Note-taking with Notion

👋🏽 Introduction

Welcome to the first of a series of posts about How To Get More Done With Notion (HTGMDWN) for short! Coming up to the half-year point, I decided it would be fun to document some of the fun and cool ways that Notion helps me with my workflows, both professionally and personally.

As the title suggests we’re kick starting with one of the more obvious ones: note-taking!

🔎 Understanding Taking Notes

Let’s delve really quickly into what note-taking might mean. It could be slightly different depending on the context around the actual notes. At it’s most basic form, taking notes involves reading up or learning about something, and writing it down for future reference or memorization purposes. This can be done using pen and paper, on your phone or via other tools like Notion.

Taking notes can also mean storing important information somewhere for safekeeping, such as personal documents or information. Most people have a preferred method of taking notes, using certain fonts, styling things in certain ways or structuring them in a particular manner.

🎉 Notionize it!

So what does Notion provide for this simple task? Let’s cover this in small batches.

Starting with the simplest benefit, Notion has text styling capabilities which are easy to use and add to make your notes pop. Other than simple italics and bolds, you can add color, emojis, embed fun gifs to really liven up your workspace and make note-taking something to look forward to doing rather than a chore.

If you haven’t heard already, everything in Notion is a block. It can be a sentence, a small heading, an entire essay or even databases. These blocks have different capabilities and can fulfill a multitude of purposes. They can also be dragged around and formatted in the ways you might prefer.

A big advantage most online note-taking tools have over physical media is the ability to aggregate and compile data into tables. Using a pen an paper, constructing tables is a daunting task not just to start up, but also to maintain. Comparatively, using Notion we have access to databases which can store multitudes of annotated data in an easily digestible format and continuously malleable without much effort.

📒 Comparisons to other types of notes

Notion is definitely in a competitive market when it comes to taking notes. There are various other alternatives for note-taking, both in the digital and physical space. I’ll really quickly cover the popular options:

💭 Conclusions

Notion offers a lot of easy note-taking ability straight out of the box. In the next blog post, we will explore how to build the simplest note-taking system using Notion, and over the course of the next several post, level this system up depending on the needs you have.

This does not mean that Notion is the best note-taking app of all time, as everyone will have different needs, and the complexity offered by Notion might clash with the ease-of-use of type of use you require.