Tag: Notion

Planting a Digital Garden
One of the cool things about working at a place like Automattic is that you are part of this global network of inspiring people that often think deeply, creatively, and publicly about expression. Unfortunately, it is incredibly easy to become blind to the verdure, as a result of the daily obligations that our busy roles require.

Over the past couple of days I decided that the thicket of ‘low priority’ e-mail notifications I had allowed to build up was becoming unreasonable – even by my standards – and that I urgently needed to wrest some kind of control back. As I hacked through the undergrwoth, I came across some posts on my colleague Cheri’s blog talking about the idea of a ‘digital garden’ – which immediately sparked some kind of mental wildfire.

What is a digital garden?

So what the heck is a digital garden anyway? I am well aware that it may sound dangerously twee, but bear with me, as I think there’s something to it. There isn’t a specific definition that I am aware of, but if I had to boil my understanding of it down to a simple summary, it would be:

An open, personal collection of perpetually evolving notes and other media, which eschews attributes commonly associated with blogs or other platforms such as presentation via chronological order based on publication date.

That’s quite a mouthful, but effectively what this describes is an approach to a website that has an assortment of different snippets on various topics, loosely organised. Kind of like a personal Wikipedia, or a public notebook.

The concept isn’t really new, even if the nomenclature is – and it actually strongly reminds me of the way that personal websites used to be, before the web became more structured, and often siloed through the use of social media timelines. An important element of such a thing is the reliance on contextual hyperlinks, to tie pages together in a much more organic and idiosyncratic way, as opposed to rigid categorical linearity.

Reimagining blogs

One of the things that we know people struggle with when it comes to blogging is how to keep their site active. Commitments to a regular posting schedule quickly fall by the wayside in the face of internalised pressure to have something ‘worthwhile’ to say, particularly when the output has to be the finished article. Even with the best of intentions, disillusionment can often follow, with the process becoming more of a chore than a liberation.

Despite my love for – and involvement with – blogs, I too feel this sense of inadequacy keenly. That should be self-evident purely based on the date of the last post I made here, which was over 9 months ago. However, I also currently have 71 drafts in progress over on my main photo blog allmyfriendsarejpegs. While I am constantly writing and updating, the nature of these and my own perfectionism means that I am often stuck in a constant state of false progress, working on articles that will potentially never see the light of day.

Preservation, not Presentation

I find fascinated by the possible reconception of blogging that the idea of a digital garden brings. Removing the finality of publication, as well as the perceived need for time based updates means that you can focus purely on the act of writing and collation – as opposed to chasing what effectively amounts to a kind of news update or dated diary.

Over the past couple of years I have struggled with a declining interest in photography – something that used to be central to my identity. As part of an ongoing period of reflection on that, I’ve come to realise that part of the reason may come down to a gradual change in why I take pictures. I think that I have probably become so concerned with getting the right shots for an eventual, theoretical blog post, that I no longer enjoy or engage with the process itself. In other words: my preoccupation with the final presentation of the work has supplanted the reason for participating in its creation in the first place.

As I’ve begun to explore this revelation, I’ve consciously shifted my approach away from a concern with the eventual presentation of content, to one of preservation, where I take pictures or shoot video to capture moments purely for the sake of doing so itself – not thinking about what I will necessarily do with them later. That simple adjustment has completely transformed my way of thinking, and reinvigorated a lot of the passion that I once had in these kinds of expressive actions.

The notion of planting and growing a digital garden which is more concerned with the ongoing as opposed to the culmination strikes a chord with me partly because of this understanding, and is one that I find incredibly exciting.

The Plan

Going forward, I am going to experiment with the idea on this site. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t any specific themes or established methodologies for doing so with WordPress, but it seems like fertile ground on which to explore.

