
Notion encourages busy-work - _ttg
https://medium.com/diesdas-direct/notion-encourages-busy-work-and-im-tired-of-it-b1e049edb663
======
gault8121
I am a huge Notion supporter - it's our organizaation's brain and one of our
most important tools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
jlokier
> I think of it like a write-ahead log

Lovely analogy.

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

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

------
qrohlf
This isn't a new phenomenon - my favorite past example of this is the
FileMaker series of applications.

The biggest hurdle to building most great tools isn't the coding, it's the
process of carefully thinking about the problem and designing something that
fits without being overly complicated or too basic. Incidentally, learning to
code often gives you some basic understanding of this issue.

No-code tools like Notion or Filemaker throw users straight into the deep end
of designing their own solutions, and because of the data-agnostic nature of
the tool it's difficult to build in guardrails to stop the user from over-
complicating their solution.

~~~
intopieces
At the same time, I believe there is value in allowing people to over
complicate their solution. Let the user learn how to simplify their workflow
over time instead of limiting them from the start.

~~~
kickscondor
Thank you - great comment. I have the same issue with the social networks -
they are too limiting. They give you a little box to type your paragraph into.
Give people hypertext - yah they’ll make a mess, but they’ll do amazing things
as well. And people will figure develop the skills over time.

------
Poems
Notion was the tool that made me realize I wanted opinionated tools.

At first I was excited by all of Notion’s possibilities, but after a while I
felt this was not a strength but a weakness.

We were on Notion for six months, without much enthusiasm. I switched us to
Clubhouse + Stack Overflow for Teams and we’re loving it.

~~~
satanic_pope
Couldn't agree more.

As a pilot run - tried migrating small amount of knowledge base from Evernote
to Notion but it just feels too overwhelming. Upending existing information
architecture (with umpteen possibilities re: templates) quickly gets
exhausting.

This is when I realized, I need an opinionated tool. Gave up and went back to
Evernote.

------
yarinr
> Gardening Notion boards becomes an activity in itself … Notion doesn’t get
> out of the way, it’s malleability always invites you to tweak your boards
> further, to add another property, to connect another relation, to add
> another view, to go through your board and complete data on all cards.

Sounds exactly like the problem so many folks here are having with Emacs.
Malleable tools, while powerful, often become a huge time sink if you go into
the rabbit hole of tweaking them too much. And it's often hard to resist.

~~~
j88439h84
Very relatable. I feel the same way about dotfiles, and fancy programming
languages.

------
pixelmonkey
If you think of Notion as your team wiki, it's an exceptionally good tool.

Probably the best "wiki" I've ever used. I've used Trac, MediaWiki, MoinMoin,
Confluence, GitHub Wiki (+ Gollum), and finally Notion. Notion is easy-to-use
for non-developers, but still mostly supports Markdown. It makes rich content
easy, including tables, in-line images, code snippets. It supports GDoc-style
real-time editing, fine- & coarse-grained permissioning, in-line comments,
mentions, and versioning. It's a great wiki.

It's really, really easy to over-use a wiki for everything. It's also really
easy for wikis to get under-utilized, out-of-date, etc.

But if you're a fully distributed team with 20+ people, you need somewhere to
store your team policies/practices, your culture, your vision/roadmap, etc.
Notion is a great fit for this.

If you try to use Notion as the "hub for all of your work", you'll certainly
be disappointed, just as you would have been using any other "wiki" product
for this. For example, though we use Notion as our team wiki, we still use:

\- GitHub Issues for bug reports, because it's built perfectly for this, and
links with code and pull requests seamlessly

\- GitHub project boards for code-oriented project management, because it can
kanban-ize GH issues to visualize capacity, issue stages, and
project/milestone progress

\- Trello for non-code project management, because if you're not a programmer,
Trello is much simpler than GH Issues/Projects, and nails the experience of a
kanban project board

\- StackOverflow for Teams for FAQ-oriented team & product knowledge base

\- GDocs for long docs, forms, slides, spreadsheets, and so on -- and
especially when these need to be shared "officially" with external parties

\- Slack for real-time chat and notifications, often linking to the above
tools

I think part of the dissatisfaction expressed in this article is that Notion
is being hyped (especially with the VC valuations) as "the future of all
work", similar to Slack in a prior startup generation.

