Why I Organize My Life with Notion and Why You Should, Too
Using Notion is like having a personal assistant for my day-to-day life. It‘s an all-in-one productivity app that I’ve been using for 2+ years (for free!). It has been a tremendous help in organizing both my professional and personal life. If you’re new to Notion, I hope this article could help you get a glimpse of what Notion is and what it's capable of, and maybe, consider using it too!
What is Notion?
Notion is an all-in-one workspace that, at its core, is comprised of a block-based document editor and a really powerful database feature.
For me, what makes Notion really special is its remarkable customizability. You’ll be able to personalize your workspaces to support almost virtually any kind of personal or collaborative workspace needs.
Notion’s basic plan is free! And for me, the features that came with the basic plan are more than enough for my day-to-day personal uses.
I myself use Notion for:
- Personal task management
- Personal goal tracking
- Idea brainstorming
- Requirement documents
- Development progress tracking
- Team wiki
- And many more…
Why Notion?
Below I highlighted five benefits that I believe you could be able to benefit too from using Notion:
1. A highly customizable and powerful task management tool
Just as with other document editor platforms, you can easily create bullet points or checklist items on a Notion to manage your day-to-day tasks. But it is when the Notion database feature is utilized, that task management in Notion really shines.
Notion databases have a wide range of views to choose from ranging from a typical list view, a table, or a calendar view. These views allow me to view and interact with a database in various ways according to my needs.
Aside from the wide range of views, Notion databases possess a sophisticated filtering system as well. Based on various data that a task data entry has (e.g. last updated date, labels, deadline date), I can filter them to show the data I want to see, where I want them, and when I want them to appear.
Below is my ‘mission control’ page — my centralized to-do-list dashboard that displays the tasks I need to do on a day. I utilized a list view and implemented a filter that instructed the list to only display tasks that are scheduled to be completed on the current day.
When I want to have a more bird-eye view of my tasks beyond the current day, I would view the task database via its calendar view:
2. It's very easy to share your work and collaborate on it
It is very easy to share what you created on Notion with others. Every page is equipped with a share button that allows you to generate a public link that can be shared. Other people who receive the public link can simply open and view the page via their web browsers. (you don’t have to be a Notion user to be able to open the page)
On the free plan of Notion, you can also invite up to 5 guests to work collaboratively on a page.
3. A very flexible notetaking and thought capturing tool
Rahim Makani, Match Group’s Director of Product explains it best:
“Notion is a workspace that adapts to your needs. It’s as minimal or as powerful as you need it to be.”
In Notion, capturing your thoughts can be as simple as typing basic text on a page or as powerful as utilizing a personalized database view. This flexibility provides me with various different methods of capturing thoughts, data, or any other important insights that suit different scenarios.
For instance, I can create a personalized database board view for planning and keeping track of online courses I want to take:
In other cases, I can simply create an unstructured workspace for easy note-taking for random and miscellaneous things:
And in Notion, it is always easy to evolve any blocks to a more sophisticated one as the need arises. For example, I can turn any text blocks from my random inbox page into a page of its own when I wanted to:
Having the right balance of capturing difficulty and data structure complexity is very important in building a good notetaking habit. You don’t want to lose important insights simply because you feel that it is too much hassle to take note of it or because the data structure is not sophisticated enough.
4. Abundance of learning resources
Notion may be daunting at first. But do not worry, there are a lot of free resources to bring you up to speed. You can find a lot of amazing tutorials from Notion themselves and from the many dedicated and talented Notion content creators and evangelists as well.
These are free Notion learning resources that I recommend:
5. Constant updates and improvements
Notion regularly updates and improves its features. In the past 2+ years of using Notion, they have released new features that greatly improve my experience. Among them are their timeline database view and their simple table block. You can see their latest releases on their Releases page.
It’s awesome knowing that there’s a team dedicated to actively improving a platform that I’m using. It greatly improves my confidence in using it and I’m always looking forward to ways I can improve my productivity using Notion’s feature updates.
Final Thoughts
Even with all the features and ways of using Notion I mentioned above, I think I only have touched the tip of the iceberg of Notion. There are still so many advanced features and capabilities I have yet to explore.
Will I keep on using Notion in the foreseeable future? Maybe. I think it’s important to never be too attached to one tool and always keep an open mind. It is also better to develop a productivity system and habit that is agnostic to the tool so that it would be easier to adapt when new or better tools are available (I‘ll be writing more on this in a future article, please look forward to it!). But at least for now, I believe Notion is the best choice for my current needs and circumstances.
I hope this article is helpful in showing you a brief overview of Notion and how it may benefit your day-to-day life as well. Have a great day!
Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. This is a personal review, and all opinions expressed here are mine.
