People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

I use, love and evangelize Notion but yes, all of these are valid criticism, and copy-pasting in particular is so busted.

I remember the days before tables, and I think it's come a long way with lots of great features... That said, I don't see it as a replacement for regular tools like Google sheets and docs etc.

Even trying to select text is a nightmare. Notion can’t make up its mind between selecting text or selecting the objects that contains the text.

I wish there was a markdown mode with a live preview, then I would never use the rest of the Notion interface.

Their native app wrappers also have issues.

- On macOS the "Sync dark/light mode with OS" settings constantly get reset

- I'm frequently logged out (and have to log back in)

- No effort for basic integration has happened, which makes drag & drop in and out of the app awkward, no sharing extensions, etc.

If I'm being honest, I envy them for being in the position of being able to completely ignore this stuff and still have a product that people love. That said, it feels like an easy thing to throw 1-2 people on with the task of, "make this integrate deeper into the host operating system with Electron basics"

For me the thing that made me give up using Notion was the “feel” of the basic text editing. There was a latency and lagginess to the way it responded that made it so unsatisfying and, at worst, irritating to use that I couldn’t go on.

Typing this, it feels weird to give up because of such a subtle thing, but there were probably a dozen more details lacking in this way that eroded all of the goodwill won by the flashy features.

In something as seemingly simple as a text editor it turns out that if it’s not built on a solid foundation of usability then I very quickly sour on the rest of it.

Currently using Obsidian and am very pleased. I’m happy with how “light” it feels.

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 an "ecosystem" generic enough to potentially offer unlimited tacked on features and unlimited scope creep

> Make it very minimalist and user friendly so there's no adoption cost

> Create the impression that there's some ideal harmony of workflow available to any user who uses it the "right way". Apple heavily leans into this in their marketing. If it doesn't work for you then you must not be using it right

As softsound says, even with its limits, just having basic tables now feels like such a win. It took so long.

I think they always kinda hated tables, and simple or databases ones, editing and formatting wise it's still the worse part to deal with in Notion.

At the same time the whole product got so much slower. I regularly see the "click here to see latest version" head banner as my browser local version falls out of sync, when online collaboration and quasi-realtime sync was the whole point of Notion.

Adding to timezones: the new date shortcuts (@today etc.) are so close, yet so frustrating to deal with on auto-generated pages on regular schedules. Say you schedule a report page to be created on friday morning so you get to fill it for the monday meeting, good luck with dynamically setting the dates.

I love Notion.

There I said it.

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

100% this. I am starting to hate Notion, and I hate myself for the fact that I trusted this company to "do well" to its users. They're not.

For me, the key factor for switching from Notion to Obsidian, was its slowness with pages containing a lot of code blocks (e.g. Python). Some pages were even completely crashing the Notion mobile app.

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.

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's documentation multiple times an hour (more active), the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all. Also I will say, with their API you can technically hook up whatever databases you have within Notion for use, so it can easily become a place to store your blog notes and use them without copying/pasting. But again, blog notes are rarely changing so you see the pattern here I hope.

I also don't get the notion template hype on gumroad/etsy/producthunt/etc. You can create them yourself within seconds, but that's the nature of the "productivity industry", you get big bucks for the mere idea that your product will make their life easier/faster.

I use Notion as a personal work notebook. I like it for its lack of rigidity and fixed structure. I've always struggled with tools like Trello because they have a specific model that you need to fit your usage into. Then again, I'm not a Notion power user, nor do I make heavy use of templates outside of a few I've designed myself, so I'm definitely not one of the "hype"rs

(I work for Notion)

Notion is also "basically just a bunch of lists", plus titles. Pages in Notion are a title, and a list of blocks. Text blocks are a title (the text of the block) and a list, it's indented children.

We also have boards like Trello, and you can drag and drop list items between boards, pages, paragraphs, everywhere. Maybe you could see it as everything you like about Trello, but applied to more modalities of content.

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 doing bizarre spreadsheet hacks to achieve the same functionality is much less intuitive to me.

The reason there’s an entire weird industry around Notion is not surprising to most people here: relational databases are useful. Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most. Notion and Airtable wrapped a good UX around creating semi-primitive rdbs and here we are.

> I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.

> I don't get what I am missing.

100% agree. Notion doesn't work like my brain when it comes to documents, formatting, structuring — I ended up spending most of my time configuring systems and formatting than actually inputting information & accomplishing things.

