In your own words…how would you describe situations where you should use Trello or Notion or Omnifocus?
I have been seeing more videos about Notion (through Sweet Setup and Matt Birchler online) so not trying to get to influenced on the “new app drug”.
My uses historically Omnifocus - task manager for my life (bills, projects, classes, parish) Trello - collaboration with 1 group for a specific project Slack - communication system for various groups I am involved in. I am probably misusing it a lot. I have started making private channels for different groups. A glorified “WhatsApp”.
After seeing Notion more and more, I am trying to see if Notion would be helpful as I begin to homeschool my children this year (we are talking K-2 grade for the range). It would be mainly for myself and my wife to monitor/follow-up.
Is it worth adding another app to the line-up? Or just make do with what I have? Anything that I would be missing out on? etc.
What is the communication you are trying to accomplish between you and your wife in regards to homeschooling? Are you looking to track status, or to ask each other to help or review? The status of schoolwork is usually self-evident so we’ve traditionally been reluctant to add much communication overhead.
More for tracking status, what the week’s assignments are, etc. We both have opposite work schedules. For example, most of my appointments are in the late afternoon (whereas she has appointments early morning). I would cover X topics and X assignments, then when we switch off during the day, she would be able to see where we stopped at, then at night when the kids sleep, we can review the day and plan again for the next.
That makes sense. In that case, I would prefer something like Notion or Google Docs because it can present all the information to you at once. Trello’s hierarchy would be frustrating because there wouldn’t be value in hiding the details for a child/subject/day in a card. Additionally, you’d likely prefer a less structured document format to a task manager so you could quickly change everything and write highly visible ad hoc notes to each other.
I assume you’d be too in the daily groove to need to remind yourself in OmniFocus to participate in your system, but that’s where it’d come in, at least for me. I do use OF to remember to look for deals on books and materials, though!
If not, you might consider looking for apps that are specifically focused only on lesson planning.
Also consider connecting with your neighborhood home-schooling community. I would say from what I hear from a neighbor about her methods that this is not an area where anyone should feel that they have to reinvent the wheel or to work in a vacuum. The art of teaching at home has become a well-respected science in its own right.
I used an Airtable database to keep track of my son’s assignments last year. Notion can also do databases but not as well as Airtable. But, notion is better by having different “views” (filters) permanently visible on any given page to a linked database rather than toggling filters(like Airtable). If you want a more document centric approach with Database capabilities, Notion is the way to go. Both products can do Kanban, so they have much more utility than Trello. I will give Notion
a try this year with online schooling continuing.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, since I don’t use Notion and am not a fan of personal wikis, and I’m sorry you lost data. But it would have helped to have described your experience and how Notion Support responded instead of repudiating the app in ALL CAPS claiming something as flatly true which I haven’t seen anyone claiming on this forum, or on its subreddit. The only time I read about “data loss” in the app it was diagnosed by other users as a sync delay… and the OP never replied, implying that was it.
Friend and I were working on a project, using Notion to store data
One day, friend can’t access data. Logs into account, shows spinning wheel, data cannot be displayed/retrieved
I couldn’t access that data either, although I could access other data on my account
Friend emailed Notion support, never got an answer
I loved Notion, and I was a big power user. However, data loss is a big dealbreaker for me and I’m sure for some other people as well. I thought I should probably put out that advisory and let people make their own decisions about it.
Edit: we also tried multiple devices, none of which were able to access the data.
Omnifocus - for personal task tracking, excellent. No collaboration, expensive, UX not to everyone’s taste. What it does, it does very well, and I sued it for years. I’ve recently switched to TickTick just for a change (not because OF is poor)
Trello - excellent if Kanban is the way you work. Very goo collaboration, easy to use and learn (especially for inexperienced users). If the Kanban approach is not what you want, Trello isn’t much help. I use Trello for project management as an adjunct to a “tradition;” PM app like OminPlan… Its great for things like testing phases, where sprinting is important.
Notion - very, very flexible - many different ways to organise and present your data, very good collaboration. The downside is it can take a lot of work to get it set up in ways that work for your purposes. Although there are loads of templates, most are poor. T get the best from it, you need to invest real time an effort I use it for helicopter views of tasks and projects, and as a curated database of key information. It has limitations as a task manager (no repetition, for example).
I would throw GitHub issues into the mix. In fact I strung together some automation that raises an issue in GitHub, then creates a task for it in Omnifocus and then - via Pushcut and a Shortcut - creates a Trello card.
So I consider them all (4) to be in the same ballpark.
