Morning Pages

In my continuing pursuit of the perfect task organisation system (spoiler: there isn't one, but this is not going to stop me questing), I have been back in Notion.

Notion is not easy and it's not pretty. But I have spent a lot of time over the years building my Notion iteration into something that really works for me. Every now and then I get bored of it and find myself in TickTick or Things, but I always get pulled back to Notion when work gets heavy and I need to start sorting my priorities and organising my life.

Notion sucks at a couple of key aspects though; it lacks proper calendar integration (it's pointless planning out the day or the week if you can't see what life events are going to get in the way), and it doesn't handle recurring tasks in any useful or usable way.

So I was looking for a front end - something that would integrate with Notion and pick up those elements of slack. For the past week, I've been trying out Sunsama for this. Sunsama is great; a calendar and task manager that sucks in all your Notion tasks and lets you move them around, block out the days etc. It's nice to look at and it holds your hand through daily planning and shutdown, to make sure you're not overwhelming yourself and that everything is properly scheduled. In terms of recurring tasks, you can add these straight into Sunsama and it takes care of them well.

There are a couple of issues with Sunsama - when you put a task into your calendar, it updates the due date in Notion BUT it does so with the date the task was physically moved, NOT the date it was moved to. This isn't a deal-breaker if you're mainly looking at Sunsama for deadline, but it is a gripe. Sunsama has a nice mobile app which makes it easy to see what you're supposed to be doing and when.

I thought I was happy with Sunsama. And then I discovered Akiflow...

Akiflow basically does the same job as Sunsama. It updates with Notion a lot slower, but it does do it (caveat: there's some trial and error involved in setting up the integration) but when you move tasks around, the dates and times update accurately in Notion.

Akiflow provides great keyboard shortcuts, uses natural language and integrates with pretty much everything. There's no mobile app yet, which might become an issue, but so far I like how it all works.

I will almost certainly change my mind about everything here tomorrow.

If you're still here, I'm going to hit you up with a great Christopher Hitchens quote about finding your voice as a writer:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class can talk? I mean, really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.

I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really _was_ a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own _voice._

Have a good one.