My plan is to:
1. Move the date-specific blog portion of this site to its own dedicated area.
2. Create pages for specific ideas, notes, and musings that come to mind, as and when they do.
3. Replace the home page with a splash which will help people navigate this brave new world.
There are some challenges of course, including the fact that page updates won’t necessarily produce any kind of notification to readers, and it will be difficult for folks to track what is new. However, I am keen to embrace the chaos, and kind of like the idea of things sprouting up naturally in what may end up as a tangled, inter-connected suffusion. For that reason, I am not going to implement any specific automated systems of categorisation and sorting, as that would spoil some of the magic.

Irrespective of how this turns out, I am looking forward to breathing new life into this site, and perhaps feeling a bit less terrible about paying the annual domain renewal fees for something I rarely update.
25/10/2023
How I replaced everything with Notion: Recurring Tasks and Wishlists
Things: To Do items and other projects

I’ve written before about how much I love Things, and that hasn’t changed. When it comes to organising and tracking daily tasks, Things is still my go-to. However, there were a couple of issues that I had begun to run into which were becoming counter-productive:
1. Too many tasks, not enough organisation: Similar to what I had experienced with Evernote, while I was quick to dump all sorts of things I wanted to do into Things, it seemed like the ‘Someday’ and ‘Anytime’ pile were growing and growing into a huge, unmanageable mass. Piles of articles to read, videos to watch, and miscellaneous tasks. Even using tags, it was becoming a strange source of low-level anxiety, as I knew I would never get round to doing anything there.
2. Recurring tasks never ‘completed’: Lots of the things I want to do are daily tasks, such as practicing Japanese, or making music. The problem with this was that most of my To Do list never really changed. I would tick off the checkbox, only to… immediately re-create it for the next day. It felt like a pointless exercise, and didn’t provide any of the satisfaction that I should feel upon completing a task.
Eugh, what a mess.

What I realised was… neither recurring tasks or lists of videos to watch, articles to read, or music to listen to are actually To Do list items at all, but something quite different.

What I thought of as daily tasks are actually habits, rather than ‘to do’ items.

This was an important one. Realising this was liberating, as I could approach the issue differently – with a Habit Tracker.

My habit tracker within Notion.

There are various different kinds of habit tracker templates available, and I customised one that I found online (I can’t remember where now, sorry!). Each week I create a new table, and adjust the habits I want to focus on as appropriate. This not only allows me to more easily track and report on my progress – but also frees up my To Do list in Things for one-off, immediate tasks that need to be completed on a specific day.

Things to Read, Watch, and Listen to

As I mentioned, my Things ‘Anytime’ lists were filled with different articles I wanted to read, or videos I wanted to watch at some point, and it simply wasn’t working. Instead, I created different databases in Notion to gather and organise this stuff.

For example, here is my list of films to watch…

an excerpt from my Reading List (don’t judge)…

and my trimmed down YouTube list (filtering out the Japanese learning videos, as there’s so many of them).

The beauty of this is that I can organise them in a much deeper way with Notion, assigning tags, related URLs, authors, etc – and then sort/display them on that basis. Rather than facing a huge list of items to get through like when they were chucked into Things, I can now dive in to the specific database and find exactly what I want when I have some spare time. I can also add notes and ratings when I’ve actually read or watched them, which are also reportable/sortable.

Blog Post Ideas

Ideas for blog posts were another thing that I used to store in Things, which didn’t really work out all that well. The reality with blog posts is that they all exist at different stages – and are more like mini-projects than To Do list items to be checked off.

Now, I organise them as documents within Notion, like so:

Each entry acts as its own ‘page’, which can contain notes, images, etc, and I can assign tags depending on the status of any particular post (from idea, to ‘in progress’, to completion).

Again, doing this means that my To Do list is freed up and reserved for items which require action and completion in the short term – which brings added focus and clarity.

Visibility

Aside from the deeper meta-data capabilities that come with Notion’s database approach, there’s also something else which has proven to be invaluable, but also really simple… and that’s the visibility of the tasks.

While hard to capture in a screenshot, all of my different lists or projects can be displayed on my home dashboard in a neat, logical, organised way.. with a custom view as appropriate. This means that instead of dumping things into ‘Anytime’ or ‘Some Day’ in Things and forgetting about them, I can keep certain projects or items on my radar – without them becoming too intrusive or overwhelming.

