I am a huge Notion supporter - it's our organizaation's brain and one of our most important tools.
However, having used the tool for more than a year at a 20 person org, one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages. There is "Notion anxiety" about not wanting to mess up the board.
One thing we've done to address this is by adding two common tables, the Documentation table and the Meetings table. Anytime anyone wants to create a new doc, they can simply add it to the documentation table and then tag it to their team, and we have a full list of all of the docs everyone has written. From there, if a certain piece of documentation needs to be somewhat else, it can be pulled out and moved there. Additionally, each team member has a default "project board table" and if you say need to create a quick to do list, you should just add it to your personal board. Having these "default tables" rather than a special table for each specific project may really help your team.
Notion requires intentional planning, and you need to be opinionated about the architecture. If you just keep adding things on haphazardly, it's going to turn into a mess.
Finally, I do agree with OP that notifications could signicantly be improved. If anyone from Notion is reading this, please think of notifications like emails. At the moment, notifications are only in the state of read/unread, and as soon as I open my notifications, they clear. Instead, I want my notifications to be a mini-inbox, where I can view notifications, respond to notifications, archive completed notifications, and filter notifications into channels (the same way I can filter emails). Notifications are a to do list, and should be thought of as such. Having this set up would address OPs concern about being able to filter notifications at the email level by setting the filtering logic in the app.
My team started using Notion last year, and this rings true:
> one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages
I have also seen this happen with every knowledge-base software I have ever used. A team’s knowledge-base (which represents a shared domain model) is evolving all the time, as people’s understanding of the domain evolves, and sometimes there is information that is valuable but doesn’t have an optimal home in the current domain model.
The only way I’ve seen it successfully managed is by having different standards for information structure depending on how well the information’s role is understood by the org.
You need dumping grounds where one can quickly jot down relevant information for later processing, and you need areas that present a more structured view of what you know to support decision-making, and a schedule for consolidating and structuring the unstructured knowledge. This creates far less pressure to put everything in the right place at first.
I think of it like a write-ahead log, or like how food is dumped into the stomach before the individual nutrients are extracted and delivered to various destinations around the body - you don’t deliver each nutrient molecule to its destination before eating another.
It's also how high write-throughput databases work. First write the data in a way that's optimised for getting it committed to storage and at high density.
Only later, in the background, maybe at a more convenient time, is the data reorganised for finding and reading things.
Interestingly, my company’s “knowledge base” doesn’t really have a structure for the most part. I can just publish a page in it and share the URL around, and most people interact with it via search. So no matter how I organize the page, people generally find it without going through some kind of hierarchy. I think this works really well when there are tons and tons of pages, and I also don’t have to be concerned about how to organize it.
This is exactly my pain with Notion for personal knowledge management and why I switched to Roam Research. In Notion, I have all my pages in one table, plus tags, in order to manage the hierarchy without sinking a huge amount of time it. But I think Roam isn’t very well-suited for collaborative use cases at the moment.
> I want my notifications to be a mini-inbox, where I can view notifications, respond to notifications, archive completed notifications, and filter notifications into channels (the same way I can filter emails).
This is exactly how the most recent release works, no? Notifications are "unread" by default, but "read" when you see them -- however they stay in the "Inbox" tab of the notifications panel. You can reply directly from there, or mark them as done by clicking the "x" to remove them from the Inbox. Everything you described but filtering.
> one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages. There is "Notion anxiety" about not wanting to mess up the board.
> One thing we've done to address this is by adding two common tables, the Documentation table and the Meetings table.
Definitely. It is important to have one or more fairly undifferentiated tables that function as an inbox or a repository of generic notes into which people can dump stuff easily.
Maybe the stuff gets triaged and organized later, or maybe the stuff in the notes tables just stays as notes - the search functionality got much faster and better a couple months ago and that can surface unorganized stuff.
Linked databases also help for this. You can create a linked db filtered for a team or tag on every team page. Create meeting docs from there, and then new meeting docs show up there and live in the master table with appropriate properties to categorise them.
This isn't a new phenomenon - my favorite past example of this is the FileMaker series of applications.
The biggest hurdle to building most great tools isn't the coding, it's the process of carefully thinking about the problem and designing something that fits without being overly complicated or too basic. Incidentally, learning to code often gives you some basic understanding of this issue.
No-code tools like Notion or Filemaker throw users straight into the deep end of designing their own solutions, and because of the data-agnostic nature of the tool it's difficult to build in guardrails to stop the user from over-complicating their solution.
