Comment by gault8121 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gault8121 | Hacker News Reader

I am a huge Notion supporter - it's our organizaation's brain and one of our most important tools.

However, having used the tool for more than a year at a 20 person org, one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages. There is "Notion anxiety" about not wanting to mess up the board.

One thing we've done to address this is by adding two common tables, the Documentation table and the Meetings table. Anytime anyone wants to create a new doc, they can simply add it to the documentation table and then tag it to their team, and we have a full list of all of the docs everyone has written. From there, if a certain piece of documentation needs to be somewhat else, it can be pulled out and moved there. Additionally, each team member has a default "project board table" and if you say need to create a quick to do list, you should just add it to your personal board. Having these "default tables" rather than a special table for each specific project may really help your team.

Notion requires intentional planning, and you need to be opinionated about the architecture. If you just keep adding things on haphazardly, it's going to turn into a mess.

Finally, I do agree with OP that notifications could signicantly be improved. If anyone from Notion is reading this, please think of notifications like emails. At the moment, notifications are only in the state of read/unread, and as soon as I open my notifications, they clear. Instead, I want my notifications to be a mini-inbox, where I can view notifications, respond to notifications, archive completed notifications, and filter notifications into channels (the same way I can filter emails). Notifications are a to do list, and should be thought of as such. Having this set up would address OPs concern about being able to filter notifications at the email level by setting the filtering logic in the app.

My team started using Notion last year, and this rings true:

> one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages

I have also seen this happen with every knowledge-base software I have ever used. A team’s knowledge-base (which represents a shared domain model) is evolving all the time, as people’s understanding of the domain evolves, and sometimes there is information that is valuable but doesn’t have an optimal home in the current domain model.

The only way I’ve seen it successfully managed is by having different standards for information structure depending on how well the information’s role is understood by the org.

You need dumping grounds where one can quickly jot down relevant information for later processing, and you need areas that present a more structured view of what you know to support decision-making, and a schedule for consolidating and structuring the unstructured knowledge. This creates far less pressure to put everything in the right place at first.

I think of it like a write-ahead log, or like how food is dumped into the stomach before the individual nutrients are extracted and delivered to various destinations around the body - you don’t deliver each nutrient molecule to its destination before eating another.

> I think of it like a write-ahead log

Lovely analogy.

It's also how high write-throughput databases work. First write the data in a way that's optimised for getting it committed to storage and at high density.

Only later, in the background, maybe at a more convenient time, is the data reorganised for finding and reading things.

Interestingly, my company’s “knowledge base” doesn’t really have a structure for the most part. I can just publish a page in it and share the URL around, and most people interact with it via search. So no matter how I organize the page, people generally find it without going through some kind of hierarchy. I think this works really well when there are tons and tons of pages, and I also don’t have to be concerned about how to organize it.

This is exactly my pain with Notion for personal knowledge management and why I switched to Roam Research. In Notion, I have all my pages in one table, plus tags, in order to manage the hierarchy without sinking a huge amount of time it. But I think Roam isn’t very well-suited for collaborative use cases at the moment.

> I want my notifications to be a mini-inbox, where I can view notifications, respond to notifications, archive completed notifications, and filter notifications into channels (the same way I can filter emails).

This is exactly how the most recent release works, no? Notifications are "unread" by default, but "read" when you see them -- however they stay in the "Inbox" tab of the notifications panel. You can reply directly from there, or mark them as done by clicking the "x" to remove them from the Inbox. Everything you described but filtering.

> one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages. There is "Notion anxiety" about not wanting to mess up the board.

> One thing we've done to address this is by adding two common tables, the Documentation table and the Meetings table.

Definitely. It is important to have one or more fairly undifferentiated tables that function as an inbox or a repository of generic notes into which people can dump stuff easily.

Maybe the stuff gets triaged and organized later, or maybe the stuff in the notes tables just stays as notes - the search functionality got much faster and better a couple months ago and that can surface unorganized stuff.

Linked databases also help for this. You can create a linked db filtered for a team or tag on every team page. Create meeting docs from there, and then new meeting docs show up there and live in the master table with appropriate properties to categorise them.

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