This is the start of a series on my Notion architecture for various life management systems. To see the full series, please visit the home page, Productivity In Notion.
I'm really not one to shill for new software. Generally when I try a new piece of software, I am unimpressed. And as a general rule, I presume most people are able to choose the software that works best for them, and often have an aversion to switching to a new software or app.
That's why there's a good rule of thumb that new software needs to be a big step ahead of existing options for the challenger software to eat away at the incumbent. Good incumbents adapt as challengers appear (think Microsoft), while others will inevitably be replaced (think MySpace).
And it's with that preamble that I want to tell you about our lord and savior focus for today, Notion. I've tried many different apps for a combination of personal note-taking, project tracking, habit building, journaling, and writing. This includes: Trello, ToDoist, One Note, Microsoft Word, Evernote, Plain Text Documents, a bushel of Habit Trackers.
Here's the thing: Notion replaces all of them. That is a big step ahead. Since finally downloading it about 10 days ago, I've been spending most of my non-work waking hours building out my Notion workspace and importing all the threads I have in various other sources.
Notion is hard to succinctly describe. But if you were to describe it, it's a sexy mashup of note-taking (like OneNote or Evernote) with easy-to-use tables that come with database functionality and can easily be transformed into other views: kanban boards, galleries, calendars, etc.
Okay, so maybe that wasn't that succinct. Nor does it fully describe the wonders of Notion. As with many things, showing may be better than telling.
One beauty of Notion is that you can organize things however you like, and it is also easy to change that organization once you do. For me, I've opted to treat any effort (large or small) as a "project". Each project thus is an entry in a large table:
But a prettier way to look at them is in a "gallery" view:
So each project (there are many) has a few properties about it (shown above the page status and project status), and then have an entire page of its own that can then have its own tables and pictures and more!
Case-in-point: let's go to my "Learning Hub." This isn't fully built out yet, but will contain my notes as I go through learning various topics: