[HN Gopher] People who use Notion to plan their whole lives
___________________________________________________________________
People who use Notion to plan their whole lives
Author : FinnKuhn
Score : 265 points
Date : 2023-04-25 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| capitanazo77 wrote:
| I just love simplicity in markdown files plus linux tools.
|
| And for sync: obsidian.
|
| And that's it. It's just perfect.
| i5heu wrote:
| I just use Git and Markdown
|
| You know planing your life on some ones else software and
| hardware is a bad idea.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| 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.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| yet another thing well-solved by plain text files, and vim
| mouse_ wrote:
| https://files.catbox.moe/lrism9.png
|
| wtf
| Aulig wrote:
| 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.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| 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?
| syntheweave wrote:
| 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.
| theFletch wrote:
| 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.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the
| first encounter with <s>the enemy's main force</s> reality.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Yeah, I have so little energy and motivation to do stuff. I
| need to spend the little I have actually doing stuff rather
| than planning to do stuff
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| 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.
| 12907835202 wrote:
| 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)?
| waprin wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Do you track how long it takes you to track things?
| senectus1 wrote:
| this is the point i fail... normally before i start.
|
| I think about all the things i'll track, then realise just
| how disruptive and time consuming that will be and give up.
| aszantu wrote:
| have you ever found a relationship between mood and what you
| eat in a 5 day window?
| koliber wrote:
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| 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.
| csw-001 wrote:
| 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.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Slightly different context, but similar enough.
|
| I wear a Garmin sportswatch so keep an eye on the subreddit. If
| you go there you'll see daily threads about arbitrary metrics
| like "sleep score", "body battery", hrv and vo2 max. People
| _obsess_ over the numbers without really thinking to take a
| step back and thinking about how accurate the data is and
| whether or not it's actually meaningful in any real terms.
|
| Definitely a lot of folks out there becoming slaves to this
| sort of thing.
| throwawayjs wrote:
| I personally just use my calendar + Notes app + reminder app on
| my iPhone and that's been more than enough for me.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| > Joshua Bergen is a very productive person.
|
| 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?
| blantonl wrote:
| You judge people's productivity based on their LinkedIn?
|
| This might be peak /r/LinkedInLunatics
| [deleted]
| azubinski wrote:
| "Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. His secret is the
| workspace app Notion..."
|
| sancta simplicitas
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Just marketing.
| protortyp wrote:
| 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.
| charles_f wrote:
| Can't you just use a file share as your common vault for the
| team to use?
| bad_username wrote:
| 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.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| Plug for a friend who is building this exact thing - a tool
| that makes Obsidian collaborative, and also allows syncing
| between Obsidian / Roam / Notion
|
| https://samepage.network/
| uptownfunk wrote:
| It looks good. Couple questions:
|
| 1/ how do you support hierarchical organization. The links let
| you show relationships but how do you get to a hierarchical
| representation
|
| 2/ at some point this knowledge graph must become large and
| unwieldy, how do you manage that?
| protortyp wrote:
| I primarily use folders and the dataview plugin [1] for 1).
| E.g. when I am managing a course, I have a structure like so:
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mbcuu2pyy7eb3o/folder-
| structure.p...
|
| 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:
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/wk8jjldlohg6bf3/dataview.png?dl=0
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview
|
| [2] https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Tags
|
| Edit: Formatting is horrible on HN. I posted screenshots
| instead.
| ralfd wrote:
| ... His secret is the workspace app Notion...
|
| ... the reason Notion has such a devoted fan base is its
| flexibility...
|
| ... Notion's most devoted fans say they're unlikely to jump ship
| to any other promising platforms anytime soon...
|
| Is Notion so good, or is this product placement PR?
|
| See: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| mrkwse wrote:
| 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.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| 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.
| fogoflove wrote:
| Notion is a good product, imo. But it's not unique -- there
| are other products like it out there, most notably Microsoft
| Loop, which is a clone.
| eropple wrote:
| Loop seems a little more like Coda to me than Notion.
| Similar space, but not a similar "outlook on life".
