For me the thing that made me give up using Notion was the “feel” of the basic text editing. There was a latency and lagginess to the way it responded that made it so unsatisfying and, at worst, irritating to use that I couldn’t go on.

Typing this, it feels weird to give up because of such a subtle thing, but there were probably a dozen more details lacking in this way that eroded all of the goodwill won by the flashy features.

In something as seemingly simple as a text editor it turns out that if it’s not built on a solid foundation of usability then I very quickly sour on the rest of it.

Currently using Obsidian and am very pleased. I’m happy with how “light” it feels.

Notion is a greatest common denominator of the general form on how to make a successful company out of nothing really new or groundbreaking.

It's no better than the alternatives, but invites a sort of appetite for using it that keeps it afloat and to any company mired in the complexity of their enterprise productivity solutions, offers a simple, one-stop-shop to everything, even if its promises are vacuous.

> Create an "ecosystem" generic enough to potentially offer unlimited tacked on features and unlimited scope creep

> Make it very minimalist and user friendly so there's no adoption cost

> Create the impression that there's some ideal harmony of workflow available to any user who uses it the "right way". Apple heavily leans into this in their marketing. If it doesn't work for you then you must not be using it right

As softsound says, even with its limits, just having basic tables now feels like such a win. It took so long.

I think they always kinda hated tables, and simple or databases ones, editing and formatting wise it's still the worse part to deal with in Notion.

At the same time the whole product got so much slower. I regularly see the "click here to see latest version" head banner as my browser local version falls out of sync, when online collaboration and quasi-realtime sync was the whole point of Notion.

Adding to timezones: the new date shortcuts (@today etc.) are so close, yet so frustrating to deal with on auto-generated pages on regular schedules. Say you schedule a report page to be created on friday morning so you get to fill it for the monday meeting, good luck with dynamically setting the dates.

I use, love and evangelize Notion but yes, all of these are valid criticism, and copy-pasting in particular is so busted.

Their native app wrappers also have issues.

- On macOS the "Sync dark/light mode with OS" settings constantly get reset

- I'm frequently logged out (and have to log back in)

- No effort for basic integration has happened, which makes drag & drop in and out of the app awkward, no sharing extensions, etc.

If I'm being honest, I envy them for being in the position of being able to completely ignore this stuff and still have a product that people love. That said, it feels like an easy thing to throw 1-2 people on with the task of, "make this integrate deeper into the host operating system with Electron basics"

Even trying to select text is a nightmare. Notion can’t make up its mind between selecting text or selecting the objects that contains the text.

I wish there was a markdown mode with a live preview, then I would never use the rest of the Notion interface.

I remember the days before tables, and I think it's come a long way with lots of great features... That said, I don't see it as a replacement for regular tools like Google sheets and docs etc.

100% this. I am starting to hate Notion, and I hate myself for the fact that I trusted this company to "do well" to its users. They're not.

For me, the key factor for switching from Notion to Obsidian, was its slowness with pages containing a lot of code blocks (e.g. Python). Some pages were even completely crashing the Notion mobile app.

I love Notion.

There I said it.

Their features suit my needs in a clean and satisfying way. Props to the team.

Weird that nobody’s mentioned it yet, but the main value proposition of Notion is that is uses mini-relational databases instead of tables. It’s like Airtable baked inside of a note app.

It has a ton of downsides like being slow, not having offline access, and no E2E encryption, but there are few tools that execute well on the approachable database concept. I wish there were more, because the standard approach of doing bizarre spreadsheet hacks to achieve the same functionality is much less intuitive to me.

The reason there’s an entire weird industry around Notion is not surprising to most people here: relational databases are useful. Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most. Notion and Airtable wrapped a good UX around creating semi-primitive rdbs and here we are.

(I work for Notion)

Notion is also "basically just a bunch of lists", plus titles. Pages in Notion are a title, and a list of blocks. Text blocks are a title (the text of the block) and a list, it's indented children.

We also have boards like Trello, and you can drag and drop list items between boards, pages, paragraphs, everywhere. Maybe you could see it as everything you like about Trello, but applied to more modalities of content.

> I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.

Remember Evernote ... that was going to change your life once upon at time.