I've tried a few times to get into it, and see what others see in it. I just can't.

> I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.

Remember Evernote ... that was going to change your life once upon at time.

Are any of these things bad? Not really. Will any of them change your life ... almost certainly not, unless your life is making hype content on social media for these products and you manage to become a fully fledged "influencer".

I think it's okay, I use it because it was the first polished app I could read and edit notes from so many devices.

But the idea Notion is a 100M business, let alone a 10B valued company is madness.

You are not missing anything. It's stupid, but hey, some people are paying for that stuff and and some people are making money out of it. Who are we to judge.

I’ve been meaning to try trello, notion is just so slow

Kanbanflow > trello. Same thing, just nicer interface imho

It's also a very good example of why search engines suck today. Everything is stuffed to the gills with right keywords, to get the maximum number of clicks on the affiliate link that is almost certainly embedded in the video description.

Over the last 20 years or so I've tried: index cards, wunderlist, todo.txt, remember the milk, Asana, Any.do, Evernote, Google Notebook, Simplenote, Trello, Workflowy, Google Keep, Bear Notes, org-mode, and probably a dozen others. Three years ago I started using Apple Notes and told my wife "if you see me trying anything else at all, yell at me". I've been pretty happy with it and am much more productive just using something rather than trying to find some magic new tool.

The same thing happens in the workplace, too. My last two jobs have had groups that adopted Notion and tried to use heaps of rules and templates and emojis that they wanted everyone to use to structure and document everything in Notion.

It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done.

The Product Management group at my last company was the worst at this. They had hundreds of Notion pages that supposedly collected everything and show them in meetings, slide decks, and at every chance they had as proof that they were on top of things. Yet they could barely do any product management work that we needed to ship product because their whole world revolves around building Notion pages rather than building products.

The sad part was that it worked, at least for a while. Executives would praise the team for being so organized and always having so much to show in presentations. Eventually people started to realize that they were lost in the process of writing Notion docs rather than focusing on getting work done, but it took a long time.

When I first got into Linux it seemed like a lot of people mostly used Linux to configure desktop environments and Conky to take screenshots of.

There's a Buddhist parable about someone spending their whole life building a boat to cross a small river and dying before they made it across.

Now this is a fascinating take, as exactly that thought was discussed in a concurrent thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35670129

The phenomenon you describe (the configurators instead of doers) can be found in the upper right corner of the schema in the linked post.

There was just a post about the distinction between being someone who fiddled with tuning a bike, versus someone who rides a bike - and how ultimately complete devotion to one must preclude the other. (Or the more charitable version, there was only really time in most people’s lives for the serious practice of one side of the hobby, not the other - you can’t be taking apart your bike and putting it back together and be riding it all at the same time)

Tinkering with tooling and ‘process’ with software seems like it could be another realm of that principle. You can either spend the next week playing with syncing, hosting, processing, making sure your extensions and utilities all hook seamlessly into eachother… or you could have spent that week writing using just notepad and already have X-thousand words down.

(There’s probably a happy medium for everyone though)

Same here. I then ended up just using pandoc and a small shell script and it's served as a great static site generator letting me focus on writing my markdown.

I use Trello for car restoration projects, and I’ll admit I lost basically an entire day just trying to get this automated workflow to happen. But after having figured it out, it made things like cataloguing new parts that I need a 0 second automated process vs a 1 minute manual process. Like basically infinite time gotten back.

The biggest win imo is it took a rote and tedious task (inventory management) associated with my fun task (working on a car) and removed it from my fun task which allows me to enjoy my fun task more and gives me greater odds of completing it.

I have diagnosed ADHD and I have struggled with this, but like someone else said, you have to make sure you don't fall into a hole trying to make one of your pages perfect -- I mean, go for it if that's what you're interested in, but I have accepted that something perfect for me will take refinement and delayed gratification.

I don't use Notion, but I kind of fell down the similar Obsidian rabbit hole.

Obsidian is interesting because it makes you really feel like you're being productive, creating links and little "mini wikis", but it didn't seem like I was actually accomplishing more.

I still use the app for notes, but now I mostly use it for just a "relatively easy to search" notes app.

> I get the impression some people spend more time configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being productive.

I think that's not a consequence of the software, but that some people have an innate draw towards these sorts of activities.

e.g. take a look at the community around journalling. Tons and tons of subjectively beautiful layouts and designs, and productivity is merely a side effect.

I see a therapist who specializes in OCD. They believe that the mood journal trend around 2010-2015 led to a lot of people - nearly all of their patients including me - having a compulsion to write down and re-think/overvalue every passing thought.

>The 23 minute video linked on the "ultimate notion setup for 2023" sounds like a great trap to fall into to not actually get anything done. I get the impression some people spend more time configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being productive.

This is me with emacs.

> perfecting my .vimrc instead of actually working on projects. Messing around with static site blog generators when I should actually just be writing content.

I feel attacked.

It’s the 2020 equivalent of getting your perfect vim or eMacs config maybe?

I went through some of the video, and I found it interesting that most of the projects and task the presenter is showing are about making videos. There's something borderline ironic in the cyclicality of those youtube people focusing on "productivity" mainly producing videos about how to be productive.

And yeah, the administrative burden of maintaining such a system gives me pause ; the decorum of being formal gives the impression of being productive, but are you really productive when 25% of your time goes into the project management and time you invest in setting it up?

(I work for Notion)

This is certainly a trap with any tool with exciting possibilities.

I personally don't use any templates; I'm of the "brutalist Notion" school of thought. When I want to use Notion for something, I start with the simplest possible approach that could work. Then I add Notion features if they prove necessary. So for something like household chores, I started a Notion page called "chores" and just add to-do checkboxes there when there's a new task, and at-mention myself or my partner to assign things if needed. This is instead of making a database with status, assign property etc.

We do use some separate databases for shopping, meal planning/recipes, and make larger pages for specific trips. Keeping things simple initially and adding complexity where it's needed means you never over-invest in a system that's not necessary. Plus, every column you add to a database is one more bit of work you need to do to "file" something completely. I find it discouraging to add friction to stuff I already consider a chore that I want to avoid.

Relevant: Andy Matuschak: People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzX...

There is value in structure and rules, to clear your mind and give you orientation for your work. But everyone is also different, so you also need to first figure out the structures and rules which are working for you and your situations. Which, yeah..it's an eternal trap of bike sheeding. Flexible tools like notion are very helpful and seductive in those regards. They can help you get your things done, but can also led you astray to the wrong roads.

I think at this point it might be useful to have some studies in how selforganization-porn-addicts and mental health issues correlate. I get the impression that people with adhs for example are more likely to search out this kind of tools&systems to get some control over their mind&life back. I know it's at least for me the case.

I'm going to be a little mean here, but I think it needs to be said: "How to be productive in Notion" videos and template sales sites and such are always made by boringly unsuccessful people. I would love to see a broader intensive study on this topic, but just from my observations: its youtube and tik tok creators with a few thousand viewers, people who may actually be rather busy but don't drive much success from what they do. Running on a treadmill (and spending hours a week planning that run) so to speak.

Subsequently: Go ask the CEO or other leaders of your company the systems they use to stay organized. I bet twenty bucks that the most common answers to that question, when limited to the note-taking space, are: Nothing, and Apple Notes. If that definition of success isn't your cup of tea, then go ask who you perceive as the most productive person you work with. I did that very specifically with this extremely talented and productive engineer on my team, and his answer: markdown files in a big folder, grep, and vim. Ok greybeard :)

But point being: Its almost never Notion or tools at a similar power level. Its simple shit. Physical journals, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Google Docs, for the technically inclined just markdown files.

Which is why I just ditched scrivener for a markdown editor with minimal features for my writing. Configurable tools can lead you to spend all your time configuring them instead of using them

I actually found YC advice on startups to work great in real life as well. Afaik YC is all for execution and thus write great material for getting things done. Best advice ever for me was the whole single metric thing - pick a metric, makes sure it goes up x-% every week.

Self cleansing notes. That is a great idea.

Dying notes are a fascinating thought, and relate to some of the cruft aspects I've seen with any sort of task-tracking.

That said, in my usual note-taking app, I have things like recipes I might make once in a blue moon, and I'd be very annoyed if I lost my late grandma's lasagna recipe.

> notes die when you don’t engage with them

That is an interesting idea, but not something I would ever want in a notes app. A note may be important but never opened.

