary (and I don't know how much 'hype' there is because I don't follow stuff like ProductHunt) but it is more than that - it's a sort of recursive database table where every page is an entry, and you can view the page itself or various views (literally a table, or kanban for example, filtered, sorted) on the table. Or make a page containing a view on the table.
Markdown editor is roughly what you get for free, but then there's the flexibility to build within it: kanban system with custom fields, CMS for a blog, etc.
It's part of 'no-code' (although you can script formulaic fields derived from others) hype I suppose.
Edit: I've just seen logseq.github.io via another comment, which looks great and probably clearer (to an HN user) why it's good and what you can do with it. Notion then is like a closed-source proprietary-format logseq, that's easier to use for, and targetting, a broader audience.
> Is that really such a breakthrough? Don't evernote etc. do the same?
Yeah it's the hype, today Notion is the go to tool for PKM, the same Evernote used to be a few years ago and the same others used to be before Evernote. For some weird reason people prefer to all use the same product, and instead of having a bunch of users on Evernote, a bunch on Notion, a bunch on Roam, a bunch on others. They all migrate to the current hot tool
Whether it's Evernote or Notion, they are great products, but nothing revolutionary. The major difference between Evernote and Notion is that Notion has managed to get a good chunk of their revenue from companies. This should make them more durable.
> For some weird reason people prefer to all use the same product, and instead of having a bunch of users on Evernote, a bunch on Notion, a bunch on Roam, a bunch on others. They all migrate to the current hot tool
I don't think this is so very weird. For most users, popular products are likely to be more future proof, so choosing them can grant a sense of security.
> For most users, popular products are likely to be more future proof
Psh, the average user clearly hasn't heard of the Lindy effect[1]! /s
Sarcastic condescension aside, I was really taken aback by the sheer fanfare Notion had when it released. In my circles, adoption was driven largely by one designer; in fairness he's always excited about new technology but when everything is the best thing since the iPad, a few eyebrows get raised. I'll bet lunch money they would be first to migrate to the next-hot PKM tool for the slightest feature offering.
As for me, I want to spend the least amount of time adapting my workflow. My workflow must help me work, not be something I am constantly working on. So it's all about inertia for me; Evernote needs to fuck up big before I leave.
In fairness, there was a time (around 2015s) when Evernote had frustrating bugs. Even beyond that, their editor was also subpar for such a long time. But I'm really satisfied with the current version which, I suspect, came about due to the threat Notion posed to their user numbers. Yay for market competition, I guess somehow I still benefited off Notion. :)
That is my bet. Lindy will save Evernote, which little by little will improve, become faster and include new and useful features (I hope not too many). I really like it now, except the performance, but performance will improve little by little as they optimize the new code.
Didn't Evernote experienced a similar hype cycle? I still vaguely remember when it was Evernote that was the new kid in the block back in the day, streamlining the organisation of personal knowledge/information with rich text editor, tags, and syncing.
It's probably better being hyped before waning than just waning, I guess.
Notion allows to create much more structured data than Evernote-like apps, which are usually just flat collections of pages. It's kinda a mixture of OneNote with WorkFlowy/Dynalist and some simple spreadsheet capabilities. In other words: nothing new, not perfect and not particularly fast, but conveniently packaged and flexible enough for most people to manage their workflow from a single app
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.
Ad- and script-blocking helps, but those are targeted primarily at web browsing, and that is certainly not the only attack vector.
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.
There are adequate solutions, but they raise the bar in terms of the expertise, expense, and effort required. Even if a company addressed the "expense" issue by releasing a consumer-priced whitelisting application for Windows, there is no clear way to eliminate the other requirements.
