Ask HN: How do you use Notion?

I have some pages and I type stuff in the pages. Later I sometimes read the things that I've typed. The pages contain lists, text, links and kanban boards. That's about it, I don't need anything more complicated. I've also never used other people's templates.

I don't. I can't commit to constantly using it. Probably a personality flaw.

-- having consulted to many startups who use either Notion or Google Drive - I strongly feel that business who run on a well organized google drive are considerably more productive than those who are running in notion - Two general reasons I see - Notion itself isn't particularly snappy for everyone - especially team members on weaker internet connections - plus - it encourages strange rabbit holes of information in hacked together structures - hard to put my finger on that last one, but having been in multiple companies notions - they seem generally more difficult to navigate / find useful information quickly in --

I always find myself coming back to it, both for work and personal life. I'm doing the whole "build in public" thing for my SaaS and use the public notion page to warehouse all of our updates and information.

I've found https://getoutline.com to be a pretty solid contender, although with slightly less functionality.

Used it for a while and after 2-3 months I gave up. It reminded me of those awful Filemaker workspaces in the early 2000s.

I have never used it for business cases, but I am in notion for at least an hour a day for personal uses. I use it for a daily planner, personal wiki, and ticker(getting things done) I am naturally unorganized, so I overcompensate. I don't think much of what I do is outside of Notion's primary use case, but maybe it is???

Daily planner

- Every morning I do gratitude, "single most important task", and quick retro on the previous day.

- Schedule out my day giving every 15-minute block of time a goal. While being burnt out I would beat myself up for "not knowing what I am doing with my life". Having a schedule allows me to say "I should be doing x, I don't have to, but that is what I planned to do with this time" it calms some of that negative self-talk.

- Space for me to document random thoughts so they don't use active memory/thought process

Personal Wiki

- I have struggled with too many tabs open, or too many bookmarks in the past. To keep that at bay I have been trying this personal wiki approach for about a year.

- I have a few top-level pages for major categories of my life like bikes, household maintenance, fitness, computers, and programming. then I populate it with different types of content like pages, notes, and databases. These are things like car maintenance schedules, checklists for cleaning, and links/formulas I need to pay quarterly taxes.

Ticker file

- Single database with a few attributes. One attribute is the "review date" that I filter by.

- I chuck random things into this so I can pull them out of my active memory and come back to them later.

Initially used it for weekly reviews and for gathering notes. Then went into the rabbit hole of using the templates created by others.

Gave it up and use multiple apps now. Main ones being Dendron, Complice and workflowy.

Notion is the new Rainmeter.

It gets a lot of talk because people invest tons and tons of time in elaborate aesthetically pleasing set ups which can be very satisfying. But then the messy nature of "every day life" slowly erodes the ability of said setup to (cleanly) contain the information, and eventually a lot of people give up on it.

Notion used in that way is essentially trying to make a database for your mind. Except programmers know that writing a schema for a well defined business case is hard. Writing a schema for your knowledge of the natural world is somewhere between an endless task and an impossible task, yet that's what Notion will require of you to take on that role..

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If you want to get actual value out of it, keep it simple. But if you keep it simple, imo you're better off using something like Evernote, which drops the whole "database of your mind" pretense and just focuses on letting you write.

Just started using, feels amazing and really snappy to use (I've seen many complaints in the other direction). Started organizing all my projects and persona things into kanbans, added some tables for subscriptions and other things I rarely keep track of. Loving it so far, especially how many features are for free.

Depending on your use cases you may want to check out Clover (cloverapp.com).

They’re a YC alum making something a little more ‘streamlined’ than Notion. Doesn’t have as many blocks, but the ones it does have work well.

(No affiliation, just a happy user that moved over from Notion because it got a little too ‘bloated’ for my taste).

I recently started a new job where notion is the company wiki. Think of it like a confluence or sharepoint page. The ones how painfull it is to create a clean and beautiful sharepoint is, will love it. Compared to confluence I liked the snappyness but overall it is not really such a big gain, in my view. Storing and finding documents is good for presenting them to go read an article, I however prefer the good old folders on gdrive or onedrive - might be taste. So I use OneDrive as summary and explanation of our team and whats ongoing but store the docs on onedrive.