For example, I have a note in Craft with my bike serial number and a picture of me standing next to it. If my bike is ever stolen and recovered, this note is proof of ownership. I have not opened this note since creating it, because my bike has not been stolen, but I would obviously hate to lose it.

I just use Sublime and a notes folder containing text files groups in folders by topic. The search function is excellent, and I don't need anything more.

save your notes so you can train chatgpt on them.

I love this! I'm starting to feel this is a solution to a lot of info-overload stress in our lives. I'm making an iOS app with the same slant: every day has its own list, so you start fresh every day, or you can add to your tomorrow's list at night so you start the day prepared. I also added a bullet-journal-like view for the month and it all adds up to a lot less stress than what I've been doing before (the testflight is at https://testflight.apple.com/join/t5ZpRV2l )

Rather than a note dying, I wonder if notes could decay into smaller and smaller summaries.

I presume you were scratching your own itch but maybe you can answer a question for me, why are the majority of productivity apps on here only available on IOS?

oof, I feel like this is replicating the worst parts of having a fallible human memory.

Notion still does have pretty bad performance, although I believe they’ve recently upgraded the search. It’s quite good at least in my experience.

Have you ever looked at task warrior? https://taskwarrior.org (and you could host it online yourself (I believe) with inthe.am - https://github.com/coddingtonbear/inthe.am if you aren't comfortable with the existing version)

It's well documented ( https://taskwarrior.org/docs/ ) had enables a number of different workflows and export and import options (I've dabbled with jira imports to task warrior for my own sorting views).

Have you tried Joplin?

It's markdown, allows copy pasting images, embeding files like PDF with preview, works offline by syncing using apple/google/microsoft/dropbox cloud storage.

Has desktop and mobile app.

Free and Open Source.

I similarly am obsessed with maintaining my own knowledgebase and wanted it to be self hosted and open source.

I was looking at setting up a wiki and considered Dokuwiki and Bookstack. I ended up using Tiddlywiki, which is by default a single user wiki that is actually just a single HTML file that defines the whole app and the wiki contents. This means that all you need to run it is a browser that can read HTML and run JS.

I since migrated from running it as a single HTML file to a Node.js server to enable better version tracking with Git and to make saving updates less cumbersome. It's a little wonky to save updates to the single-file version without a custom browser plugin or app.

Anyways, at some point I might try migrating to a more traditional wiki solution as I like the idea of being able to share parts of my wiki with others. But for now Tiddlywiki works nicely for me!

Can I ask what determined you to move away from Zim? I'm currently using it and finding it quite good.

I'll throw tiddlywiki into the ring for the 'list of things to try', it is pretty neat and I like how it is all contained in a single file and it's really fun to explore inside of it.

But I also landed on bookstack. Weird how it turned out that formatting my stuff like a book would be the best format as opposed to all the super cool different ways of thinking that are possible with new-gen apps. I'm not sure if books are just superior or if I just personally am really wired to books, but I landed on it after evernote, onenote, obsidian, joplin, and Notion.

Basically I am using tiddly as a zettelkastan where appropriate and bookstack for things that are more finalized.

I really wish my team would switch to BS instead of the unorganized knowledgebase soup with inconsistent tagging, zero curation, and bad search engine (servicenow knowledge). omg what if we had an actual procedure manual instead of just hoping people will enter the right search terms to land on KBs they dont even know to search for. now THAT would be revolutionary.

Maybe try Obsidian? It works completely offline, it's free, and its stores your data as a folder of markdown files. It should cover your personal wiki / Zettelkasten needs, plus, if you're willing to spend some time on learning the Tasks plugin, you can implement a pretty decent GTD-like system on it.

I'm someone who has used and paid for Notion for several years at this point.

What I would say is that it's very versatile. It has almost Atlassian Jira levels of features (and arguably of bloat), and it's possible to reasonably organise a lot of thoughts/knowledge/tasks in a wide range of ways.

I think the reason why it's so popular and oft lauded is because the range of capability allows people to really engineer workflows and processes that work for them and that without the prompts of the examples that Notion and its community provide they may not otherwise arrive at.

So for me I'd probably say that the product itself is fairly good. It's far from flawless (e.g., it uses Electron), but does a solid job of a wide range of things. The killer differentiator against its competitors, however, is the library of templates and example projects - this initially was produced by Notion itself but then the community really grew, shared its own interpretations, and _productivity content creators_ really latched onto it as a good conduit for communicating workflows, processes, and systems for working/getting tasks done.

