1/27/2023 - Notion

An all-in-one organization tool. I consider this my 'Second Brain'

Overview

Notion is a beautiful tool that offers the creation of pages, tables, automation tricks, etc that can be utilized to keep a person or team organized. Out-of-the-box Notion offers a range of templates that support many use-cases: Design documentation; Engineering wiki; Calendar; Context Creation; and so much more. I compare it to any note taking app, such as iOS's default notes app, but on steroids.

Use Cases

• A company wants to track tasks and assign users to specific tasks (think Agile / Sprint boards)

• A user wants to track their content creation in a calendar view

• A user wants to create a reading list to keep track of in progress books / previously read

• So much more

Features

• Calendars

  
• Tables

  
• Integrations (just a small subset, a lot of flexibility)

  
• Page Hierarchy

  
• AI

  • Notion has recently added the ability to utilize AI to produce content, generate ideas, and much more

How do I use Notion

Figure 1: My company's agile board

I use notion in a ton of different ways. Beginning with my company, PNW Software Solutions, I track notes from meetings, create stories / bugs / research tasks and track the progress of each and create engineering docs in case of future developers. This allows for our team to easily see what is left to do for a release, and update the progress accordingly.

I also use notion for personal stuff. Anything related to travel planning, software engineering notes, yearly goals, macro / calorie tracking, etc. This is the place where everything I need to plan for I put (aside from stuff like passwords).

References

• https://www.notion.so/

• https://gumroad.com/blog/notion-templates