Anyone here tried this? It's a rare combination of intuitive (it just works) interface like OneNote/Google Docs but it allows for a LOT of depth. It's on all the platforms (except Linux I think but the browser interface is very good) and the sync works really well. I can even have multiple desktop windows open which is very important for cross-linking purposes as I'll explain why that's particularly important below.

It's hard to do a comparison to anything else because it's a blank canvas that lets you design your system how you want because it enables a whole different way of doing things. It's thing is to nest objects within pages that can contain a mix of free form and structured content arranged on a canvas. Also, you can create relational databases where each item IS US a full-featured linkable/nestable page just like everything else. This makes for a great combo of quick note-taking with the ability to add a fully-custom metadata index. And that metadata can be so much more than a simple index because it can be a part of a full RELATIONAL database! It's like Airtable and OneNote had a baby.

A simple example would be keeping a reading journal/book list. You create a database of books and add as many descriptive fields as you want (author, isbn, rating, priority, category, etc). You can toggle that view into kanban or calendar (a now-common feature among the new breed of 'user-friendly' databases like Airtable). You can even NEST a filtered view of that reading database inline within any other page like say a weekly plan. To get even more specific, you could jot down a new favorite quote from your book notes (that is itself indexed within your 'book' database). The quote is embedded 'inline' with the rest of that book's content. But this quote itself can BE an item within a different 'quotes' database! Can that quotes database have a field that is cross references it with your 'books' database? You bet your a$$ it can!

The part I'm currently struggling with is this 'infinite nesting' feature, which is also the secret sauce. Stuff can show up in many different places (usually called cloning, transclution, or logical linking around these parts). And that is the case whether it serves as just a page or as an item within a database. The hierarchy on the left takes some getting used to. I'm used to just being able to drag and drop note pages in different places in the hierarchy two-paner style where a note's place within a tree is independent of its content. For Notion, the 'children' items in the hierarchy tree are a representation of what objects are embedded inside the CONTENT of the 'parent' page.

At first this really confused me because you can drag and drop notes around within the hiearchy to re-organize your content. But then you notice pages automatically appear as hierarchy children as you create/link to them from within a parent page's content. Then you notice that both 'native' subpages and 'dragged and dropped' subpages look exactly the same under the parent in the hierarchy tree. Well it turns out that is because they ARE exactly the same things because 'nesting' an item vie drag and drop really means that a clone of the item has been embedded within the content of your target. It'll appear inside there alongside the 'natively created' items. It took me a while to realize this which is why I'm describing it in such detail here to save someone else that leap. I'm not aware of any other software that does something like that. Imagine two two icons on your desktop, 'bill.txt' and 'ted.txt'. Then imagine dropping the 'bill' icon on 'ted' and the result is 'bill' being appended to the end of the teds content. But it wouldn't be bill's actual content inside ted, just an icon that represents bill which is still it's own separate content but he's now nested within ted as if ted is a folder AND note page....and bill can be other places too... ok I've confused myself.

Another example of this 'editing page content without opening that page' is that if you drag and drop an item onto another item all within the same page then that dropped item actually is transferred to that destination page via the icon acting like a bucket and the hierarchy to the left will reflect the new logical location. In fact dragging a page item to an item on the tree vs an item link in the page is the exact same result.

So lets say I have a project page containing a bunch of subtasks that also happen to be their own pages and therefore 'nested' under the project item. I can reference that project in as many other pages I want and it will show up along with its children-tasks as true clones under each one of those items in the hierarchy. Any edits will be reflected within every instance. Unfortunately, Notion isn't good at telling you all the pages any particular item appears in which limits using deep cloning AS your structure like you can do with Ultra Recall. It can be confusing to remember if you are currently in a cloned branch or the original branch. There is a 'show path breadcrumb' you can insert anywhere in the page which will show the item's ACTUAL home. Also it always shows you the current item path at the top which is nice because that 'real' path frequently doesn't reflect where you actually are. So you can always tell IF you are currently looking at a clone and where that clone's true home is, but you can't automatically see if other clones exist.

