I've been using Notion at my new workplace and was excited at first, but having used it now for many months I came to hate it. They constantly announce new features but are completely neglecting the basics:
- Copy and paste is completely broken. Good luck trying to paste a table.
- The drag & drop feature is equally annoying, it just never works and doesn't select the things you intend to select or drop them in the place where you want them to be.
- The basic table is very limited (e.g. no pictures/formatting inside cells, no ability to reorder/sort - vs a Google Docs/Sheets based table)
- It grinds to a halt in long docs and databases over 100 rows. Can't stress this enough.
- Timezone support is completely messed up (you can e.g. create a database with a time column and specify the timezone, but the calendar view will always map all events in the timezone you're in, making it useless because events are getting shifted to other days)
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.
As much as Atlassian stuff is hated on, Confluence Cloud editing feels butter smooth and very simple. The slash commands are a nice addition and it's improved quite a lot since the early days of confluence.
Now Atlassian only needs to fix the absolutely awful search bar that never finds what you want and the dreadful performance that makes even a developer's machine lag when navigating.
Yeah I felt this too. IME non-engineers love Notion, but engineers hate it because it's a pretty bad version of the system they're probably already using to organize themselves. Maybe this is too dismissive but I can't help but feel like it's just the latest "find a UNIX service/app (Vim/Emacs), make a worse SaaS version, $$$".
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
What it gives is a step up from spreadsheets for managing everything from projects to customers. You can build a trivial CRM with a few tables.
Earlier today I thought, I need a quickie CRM. Each customer has contacts, Each customer has logged events (phone calls).
I could build a CRUD app to do this. I built it in notion in about 10 minutes.
And the thing is - a company like mine already has things like internal portals to do all sorts of stuff. Instead of a business admin asking the developers for a new field on X, he can just go build it out - but it has two killer features to excel/docs
1. Global search. I cant stand having a million different excel sheets where nothing is linked. Even if notion search can be slow - typing in something and getting an answer is a breath of relief
2. Has way better structured data, templates and plugins out of the box ( I can just do remote data to jira, bitbucket, etc).
Are you making a page per customer or the database feature? Would Airtable work better for this? I use Airtable for stuff like this personally. I use Notion for some simple work stuff too like as a CMS
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.
- 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"
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.
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.
I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.
Even worse, is you go on product hunt and there are nonstop 'product' launches which are just notion templates named 'operating systems' being sold at crazy prices for what they are.
I don't get what I am missing. I personally love and use Trello, because it's basically just a bunch of lists that I can drag and drop too, i have a boards named 'spark board, where i keep lists of things I am interested in, it's a list of movies, tv shows, games to play, things to eat, things i might want to buy, even lists for different people and things they mentioned so i have gifts for them when it comes time to buy, whenever i need anything I just go there, search the list and find something, but notion is just annoying to me, I hate the UI and i don't see the point in it.
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've put some thought into how cool it would be to have a feature similar to Notion databases within Obsidian; probably not integrated into the markdown document, but similar to their new Canvas feature, separate files next to markdown documents which map to SQLite databases with a standard schema that you can browse right within Obsidian. Feels like something an add-on could exist for, but doesn't; and/or I hope its something the Obsidian team is thinking about now that Canvases are shipped.
Obsidian is at the moment not really well-equipped for this task, even though some extensions tried to implement it. I think the major problem is that freetext like markdown simply sucks for managing structured data. And even though there is something like dataview, which enable some level of database-like behavior, it's too limited at the moment. But, there is a successor(?) to dataview in work which aims to be more like notion, and Obsidian seems to have some features on their roadmap which might also be helpful in that regard. So may, in a year or two the situation will have improved?
But frankly spoken, I don't think Obsidian is really a good solution for this. IT should be the other way around, based on a structured format like JSON, and enable a freeform-document which can be extended. Notion is doing this, and while their internals kinda suck, it's far easier for them to move their goals and improve their app.
Dataview can get you part of the way there, but it’s not an easy learning curve and requires a lot of consistent metadata management. Also Obsidian somehow has a worse mobile experience than Notion, which is also a no-go for me when I need quick data entry.
I remember Federico Viticci at MacStories doing some crazy stuff with extensions and Siri Shortcuts that could address those problems, which might be worth exploring if it’s important enough to ya. I have no desire to go down that path.
Make.md is trying to solve this, you could take a look, I tried it, but it's still not stable for my use case, but apparently they have people who use it successfully.
Be sure to mention that if you dare venture down the path of learning about this mysterious mini-relational database, emerging with useful knowledge will cost you three quarters of your sanity and the soul of your firstborn.
It’s not quite that bad, but every. Single. Time. that I’ve been intrigued about notion’s advanced features, I’ve slapped myself two hours later and said “get back to work; you could spend your whole life learning about this. Or at least your whole weekend.”
For me it's one of those learn it once and get it over with. They really are powerful and if you spend one weekend on learning, it should be enough to go a long way.
That's exactly how I felt about Salesforce over many years of customizing it to basically be a UI on top of a relational DB with a nice import tool and some workflows built in.
But apparently it's out of vogue now and Notion and others are the "web 2" versions of that with more Javascript.
The best thing about Notion is that it’s not just (EAV) relational databases — it’s that freely mixed with unstructured rich text, including collaboration features like love editing and comments.
Filemaker is underrated. Long ago they came out with Bento which was supposed to be Filemaker for personal use. But it didn't last long.
Both Filemaker and Bento both lacked the out-of-the-box document writing feature. It makes Notion very easy to start using. In fairness both Filemaker and Bento were aimed at very different use cases.
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.
Semantically our data model is an infinitely nested hierarchical tree of lists, although the UI might not look or feel like "just a list".
Our editor is more like an "outliner" than a traditional word processor, and before January 2022, you could't even select text across multiple blocks. We rebuilt the editor to work like both an outliner and a traditional word processor at the same time. You can still "feel" the tree/list structure when you select and drag multiple blocks around, or use indent/dedent - you can't indent a block multiple times within another block because that doesn't make sense in the tree structure.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. But you do understand that from an enduser view, this doesn't really matter? What the original commenter meant that they like the simplicity of Trello, because it's just a kanban board. Notion is much more flexible than that as a user.
I just don't like recreating a kanban board in Notion, it just seems too complex and cluttered, I don't care about all the other stuff, I love trello for how simple it is, but I keep finding different ways to use it, the simplicity is the key as it allows me just to dump what I want into it and use it however I wish, Notion is just overwhelming for me.
Thanks for letting us know about the details, honestly not being able to select text between blocks was wan of the UX deal-breakers for me, seemed like a way to avoid -exporting- your docs or whatever not allowing to copy the document fully easily. Glad its solved
Did anyone actually go over the NLS internals docs over at bitsavers? I went through them, it is impressive how much mileage they got out of the '68 designs. Still parts missing that no one seems to want to add to their new outliners.
