Notion: day one review
My new journaling, blogging and note taking app
This is a review of my first day with Notion. Sorry to disappoint you, Day One* enthusiasts.
* Apparently, Day One is also a journaling app… I actually wasn’t sure whether “day one review” was a common English phrase, so I googled it and that’s how I found out about the app. So, confusing title pun not intended.
** Still not sure if people ever use the term “day one review” for a review after one day of trying something. But sometimes you just have to sacrifice clarity for the opportunity to make obscure puns only 3 other people in the world will understand and probably not even find that amusing. Taking one for team obscure puns!
*** Is this actually a pun? Guess I should google that as well.
**** Let’s get on with the review, shall we.
As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve switched out Zim for Notion as my main journaling tool. Also, I’m using it to write blog drafts, like this one, which I then copy paste directly into Medium. So these are the first things I tried out. Also, offline support is really important for me, and I’ll tell you about my experiences with that below. Finally, some words about costs.
Journaling
When you first create a workspace, Notion automatically includes a default journal section. In here, you can manually create a new journal page to write about your day. I kinda miss the automated creation of the journal page in Zim, but it’s not yet become a major annoyance.
The journal template includes a Daily Reflection page template. Already on day one, this template changed my workflow for the better. What I like most is that it starts with a list of Intentions for the day. On Microsoft To Do, I’ve been trying out the My Day feature, and Intentions is essentially that, except in a less structured way. It seems like a small, insignificant thing to have this in a ready made template; why not just write it down yourself? For me, the answer is: I just need the nudge, otherwise I forget. To Do’s My Day I also tended to forget some days. Because I use the journal to jot down everything, including my hours, which by definition start at the beginning of the day, I now automatically get this Intentions template under my eyes. Really useful.
The rest of the Daily Reflection template I use for journaling, just as I did before, with a simple bullet point list of things I did or am doing or random thoughts while doing them. I remove the “Grateful for” and “Action points” lists; the latter I already have in my To Do app. I do think the “Grateful for” list is a really good idea. According to common YouTube knowledge, training yourself in gratitude is one of the easiest things you can do to boost your happiness. I’ve also read that this is, in fact, one of the big benefits of being religious (at least those religions where you thank some deity). But I’m way too cheerful already, so thanks, but no thanks.
Blogging / multi-tasking
As you can see, the blogging is going pretty well.
One thing that Notion is not ultimately great for, though, is for reviewing itself :D
If you need to click around a bit, for instance to remind yourself of what something was called exactly, the page you were blogging on disappears from your screen and you have to find it back afterwards. It would have been nice if there were something like tabs or separate windows to avoid this. It’s not just a blogging thing, I may at some point be writing down some general notes on some page, while checking or updating my journal; in any such multi-tasking cases it takes you out of your flow to have to switch back and forth between pages.
Offline
Another issue that came up in this same process is that loading different pages is slow if your internet connection is slow. I don’t really understand why this is, because I think pages are cached on your machine…
Wait, let me turn off my wifi…
Yep, it’s actually faster when you turn off your internet than when your internet is slow and choppy! Apparently, when it detects an internet connection, it first tries to check for updates on the server when you open a page and in the meantime doesn’t show you the cached content yet. Kinda annoying for me, since I work on the train 12 hours per week and while I don’t want to complain about the free Dutch train wifi (thanks Vince Croft for the reality check)… it’s obviously not as solid as a home connection.
Right, so up to this point I was thinking: there’s some minor things to iron out, but so far I’m liking this Notion experience quite a bit. I then decided to give it an honorable place in my dock, right up there with the browser and terminal (and of course XQuartz, which I use for Zim, see previous blog):
Then I wanted to paste this screenshot here… and what happened next is a pretty big problem. With my wifi still disabled, I went back to my daily journal page and when I came back to my Blog pages list, THIS BLOG DRAFT PAGE WAS GONE! Ok, so, let’s use Quick Find to find it back. DENIED. Can only be used when online… Ok, so I guess I’ll put my wifi back on then, sheesh… And indeed the article popped back up in the Blogs list and all my latest changes were still there, so nothing was actually lost. However, as mentioned above, I’m quite often without internet, also for instance when on a plane, so offline (and onchoppyline) really needs to be better… hoping someone from Notion will read this (if so: let me know if you’re working on it, so I can update this article).
Costs
The free version has the main limitation that you can only save 1000 “blocks”, which are basically paragraphs (but also bullet points, titles and other stuff). After that you’re going to have to cough up $4 per month in the most basic version without collaboration. This gets you unlimited blocks and version control, which might also come in handy.
Fortunately, for the Scrooges among us, there’s a few things you can do to earn credits to upgrade for free. Just by using a few of Notion’s features, you can earn up to 5 months of the basic plan this way.
Right now, after about a day and a half of using it (and already writing 1 blog and 2 drafts), I’m at 90 blocks, so this does go pretty fast. At this rate, I’ll have 10 to 20 days of completely free journaling ahead of me, followed by 5 months on the free credits. This should be plenty of time to thoroughly try it out, so great.
Verdict
I’m going to keep using it for a while, even though offline support is still a bit iffy at the moment. All in all, it feels like a really nice tool that fits my workflow well.
