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Notion.io is my new favorite
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Posted by Luhmann
Nov 27, 2021 at 07:26 AM
I never much liked Notion for note taking or managing my tasks, etc. (I do all of that in Logseq now), but it has some nice features I do use:
1. Website
Notion makes it easy to create your own website with a custom *.notion.site URL. I moved my Obsidian Publish site over here because it is actually much easier to manage. Everything looks exactly the same in the app and on the site, and changes are published instantly.
2. Sharing
Notion makes it very easy to share private pages with my students, which is great for teaching. Even better, anyone with an academic email address can get a free premium subscription.
So I use Notion for my academic webpage and for sharing lecture notes with students and it has been working pretty well, but there are so many things about the UX for Notion that drive me crazy. The worst thing for me is how it handles creating new pages, which (unlike Roam or Logseq or Obsidian) are not just links in your text, but have some kind of special status, making them hard to move, and if you delete them you also delete the page they link to. (You can recover them from the trash, but this keeps happening to me because I’m so used to Logseq…)
Posted by steveylang
Dec 14, 2021 at 05:31 PM
It didn’t take me long to set up my Notion workspace to my liking, with occasional small tweaks here and there to further optimize. No decisions feel too constraining as everything is pretty malleable- it’s very easy to convert a list of items into a toggle list, or into its own page, or into database entries (or its own database), and back and forth. It’s also really easy to work with Kanban boards since they are just another view you can use with any database.
My major complaint about Notion right now is cloud-only data. I’m not that worried about occasionally dropping out of cell coverage or whatever, it’s more that I feel the lag in my day to day use at my desk or at home. Every time you click through to a page, it loads like a web page (which it literally is I guess) instead of a regular app.
I’m playing around with Obsidian right now, it’s a shame though as if Notion had local data storage I would have no significant complaints about it.
MadaboutDana wrote:
I do like Notion – very much – but you’ve hit the nail on
>the head: always beware of an app where you may end up spending more
>time playing with the ingenious possibilities offered by the app than
>actually managing your information in it!
>
>So after some playing with Notion, I have reluctantly abandoned it.
>
>steveylang wrote:
>Notion is turning out to be pretty amazing for my use- deep, versatile,
>>and a ton of resources online (templates, Youtube tutorials, etc.) I
>>guess this forum is Outliner Software.com, but on a general level we
>are
>>really talking about hierarchies (and types) of information, and Notion
>>lets you work in so many ways.
>>
>>Pages of pages, databases of pages, pages of databases, toggles,
>>columns, etc. all give me a lot of freedom to structurally and visually
>>organize information the way I want. You have to be careful to not
>spend
>>too much time just working on the app itself (rather than your
>content),
>>but once I have an idea for something it’s usually not hard to
>>implement. Also, you can create templates for everything, so once you
>>make some building blocks they are easily repeatable.
>>
>>Not only are there are a lot of building blocks at your disposal, but
>>everything is very malleable and can be changed on the fly. Folding
>text
>>or other objects with toggles, converting selected text into a subpage
>>and vice versa, turning pages into database items and vice versa,
>>organizing info into columns, all is very easy to do. With the new API
>>it also didn’t take me long to find/adapt some iOS Shortcuts for either
>>typing or recording (with or without transcription) new Inbox items
>>without going into the app, as well as forwarding emails into Notion.
>>
>>It took the free personal account for me to be able to figure this all
>>out, there’s no way I could have learned this only playing around with
>>say a 50 item limit.
>>
>>I still am not sure what happens as I add more and more information
>into
>>Notion, but I don’t think it should be inherently more unmanageable
>than
>>other apps.
>>