At the same time, I believe there is value in allowing people to over complicate their solution. Let the user learn how to simplify their workflow over time instead of limiting them from the start.
Thank you - great comment. I have the same issue with the social networks - they are too limiting. They give you a little box to type your paragraph into. Give people hypertext - yah they’ll make a mess, but they’ll do amazing things as well. And people will figure develop the skills over time.
As a pilot run - tried migrating small amount of knowledge base from Evernote to Notion but it just feels too overwhelming. Upending existing information architecture (with umpteen possibilities re: templates) quickly gets exhausting.
This is when I realized, I need an opinionated tool. Gave up and went back to Evernote.
> Gardening Notion boards becomes an activity in itself … Notion doesn’t get out of the way, it’s malleability always invites you to tweak your boards further, to add another property, to connect another relation, to add another view, to go through your board and complete data on all cards.
Sounds exactly like the problem so many folks here are having with Emacs. Malleable tools, while powerful, often become a huge time sink if you go into the rabbit hole of tweaking them too much. And it's often hard to resist.
If you think of Notion as your team wiki, it's an exceptionally good tool.
Probably the best "wiki" I've ever used. I've used Trac, MediaWiki, MoinMoin, Confluence, GitHub Wiki (+ Gollum), and finally Notion. Notion is easy-to-use for non-developers, but still mostly supports Markdown. It makes rich content easy, including tables, in-line images, code snippets. It supports GDoc-style real-time editing, fine- & coarse-grained permissioning, in-line comments, mentions, and versioning. It's a great wiki.
It's really, really easy to over-use a wiki for everything. It's also really easy for wikis to get under-utilized, out-of-date, etc.
But if you're a fully distributed team with 20+ people, you need somewhere to store your team policies/practices, your culture, your vision/roadmap, etc. Notion is a great fit for this.
If you try to use Notion as the "hub for all of your work", you'll certainly be disappointed, just as you would have been using any other "wiki" product for this. For example, though we use Notion as our team wiki, we still use:
- GitHub Issues for bug reports, because it's built perfectly for this, and links with code and pull requests seamlessly
- GitHub project boards for code-oriented project management, because it can kanban-ize GH issues to visualize capacity, issue stages, and project/milestone progress
- Trello for non-code project management, because if you're not a programmer, Trello is much simpler than GH Issues/Projects, and nails the experience of a kanban project board
- StackOverflow for Teams for FAQ-oriented team & product knowledge base
- GDocs for long docs, forms, slides, spreadsheets, and so on -- and especially when these need to be shared "officially" with external parties
- Slack for real-time chat and notifications, often linking to the above tools
I think part of the dissatisfaction expressed in this article is that Notion is being hyped (especially with the VC valuations) as "the future of all work", similar to Slack in a prior startup generation.
Slack is better IRC for busy teams who prefer a SaaS. Notion is better MediaWiki for busy teams who prefer a SaaS. Neither is an all-in-one work hub. Neither is "the future of work". They are just communication/collaboration tools in different categories.
The Achilles’ heel for use as a simple wiki, IMO, is that you can’t just make a simple table for layout, it has to be a “database”. This is OK as long as you stay in Notion, but it sucks for exporting.
Dropbox Paper’s table implementation is really nice (now if they’d just hurry up with their Dropbox 2020 thing and unify Paper and regular Dropbox folders...)
After a few months using Notion at work, I feel such a relief when I get directed to a regular office-style doc (Google docs in our case, but Office would be just as fine).
This week I formally proposed my team move out of Notion for all internal documentation and back to google docs.
Notion is the best and easiest to use wiki there's ever been, I guess, but the reasons I tried wikis before and never stuck with them still apply to it.
Right there with you. I got relatively used to Notion, then a co-worker and I started collaborating on a Google Doc and it felt refreshingly...serious? I'm not sure how to describe it other than I took it more seriously than I do Notion and all its emoji nonsense. It feels like Notion isn't the place where real work gets done.
Fwiw I came from a law background so might value the 'seriousness' of an app more than others.
I’d love to hear why you prefer word processor docs over a Wiki?
For me, Wikis solve the big problem with word processor documents: It’s hard to define the relationships between documents. But I’d also love to hear other perspectives, e.g., what people dislike about them.
