A Beautiful Notion

There are more productivity apps than there are people who want to be productive. I spent a considerable amount of time this year to juggle through various such personal productivity apps. From To-Do lists, Kanban boards, calendars, habit trackers, and whatnot. Like most of the people, I wasted (read invested) more time in trying a range of things instead of working on them in a more practical sense. I also delved real deep into GTD and PARA and Zettelkasten processes and which process or combination could achieve the best results. I tried multiple ways to find out which app could do the most justice to it. Some apps can do one thing better, others can do another thing better. And as more the number of applications grows, the more the anxiety which grows with it. My search finally ended on one app: Notion. This is a Notion appreciation post. #NotPaidBlogpost

Notion is an app that is the right app for the right time. It is a combination of many things that can help you remember more things, store more information, help you reach your goals, and track things for you.

Here are a few points which make it one of my favorite finds this year:

One-Stop App

  • Notion is a one-stop application for taking notes, creating databases (tables with interlinking), kanban boards, gallery, to-do lists, and the list is endless.
  • For me, it replaced the need for having a note-taking app like Evernote, a bookmarking app like any browser’s bookmarks, a lists app like Google Keep, a To-Do list App like Todoist or Google Keep or Microsoft Todo, a task tracker like Trello and so on. It can handle everything with ease.

Note-Taking

  • Note-taking is really important to me because the brain can handle that much, right. Notion was the only app I used to take study notes and that worked like charm. In fact, it actually has some great templates which helped me learned to take notes in a better way. Read this.
  • The only shortcoming here is that I couldn’t directly draw into a Notion page as I can do on Evernote. Maybe that’s one opportunity there for it.

Idea Pad

  • The mind is a wonderful thing. It can run into all directions when it has to stay calm. There might be many ideas germinating in it and ideas can generate any time. Notion helped me a lot in jotting them down, create metadata out of it, made them look really good, and made them easily actionable.
  • You can make here your Watch List, your Reading List, your wiki, and anything you want to keep track of.

Bonus

You could use Notion as your website too. Everything is on cloud and all the pages can be shared (like Dropbox Paper).

To summarize, in last 6 months the one app which has actually helped tremendously is Notion. I strongly recommended to anyone who deals with multiple things together and wants to find a way to have them all at one place. The free version has everything you need. Students might also get the pro plan for free if their university is in Notion’s list of eligible universities.

There are some more apps like this like Airtable but Notion, for me, is here to stay.

Happy note taking!

Published by Abhinav Bhatt