Notion.io is my new favorite

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.

Posted by satis
Aug 16, 2018 at 08:58 PM

> 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.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 1, 2018 at 08:44 PM

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.

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