The potentially exaggerated news of Evernote’s demise caused me to install Notion, and I’ve been trialling it in August. I started out a bit sceptical – I didn’t like the encouragement to use emojis everywhere or the huge font. I was confused by the page vs sub-page vs database structure. It also seems to have a huge ‘community’ which irrationally puts me off. I like to discover things that other people haven’t discovered. 🧐
Three weeks on, I’m more or less converted. I love the ability to create a network of sorts of notes with backlinks, mentions and synced blocks. The databases are revolutionary for someone coming from Evernote where I had tried to create a similar structure with tags. Tags aren’t versatile enough, however, and it’s wonderful to be able to collect the same kind of note into one table and decide what properties make sense for that particular table.
In other personal technology news, I think it’s time to admit I’ve developed a phone problem. It manifests itself in the evenings when the children have gone to bed, i.e. prime time for any personal pursuits. My Achilles’ heel is those stupid articles where they collect funny memes from the internet (’15 times when someone didn’t know who they were talking to’), and some sorry soul has written a whole article explaining the memes. ‘Johnny thought he was doing a big favour to the woman at the gas pump, but he soon knew otherwise. It just goes to show, blah blah blah.’ Obviously, no one reads the bits in between, but this extremely brainless content gets me when I’m weak.
Cal swears by leaving your phone by the door, but I haven’t come up with a rule like that. It’s got to happen, though. I’m all for wasting time, but it should at least feel enjoyable – what I get sucked into is close to zero value.
[…] any case, Notion was so wonderful in my old job because there were several different categories of things to keep track of – […]