Notion Calendar | Hacker News Reader

Notion Calendar

notion.so

190 pointsdylanirlbeck185 comments

I'd love to give it a try, but the permissions list in the auth dialog is crazy. Including: "See and download your organisation's G Suite directory", "permanently delete all the calendars that you can access using Google Calendar", "permanently delete your contacts".

I am reasonably sure they need (maybe _need_ here is too-strong a word) those permissions in order to perform certain operations on my calendar, but it just seems so scary to give another company that level of control over my Google account.

I do wish we had more granular permissions across a lot of services out there (e.g. Google, Slack, GitHub), because I can't be alone in not trying something that looks cool because it has the ability to wipe my account out.

It's totally a failure of the platforms. Some of the permissions I've had to request from the Slack API to do the simplest things are insane. Not to mention the "justification" for requesting certain scopes. Like what? You want me to justify a permission that I have no justification for, and I only need it to do this other very unrelated operation.

This is a perennial issue with Oauth2, but it’s way better than what we had to live with before (pretty much just handing the third party your login).

I get exactly why apps ask for the moon when they’re asking for oauth scopes: to reduce friction. They judge (probably rightly) that if they first ask for a minimal set which accounts for 90% of usage and then later have to ask the user for more permissions later when they want to do a 10% task, that some proportion of users will not “convert” / won’t finish granting the extra permission, even if it means they can’t do the task they were trying to do.

So, they ask for the superset of all permissions their app currently needs (and some permissions that are still just planned functionality), and hope (again, probably rightly) that users won’t really care and will just click through. This creates nightmare issues for infosec teams.

Some sites/apps will ask for the kitchen sink omnibus scope buffet, and then if you click the “oh no thank you, cancel” button on that scopes screen, will actually present you with a reduced set of scopes. They do this without explaining what’s happening or why.

Mobile platforms are getting better about allowing very fine-grained access to permissions. At least on ios, apps that want to access your photos can be given access to only a subset of them. You can pick and choose when to provide location data, etc.

I wish there were an Oauth2 proxy service or something, which let you give apps whatever scopes they ask for, but which would then either fail API requests that use scopes that you’re not actually okay with, or else give valid but not 100% true API responses.

I understand what you’re saying but it seems like the issue here is that the only scope that allows create also allows delete: https://developers.google.com/calendar/api/auth. A proxy service that could reduce the scope of the endpoints you explicitly allow would be helpful here as you mentioned.

Blame Google, not Notion.

IIRC: See and download your orgs GSuite directory is required to read contacts in your org's directory, and perm delete calendars is required to edit calendars. https://developers.google.com/calendar/api/auth

It doesn't help that documentation for anything related to Workspace APIs is unbelievably difficult to find, outdated, or both outside of their HTTP REST docs.

This is a great point. I ranted about oauth2 relying parties in my other comment but oauth2 providers certainly don’t make it easy for people writing RPs to figure out what scopes are necessary.

Even worse is that oauth2 doesn’t provide for any capability-based scope limitation, or token attenuation, or anything like that. If I want to be able to give write access to only a single google calendar instead of all of the calendars my account has write access to, the best thing I can do is give write access to a one-off Google account and then oauth2 to that account.

There’s some XACML thing I’ve never heard of before today, no idea if anybody uses it in the wild.

The concept of OAuth Scopes is even more silly when looked at through layman's eyes. If your experience with average humans is, that they will be able to make a judgement calls about wether an app they want to use can reasonably require access to a specific scope, you are not actually dealing with average humans.

Average humans will be at best insecure or indifferent in light of these choices as presented, but certainly not informed. I do think any system asking for these kinds of decisions should at least communication very clearly a recommendation about how to proceed and provide the necessary tools to judge if "permanently delete all calendars" is a reasonable request.

This could maybe be solved with a more thorough (maybe AI automated) review process and JIT OAuth requests (or more frictionless update requests) only when necessary in the app process.

I understand that it's simpler to pawn this off to the user in a roundabout way, but we need to be better and more compassionate with actual users.

It'd be neat if this sort of cross-organization capability granting worked more like e.g. Android permissions. Prompt at the time of the need, not at account creation, and allow the answer to be "Only once".

"App X wants to delete calendar named Y, owned by ACME Corp. [Allow once] [Allow always] [Deny]"

Based on its UI it seems to pose itself as just a more polished version of the entire Google Calendar UI, so I guess if it's trying to be a full replacement it probably needs all the permissions.

I wonder if Google will suddenly EOL half the APIs at some point rendering it unusable though.

I tried Notion a few years ago. Definitely a slick and polished app. And clearly useful to a lot of people. But I'll never get used to the idea of putting that much of my life or business into a web app.

Between potential terms of service changes, potential security issues and now potential misuse via AI (and I LOVE AI) I just will never be comfortable having that much information in someone else's web app.

I feel the same way, I’ve never been steered wrong just using markdown and grep’ing my notes.

Obviously not advanced as notion but I’m just writing text here, it doesn’t need to be advanced.

The hardest part when writing is the act of writing itself, web apps just seem too bloated for my use case of simple text.