Slack is better IRC for busy teams who prefer a SaaS. Notion is better
MediaWiki for busy teams who prefer a SaaS. Neither is an all-in-one work hub.
Neither is "the future of work". They are just communication/collaboration
tools in different categories.

~~~
jraines
The Achilles’ heel for use as a simple wiki, IMO, is that you can’t just make
a simple table for layout, it has to be a “database”. This is OK as long as
you stay in Notion, but it sucks for exporting.

Dropbox Paper’s table implementation is really nice (now if they’d just hurry
up with their Dropbox 2020 thing and unify Paper and regular Dropbox
folders...)

~~~
pixelmonkey
Agree that Notion should consider adding a "simple" table that isn't the full-
blown database.

~~~
finnh
I often end up valigning text in vim and then pasting it as a code block to
Notion :(

------
Jare
After a few months using Notion at work, I feel such a relief when I get
directed to a regular office-style doc (Google docs in our case, but Office
would be just as fine).

This week I formally proposed my team move out of Notion for all internal
documentation and back to google docs.

Notion is the best and easiest to use wiki there's ever been, I guess, but the
reasons I tried wikis before and never stuck with them still apply to it.

~~~
robenkleene
I’d love to hear why you prefer word processor docs over a Wiki?

For me, Wikis solve the big problem with word processor documents: It’s hard
to define the relationships between documents. But I’d also love to hear other
perspectives, e.g., what people dislike about them.

~~~
Jare
Some quick thoughts, they may be incomplete or ambiguous but hopefully will
provide some idea:

\- A wiki combines content and organization of that content. This is a
strength (documents know about each other) but also a weakness (the
organization system must understand and support the types of documents it
contains). I'll expand in the next points.

\- When I use a filesystem to organize, it doesn't need to care what types of
documents I throw in there. In a wiki you are typically led to keep copies,
not originals, of such alien document types, as attachments to a wiki-
supported document.

\- If you are willing to commit to a certain organization filesystem (this is
not optional in a wiki), you can usually hyperlink documents using your
filesystem's url format (e.g. gdrive urls).

\- I have found repeatedly over time that the very ease of use of multiple
documents across a wiki leads to people spreading information across multiple
items "because it's so easy to navigate". But, similar to my impressions with
codebases where functionality is heavily spread and atomized across a
multitude of files and small functions/classes, this can hinder the ability to
grasp or comprehend the compete intended contents of a document. (see
[http://number-
none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm...](http://number-
none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carmack-on-inlined-code.html) for
more about atomized code)

\- As outlined in the article, wikis tend to have to duplicate a lot of
existing document editing, layout and rendering technology and standards, and
very rarely reach the level of power and quality that dedicated tools have. In
keeping with the intent to make them easy to use and navigate, they end up
making the easy stuff easier (great for non-tech or beginners) but the hard
stuff harder. So, for something trivial they are great, for complicated stuff
they become a hindrance. I can't remember the last time I wrote or formatted
something in Notion and _didn 't_ feel like I was fighting a 2-decades-old
word processor.

\- Extra customizability like Notion offers, make it quite powerful but also
exacerbates the above point, because it's not just the basic built-in feature
that may work half as good as they could, but the customizations end up in a
similar state (because it's not a full app development platform).

~~~
robenkleene
Great, thanks for writing this up. I agree with all of these points, these are
the trade-offs, I end up preferring Wikis, but I can certainly see how someone
can prefer other formats for these reasons.