Notion is very, very good, and to me that became most apparent, when I tried to find an alternative, because designing the more serious parts of my life for life around a proprietary piece of SaaS seems ludicrous for too many reasons.

It is that good, but more specifically, it has a very specific and innovative concept. There is not much competion yet, even though some have finally emerged in the last years. But with tools like this, it's also so specific in its ways and features, that it's hard to switch because of your habits. Think of it like vim, and how hard people seek for similar modal interaction in all other tools they use.

The submarine article I came across earlier, but it's so good, so on point, that I had to read it again.

"If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all."

Fantastic way to understand a lot more of the world. Not just critical thinking, I have been making good progress in my interpersonal relationships too.

I've long dreamed of tracking every little thing. I don't know why but tracking everything I do, what I eat or drink or wear, how many hours I watch TV or sit on Reddit, how often I urinate, my work life balance, literally everything, the of having it all is exciting to me.

Beyond the thrill of acquiring and holding it, it would no doubt be more useful than simply admiring it. Compare it to say a sports trophy, that's something you simply admire although of course you have the memories of the journey to win it as well.

Data and tracking on the other hand feels practical and usable in the present and the future, as well as something to look back on or "admire".

Would you think less of people who put the hours into winning a sports trophy or writing a book (that they presumably never read or use themselves)?

I find tracking things is a helpful (and relatively healthy) way to manage anxiety. It’s a total time vampire - but once I’ve made my lists of todos/sheets/Roam/Notion/BuJo/whatever and convinced myself I’m organized and in control, then I can get real work done free of nagging concern I’m missing something. I try to find a healthy balance, and my level of tracking varies with my mental health and stress. I’ve noticed that if I’m tracking nothing, things are bad. Likewise, if I’m tracking EVERYTHING, I’m spiraling and things are bad.

I've tracked things like food intake for years at a time when loosing weight. I also tracked every dollar spent manually for 3 or 4 years.

Both times I did that they were extremely helpful to achieve my goals. Too much of what we do is on autopilot. Noticing what you're doing is a helpful way to course correct before you're 10k over budget or 5 pounds heavier.

You have to do it in a healthy manner though, you can't obsess about tracking. Be gentle with yourself and know you'll make mistakes, both in tracking and what you're doing.

It can be a lot of work. It can be a trap. But I don't think Notion is the problem.

I will share some personal experience on this journey.

I like to be organized where I need to. I worked up a TODO list habit and a note taking habit over time. At first it was pen and paper. Then plain text notes. Then Evernote. And now it's Notion.

Regardless of the tool, there were times when I overdid it. I became too meticulous. The TODO list, instead of keeping me organized and my mind free, became the source of my work and worry.

I iterated over time, and have built up a system that works for me. Whenever I feel that something becomes too heavy, I trim it. Notion is nice because it allows me to be flexible. It's more like a notebook with superpowers than Jira and Asana.

If you're obsessive and don't catch yourself, Notion can become the source of troubles. But so can cataloging your CD collection.

I recently shared my TODO list workflow with someone. I have a daily and weekly template and they're quite involved. The person was surprised asked me if I ever get stressed if I don't do it all. Not at all, I said. What I don't do gets thrown away and I start over tomorrow. It keeps me structured and organized, but I am not its slave.

It's not how involved your system is. It's how much it works for you, vs working against you.

Yeah, I have so little energy and motivation to do stuff. I need to spend the little I have actually doing stuff rather than planning to do stuff

I somewhat envy people who can meticulously plan like this. When I try to do something like this I love talking about the planning and researching, but putting it all together into a detailed plan stresses me because I don't even know where to start. It starts to make it feel like work. Then there's another side of me that loves spontaneous adventure and just going with the flow. If anyone has any tips to find a happy medium, I'm all ears.

I just got home yesterday from a 2 week vacation. I was feeling especially relaxed during the trip, much more than usual. I thought this was due to how good I had gotten at thought exercises and managing anxiety, and I didn't want to forget what I was doing that led to this so I bought a notebook. After I started writing I lost the sense of detachment that was so pleasant and couldn't get it back the rest of the trip.

Slightly different context, but similar enough.