Notion doesn’t really shine when it’s used as a markdown alternative or an editor, though their editing experience IS excellent (though admittedly, for simple cases, no app can really beat the simplicity of Markdown).

The things you can do with dynamic content (database) really make it more than a wiki. People can, and do, plan their whole life in it. Project management, SEO-indexable pages, lots of surprisingly cool stuff. I used to use it quite frequently, though my ADHD causes me gravitate a bit more heavily towards organizational mechanisms like it to cope.

Using it to make impromptu priority lists that will do a lot of the reorganization for me as I slot new content in is really nice. It’s a bit of overhead but it’s often worth it for anything nontrivial. I keep a backlog in it and use it for scratch work and rough design docs (final copy goes in our actual deployed-from-markdown docs).

I was using Notion, but I found Obisidian to be very similar, maybe less powerful out of the box, but feels much better to use. All files are written in Markdown and stored on device (or in iCloud or wherever), has a "marketplace" for user designed themes and plugins.

I like Obsidian too, but the one thing it really can't do that Notion does well is collaboration. And surprisingly I haven't seen any good plugins that solve this problem (to be fair it's not an easy problem).

I have some months ago messed around with writing a plugin that allows collaborative editing in some sense.

Basically, I realized that my notes are in nextcloud and nextcloud already has a collaborative markdown editor based on Y.js.

So my goal was to open a file from nextcloud in obsidian as a participant to the collaborative editor session of that file. Right now I'm a bit busy with exams but it was working pretty well and I may finish it sometime.

That's why I'm working on a local-first with native-like performance Notion alternative using Qt C++ and QML called Plume[1]. It uses an advanced block editor[2] that I built from scratch. All notes are simply plaintext/markdown underneath. Advanced blocks (like Kanban, for example) uses very simple syntax, for example:

  {{kanban}}
  # Todo  
  - [ ] item 1
  - [ ] item 2
  # In Progress
  - [ ] item 1
  - [ ] item 2
  {{/kanban}}

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

[2] https://imgur.com/NIgDLOU

From what I see, this doesn't compare to Notion. Notion is not typically used as a note-taking app, but rather as an internal wiki.

It will support inter-note linking. So you could build your own personal wiki using Plume. The main difference with Notion will be real-time collaboration (which Plume doesn't support).

Collaboration is definitely where all note taking apps go as soon as more people need to access your notes or participate in them as a group

There is still a huge market for personal note-taking apps. Obsidian, Joplin, Bear, Logseq, just to name a few. Plume will support sharing notes, and maybe some form of non-real-time collaboration (think git-like) in the future.

Personal note taking by no means is solved but lots of much better options coming out like the ones you mentioned.

Still, my personal knowledge graph is great but only so useful in the cases when it’s about more than me. Double entry and maintaining anything is a pain especially with a lot of notes.

I think the markdown notes as graph software may finally bring some good opportunities to sharing certain tags in certain ways and not others. If logseq and obsidian could do “plugin groups” instead of installing them individually that would be amazing

Even if something is documented for myself I might tag it shareable. One example is how much I’m proactively recording a loom for doing anything as I work instead of when it’s needed. Handoff or asking or help is much easier.

I didn't intend to undermine your efforts, by the way. I hope it becomes successful and thrives.

What is a wiki but a set of notes?

Are we discussing a personal wiki or an internal company wiki? There is a significant distinction between the two.

Your tool seems to be STRONGLY inspired by the MPL-2.0 licensed https://www.get-notes.com. And I mean STRONGLY. Down to the websites Favicon.

Haha, they're both my creation (: Plume is based on Notes (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes). I believe I'll change the icon before Plume's release.

The biggest omission in Notion is that it does not have an honest or complete offline-first mode.

Internet connectivity can vary. People still fly and waiting on slow wifi or data is not acceptable. 30% slower internet speeds makes you work 30% slower.

I quite liked notion otherwise. I just think they will always fight this issue for a group of people who would pay and use it for a long time who may have previously outgrown OneNote, Evernote, etc.

This is why I love using obsidian. It's just a directory of markdown files on my computer.

I agree but I wish it were finally open sourced. At this point the community and paying users must be plenty anyway.

While not as useful as Notion, I agree and use Obsidian as well. Check out their road map: https://obsidian.md/roadmap/ They do have plans to work on "Dynamic views - Create dynamic tables using data stored in note properties." which may give a more Notion like feeling to some things..

I took a look at it not so long ago, they were pushing AI features rather too aggressively, essentially turning the cursor into an advert for them.

I noped out very rapidly.

Are there tools you do trust? How broadly do you apply this approach to the use of web applications?

I'm not an authority on this stuff at all. For me, trust is on a spectrum. And whether I use a tool or not depends on what end of the spectrum it falls on and how much I need to use a service. For example, I really ought to find a new email provider.

Yup. And experience[1] says that even if you think it's great and/or the team is great today things can change in such a way as to really suck in the future.

[1]I'm looking at you in particular evernote.

I found them okay, but then they really started pushing the useless AI crap and wouldn't let me unsubscribe from their spammy emails, so I dropped them completely

Fuck off, Ivan from Notion, I don't care about your useless AI offerings

You may want to try trilium, desktop app with the ability to self-host a sync/web server.

