Tools for Creativity: Organization & Creativity
Issue 2: Microsoft launches Notion clone, hierarchical file systems & my Library template for Notion.
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Notes about Notion
Last week, I was invited to join the Notion community on Twitter. While it's been wonderful to see how helpful and engaged this small community is, banding together around a tool I love, I can't help but think about the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, also known as when something you learned of suddenly starts appearing EVERYWHERE (also commonly known as the frequency illusion). Just a few weeks ago, I was so surprised by how few people knew about Notion. Today, my small little bubble on Twitter tells me otherwise.
Microsoft launches a Notion clone. Just five days ago, Microsoft announced a new Notion competitor called Loop. I went back-and-forth about it with a few other folks in the Notion community on Twitter, musing about how a community like the one Notion currently has is difficult to replicate. At the end of the day however, it could be that platform dominates over product and Loop ends up winning. If we think about all the organizations already on Microsoft's ecosystem, there is a good chance that a year from now, we'll all be singing a different (and Loopy) tune.
You've heard of #Movember and #Nodevember, but have you heard of #NotionNovember? Probably not because I made it up! Earlier this month, I challenged myself to share one Notion tip a day in the month of November, mostly to see if it's something I could actually stay consistent with and minus a small blip on Saturday, I've managed to keep this well and alive. It's been seven days of tips so far - full thread available here. So far I've covered:
Database templates for tasks
Database templates for team workspaces
Shortcut to switch between workspaces
Dragging and dropping into callout blocks
Columns inside toggles
Difference between links vs. embeds. bookmarks
Resizing images inside documents
Any suggestions for a tip you'd want to see, let me know! I've been guiding this mostly with what I wish someone had told me three years ago when I first started using Notion.
The legacy of organization and hierarchical systems
The advent of Microsoft joining the race, if you will, sparks the notion (hah!) that maybe this whole Notion things is not so crazy afterall. A few days ago, I tweeted out a somewhat controversial thought that the concept of "Folders" could become obsolete someday soon. This was in response to Dropbox introducing "tagging" in their folder systems and it reminded me of how just a few months back, as we were trying to explain the concept of "Folders" to Jane (11), I was reflecting on how her generation might be organizing information a lot differently than we did way back when.
I assume most of us here are all familiar with hierarchical file systems, it's how most of us organize information on our computers and a system by which most operation systems are based off of. It starts with a top-level folder, often user
and from there, the hierarchy forms down. It then branches into a couple more top-level categories by which we organize our lives. Most commonly, this is a dichotomy between work
| personal
and from there the sub-branching continues. Depending on how your brain works, some folks like to organize by year and throw all old items into an archive
, never to be seen again with the solace of stored bits providing a small sense of comfort. In a way, Notion works like that too and users new to the tool often use the familiarity of the hierarchal system to store information and pages. Truth be told, it's a system I return to often and only just in the past year, have finally moved into a system of relational databases instead.
I've typically been pretty disappointed by hierarchal organization systems without knowing that there was a name and classification to it until very recently. The nature of how information is stored and retrieved in this system relies on the fact that every single piece of information has only one classification. For example, you have a folder called Project Popcorn
that stores all information related to Project Popcorn. You also have another top-level folder called Documents
sub-divided into Documents / 2021
. You wrote some documents related to Project Popcorn and now have to store them, where do they go? If you store it in Project Popcorn
, that feels the most logical, and perhaps you've made enough documents related to the project to have a sub-folder Project Popcorn / Documents
but then you've also depleted the Documents / 2021
folder of some important artifacts — hence, the breakdown of this linear-system.
The advent of tagging has helped us relieve some of this information silo-ing but a few of us here might also know that after a long stretch of time, tags can become unruly and disorderly without proper maintenance.
So where does Notion come in?
I didn't think this newsletter was going to end up here this week but it has and I'm not mad since this subject dives into a very specific reason why I believe in the potential of Notion to transcend into a lot of areas because it fundamentally changes the way in which we relate to information. To revisit my LIBRARY database that I shared last week:
If you look closely at the assigned properties in my Library database, I have a number of fields assigned. This one has three active relational properties to three other databases in my Notion system — Subscription, Person, and Tags. When I store information in Notion, I don't have to pick and choose just one way of classifying something, I can classify them in as many ways I want them to. In one quick search, I can see that "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" was recommended to me by my friend Linda, I consumed it by way of my subscription through Audible and the book is related to the tag of Leadership. If I dive into just one of those, I'll be able to see that I spend about $180 a year on my Audible subscription (not chump change!) but in turn, I can also see that I've gotten quite some use out of it:
This won't be the first and last time I talk about relational databases in Notion and how powerful it can be. In fact, this is probably the most lightweight version I could think of by way of introduction but I hope that it's given you some insight into the potential of Notion as a tool that allows us to rethink that way we organize information, which I see as an ultimately creative endeavor.
If you want to and are ready to chat more about how you can implement systems like this into your work, personal or creative life, just reply to this email / give this post a comment and I'll get back to you and we can set up some time! If you have opinions on anything I mentioned here, I'd love to hear them too!
Further reading
Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies: https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-around-tags-not-hierarchies
Move over, Microsoft Word: The race to reinvent document editing (written about 2 weeks before the launch of Loop): https://www.fastcompany.com/90685280/notion-coda-microsoft-word-alternatives
Sharing is caring: my Library template for Notion
As promised from last week, I’ve created a small template of my Library template. You can duplicate this by hitting [duplicate] on the top right hand corner of the page. Feel free to delete all existing information and start populating with your own. This database will only be as powerful as the other databases you link them to so if you need help setting those up, let me know and we can do that together!
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Until next week.
Nikki