Notion

Intro

I'm going to take a look at a relatively new app, called Notion. It's like a one-stop shop for all your stuff.

 

Welcome

If you’re a user of Evernote, ToDoIst, Trello, calendars, even wikis, then there’s a app in town that has you pretty much covered.

Notion.so is an all-in-one workspace.
In fact, their own website likens then to a Lego-style building blocks for your information.

Introduction to Notion

Notion is completely free to use on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and via the web. Notion allows you to build workspaces to store and manage information for whatever you like.
A good example to start with is this podcast.
I use Notion to collate and write my scripts. I can upload documents, add images, to be used in the blog transcript, and use a kanban board for my to do list - when I need to complete scripts, when I need to record, etc.
I use Notion to update the blog version, before copying it into my blog.
In fact, Notion has been touted as a replacement for Evernote; although I don’t think it’s quite there yet in terms of some of the functionality.

Notes & Wikis

Notion is great for businesses and individuals alike. So what does Notion claim they can replace?
For notes and documents, then it can replace Google Docs and Evernote - although, as I mentioned before, the full capability of Evernote is not there yet.



The knowledge base style could replace Confluence or GitHubWiki. With code snippets a breeze, it's a great tool for capturing coding standards. You can embed a document stored on Google Drive. Add a link from Google Maps. Do you use Invision for your designs? These can be embedded too. There are 50+ integrations.

Tasks & Projects

For tasks and projects, Notion say they are a good alternative to Trello, Jira and asana. I have to agree that the Trello style boards is really rather good, with plenty of options to add statuses, reminders, tags and the like.
You can create to do lists, and add a reminder.




At the moment you can’t create recurring tasks, so it’s not a replacement for ToDoIst or Reminders just yet. But I’m assured that’s coming.

Finally, spreadsheets and databases. For this, they suggest this can replace Google Sheets and Airtable. Using views, Notion does give you access to your information in a variety of ways.

General

Editing across the application is as simple as drag and drop. You can do font customisations, select colours and add comments; which is ideal for collaboration.
Talking of collaboration, you can also use the Slack integration to push updates to the rest of your team.

Just by highlighting text, you can create bulleted or numbered lists and one of my favourites is the toggle list - which allows you to expand / or hide a section of text at the click of a button.
Notion can also be used offline and will sync with your other devices when reconnected.
I could spend many more hours talking through the various options.

Cost

Earlier on I mentioned that Notion is free to use, and that is true. You can have unlimited members, and you get 1000 blocks of whatever type of content you want to create. A block is any single piece of content you add to your page; like a to-do item, an image, embedded file. It's a lot of information - my entire set of scripts and blogs are created here and I have plenty of room left.

The free version also limits file uploads to 5MB for each file.

Once you reach the limit, you can either delete blocks to free up space, or you can subscribe to the completely unlimited personal version, with no file upload limit, and advanced permissions for $48 per year (which is about £36 at todays rate).

The Team version, which also adds administrative tools is $96 per year, per user (about £74). When you consider the costs of the other tools combined, this is not overly expensive.

Conclusion

Now, whilst I am extolling the virtues of Notion, it must be said that it comes with quite a steep learning curve.

It can do so much, and when you first start to look at it, it can be a little daunting. However; it is definitely worth spending some time getting to know what it can do - and since it's free, then there's nothing lost; except time.

Thank You

I hope you’ve found this post interesting.
If you have any questions about Notion, then please get in touch via the comments below.

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