I've been using Cron for the last year and a half and migrated from Vimcal.

It's a delightful calendar with all the modern keyboard shortcuts including Vim's J/K for previous next and logical shortcuts for everything else (m for month view, w for week view, c for create, etc.).

It's speedy. (Hopefully Notion keeps it that way and doesn't introduce Notion's annoying lag)

They've nailed the details: - meeting participants are easy and logically sorted - you can move an event between calendars and accounts with no hiccups (Apple Calendar used to die on this repeatedly) - they expose just the right amount of information for a calendar invitation in the right order - Title, Time, participants, conferencing, then location - so you can tab through and hit enter when it's done

Conferencing is great - select your app and the meeting is automatically generated and added.

It has Vimcal-like sharing mode where you can block off time and autogenerate either an easy to read list of available times and dates or you can opt to append a link so people can book online and see current availability. I have a couple of quibbles with this implementation - it's hard to add 15 minutes to a selection - but overall it's quite elegant.

The last thing that delights me far more than it should: Command-Shift-J opens your Meet / Zoom / Whathaveyou no matter where you are on your computer.

how does it compare to google calendar? From the video, it seems to have almost identical UI. is that indeed the case?

The UX was just way, way better.

That said, it's clearly been neglected since the Notion acquisition. IMO it has gotten actively worse/buggier, and the mobile app hasn't seemed to improve at all? I am not hopeful for its stewardship under Notion, given how clunky Notion is. The entire value prop of Cron is the lack of clunk.

I've switched to Amie (amie.co) and been really enjoying it. The aesthetic is a bit overly "playful" for my personal preferences but it's decidedly not-clunky, which is what I care about.

FWIW: Cron and Amie both sit on top of Google Calendar. They're just better frontends. So it's not really an "either-or" type decision.

> FWIW: Cron and Amie both sit on top of Google Calendar. They're just better frontends. So it's not really an "either-or" type decision.

That was the part I was missing for even considering trying them out. will do now :D

I think the URL is amie.so

Both seem to work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I find Google calendar on desktop to have a bunch of little annoyances relative to Cron.

Examples: - When you create an event, it pops over your calendar instead of on the right - You can't easily tab through the event creation process - Not simple to share a list of available times for scheduling with external users - To switch which calendar my event is going on, I have to click to expand, then click to change

Cron (excuse me, Notion Calendar) is just cleaner.

I know there are ways to make a web app act like a desktop app, but I prefer installing an app and being able to jump to it or open it from Command-Space on Mac.

I won't rehash what others have said in the thread (UX good, etc, all of which I agree with).

I explored switching away from Cron a few weeks ago because I use Fastmail for personal stuff, and the thing I found myself struggling to live without is the global shortcut for joining the current meeting. It feels silly to say, but I freaking love that feature.

On Mac I can recommend MeetingBar [1] for that.

[1] https://meetingbar.app/

Raycast also has this natively + Alfred has a plugin for it.

Weird question, but it seems similar to me; do you know how it compares to Dato?

https://sindresorhus.com/dato

Still no offline-mode? Notion is a really great tool, but I really want my data local to tinker with them in all kind of ways which Notion was not made to support. And all the clones and alternatives are still years away from Notion's level of polishing. Really strange.

It'd be such an easy win of customers. If they support offline calendar, and human startup time, I'd replace my calendar with Notion in a heartbeat.

Does this look like keeping the data on a local sqlite?

Checkout Anytype. Privacy focused alternative to Notion

Thank you for the recommendation; I've wanted to start a private Notion for a while but had the same requirement for local data storage.

if you start a Notion variation, let me know. I would love something like notion but offline and secure.

If you don't need collab, give Trilium a try. It's IMO better than notion at keeping things organized (notion lets you create types/objects as "databases", but craps at polymorphism, i.e. extending and specializing those types). I really don't need the bling of notion/capacities/obsidian if they can't manage consistent data, and Trilium works offline, too, and is impressively hackable.

I've been using Logseq for a while, which seems kind of in the same general category of tools as Trilium. I like it a lot, but mostly use it for disorganized note-jotting. In reality I know it is highly extensible and configurable for more advanced use cases.

I wouldn't put Trilium and Logseq in the same bucket, I spent quite some time with Logseq (and Obsidian, and SiYuan, and Joplin, and Anytype and some commercial offerings like Notion) before settling with Trilium, so I can pretend having quite the comprehensive view round the topic.

How I would describe Logseq is that it's an outliner (it relinquishes the concept of folders in favour of pages containing nested blocks inheriting form their parent's block/page properties). It's possible to structure information hierarchically using (hierarchical) tags/page prefixes, and it's possible to use templates to instantiates new pages with predefined attributes, but Logseq metadata model is manually managed and potentially (probably) inconsistent: changing a template definition won't change its page instances, defining a parent block/page attribute without a value doesn't imply/suggests that its children will override/provide a value for it… Maintaining libraries of "things" (people, locations, events, …) is a manual job, and it didn't take me long to realize that the tool was giving me more work to do than was helping with it.