I wear a Garmin sportswatch so keep an eye on the subreddit. If you go there you’ll see daily threads about arbitrary metrics like “sleep score”, “body battery”, hrv and vo2 max. People obsess over the numbers without really thinking to take a step back and thinking about how accurate the data is and whether or not it’s actually meaningful in any real terms.

Definitely a lot of folks out there becoming slaves to this sort of thing.

It's contextually bounded, I think. You can't be the librarian of your whole life, but you can parcel out some things that warrant discrete records(e.g. finances).

I do think it's pointless to put all of it in a computer. Some things do better with a whiteboard(or an electronic version of such like Boogie Board) or a paper journal. The computer is for if you genuinely want to edit, rearrange, and structure the data. It constantly tempts you to do so.

To never do it, or to do it all the time, are neither good. The best is if you can do trials of things like this. To be able to monitor something closely, but then draw conclusions and let it go.

It’s true that the organizational model of the file system and desktop metaphor should be usable for this.

There’s another huge gap though: documents in your local machine don’t have easy to use hypertext. Apple Notes app is very nice, but neither it nor TextEdit nor Pages can do what a Notion document can do. The OS needs a HyperCard to make it adopt Web-native tools for thinking.

People have been trying to turn the file system into a database for decades at this point. It was supposed to be the killer feature of Windows Vista.

IME the filesystem is both too complex and too simple; it's completely underspecified, has no memory model or semantics, and all the advanced features like extended attributes are unportable to the point of uselessness. There's literally one filesystem metadata feature that actually works reasonably reliably and it's the one most of HN hates: Windows three-letter extensions to indicate file types.

It would be great to have a portable, standardised, database-like layer - SQL isn't it either - but I think it would have to be something ran as a userspace layer rather than built into the filesystem.

>a failure of the file system and desktop metaphor.

I agree. I think this is because the file system is very rigid in terms of what you can do with it, especially regarding extending it, and managing it from a higher perspective. It would be very nice to use labels/tags for files and folders. To have a nice index that can be easily viewed, sorted, filtered. The file systems are also very rigid. To create filesystems while computer is running, mounting them around, resizing etc on the fly, this is unthinkable to me with existing file systems, and I have used some.

The lacking of file systems are demonstrated I believe in file formats that are basically file systems themselves. Archive formats come first to mind, and that basically every game I have played grouped its assets into large data files.

There is nothing weird about it. I have been doing it, and many others I personally know have done it since forever. It seems for boarding school folks, at least around where I am from, diary is really a companion right from the beginning; for me it has been since really young. However I also happily use one or two clean/simple note taking apps and it is on my phone at any given time (paid or free; but strictly non-subscription).

A diary with sticky notes is an excellent feedback loop: Stick in tasks, then write down what happened later.

You don't have to use a SaaS, you can use a modern "note taking"++ tool like Obsidian (not affiliated, just a huge fan) or Logseq (FOSS). In both cases files are fully local, sync is optional (for Obsidian there's a paid service or you can just use Dropbox/GDrive/Git/etc.), and you get a ton of advanced features like complex search, smart references, etc.

For instance I use Obsidian for meeting notes, and with the help of a plugin I link all previous meeting notes on this topic/customer and can at a glance see the history I have with this subject. Furthermore, I also link the associated Jira ticket and the Jira ticket history matching the labels, again for history purposes. I also use the Excalidraw integration to get diagrams that I can embed in my notes. There's also a Kanban plugin, Map view plugin (e.g. if planning a trip), etc. etc. The sky is the limit!

Overall, I'd strongly recommend.

Same and same. My most effective Motion pages are the big ugly bullet point lists to quickly jot down to-do tasks or grocery lists or writing ideas or albums I want to listen to; what makes it all work is the ability to offload my brain into an external source as quickly as possible (and retrieve it later when I need it).

Some of these really fancy setups look nice, but they strike me as adding too much friction to the whole process.

My secret weapon is a "to do" list in notepad.

One list which has everything. No apps, no workflow, no SaaS fees. Works better than anything else I've tried.

I wonder if they offer an option to export the data in some usable format.

They probably don't care or think they have nothing to hide or probably never stumbled across numerous self hosted alternatives

https://selfhosting.quest/search?q=wiki

you can export and backup your entire workspace in usable format ( markdown for pages + csv for databases + attachments).

Notion's biggest market is students that have grown up with Google Docs. The idea of local storage is long gone for the "digital natives" generation. There was even this story from a couple of years ago from an engineering professor who had to change how she taught basic concepts because her students weren't familiar with folder-based file systems [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

I am. I export my Notion to HTML regularly. I can do a plain text search on it.