For personal organizations and notes I have stick with OneNote for years and still find it superb especially to search notes and screenshots. Just missing a better todo list and planning.

I used notion for personal projects and note-taking for a while, but recently I switched to standardnotes [https://standardnotes.com/]. In my opinion, it's better for personal use (and of course, it's open source)

notion intimidates me with all the hype

It's a great tool. I use it for almost everything

- Bookmarking. Notion downloads the complete article not just links to it.

- Idea dump.

- Notes dump for any new learnings.

- Health records.

- Simple inventory Management. ...

Idea is to have a single app for all references. Works great across Desktop and iOS.

What I want?

1 click backup/restore.

Given that a lot of my data goes in it, and companies these days have a poor record of kicking-out users (and not telling them why) for the slightest of mistake. I would like to have some automated way to back-it-up on a daily basis.

Not well and mostly disappointingly. It’s a nice enough UI but I don’t find it substantially better than OneNote - at least not enough to replace that use case.

I finally am getting my head wrapped around Tinderbox and it clicked. It’s a better tool for thinking for me. No sharing beyond sharing a file but that’s fine. I don’t tend to like collaborative software for that sorta thing.

I have a big personal workspace I use for everything, but I really like it for writing fiction (sci-fi short stories, specifically). I can pop open a new page, start jotting down snippets of scenes or ideas without any order or cohesion, drag them around to reorder them, start fleshing one bit out, move it into a subpage and turn the original page into a project folder as the story grows, it's quite nice and organic compared to trying to manage things in a traditional filesystem based word processor or worse, Google Docs.

I don't use any community templates, though. Are there any people have found particularly useful? My Notion pages are generally just text and I'm happy with the default styling so I haven't felt the need to go out and search for anything specific.

I stopped using Notion of a few months ago due to the leaky abstraction of their blocks model. Back to plaintext (via Obsidian) for me.

Have used it for many years as a personal wiki/database

I pull out the app all the time to answer various questions

For example:

* What kind of oil does my car take again? When was the last oil change?

* How much did I weigh in 2015

* What's the square footage of my apartment?

* What was my start/end date of job X?

Lots of random details like that I may need to reference later

I use the tables a lot for anything that changes over time

Stuff like this is pretty unstructured so I like having arbitrary hierarchies to keep it organized

Company docs (onboarding guides, developer wiki, guides for maintenance, decision log...), scrum board, ticket prioritization/estimation list, idea archive, ...

Endless. It serves as our source of truth.

A few ways I use Notion: - An "event log" page. This is my go-to for capturing information when I'm not sure where else to categorize it. I put lots of things there such as * large purchases, * new accounts, * summaries of appointments or calls with vehicle service, Vets, utility providers, doctors, * model numbers for TVs, monitors, or other appliances that I might want to reference later, etc. I initially tried finding the perfect place for every piece of information I wanted to keep track of, but that failed for a number of reasons. It takes more effort to decide where some information belongs and creating that location if it doesn't exist, there's usually multiple equally sensible ways to structure the location of the information, and when trying to find the information again, I have to remember where I decided to keep it or just do a global search which seems to defeat the point of structuring the information in the first place.

- A "dump" page for thoughts, current work, plans, TODOs, etc. for personal projects. Again, tried initially to be more structured with how I tracked work for personal projects, but ultimately found it too effortful and difficult to use later. Now I just have a growing page where I drop an `@now` and whatever the latest thing is I'm working on or thinking about for a given project.

- Structured notes for upcoming trips or pending decisions.

For my personal use case, it's mainly a database for books, articles, learnings and a bunch of random information.

I find it loads too long for me to use it as a to do list or diary.

At my small company we use it as an internal wiki, project management tool, writing tool, and more importantly we use it to maintain a couple of complex enough databases of content that we publish to the web through the API.

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Txt files (sometimes markdown) on dropbox work much better for my personal planning and knowledge base than all those fancy blows&wistles.

Because the limitation of the format forces you to really prioritize, focus and throw away all unimportant garbage.

This gives me amazing peace of mind and clarity.