Are any of these things bad? Not really. Will any of them change your life ... almost certainly not, unless your life is making hype content on social media for these products and you manage to become a fully fledged "influencer".

This isn't an endorsement for Notion, I also dislike it and use other tools. I can see why some do however, it's a solid second brain organizational tool, somewhere to place things "long term" and keep them. It's a less "active" tool, which is also why for some people I think Notion is the wrong solution but for others works great. Think: internal team documents in one central place (less active) vs updating your app's documentation multiple times an hour (more active), the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all. Also I will say, with their API you can technically hook up whatever databases you have within Notion for use, so it can easily become a place to store your blog notes and use them without copying/pasting. But again, blog notes are rarely changing so you see the pattern here I hope.

I also don't get the notion template hype on gumroad/etsy/producthunt/etc. You can create them yourself within seconds, but that's the nature of the "productivity industry", you get big bucks for the mere idea that your product will make their life easier/faster.

This article reads like an ad.

Perhaps I live under a tech rock, but I have not heard of notion before today. And I don't like that it is being shilled.

I use Notion as a personal work notebook. I like it for its lack of rigidity and fixed structure. I've always struggled with tools like Trello because they have a specific model that you need to fit your usage into. Then again, I'm not a Notion power user, nor do I make heavy use of templates outside of a few I've designed myself, so I'm definitely not one of the "hype"rs

> I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.

> I don't get what I am missing.

100% agree. Notion doesn't work like my brain when it comes to documents, formatting, structuring — I ended up spending most of my time configuring systems and formatting than actually inputting information & accomplishing things.

I've tried a few times to get into it, and see what others see in it. I just can't.

I think it's okay, I use it because it was the first polished app I could read and edit notes from so many devices.

But the idea Notion is a 100M business, let alone a 10B valued company is madness.

Kanbanflow > trello. Same thing, just nicer interface imho

I’ve been meaning to try trello, notion is just so slow

You are not missing anything. It's stupid, but hey, some people are paying for that stuff and and some people are making money out of it. Who are we to judge.

The same thing happens in the workplace, too. My last two jobs have had groups that adopted Notion and tried to use heaps of rules and templates and emojis that they wanted everyone to use to structure and document everything in Notion.

It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done.

The Product Management group at my last company was the worst at this. They had hundreds of Notion pages that supposedly collected everything and show them in meetings, slide decks, and at every chance they had as proof that they were on top of things. Yet they could barely do any product management work that we needed to ship product because their whole world revolves around building Notion pages rather than building products.

The sad part was that it worked, at least for a while. Executives would praise the team for being so organized and always having so much to show in presentations. Eventually people started to realize that they were lost in the process of writing Notion docs rather than focusing on getting work done, but it took a long time.

I'm going to be a little mean here, but I think it needs to be said: "How to be productive in Notion" videos and template sales sites and such are always made by boringly unsuccessful people. I would love to see a broader intensive study on this topic, but just from my observations: its youtube and tik tok creators with a few thousand viewers, people who may actually be rather busy but don't drive much success from what they do. Running on a treadmill (and spending hours a week planning that run) so to speak.

Subsequently: Go ask the CEO or other leaders of your company the systems they use to stay organized. I bet twenty bucks that the most common answers to that question, when limited to the note-taking space, are: Nothing, and Apple Notes. If that definition of success isn't your cup of tea, then go ask who you perceive as the most productive person you work with. I did that very specifically with this extremely talented and productive engineer on my team, and his answer: markdown files in a big folder, grep, and vim. Ok greybeard :)

But point being: Its almost never Notion or tools at a similar power level. Its simple shit. Physical journals, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Google Docs, for the technically inclined just markdown files.

Over the last 20 years or so I've tried: index cards, wunderlist, todo.txt, remember the milk, Asana, Any.do, Evernote, Google Notebook, Simplenote, Trello, Workflowy, Google Keep, Bear Notes, org-mode, and probably a dozen others. Three years ago I started using Apple Notes and told my wife "if you see me trying anything else at all, yell at me". I've been pretty happy with it and am much more productive just using something rather than trying to find some magic new tool.

When I first got into Linux it seemed like a lot of people mostly used Linux to configure desktop environments and Conky to take screenshots of.

