Comment by lemiffe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemiffe | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely love Notion for the aspects mentioned in the article; I love how I can cluster everything together (work, life, etc.)

From short term planning (templates for my week which I copy every Sunday to start a fresh week - these templates are a 7 day todo list (in columns) with a link to my main calendar, project 'kanban' boards, and a linked "general todo" list for things that don't fit in the week and keep dragging on)

After being addicted to scheduling everything in a calendar (for about 5-6 years), and having to drag items I didn't complete to the next day every single day, working with templates (and linked lists / embedded sections) in Notion is really a game changer. I've tried many other to-do tools (like Wunderlist which I loved before it came Microsoft To-Do, which I still gave a chance but had too many bugs).

Notion is just a game changer plain and simple, I hope they never break it, this is the only tool I have come to love and trust to keep my entire life in.

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.

Or maybe it's the best way for this person to stay on track. You seem awfully judgmental over a relatively basic strategy to complete tasks. Have you ever considered that some people do things because it's the best way for THEM to accomplish tasks?

I've got ADHD. I either (a) complete the task immediately, (b) have anxiety over the task and procrastinate, (c) completely forget about the task altogether until its important. I don't create lists for fun. I create them because I accomplish things faster when I have a list of things to knock out.

Virtually everyone who has ever gone through something like this has already DONE what you described, and it didn't meet their needs. If you've got time to waste on HN, then you're clearly not as hyper-efficient as you like to think you are.

Not the parent, but I bridle at the notion (see what I did there?) that a calendar should only be for work. Some of us have busy lives to manage. I wish I could keep work and personal calendars all in one place, but my employer and my own desire for privacy prohibit it.

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've extensively used both. The problem I have concerns this part:

> 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.

Something better already is out, and the data has already changed. A ton of the power of Notion is in the structured formatting of note metadata; Notion calls them Databases. This is the core of a lot of the produtivity-hacking snake-oil that these YouTube videos sell, but there is something to it. Markdown doesn't have a correlate. Nothing even close. You physically cannot represent in markdown what is possible in some of these Notion documents.

Indeed, as long as we can export data I wouldn't mind too much. Worst case you can write your own tool to represent the data in a visual format you desire. I think the columnar structure of Notion (which collapses on mobile) is quite neat.

The only thing I'm scared of is I've started writing a book (in Notion), and it would be a shame if something happens to it due to unrecoverable data loss...

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