Notion: A One Stop Shop

Published February 12, 2022 in Personal - 2 mins to read

In the past couple of weeks, I have come to realise quite how amazing Notion is, so much so that I would safely see this is not only the best free productivity tool I’ve ever used, it’s better than any of the paid ones I’ve seen as well. After having put some effort into tidying mine up, it now has the following features:

Categorised, easily re-organisable rich-text notes with tags and embedded media;
Kanban boards for work, this website and my other personal projects;
My new bullet journal that comes with a calendar, habit tracker, and pages for every day, week, month and year which have space for various fields, including goals for each period of time which are all linked together - each yearly goal must have a parent overarching life goal, each month goal must have a parent yearly goal, etc etc;
A database to track my progress towards my 100 hour goals which will replace the Google Sheet I’m currently using;
Some personal miscellanea including a reading list and collection of recipes, the latter in mood-board format.

There are a lot of other features I’m excited about too. Firstly some kind of exercise tracker/training log that would capture more than Strava, as well as let me draw meaningful insights from my own data by crunching the numbers myself. Secondly there are all kinds of possibilities available through the Notion API, particularly in relation to this site, for example to have it the data for the 100 hours page be retrieved by the Github runner every time I build the site, or even to write these blog posts themselves in Notion and have a webhook that will trigger a build, and similarly to retrieve the new post through the runner interacting with the API.

The dream is to have as much of my life organised in one place as possible, and similarly to have as many of my thoughts written down there as possible (and to have some kind of regular backup of all my data to make sure I don’t lose it). We’ll see how well I manage to stick to the plan, but right now I’m very excited about it.