3 use cases that made me love Notion
If you are here, reading stuff on Medium, I bet you know as much as me that the internet is completely full of any kind of tools. When it comes to web tools, I think Notion today is one of the best and most known tools.
For those that still don’t know it, Notion is a tool that describes itself as an “All in one workspace”; as the name suggests, it creates a web space for your account (personal or company) and allows you to create pages and subpages with different components, like tables, views, etc.
You can also use templates to create a page that already has a structure ready, made with the available components; for example, you can start from a to-do-list template or a Kanban board.
I first heard about Notion almost a year ago and for a long time was curious about it but couldn’t find any use case that could fit any need for me, so I just knew it exists and saw some colleagues use it in many different ways.
Then, the first possible use case came to my mind, and since then, my personal Notion space grow with new use cases; 3 of them in particular I think are worth sharing because I never find any specific tool to solve the needs I’m solving with Notion right now.
1. Daily Journal
Taking a daily journal is an activity that I could suggest any developer should start. I first saw it from some external freelance some time ago and it looked like a good idea to take inspiration from that.
After a while, I started my own daily journal, where I transcribe everything important that happens to me in the job: it helps me to remember what happened and track all the solutions, tools, and products that I may discover in the day.
It can also be helpful to let out some pain of myself about something bad that happened, possibly before talking with any manager so that can have a better conversation about it.
I think I’m a better, more aware professional since I started this habit so i can only suggest you do the same, developers and not.
2. Job Resources
As I said for the Daily Journal, is a good idea to track the stuff you meet in your path; for me, this means not only the Journal but also have a specific view where I track the tools, practices, methodologies, or whatever I meet in the job so that later I can go deep with them.
Typically, as soon as I meet something interesting, I go to this page, creates an entry with the title of the topic (if not existing yet), and at least add the main link I could find about it; optionally, when I have time, I make a quick search on Google to find some additional links.
This kind of page comes in handy later: it can be something I know nothing about and read the links to learn something, or it can be something I already know or I listened to someone speaking about it so I go transcribing what I heard.
I really wish I started this on the first day!
3. Study Dashboard
In the end, the bomb: a Study Dashboard where I track everything I want to study, what I’m currently studying and what I plan to study in the future.
I searches a “Learning management system” for a while but could never find something that worked for me: I didn’t simply want to track the books, articles, video, courses, etc. that I take but also write my notes in a digital way (did it on paper before Notion!) in order to create my own summary about the content.
This helps a lot in my learning, because writing down things, even if digitally, really helps to remember them and also creates a story that can be consulted and reused in the future.
I created different views for the backlog, what is “In progress” and the complete history so that I can easily see what I’ve been studying on.
BONUS: another view I use on Notion is a Content Dashboard, which is the same as Study dashboard but for content like videos or articles, not strictly to be studied like a book but still something I want to track the summary to remember the most possible. Could be all in a single view with the books and courses? Yes, but for me, it works better this way!
Do you have any suggestions on more use cases for Notion? Please share it!