Two more quick questions if you get a chance: Which document format do you
prefer? It sounds like you like to mix different document types, but I'm
curious what your bread-and-butter/default choice is? I'm also curious what
you mean by "complicated stuff" (in "for something trivial they are great, for
complicated stuff they become a hindrance"). I'm assuming you mean things like
inline graphs and diagrams? But then this ties into my first question, I'd be
really curious to hear what tool you think does do things like that really
well? (I've always just exported from other tools.)

~~~
Jare
Say.... 50% docs, 25% powerpoints, 10% excels, 5% images, 5% mp4 videos, 5%
other (.ai, audios, SWFs, jsons, source code excerpts...).

For complicated stuff I mean yeah, sometimes tables, sometimes multi-columns,
sometimes embedded visuals, sometimes even just some unorthdox layout (like,
trying to add a paragraph with my comments in the middle of someone else's
bulleted list).

Any of them can be argued, but I've found them useful often. Any of them may
be solved by a particular wiki like Notion... but never all of them, because
writing a fully featured document editor (or, as seen above, several editors)
is a HUGE task.

------
Kagerjay
I used to be in the camp of finding better workflows with these tools. I ended
up just gardening them,losing time elsewhere.

Now I just prefer the simplest dumbest tools possible for specific use cases.
Notebook + sticky notes for task mgmt, GitHub repo for code snippets,
simplenote for private information, Google docs for collab

~~~
nilkn
Thank you for pointing out Simplenote. All I've ever wanted is the ability to
take basic textual notes on any device (including Windows) with perfect sync
and with dead simple but native mobile apps. OneNote got me pretty close, but
the sync feature is far too buggy to rely on for serious work; I can't deal
with syncing issues when I need to pull up a note in a meeting on my phone.
I'd looked at Notion but it offers much more than what I need, so using it
just for basic notes was clunky. Simplenote appears to be exactly what I want.

~~~
Kagerjay
ah yeah onenote suffers the same problem as notion. Too many ways of doing
things.

I've learned to take less notes over the years. If I need image or gif support
I just use slack to shoot myself the information, slack's been my new
temporary dumping grounds

------
hprotagonist
This is an old problem, it’s a mixture of amusement and resignation to see it
keep coming up in new areas.

In the salad days of my early undergrad, i spent about three weeks hand tuning
(very poorly) an init.el, learning latex, fiddling with auctex and bibtex and
makefiles, and doing no work. Quite literally sophomoric.

Learned a lot about elisp, and fuckall about mechanics, but dang if i didn’t
have the prettiest lab reports.

~~~
ludamad
Hard to look down upon spending 3 weeks learning elisp and latex during
undergrad! Tell your employer you did this and they'll be less kind probably
:D

~~~
hprotagonist
right?

as it turns out, dropping months into obscure trivia of how to do all this
silly nonsense has paid off in my professional life, but it sure felt like
wasting time at the time.

------
jshaqaw
I keep being intrigued by Notion but ultimately old warhorse Evernote remains
the core of my knowledge system. It amazes me that this long into the lifespan
of the iPad there is really no competitive way to read/annotate/search and
store large numbers of documents across iPad and desktop other than Evernote.

~~~
chacha2
What about OneNote?

~~~
jshaqaw
For my usage I find OneNote way clunkier dealing with large numbers of
documents. I’m sure it has awesome advantages for people with other workflows.
I have also only dabbled in it so maybe I’m missing something.

------
AlexMoffat
Sounds like a reinvention of Lotus Notes with today’s technology.

~~~
projektfu
I agree. I haven’t used notion but the complaints are identical to my lotus
notes experience. I wished I could have entered expense reports in a real
program fit for purpose.

------
chrisfrantz
We run our company through Notion. Part of using it is establishing your own
best practices within the company. Since Notion is flexible, it provides you
the opportunity to be rigid and make the decisions on database design that is
right for your team.

Notifications in Notion are very poor and that is a valid criticism mentioned
in the article. I imagine it will only improve over time and with the coming
public API we should start seeing third-party tools supplementing Notion for
specific use cases.

------
rayalez
I keep being curious about notion(and evernote), but can't get into it.
Probably because my current solution works well for me.

