Anyone who knows me can tell you I am a neat freak. I am fastidious with naming and obsessive with organization. While this has greatly reduced the recurrence of situations where I’m at a loss as to where something is located or what information is in a certain category, its also caused me to bounce around various softwares in an attempt to optimize my organization of information in a productive manner.
As I am not in a position to break strict rules of financial frugality, I took time to look into various productivity apps to find which ones offered the most within the free versions. In some cases, I combined two apps – one for a few set purposes, and another for other, different roles. Given how much research and simultaneous creative ideas I have, manually transferring data took a huge effort – and learning the software’s features caused the birth of even more ideas. As exciting and explorative as this journey was, ultimately it was counter-productive and was only causing ideas to pile up, instead of being properly initiated and built upon into something tangible and meaningful.
I have used Microsoft OneNote, Apple Notes, Notion, Asana, and Trello. I initially left Notion because I found some features too complicated and wasn’t comfortable using templates, let alone how to use them effectively – especially complex ones. Furthermore, I was trying to cross-reference too many databases at once and got frustrated with how the pages-within-pages hierarchy was working. This led me to stick with OneNote (which I had been using for many years already) and simply using a Kanban software to manage my projects instead – Trello.
However, over time the back-and-forth between the two apps started to get cumbersome, and quite often I found myself duplicating information on a project or idea across both apps. Notion started to become more appealing as I (somewhat) began to resume watching YouTubers like Ali Abdaal and Thomas Frank – along with a slew of new helpful features added to the app.
After taking a closer look at Notion from these YouTubers, I finally decided to make the permanent switch – whilst still keeping my old, pre-existing ideas and writing in OneNote as a backup. With a fresh approach, I researched on the best widgets to customize the experience, and utilized databases, basic tables, and templates in the best way possible. Added to which, I noticed Notion also had many of the same features I enjoyed within other apps. Now it truly felt like an all-in-one workspace – as its self-proclaimed description and slogan states.
After years of fussing, I can safely say my neat freak of a brain and heart is truly satisfied – in spite of the lack of a dedicated offline mode. I have a central place to write, to embed bookmarks, and visually present ideas, table-oriented data, Kanban boards, image galleries, and much more.