Notion - organise your life/team

I have to mention Notion.so, especially because they recently went completely free for personal usage (I had a subscription in before).

I’ve tried various things to organize myself digitally over the years:

  • I used Trello lists to keep track of books I wanted to read and movies I wanted to watch
  • I had a bunch of Evernote notes around ideas for projects (be they dev, rpg, or whatever related)
  • I tried to use Google Docs to organize RPG content, like character sheets

None of these really gave me a unified experience when trying to basically organize my life. There was always something which I wanted to work slightly different, because it didn’t fit into the workflow designated by whatever tool I was using at the time. Until I found Notion.

Currently I have multiple Notion spaces, one simply titled “Live” and two other spaces for roleplaying campaigns I’m running.

In my “Life” space I keep track of:

  • books I want to read
  • movies I want to watch
  • recipes I cooked or want to cook
  • projects I want to work on, or am working on
  • technology I’m interested in, and cool articles about them
  • TIL from my day-to-day life (work or personal), easy to search through
  • Study information, I’m currently learning about Linux sysadmin things, and have a dedicated page for articles, a searchable glossary, and further material I want to dive into
  • fitness stuff, I have a page with “best practice”/FAQ-style content on some exercises I do in my fitness routine; things like how I to best perform certain exercises etc.
  • and much more (travel, conferences, work, etc.)

For the first time in my life I’m in the position where I can say: if I want to look something up related to my life or work, I go to this one tool and this tool is Notion.

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Looks good Sascha, do they have a desktop app too or is it cloud/web only?

Shall we split to a new thread too? Like what we did for Obsidian? :nerd:

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They have a desktop app but it’s the usual electron version of the web app. Nothing to write home about but it does it’s job.

And sure, if you think that makes sense. :slight_smile:

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…done :smiley:

Can it store all your files/lists locally or does it need to store them in the cloud?

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It is sadly a pure cloud solution. So sadly no, no option to store things locally.

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I keep telling myself to use it but the supposed freedom to organize anything the way you like it serves more like a paralyzing factor than anything else.

Would you be okay with sharing some screenshots of the spaces you mentioned? And the sub-sections? You can obscure the texts of course; I am interested in what kind of structure you went for.

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Try also the “Bullet Journal” method, it would perfectly fits your needs and more :slight_smile:

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pure cloud + electron app would be a deal breaker for me. Fortunately, GNU Emacs has Org Mode. It can do most of what Notion does, but offline and in plain text. :slight_smile:

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All right, here are some sections from various places in my Notion space(s). I only blurred some of the roleplaying stuff in the unlikely case my players wander in here by accident (because those would contain spoilers for them):

Life

Things that matter

This page is kinda the “entrypoint” to everything else. I have a bunch of favorites in the sidebar but if I want to go anywhere else: here is the place to go from.

Books

I use this page (a database in Notion speak) to keep track of the books I wanna read, or I’m currently reading. As you can see I got quite the backlog. :smile:

Conferences

Here I keep track of interesting conferences and potential talk submissions. The cool thing about Notion databases is: you can have multiple views on the same DB which allows to focus on various parts of the data at hand.

For example, here is a calendar view of the “Concrete Conferences” DB:

Fitness

This page is where I keep summaries of some of the exercises in my routine. Not for all of them but only for those were I need to regular reminder on how to do proper form. I use the expandable blocks a lot here, as you can see.

Roleplaying

Overview

This page serves the same purpose as the “Things that matter” page above but only for one of the campaigns I’m running. BitD stands for Blades in the Dark which a really great system.

Planning

This is a page aggregating and embedding various DBs for a quick overview of where I’m standing as GM and what will be coming up in the next sessions. I blurred some of the things here to not spoil my players should they ever wander in here.

NPCs (Non Player Characters)

A database of important and secondary NPCs in the campaign and their standing towards the group. While this technically contains more information than the players have it’s not like they couldn’t deduce how some of these people stand to them. :smile:

As you can imagine the standing of NPCs towards the group is in constant flux.

Factions

While the NPCs are a single character here we have factions, speak groups and their standing towards the player characters. I’ve chosen the list view here to show a different perspective on the same data (here they’re ordered by strength). But of course I also have a perspective similar to the one of the NPCs.


Especially for the roleplaying stuff I use the DBs and interlinking between them quite heavily. For example I have a “Heist” DB which also contains references to affected NPCs and Factions. This is great to keep the big picture in mind without having to shuffle a lot of paper around.

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Thank you! :heart:

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After @AstonJ share with me this topic.

I created my notion account, and tested a few templates by notion.

And, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos to how create your own space and shaped. But always I felt like I’m in entirely inside of notion but kept me disconnected.

I think, I need to create a full agenda and create many views, and how to use properties to apply good filters to make sense in these differently visualization.

And, so of them things needed to be disconnected, like a task list with an archived page, and I could keep a weekly task list or/and maybe today, soon, someday task list…

A company and personal pages with toggle list, with linked items to an external web pages.

But I could find yet my final results how I liked to build my own notion environment.

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