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 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.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| 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.
| jstop107 wrote:
| That's an advertisement
| fastball wrote:
| 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).
|
| [1] https://supernotes.app/changelog/
| dtihanyi wrote:
| 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 use Taskade now https://www.taskade.com/
| yz_coding wrote:
| Taskade is easier to use and faster. Notion looks great but I
| always felt it needs some cognitive load to even get started.
| lemiffe wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I'm actually starting to do this but with Obsidian. I love
| notion but one of my issues with it (and this is purely on
| principle) is that you don't "own" your data. This got me
| thinking, what would happen to my data in 5-10-15 or 20 years
| down the road? My solution to this is to have a bunch of
| markdown files in a git repository and use obsidian to manage
| it. I assume that in the next 5 years something better than
| Obsidian will come out though the idea is that is really
| doesn't matter in the end because the data stays the same.
|
| /end soapbox.
| 015a wrote:
| 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.
| lemiffe wrote:
| 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...
| thiago_fm wrote:
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| Why use this to plan your life?
|
| 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!
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I have ADHD, and if I don't write it down, it isn't happening.
| How that information is presented is a big deal.
|
| If you do a basic litmus test of going to a sub-Reddit that
| specializes in productivity, concepts like GTD, or software
| like Obsidian, you'll quite frequently find people with ADHD,
| and folks who suspect they have ADHD, but have no diagnosis, or
| can't access appropriate medication where they live for one
| reason or another.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't use Notion. I didn't like it.
| imtemplain wrote:
| [dead]
| joseph_grobbles wrote:
| [dead]
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| czbond wrote:
| I opened the comments to see if anyone mentioned ToDoist. I use
| it and love it for personal use.
| ZunarJ5 wrote:
| 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.
| darkteflon wrote:
| 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.
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| darkteflon wrote:
| Oh sorry, yes I like Todoist's mobile UX a lot - it's very
| good. I meant that I wished Notion's mobile UX was better!
| [deleted]
| jrmg wrote:
| 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.
| swalling wrote:
| 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.
| DerCed wrote:
| Hence, Obsidian.md
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| 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
| swalling wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| 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.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| 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.
| mandmandam wrote:
| If only Apple Notes would just bring in drop down bullets.
|
| I'm a little baffled that they still haven't - it would be such
| a huge quality of life improvement for such a tiny effort.
| pbueckle wrote:
| 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)
| renjimen wrote:
| Even trying to select text is a nightmare. Notion can't make up
| its mind between selecting text or selecting the objects that
| contains the text.
|
| I wish there was a markdown mode with a live preview, then I
| would never use the rest of the Notion interface.
| bradgessler wrote:
| Their native app wrappers also have issues.
|
| - On macOS the "Sync dark/light mode with OS" settings
| constantly get reset
|
| - I'm frequently logged out (and have to log back in)
|
| - No effort for basic integration has happened, which makes
| drag & drop in and out of the app awkward, no sharing
| extensions, etc.
|
| If I'm being honest, I envy them for being in the position of
| being able to completely ignore this stuff and still have a
| product that people love. That said, it feels like an easy
| thing to throw 1-2 people on with the task of, "make this
| integrate deeper into the host operating system with Electron
| basics"
| softsound wrote:
| 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.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| 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.
| corndoge wrote:
| I use, love and evangelize Notion but yes, all of these are
| valid criticism, and copy-pasting in particular is so busted.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| 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
| idlephysicist wrote:
| 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.
| syntheweave wrote:
| A diary with sticky notes is an excellent feedback loop: Stick
| in tasks, then write down what happened later.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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).
| idlephysicist wrote:
| Yeah I've also had a similar experience with a school diary
| or as we called them homework journals. Though no boarding
| school experience.
|
| I do also use the reminders app on the iPhone if I need a
| reminder at a specific time.
| sofixa wrote:
| You don't have to use a SaaS, you can use a modern "note
| taking"++ tool like Obsidian (not affiliated, just a huge fan)
| or Logseq (FOSS). In both cases files are fully local, sync is
| optional (for Obsidian there's a paid service or you can just
| use Dropbox/GDrive/Git/etc.), and you get a ton of advanced
| features like complex search, smart references, etc.