There's a Buddhist parable about someone spending their whole life building a boat to cross a small river and dying before they made it across.

I don't use Notion, but I kind of fell down the similar Obsidian rabbit hole.

Obsidian is interesting because it makes you really feel like you're being productive, creating links and little "mini wikis", but it didn't seem like I was actually accomplishing more.

I still use the app for notes, but now I mostly use it for just a "relatively easy to search" notes app.

(I work for Notion)

This is certainly a trap with any tool with exciting possibilities.

I personally don't use any templates; I'm of the "brutalist Notion" school of thought. When I want to use Notion for something, I start with the simplest possible approach that could work. Then I add Notion features if they prove necessary. So for something like household chores, I started a Notion page called "chores" and just add to-do checkboxes there when there's a new task, and at-mention myself or my partner to assign things if needed. This is instead of making a database with status, assign property etc.

We do use some separate databases for shopping, meal planning/recipes, and make larger pages for specific trips. Keeping things simple initially and adding complexity where it's needed means you never over-invest in a system that's not necessary. Plus, every column you add to a database is one more bit of work you need to do to "file" something completely. I find it discouraging to add friction to stuff I already consider a chore that I want to avoid.

Now this is a fascinating take, as exactly that thought was discussed in a concurrent thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35670129

The phenomenon you describe (the configurators instead of doers) can be found in the upper right corner of the schema in the linked post.

There was just a post about the distinction between being someone who fiddled with tuning a bike, versus someone who rides a bike - and how ultimately complete devotion to one must preclude the other. (Or the more charitable version, there was only really time in most people’s lives for the serious practice of one side of the hobby, not the other - you can’t be taking apart your bike and putting it back together and be riding it all at the same time)

Tinkering with tooling and ‘process’ with software seems like it could be another realm of that principle. You can either spend the next week playing with syncing, hosting, processing, making sure your extensions and utilities all hook seamlessly into eachother… or you could have spent that week writing using just notepad and already have X-thousand words down.

(There’s probably a happy medium for everyone though)

I use Trello for car restoration projects, and I’ll admit I lost basically an entire day just trying to get this automated workflow to happen. But after having figured it out, it made things like cataloguing new parts that I need a 0 second automated process vs a 1 minute manual process. Like basically infinite time gotten back.

The biggest win imo is it took a rote and tedious task (inventory management) associated with my fun task (working on a car) and removed it from my fun task which allows me to enjoy my fun task more and gives me greater odds of completing it.

Relevant: Andy Matuschak: People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUMFE66dxeweppDvgbNAb5hukXzX...

> I get the impression some people spend more time configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being productive.

I think that's not a consequence of the software, but that some people have an innate draw towards these sorts of activities.

e.g. take a look at the community around journalling. Tons and tons of subjectively beautiful layouts and designs, and productivity is merely a side effect.

I went through some of the video, and I found it interesting that most of the projects and task the presenter is showing are about making videos. There's something borderline ironic in the cyclicality of those youtube people focusing on "productivity" mainly producing videos about how to be productive.

And yeah, the administrative burden of maintaining such a system gives me pause ; the decorum of being formal gives the impression of being productive, but are you really productive when 25% of your time goes into the project management and time you invest in setting it up?

There is value in structure and rules, to clear your mind and give you orientation for your work. But everyone is also different, so you also need to first figure out the structures and rules which are working for you and your situations. Which, yeah..it's an eternal trap of bike sheeding. Flexible tools like notion are very helpful and seductive in those regards. They can help you get your things done, but can also led you astray to the wrong roads.

I think at this point it might be useful to have some studies in how selforganization-porn-addicts and mental health issues correlate. I get the impression that people with adhs for example are more likely to search out this kind of tools&systems to get some control over their mind&life back. I know it's at least for me the case.

I see a therapist who specializes in OCD. They believe that the mood journal trend around 2010-2015 led to a lot of people - nearly all of their patients including me - having a compulsion to write down and re-think/overvalue every passing thought.

> perfecting my .vimrc instead of actually working on projects. Messing around with static site blog generators when I should actually just be writing content.

I feel attacked.