I use this all the time, alongside my other personal databases and such. I wish there was an open source or self-hostable gizmo that was as flexible as Notion is.
The underlying data structure is really just a list of typed elements. But the interface is also hiding this pretty well, to the point that it becomes a bit messy on the corners, making it hard for new users. Trello in that regard is significant cleaner in its representation, but also more limited.
> 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".
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.
A couple reasons. It's operationally too slow, and when you're working on teams (larger than 1 per role), this makes notion a hassle to update. For devdocs, the larger developer community has already rallied around open source tools that provide easier management through github. The current sharing options are also not good enough to support that use case.
Essentially, the more you update a notion page, the more unbearable it gets.
Depends what kind of documentation. General team docs? Yeah great those barely change. Same with job postings, outside of an "active" toggle, there's not much that changes for them. Everything else? You waste too much time dealing with notion lag. A lot of the integrations also suck and are far too limited in what they do.
One final note on docs, one of the best moves in recent years is expressing difficult concepts through interactive content. Notion cannot handle this at all. Static or nothing on notion!
It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone who's been able to become aware of & use a niche app like Obsidian has never come across Notion. Obsidian is definitely a power-user tool, which one would usually use after considering the other options, with Notion being almost as default as a choice as Evernote once was.
Additionally, a lot of apps now are even using it as their support bases. It almost feels unavoidable at this point.
Not sure what to tell you. A sharp new developer I respect a lot pointed me towards Obsidian, and so it goes. Other than that, my recent search history shows the past few years are focused on python, pola.rs, Rust, data science, databricks, Oracle, Postgres, DuckDB, and the legal and administrative aspects of running a business, with the occasional dataset documentation search.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Seems kind of weird to me, but if the poster is telling the truth, it's like buying an iPhone and never hearing about the iPad.
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 barely ever used databases. I have a journal with my daily work todos, notes about technology, company, people I want to keep. It's god for that I can share content with my friends/coworkers, it does already way too many things for me.
Yup, this is me too. I use Notion every day so I'm a fan in that sense but I'm also on the free personal plan so I guess I'm not a customer. But I love it for second brain purposes (especially with Readwise) + being the homebase for all of my text.
> 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 ended up spending most of my time configuring systems and formatting than actually inputting information & accomplishing things.
I end up feeling this way about a lot of “productivity” tools like notion, obsidian, and ESPECIALLY Arch browser. I don’t want to have to learn how to use a tool that I’m using to do something fundamental like visit websites or take notes. Give me the barest abstraction possible over these features.
Do not ask me to make extra decisions to do basic things like open a tab (decide between 3 levels of ephemeral and how it relates to other tabs). And don’t automatically close shit on some arbitrary schedule which can’t be disabled!
Ironically, the best productivity tools I've used in & for the past ten years has been Things, and my Moleskine notebooks. Incredibly simple system, and while both can be considered a bit expensive, the work every time, without fail, in a way that makes sense and creates the results I expect and require.
I've found the simple things that are high quality work the best for me, in almost all aspects of life.
Me too. I spent New Years Eve reviewing my journals (wife was sleeping) all the way back from 2013 and found some very enlightening arcs that would not be available with transient data. Some things just need to be read rather than presented.
Subjective counterpoint to Arc browser; I spent all of 10 minutes getting used to it, and it’s been a game changer ever since. I can’t actually use chrome/firefox again. That’s wild! Maybe it just fits with the way I use the web naturally, but moving to other browsers is like moving back to tabless IE after getting used to tabbed Firefox. Automatic (very important) Picture in Picture mode, and their way of organising/deleting tabs is a game changer.
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.
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.
Although I admit I've been guilty the same thing, perfecting my .vimrc instead of actually working on projects. Messing around with static site blog generators when I should actually just be writing content.
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.
> It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done.
Same, except it's Jira and Confluence. Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint and show a impressive looking graph in retrospectives.
> Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint
If you have a manager that's treating N points as a target, then you just have a bad manager. Sprint points are just a signal for how over/under your estimates are on average, to help inform future planning. If someone goes on vacation, how do I know how much work the remaining team can handle? It's also a good signal for measuring the impact of team/process changes (to be clear, the idea here is post hoc analysis and not +N points as a target).
That said, how would you prefer to handle capacity planning? Points aren't perfect, but trends should stabilize over time (you can have predictability/consistency without precision). You can even map point values to ranges of time (e.g. 1 point = [2, 8] hours) if it helps.
I can't think of any healthy team dynamic that doesn't require some form of deliverability estimates (this is not limited to engineering), and am very curious how you approach this.
Ideally a good tech lead with a pulse of his team and stack should be able to do it alone. When estimations are crucial they can be further analyzed with more people.
It's the beaurocratic gamification aspect I despise.
As long as you use Jira and Confluence to track what you are doing and make handy reference notes, they work super good.
About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results.
Also story points estimations/tracking (as opposed to time in real world units) : never saw it work in practice.
Whoever says software/hardware project time schedules are 'under control' or 'predictable' is probably joking.
> About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results.
If your management can't understand these charts - including when you get results you don't want - I think your management is failing.
E.g. if you don't realize "whoa there's a lot more ambiguity here than we expected and it's causing big delay" until the project goes sideways trying to find clarity, then you missed something big in your earlier planning and estimation.
And whether or not it was important to spend the time to try to get a more accurate estimate vs just start building should be a business-requirement and project-specific decision, but it should be a conscious one.
I would argue that the performance of Jira being what it is along makes it pretty unsuitable for just taking reference notes. Our onprem hosted instance is pretty slow, which you might blame on server provisioning, except last time I used Jira cloud it was even worse with an empty instance (compared to our at least multiple million tickets instance)
Well Confluence is for the handy notes, which can grow into quality documents if you have them reviewed and updated. Personally never experienced performance issues.
That's why you have someone whose job is to make that Notion/Confluence/Dokku who is part designer, part technical writer. They're sometimes called company historians.
It is the only solution I've ever seen for the "documentation always gets cut" problem with SWE. Someone's whole work stream is thorough documentation and knowing everything. How features work, what customers requested them, what technical trade-offs were made and why.
I miss having one of these people every day at $dayjob. She would make reports for questions that's needed a thorough response. I asked what I thought was an innocent question about what a small kafka cluster was used for and I got back a long-ass document that outlined the whole saga, the complaints the customer had, the VP discussions, the MRs that introduced it, other things people proposed and why they were shot down, meeting notes, screenshots of the discussion on Slack. Like hot damn.
Yes! I'm Johnny.Decimal and I'm starting to advocate for the idea of 'the Librarian' at work. You need someone to organise your stuff. That person needs the right skills -- passion, even -- to do that job.
Today that role is filled by either a) nobody or b) the lowest lackey who doesn't give a hoot about the concept.
We tried it where I work and had the same result - we've since gone back to boring old Redmine. I do think it's great for personal use though - I use for everything from shopping lists to dream journals (don't judge me ;) ) to 5 year plans.
