Very Early First Impressions of Notion for Productivity
Keeping notes, research, todo lists and habit trackers — to name a few — for the longest time has been relegated to a slew of various apps, notebooks and whiteboards. There is my daily whiteboard of my Big Three tasks that I want to accomplish each day as well as smaller sub-tasks that would be nice to get finished. I read various articles throughout the course of the day and save snippets to read later in Bear as well as take notes and keep track of various research and thoughts. I start my morning by journaling in the Day One journal, which I love. I start my work-day with my Things todo list and also house my personal project checklists and grocery lists in there. Finally, I post all my research findings and create a network of thoughts using Roam Research.
Every single one of these various tools serves their purpose and has been carefully selected over the years as being the best for what I need. Once an avid Wunderlist user and Evernote junkie, I made a massive switch in the middle of last year to a new system. I am constantly looking for ways to improve my processes without forsaking simplicity. Typically, I do not like all-in-one systems which is why I have a varied app collection that each do one thing very well. The problem is, without a decent amount of work and effort on my part, I cannot connect all of them in a usable way. I hate to give away the farm but it’s looking like Notion to the rescue.
Why Bother?
In the last few months I have been on a quest to really begin to balance what I am calling the C3 Model of Creativity. I must admit, I gave it an albeit somewhat lame name but the first place I heard this codified into a simple model was this excellent article by Annie Mueller. As creative folks we should strive to strike a balance among consumption, curation and creation. I believe the first speaks for itself, the consumption of content, be it movies, music, paintings, photos or what-have-you. The second is curation. I like to think of this as creating playlists in Apple Music or something similarly creative where you are not the originator but instead a curator that repackages content for others to consume. The final part of the model is creation and this is anything where you are the originator.
For a long time, outside of my daily work on Bloxels, I have been living in the first two pillars of the aforementioned creative model. Recently, I decided to begin to strike more of a balance in this regard and focus more heavily on creating original content, namely videos, podcast episodes and music. As part of this new creative journey, I have been in need of organizing my creative life a bit more and have been striving to pull everything under one central umbrella in some way.
Notion - All in One
After hearing about notion for over a year now and seeing it used by some of my favorite content creators and productivity-focused folks, I finally broke down and decided to give it a real shot. Starting a new system is tough as you are stuck in your current ways and there are inevitably drawbacks and learning curves that can set you off your focus. Surprisingly so far, Notion has been a delight to use and I am extremely impressed with how robust it is while still maintaining a simplicity I enjoy.
An example database I have set up in Notion for tracking the Remote with Rob & Dan schedule.
What honestly amazes me with the platform is how well it handles various types of input. I have only just begun to get all my projects and databases set up but I find myself enjoying the process of creating inside Notion.
Not surprisingly, there is an amazing community of folks using Notion and sharing their templates, approaches and thoughts along the way. Also not surprising, there are a plethora of YouTube videos of some of the best productivity folks around talking about Notion and how they use it.
How I Use Notion (So Far)
While I am still new to Notion and everything it has to offer, I have spent a bit of time moving some of my workflow to the new platform. For me, there are a few areas of recording information that are vital in my daily workflow.
Daily Todos
Weekly Agenda (Goals)
Research Notes
Curation of “I’ll read this later” content
Books I want to read
Articles / videos I come across that inspire me
New products that I want to try
Content schedule (podcasts, videos, blogs)
Idea tracking
Hyper-specific work todos and inbox (pay this bill, call that person)
So far, Notion has me covered on all fronts. I have created what they call databases for my content schedules. I have a daily todos section as well as a weekly agenda, with reminders if I do not want to forget something time-sensitive. The Notion Web Clipper is an excellent Chrome extension for grabbing articles and adding them to their corresponding page in Notion. Finally, the Markdown integration and keyboard shortcuts make taking notes and doing research extremely easy. I will say that so far, my favorite feature is the ability to embed a webpage into a page in Notion. For example, for the next video I am working on, I am doing some research into the concept of Flow as popularized by the research and book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I was able to embed an article I didn’t want to forget directly into my notes.
Final Thoughts
I will absolutely be writing a follow-up article after I’ve had around 30 days with Notion but I must say that so far, it is looking like I will be replacing a handful of apps to focus on just one. The only app I will not be replacing any time soon is my Day One Journal as I enjoy it immensely and I cannot imagine replacing it anytime soon. For now, I would suggest checking out Notion and giving it a whirl, I think you will be pleasantly surprised with how nice it is to use should you have a need for any of the features I have listed here.