|
| For instance I use Obsidian for meeting notes, and with the
| help of a plugin I link all previous meeting notes on this
| topic/customer and can at a glance see the history I have with
| this subject. Furthermore, I also link the associated Jira
| ticket and the Jira ticket history matching the labels, again
| for history purposes. I also use the Excalidraw integration to
| get diagrams that I can embed in my notes. There's also a
| Kanban plugin, Map view plugin (e.g. if planning a trip), etc.
| etc. The sky is the limit!
|
| Overall, I'd strongly recommend.
| idlephysicist wrote:
| Nice, glad to hear that you have a useful and productive
| workflow.
|
| Yeah at work I use what ever tech what I'm told to use, but
| paper is still an important part of my thought process.
| alhirzel wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://clickup.com/
|
| I'm surprised I don't hear more about ClickUp on HN. Generous
| free tier, can share lists with other people, support for
| automations...
| qot wrote:
| I don't recommend ClickUp because of the amount of marketing
| emails / spam they send you. Every minor version update gets an
| email in your inbox.
|
| Their "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the emails also
| doesn't work which is unacceptable.
| sockaddr wrote:
| This Notion spam is getting tiresome.
| have_faith wrote:
| 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.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| 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).
| SamBam wrote:
| Since Notion is just plain text files, it would be lovely if
| someone could produce a better app for mobile that could work
| with those files.
|
| It could be a fraction of the features, like just text
| editing and good lists, and you could always switch to
| editing markdown if you needed to.
| SamBam wrote:
| s/notion/obsidian
| Ruq wrote:
| In my experience lists are great but for reordering which can
| be awkward. Even there, there ought to be a plugin that makes
| reordering easier.
|
| Have you checked out the mobile toolbar? It makes
| indent/unindenting list items easy.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| 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.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| 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.
| doubleg72 wrote:
| I am in the process of moving to obsidian from Joplin. I like
| Joplin but the screen real estate is a bit much on smaller
| screens.
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| 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.
| inferense wrote:
| 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.
| raybb wrote:
| 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.
| rho4 wrote:
| 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.
| jldugger wrote:
| 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.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| One thing I'm wishing for in Trello is the ability to add an
| icon to my Android home screen pointing directly to a specific
| checklist.
| brycedriesenga wrote:
| 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.
| mxuribe wrote:
| You can def. link directly to a card (I've been doing that
| for years)...but to a list, not sure about that one.
| [deleted]
| cobertos wrote:
| I used to do this, until the slowness, downtime, no offline mode,
| and API throttling fucked me over. So I left the ecosystem.
|
| Unfortunately I havent found anything comparable, though Typora
| mostly fills the void.
|
| I'm working on my own version though now
| [deleted]
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 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.
| pbowyer wrote:
| 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.
| nmca wrote:
| Also my go-to. Very useful for travel, projects etc. Recursive
| lists fit my brain well & the search is good enough!
| mandmandam wrote:
| I liked Workflowy a lot, but the idea of paying $60 a year for
| drop down lists inspires a deep, deep revulsion.
|
| I wouldn't even pay that for the full app to own for life.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| It's $49 annually. If you use it for everything, it is
| totally worth it.
| lazymentors wrote:
| I honestly use taskade instead of notion. A better user interface
| and help from their team. https://www.taskade.com/
| dt3ft wrote:
| Isn't this entire article just marketing? Why mention specific
| app/saas provider?
| prmoustache wrote:
| I was about to say that. It is just a badly disguised paid ad.
| connordoner wrote:
| Is there any evidence that it's paid? I mean, it does strike
| me as an ad, but I can't see anything factual to confirm that
| it's paid.
| kylecazar wrote:
| I guess I'm in the minority, but I don't use anything to 'plan'
| my life besides a calendar.
| [deleted]
| arkitaip wrote:
| You're probably way better off because of it. Most productivity
| work is busy work and a failure to better manage anxiety and
| stress.
| paczki wrote:
| 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
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| 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.
| apozem wrote:
| > notes die when you don't engage with them
|
| That is an interesting idea, but not something I would ever
| want in a notes app. A note may be important but never opened.