Contrast that with Trilium, which has even simpler and more effective principles: everything is a note, and notes can be nested. Notes can carry (optionally inheritable) attributes, in such a way that all metadata within a subtree are guaranteed to have attributes and properties from their parents (e.g. all notes within "People" can have "Name" and "Date of Birth" attributes), and, as expected, adding after the fact new properties to the parent automatically propagates to the children. Polymorphism (notes specialization) can be achieved following the same principle by placing notes under dedicated hierarchies (e.g. "Colleague" can be a subnote of "Persons" with specific properties like "Department" and a constant value for "Company"). Notes can co-exist (like symlinks) in multiple hierarchies at the same time (so you are not bound to a "top-down" or "linear" organizational model). And on top of that you can create new notes (and notes hierarchies) by composition instead of by inheritance (like "traits composition") by defining a note as having multiple templates. Trilium makes all that spontaneous (doesn't get in the way), explicit (you can easily explain why things are the way they are) and flexible in case you later find a more suitable structure for your notes.

Thank you for sharing. My thoughts on Trilium are similar to yours, would like to know your views on Anytype.

Sure! I wrote some about it recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38793540

tl;dr: the sync/live editing is very impressive, and that's encouraging if it ever wants to become a collaborative tool (would I ever have the need for one), but the way attributes are managed is manual and inconsistent. A reply to my comment says that they are putting some thought into the problem, so I'll definitely keep an eye on them and see what they come up with.

At their place, I would:

- do away with the current templates implementation, it lets you define attributes at template (=representation) level and at type (=model) level simultaneously. I'm also unconvinced that a type needs multiple competing ways to be represented

- consider organizing types as hierarchies with attributes inheritance as a core principle. Done right, it could address one of notion's biggest shortcomings and be a more approachable Tana's "supertag"

- consider letting template blocks be annotated as to prevent type instances/objects to change their layout too much (that's something Trilium doesn't have due to its rudimentary editor and which I sometimes miss), this could also be used to configure how inheriting types could alter (or not) the base type's layout

- imposing all new objects to be typed or at least suggesting a type to derive from. Changing the type of an object isn't easy (I don't remember if even possible), so it's probably good to encourage the user thinking about it upfront

Plus, trilium has a self-hostable sync/web server. The data is stored in a database but you have the option to export as markdown/HTML.

Only issue is that its maintained privately by one person. I take this as a plus but it does mean that theirs a bus factor of one (unless someone else forks it).

yup, there's a legit bus factor question, but it's not totally a one person's job either having a healthy stream of contributions (some even as code). What makes it even less a concern for me is that the scope of the software is clear and finite, its implementation mature with no major feature missing and it has a sound design. Boring is good in this area as far as I'm concerned.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Someone recommended trying out Outline as well which is self-hosted, but requires using web connected single sign on.

Glad I'm not alone on the offline mode.

This looks a lot like the default macOS calendar app, enough that I went back to Calendar.app and added back my calendars and now I'm using it again. Someone else mentioned no offline support which is a big thing for me, I like to clean up my calendar and other "productivity" related areas like Reminders, Notes, etc while I'm on long flights which often don't have internet access.

Increasingly less so, I am sure?

Why would you be so sure?

Most long flights these days have internet access!

Been a happy cron user for 2 years now.

Here's the real improvements as I see them

1. You get a push notification that includes a join button 1 minute before your meetings

2. You always have a heads up to how long to your next meeting, or how long left in your current meeting

3. I can schedule/find time with coworkers in 2 clicks

4. I can see my coworkers timezones

5. I can replace calendly for sharing my availability.

But none of them have to do with Notion so far.

> You get a push notification that includes a join button 1 minute before your meetings

Why this still isn't an option in every calendar application in 2024 is beyond me.

My current Outlook is at least better than whatever I had before: Now I can at least choose a reminder 5 minutes before something start instead of only increments from $NOW.

I’m a long time Cron user but didn’t know it had Calendly functionality. How do you share availability?

I think it's only the "Share availability" functionality. You can drag times you are available, then it copies text to your clipboard like this, plus a booking link:

Would 30 min during any of these times (all in PST) work for you?

- Tomorrow Thu Jan 18, 3-5:45 PM

- Fri Jan 19, 12:15-5:45 PM

- Sat Jan 20, 8 AM - 5:45 PM

You can just let me know or confirm here: [link]

What's nice is that you can also change the time zone so the other person sees the suggestions in their time zone.

I don't think you can just do a generic scheduling link like Calendly, you have to pick the times first.

Your comment convinced me to try Notion’s calendar but then when I went to add calendars, I’m only able to use a Google account, bummer. I have a Fastmail and an iCloud calendar which I’m guessing will come later to Notion.

Cron was bought by Notion in 2022: https://www.notion.so/blog/notion-acquires-cron

The thing that has always stopped me from using Notion is that it's not end-to-end encrypted. So much personal data will be uploaded, with the possibility of abuse and/or getting stolen in a leak, or as often happens, some other company buying them including all your data, and changing the policies;

For tasks i've been using OmniFocus, which is an excellent app. e2e + syncs between all devices.

Haven't found a good Calendar app yet of the same quality...