I've been testing some workarounds for the lack of 'what links to here'. The simplest answer isn't a workaround at all, just make sure every note is a database item and link them common fields. Then all backlinks are automatic because it's a friggin relational database. Not so simple for your basic in-line wiki references to non-database items though. That requires a manual step of copying reference links. For database items, I like to put these links into a custom 'related items' field, for non-database items, I just have a page section to dump in 'parent' item links as a reminder of all it's cloned locations. I like to have two windows open at the same time. That makes cross linking and embedding new database items within pages really easy.

Honestly it's such a unique animal that I'm constantly running up against my old habits and assumptions about how to structure content that are no longer necessary. I'm hoping I can recruit some other CRIMPers to play around with more ways to use it. The intended audience is for group projects and wikis for corporate 'creative' types. Also the database functionality is a recent update. So the vast majority of users aren't pushing it's potential and there aren't many examples of how to leverage this deceptively powerful platform.

LOL, I got the name wrong. It's www.notion.so, not .io.

@nathanb wrote

Anyone here tried this?

These threads might be interesting

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6196/0/notionso

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8143/0/notionso-updated

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/7697/0/notion

nathanb wrote:

LOL, I got the name wrong. It's www.notion.so, not .io.

For some reason, I'm getting an error message for this web address.

Here is the correct link:
https://www.notion.so/

Best,
Dominik

Dominik Holenstein wrote:

Here is the correct link:
https://www.notion.so/

Best,
Dominik

Many thanks, Dominik.

Paul Korm wrote:

@nathanb wrote
>Anyone here tried this?

These threads might be interesting

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6196/0/notionso

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8143/0/notionso-updated

https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/7697/0/notion

Thanks Paul! I really need to practice searching here more often. I'm too used to other forums organized like a directory. Sorry for the extra noise.

nathanb wrote:

Paul Korm wrote:

>@nathanb wrote
>>Anyone here tried this?
>
>These threads might be interesting
>
>https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6196/0/notionso
>
>https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8143/0/notionso-updated
>
>https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/7697/0/notion
>

Thanks Paul! I really need to practice searching here more often. I'm
too used to other forums organized like a directory. Sorry for the
extra noise.

Just scanned through those threads. Spot-on in general. Without the database function that they introduced this year (April-ish) this is only a good candidate for users who just want simplicity for group-projects and light content. What the average user might call a 'company wiki' when it's really just a user-editable web-site. rant rant-over

I wouldn't even consider using it without the database tables to help organize things. It's way too easy to nest and transclude yourself into a big mess since it doesn't have other global metadata to help keep everything herded. But once you start messing around with big page layouts and playing with how to embed things and apply structure via database in a free-form way.... Usually every app I use begs the question "I wish it could do this" then you change your workflow to live with that limit. The more I use Notion the better I get at designing out those walls and design the app to match my workflow instead of the other way around.

Notion's target user is clearly casual and it's super slick and pretty because of that. Hopefully enough of the 'ooh shiny' crowd will sign up for it to keep the platform going. It's a lot like Excel's usage, where 95% of users just make lists and basic sums with it. They don't understand the quantum leap in capability that the equations/macros/programming can give them and they'll never bother to explore that. It seems like Notion's database feature is just like Excel's power features...unappreciated by most but for those of us who can see the possibilities it's a 'holy crap!' moment.

Maybe I'm just excited that FOR ONCE, a slick, 'dumbed down' cloud based app offers much deeper capability for more adventurous users instead of catering to the lowest-common denominator user. Microsoft has spent 11 years stripping OneNote down in the name of 'usability'. They SHOULD have added this kind of Database functionality like Notion did years ago but they didn't have the imagination. There's a lot of depth for power users with this new breed of 'make your own cloud database' apps like Airtable, Notion, Quip,Coda, etc. Hopefully that marks a turning point where won't have to constantly choose between 'modern-but-simple' and 'classic-but-powerful' when finding new homes for our data.

It’s hard to do a comparison to anything else because it’s a blank canvas

For me that's a bit of a downside. I like my apps to have more obvious structure with which to work, though that may not be the case for others. I had a lot of trouble getting up to speed with Ableton Live until I was able to use (and understand) some templates created by a user to quickly start work. Notion reminds me of this.