I have diagnosed ADHD and I have struggled with this, but like someone else said, you have to make sure you don't fall into a hole trying to make one of your pages perfect -- I mean, go for it if that's what you're interested in, but I have accepted that something perfect for me will take refinement and delayed gratification.

I actually found YC advice on startups to work great in real life as well. Afaik YC is all for execution and thus write great material for getting things done. Best advice ever for me was the whole single metric thing - pick a metric, makes sure it goes up x-% every week.

>The 23 minute video linked on the "ultimate notion setup for 2023" sounds like a great trap to fall into to not actually get anything done. I get the impression some people spend more time configuring these productivity tools instead of actually being productive.

This is me with emacs.

It's also a very good example of why search engines suck today. Everything is stuffed to the gills with right keywords, to get the maximum number of clicks on the affiliate link that is almost certainly embedded in the video description.

Which is why I just ditched scrivener for a markdown editor with minimal features for my writing. Configurable tools can lead you to spend all your time configuring them instead of using them

Same here. I then ended up just using pandoc and a small shell script and it's served as a great static site generator letting me focus on writing my markdown.

It’s the 2020 equivalent of getting your perfect vim or eMacs config maybe?

> notes die when you don’t engage with them

That is an interesting idea, but not something I would ever want in a notes app. A note may be important but never opened.

For example, I have a note in Craft with my bike serial number and a picture of me standing next to it. If my bike is ever stolen and recovered, this note is proof of ownership. I have not opened this note since creating it, because my bike has not been stolen, but I would obviously hate to lose it.

I just use Sublime and a notes folder containing text files groups in folders by topic. The search function is excellent, and I don't need anything more.

Rather than a note dying, I wonder if notes could decay into smaller and smaller summaries.

Dying notes are a fascinating thought, and relate to some of the cruft aspects I've seen with any sort of task-tracking.

That said, in my usual note-taking app, I have things like recipes I might make once in a blue moon, and I'd be very annoyed if I lost my late grandma's lasagna recipe.

I love this! I'm starting to feel this is a solution to a lot of info-overload stress in our lives. I'm making an iOS app with the same slant: every day has its own list, so you start fresh every day, or you can add to your tomorrow's list at night so you start the day prepared. I also added a bullet-journal-like view for the month and it all adds up to a lot less stress than what I've been doing before (the testflight is at https://testflight.apple.com/join/t5ZpRV2l )

I presume you were scratching your own itch but maybe you can answer a question for me, why are the majority of productivity apps on here only available on IOS?

Self cleansing notes. That is a great idea.

oof, I feel like this is replicating the worst parts of having a fallible human memory.

save your notes so you can train chatgpt on them.

I'll throw tiddlywiki into the ring for the 'list of things to try', it is pretty neat and I like how it is all contained in a single file and it's really fun to explore inside of it.

But I also landed on bookstack. Weird how it turned out that formatting my stuff like a book would be the best format as opposed to all the super cool different ways of thinking that are possible with new-gen apps. I'm not sure if books are just superior or if I just personally am really wired to books, but I landed on it after evernote, onenote, obsidian, joplin, and Notion.

Basically I am using tiddly as a zettelkastan where appropriate and bookstack for things that are more finalized.

I really wish my team would switch to BS instead of the unorganized knowledgebase soup with inconsistent tagging, zero curation, and bad search engine (servicenow knowledge). omg what if we had an actual procedure manual instead of just hoping people will enter the right search terms to land on KBs they dont even know to search for. now THAT would be revolutionary.

Have you tried Joplin?

It's markdown, allows copy pasting images, embeding files like PDF with preview, works offline by syncing using apple/google/microsoft/dropbox cloud storage.

Has desktop and mobile app.

Free and Open Source.

Have you ever looked at task warrior? https://taskwarrior.org (and you could host it online yourself (I believe) with inthe.am - https://github.com/coddingtonbear/inthe.am if you aren't comfortable with the existing version)

It's well documented ( https://taskwarrior.org/docs/ ) had enables a number of different workflows and export and import options (I've dabbled with jira imports to task warrior for my own sorting views).

Maybe try Obsidian? It works completely offline, it's free, and its stores your data as a folder of markdown files. It should cover your personal wiki / Zettelkasten needs, plus, if you're willing to spend some time on learning the Tasks plugin, you can implement a pretty decent GTD-like system on it.

