Notion: Your Second Brain

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Not a reading person? No problem!
Just click play and i’ll read it to you..

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If you have ever searched the internet for productivity tips, you would have definitely come across Notion. Although it has been around for 4 years, I only experimented with it around 2 years back. I gave up almost immediately because of its non-existent offline experience and the incredibly slow mobile application.

Why am I posting about it now? I got an email from Notion a few days back, announcing that they have updated their software and they have made it free for personal use! I gave it a try and I am impressed!

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Notion is a tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It’s an all-in-one workspace for you and your team. What makes Notion special is its ability to adapt to all of your productivity needs. Notion uses blocks to build your pages. You can think of these blocks as Lego bricks. You get a variety of standard blocks using which you can build your own system. It also packs a ton of additional features such as Relational databases to organize all your data and helps you visualize it in multiple ways.

How I use Notion:

• Lists
  I have a lot of lists! A To-Do list, NOT To-Do List, Things I own, Subscriptions list etc.
  Notion adds value to these lists by displaying it in different views for different scenarios. You can also add categories, tags, and sort it in a million ways using relational databases.
• Tracking my online lessons
  Notion also helps me organize my online courses. It stores all the information regarding my courses and presents them in a visual table. This table contains every information I need to ensure that I am on track and reminds me of why I signed up for this course by displaying my Drive and Goal alignment.
• Blog Notes
  The Relational Database table helps me track all my ideas for my blog posts. It helps me organize all my posts and acts as a home for all the reference material and my notes.
  The web clipper extension helps to quickly save posts I am interested in for further reading and reference.
  I also use it as a notepad to write my article and eventually form a blog post. This is my first post using Notion and I have to say, it has made my work so much easier.

Why you should get notion..

• It’s absolutely free for Personal Use. Give it a try! 🙂
• Pre-Defined Templates for quick implementation. They have a ton of free templates neatly categorized for different areas of your life.
• A unique approach to productivity software. There are very few apps that provide this level of flexibility to organize your life the way you want it.

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Shortfalls of Notion:

• Offline experience is not so good. Although they  have improved it over the years, they still have a long way to go.
• It does not sync with Google Calendar(Or any calendar). All my activities are scheduled using Google Calendar. Linking Notion with a calendar would make it the ultimate Productivity application!

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Conclusion

Notion, along with the Google Productivity Suite (Cal, Notes, Gmail) will have all aspects of your life covered.

But, just like how some people spend a lot of time making their bullet journals look attractive, you can just as easily get lost setting up your perfect Notion page. While I have nothing against such people, I personally feel that mediums like Notion and a BUJO should be invisible and offer a frictionless experience to help you achieve your goal. While this is in no way a drawback of Notion, it is just something to keep in mind while using such applications. 🙂

Overall, I am super excited about this new version of Notion! You should definitely give it a try yourself! 🙂

Click here to download Notion.

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