Some quick thoughts, they may be incomplete or ambiguous but hopefully will provide some idea:
- A wiki combines content and organization of that content. This is a strength (documents know about each other) but also a weakness (the organization system must understand and support the types of documents it contains). I'll expand in the next points.
- When I use a filesystem to organize, it doesn't need to care what types of documents I throw in there. In a wiki you are typically led to keep copies, not originals, of such alien document types, as attachments to a wiki-supported document.
- If you are willing to commit to a certain organization filesystem (this is not optional in a wiki), you can usually hyperlink documents using your filesystem's url format (e.g. gdrive urls).
- I have found repeatedly over time that the very ease of use of multiple documents across a wiki leads to people spreading information across multiple items "because it's so easy to navigate". But, similar to my impressions with codebases where functionality is heavily spread and atomized across a multitude of files and small functions/classes, this can hinder the ability to grasp or comprehend the compete intended contents of a document. (see http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm... for more about atomized code)
- As outlined in the article, wikis tend to have to duplicate a lot of existing document editing, layout and rendering technology and standards, and very rarely reach the level of power and quality that dedicated tools have. In keeping with the intent to make them easy to use and navigate, they end up making the easy stuff easier (great for non-tech or beginners) but the hard stuff harder. So, for something trivial they are great, for complicated stuff they become a hindrance. I can't remember the last time I wrote or formatted something in Notion and didn't feel like I was fighting a 2-decades-old word processor.
- Extra customizability like Notion offers, make it quite powerful but also exacerbates the above point, because it's not just the basic built-in feature that may work half as good as they could, but the customizations end up in a similar state (because it's not a full app development platform).
Great, thanks for writing this up. I agree with all of these points, these are the trade-offs, I end up preferring Wikis, but I can certainly see how someone can prefer other formats for these reasons.
Two more quick questions if you get a chance: Which document format do you prefer? It sounds like you like to mix different document types, but I'm curious what your bread-and-butter/default choice is? I'm also curious what you mean by "complicated stuff" (in "for something trivial they are great, for complicated stuff they become a hindrance"). I'm assuming you mean things like inline graphs and diagrams? But then this ties into my first question, I'd be really curious to hear what tool you think does do things like that really well? (I've always just exported from other tools.)
For complicated stuff I mean yeah, sometimes tables, sometimes multi-columns, sometimes embedded visuals, sometimes even just some unorthdox layout (like, trying to add a paragraph with my comments in the middle of someone else's bulleted list).
Any of them can be argued, but I've found them useful often. Any of them may be solved by a particular wiki like Notion... but never all of them, because writing a fully featured document editor (or, as seen above, several editors) is a HUGE task.
It would be great if Docs had transclusion across documents.
The best there is now is embedded sections of Sheets and Slides, but being able to link sections across documents would be awesome for complex documentation.
I used to be in the camp of finding better workflows with these tools. I ended up just gardening them,losing time elsewhere.
Now I just prefer the simplest dumbest tools possible for specific use cases. Notebook + sticky notes for task mgmt, GitHub repo for code snippets, simplenote for private information, Google docs for collab
Thank you for pointing out Simplenote. All I've ever wanted is the ability to take basic textual notes on any device (including Windows) with perfect sync and with dead simple but native mobile apps. OneNote got me pretty close, but the sync feature is far too buggy to rely on for serious work; I can't deal with syncing issues when I need to pull up a note in a meeting on my phone. I'd looked at Notion but it offers much more than what I need, so using it just for basic notes was clunky. Simplenote appears to be exactly what I want.
ah yeah onenote suffers the same problem as notion. Too many ways of doing things.
I've learned to take less notes over the years. If I need image or gif support I just use slack to shoot myself the information, slack's been my new temporary dumping grounds
This is an old problem, it’s a mixture of amusement and resignation to see it keep coming up in new areas.
In the salad days of my early undergrad, i spent about three weeks hand tuning (very poorly) an init.el, learning latex, fiddling with auctex and bibtex and makefiles, and doing no work. Quite literally sophomoric.
Learned a lot about elisp, and fuckall about mechanics, but dang if i didn’t have the prettiest lab reports.
Hard to look down upon spending 3 weeks learning elisp and latex during undergrad! Tell your employer you did this and they'll be less kind probably :D
as it turns out, dropping months into obscure trivia of how to do all this silly nonsense has paid off in my professional life, but it sure felt like wasting time at the time.