Notion's definitely gunning to be a techie darling with the Apple tech-pioneer interviews it's posting on its Youtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoSvlWS5XcwaSzIcbuJ-Ysg/videos

and its sponsorship deals with productivity bloggers like Francesco Dalessio, who posts most of the content I've seen online for the product, after switching from Todoist.

Just wondering how people are getting on with Notion. I've bee trialing it all day. My take is that the whole is not egual to the sum of its parts. By that I mean, I love so many of the features Notion offers, but putting it all together it feels like a bit of a mess. Maybe it is better for groups and collaborating. I've just been using it as an individual.

A couple of examples of my frustration with it. I created an agenda for a meeting, then found that I could only print it through PDF and it includes all the fluff that isn't necessary to actually having an agenda. So I tried to export it -- you can only export as markdown. I'm okay with that, but when I opened the .md file in iA Writer, all I had on screen was a salad of unintelligible symbols. I ended up retyping the whole thing in Word.

I looked for some video tutorials, but didn't find anything that was particularly helpful.

Can someone tell me something that would encourage me to continue trying to master Notion? Is there a good set of tutorial videos somewhere on the web? I didn't find any on the Notion website.

Thanks for any help (or, for that matter, validation that my initial reaction to Notion is right).

Steve Z.

Can someone tell me something that would encourage me to continue trying
to master Notion? Is there a good set of tutorial videos somewhere on
the web? I didn't find any on the Notion website.

'https://notionpages.com is the only Notion community I'm aware of. It hasn't been around very long but does seem to have good action. It links to a facebook community page that is actually pretty lively. I hate fb but find myself logging in once a week or so to scan that group's posts and always pick up good tips.

Notion themselves put out a pretty good twitter thread on how their database roll-up works https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1042842519845781504

This dude has put out a lot of solid videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zti4m-cZuKo&feature=youtu.be . Though he's doing it to peddle a skilshare course (which may be quite worthwhile). Also his stuff is a good overview of how pretty and organized you can make the pages look and gives good ideas on how different setups might look. But he's not doing anything creative at all (as far as I can tell) with the database functionality. In fact there's a few things he demonstrates as 'dumb layouts' that could have easily been cross-linked 'smart layouts' within notion.

I remember seeing a really strong demonstration of someone using it the right way for project management but of course can't find that link right now. He made several dashboards showing filtered views of databases within a page which is the kind of thing notion is uniquely suited for.

A good example of how it offers a unique spin on things is including views of tables within a page of other stuff. For example, I've always wanted to perfect some sort of unified 'today' list which includes stuff from task/project lists flagged scheduled for today, but also show daily checklist/routines/habits etc I'm trying to track and remind myself of. With notion you can build a really slick daily/weekly control template with static areas of dumb checklists and stuff but also show a filtered view of one or several task/project databases which is a 'live' dashboard of a real database.

It's great for reading notes since you can build a metadata-filled index of books/articles, but have unlimited deep notes capabilities to contain a reading log for each item. You can then include a view of your reading/learning list that is flagged as 'currently doing' as a filtered view within a larger 'life dashboard'.

You can build a favorite quotes database. Then you can embed those individual quotes (because they are a page AND a database item) within your reading notes. The one thing about this process that I think is holding notion back is that there isn't an automatic 'what links to here' view. The database item/page itself won't tell you 'hey I'm mentioned in all these places'. You can make workarounds of course, like create a field to contain links to pages that mention that item. But that is a manual process.

Obviously this isn't nearly as powerful as dedicated qda software. I wouldn't try to write a thesis with it. It's great for personal reading lists and any other 'light database' capability that can be embedded willy-nilly within a solid cross-platform note taker.

My wife and I are house hunting right now and sharing a notion table for that is working really well. That way I can add a level of geekiness to it (it quantifies several subjective ranking categories in addition to other metadata) that she would normally be annoyed by because it usually requires a much clunkier interface. But she has no issues adding items to this database or dealing with any part of it. Since you can add attachments, it can make for a pretty good special-purpose repository for things like receipts and manuals. I wouldn't use it as a general file repository since it's too clunky for that. I think it'd be great for shared shopping lists and as a recipe database.