I simply use markdown files synchronized using dropbox. I use Emacs Org Mode
on desktop, and Editorial on iOS. Editorial is still by far the best markdown
text editor on iOS, although it's, very sadly, almost never updated
anymore(it's still pretty close to perfect, so I keep using it).

I write down all my thoughts in one single journal - a "Notes" folder in
dropbox, with markdown files for every 2-3 weeks of notes, called like
"2020-05-02.md". Sometimes I use a bash script to combine them all into one
big file to easily search through them.

I use ">>" symbol to mark the important ideas/insights so I could easily
search for them later.

I use hashtags to organize ideas and notes by topics. Like #pst for blog post
ideas, #gamedev for everything I've learned about game development, #book for
books I want to read, #health 2020-05-02 for daily notes about my health,
#todo 2020-05-02 for todos, etc.

Notes aren't organized in any other way, it's just stream of consciousness.
When I have an idea or learn something - I open Editorial and write it down at
the end of the currently open file, and if it's important I mark it with a
hashtag or ">>".

Every few weeks I search through all the important thoughts of the past few
weeks I've marked with ">>" and collect them into a separate file, so I have a
kind of a summary of what I've learned/thought about in the past month.

Works really well for me.

Also I can highly recommend Dynalist, it is like a superior version of
workflowy. An app for nested lists. Can be used as trello, as an outlining app
for writing, as a way to keep a list of your project ideas and the tasks you
need to accomplish. I use it to outline fiction, organize my ideas for games
and 3D art I can make, and for anything else that fits well in this format.

Finally, Track And Share is the best habit tracker on iOS that I could find,
highly recommend it.

------
mkchoi212
Notion has always felt like it's trying to do so many things that it falls
short from being good at anything. Products like Trello are good because they
focus on one thing and one thing only. Notion has their features and
priorities spread-thin. I feel like they could have done much better if they
started out with a single feature, somewhat master that implementation, and
keep building on features to the app. This way, they can at least manage their
priorities and not have to concurrently chase down 20 features.

------
formalsystem
I'd be curious to read a study as to productivity tools actually do help
people be more productive.

Anecdotally, I used to use many different tools from EverNote, WunderList
etc.. but over the past 2 years my process has been use Google Drive as a
journal and write down my top priorities on a post-it.

Post-it naturally forces me to prioritize a small number of tasks and my
journal is to help me document everything I learn. I don't see ticking off low
leverage items as a value add to anyone even though the dopamine rush does
feel good.

------
jtth
I agree with this.

I've collapsed everything to Workflowy for myself, and Basecamp for projects
with collaboration, or that may someday need significant collaboration.
Documentation lives in repos in text files. Everything else starts to feel
like busywork.

------
dguo
My teammate has described Notion as a B+ solution for everything. It's
impressive how many things it can handle, but it's all in a merely decent
manner.

~~~
input_sh
I agree. Table rows have to have names, kanban boards have to have "no status"
list, number field doesn't support my local currency, you can't round numbers
to a fixed number of decimal spaces, instead being forced to use something
like:

    
    
        round((10/3)*100)/100
    

Can't save custom icons, so I have to re-upload one of like five custom icons
I use over and over again. Can't open items in a database as a page
automatically, but have to click on "open as page" over and over again, it
supports Markdown but not quite:

" instead of > for a quote.

[] instead of * [ ] for a to-do.

Supports h1 to h3, no support for h4 to h6.

Switching between Markdown and Notion is a real pain in the ass. All of those
are _so close_ to being perfect, but there's like one major annoyance with the
majority of the features I use. B+ indeed.

That being said, you can reference other notes pretty easily within the text
and create tables with no hassle (unlike in Markdown), making the other
solutions I've tried C+ at best.

------
defnotashton2
I'm using notion for personal stuff and have found this line too. Personally
it's still the best note taking basic + kanban board. I use github issues with
zenhub for code stuff and notion for everything else. I have a global tags
database in notion and then I use a global recursive self referencing tasks
table so I can link thing globally easily and then just create views when I
need to. I think you can get lost but overall it's nice having one source of
truth with different views.

I think the product lacks maturity. I think the notifications are garbage, and
the inability to hide / emphasis / format the data for a specific form or view
is lacking. I think they tried and failed with templates. They need a form
builder and more view windows present in places like the properties list.

In my experience regardless of the flexibility of the tool, somebody will want
to waste time building out the tool from that 80% to 100% use case when they
should have just been happy with the 80%.

------
nreece
Been hearing the same hype about Roam Research, just as Slack, Zoom, and
countless other 'shiny new' consumer tech products.