|
| For example, I have a note in Craft with my bike serial number
| and a picture of me standing next to it. If my bike is ever
| stolen and recovered, this note is proof of ownership. I have
| not opened this note since creating it, because my bike has not
| been stolen, but I would obviously hate to lose it.
| ayewo wrote:
| That's an interesting use case.
|
| Why not just include a photo of the receipt as proof of
| ownership?
| dymk wrote:
| Why not just keep a searchable note of it in a notes app?
| OJFord wrote:
| Why would you want to repeatedly 'interact' with that any
| more?
| dvzk wrote:
| 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.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Because it's hard to match a visual depiction of the bike
| and owner to a printed receipt.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| trevwilson wrote:
| 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.
| drewrv wrote:
| A little off topic, but you should check out bikeindex.org
| fudged71 wrote:
| Rather than a note dying, I wonder if notes could decay into
| smaller and smaller summaries.
| trenchgun wrote:
| That could be a really nice feature too
| ErikHuisman wrote:
| Self cleansing notes. That is a great idea.
| mywacaday wrote:
| 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?
| patatino wrote:
| iOS user spend more money
| waynesonfire wrote:
| save your notes so you can train chatgpt on them.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| 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.
| courgette wrote:
| I use the built in note from apple in my phone. The one on
| top are the most recently touched. It works for me.
|
| The bottom is stuff from years ago. It can be nice to revisit
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| slaven wrote:
| 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 )
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| oof, I feel like this is replicating the worst parts of having
| a fallible human memory.
| electrondood wrote:
| 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.
| quacked wrote:
| 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.
| snissn wrote:
| 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?
| bckr wrote:
| Now imagine it has access to unlimited indexable storage as
| well as your messaging, email, browser...
| Gbox4 wrote:
| There's some people working on something like that:
| https://klu.so (not affiliated, just thought it was cool)
| zepolen wrote:
| This entire article reads like an advertisement written by chat
| gpt.
| menacingly wrote:
| Even more than I love Notion, I love how effective the PR I just
| read was
| jwie wrote:
| Turning your life into a checklist is missing the point.
| koliber wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Counterpoint: Turning the important things into a checklist so
| you don't forget about them, and get them done quickly frees up
| time to live your life.
| karles wrote:
| 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).
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| 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.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Just realized I meant to say *Notion and not Motion... note
| to self, don't leave HN comments when you're sitting up at
| 4AM with acid reflux :P
| winstonprivacy wrote:
| My secret weapon is a "to do" list in notepad.
|
| One list which has everything. No apps, no workflow, no SaaS
| fees. Works better than anything else I've tried.
| anongraddebt wrote:
| Same here for todos (just with pen and paper).
|
| I don't see why I'd need an admin dashboard and a DBMS to
| effectively prioritize what I need to accomplish in 16 hours.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| Same, except that I've added Obsidian as a UI on top of it.
| Check in markdown, have decent visual on top.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cyberpunk wrote:
| 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 ;)
|
| I just wish it had a decent vi mode!
| cldwalker wrote:
| Check out https://github.com/vipzhicheng/logseq-plugin-
| vim-shortcuts
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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.
| figassis wrote:
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| darkteflon wrote:
| Pagico looks interesting, would you mind saying a few more
| words on what you like about it?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Of course.
|
| 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 prioject'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.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I don't use any checklist or notebook or anything. I just know
| what I need to do and do it.
| maxbaines wrote:
| 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.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| 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
| anongraddebt wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _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.
| IceWreck wrote:
| 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.
| dbmikus wrote:
| 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!
| freshbakedbread wrote:
| Notion still does have pretty bad performance, although I
| believe they've recently upgraded the search. It's quite good
| at least in my experience.
| shagie wrote:
| Have you ever looked at task warrior? https://taskwarrior.org
| (and you could host it online yourself (I believe) with
| inthe.am - https://github.com/coddingtonbear/inthe.am if you
| aren't comfortable with the existing version)
|
| It's well documented ( https://taskwarrior.org/docs/ ) had
| enables a number of different workflows and export and import
| options (I've dabbled with jira imports to task warrior for my
| own sorting views).
| dbmikus wrote:
| 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.
| wooptoo wrote:
| Can I ask what determined you to move away from Zim? I'm
| currently using it and finding it quite good.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The MacOS app was unusable when I tried it
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| > 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.
