Notion Omnifocus



2019-11-18 2295字 English

This is just my personal opinion. I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying out Notion. If you’re searching for a new productivity tool or experience, please give it a try.

Notion

Notion for Academics Inspiration Idea #4: Want to create a comprehensive personal management system that combines a daily journal that tracks your progress with goals and/or habits, which feeds into weekly agendas, and also connects to your notes (academic and personal) as well as to other resource materials you are saving online, AND connects to your quarterly and/or annual goals? And this brings us to three prime candidates for ridicule: Notion, OmniFocus, and Morning Routines. I’ve fallen for 2 out of 3 of these traps. Here’s the thing: each of these systems requires more maintenance and setup work than any potential gain you could get out of it. Think of it like Hybrid cars when they came out. Moving all my productivity architecture to Notion caused me to stop (or almost stop) using these 4 apps: Omnifocus. Centralizing the core of my productivity system in just one software is quite a risky move, but.

NotionNotion Omnifocus

My background:

  • I’m very disorganized in general. Previously, the only task management system that works is the bullet journal (first generation). Yes, I’m still using the 2013 setup - Moleskine squared notebook, “a dot” means notes, etc. The original bullet journal video: Bullet Journal.

  • My day job is a software engineer, so I have used some advanced feature in Notion. E.g. I figured out how to use Formula to calculate the time between a time range and display it in “hh:mm” format.

After 2 months of using Notion, I noticed I only enjoy using two pages: my sleep log and spending log.

Graph: my sleep log

The database that tracks my spending has nothing fancy, so I’ll skip it.

Otherwise, the app doesn’t meet my need. What I’m looking for a tool that helps manage my side projects and personal goals. I like the UX of Things 3 and have tried Omnifocus, but I wish I could get an editorial view for projects.

At first, Notion’s flexibility is very appealing.

However, while I could spend hours to set up the projects, epics and tasks correctly, I keep failing at executing the plans.

IMHO, this is the biggest flaw of the Notion’s UX. After everything’s set up, now what? How to help users execute the plan?

The database format makes it really hard to see the big picture or to visualize the progress and the next step. Eventually, I resort to use the page icon to signal a task’s status.

Graph: my tasks

I redesigned my workflow a few times, and watched plenty of Notion videos and checked out all official templates. Nothing works so far :(

Notion Omnifocus

A surprising use case: planning my novel.

I have tables for my characters, scenes, writing schedule, and a calendar for events happening in the book.

Graph: plot timeline

The calendar view is very helpful for plot planning. I could use it to visualize when things should happen. There are dedicated apps (e.g. Aeon Timeline) to do this and they can sync with Scrivener and Ulysses (!!), but they’re not free.

Another task that I’ve tried is to trip planning. It’s OK, I don’t hate it, but after I planned everything, I don’t read them. :(

Conclusion

Bullet journal and Notion are not compatible, because I think they serve completely different users. If you’re a bullet journal person, Notion (at least the database feature) won’t meet your need.

I also feel like Notion can’t replace a todo list app or a time management app.

What Notion is good for:

  • logging
  • planning small projects (with less than 10 tasks in total).

What Notion is not good for:

  • planning big or complicated projects
  • tracking long term goals, or getting a big picture of how things are going

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2020 was a great year for productivity apps.

With the rise of Notion, Coda, and other no-code tools plus the exploding need for productivity apps due to everyone working at home during the pandemic, this genre has been flooded with possibilities.

I have a great love for organizing things and testing out new tech so trying all of these apps has been a veritable playground for me.

I've taken a deep dive into quite a few of these apps during the past year, going so far as to set up a full Life Operating System (inspired by August Bradley and Marie Poulin, thanks y'all!) in both Notion and Coda as well as extensively using quite a few others. (Stayed tuned for some videos and articles going through my Life OS)

What I've Tried

Here are the main applications that I used in 2020:

  • Notion
  • Coda
  • Craft
  • Evernote
  • Roam
  • Obsidian
  • Google Tables
  • Airtable
  • Google Sheets
  • ClickUp
  • Todoist
  • Dropbox Paper

The ones that I used the most extensively were Notion, Coda, Airtable and ClickUp. I set up a full system in the first two and went as far as I could to do so with the last two.

I've learned quite a bit about each product along the way and will cover them individually in detail in future posts.

I've also learned a lot about what I do and don't want in a productivity app and what I do and don't need.

The app that I have ended up fully adopting is Coda. At the same time, while I love so much about it, there are still some key features that it's missing for my workflow. In fact, my top apps all seem to be just one small change away from really satisfying my needs.

So I'm in somewhat of a holding pattern, waiting to see which product will release the next big update fulfilling what I'm looking for. Which one will win the race to integrate 'the missing feature'?

Notion omnifocus

What I'm Looking For

So what am I looking for?

Notion And Omnifocus

If I could build my perfect productivity app, here is what it might look like:

  • Local storage, open source and privacy of AnyType.
  • The power and flexibility of Coda's formulas. Inline formulas too!
  • Task management from ClickUp, Todoist and OmniFocus.
  • Databases/tables from Airtable, Notion and Coda.
  • Craft's speed, UI and just plain slickness.
  • Notion's aesthetic and doc organization.
  • Backlinks and networked thought à la Roam Research.
  • ClickUp's roadmap and feature request transparency.
  • Notion's community engagement and availability of learning resources.
  • The cross-platform quick entry/web-clipper options of Evernote.
  • Scalability and performance of Airtable and Google Sheets when it comes to larger tables.
  • Coda's customer service.
  • Table rows as pages and self-referencing filters from Notion.
  • ClickUp, Airtable and Coda's integration options and API. (Integromat is life!)
  • Native apps like Craft.
  • Coda's charts.
  • The Siri and iOS widget integrations from Todoist and OmniFocus.
  • Notion's fairly low (or free) subscription cost.
  • Powerful math functions from Google Sheets.

Now, as someone with programming, UX and development experience, I understand that some of these wishlist items directly conflict with each other and just aren't practical in one product (although I think the folks at ClickUp might think otherwise! lol).

My Frontrunners

I know there are going to be trade-offs.

So of my top apps here are the main things I'm looking for to fully make a switch:

Notion: More powerful, flexible and inline formulas. API access and automations (recurring tasks is a deal breaker for me).

Coda: Table rows as pages. More flexible page layouts. Self-referencing filters.

Notion Vs Omnifocus

ClickUp: Documents as first class citizens, different navigation and greatly simplifying the UI.

**I will continue using Roam until someone integrates backlinks like they do. Also, I'm waiting to get access to the AnyType alpha, so I'll reserve further judgement until then.

Basically, whoever implements these items first will get my business. From some of my discussions I think we're super close to seeing some of these. My understanding is that these 3 products are working on items from my list right now.

So who will get there first?

I want to close by saying I am blown away by all of the talented and fantastic developers, designers and teams creating these incredible tools for the rest of us to use! We're living in a time of amazing ingenuity and the pace and sheer number of new apps and features that are coming out is mind-blowing. Props to y'all.

What about you? What would make your perfect productivity app?

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Notion Omnifocus