I keep looking at Notion and seeing if it will help in a certain project (over Craft my usual go-to) Does anyone use Notion for anything that is not complicated? By that I mean, it seems people store their whole life in there and are very granular about it, YouTube is littered with videos about how amazing Notion is.
Anyone how use cases that are too crazy? I am not running a business, or a team, etc. This particular project I will use it for will be created a Dashboard of sorts from monitoring our homeschool lessons, resources, books, assignments, etc that we need to track, turn in, etc.
If it grows past that, great sure, but I want to grow it slow, no need to throw all my stuff into a whole new app.
My uses for Notion are primarily for a gardening database and a book collection database.
My Garden database has two tables: Plants and Gardens. The two tables are related as a garden can have many plants and I can have the same species of plant in many different gardens. Same for my Book Collection database, except with authors and books. Notion works great for my needs.
I also just stared testing Notion to keep track of my home projects. I have graduated from employment, so my needs are fairly simple.
Notion is a complicated as you want it to be. Or as simple as you need it to be. Publishing is a one-click action. For more sophisticated sharing, a subscription will be needed. The dashboard idea should be easy to do.
As with most software, try it. Set aside an hour with the free account and see if you can build the site you want.
Most of my projects start in Notion. For example, I am redesigning a study plan for a degree and having databases for the old and new study plans, and being able to drag and drop courses between semesters and years is convenient - much more than working in plain text.
My colleagues also use it, and I often use the collaboration features, which work well. Most of them are on Windows, so it has a big advantage over Mac-only apps. Most of my students also have it and actively use it, and this isn’t the case with other similar apps I’ve tried.
I use it in most research projects because it’s become the tool of choice for sharing data among researchers, especially due to the free educational licenses (I get the Pro subscription for free).
Nothing beats it for quickly drafting and sharing a page online in my opinion, especially when multiple people are editing it on different platforms.
Since Notion is basically just a pretty database (at least from my understanding), would it be useful for home finances? A database would be a better option than a spreadsheet, but years ago I tried to do it in Access, but it turned out to have too large of a learning curve for me.
I use Notion a lot for personal (I’m retired, so no business) stuff - collecting information (recipes, coffee, woodworking techniques and projects). It’s very flexible and can be extremely helpful. It’s a lot more structured than Craft, for example, and excels in enabling you to present your content in multiple different ways.
Example: I might have a woodworking project (making a bench, say). I’ll use Notion to:
Create a list of materials, which I can check off as I collect the items
Create a task list/schedule - what needs to be done and when, with an indicator of dependencies
Embed helpful content (Drawing/diagrams, maybe something of Youtube on technique.
If it’s a complex project, I can split it down into subproject, but that’s rare
Notion’s flexibility cuts both ways - you do need to spend some time getting to grips with it and it helps to understand databases bit. Marie Poulin has excellent practical YouTube content on how to get some good results from Notion.
Downsides - it’s online-only and the mobile experience isn’t great; it’s not the best note-taker - can be a bit slow to respond and the interface isn’t really designed for that; it has occasional service issues;
I am still trying to understand workspaces vs teamspaces. (coming from Craft for this project)
When I open my Notion, I just see Favorites and Private, under Private are all the templates I am playing around with and messing with.
Essentially, in Craft, I had 3 major projects (1 in area of life). But I needed it to be on its own domain so I can share and display, not necessarily. collaborate.
project1. craft. me
project 2. craft. me
The only way to achieve that in Craft, was to have 2 separate paid accounts. You are only allowed 1 custom domain per account, but can have unlimited spaces. In the grand scheme, looking back at Craft, I could have keep it all under 1 account, but then it would be awkward to explain to the people I am sharing with, why does it show (example) jedi-temple.craft.me for a community project… hence needing a separate account that allowed for a different name.
IF I want to have 2 separate custom domains, does that require 2 Notion accounts?
