The right Notion for you is here!
Notion, has since its release in 2016 emerged as probably the world’s strongest and all encompassing important productivity application. The company describes it as an all-in-one workspace for note taking, project management and task management. What makes Notion great is that it combines the capabilities and features of several online tools like task management, note-taking, web clipping, spreadsheets, collaborative documents, databases and more.
Standing out
For years until now Evernote has been the leading application in this arena however issues with privacy and data protection. Recently, even Bear took over from Evernote with its sleek and simplified interface. However, it is only available on iOS and Mac which limits its usage only to people with Apple products.
Notion has been able to fill this opening in the digital productivity market for the past two years. It began as a tool focused on businesses to track tasks and manage projects. The company started with charging an 8$ fee per person per team once it had exhausted its limit of 1000 blocks. It however also expanded to individuals for a monthly subscription of 4$ after users have reached a certain storage threshold. Price point wise, this puts Notion right in between Bear (1.49$ per month or 15$ per year) and Evernote (70$ per year).
Building like Lego
The most popular note taking applications are the ones where developers create a novel and useful features that go well beyond the established default by previous applications. Keep productivity very aptly describes Notion as having a Lego structure. The application provides the building blocks with which one can create their own layouts and toolkits. The Lego blocks provided by Notion can be anything: text, checklist, bullet points, code or anything one wishes.
The workspace allows one to write in a beautiful clean space; build a personal wiki, plan using a Kanban view, a calendar view or a simple list view. It also helps to capture workflows and record everything using spreadsheets and databases. The possibilities are (almost) endless.
Customization
The most important thing to remember about Notion is that it is a tool meant to work for the user. Users can try out various customization tools such as ‘Workplace URL’ for collaborative projects where people only from an allowed email address domain can enter. For when there seems to be too much possibility available with the customization, users can choose from basic coding, calendar, blank post, database and more to create what they need. Additionally, Notion’s syncing capability across various platforms also provides for plenty flexibility with the user.
New Ventures
Recently in September 2019, Notion started to provide its premium version for free for students and teachers. Anyone with an academic email address could avail this upgrade and have unlimited uploads, storage and version history features. Students can use it to take and share notes in class or to organize tasks into to-do lists. Teachers might also use it to create syllabi and share them with students or create a wiki for the class. The company has also released, as a part of this new venture into the academic field, 25 templates that highlight what the company can do such as tools for students to building grade calculators, a personal budget, job applications; teachers can find templates for lesson plans and a class directory also among other things. This is part of a more aggressive growth strategy taken upon by the company that recently announced it hit 1 million users.
Drawbacks
There are however a few drawbacks that Notion currently has, such as the versatility of the product can be overwhelming for new users even though the application basically holds the users hand through the process of creating their first note. There is certainly a learning curve that a simpler alternative like Bear or Evernote lacks. The second drawback is Notion’s speed. Even though individual actions are very fast, navigating the app can feel very slow. A lot of scrolling can be involved as one learns to navigate the interface to hunt the particular tool that they are looking for. When it comes to taking notes, speed is paramount and the feature set is secondary.
Conclusion
But for those who like flexibility and power in their note-taking, Notion is an impressive piece of work and well worth a look. This brilliant tool is available on both desktop and mobile (iOS & Android). Also now that it is free for students and teachers, many more people will have a good reason to give it a try.