One big thing it's missing on mobile is shortcuts to pages or any sort of 'quick entry' like you can do with most the task managers and evernote/onenote. You mentioned some other ways that it's 'I/O' is somewhat lacking and that is definitely a drawback. That's the main reason I'm not using it as my daily task manager right now.

BTW, I've read your connected text articles and they really helped me learn what can be done with knowledge-management software in the right hands. By making several attempts, I have learned that I'm either too dumb or too undisciplined to be able to properly take advantage of the really geeky stuff. So you are coming at this with much deeper skill-set. I am curious if you'll find a clever use for it that you aren't already doing with something else.

I've been playing around with it the last few days too and haven't formed a definitive opinion myself, but re printing: Did you try printing using the browser's print functions? Worked for me. You don't have to print to PDF.

Nathan,

Thank you for the encouragement and suggestions for tutorials. I've found a couple of good resources for Notion tutorial videos (perhaps who you were referring to):

https://www.youtube.com/user/rebannford

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnYP1nUFONc8N6aemW-INdQ

I found these two presenters easier to follow than the guy you referred to. He seems to assume that viewers have a higher Notion IQ than I have.

Steve Z.

Notion.so is the product I wanted to like but eventually decided not to use it. I found I spent too much time “organize” or “structure” the notes instead of focusing on note itself.

Yes. I can see that.

I really want to like Notion. I admire the feature set, and the ambition of the developers.

But.

It is easier to build pages than it is to take notes. Also, getting information out of Notion in a useable format seems a real challenge.

I have found small annoyances, too. For example, I wanted to add a simple table to a page, with two columns: Date and Record. But Notion requires a "Title" column, which I have no need of.

The small issues will probably be ironed out, I imagine. But I also fear that Notion is doomed to fail. It is too complex for most people. I can't imagine the difficulty of getting the whole company workforce comfortable using it. I've tried to get people on my board of directors to use collaboration software that is much easier than Notion, and had to abandon the effort.

I hope I am wrong about this. As I said, I admire the developers for coming up with a new paradigm. I do hope they succeed.

Steve Z.

Reder wrote:

Notion.so is the product I wanted to like but eventually decided not to
use it. I found I spent too much time “organize” or
“structure” the notes instead of focusing on note itself.

Ha, yes, the "Board of Directors" test! Good luck with that - senior managers are undoubtedly the best/worst possible testing group of all!

I've tried so many solutions for client extranets that have fallen by the wayside because, despite initial enthusiasm, the client has never actually got around to using the concept (or fully understanding it).

Somewhat to my surprise, the system that's recently been successfully adopted by a bunch of Brits in France involved in an anti-Brexit group -- so a very varied range of users -- is Samepage (samepage.io). After the success of this, I tried using Samepage as an extranet system with some colleagues, and they also hugely preferred it to e.g. Slack, Tipi and other "communication" platforms.

Why was I surprised? Because Samepage is actually quite sophisticated (even though they've dumbed it down since it was known as Kerio Workspace); I wasn't expecting users to get to grips with it as fast as (most of them) have done. The chat feature has been especially popular.

Samepage is a very useful platform for small groups; the "Free" option is perfectly adequate if you're not exchanging vast quantities of information. Although 10 pages sounds like a significant limitation, they are web pages, not Word pages, so you can fit an awful lot of information onto a page (if you want to).

Cheers,
Bill

Hi, Bill,

Ironically, the collaboration software I was referring to, which my board didn't get on board (sorry for the pun) with, was Samepage. I liked it, as did a few other members of the board. I do think it was the most comprehensible (as well as pretty comprehensive) solution, and that was three or four years ago -- it has probably only gotten better. The kind people at Samepage even gave us a free subscription, because we were a small nonprofit.

Steve

MadaboutDana wrote:

Ha, yes, the "Board of Directors" test! Good luck with that - senior
managers are undoubtedly the best/worst possible testing group of all!

I've tried so many solutions for client extranets that have fallen by
the wayside because, despite initial enthusiasm, the client has never
actually got around to using the concept (or fully understanding it).