Summary

Things is great, but trying to use it as a master tracking utility for everything simply wasn’t working for me. Offloading the larger and longer term projects to Notion, and having Things focus on specific things I need to get done on a day to day basis has made a huge difference. Give it a bash.
27/11/2020
How I replaced everything with Notion

Knowing my penchant for a productivity tool, my good friend Pazy suggested I investigate one that I hadn’t heard of before: Notion. From what I could gather, it was a central place to store a whole manner of different kinds of notes.

I was initially a bit wary of diving head-first into Notion, as I have both used and built up a significant amount of content in Evernote over the years. However, the temptation was too much to resist, and I gave it a whirl. After just a short time, I was convinced. Notion is the promised land.

Coming from Evernote

While Evernote has been touted as the single place that you can quickly grab and throw all of your various ideas, links, clippings, and files that you come across on a daily basis – Notion takes that idea a step further. Rather than just acting as a huge repository with search capabilities, Notion encourages you to store information in a far more organised way, making heavy use of its own databases. At first, I found this a bit confusing, as my Evernote ‘save it all’ approach didn’t quite fit neatly… but once I realised that Notion involved a fundamentally different approach to data organisation, it made much more sense.

Databases versus Notes

I can already hear people turning off at the sound of databases. I was the same. Pazy is a database guru as part of his day job, so I just assumed he was naturally inclined to gravitate towards databases in his personal life too. However, Notion utilises and presents databases in a way that you wouldn’t even realise they were there unless you stopped to think about it. Essentially, rather than storing information in a text-note, you are gently prodded to put it into tables, with tags – all of which is presented in a logical hierarchical structure. Before you know what’s happened, you suddenly have the ability to organise, filter, and display your notes in a much more powerful and diverse way than would have been possible with the alternative.

To give a concrete example, as a musician I keep a note of tracks I have started working on, but which might not be finished. In Evernote, that looked something like this:

and here is an excerpt of how it looks in Notion…

Of course, Evernote can also present data in tables… but with Notion the key point is that the information is treated as a searchable database, rather than just text presented in a different way. With Notion, I can now quickly and easily see which projects are at which stage, and filter them depending on the different variables that I want to display.

For another example, I used to collect recipes to give me ideas for what I could eat on days where I lacked inspiration. In Evernote I would collect these by meal type, but in practice I found that the limited ways to filter these outside of just a plain search meant that I almost never referred to them. Now, they are stored in a dedicated database in Notion:

Looking for a vegetarian dinner? What about an egg-based breakfast? Maybe just a gluten-free snack… It’s as simple as combining the tags and filtering for desired results.

So much easier than sifting through a huge pile of text-note clippings.

Personal Workspace and Linked Databases

One of the other most useful features of the database storage model over using text notes, files, or simple tables is that you can create ‘linked database views’ in different places. In other words, you can have one central database for a particular purpose, and then filter that database to display the relevant data for the appropriate section you are working in. That sounds a bit convoluted, but here’s a practical example. If I want to compile a Reading List of different blog posts, books, journal articles etc that I want to read… rather than having different databases for each area of my life (work, personal, music, language learning, etc), I can have the main database like so:

and then under a specific page, I can have a dedicated ‘view’ of that same database, presenting only the relevant entries. For example, here is how I have the Reading List set up to display on my dedicated Japanese learning page:

Note that it isn’t just displaying a particular sub-set of the data (filtered by those articles tagged ‘Japanese’), but I can also choose how it appears on the page. There’s a bunch of different options including simplified lists, full tables, galleries, etc.

As you can see, rather than creating a typical file structure where you collect pages and files or notes within a hierarchy of folders, Notion encourages you to put together what are essentially ‘dashboards’ of data. This means that on the top level you can display the data from the various collections underneath it – not just act as a blank ‘storage box’. This is an incredibly useful feature, which means you can set up different workspaces for different projects, or for different areas of your life… even if just to separate out work and personal items.