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| 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.
| hu3 wrote:
| Have you tried Joplin?
|
| It's markdown, allows copy pasting images, embeding files like
| PDF with preview, works offline by syncing using
| apple/google/microsoft/dropbox cloud storage.
|
| Has desktop and mobile app.
|
| Free and Open Source.
| guessbest wrote:
| 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.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| Anti-Thony wrote:
| 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.
| ryanlime wrote:
| 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
| baron321 wrote:
| 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.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| 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 list as part of my notes.
| mtsolitary wrote:
| Are these people not worried about storing _their entire lives_
| in some SaaS company 's proprietary format on their cloud
| servers?
| rchaud wrote:
| Notion's biggest market is students that have grown up with
| Google Docs. The idea of local storage is long gone for the
| "digital natives" generation. There was even this story from a
| couple of years ago from an engineering professor who had to
| change how she taught basic concepts because her students
| weren't familiar with folder-based file systems [0].
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-
| direc...
| Invictus0 wrote:
| That idea will come right back when one of their favorite
| services pulls the plug.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| coding123 wrote:
| Generation before me does that.
|
| My generation knows what a file is.
|
| Generation after me does that.
| quaintdev wrote:
| They probably don't care or think they have nothing to hide or
| probably never stumbled across numerous self hosted
| alternatives
|
| https://selfhosting.quest/search?q=wiki
| agentdrtran wrote:
| 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.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| 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.
| tylergetsay wrote:
| Self hosting has only got easier in the security regard
| thanks to solutions like tailscale
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| Thrymr wrote:
| 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.
| Karunamon wrote:
| A generic wiki is not an alternative to Notion. And believe
| me, I have looked.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Might not be for you but it is for me and countless others.
| koliber wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| We know, and we are!
| sligor wrote:
| you can export and backup your entire workspace in usable
| format ( markdown for pages + csv for databases + attachments).
| HPsquared wrote:
| I wonder if they offer an option to export the data in some
| usable format.
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| Unless there's a tangible monetary benefit in doing so, I
| don't see why that would be a good business decision.
|
| It is likely that there will be some use cases for power
| users, however one must justify the development and
| opportunity costs associated with that.
| corobo wrote:
| Seems like they do from a quick googlin'
|
| https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content
|
| https://www.notion.so/help/back-up-your-data
|
| > one must justify the development and opportunity costs
|
| GDPR
| idontknowifican wrote:
| yes, markdown
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| 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).
|
| [1] - https://forum.obsidian.md/t/notion-2-obsidian-
| migration-inst...
| jitl wrote:
| (I work at Notion)
|
| We support Markdown/CSV "plain text" export, a semantically-
| rich HTML export, and a PDF export which is just the HTML
| export rendered as a PDF.
|
| https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content
| NemoNobody wrote:
| This was a great ad
| bnjms wrote:
| 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.
| bbkane wrote:
| This was almost exactly my requirements -
| https://www.bbkane.com/blog/how-i-take-notes/
|
| I landed on https://typora.io/ and I've been pretty happy ever
| since
| funOtter wrote:
| I was in your same situation a few years ago. Switched over to
| "Joplin" - works great. Copy/paste screenshots works great. All
| in markdown.
| SN76477 wrote:
| I'm one of those people ... but Notion has let me down too many
| times. I've had to move on.
| BogdanPetre wrote:
| 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
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| 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
| leobabauta wrote:
| I wonder if you notice the lovelessness in hating them and
| pitying them.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Tru. Or maybe I hate them because I love them enough o want
| better. Or maybe I am just cruel and loveless.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| This article reads like an ad.
|
| Perhaps I live under a tech rock, but I have not heard of
| notion before today. And I don't like that it is being shilled.
| hgsgm wrote:
| The website is Technology Review. If course it's an ad.