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.
I've recently started using Notion in a similar way that your engineer uses Markdown files. Apple Notes is great and I have moved away from paper notes simply because there is no search and it can be hard to flip back through books to find what was said in a meeting six weeks ago. My favourite thing about paper notes is that I engage more with the meeting since I have something to do with my hands.
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.
Been using Apple Notes for 8 years now and can't imagine using any other tool at this point. Everything else is too complicated and with distracting thrills, or is too barebones. Notes is the perfect balance, and I like that the notes can be totally offline.
The only thing that needs improvement is the search function.
EDIT: Another thing I really like about Notes is how notes can be password protected, which includes full encryption, and they can be unlocked with your fingerprint. If the user doesn't interact with the app for a few minutes, the notes automatically relock themselves. This is great for journaling because I can be confident that the more candid thoughts I express won't be accidentally read by anyone.
Maybe you know about this but one of the things that helped me with Apple Notes search was discovering there was a 'Find Notes' shortcut action. It allows you to filter by folder while searching by name, body, date created, etc...
It works out to be just about as efficient as if it was built into the app since you can use Siri to run it by saying/typing the shortcut name.
I started with text files in Notepad, then learnt from a friend how to use Freemind to organise notes as hierarchical mindmaps instead. It worked great, but search was broken (DFS but only able to find results in one treepath?!). Years passed, and I needed something to take notes with on mobile, and Google Keep was the simplest fit. But Freemind and Keep were both still too inconvenient on desktop, so at some point I ended up back at text files. I skipped all other note-taking apps over the years because I was convinced by people here who said plaintext was best.
In the last two years, though, my current text file has gotten too unwieldy to use. I have to do a bunch of searching to get to sections (or remember their character-exact names). Then last week, I lost a day's research notes because Google Drive crashed and didn't sync until it was too late, overwriting my work. Clearly, I'd outgrown my setup.
This last Sunday, I researched note-taking apps that don't use proprietary formats or cloud storage: Obsidian? Foam? Dendron? Logseq? I went with Obsidian, which while closed-source, keeps everything in Markdown files, so I'll always be able to use them in the future. (Logseq's different approach also seemed promising, and it's open-source too; I'd recommend trying that too.) I set up Obsidian-git for reasonable syncing that wouldn't result my notes being overwritten by accident. It all took a few hours, not endless tinkering.
I've migrated a few note sections into it, done a few diagrams and code blocks. Works well. I think I'm set for the next 10 years.
Obsidian's ecosystem is incredible. You can make Obsidian a queryable database, a longform book editor a la Scrivener, or a gilded tabletop RPG campaign book.
Half of what makes Obsidian so great is that they've encouraged modding so heavily.
.txt was never going to cut it for me, I always include images like drawings, photos and screenshots etc.
Logseq is open source, reasonable file format, stable, extensible, has a reasonable plan for funding itself without lock ins, and, for me, is among the smoothest I have used.
Notably missing from old OneNote 2016:
- shared notebooks w/indication of updates
- smoother syncing
Notable upgrades from OneNote 2016:
- still exists
- more structured (OneNote can out text and objects everywhere)
- easily extensible
- queryable
- taggable (Tags in OneNote aren't really tags, only glorified emojis)
- open source
As for the modern version of OneNote, I have given it up. It almost isn't comparable.
Yep, good reasons to use Logseq. I picked Obsidian over Logseq because of the larger community, and because I thought the former's UI looked suitable for hierarchical notes in main categories, which is my usual approach. I go to the right folder and append to the end of the relevant note. I do like Logseq's more free-flowing, block-tagging, hypertext-journal approach, but thought I didn't really need the journal format for now.
If Logseq can also do hierarchical organising/browsing with a simple sidebar interface, I think I'll give it a go. Does it work well for that use case? What's nice is that you can run both Logseq and Obsidian on the same Markdown files, since they're (mostly compatible) Markdown, so I'm not too worried about switching as needed or even using both.
I'm not aware of any extension that gives you a hierarchical sidebar on the left.
The right side however has a built in "Contents" page - which tells you what it is for - only as far as I know one has to fill it out oneselves.
That said, my goal was not to convert you or anyone. I am a NetBeans user myself so I know a bit or two about others telling me why I should switch to "clearly superior alternatives" and I don't want to do that to others ;-)
Hah, appreciate it. Although I actually do like finding out about better alternatives and weigh the benefits of switching. It's good to know what people are happy about, even if it isn't quite for oneself.
Sounds like Obsidian fits me better than Logseq for now (for the inherent hierarchical organisation). Though one of these days I'll try running Logseq on the same files just for a different view and to try out journalling.
You maybe already know, but I write it anyway in case you or someone else find it interesting:
AFAIK Logseq docs encourage new users to put everything under Journal and just tag the relevant blocks. Multiple hierarchical tags are possible, as are aliases, which comes in handy, e.g. I have examples of good ux nested three steps down from root, but in practice I write [[Good UX]] and paste the screenshot and I am done, it shows up at the right place, but is a lot more readable in my journal. BTW, that alias could have been #GoodUX as well and I would have gotten away with hashtag notation.)
> As for the modern version of OneNote, I have given it up. It almost isn't comparable.
Agreed, that's why I'm happy they basically kicked "onenote for windows 10" to the curb and leaned back into the win32 style full desktop application on Windows, AKA onenote 2021. It even has full dark mode and dictation now!
> the win32 style full desktop application on Windows, AKA onenote 2021.
It exists?
Edit: I checked and it does exist! Thanks!
I installed it and verified tags are just as cute as before.
I don't have time to verify if the old brilliant sync via file share feature works longer, but the rest of it looks good. I probably should test OCR of pasted images too, now that I think of it, although the OCR in Windows Power Tools has replaced it for me.
I'll probably not use it much again now that I have Logseq and thankfully don't work at many "Microsoft only" shops but if sync via fileshare works it is back as my recommendation for smaller shops that insist on Microsoft centric setups.
I'd probably also personally prefer it to Confluence on small projects (and that thankfully means almost every project I touch).
Currently I sponsor the project and use the built in sync but it is a bit rough around the edges still and I have seen a solution for automatic conflict resolution using syncthing.
Do you use a script or something or are you just careful?
I can also recommend using Syncthing with obsidian. I use it to synchronize my vault to all my devices. I also added it to my existing Raspberry Pi server that's always online, so I always have a distributor instance running and don't need to worry about sync issues.
I'd tried paper notebooks (including really tiny pocketable ones) and Google Keep before picking up Apple Notes. Notes is the only one I've not had to work at continuing to use—it's just there, and I use it, and it works fine-to-great at everything I use it for, and that's it.
If they ever turn it into some slow webshit thing, that may set me looking for another solution, but until then, no complaints on the note-taking front.