~~~
hirundo
I've recently switched from Notion to Roam, and feel good about adding to that
hype. I can't judge between them as enterprise tools, but as personal note
stash I far prefer Roam. Roam doesn't have Notion's awesome flexibility that
the author of this piece describes. But for me it does the important parts
better.

It's great to see the deep competition in this area. Even as a current Roam
fanboi, I'll switch again with little regret when something better comes
along.

------
gtm1260
I do really Enjoy Notion as my personal note-taking/productivity app, but I
agree that its collaboration features make it really hard to use with more
than a few people.

------
khaledh
Notion reminds me of Sharepoint. Too flexible and too generic, with absolutely
zero opinion about differentiating content or workflow strategies or UX. Those
kind of tools are usually optimized for prolific creation, but not for
meaningful, productive consumption.

------
szhu
For those looking for a Notion alternative: at my previous company, the
excessive customizability of Notion convinced me to switch everyone from
Notion to a more lightweight and opinionated tool called Slab. We made the
switch in early 2019, and far as I know, everyone still loves using it!

This also replaced some other documentation tools we were using, like Google
Docs (partially), GitHub repos of Markdown docs, and Guru.

[https://slab.com/](https://slab.com/)

(I'm not affiliated with Slab other than as stated above.)

------
diggan
I'm slightly late to the party and also slightly off-topic but usually I get
very good answers from the HN crowd so here goes nothing:

Does anyone have any recommendations for open-source alternatives to Notion?
I'm mainly looking for a Notion-alike that works offline but still has the
same flexible structure and "database views" of other pages like Notion.

Closest I've found is TiddlyWiki, but it's documentation and data structure
support is a bit all over the place. Not impossible to get through, but maybe
there is something more polished out there?

------
jplayer01
I like Notion and I can't stand it. The interface is entirely unsuited and too
slow for what it's trying to do.

~~~
kristianc
Notion's speed really counts against it for me also. I'd find it so
frustrating if my day-to-day revolved around it.

------
atfzl
I was amazed to find Notion which replaced a lot of apps with features like
database, notes, spreadsheet, wiki. But later on I realised it was better to
use different solutions which were the best in their domains instead of a huge
universal app which tried to do all the things in a half baked way.

Right now I use Bear for notes, google sheets for spreadsheet/database etc.

------
didntknowyou
was excited when i first used it, but it's like swapping a notebook for a
stack of handwritten notes

------
tstrul
I Use it to manage my personal backlog (work and personal goals boards) and as
a note-keeping replacement (lots of templates for meeting summaries, daily
meetings, one on one etc).

I have a daily page that summarizes all of my tasks for today (from all of my
workspace) professional and personal and I start my day looking at this board.

I think Notion is very good for this purpose. I had no luck trying to convince
my organization to transform from Atlassian tools towards this unified
solution.

------
jhymn
The gtd system by David Allen and a blank text file will get you 90 percent
there. An app like Dynalist pro will get you the other 10 percent.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Ten years from now people will figure out a tool like Notion doesn't save you
from how hard of a problem Information Architecture is - the same way
companies learned creating intranets and internal Wikis twenty years ago.

------
eatonphil
I like notion because it's pretty simple and works on all my devices. The only
other app like that is Gmail. Google suite is awful on mobile, otherwise it
would probably be sufficient for my needs.

------
d0m
I'm a big fan of the default table with an url and some tags. Gets me 90%
where I want most of the time

------
macawfish
Maybe the 40 hour work week encourages busywork?

