2025-04-10
A short hymn to Notion
Not every post is going to be about process, I promise. But I have a few things to get out of my system.
I have a love hate relationship with Notion. I've been using it on and off for years. I don't think it looks nice, I don't think it's easy to learn, I don't like that everything is stored in the cloud... There are lots of reasons not to go near it.
And yet... Whatever productivity tool catches my eye, however much that new toy initially wows me, I always end up back here.
I'm working with a handful of projects simultaneously at any given time, and each one has multiple steps to completion. Notion lets me outline those steps, then schedule them, and it allows me to set dependancies so that if one step is delayed (if I decide to play Atomfall instead of writing something), the whole schedule nudges along to accommodate it.
I would love to be using something pretty and minimalist like Things, but I need a workhorse more capable than a simple to do list. I need to be able to see crunch points, to schedule things in order, to see a birds-eye view of all my projects over a period of time and then zoom in to a given day.
Using Notion in combination with Akiflow lets me easily time-block days, so I can see how badly I'm falling behind in real time.
It's a tool. It's not a pretty one, it's not one you want to put on display. I would never use it for writing or notes and I don't understand anyone who does. But as a project management system, I haven't found anything better.
And now, as a reward for dealing with that, have a couple of fun pieces from Aeon:
