You’re probably wondering what is this or what would make it use full for me. If that is your case, then you are in the right place.
What is Notion and what is it for?
Notion is a place to store everything you want, it can be everything you need it to be. Some will consider Notion as a second brain so they don’t forget anything. Others think about it as their perfect Journal so they don’t lose track of anything.
Notion is a cross-platform service to store anything you want to: notes, reminders, to-do lists, drafts, calendars, travel plans, links to read, articles you want to remember, images, vídeos. Anything you can think about, this is the right place to store it.
You can consider Notions as your personal wiki which will help you managing your tasks, documents and database. This app is fighting within the world of productivity apps against OneNote (Microsoft), Evernote and some others.
Be careful! This is not just another notes and reminders app or any task manager like Todoist. Notion takes the best and greatest things about relational database with web elements such as images, videos, links or anything embeddable).
How does it work?
As a cross-platform service, you’ll be able to use it wherever you are. You can have Notion in your phone, your laptop or just any browser. To be able to use it you have to sing in with an account (or just your email).
Notion works with the concept of building your own workspace. This can have folders and all the pages you need. Notion offers the possibility to work with your team by inviting other users to see or edit the pages you want them to reach.
All the element you add to your pages are considered “blocks” with their own attributes and registers. This is important cause that what lets you link some of this “blocks” to other workspaces, pages or maybe to other “blocks”.
Notion offers templates so you can start by picking someone’s ideas and adapt them to serve your purpose. As you can do anything with notion you would have to learn how to use it but, once you do it’ll be great.
Another great thing about Notion is the web clipper. They offer an oficial extension for Firefox and Chrome which allows you to take quick notes and save them to any of your pages in notion directly from your browser.
With this web clipper, you’ll be able to save anything with one click. You just have to hit the Notion logo to save any page you are on. Then you’ll have to choose its destination to give it a home in your Notion workspace. With the extension you can also make it actionable. Add notes, share it or make it a task. Every item can be tagged and assigned.
How much does it costs?
As any other service notion has different pricing plans which suit different purpose for all their users. Considering all the thing notion offers to their users, it is really cheap. Other apps like Todoist or Bear are a bit cheaper, but they just offer one of all the functionalities Notion can offer you.
Pros and cons
Now that we know what is Notion there are some points to consider:
PROS
- It can be suitable for anybody because of its power to personalize your own workspace.
- It is simple and minimalist. There are other great apps in terms of productivity like OneNote. But they have a bit of a problem with their tough interface full of functionalities that can confuse the users.
- It is the most flexible productivity app nowadays. They understand every single user is different and that is why it can serve different purposes to make it suitable for anyone.
- It helps building a community around the app. The users can share their workspaces so others can use them as a template. They also have a place for the users to share questions and tips.
- They will keep you and your information save. Notion provides encryption within the service and in transit.
- For any enterprise or any team that uses Slack, you’d like to know that Notion can integrate with your Slack channel. Then you’ll get notified if there’s any change or upgrade in a Notion page.
CONS
- Offline use is limited. There are some situations where you don’t have internet and you can only used the Notion pages you have loaded before the app notices you don’t have internet connection. The good is they have said they are working on it.
- Notion it’s only in english. This is not a big problem if you are reading this article but for the use of the app all around it is something they should work on.
- They could improve the way files are added in Notion. It would be grate for notion to add the functionality to scan documents and save them as images or PDF.
CONCLUSION
I’ve written this article after using Notion for three months. I can say there’s a learning process to master Notion but as you go through it you find new purposes in the way you use it.
I would 100% recommend this to all my friends, family and coworkers. You should give it a chance and try to learn more about it by using it. Notion can make anyones’ live easier.
