Getting Organized with Notion

I love lists. I write lists for everything, and I need to keep track of everything in some kind of list somewhere, or it will fall completely out of my head. There have been a number of apps that have failed miserably at helping with this, and over the years I developed a fairly steady system of hand-writing lists on paper and using the Notes app on my phone.

This works fine, and it's not that this was a bad system, I just wanted to be able to do a little bit more with it.

Enter Notion.

Notion's whole thing is being able to create a database of information, then pull from that database from anywhere and arrange, filter, and sort the data in a number of ways. This makes it useful for lots of different things, though it's primarily billed as a 'note-taking' app.

Task Management - it's like a super to do list!

Habit Tracking

One popular use for Notion is habit tracking. You can get pretty fancy with this, but I went for a fairly simple approach.

Does it work? Well, it's certainly become a habit to tick off the boxes for the things I did each day; I suppose there is some extra desire to see lots of blue checkmarks which might translate to actually doing more of these things. I'd like to see if there's any progress with this over the course of, say, 6 months - will I have gotten any better at these habits? Look how bad I am at flossing every day! So far, the only thing I'm good at doing consistently is making the bed 😛

I don't look at this big calendar view that often, though - on my main 'dashboard' page, there's just yesterday and today to focus on:

Could Be Better

Notion isn't perfect. Notion is slow. Slow as heck. Heckin' slow. Hopefully that gets better.

It would also be nice to be able to customize things a little more - for example, I would like to be able to hide the title of a linked database, and get a little more punchy with the colors.

Random Notes

Notion is also a great place for me to store a bunch of other, more random stuff. I have a grocery list and weekly meal plan page I share with my partner, that uses a database of our favorite meals so that we can easily figure out what to eat and shop for each week. I have a database of gift ideas that I add to throughout the year, for friends and family (as well as myself!) that I can come back and use for inspiration during the holidays. I used to keep notes about the books I'm reading, though this has since become something that I put directly on my website in my digital garden.

I've also dabbled in using Notion for personal journaling, but I just... don't really do that. Keeping a daily journal is real hard, and I'm real bad at it. Notion is a good tool to use for it, though!

Altogether Notion has been a really great tool for helping me get organized and so far it seems to be hitting the right balance between ease of day-to-day use, while being powerful enough to do everything I need. It even served as inspiration for this website's current design (though we'll see how long that lasts).

March 23, 2021