An Overview of Notion

What is it and why should you use it?

If you haven’t heard of Notion or are unsure about using it, let me give you this in-depth introduction to Notion and why you have to use it.

Notion calls itself an all-in-one workspace for your docs, wikis, and projects.

Is this true? Of course!

It is “all-in-one”. You can write a document and organize several other documents on the same page. They have tables, galleries, kanban boards, and calendars that can all be part of the same database. Notion is the platform for building systems.

Notion can do this much because everything is built on blocks. In Notion, a block can be anything. It can be any kind of text, a link, a page, a database, etc. Once you understand how these blocks work, you can build systems too.

Since the software release in 2016, the app has gained massive popularity on social media and YouTube. Notion currently has over 30 million users of which 4 million are paying customers. Notion promoted and sponsored many YouTube channels that gave Notion tutorials and templates. They also have the Notion Certified program to which consultants can apply to be “approved” by Notion. They also host events and webinars for the Notion community; anyone can join their community-hosted groups.

There are so many ways to use Notion. Whether it’s for school, work, business, or your personal life, there will always be a way to save time using Notion systems.

• You can keep track of your homework, projects, and grades in each class as well as due dates for everything you need to do. You can easily build a system where it shows each upcoming assignment in every class.

I made this simple school planner in 30 minutes. You can even add a class notes feature.

• You can do the same for your work or business. If you’re working with other people, you can add them to your Notion workspace and edit the same documents in real-time. You can create automation to notify people whenever you complete a task, edit a page, or want to set up a meeting. You can change the sharing permissions on each page if you have teams working on different projects. Notion helps you minimize the busy work from your job or business.

One of Notion's pre-made templates to manage tasks, projects, and sprints for a team.

• Notion for personal life is one of the more common uses because there are so many things to keep track of. You can create planners for food, workouts, reading, job searches, habits you want to keep, and just any hobbies that you want to keep track of. You can check out my workout tracker template below as an example. Also a picture of my reading log that I created.

A simple reading log.

So why should you use Notion? Why not just use the old methods of your phone or notebook or Google Docs?

Let me ask you this… How many different apps/software/journals do you use to keep track of your tasks, projects, documents, your job, or your business?

With Notion, you can keep track of ALL of those things not just in the same app or website, but on the same singular page!!! Notion is a tool to help you keep track and plan for any area of your life.

The second reason is the huge community learning and teaching Notion. There’s content on how to use it as well as creating ready-made templates to buy.

The most common template is the “Second Brain” which is a personal productivity system designed to organize your whole life. It uses strategies from the book “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte, as well as many other books like “The PARA Method”, “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, several books by Cal Newport, and more.

A quick search on Gumroad reveals several Second Brain templates for sale. Click on “Second Brain” in the paragraph above to get to this website.

Several YouTube channels focus mainly on Notion that have over 100k subscribers. The r/Notion subreddit has almost 350k members. On almost every social media, there are Notion groups all with thousands of members.

Finally, once you learn the basics of Notion, that’s all you have to know. You can create many systems even with little experience. In fact, you can skip the learning! Just download a template or hire a Notion consultant to create a system that is tailored to your needs.

And that’s Notion! This was a more drawn-out version of my first post but I wanted to explain why I’m a big fan of Notion and you should be too!

On the next episode of the Stay On Task blog…

So you want to become a Notion expert? Here’s how to learn as efficiently as possible.

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