I keep being intrigued by Notion but ultimately old warhorse Evernote remains the core of my knowledge system. It amazes me that this long into the lifespan of the iPad there is really no competitive way to read/annotate/search and store large numbers of documents across iPad and desktop other than Evernote.
For my usage I find OneNote way clunkier dealing with large numbers of documents. I’m sure it has awesome advantages for people with other workflows. I have also only dabbled in it so maybe I’m missing something.
I keep being curious about notion(and evernote), but can't get into it. Probably because my current solution works well for me.
I simply use markdown files synchronized using dropbox. I use Emacs Org Mode on desktop, and Editorial on iOS. Editorial is still by far the best markdown text editor on iOS, although it's, very sadly, almost never updated anymore(it's still pretty close to perfect, so I keep using it).
I write down all my thoughts in one single journal - a "Notes" folder in dropbox, with markdown files for every 2-3 weeks of notes, called like "2020-05-02.md". Sometimes I use a bash script to combine them all into one big file to easily search through them.
I use ">>" symbol to mark the important ideas/insights so I could easily search for them later.
I use hashtags to organize ideas and notes by topics. Like #pst for blog post ideas, #gamedev for everything I've learned about game development, #book for books I want to read, #health 2020-05-02 for daily notes about my health, #todo 2020-05-02 for todos, etc.
Notes aren't organized in any other way, it's just stream of consciousness. When I have an idea or learn something - I open Editorial and write it down at the end of the currently open file, and if it's important I mark it with a hashtag or ">>".
Every few weeks I search through all the important thoughts of the past few weeks I've marked with ">>" and collect them into a separate file, so I have a kind of a summary of what I've learned/thought about in the past month.
Works really well for me.
Also I can highly recommend Dynalist, it is like a superior version of workflowy. An app for nested lists. Can be used as trello, as an outlining app for writing, as a way to keep a list of your project ideas and the tasks you need to accomplish. I use it to outline fiction, organize my ideas for games and 3D art I can make, and for anything else that fits well in this format.
Finally, Track And Share is the best habit tracker on iOS that I could find, highly recommend it.
I agree. I haven’t used notion but the complaints are identical to my lotus notes experience. I wished I could have entered expense reports in a real program fit for purpose.
We run our company through Notion. Part of using it is establishing your own best practices within the company. Since Notion is flexible, it provides you the opportunity to be rigid and make the decisions on database design that is right for your team.
Notifications in Notion are very poor and that is a valid criticism mentioned in the article. I imagine it will only improve over time and with the coming public API we should start seeing third-party tools supplementing Notion for specific use cases.
Notion has always felt like it's trying to do so many things that it falls short from being good at anything. Products like Trello are good because they focus on one thing and one thing only. Notion has their features and priorities spread-thin. I feel like they could have done much better if they started out with a single feature, somewhat master that implementation, and keep building on features to the app. This way, they can at least manage their priorities and not have to concurrently chase down 20 features.
I'd be curious to read a study as to productivity tools actually do help people be more productive.
Anecdotally, I used to use many different tools from EverNote, WunderList etc.. but over the past 2 years my process has been use Google Drive as a journal and write down my top priorities on a post-it.
Post-it naturally forces me to prioritize a small number of tasks and my journal is to help me document everything I learn. I don't see ticking off low leverage items as a value add to anyone even though the dopamine rush does feel good.
My teammate has described Notion as a B+ solution for everything. It's impressive how many things it can handle, but it's all in a merely decent manner.
I agree. Table rows have to have names, kanban boards have to have "no status" list, number field doesn't support my local currency, you can't round numbers to a fixed number of decimal spaces, instead being forced to use something like:
round((10/3)*100)/100
Can't save custom icons, so I have to re-upload one of like five custom icons I use over and over again. Can't open items in a database as a page automatically, but have to click on "open as page" over and over again, it supports Markdown but not quite:
" instead of > for a quote.
[] instead of * [ ] for a to-do.
Supports h1 to h3, no support for h4 to h6.
Switching between Markdown and Notion is a real pain in the ass. All of those are so close to being perfect, but there's like one major annoyance with the majority of the features I use. B+ indeed.
That being said, you can reference other notes pretty easily within the text and create tables with no hassle (unlike in Markdown), making the other solutions I've tried C+ at best.
I've collapsed everything to Workflowy for myself, and Basecamp for projects with collaboration, or that may someday need significant collaboration. Documentation lives in repos in text files. Everything else starts to feel like busywork.