Web Clipper

Evernote’s Web Clipper tool is known for its ability to grab almost anything from the web and squirrel it away for reference – whether it’s screenshots, selections of text, full web-pages, or whatever else – so Notion has a tough act to follow in that regard. In practice, it isn’t as configurable on the surface, which is a bit of a shame. However, it is deceivingly powerful. Here is how it looks when saving an article from a site:

As you can see, there aren’t all that many options. On the bottom right you can click and search for the page you wish to import the clipping to – but not much else. What isn’t obvious though, is that Notion will grab various fields, and import them into the appropriate tables of a pre-existing database. That means, that it will save the URL into the ‘URL’ column of your Reading List table. This is really handy, as it means you have to do less leg-work when it comes to getting different kinds of info into your custom databases. Unfortunately, the extent to which you can modify this is fairly limited… (as in, to tell the clipper to save the URL to a different table field, etc) but hopefully that will come in a future update.

UI and Page Formatting

The UI of the Notion block-style editor is particularly nice. Emojis are littered everywhere, acting as icons or nice little visual indicators, and you can customise pages with images pulled from around the web. There’s even an Unsplash integration, which is a pretty great way to directly get access to high quality images for free.

There is also a wealth of different ways to format the information on your pages and organise them as you see fit, including collapsible sections, different headings, etc.

Anyway, you’ve all seen rich text editors before… but it’s worth saying that the options here are far more fully-featured than I would have expected.

File Handling and Embeds

It should go without saying, but embedding content from other parts of the web like YouTube is really easy. However, at first I thought that file handling in terms of uploads might not be so great, based on various reviews talking about how great Evernote was at handling all kinds of different file types. In practice though, this wasn’t really the case. While you have to purposefully create an ’embed’ block first and then upload your file to Notion for it to display inline (if you just drag and drop, it will create a download link instead) – it is still perfectly functional, handling PDFs, MP3s, etc.

The one caveat here is that while Notion is free for personal use, uploading files larger than 5mb requires a paid account – which starts at 4USD per month for an annual subscription (or 5USD on a monthly basis).

How I use Notion

Years ago I helped create a Wiki style ‘portal’ for a company that I worked for. The idea being to serve as a central Intranet dashboard full of links, news, and other resources that folks might need. The software we used wasn’t exactly up to scratch, but it got the job done. If Notion had been available back then, it would have fitted the bill perfectly – and that’s one of its major strengths.

Instead of having all different kinds of data stored in different services that I inevitably forget about (Pocket, Evernote, Google Spreadsheets, etc), I now have a single personal ‘portal’ which displays a whole bunch of stuff that I need and use on a daily basis – or simply want to be reminded of. Links to commonly used sites, goals for the year, habits I want to track, articles I want to read, etc. There’s so much information collected and organised in the one place that it’s hard to show just what I mean, but here’s something of an insight…

Having everything I need organised and presented in this way, where I can see the status of a bunch of different ongoing projects at a glance, and dig in deeper into the sub-pages for more information as required has been really liberating. Instead of just chucking every little thing I find on the web which might be useful one day into vaguely defined categories in Evernote (which never really worked very well), I now have things much more neatly defined, and feel so much more organised. It has lifted some kind of low-level mental pressure around accumulating so much data that I would never be able to find again because of its haphazard nature.

Conclusion

I really didn’t expect to take to Notion in the way that I have. While it did initially take some adjustment to understand its core kind of usage philosophy, and a bit of time to set up and input my data in a way that made sense for me, it has replaced and improved on so many different areas of my daily workflows that I can’t imagine going back to Evernote.

Ultimately, the data that I save is now far more organised, far easier to access, and much more useful than it ever has been before as a result. I would definitely recommend it to anybody interested in keeping track of their digital knowledge base.

There is so much more to the app than I can squeeze into a single post, including the ability to manipulate or query the databases via scripts, etc… and so I’ll post a few follow-ups with specific use cases for more details.

17/11/2020