| waboremo wrote:
| I envy the person who has been able to avoid Notion
| advertising in the past ~5 years.
| tomrod wrote:
| Rare is it that I am envied.
|
| Obsidian I've enjoyed, but find it difficult to become
| fluent with it.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| This is equally bizarre to me, and I haven't used either.
| I definitely hear about Obsidian more on HN and at work
| because coworkers use it.
|
| But knowing what Obsidian is and not Notion is sort of
| like knowing what Markdown is but having never heard of
| Microsoft Word.
| gms7777 wrote:
| 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
| epolanski wrote:
| You and I I believe are the same type of user.
|
| 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.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| 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.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Atlassian's Confluence is apparently launching databases as a
| feature soon. The screenshots I've seen look very similar to
| Notion.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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."
| jeron wrote:
| 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.
| 015a wrote:
| 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.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| 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.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 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.
| jmcphers wrote:
| I'll second this. I use Obsidian and don't find the Canvas
| useful at all, but would love a structured way to query
| data from my vault.
| epolanski wrote:
| Could you expand in more details?
| carimura wrote:
| 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.
| Zetobal wrote:
| You would have loved filemaker back in the day.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| (I work for Notion)
|
| Notion is also "basically just a bunch of lists", plus titles.
| Pages in Notion are a title, and a list of blocks. Text blocks
| are a title (the text of the block) and a list, it's indented
| children.
|
| We also have boards like Trello, and you can drag and drop list
| items between boards, pages, paragraphs, everywhere. Maybe you
| could see it as everything you like about Trello, but applied
| to more modalities of content.
| shafyy wrote:
| What are you talking about? Notion is clearly not just a
| bunch of lists like Trello is.
| samueldurante wrote:
| The implementation of the Notion can be bunch of lists,
| like Trello. However Notion's UI doesn't pass this feeling.
| jitl wrote:
| 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.
|
| I wrote a bit about turning our outliner into a word
| processor here:
| https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1483918085384028163
|
| And also about the data model itself here:
| https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion
| tough wrote:
| 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
| shafyy wrote:
| 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.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Yep can confirm.
|
| 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.
| jdougan wrote:
| Ah, so it mirrors the NLS internals
| eropple wrote:
| It can be, if you want it to be.
|
| https://www.notion.so/templates/kanban-board
|
| 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.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 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.
| calf wrote:
| I'm confused, people have said Notion is a relational
| database. Is that not the same as "trees of lists"?
|
| I thought a relational database like MySQL or whatever is
| formally more powerful than trees and list structures.
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| I tried Notion once to replace a Trello board, but couldn't
| find a way to have cards with checklists inside.
| blitzar wrote:
| > 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".
| epolanski wrote:
| I think it's okay, I use it because it was the first polished
| app I could read and edit notes from so many devices.
|
| But the idea Notion is a 100M business, let alone a 10B valued
| company is madness.
| waboremo wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| > the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all
|
| why?
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > 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!
| iamthirsty wrote:
| 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.
| codpiece wrote:
| 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.
| Jackevansevo wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| (I work for Notion)
|
| This is certainly a trap with any tool with exciting
| possibilities.
|
| I personally don't use any templates; I'm of the "brutalist
| Notion" school of thought. When I want to use Notion for
| something, I start with the simplest possible approach that
| could work. Then I add Notion features if they prove necessary.
| So for something like household chores, I started a Notion page
| called "chores" and just add to-do checkboxes there when
| there's a new task, and at-mention myself or my partner to
| assign things if needed. This is instead of making a database
| with status, assign property etc.
|
| We do use some separate databases for shopping, meal
| planning/recipes, and make larger pages for specific trips.
| Keeping things simple initially and adding complexity where
| it's needed means you never over-invest in a system that's not
| necessary. Plus, every column you add to a database is one more
| bit of work you need to do to "file" something completely. I
| find it discouraging to add friction to stuff I already
| consider a chore that I want to avoid.
| fogoflove wrote:
| 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.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| 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.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > perfecting my .vimrc instead of actually working on projects.
| Messing around with static site blog generators when I should
| actually just be writing content.