I barely even try to organize it, and just let search do its thing. If I have some particular project (say, I'm DMing an RPG and composing & organizing my world/encounter/session stuff in there) I may try to keep all that in one category/folder for easier browsing of multiple related notes at once, but otherwise, I just dump stuff in and let search bring it back for me if I need it.
In the end there’s actually doing stuff. And there’s putting it on a TODO list. Both are types of activity but only one actually got something real done
Is there an easy way to link other notes in Apple Notes?
I've used Obsidian for years now. Mainly because it's frictionless, I can easily link notes, and just Markdown files. I don't spend time looking for cool new plugins or new methodologies, so I don't have those temptations. I wish there were a better mobile app, though.
Easy way? No. You can create a weird workaround though, on both mac and ios you share the link invite yourself, and then in share options you copy the link and then paste it in your note.
However, I don't really recommend this as now you have a bunch of icloud links littering your notes and can become confused easily trying to determine which notes are actually shared and which ones were just shared with yourself.
It's one of the biggest weaknesses of Apple Notes, and the only reason I (tried) searching for alternatives.
I installed obsidian today and spent the entire time configuring plugins etc. I uninstalled it for something simpler and less about configuration combos
I used to be a total Linux nerd throughout highschool. To the point of being a Gentoo user! On a machine that took 3 days to build KDE.
Around freshman year of college I switched to Mac. Realized I wanted my computer to be a tool, not a hobby. Some config is fine, but for the most part I stick to the defaults now and trust that people who spent years thinking about this stuff have it handled. If they don’t, it’s probably because I’m not their target user and should pick a different app or OS.
I think you're referring to "The Parable of the Raft", which describes a man who has built a raft and crossed a river with it debating whether to hold on to the raft or not.
Nothing wrong with spending one's life building a boat if that is what floats your boat. It is the journey, not the destination, where you spend the most time so might as well make it a happy one!
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.
Obsidian makes a big deal of their graph view, but in the time I've been using it I've never touched it. I really like the WYSIWYG-ish markdown editor and the search seems to actually work. Those are the killer features for me. I tend to just make a new working note every week, copying last week's outstanding to-dos on Monday morning.
I'm more or less in the same boat. I like that app a lot, I even pay for it, but I think the graph view is largely a novelty.
I very occasionally utilize the "linking" features with the [[]], but I only really do it when there's an obvious link, not because I care much about a mind map.
Though to be honest, the thing that gets 99% usage is "just a place to copy and paste stuff so I don't lose it".
Obsidian's rabbit hole is hidden in the extensions, which are going far deeper than Notion extension-options. It's really such a shame that Notion has no local native extension-ability.
I think it's a different sort of rabbit hole. If you lean in to the graph-based organization and try to build a mind-map, it can get pretty deep. I had to restrain myself when I found organizing every market segment and competitor in my industry, or every technical topic I'd ever come across.
In Notion I think the rabbit hole is overly-complicated documents. In Obsidian it's going crazy with the graph and volume. That and finding the optimal set of plugins.
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.
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)
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 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.
Or look on amazon, there are so many extremely well selling books based around that very idea. Unfortunately the end result is usually feeling productive by reading the book, but then never actually being productive outside of that.
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?
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 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.
> 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 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 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.
>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.
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.
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
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 built minimal.app as the antithesis of over-planning, over-documenting, over-organizing, and over-thinking. The feature that keeps the mind open is the Note Lifetime, whereby notes die when you don’t engage with them [1].
This is in contrast to notion, evernote, et al where writers collect stuff and live in these information silos, trapped by the confines of their tools. Of course many (most?) thoughtful people can pull themselves out of these traps with discipline, but I prefer my tools devoid of these slippery slopes that make discipline a necessity [2].
I use Minimal to “plan my life” just like the characters in this story, except every time I open the app it feels like an empty slate, a blank canvas, so new projects can take new directions and new mindsets are less constrained by prior mindsets. As the designer and builder, my goal is to capture the best of a paper notebook and the best of software. I know I’m not executing perfectly, but this is a fun and exciting guiding principle.
[1] – Also the interface is just clean with features hidden away until they are needed.
[2] – Just like a well-architected structure makes the resident by default open-minded, comfortable, and joyous, our tools similarly have a “gravity” or default effect on the user. It’s very important to observe these patterns.
[Final aside] – Anyone who wants to can get a free membership and unlimited access tk premium features by joining the beta program - do it at minimal.app/#beta if you want to check Minimal out.
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.
The "note lifetime" image on their page mentions pinning notes to keep them from being deleted, but if that keeps it persistently at the top of the list it's probably not what you'd want either.
The minimal.app idea would make more sense for a ToDo list app than a note app, I think. ToDo items that aren’t either checked off or interacted with after a time are likely not either urgent or important and can be auto-deleted.
Looking at the site, I guess the dead notes might just be hidden in a “delete” folder instead of actually gone forever, which seems like a reasonable compromise.
For one thing, it's common for enthusiasts to replace stock components. A serial number stamped onto the frame isn't useful all the time, especially if the frame itself is secondhand. If someone takes your >$2,000 carbon wheelset then you're SOL, likely no matter what.
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.
I keep my root notes folder open as a project window, and just use CMD+T to find by filename, or CMD+Shift+F to "superfind" across all of my files by word or Regex.
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.
Based on the site, it looks like it moves them to a “deleted notes” folder rather than actually completely destroying them.
I’m not sure if it is locally hosted or a cloud thing. If it is a cloud thing, having noted eventually degrade might be a nice reminder that like any cloud thing it could just up and vanish at some point. That recipe is probably due for long term storage.
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 )
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?
I think it comes down to business mechanics. I think it’s often the case that Apple-ecosystem customers are more willing to pay for a product, allowing the company to have a direct relationship with stakeholders. It’s quite nice to charge a customer money, respond to their questions and feedback, grow together, succeed together. Advertising and other non-paying solutions do not have such powerful interest alignment, particularly for smaller and more artisanal brands. So business are choosing customers that support this more harmonious alignment by going platform-specific.
(In my case, I simply don’t have enough resources to support Windows, Android, and web versions. For Minimal, Windows is the most requested second platform.)
I am quite obsessed with keeping a personal wiki, like some of these people described in the article. However, I simply cannot imagine doing that in an application that isn't controlled by me or doesn't work completely offline.
I dont want my life to be organized around an application that charges a subscription and my workflow is at the whim of a corporation.
I went from Zim to Dokuwiki to Bookstack (where I've been for the past 3 years). The former is an offline app and the latter two are self hosted. All three are FOSS.
Anyways, I did try Notion once, it was super slow (feels sluggish) and the search was bad.
Edit: after reading some other comments, one thing I really appreciate about Bookstack is that its opinionated and batteries included -> no falling into the "waste all your time customizing and perfecting your workflow" trap.
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.
> 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.