I similarly am obsessed with maintaining my own knowledgebase and wanted it to be self hosted and open source.

I was looking at setting up a wiki and considered Dokuwiki and Bookstack. I ended up using Tiddlywiki, which is by default a single user wiki that is actually just a single HTML file that defines the whole app and the wiki contents. This means that all you need to run it is a browser that can read HTML and run JS.

I since migrated from running it as a single HTML file to a Node.js server to enable better version tracking with Git and to make saving updates less cumbersome. It's a little wonky to save updates to the single-file version without a custom browser plugin or app.

Anyways, at some point I might try migrating to a more traditional wiki solution as I like the idea of being able to share parts of my wiki with others. But for now Tiddlywiki works nicely for me!

Notion still does have pretty bad performance, although I believe they’ve recently upgraded the search. It’s quite good at least in my experience.

Can I ask what determined you to move away from Zim? I'm currently using it and finding it quite good.

I'm someone who has used and paid for Notion for several years at this point.

What I would say is that it's very versatile. It has almost Atlassian Jira levels of features (and arguably of bloat), and it's possible to reasonably organise a lot of thoughts/knowledge/tasks in a wide range of ways.

I think the reason why it's so popular and oft lauded is because the range of capability allows people to really engineer workflows and processes that work for them and that without the prompts of the examples that Notion and its community provide they may not otherwise arrive at.

So for me I'd probably say that the product itself is fairly good. It's far from flawless (e.g., it uses Electron), but does a solid job of a wide range of things. The killer differentiator against its competitors, however, is the library of templates and example projects - this initially was produced by Notion itself but then the community really grew, shared its own interpretations, and _productivity content creators_ really latched onto it as a good conduit for communicating workflows, processes, and systems for working/getting tasks done.

The submarine article I came across earlier, but it's so good, so on point, that I had to read it again.

"If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all."

Fantastic way to understand a lot more of the world. Not just critical thinking, I have been making good progress in my interpersonal relationships too.

Notion is very, very good, and to me that became most apparent, when I tried to find an alternative, because designing the more serious parts of my life for life around a proprietary piece of SaaS seems ludicrous for too many reasons.

It is that good, but more specifically, it has a very specific and innovative concept. There is not much competion yet, even though some have finally emerged in the last years. But with tools like this, it's also so specific in its ways and features, that it's hard to switch because of your habits. Think of it like vim, and how hard people seek for similar modal interaction in all other tools they use.

I find tracking things is a helpful (and relatively healthy) way to manage anxiety. It’s a total time vampire - but once I’ve made my lists of todos/sheets/Roam/Notion/BuJo/whatever and convinced myself I’m organized and in control, then I can get real work done free of nagging concern I’m missing something. I try to find a healthy balance, and my level of tracking varies with my mental health and stress. I’ve noticed that if I’m tracking nothing, things are bad. Likewise, if I’m tracking EVERYTHING, I’m spiraling and things are bad.

It can be a lot of work. It can be a trap. But I don't think Notion is the problem.

I will share some personal experience on this journey.

I like to be organized where I need to. I worked up a TODO list habit and a note taking habit over time. At first it was pen and paper. Then plain text notes. Then Evernote. And now it's Notion.

Regardless of the tool, there were times when I overdid it. I became too meticulous. The TODO list, instead of keeping me organized and my mind free, became the source of my work and worry.

I iterated over time, and have built up a system that works for me. Whenever I feel that something becomes too heavy, I trim it. Notion is nice because it allows me to be flexible. It's more like a notebook with superpowers than Jira and Asana.

If you're obsessive and don't catch yourself, Notion can become the source of troubles. But so can cataloging your CD collection.

I recently shared my TODO list workflow with someone. I have a daily and weekly template and they're quite involved. The person was surprised asked me if I ever get stressed if I don't do it all. Not at all, I said. What I don't do gets thrown away and I start over tomorrow. It keeps me structured and organized, but I am not its slave.

It's not how involved your system is. It's how much it works for you, vs working against you.

I've tracked things like food intake for years at a time when loosing weight. I also tracked every dollar spent manually for 3 or 4 years.