|
| I feel attacked.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
| blakblakarak wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| Redmine is amazing! Way underrated.
| https://www.redmine.org/
| spzb wrote:
| > 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.
| huehehue wrote:
| > 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| I've never ever seen this estimation game lead to any
| better planning, ever.
| huehehue wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| 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.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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)
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| jen729w wrote:
| 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.
| asherah wrote:
| i hadn't ever heard of this but this sounds immensely
| helpful. i wish this were a more common practice!
| majormajor wrote:
| This is one of the lowest hanging fruits for generative AI in
| the workplace: let the language model rewrite people's notes
| into the structured form.
| julianlam wrote:
| > 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.
| waboremo wrote:
| 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.
| sveme wrote:
| Now this is a fascinating take, as exactly that thought was
| discussed in a concurrent thread on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35670129
|
| The phenomenon you describe (the configurators instead of
| doers) can be found in the upper right corner of the schema in
| the linked post.
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| Excellent cross-link, thank you! That was not on my front
| pages and I would have missed it.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 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.
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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)
| rvense wrote:
| When I first got into Linux it seemed like a lot of people
| mostly used Linux to configure desktop environments and Conky
| to take screenshots of.
|
| There's a Buddhist parable about someone spending their whole
| life building a boat to cross a small river and dying before
| they made it across.
| shruggedatlas wrote:
| 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.
| rvense wrote:
| That sounds right, thank you for the reference.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| It's right, but I actually really like your paraphrased
| version for this context. It resonated with me.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| 226_ebro_treaty wrote:
| It happened to me :-)
|
| But the older I get, the more I prefer Window's Traditional
| UI. Needless to say, I don't like W11's design choices at
| all.
| bakul wrote:
| 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!
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| At the end of the day, Obsidian is a specialised file
| explorer operating on text files, links, and images. It is
| about as simple as it can get.
|
| It doesn't offer a fraction of what Notion does. The rabbit
| hole is so much shallower.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| 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.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| Sort of? There's a bunch of plugins for Obsidian that
| really do augment the hell out of it, so it's still a
| reasonably deep rabbit hole.
| leoedin wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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".
| sureglymop wrote:
| 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.
| 015a wrote:
| 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.
| charles_f wrote:
| 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?
| fafqg wrote:
| [flagged]
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| dmd wrote:
| 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.
| creamyhorror wrote:
| 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.
| eitland wrote:
| I'm using Logseq for the same reasons.
|
| .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.
| creamyhorror wrote:
| 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.
| eitland wrote:
| 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 ;-)
| creamyhorror wrote:
| 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.
| eitland wrote:
| 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.)
| mdhen wrote:
| I've been using syncthing to sync logseq and it works
| very well.
| eitland wrote:
| I'm considering it.
|
| 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?
| citizenkeen wrote:
| 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.
| protortyp wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| foxandmouse wrote:
| The latest version of apple notes is great, but drafts has
| been the pkm tool I've been the happiest with.
| harryf wrote:
| 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
| jwestbury wrote:
| The tool you have is usually the most efficient. Sometimes
| that's not true, but it's especially true if it's a tool you
| have _everywhere_.
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| podviaznikov wrote:
| made a tiny app to link notes in apple notes
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35698521.
|
| mostly use it myself
| runjake wrote:
| I think your link is wrong. This link is to the post
| itself?
| waboremo wrote:
| 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.
| jeron wrote:
| You can recognize the productivity junkie by the amount of
| tools they tell you they've tried
| dmd wrote:
| Hi, I'm Daniel, and I'm a todo list software addict
| Jorslu wrote:
| You have described the 2010's for me succinctly. Wow.
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| >The 23 minute video linked on the "ultimate notion setup for
| 2023" sounds like a great trap to fall into to not actually get
| anything done. I get the impression some people spend more time
| configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being
| productive.
|
| This is me with emacs.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It's the 2020 equivalent of getting your perfect vim or eMacs
| config maybe?
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| 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.
| splatzone wrote:
| Relevant: Andy Matuschak: People who write extensively about
| note-writing rarely have a serious context of use
|
| https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzX...
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