After a series of trials and missteps over the Christmas holidays, I’ve finally found a spot for Notion in my arsenal of productivity apps.
Here’s my preferred productivity stack:
📋Notion – Reference
🗳Evernote – Collecting & Archiving
✍️Ulysses – Writing
🧳G Suite – Collaborating
What is Notion good for?
Notion is best suited for curated content that doesn’t change much.
For me, this means things like standard operating procedures (SOP). Even if I’m the person who’s executing the SOP, being able to write down and run a process from a checklist decreases the energy expenditure required to execute the task.
Notion is best for curated content that you refer back to.
For example, expensing mileage is something I do very infrequently, and I put off doing it because I can’t remember what to do.
It becomes this big bugbear of tabs, Excel sheets and manual reconciliation, which saps energy that I never want to do.
What is Evernote good for?
Conversely, Evernote’s superpower is quickly collecting, filing and archiving information, regardless of its origin.
You can email documents, use the web clipper, screenshot and so on to vacuum information into the app.
Evernote’s super power is quickly collecting, filing and archiving information.
What is Ulysses good for?
Ulysses is a writing app, first and foremost. Authoring blog posts, tricky emails, manuscripts, whatever, Ulysses makes it easy by:
- minimizing distraction with beautiful typography and highly customizable viewing options,
- simplifies formatting by using MarkDown, and
- focuses you on the content, to the exclusion of everything else.
As you can tell, since discovering it, I’ve become a big fan.
What is G Suite (Google Docs) good for?
Lastly, Google Drive is best suited for real-time collaboration on files (Sheets, Docs, Slides), but makes a poor file store. Documents kept here become “WORN” – Write Once, Read Never, as locating items is next to impossible.
Which reminds me of a favorite quote…
You can find anything with Google, except files stored in Google Drive.
Still on my list to investigate is Roam Research, which calls itself a “networked note-taking” app.
What do you use?