Both times I did that they were extremely helpful to achieve my goals. Too much of what we do is on autopilot. Noticing what you're doing is a helpful way to course correct before you're 10k over budget or 5 pounds heavier.

You have to do it in a healthy manner though, you can't obsess about tracking. Be gentle with yourself and know you'll make mistakes, both in tracking and what you're doing.

I just got home yesterday from a 2 week vacation. I was feeling especially relaxed during the trip, much more than usual. I thought this was due to how good I had gotten at thought exercises and managing anxiety, and I didn't want to forget what I was doing that led to this so I bought a notebook. After I started writing I lost the sense of detachment that was so pleasant and couldn't get it back the rest of the trip.

Slightly different context, but similar enough.

I wear a Garmin sportswatch so keep an eye on the subreddit. If you go there you’ll see daily threads about arbitrary metrics like “sleep score”, “body battery”, hrv and vo2 max. People obsess over the numbers without really thinking to take a step back and thinking about how accurate the data is and whether or not it’s actually meaningful in any real terms.

Definitely a lot of folks out there becoming slaves to this sort of thing.

Yeah, I have so little energy and motivation to do stuff. I need to spend the little I have actually doing stuff rather than planning to do stuff

I've long dreamed of tracking every little thing. I don't know why but tracking everything I do, what I eat or drink or wear, how many hours I watch TV or sit on Reddit, how often I urinate, my work life balance, literally everything, the of having it all is exciting to me.

Beyond the thrill of acquiring and holding it, it would no doubt be more useful than simply admiring it. Compare it to say a sports trophy, that's something you simply admire although of course you have the memories of the journey to win it as well.

Data and tracking on the other hand feels practical and usable in the present and the future, as well as something to look back on or "admire".

Would you think less of people who put the hours into winning a sports trophy or writing a book (that they presumably never read or use themselves)?

I somewhat envy people who can meticulously plan like this. When I try to do something like this I love talking about the planning and researching, but putting it all together into a detailed plan stresses me because I don't even know where to start. It starts to make it feel like work. Then there's another side of me that loves spontaneous adventure and just going with the flow. If anyone has any tips to find a happy medium, I'm all ears.

It's contextually bounded, I think. You can't be the librarian of your whole life, but you can parcel out some things that warrant discrete records(e.g. finances).

I do think it's pointless to put all of it in a computer. Some things do better with a whiteboard(or an electronic version of such like Boogie Board) or a paper journal. The computer is for if you genuinely want to edit, rearrange, and structure the data. It constantly tempts you to do so.

To never do it, or to do it all the time, are neither good. The best is if you can do trials of things like this. To be able to monitor something closely, but then draw conclusions and let it go.

It’s true that the organizational model of the file system and desktop metaphor should be usable for this.

There’s another huge gap though: documents in your local machine don’t have easy to use hypertext. Apple Notes app is very nice, but neither it nor TextEdit nor Pages can do what a Notion document can do. The OS needs a HyperCard to make it adopt Web-native tools for thinking.

>a failure of the file system and desktop metaphor.

I agree. I think this is because the file system is very rigid in terms of what you can do with it, especially regarding extending it, and managing it from a higher perspective. It would be very nice to use labels/tags for files and folders. To have a nice index that can be easily viewed, sorted, filtered. The file systems are also very rigid. To create filesystems while computer is running, mounting them around, resizing etc on the fly, this is unthinkable to me with existing file systems, and I have used some.

The lacking of file systems are demonstrated I believe in file formats that are basically file systems themselves. Archive formats come first to mind, and that basically every game I have played grouped its assets into large data files.

People have been trying to turn the file system into a database for decades at this point. It was supposed to be the killer feature of Windows Vista.

IME the filesystem is both too complex and too simple; it's completely underspecified, has no memory model or semantics, and all the advanced features like extended attributes are unportable to the point of uselessness. There's literally one filesystem metadata feature that actually works reasonably reliably and it's the one most of HN hates: Windows three-letter extensions to indicate file types.

It would be great to have a portable, standardised, database-like layer - SQL isn't it either - but I think it would have to be something ran as a userspace layer rather than built into the filesystem.