BookStack dev here. When originally building BookStack, I did initially built it with infinitely nestable pages since it seemed like the "technically better" approach that didn't limit user content, but in use it just made UX and discovery a pain, especially for the mixed-technical-skill workplace environment I was targeting, which is when I landed on the book > [chapter >] page setup (With shelves being a late awkward addition based upon demand). Good to hear that works for you. Is often the love-it-or-hate-it factor of the platform.
It's markdown, allows copy pasting images, embeding files like PDF with preview, works offline by syncing using apple/google/microsoft/dropbox cloud storage.
You can run your own sync server and not rely on cloud storage at all (there's a docker image - very simple to set up). It also imports and exports a hierarchy of folders/markdown files, so on- and off-boarding are simple.
For many years I used plain old markdown files and either git or syncthing to ship them around, but the editing and viewing experience was never great, and sync on iOS wasn't exactly seamless.
The other big benefit is cross-note search. Previously I had to rely on the editor I was using - which was fine on a desktop with VSCode, but nonexistent on mobile.
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).
I used Taskwarrior before and found it worked pretty well for tasks but not for longer notes or tasks that need a lot of description. I used it for a few years before moving to Org Mode for tasks and Tiddlywiki for my knowledgebase.
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.
Also, if you're in the Apple ecosystem, you can store your obsidian vault in iCloud and sync between laptop & mobile. The obsidian mobile app is surprisingly good too.
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!
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's definitely seen a lot of bloat in the last few years. I used it since the "2.0 relaunch" and it's gone kind of downhill after each release. Stuff that used to work well don't work as well or fast anymore.
Still better than anything else on the market though.
Apple Notes is great for my own stuff — but good luck trying to get multiple collaborators to use it.
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.
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.
This just seems like so much work. The obsessive tracking of ever little thing. Does anyone really use this data in any meaningful way other that just admire its detail? What happens if you miss period, does this cause anxiety?
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.
honestly sounds like you should talk to a therapist. spending so much time "organizing everything" isn't a sustainable or effective way to handle your problems
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have the Apple Watch and I hardly ever check the stats but every few months it pings me with something like "Over the last 5 days, your resting heart rate dropped" which was a period I was on holidays, made me wonder if it was the lack of access to coffee, or just a more inactive period where I sat in a car most of the time.
The long term data can be interesting. Moved apartments and saw my elevation climbed stat went up as the local area was not so flat
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)?
This is a passion of mine as well , and is called “life logging” or “the quantified life”.
I have a long term passion project called Navigoals (Navigoals.com) built around the concept. It’s like a habit tracker but I organize all my habits/actions into a massive DAG so if I track something at a low level it also bubbles up to a high level goal. I can track instances of things or durations of things (time tracking).
I also have an unpublished iOS version with Apple Watch support, using the Watch is quicker to track stuff.
I realize to many this sounds insane but PLEASE email me waprin@gmail.com if you’re down to watch a demo over video chat.
As far as the people who think I’m crazy, here’s why I’m passionate about this project. I really had trouble focusing my whole life so as an adult I bit the bullet and got ADHD meds. Those helped a LOT at the immediate problem of focusing but literally made me crazy, very crazy, almost ruined my life. During recovery I decided I would meditate 5 minutes every day and journal one paragraph every day, which I used a habit tracker for. This was a key part of my recovery. That got me thinking - if a little tracking saved my life, what can a lot of tracking do? I also needed to better manage my time and goals without the usage of any medication.
People will say the data is pointless if you just admire it, not the case. I noticed in weight loss subs , people strongly advocate starting with food tracking. Just the act of forcing honesty with yourself about what you’re eating will change your relationship with food. In a completely different domain, the most important step to playing pro or semi-pro poker is diligently tracking all results. Same reason - forces honesty. And also in both cases, surfaces trends (e.g. I eat or play poorly certain times of day).
I track over 200 of my actions every day and I strive for my apps to make it quick to do. However it’s important to understand this does not turn me into a robot. My brain is so naturally all over the place , I wander and do random things so much, that just forcing myself to use apps to have _some_ structure and discipline puts me in the balance of a rigid life and an improvised one.
I am realizing I’m in the minority, most people I demo my apps to say, “that seems cool…for a certain type of person.” So, open to connecting with certain types of people.
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.
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.
These systems always strike me as a failure of the file system and desktop metaphor.
_The computer_ was intended to be the system you stored documents in, with paths to link between them, and any number of applications to do any number of things with them. Extended attributes are available for metadata. There’s not really any reason why things like Dropbox and iCloud couldn’t extend this to the Internet.
But it somehow became too unwieldy to really work this way (for me, too - I’m not arguing that it’s a good way to do things with the systems we really have). It’s a shame.
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.
Yeah, to expand Obsidian is almost exactly what you're describing. It's a wiki-like software that works entirely on markdown and data on the file system. Has similar functionality to Notion but feels more like an IDE
Gotcha. I think I never dug into it because normal people generally don’t want to write in Markdown. The effort in doing that and manually managing cloud sync isn’t worth it. Apple needs to build it with WYSIWYG and have it work out of the box with iCloud.
>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.
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.
Maybe I am the weird one but I use a diary / planner what ever you want to call it. I'll never get locked out of it, I don't have to pay a monthly fee. Personally I think that I have enough screen time as it is.
Ok yeah the search feature is somewhat lacking but from the sounds of it most of these organise your life SaaS products have the same issue.
Sure I could lose it but I'd argue that losing your access to Notion et al. is worse because you know where your data is but you're not allowed in.
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!
I find obsidian great because along with all your files being stored in .md format, you can also make and use user-created extensions, instead of the limited functionality notion provides
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).
As a Notion-user, this just seems excessive to me.
I love Notion because it gives me the ability to make "lightweight" notes/pads fast. I've since learned to utilize the linked database features which makes it easier to organize notes, tasks and projects.
At some point however, it feels like it just becomes busy-work to make new boxes to check, new links, relations and what-not.
To me the beauty is in the simplicity, cross-platform capabilities and relative ease with which I can create and access simple notes fast.
EDIT: I forgot templates. I use 2 or 3 templates for notes and "new projects". I never use more than 5 columns for my projects/notes either. And I don't have any "dashboards" besides my task-list (that I can sort as kanban with four status-indicators - basic stuff).
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.
Same, except s/notepad/vim. One big file. Easy to keep in version control (I keep it in my dot files repo), easy to search/grep, Currently has 10 years worth of stuff (well over 10,000 lines) but is still instantaneous to open and search. I've recently started trying out Logseq and there's a chance I may actually switch, but the single-text-file approach has served me very well for a long time.
I was the same, I've been on logseq for a while and I'm pretty much a convert. Syntax highlighting, embed images, todo/now/done -- all a bit more effortless.
And it all went into the same git repo as my previous vim based .plan ;)
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].
The majority won't. I have seen this myself, as I did not like the SaaS nature of Roam Research, and wanted a local-first solution. There is a large community of people using Logseq or Obsidian, but they are still a tiny monitory as these products don't have name recognition and there aren't as many polished videos about them on YT.
