How Notion has changed my life (in priority order)

A Notion app review. Plus, three feature requests I hope to see from Notion in the future.

I have always been a productivity tool junkie.

I’d often find myself bopping around from tool to tool, making the most out of the best those tools had to offer. Very regularly this meant I had information spread across several applications, or would find myself duplicating information in search of the next best thing.

I’ll have to admit, I was late to the Notion bandwagon. It wasn’t until there had been a groundswell of support and excitement among my Viget colleagues, too loud to ignore, that I decided to finally give it a go. I assumed this would be a tool that, like all the rest, would do one or two things well but fall into my heavy arsenal of apps I could say “yep, used that one.” Boy was I wrong.

After nearly a year of using Notion, I can’t imagine doing my job without it. It’s truly changed the way I organize myself, process information, and has become a major channel of communication for my project teams.

Here are my top five reasons (in priority order) for why Notion has changed my life as a project manager and all together more productive and organized human.

1. Superior note taking

• Keyboard shortcuts (or slash commands) give me just the right about of in-the-moment formatting that Google Docs does not. Now, I don’t get stuck on making sure my headings and fonts are consistent. I just start typing and go.

These are my most used Notion keyboard shortcuts that help me take notes quickly

• Drag and drop is crucial for me when reordering takeaways, next steps, and thoughts in mid-conversation (and after the meeting). This has completely eliminated the frustration of trying to capture a non-linear thoughts in mid conversation. I just type it out knowing that the clean up afterwards will take no time at all.
• Organizing notes in a table by using a tagging system gives me the quick info to find what I’m looking for easily. This is everything to me.
• Automatic page layouts with templates lets me set up a notes document in seconds. You can make templates pre-populate properties too so you will never forget to date or tag a post.

A meeting notes database using the Table view in Notion

2. Visual page layouts

• Making pages visually appealing and easy to scan is incredibly important to me, and increases the likelihood that someone will actually read my notes (I think).
• It’s more fun and that counts for a lot when you create documentation for most of your job.

Cover page of a project workspace can be made in minutes

3. Quick page creation

• Whipping up something quickly makes handoffs on onboarding a lot less daunting.
• Page content and layout is pretty file type agnostic which means I feel less confined when pulling materials from a bunch of different places.
• There are a ton of templates offered by Notion (and by a ton of independent Notionos) that make creating a workspace really approachable.

4. Dynamic views

• Manipulating table data into a variety of view formats (kanban, timeline, gallery, etc.) offers a lot of different ways to analyze information to make it more useful.
• Linking custom views to be used on other pages makes it super easy to reference information in several places without having to copy and paste.
• The added bonus of updating information in one place (🙌🏼) is having it dynamically populate pages like tasking boards and status reports. This syncing happens in real time and has eliminated the time I used to spend copy and pasting information across tools.

Setting up different views for a Notion database turns a once static table into a powerful organizational tool.

5. Super scalable

• Whether it’s a one-woman show or a dozen people on the team, Notion can shrink or grow for what you need it for
• You get a lot of features under the personal plan and the personal pro plans is highly affordable for small to medium sized teams

Some hopes for the future

Improvement of performance and stability

In 2021, Notion has been noticeably laggy. Notion has publicly addressed this with clear steps to how and when they intend to get things more performant.

Update as of April 21, 2021

More filter settings for Timeline view

The current timeline view is, really, just okay; it not going to reinvent your time-lining game (yet). It can give you a basic timeline for simpler projects but nesting and color coding are limited. Some upgrades I’m hoping for:

• Being able to filter a timeline view with a specific date range. The “next week” or “this month” type filter is handy but it does not work well with long-term tasks that span multiple weeks or months
• Eliminated weekends from the view. For personal organization, the weekends are great. But for my billable client work? Not so much

Better grouping in tables

While filtering in Notion is pretty robust and easy to use, there is no concept of grouping. This is the main differentiator between Notion and AirTable and a clear decision point for me when I am about to make a table.

• Viewing a parent to sub-task relationship is very cluttered. This is the main reason why I still use AirTable as my fall back when I need a robust relational data table. While it’s nice to relate properties to each other it gets unwieldy, fast (over five related properties).

Additional Notion Resources

• Block basics: build the foundation for your team’s pages | Notion
• One Tool To Rule Them All | Oki Doki, Marie Poulin
• Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and Notion | UX Collective, Brandon Dorn
• Pro Tips | Notion VIP, William Nutt

💭 What are your favorite Notion features? Leave a comment below.