Somewhat to my surprise, the system that's recently been successfully
adopted by a bunch of Brits in France involved in an anti-Brexit group
-- so a very varied range of users -- is Samepage (samepage.io). After
the success of this, I tried using Samepage as an extranet system with
some colleagues, and they also hugely preferred it to e.g. Slack, Tipi
and other "communication" platforms.

Why was I surprised? Because Samepage is actually quite sophisticated
(even though they've dumbed it down since it was known as Kerio
Workspace); I wasn't expecting users to get to grips with it as fast as
(most of them) have done. The chat feature has been especially popular.

Samepage is a very useful platform for small groups; the "Free" option
is perfectly adequate if you're not exchanging vast quantities of
information. Although 10 pages sounds like a significant limitation,
they are web pages, not Word pages, so you can fit an awful lot of
information onto a page (if you want to).

Cheers,
Bill

Just wondering how folks are getting along with Notion. I just took another look at it after getting an upgrade (to version 2.5) notice from the developer. I was pleased to see that since the last time I checked, they have added a pretty decent Markdown export option. So just wondering if those who have liked it continue to like it.

Thanks.

Steve Z

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Just wondering how folks are getting along with Notion. I just took
another look at it after getting an upgrade (to version 2.5) notice from
the developer.

I'm glad to see that Notion is being improved at fast pace. But I'm still waiting for Notion to support recurring reminders before giving it a serious try. It seems recurring reminders are "on their radar"… so who knows, we will maybe get that for 3.0.

https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1044071518043496454

‑Alex

You may already know this, but it is possible to embed an app like TickTick in a Notion page, so you can manage notes that way. Honestly, I have no idea if this is advantageous or not... which is how I feel about much of Notion, which looks impressive, but seems like it might be more work than it is worth.

Alessandro Vernet wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Just wondering how folks are getting along with Notion. I just took
>another look at it after getting an upgrade (to version 2.5) notice
from
>the developer.

I'm glad to see that Notion is being improved at fast pace. But I'm
still waiting for Notion to support recurring reminders before giving it
a serious try. It seems recurring reminders are "on their radar"…
so who knows, we will maybe get that for 3.0.

https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1044071518043496454

‑Alex

I meant to add this link to a video about integrating TickTick with Notion:

https://youtu.be/ZfgYww_tqKY

It's a little meandering.

Steve Z

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Honestly, I
have no idea if this is advantageous or not... which is how I feel about
much of Notion, which looks impressive, but seems like it might be more
work than it is worth.

A thousand times this. Notion.so does indeed look very cool. So do many apps like it. But what does it really do for us?

JakeBernsteinWA wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Honestly, I
>have no idea if this is advantageous or not... which is how I feel
about
>much of Notion, which looks impressive, but seems like it might be more
>work than it is worth.
>

A thousand times this. Notion.so does indeed look very cool. So do many
apps like it. But what does it really do for us?

I wanted to like Notion. But I don't want to maintain and manage and prune a personal wiki, which is what this really is. It's a solution to a problem I don't have, when I'm mostly interested in cross-platform text (short-form and long-form) that conforms to varying degrees of outline support.

The main value in Notion IMHO over a traditional wiki is that it's really built on a database model, rather than a traditional wiki model. There's a whole layer of it that you can treat as a hierarchical wiki, without encountering the database stuff at all, but everything (even pages that don't look like database pages) are database items. So for people who find building inter-linked networks of web pages too much effort/cognitive overload, you can just create pages, let them exist in little siloed mini-databases (again, these are part of the big database), and find, filter, and manipulate them as database items rather than cross-linked wiki pages. And several of the database views are more useful than traditional database views, like kanban boards.

The other big innovation in Notion is how it treats relationships between pages. Everything, including database items (everything is a database item) can have a hierarchy of sub-items. In some respects this is a little reminiscent of Ecco.

Recent versions of Notion also allow grouping heterogenous file types in database attributes rather than in the main content of an item, which is pretty handy too.

It's one of those tools that you can be creative with pretty easily.

I use Notion every day.

While it isn't perfect, what I love about it is that it lets me create my own solutions for myself and my clients. I usually describe it to people as database meets wiki. I use it for task management, CRM, workflow process management, checklists and a lot more.