Noteplan combines them quite nicely, although the calendar part still needs a lot of work

Fantastical?

Price just got jacked, again.

I ditched it recently because it beachballs so regularly on the menubar app. Ended up going with BusyCal which, on a design level, is not exactly pretty, but it's fast, very capable and doesn't beachball when I'm trying to check where my meeting is.

Last time I used it u don’t remember any beachbal issues. I periodically subscribe when I need the meeting scheduling software as they have what I consider to be the best system for that I have ever used. Performance was solid when I used it in the fall.

Price seems fine to me given the quality. Personally stick with apple calendar as my needs are simple, but if I needed a better calendar then fantastical pricing seems reasonable to me.

Maybe I’m not understanding the directionality of this integration.

I have items in a Notion database that have dates, status, dependencies, notes, etc. which are assigned to me the user (as a Person property using the Assignee type)

I have set up Notion Calendar and connected it to this same workspace.

The Notion calendar is not showing these assigned Tasks.

Is this meant to be used in reverse where you create an event in the calendar and add links to Notion pages? How exactly is that different from just putting links to your Notion docs in an any calendar event description?

And is there any place in Notion to edit events as a database?

Edit: I found it!

On any(?) database there is now an “Open in Calendar” button on the top right of the database

However, it doesn’t filter to just the ones assigned to you. The full database goes into your calendar. And the calendar app doesn’t show properties besides the title and datetime.

Try creating a calendar view in your database and filter it with your name or any properties. It works for me.

Is there a calendar that can show the whole year and mark days with different colors if there are all-day events? For some reason calendar apps don't treat year view as something important which is crazy to me. I like to have an overview when planning vacations and stuff like that.

Second this. I've written my own private Google Apps script specifically for this view and I wish more calendar apps would do the same. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

I've been looking for this kind of feature for a long time. Lots of orgs need to plan out certain things over the whole year with their various teams (you don't want two teams trying to do their biggest fundraising at the same time, for example), and it boggles my mind that calendar companies don't make this easy to see.

I have found a few excel templates that print out the whole year on a tabloid piece of paper.

There's one landscape template that works well enough that it could also look good on a monitor. If I can find the original link to it I can share it if interested. I ended up writing a script that just populates the excel template until I get around to replacing it, or discovering it.

I really like Teamup's year and timeline views. Set it to multiweek for 30 weeks and span it across all your screens: http://teamup.com/examples/ex12

I also keep a printed copy of this at my desk. https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/

I was looking for the same recently, would be especially nice for vacations and remote working periods. It feels like the best method is still a paper wall calendar and a marker which is a bit surprising. If someone has any suggestions I'd be excited to give them a try!

https://twitter.com/tehwey/status/1614201251356463106

I don't think its crazy either. Having a view of your year with major things that require lead ups and follow up is critical. It actually makes the year go much smoother.

I wanted this so bad I wrote up a quick personal app that pulls from a couple of subscribed Google calendars and does almost exactly like what you are asking for. I don't know how anyone plans multi-day events without it. Huge for family meetings where we are planning out the year.

OneView Calendar did this (even multi-year), but it seems dead, now:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20191029164736/http://www.onevie...

- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/11846108

- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/13601391

- Demo (try zooming out): https://web.archive.org/web/20191003004300/http://app.onevie...

The example calendar they show makes me anxious and realize that even though I run my life from a calendar, I don’t want to micromanage my time to that extent. Even if I became incredibly productive through use of the product, I never want that kind of life.

My partner does this, it's completely full every week including scheduled leisure.

I'm lucky if even all of my meetings are in mine.

there's a threshold you reach where it becomes necessary to externalise parts of your brain.

Sounds really dumb but the way your mind works (or at least mine does) is that "meetings" are heavy and contextual.

Similar to how you can't read a single byte of memory, trying to think of when a meeting starts will cause me to "load" a large amount of information about the meeting.

Fine to do this for a handful of meetings but when you have 5+ per day, it becomes difficult to do anything else.

Calendars suddenly become really convenient, it's very quick to make an entry and then "there is time", "I wont forget about it" and "everything has its time, or it will conflict and it will be immediately visible".

Unironically I book focus time and time to read books too.

But this is since I became CTO, and I have partially diagnosed ADHD (unmedicated) so I've been using structure to keep me sane.

An aside, but was anyone else horrified at the state of that calendar? I'd catch fire after a few days of running at 100% every given hour. Normalise a bit of downtime, yeesh.

Maker schedule vs. manager schedule https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I had never seen this before. Really puts into perspective some of the struggles I've dealt with from chaotic schedules and a transition toward management. It has me thinking I need to be more conscious of how I schedule meetings for others. Thanks for this!

I once stayed at work really late, and I was surprised to see my boss still there. I asked him how long he typically stayed, and he told me till 7 PM or so. He was there at 9 AM every day, so I started thinking, how does this guy work for 10 hours a day without burning out? Then I paid more attention to what he was doing. It was mostly answering emails, talking to someone on the phone, talking to someone on Zoom, meeting somebody for lunch... it's easy to do that all day long if you have the personality for it. It's much harder to spend 10 hours a day doing programming, because your brain will start getting tired and you'll start making mistakes. Then you have to start debugging, which is even more mentally taxing... and eventually you just run out of gas until the next day.