I actually do regularly go back and search my notes and journals within Notion. Knowing that I will be able to do it if I ever leave Notion is comforting.

P.S. If anyone at Notion is reading this, please work on your search. It could be so much more useful.

It looks good. Couple questions:

1/ how do you support hierarchical organization. The links let you show relationships but how do you get to a hierarchical representation

2/ at some point this knowledge graph must become large and unwieldy, how do you manage that?

Plug for a friend who is building this exact thing - a tool that makes Obsidian collaborative, and also allows syncing between Obsidian / Roam / Notion

https://samepage.network/

Can't you just use a file share as your common vault for the team to use?

I use obsidian, but it can never trump the databases approach of notion in some cases. Its still pretty useless for TODOs IMO whilst being great at local first MD editor.

I similarly moved from Notion to Joplin. My data, my server etc. For me the move was triggered by Notion being very slow, but later on, with the amounts of data I had in Notion, I started to worry about privacy etc as well.

Obsidian is great. My notetaking solutions went from

- raw text files

- raw markdown files

- + homemade server rendering the markdown live

- Obsidian

- Notion

I stick with Notion because it really is infinitely configurable. I rarely use 99% of the plugins but I have, in the past, used their API to populate the show the results of my experiments straight from my Python code to a Notion Table. Super convenient. I take regular (every six months or so) hard exports that I save to disk in case the company goes belly up tomorrow. I'm comfortable with it.

did the same but missed tasks and integrations so started working on https://acreom.com during covid. It's dev centric and data ownership focused, would love to get feedback.

I just wish obsidian was better at lists, especially on the mobile client. It's really painful moving things around tab levels, reordering items, etc. I can't even manage a grocery list without it devolving into complete chaos and broken markdown. There are extensions that help but extensions on mobile are really bad (just an enormous toolbar to scroll through, no real UI... the whole mobile app feels designed to be used with a keyboard which defeats the point of mobile).

I’ve been a paid Todoist user for years - probably 6 or 7 years I would guess. I like almost everything about it but it drives me crazy that they won’t add blocking/blocked by flags and the ability to assign a task to more than one project - both of which, incidentally, Notion can do.

I’ll keep using Todoist for personal stuff but for shared work projects Notion works better for me. It feels like they just fundamentally chose a great set of abstractions. I do wish their mobile UX was better, though.

Todoist and Obsidian for me. I linked them with extensions. Obsidian is my notebook and Todoist keeps me on track. People that go this deep into pkms aren't efficient workers. They can be extremely helpful, but this sounds frankly unhealthy and unhelpful.

I opened the comments to see if anyone mentioned ToDoist. I use it and love it for personal use.

Basically from what you've written, you are still addicted to scheduling everything, but now you do it in notion.

If you need to constantly drag items you didn't complete to the next day, it means you are either a professional procrastinator, which TODO lists just make it worse, or you are over committing and need to either find a way to delegate, or just don't do it.

I bet that if you maintain literally 1 file with TODOS and remove those lines as you complete it and use a Calendar(preferably, only for work), you'll do just fine.

All that energy wasted planning, you can use it for action.

I'm actually starting to do this but with Obsidian. I love notion but one of my issues with it (and this is purely on principle) is that you don't "own" your data. This got me thinking, what would happen to my data in 5-10-15 or 20 years down the road? My solution to this is to have a bunch of markdown files in a git repository and use obsidian to manage it. I assume that in the next 5 years something better than Obsidian will come out though the idea is that is really doesn't matter in the end because the data stays the same.

/end soapbox.

I was about to say that. It is just a badly disguised paid ad.

You judge people's productivity based on their LinkedIn?

This might be peak /r/LinkedInLunatics

Now imagine it has access to unlimited indexable storage as well as your messaging, email, browser…

Agreed.

Counterpoint: Turning the important things into a checklist so you don't forget about them, and get them done quickly frees up time to live your life.

Taskade is easier to use and faster. Notion looks great but I always felt it needs some cognitive load to even get started.

Everybody is different, and Trello is a great application (I use it for longer-term planning with my partner), but after starting to use Pagico, I'm completely sold. Being able to plan things as projects, and putting them to a unified or independent gantt charts is a great way to visualize daily and long term load.