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.
Self-hosting also means you'll have to make sure it's up and secure at all times. I used to self-host a ton of things, but keeping a decent security posture has become so much effort it's just no longer feasible for me, and no longer fun, so I try to use SaaS with a good track record and a backup/export option for anything critical these days.
Tailscale is a centralized service that your whole network is exposed to. I'm using them but if you're self-hosting for security or privacy reasons, that's probably not what you'd want as they or someone who compromises them would essentially own your network and it doesn't get much more critical than that. You can monitor and harden your infrastructure against that, but that's no longer easy. If you trust Tailscale with all your traffic, including from/to your notes app, I guess you could just as well trust a SaaS notes solution with a good track record and support for exports/backups.
Tailscale is only partially centralized (the admin portion). The actual traffic flow is not.
But also, I use Headscale so I'm self-hosting my tailscale as well.
As a self-hoster, I would totally recommend to the average person to self-host services on your LAN, and just use tailscale to extend your LAN beyond your house (for example on your laptop and phone) so you can get to things when you're not at home. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I like self-hosting when I can, too, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to the "average person". Especially if they would come back to me for tech support.
The average person is not capable of self-hosting software and SaaS is much nicer looking / more fully features 99% of the time. I say this as someone who loves self-hosting and self hosts most of my own stuff.
It's not the most intuitive export (since there are backlinks, complex hierarchy, databases and all that jazz in Notion pages) but they do return Markdown for every page, CSV for databases (with some information loss), maintain folder structures, and multimedia attachments.
A quick search shows me that Notion exports can be used to populate Obsidian [1] (which implies that there's not substantial information loss).
To me, Obsidian really became the killer app overall. I used Notion and Foam before and while the interface there is much more beautiful, I like having my files locally (synced via Syncthing) and being able to write my own plugins easily. The existing plugin ecosystem with instances like Dataview or Templater makes Obsidian such a great solution for personal and work planning, and as a knowledge base.
The only thing that's really missing is a collaborative version of Obsidian to be able to work in teams. I found craft.do that has a very similar feel, but it's quite pricey and, of course, you can't self-host.
Plug for a friend who is building this exact thing - a tool that makes Obsidian collaborative, and also allows syncing between Obsidian / Roam / Notion
I usually have a top-level note for a course, here the "Computational Surgineering.md". In there, I use the dataview plugin to simply create a dynamic table of all entries in the meetings subfolder:
Another option I use is nested tags[2], like #cs/meeting for the above use-case.
As for 2) I don't really use the global graph that much. It looks quite cool, but I primarily just look at a local graph with a maximum depth of 2-3 to quickly hop around.
I guess what I was wondering is, do we have any tools that help extract a hierarchical structure from the inputted information. Rather than having the user specify the hierarchical structure.
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.
It inevitably gets ugly when notes are edited by a few people simultaneously. Unless there is specific logic for automatic conflict resolution or concurrent editing, it devolves into chaos. File sharing tools typically do not have that, besides creating endless "conflict files" that require manual merging. The friction is just too high.
I started doing this for a while but quickly switched to Obsidian. Obviously it doesn't have the same features but it serves the same purpose for me at least. The data format is much simpler and portable too, I just store the vault in iCloud and sync it to my phone.
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.
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).
Yeah the toolbar badly needs context awareness. If my cursor is on a list item then show me the list actions right there, not a global fixed list of things that never changes and almost never has what I need at the right moment.
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 once read a tweet that said "the most effective people I know just work on the most important thing, and they get way more done than the people I know who obsessively manage their time". Oddly enough, when I thought about it, I realized I could pretty easily think of the most important thing at any given time.
I like to stay organized. For random thoughts, brainstorms, arbitrary URLs or bits of information, I use Google Keep and eventually migrate them into OneNote for more permanence. For files, I use an Unsorted folder in OneDrive, and then eventually migrate them into my structured OneDrive for permanence. Organizing and migrating all this built-up information becomes a leisurely meditation on category theory. It's a great way to procrastinate productively.
When I actually want to be productive, I entirely ignore my information ecosystem, ask myself "what important thing am I avoiding?" and then work on that.
Shameless plug, but if anyone here enjoys Notion but finds it a bit overwhelming for managing their life, we designed Supernotes[1] to be a bit more settled / less trying to be "the everything app". We just released a new version yesterday that includes some fun features like "view depth" which might appeal to HNers. It's also markdown based, so less lock-in to a proprietary JSON format than Notion (though still not OSS – recommend Logseq if that's what you're looking for).
The software that's running my life right now is ToDoist.
I have daily chores, I need to remember to do at different times of the day. Other things are every 3 days. Others are on specific days. Others are every k weeks.
If I need to remember to do something, it goes on the list with a specific day and time I want to do it by. At the end of every day I review what's left and either do it or postpone it.
Cleaning a checklist works for me. Do what works for you.
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’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.
I've quite liked their mobile UX actually! On Android, I have an entire screen devoted to the widget. I swipe to the right, read the list, add to it, check things off. I rarely open the actual app.
>Many users find it’s just as useful for managing their free time.[...]
"“You don’t have to change your habits to how rigid software is. The software will change how your mind works,” says Akshay Kothari, Notion’s cofounder and chief operating officer"
Stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you? "What did you do this weekend?, Well nothing special really, but I got a 3000 line Notion document mapping every step of it". Can we stop attempting to export every workplace fad into personal lives?
Just enjoy your free time, focus on free, not on time. Compulsive busywork is not a replacement for spontaneity.
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.
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...
But is he? I mean his linkedin is, and I mean this with no malice whatsoever, quite average compared to the effort that goes into maintaining such a system?
yesterday i started using gpt4 as a todo list manager and it's pretty amazing. I can brain dump thoughts and tasks into it and it automatically prioritizes things and will let me be conversational around my tasks... i used a super basic prompt that could be improved, but so far it's really nice:
Hi! you are my secretary and todolist manager! I will generally ask you to add things to my todo list, organize the todo list by time and topic and subject, ask you to remind me of my list and also ask you to help priotiize things, soudn good?
I found Notion frustrating to use across the different teams I manage because they really want you to do things 'one way'. The endless customization tutorials end up being really surface level once you try them out.
I have been quite happy with Obsidian + Tasks.org (synced via nextcloud). I don't connect them in any way.
I used TickTick for several years and quite liked it (still recommend it) but at some point they started nerfing the free version and I became more concerned about privacy and supportively of open source so tried a few alternatives and found them to be great.
I mostly use Todo list to keep track of things I need to follow up on (like volunteer work) and homework.
Unfortunately, I still use Notion for a few things like Wikipedia page ideas because I simply don't like the way "databases" feel to edit in Obsidian with the available plugins.