As soon as someone invents a calendar/to-do app that helps you schedule your next tasks by using AI to reduce context switching (e.g., can tell from a meeting's attendees and a project's responsible parties that you're probably thinking about the right type of topic, and this is the optimal break in your calendar to hammer out this task), it'll be worth changing things up.

Until then the improvements are too small to be worth the time cost to switch.

Notion Calendar is a Google a calendar client. If you use Google Calendar the “cost” to “switchl to this app is one click + OAuth to log in, and (optional) however much time it takes to pick the keyboard shortcuts.

(I work at Notion but not on Calendar)

I don't (and won't) use Google Calendar, so there's still a cost to me.

In fairness, I don't use Notion either, and wouldn't start for a calendar (I've tried, but I seem to be one of the odd people for whom Notion is radically, deeply unintuitive), so this particular switch wasn't on the table for me in the first place.

Isn't that what Clockwise (https://www.getclockwise.com/) aims to do?

I actually wasn't thinking about the team scheduling element, though that seems really useful especially in scrappy teams that have to wear a lot of hats and sync ad hoc a lot.

I was thinking more about the task side, where if I had come from a meeting about, say, marketing, and only had half an hour until another meeting, I might be able to knock out a marketing-related task because I was already in that headspace, whereas a similarly complex task about some other topic would require more of a context shift.

Working on this over at https://beta.flexibly.ai

Do you have a mockup video or docs or something that would help me get a better sense of what this hopes to be? I'm not able to find much info on the linked page or on X about it.

It's not "AI", but Motion's (not to be confused with Notion) algorithm is pretty good.

When you add a task, you specify an urgency, time estimate, and what "schedule" it belongs to (e.g. work, personal, etc). Schedules are different categories with their own "slots" of time that a task can fill. You can also specify whether to use chunking, which lets the algorithm break a task into multiple events based on the "minimum chunk duration" you set for that task.

For example, let's say you create a 9-5 "schedule" for work. It's currently 3pm. You add two tasks:

- 3h, Task A, low priority, set min chunk duration to 1h

- 1h, Task B, high priority

Motion will schedule this as follows:

- 3-4pm today, Task B

- 4-5pm today, Task A

- 9-11am tomorrow, Task A

If you were to swap the urgencies, it will automatically reschedule those tasks (and any tasks that follow it, assuming they are marked as "auto-schedule")

Tbh the only problem is it's price. I use it quite a lot but I'm not sure I'll renew my annual subscription next month.

There's also Reclaim.ai, but I found Motion was faster to use and had a better UI

These are on the way toward what I mean for sure. They're still missing the element of, "Your last meeting was with Alice and Bob, who are in Marketing. You have half an hour before you have to leave to get to a client meeting, so you can probably knock out this marketing-related task because you're in that headspace, but this equally involved task planning the details of an event in a week might require too much of a context shift to get done right now."

Those are the types of little time blocks I lose all the time because I can't switch fast enough, whereas if a tool could figure out my contexts well, it might really be able to surface things when I'm already in the right headspace.

It's not going to be perfect. Maybe Alice and Bob are part of the event for the next week too, because they're also on the company softball team with me and the tool wouldn't necessarily know we were actually meeting about the event, but even switching to the task of "review task list to choose a task I might be able to get done now" is one context shift too many when I have a short gap.

Why does the iOS app for Notion Calendar require signing in with a Google account? I’m surprised they don’t have an option to sign in with a Notion account.

Because notion doesn’t have a caldav server, it uses Google calendar as the backend.

So Notion acquired Cron? What’s the story here? What a strange product announcement. “cron.com” just says “Cron is now Notion Calendar”

Edit: Oh wow, Notion acquired them back in June 2022. Guess that was context i was missing

May this be more successful than Dropbox's acquisition of Mailbox.

Oof! What a great app ruined by a bad acquisition!

Sad. Why can't Notion just focus on fixing bugs and polishing existing product features instead of going crazy with stuff absolutely no one asked for?

Venture capital funding

I have to disagree here. Events, reminders, deadlines and calendars are key to any project management. So far, the built-in calendar view wasn't good enough for anything substantial. Having a proper calendar experience could make me switch over for those use cases, and more.

Seems like they are venturing into Google Workspace and Office 365 territory. May be part of a bigger strategy.

UI wise it looks like they’ve cribbed some design notes from Apple’s calendar apps

I wish more people would do this! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that, sure, but especially with UI/UX, gosh... just give your users some time-proven patterns that work well, developed by giant companies who have more UX people than you have employees. No need to constantly reinvent the wheel only to deliver some stylish thing with terrible usability...

Oftentimes I wish the Web had built-in UI primitives like this, the way we do for a checkbox or text field, so that websites aren't constantly trying to reinvent basic widgets. Bootstrap, MUI, Tailwind components, etc. kinda do that, but they're not really standard.

A quote that is often helpful in product design: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

A UI like a calendar has been iterated on enough by now that it doesn't really need reinvention. Google, Apple, Outlook and the rest all look largely the same for this reason.