Also my go-to. Very useful for travel, projects etc. Recursive lists fit my brain well & the search is good enough!

I liked Workflowy a lot, but the idea of paying $60 a year for drop down lists inspires a deep, deep revulsion.

I wouldn't even pay that for the full app to own for life.

Have they added any way to have multiple root nodes? After using Workflowy for a decade on and off my tree is cluttered with notes and I want to start afresh but not lose them all. Keeping 1500+ nodes hanging around also slows the app down.

One thing I'm wishing for in Trello is the ability to add an icon to my Android home screen pointing directly to a specific checklist.

I use Trello for a lot of things. I'm not saying notion is this thing, but customizing the dessign to the workflow works better than One App To Rule Them All.

My go to example here is grocery lists. Most "productivity" apps have a checklist feature, but thats super bare bones. I used to use Cinnamon, but its been taken off the store (anylist is a my current meager replacement). What made it _good_ was that instead of "done/not done" state checklists offer was that it modeled an inventory flow. Pantry -> Buy List -> Shopping cart -> Pantry.

The shopping process is simple and repeatable. I start with the Pantry list, which describes all the stuff I expect in a well-stocked pantry, and step one is to confirm I have them. Anything I don't have (or need more of) I move to the buy list. Later, at the store, the Buy list is my guide to what goes in the shopping cart.

This is very similar to the original intention of Kanban, but:

- the UI is much smoother than trello. Just swiping, no drag and drop. And there's an undo button - the metadata is customized to the process, and can decorate the UI with info. Prices forecast your total at the checkout register, grouping by aisle or location makes it easier to grab the right stuff and confirm you've grabbed all the stuff in one go. - after a period of inactivity all items in the cart move back to the pantry automatically

Trello, at its core is designed for team project management, with many tasks occurring in parallel. The UI is designed to visualize the amount of work being done and where the bottlenecks live. It's very good at this! It even lets you design custom workflows to model the exact work being done. But there's always going to be a tensions in place working against it -- making apps that work for everything usually end up great at nothing, and its product market fit seems to be agile software development, so thats where its UI and feature set lean towards.

So IDK if you switch as much as slowly add to the pile of apps.

I was in your same situation a few years ago. Switched over to "Joplin" - works great. Copy/paste screenshots works great. All in markdown.

This was almost exactly my requirements - https://www.bbkane.com/blog/how-i-take-notes/

I landed on https://typora.io/ and I've been pretty happy ever since

You're probably way better off because of it. Most productivity work is busy work and a failure to better manage anxiety and stress.

I don't recommend ClickUp because of the amount of marketing emails / spam they send you. Every minor version update gets an email in your inbox.

Their "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the emails also doesn't work which is unacceptable.

Yes this is what I do also - But reading this thread is perhaps making me wonder if this is an unusual approach? To me its very normal to know what I need to do, and very very rarely do I miss something, a task etc.

Just marketing.

If only Apple Notes would just bring in drop down bullets.

I'm a little baffled that they still haven't - it would be such a huge quality of life improvement for such a tiny effort.

Yeah, not sure what label we’d give to a system like this but it works. I basically do the same, but with Raindrop (the bookmark manager). I’ve tried many tools and systems, but what works (for me) is basically a personal data lake where semi-structured/incompletely-labeled stuff can be archived.

For todos and calendars, I’ve found less is more to be particularly true. I don’t see how anyone gets solid ROI for non-collaborative personal projects by using feature-filled systems. I’m quite busy, and the minimal cognitive load of pen and paper is difficult to surpass.

Watch the YouTube video. Yes it’s pretty intense with GTD, but if you see the wide spectrum of her life in notion it’s very impressive. I don’t think I’d ever do it, but I wish I was organized enough to do so.

I have ADHD, and if I don't write it down, it isn't happening. How that information is presented is a big deal.

If you do a basic litmus test of going to a sub-Reddit that specializes in productivity, concepts like GTD, or software like Obsidian, you'll quite frequently find people with ADHD, and folks who suspect they have ADHD, but have no diagnosis, or can't access appropriate medication where they live for one reason or another.

Disclaimer: I don't use Notion. I didn't like it.

> Emacs Org mode.

And org-roam. Org-roam is trully great and if it dies, I'll die with it.

I wonder if you notice the lovelessness in hating them and pitying them.