I'm using notion for personal stuff and have found this line too. Personally it's still the best note taking basic + kanban board. I use github issues with zenhub for code stuff and notion for everything else. I have a global tags database in notion and then I use a global recursive self referencing tasks table so I can link thing globally easily and then just create views when I need to. I think you can get lost but overall it's nice having one source of truth with different views.
I think the product lacks maturity. I think the notifications are garbage, and the inability to hide / emphasis / format the data for a specific form or view is lacking. I think they tried and failed with templates. They need a form builder and more view windows present in places like the properties list.
In my experience regardless of the flexibility of the tool, somebody will want to waste time building out the tool from that 80% to 100% use case when they should have just been happy with the 80%.
I've recently switched from Notion to Roam, and feel good about adding to that hype. I can't judge between them as enterprise tools, but as personal note stash I far prefer Roam. Roam doesn't have Notion's awesome flexibility that the author of this piece describes. But for me it does the important parts better.
It's great to see the deep competition in this area. Even as a current Roam fanboi, I'll switch again with little regret when something better comes along.
I do really Enjoy Notion as my personal note-taking/productivity app, but I agree that its collaboration features make it really hard to use with more than a few people.
Notion reminds me of Sharepoint. Too flexible and too generic, with absolutely zero opinion about differentiating content or workflow strategies or UX. Those kind of tools are usually optimized for prolific creation, but not for meaningful, productive consumption.
I'm slightly late to the party and also slightly off-topic but usually I get very good answers from the HN crowd so here goes nothing:
Does anyone have any recommendations for open-source alternatives to Notion? I'm mainly looking for a Notion-alike that works offline but still has the same flexible structure and "database views" of other pages like Notion.
Closest I've found is TiddlyWiki, but it's documentation and data structure support is a bit all over the place. Not impossible to get through, but maybe there is something more polished out there?
For those looking for a Notion alternative: at my previous company, the excessive customizability of Notion convinced me to switch everyone from Notion to a more lightweight and opinionated tool called Slab. We made the switch in early 2019, and far as I know, everyone still loves using it!
This also replaced some other documentation tools we were using, like Google Docs (partially), GitHub repos of Markdown docs, and Guru.
I was amazed to find Notion which replaced a lot of apps with features like database, notes, spreadsheet, wiki. But later on I realised it was better to use different solutions which were the best in their domains instead of a huge universal app which tried to do all the things in a half baked way.
Right now I use Bear for notes, google sheets for spreadsheet/database etc.
I Use it to manage my personal backlog (work and personal goals boards) and as a note-keeping replacement (lots of templates for meeting summaries, daily meetings, one on one etc).
I have a daily page that summarizes all of my tasks for today (from all of my workspace) professional and personal and I start my day looking at this board.
I think Notion is very good for this purpose. I had no luck trying to convince my organization to transform from Atlassian tools towards this unified solution.
Ten years from now people will figure out a tool like Notion doesn't save you from how hard of a problem Information Architecture is - the same way companies learned creating intranets and internal Wikis twenty years ago.
I like notion because it's pretty simple and works on all my devices. The only other app like that is Gmail. Google suite is awful on mobile, otherwise it would probably be sufficient for my needs.
However, having used the tool for more than a year at a 20 person org, one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages. There is "Notion anxiety" about not wanting to mess up the board.
One thing we've done to address this is by adding two common tables, the Documentation table and the Meetings table. Anytime anyone wants to create a new doc, they can simply add it to the documentation table and then tag it to their team, and we have a full list of all of the docs everyone has written. From there, if a certain piece of documentation needs to be somewhat else, it can be pulled out and moved there. Additionally, each team member has a default "project board table" and if you say need to create a quick to do list, you should just add it to your personal board. Having these "default tables" rather than a special table for each specific project may really help your team.
Notion requires intentional planning, and you need to be opinionated about the architecture. If you just keep adding things on haphazardly, it's going to turn into a mess.
Finally, I do agree with OP that notifications could signicantly be improved. If anyone from Notion is reading this, please think of notifications like emails. At the moment, notifications are only in the state of read/unread, and as soon as I open my notifications, they clear. Instead, I want my notifications to be a mini-inbox, where I can view notifications, respond to notifications, archive completed notifications, and filter notifications into channels (the same way I can filter emails). Notifications are a to do list, and should be thought of as such. Having this set up would address OPs concern about being able to filter notifications at the email level by setting the filtering logic in the app.