I was excited for this until I realized that this seems like just a Google Calendar client ...

I can't even sign in with my own notion's account

Notion: ugh. Forced to use it a few times and it was a UX circus. I've come to see it as a sign of a broken shop to avoid, or bail early as possible.

I don't see the appeal of web-based calendar apps. They should be native and able to work offline. Fantastical is a great example of such an app.

Native: (As a native app dev I much prefer native apps, but) 95+% of people don’t care

Offline: Doesn’t matter unless you’re on workation in the hinterlands - even cheap flights usually offer wifi now

I have to use Notion for my current gig and I‘ve never seen the offline page.

Probably an unpopular opinion but the lack of MS365 support prevents me from considering this seriously as I must combine MS and Google calendars.

Was really interested in this at the time of Cron's acquisition, hoping it would mean Cron would be cross-platform (specifically on Android). 18 months for ecosystem integration and a rebrand and no platform expansion.

I made a similar version of this some time ago.

www.timeblocker.dev

If there's interest I might expand it.

One of the features I'm proud of is that it's entirely client-side encrypted. The keys are stored locally, the server cannot decrypt your data.

I’m surprised Notion is still using .so when they own .com

ccTLD (.so) are more prone to outages & risk then gTLD (.com)

And for any company, especially SaaS, safeguarding your domain (and uptime) is an exercise is financial de-risking.

Looks like anyother calendar.. I actually like the way Hey looks/works

Notion has a very powerful lock-in. I hate it. I stopped using Notion, despite its UX is great. I won't go back.

Sigh. Can we please stop hijacking existing names???

Are Calendars hot in 2024? HEY and now Notion.

Todoist finally getting around to it as well.

Sidenote: this page is so sluggish to scroll on my $500 midrange phone. Not a good sign for the brand. Or maybe Firefox?

I use notion for work, and it's _awfully_ slow.

This site isn't performant on my M1 mac...

I wanted to try this, but the dialog said I need a Google account to use it and I don't have one.

Fastmail

Would be really interesting if Notion acquired Fastmail.

It’d be a solid Google Workspace competitor for new startups to use.

I honestly pray they don’t. Fastmail is amazing and does exactly what it needs to do and nothing else. It’s one of the few services I’m happy to pay for and don’t see myself living without.

They don’t need their priorities shifted to appease notions current users

Don't get me wrong, I love Fastmail too (and don't want their service to change).

The point being - if Notion included hosted email & calendaring - you begin to have a full fledge Google Workspace replacement (when you factor in the existing capabilities Notion has)

Is Notion still slow?

I really wanted to love Notion but stopped using it due to how slow it was.

Is that still a problem?

Yes and no.

Performance on my desktop PC with good internet connection is really good. Even working together on something is seamless.

Opening my shopping list on the mobile app that takes like 5s to start and another 5s to load due to bad connection... not so much.

Their no-offline implementation is starting to bug me more and more and I have moved away from it for a lot of things.

I still really like their clipper addon, though. I use that to rapidly store articles I want to read later on desktop and mobile Firefox. Storing is fast and retrieving is fast enough if I have time to read an article anyways.

I'm not sure I need this. I'm pretty satisfied with google calendar.

Looks a lot like it's inspired by https://amie.so . They also have a Notion integration, but it doesn't work completely flawless yet – but they are only out of beta since a few months I think.

Other way around! Notion bought Cron, which was around for a long time before Amie and (one could argue) inspired Amie.

Apart from not really seeing how they are very similar (Except the calendar view itself...which looks the same in every calendar app) it actually looks like Amie was around one year longer. At least based on public announcement timestamps I found. Doesn't really matter in the end, as they have very different ideas in the same field so there's nothing wrong with that.

- Amie, 2020-08-24: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263960

- Cron, 2021-11-18: https://cron.com/blog/2021-11-18-announcing-cron

I really hope Notion Calendar will build the "schedule todo" feature for its Calendar. That's the primary reason I used Amie.

They both look broadly like Apple’s Calendar app with some features of Google Workspace’s Calender mixed in.

This is actually renbranded Cron.

First sentence says "Cron is now Notion Calendar" as they bought them two years ago.

I know. But althoguh I knew Cron and new about the acquisition, it wasn't obvious in my mind that this is only rebranding and nothing more.

Seems to be common with calendars. Sunrise (iOS) became Outlook. RIP my most favorite calendar app ever.

Why is it a separate app?

Seems like calendars are all the rage, again.[0]

[0]:https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/01/09/hey-calendar-no...

In case anybody from Notion is reading here: I'm very frustrated by being logged out on all my Apple devices (MacBook, iPhone, iPad) every few weeks to months.

By itself this would be only annoying, but on top of the spurious logout, none of the Notion apps support Keychain access. Thus when having to log in (with my email and password combination), I need to hunt for those in the password list and copy/paste them, which takes quite a bit of time doing that on each device.

Google searches tell me that I'm far from alone in experiencing it and that the problem seems to exist for several years.

Add me to the list of paying users that are disgruntled by this malfunction

Hi there, really sorry to hear about this problem. Can you use the Help & Support -> Message support function to submit a ticket with the problem you are experiencing? We will make sure to look into it and fix it.

