⚡️ Get Things Done With Notion
Author(s): Christian Scott
🤨 What is Notion?
Notion is a powerful tool that can help you organize your work and life more effectively. It provides a wide range of features that can be used to create documents, take notes, categorize knowledge and manage tasks with ease in one unified workspace. You can also use it to collaborate with teammates, share documents, and keep track of progress. With Notion, you can easily break down complex tasks into smaller chunks and monitor your progress as you go. Notion is a great way to stay organized, productive, and on top of your work and life.
Notion has applications for Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS; it also can be utilized in the web browser which is our personal favorite.
💭 Why Manage Knowledge Like This?
Managing knowledge within Notion is best when aligned to GTD. GTD stands for "Getting Things Done," which is a productivity system and time management method developed by David Allen and outlined in his book of the same name. The goal of GTD is to help people organize their thoughts, prioritize tasks, and reduce stress by helping them set clear objectives and action plans. It involves breaking down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks and scheduling tasks in stages. Additionally, it encourages people to keep a regular “inbox” where they can capture all ideas, tasks, and commitments that come to mind. By taking a holistic approach to managing tasks and commitments, GTD allows people to focus on completing important tasks, while still leaving room for greater creativity and flexibility in their work.
An important element of GTD rests on the idea of moving all items of interest, relevant information, issues, tasks, and projects out of one's mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into actionable work items with known time limits. This allows one's attention to focus on taking action on each task listed in an external record rather than trying to recall them intuitively. Reducing such mental clutter, ultimately makes one more productive, less stressed, and a happier human being.
💸 How Much Does Notion Cost?
For most instances of personal use of Notion, it’s free. They of course have “Plus”, “Business” and “Enterprise” plans that have many more features like team collaboration, granular page history, higher file upload limits and more with the paid plans.
🤨 Is Notion Secure?
TLDR: Mostly Yes. They have a SOC2 Type 2 report and pentesting report that can request if you are a customer. Their reports look fairly clean and they seem to be proactive with managing their security posture. Notion is also part of the Security First Initiative. That said, Notion isn’t perfect and the biggest downside is they do not natively support multi factor authentication; so it’s recommended you utilize their SAML SSO connector for businesses or Apple/Google oAuth SSO for personal accounts.
📚 Standard Notion Learning Resources
Getting Started with Notion🖼 More Notion Icons (via super.so)
🎥 Productive Dude’s Tutorial for Beginners
Productive Dude has one of the best Notion tutorials for beginners, although it is missing just a few of the newer features that Notion just released in 2022. This is a great video tutorial to start.
🤩 Top Notion Resources, Content & Creators
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✅ Various Tips & Tricks
- Use Tables (DBs) over Lists when organizing data that contains multiple properties. Tags are your friend; you can always filter multiple views to the tags that are most important to you.
- Have information and pages organized logically and presented in an easy-to-consume format.
- Making things aesthetically pleasing by using icons, text headers, bolding important information, and illustrations are helpful.
- Create and use templates where possible, do not manually duplicate tons of pages for things like notes. Templates scale best.
- If you have 50 pages under one page / folder, you may want to organize it into category sub-pages and folders.
- Think about how you can link and join tables (DBs) together vis Relation properties rather than track manual redundant properties.
- Utilize Roll Up properties to pull other related properties from DBs that are joined via a Relation property. You can also have Roll Up properties aggregate and sum other related properties.
- If you have so many sub-pages / folders that someone has to click three or more nested folders to get to one page; you may be over-categorizing things. Try putting things into DBs, tagging them and creative various DB views instead.
- Performance: Use the Desktop Apps, which will cache data, it will make load pages faster and it will also help with internet connections that are intermittent. https://www.notion.so/desktop
- Performance: If you are experiencing slowness, then avoid embedding lots of high-resolution pictures, especially on many nested pages. Some Unsplash cover pages can be 4K+ so tons of those will slow stuff down if you are not careful.
- Feature: If you like to collect tons of bookmarks, then the Web Clipper extension may be a good choice. https://www.notion.so/web-clipper
- Issues: It seems like the Notion spellcheck is finicky. You have to actually select the entire word to be corrected. Just right-clicking the word or having the cursor in the word is not sufficient, even though the correction window pops up. There are also some cases where that fails to work on the first try. Apparently, there are known issues with Notion’s spellcheck features. https://geekupdated.com/spell-checker-in-notion-app-tips/
- Performance & Privacy: Set your Cookie Settings to Strictly Necessary and Functional.
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Disclaimers:
The opinions expressed here are respectively our own and do not reflect the views of our organization or anyone else unless quoted verbatim.
We try our best to provide helpful insight to folks but there is no warranty to completeness of anything we create or post here; so please be sure to always do your own research.