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 "my data in a great big silo" concerns I can recommend keeping an eye on https://anytype.io/en/
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 recently started using Obsidian for exactly this reason. Although the software is non-Free, it's just a fancy Markdown editor (but more than that). Since all the data is Markdown - and most importantly, stored on the filesystem _as_ Markdown files - there is no proprietary database. I back everything with Git (and my personal Git server - unrelated to Obsidian - gives my nice Markdown previews and includes a web-based editor). Sometimes I find myself without a GUI and naturally the files all load nicely with vim (and works well with vimwiki). And on mobile I use GitJournal (Android) which is nowhere near as powerful as Obsidian, but for mostly reads and occasional writes, it's seamless Git sync really makes it easy to handle.
And if some day something happens to Obsidian, I'll just go back to Vimwiki. After all, my conversion process moving to Obsidian consisted of the single step of opening my existing Vimwiki directory structure with Obsidian...
GitJournal is pretty great. The automagical git sync Just Works, so everything is right where I need it, when I need it.
I spend 90% of my time on my "daily" notes, so (selfishly) that's where I would focus. My challenges there are:
1. My date format is "YYYY/MM - MMMM/YYYY-MM-DD" in a folder called Daily, which means the files have names like "Daily/11 - November/2021-11-18.md" (and surprisingly, Obsidian accepts that date format and manages the intermediate directories just fine). That crazy date/filename format would need to be configurable and supported for (I think) the Journal feature to work well
2. I don't include a heading with the date at the top of my Daily files (actually, _any_ files), so finding the right note (when I see a bunch of cards that all look pretty similar) can be challenging - at least my directory structure means I can narrow down to the month very fast by looking at the folder names
3. Bonus points for a calendar view to make #1 and #2 easier?
I think if I had to pick the biggest challenge, it's #2 because I end up with a big soup of files that all look the same, where the important thing to discriminate between them is the filename.
I also love the commercial model - I love Open Source, but I don't mind paying for quality, so I get the best of both worlds here. And more importantly, I don't have to spend a huge amount of money just to trial the software for a couple months - I can pay the (small) monthly fee, and if I like it, either pay the "full" fee or just keep paying monthly.
As long as you’re doing regular backups/exports I don’t see the proprietary nature as a problem. It wouldn’t be too hard to convert the data to some other format if the need arose.
I stopped investing in SaaS/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.:)
> This post is a fairly comprehensive discussion of how I use Notion (a free personal knowledge management app)
Is this a paid article? Notion is not free it has a very limited free tier. The paragraph is misleading.
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?
Their pricing structure seems to indicate a personal, non-administrated account is free. There are a lot of missing check marks on the free tier but I'm not sure if a personal account really needs permission groups or dedicated support.
My personal knowledge base is zim wiki. Completely offline and text based. Excellent search and simple syntax, brilliant plugins. I'm yet to be convinced with any online solutions.
Maybe you could write a similar article, or point us to similar? I've tried using Zim wiki on a few occasions, and it just hasn't stuck for me. The plugins and offline nature really appeal to me.
I've pretty simple requirements. I would be using vimwiki if it displayed images. I'm also paranoid and don't want random companies controlling my data.
I'm more interested in functionality than pretty displays. I was like that when I found bullet journal.
I'm also in agreement with others here, I don't want to spend more time on the tool than I do on the job.
No one would read anything I wrote about my workflow!
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/.md files fired up by two keystrokes (mapped "<leader>n" 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.
Wish I could be as proficient in using Notion, seems like a wonderful tool.
As a vim user, you’d probably just find notion frustrating. As you point out, you can tailor vim to be streamlined to your workflow. Notion is in the opposite direction where everything is pretty slow going (and as I’m sure people will pile in here about how the performance sucks).
I'm a heavy vim user but I think Notion is better suited for organising ideas and general life admin. While I'm sure it's possible to set up vim to act similar (vimwiki looks interesting) it wouldn't enable easy and nice viewing, editing and syncing across mobile devices. It's very keyboard-centric on desktop but manages to translate the interface rather elegantly to touch devices.
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'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's met and exceeded all my expectations.
I use obsidian + git (it has a git plugin that will let you upload to any git site, including your own). It's not as pretty as notion, but it gets the job done and my notes are in a few different places so virtually impervious to destruction :) . I just can't see not have a completely transparent and future proof note repository.