I got the same thing as well. It feels like it is by design.

Appreciate if you can submit a ticket and we will look into it!

This isn’t Notion’s community forum. Could you please stop spamming Hacker News with requests for your customers to file support tickets?

Messaging support in this way would make sense to me for reporting a weird, rare bug. But what I described is widely seen in the community[0-3].

In fact, looking for these links, I now found an official Notion reply from 4 years ago in one of these threads[4]: "should keep you logged in for 90 days per device".

This had me find [5]: "Notion has a default session duration of 90 days. This means all users automatically get logged out if they have stayed logged in for 90 consecutive days.".

If logging out any session after 90 days is the expected behavior, this would completely explain the behavior in my case. Can you confirm that this is happening for all accounts?

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/brcy5m/random_logou...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/vi8c9f/constantly_g...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/194xw0m/anyone_else...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/dsi5jo/login_proces...

[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/dsi5jo/login_proces...

[5]: https://www.notion.so/help/hipaa

Yes it is 90 days but we are actively working on ways to improve the user experience. Stay tuned!

That would be much appreciated. I've sent a message to support about the email not being filled in by Keychain on iOS, request 4054436.

Long time Cron user here. Cron just uninstalled itself during an update and I had to find this announcement manually. Not a good look.

After downloading the new app, I now get this error:

> This app has reached its sign-in rate limit for now.

Did you not consider the migration path for existing users?

Quite frustrated about this.

It also didn't restart the app for me, so took me until I missed the starting of a meeting to realize the workflow was broken, and THEN my launcher app couldn't find the name Cron (IE, the aforementioned uninstall). Then, opened it finally, and had to also redo Google SSO Auth, but there's a malformed request error (that seems to be a Google issue...) and I can't log in.

Same exact thing happened to me. Super frustrating. I'm ready to just leave it uninstalled at this point.

I'll probably switch to Sunsama or give Amie a try again

It's not uninstalled. It updated itself to Notion Calendar. Probably kept the old app bundle ID

Sounds like Notion ownership to me!

Happened the same to me and I thought of some updater glitch until I visited their website.

The schedule links I created with cron seem to be not working as well.

Exact same for me. Was late for my meeting because Cron just deleted itself from my computer entirely. Super annoying

+1 for this, I didn’t even know they had gotten acquired by Notion at all. It just updated and disappeared, this article was how I found out why!

Why does anyone use Notion over Excel and Notepad?

I never understood their rise to such popularity.

Have you ever used Notion? Feature-wise, it has nothing to do with spreadsheets, so the comparison with Excel is irrelevant. Comparing it to Notepad is only remotely applicable in that both could be used to take notes.

As to why it is so popular: despite its faults, it offers a very slick experience for note taking, building a knowledge-base/wiki and project management and anything in-between really. I find the way you can store data in a structured way using Notion databases and present it in different forms very useful.

A better comparison would be Obsidian or Logseq.

If you are trying to do those things on Excel... geez.

If Obsidian grew team / cloud features, that would be pretty slick.

If that were to happen, I'd switch to something else. I love the single player mode of Obsidian.

My team uses Notion and I begrudgingly adopted it. I'm not one to dictate.

The UI is clunky. It's not as bad as Atlassian software, but it makes me miss Google Docs.

I'm hoping Gsuite grows ticket and wiki support, because then I can use Gsuite for everything.

GSuite has barely changed since it came out; let's be real.

There are a lot of criticisms I think I could level at Notion but clunky would be one of the last. I'm actually curious what you use Notion for that doesn't jive well.

Any time I drag media around, it bogs my system down like crazy (I'm on Linux).

Nothing seems to snap to the "right" places.

My brain also isn't mapping to the Notion way of doing things (which is orthogonal to the other issues).

It is multi-functional. You can make it behave like spreadsheet, notepad, or database. All in the same document. So a better question might be "Why use Excel?"

My work uses notion. We have to write a lot, and I need to write a lot of mathematics. Writing math on notion pages is like pulling teeth.

Till last year, I was writing my docs in markdown on my computer (using emacs), and then uploading using this library for markdown-to-notion-import [1]. But the notion api has changed, and the library no longer works, and I am not sure what to do now.

[1] https://github.com/Cobertos/md2notion

As if Excel and notepad have good latex support!

I can pretty much read latex like the guys in the Matrix read the code to see the video. No real need to compile. So for me any plain text editor is good enough for latex.

Emacs is better cuz of the nice ways of moving around.

I don't love Notion for some things, but I haven't found anything better for mixing structured data and notes in a flexible-but-consistent way.

If I wanted to do something like their databases (large sets of notes with enforced fields of different types including relational links, tags, attached files, with dead easy data entry, autocompletion, search and extraction, all presented in an acceptably pleasing way) in Excel, it would take me hours of tweaking. In Notion, it's 10 minutes before I'm starting to enter data (not to mention the price).

Data validation in excel is literally a couple of clicks.

I am not sure UI of Notion is better than Excel but that's a person preference but I am sure Excel can handle many orders of magnitude more data than Notion.

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