Obsidian for me is mostly a daily journal plus a few pages that are like notes about cities I visited or my thoughts on the language learning apps I've experimented with.
I think after using so many of these organization apps, I used plaintext note taking apps, sublime text, trello, more structured note taking apps (evernote, Agenda for Mac, etc), Todo apps (so many of them, incl pomodoro style), then went back to trello and I think I'm staying there.
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.
First of all, Pagico is really cross platform. It has clients for macOS, Linux and Windows, plus iOS (I use it on macOS, iOS and Linux). It allows me to group the tasks either in a free floating Inbox, or in their respective projects.
I can combine all these projects' tasks in a single view, or see them in their independent contexts. This allows me to see my whole workload (private + professional) and plan my life accordingly, even for future.
Every project can have its lists, notes, files and schedule. This allows me to take small notes and track my projects and carry these notes everywhere. Hence, I don't lose my mental state about a project. It also tracks project progress and your working patterns, like which days you're more active on the projects by analyzing your activity on said project.
Tasks can be added pretty quickly while planning, even with some NLP support. "Do this. Next tuesday" automatically scheduled, and the date string is automatically stripped. NLP is done locally, on the app.
You can export these notes as HTML pages if you want, but I generally move notes to Evernote or the prıoject's public Wiki, if I chose to close the project, but that's not a given. Sometimes I just leave them in.
Pagico provides a sync capability through its servers, yet you don't have to use it. It can work nicely over Dropbox for example, but mobile clients won't be able to sync with it.
The application is designed very neatly. Actually, it's just a web view with a dedicated/specialized PHP server running as a different process. It's much more lighter than Electron, yet it works very well.
The developer is also very responsive to bug reports and feedback. They are developing the thing for a very long time and they know what they're doing.
The app is not perfect, of course, but it works very well for what it does. I bought it during pandemic, and it's now my de-facto planning tool.
However, I still use Trello for even-longer term planning and Evernote for "eternal" documents. All three works pretty well for me. I spend maybe ~10 minutes every night to plan for the next day, and I'm happy.
I also want to note that I don't use many of the collaboration features of the app, and it has much more features than I actively use.
Absolutely love Notion, but that time it went down for a while a few years ago was the last time I've used it. The fact they still don't have an offline version is baffling to me cause I'd love to throw money at them for the product but here we are.
Obsidian is my main alternative as it mostly does what I want and does it locally. Not affiliated, I just think it's an incredible tool and the extensions you can get can turn it into something else entirely. For example, Joshua Plunkett turned it into an incredible RPG manager: https://www.patreon.com/posts/67310539
Workflowy is what I have been using for almost a decade. I think the reason it works so well is because it is simple. Anti features are so powerful in an app like this otherwise you can spend all your time tweaking and coming up with the perfect system.
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.
Neomania / newness is definitely a thing. How many people use notion to organize their lives only to realize years later not much has changed? How much time is spent obsessing and perfecting your notion workspace that can be spent working on bettering your life?
Systems are beneficial in many aspects of life, but there has to come a point where there’s a moderate use of a tool and the action that tool helps foster.
Perfectionism is a battle many face and few conquer. Notion makes you feel productive, but how productive are you really?
As of recently, I use telegram for any of that stuff. For example, we setup a "ToDo" private channel where me and my partner edit a text message that contains all the todo items. I have another private channel for myself to keep photos, notes etc. One can send messages scheduled in the future, this serves for reminders. A few news channels, including HN, an RSS bot, and I need nothing more.
I use Trello to organize my life. At the moment I cannot imagine what kind of features an alternative would have to offer for me to consider switching.
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.
Hmm -- can you link directly to Trello lists/cards? Wondering if you could leverage a Chrome link on the home screen if that would then throw you over to Trello automatically? Not sure.
I need a replacement for MS OneNote for reasons including it feels too rigid. And I know people here have tested most things.
The only important feature I need is ability to paste screenshots into it. Then an easy way to mark text for monospaced fonts for text copied from a terminal and back for notes.
A quick overview of all of these makes it look like only OneNote does that well and the rest are text only.
Two excellent options I’ve never seen mentioned. But you are right that your requirements match mine exactly. Also for remote troubleshoot where I do not have access to the remote clipboard and need to capture information so I can quickly move on.
Notion's strength lies in its ability to combine different types of content in a single, customizable workspace.Trello is a great choice if you want a simple, visual way to manage your tasks and projects. It's particularly well-suited for teams that are focused on task management and want a clear, easy-to-use interface
Great article! I absolutely love Notion and use it to track my tasks and create a second brain for myself. Notion is a beast for personal productivity. However, I think a lot more businesses have started using Notion to manage their products. When I talked to some of these businesses, I came across some common issues with Notion databases which pushed me to build NotionApps (https://www.notionapps.com), a tool to create apps on top of Notion databases. These are the problems I'm looking to solve:
- Better user experience when using Notion databases on mobile
- Notion is slow to use with large databases
- Missing granular permissions when sharing data with others
- Ability to share internal data with external users
I use ClickUp[1] in similar ways. I have three spaces: family, personal development, professional development. All of the side projects I have are under personal development, various work commitments (including e.g. rental house management) under professional, and family varies from "scoop the litter box Mon/Wed/Sat" all the way to 10 year goals. I have not (and may not) reach steady-state on the way it's organized, and I may end up splitting some of it off into a dead tree some day, but for now it's accessible, consistent and actionable.
A tool should be simple with good defaults requiring little to no configuration but offering enough flexibility to get your work done and no more. Anything more or less is just noise.
More often than not, your work does not require complex tools with unlimited flexibility and configurability. Notion is an amazing tool but it can get in your way. It was designed to be shaped and transformed by each user in the way they want. That should be a good thing but only a few people actually need that level of control.
Even for team-based workflows, I have personally been more productive when using simple tools with good defaults. Whenever there is talk of setting up things and learning curves outside of your actual work, know that it is most probably unnecessary.
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.
As someone who has tried a variety of productivity tools: Trello, Jira, Notepad, religious google calendar-ing, Notion, I've only really stuck with two things: notepad and Notion.
Notepad just allows me to get simple thoughts down and easily reorganize information. I then adapted that workflow with Notion and have been pretty happy with it so far: tracking daily todos, trip plans, workout routines.
What I've enjoyed most about notion is that it lets me do something as simple as my daily routines but also helps me plan/track things for technical side projects as well. I really think the flexibility, which many other tools don't have, is what I'm drawn to here
Late to the party but I'm somewhat sure that there are no true "power users" of notion (despite what the article says), because of the lack of a feature to see your upcoming reminders. This is such a basic Todo feature.
Notion is far from ideal but I use it for note taking and knowledge storing. I want clean UI, set of functionalities included out of the box, I don't want to be editing in Markdown, I like how the blocks are modular so that they can be rearranged on the screen, I like Notion automation(buttons) and databases. As long as you're not trying to "plan your whole life" in Notion it's a good product.
