Using Notion

I recently began using an app called Notion.

I’ve actually had it for over a year, at the suggestion of a friend I met through doing markets. They used it to keep track of their life and was enthusiastic about the systems they could set up. We tried to set up a wiki (one thing it does really well) with market info but ultimately decided on using Discord to track markets because more people were using that app.

I had a hard time with it initially because I found the phone app boring. It couldn’t capture my interest with the black and white interface. I also struggled with setting up pages that worked for me in the app.

This past fall, I was in an advising meeting with a student. She’s one of those advisees who makes figuring out course schedules a joy. She came in with a whole spreadsheet of her future course plan and knew all her priorities. I asked her how she kept it all together and she said “I use this desktop app called Notion” and she proceeded to show me her whole calendar dashboard of assignments and due dates that she had constructed.

It looked really nice. I didn’t even recognize it at first because the desktop app she used looked so different.

So I made a time investment (haha I was really just procrastinating over something else) to look at some You Tube videos to build a Dashboard on desktop that would work for me. There are an overwhelming amount of videos about Notion which is kind of ironic because people use it to decrease their overwhelm, but I found a content creator (Wesley Anna) and three months later I’m getting pretty hooked. This is a habit that just might stick! The phone app now looks much more interesting and I can enter things from computer and my phone. I’m now at the point where I need to condense and combine some pages and integrate my calendar with my tasks list, but I’m looking forward to figuring out how to do that.

I now know the ADHD thing about getting notebooks and planners that will change your life with their glossy stickers and habit tracker charts. I’ve looked at my friend’s Japanese tracking journals (Hobonichi) and I’m jealous. I don’t have the capacity to track habits for very long without feeling bad about myself or guilty. I manage to drink water and take a lap around the building most days, and that’s enough for me. I don’t track the books I read or the plays I see. I’ve tried. It doesn’t bring me joy.

The good thing about this version of shiny is that it’s free. There’s paid templates and an optional AI feature** you can buy, but I don’t feel the need for either so I have a planner that I can customize at any time. (I am not sponsored by Notion nor do I work for them—though I wouldn’t say no to a sponsorship…)

I’m even using the phone app to write this post offline while i’m in the air. It will update automatically when I’m back in range.

Any of you Notion users? I find it better than the pile of notes in the Notes app or a physical pile of post-its or a page in a notebook that I’ll just lose. I’m still using paper but the act of consolidating it into Notion forces me to make notes into actions. I think that’s why it’s working for me…for now.

**I recently learned that AI kills the environment (thanks, TW for calling me in on that fact) so now I’m really keeping an eye on where it’s used. I have been firmly in the “AI hurts artists” camp, but it’s good to know where it also hurts our planet.

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