Tools for Creativity: Why I love Notion
Howdy everyone, I'm Nikki and welcome to the first issue of the Tools for Creativity newsletter! Oh, and happy Halloween! This newsletter is something I've been thinking about for a while now and it took witnessing a toad getting eaten alive by a snake last weekend for me to realize that life is too short to be watching Netflix all the damn time. If you enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. And if this email was forwarded over to you, head on over here to sign up.
In a year from now, you will regret not starting today — Karen Lamb
What is Notion and why can't I stop talking about it?
Everyone who's signed up to my newsletter so far has a varying degree of familiarity with Notion. Some of you have never heard of Notion, some of you here use it everyday. The first time I heard of it was back in 2018, and when I did, I distinctly remember signing up for an account almost immediately. (What's crazy to me also is how little Notion's UI has changed since I first used it almost five years ago.) Within a week, I had convinced our then much smaller company to sign on to use the tool. My argument was this: we have no centralized location to store our information. Everything in Google Docs gets lost in the wind and Dropbox folders are great for storage but really bad for context. Enter, Notion!
In the last two years, our team has more than doubled in size and together with the onset of remote work, the efficiency by which we collaborate & communicate has really been tested. Four months ago, I led a team-wide revamp of our Notion workspace which has led to increased productivity (measured in how often someone asks me where a document is: way fewer times than before) and our team workspace is now in a place where it works for us.
The key to that is this: it works for us. This was made possible because of how Notion is designed. Notion embraces the idea that every individual and business is slightly different by allowing us to customize our relationship with the software and I can’t wait for you to slowly uncover what I mean by this as the weeks pass.
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To the punchline:
People ask me all the time why I love Notion and I am the first to admit that I really have to work on tightening this elevator pitch. It pains me to call it a productivity tool when I see it more as a tool for creativity since it can do so 👏🏻 much 👏🏻 more than what it is currently marketed as. That, for me, is what makes Notion so exciting. It doesn't really have an agenda and because of that, it is both appealing and frightening all at once. Don’t worry, I’m here to help you debunk that. I for one can't wait to take you on a weekly deep dive on how myself and others use the tool and share some use cases & templates so that you can jumpstart your Notion adventure. The ride will be slow and steady so if you're just getting started, don't worry, it’ll be fun.
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Speaking of slow and steady, a lot of people have argued that Notion is slow compared to other note-taking tools and I honestly don't disagree! In fact, I still regularly open Apple Notes when I need a quick sandbox to just jot down ideas and I use Notion as my space to "process" all that information. In fact, half of this newsletter was put together using snippets of a note titled random in my Apple Notes app. I will never argue with anything that lets you get ideas from 🧠 to "paper" in the least amount of time possible. In fact, I've recently found myself perturbed by how long it now takes to unlock an iPhone with my mask on, so much so that I've seriously considered buying a dictaphone just like Louis Litt had on Suits.
Here's what happened over the last week:
Marie Poulin's Notion Mastery Course - I've heard so many great things about Marie's course over the last few years and decided to finally bite the bullet and sign up. I've learned so much since. Marie is truly a wunderkind and the whole team & community behind Notion Mastery is simply *chefs kiss*. I've really come to enjoy the multiple events that happen throughout the week and have benefitted greatly from peeking into Marie's Notion brain. (Also hi! I know a few of you in the course have signed up and a quick shoutout to those of you who have and have been the inspiration behind this first edition.)
Dune - I know there's been some debate around the plot and how long the film was (and FYI, Dune Part 2 just got the green light) but the visuals are what kept me. I can't recommend enough that if you haven't watched it already to immediately go see this at an IMAX theatre to do the visuals + Hans Zimmer soundtrack justice.
LaserWriter II - We just started a book club at work and this month (or quarter, depending on how fast we get through this) we’re reading LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin. Of course, I'm using Notion to track our progress and actually employed a simple formula tracker that tracks
current page #vs.current page total. I won't share with you who else is in the book club with me but either they are not updating this page as they should or I am very far ahead of them here. Either way, the book centers around a Tekserve (RIP) printer repair technician who comes of age alongside the Apple computer. More on that in next week’s issue!
Speaking of books, I also wanted to share this digital bookshelf I've curated of all the books I've read in 2021 — with the hopes that I’ll be porting over my entire collection from Goodreads over to Notion. The list goes on of course and if you are interested in this Notion template and want me to share it in the next newsletter, reply to this email with a book recommendation (either recent, or all time) and I'll use that to gauge interest 🙂 The template is part of a larger LIBRARY database that will be slightly unwieldy to handle but in an effort to test out my template-making skills, I will follow the Nike gods and Just ✔️ Do ✔️ It.
If you've reached this point in the email, I'm honored. It took me forever to trim the fat and excess but I'm glad I made it to the end. I promised a bunch of y'all that I'd leave a joke at the end of each one of these to tickle your pickle so here’s your first pickle joke:
What did the pickle say to the lemon?
I relish our time together.
Now that's making lemonade out of lemons!
Signing off now and until next week.
Peace, love and notion.
Nikki 🖤
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I’m so exited for these tips! Also I really loved reading the original Howl’s Moving Castle i read it recently and loved how much more depth the characters had in the book.