In the past few months my family has moved to Basecamp and it’s pretty awesome.
Sharing a schedule and having it sync to everyone’s calendar app is handy. Also being able to assign tasks and attach metadata is great.
The other day I was assigned a task that required getting something from the hardware store. Opened up the task and there were photos and measurements attached.
Before Basecamp we used multiple communication channels for this.
Also, it seems that our data is open enough for me. I can export Basecamp to disk if I ever want to migrate out.
I have experimented with Notion and previously used Evernote. However, I simply require basic tools and a platform that functions rapidly and synchronizes across devices. Apple Notes fulfills these needs quite effectively for me.
Contrary to Evernote, which progressively slowed down and demanded increased payments, or Notion, which I anticipate may follow a similar path, I don't foresee Apple Notes becoming burdened and focused on revenue generation.
I tried Notion about a month ago, and at first it looked very good. I copied over materials for a book I was writing and liked the idea of one environment for research materials and manuscript artifacts. Bottom line: Notion had horrible support for creating a PDF for a book project. This is perhaps simply not their market?
Most of my notes are just... Unstructured text and images. So I just put it on WhatsApp in a group with just me. Searchable, any device, offline on mobile, the lots.
I screenshot excalidraw diagrams and put them in there as well, if I wanna do that.
Personally, rarely do I have the need to store a structured and queryable table/list as part of my notes.
Can somebody recommend a simple app to do the following: keep a list of tasks and estimations of time required to complete them. When I insert an item between existing tasks, all the dates of subsequent tasks should be automatically updated. That is really all I need, but so far I have not find to right tool for this.
i've tried so many different apps like this and i consistently return to my notes app on my macbook.
i'm not a fan of the UX or how it feels, but i can write notes all i want and add "keywords" or "tags" that i can search for and go through. todos, dates, important things, brainstorming, drafts, etc.
for example, for a book project, i'll write the word "preacher" at the top and then write some words that were in my brain. then i'll have 100 notes with the word "preacher" that i can search for and go through when i need to draft the idea. i can combine tags too, like adding "denny" to "preacher".
or for a work project, write the name of the project as the tag, some todos, meeting notes, design docs, resources, etc
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.
Well I just use xl or notepad for my todo lists, rest is in my memory which I don't care documenting in some commercial product. Are we getting too much addicted to technology for basic stuff?
I've been using plain text for over 10 years. It's simple to use, easy to modify, has as complex of a tag system as I would like, and will be around until heat death. Why fix what ain't broke.
I find it interesting that Notion still uses the Somali .so top level domain. I heard from people not able to access Notion inside their company network because their company blocked the .so domain.
I like Notion but it's so horribly buggy. Just basic operations like deleting text using backspace or copy pasting break often and you end up deleting the wrong stuff or pasting at the wrong position.
I think it is ironic that the notes for usage for Notion is in the embedded youtube video called 'the ultimate notion setup for 2023', which seems to me to be text explained in a video.
There's sooo muuuch typing lag it's unusable for me, and I'm on a top-of-the-line MBP. I have already tried different browsers, disabling extensions and the Electron app.
Somebody should build an app that let people enter unorganized text and let AI organize into list of actionalble items and keep remind the user of the plan AI help create.
Just use a Calendar... and write somewhere what you need to do. Or hell, just use your brain, if you can't keep what is important in your head, it probably means it isn't important at all.
Your life isn't complex like managing multiple workstreams and projects for a whole organisation of thousands of people, it's supposed to be simple. If you have too many things to keep track of, you are doing something wrong.
People like to overcomplicate their lives. Just do it!
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.
Several times I keep finding me switching through apps. When notion became the rage, I went to make an account to find out that I already had an account (with to do lists from months ago). I have made sincere attempts to use it as my primary tool, often spending days on setting it up and sometimes money. I always lose interest and switch to the next fancy thing.
Among Notion, amazing Marvin, ticktick, toodledo, things, Microsoft todo, several calendar apps, structured, streaks, Any do, dynalist, OneNote, trello, clickup- I finally (for now) settled on Drfats and OneNote (at work since it comes default and I can move pages around).
Drafts- can’t handle images. Also needs about 20$/year. (I have paid for majority of the above listed apps at some point, including notion for their ai. )
But on the plus side, I got into a habit of just dumping everything on my phone directly into drafts, hoping I will dirty and organize it later. So the capture part is kind of good right now. The acting on captured part is still pending.
Also recommend an app called zen diary which is a linear flow of text, like a log.
I have ADHD, refuse to acknowledge it and I use Apple devices personally and windows at work.
The game-changer for me was MyLifeOrganized. The killer feature is dependencies, so you can choose to only be shown actionable tasks at any given moment, complete with context sensitivity. The only thing missing is sharing tasks with others.
With that in mind, I've been using Active Collab since 2006 for collaborating with others. It has dependencies too, but doesn't work anywhere near as well as MLO.
I've tried most of what's available over the years, but finally happy overall. I keep the widget on my home screen with an interactive list, and can also double tap the back of my Pixel in any app and add a new task. Super cool, and works on all my other devices very well.
Re the ADHD, I was diagnosed as a child and was apparently the youngest person to ever be prescribed it in the UK, stopped taking it at about ten, and now looking to get back on it, but enduring the waiting list currently. My partner's cousin has ADHD, and seeing the difference between her medicated and unmedicated gave me the realization that my dose was wrong pre-puberty, and rather than stopping it entirely, I should have been willing to figure the dosage out instead. Highly recommend people just embrace that they probably aren't a lazy failure or disorganized mess, if the intent is there but the execution isn't, they've probably got ADHD, and there's plenty of options.
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.
As far as org-roam versus Notion, Obsidian, etc... it's very reiliable and predictable. Sometimes it requires more effort to say learn to use table.el to have the poor mans ascii table equivalent of a kanban board that doesn't mess up with long lines... but... it works and keeps working.
Plus transparent support for gpg by naming files something.org.gpg or even making all of your org roam files encrypted by default is great. However beware, the sqlite database is still not encrypted. So be okay with that, delete the (easily regeneratable from org source files) database on logout/shutdown, or figure something else out.
I hate these people. It’s the wrong way to live. Life is not about getting a high score in productivity or financially. I pity the people in their lives who are being optimized like some kind of machine/chore. It sounds so loveless
- Copy and paste is completely broken. Good luck trying to paste a table.
- The drag & drop feature is equally annoying, it just never works and doesn't select the things you intend to select or drop them in the place where you want them to be.
- The basic table is very limited (e.g. no pictures/formatting inside cells, no ability to reorder/sort - vs a Google Docs/Sheets based table)
- It grinds to a halt in long docs and databases over 100 rows. Can't stress this enough.
- Timezone support is completely messed up (you can e.g. create a database with a time column and specify the timezone, but the calendar view will always map all events in the timezone you're in, making it useless because events are getting shifted to other days)