Notion Showcase

I took this week to explore Notion, a productivity and task management tool.

What is Notion?

Notion is a simple productivity tool that helps teams to manage information and tasks. After spending a week tinkering with it, I enjoyed it and I expect it to stay in my workflow in the foreseeable future.

Firstly, the Cons

Just to get it out of the way, here are what I find frustrating:

• Lack of self-hosting options
• Lack of any type of plugin/extension market place or support
• Doesn't support any features (thus automation is non-existent too)
• Views are not responsive enough, causing vertical scroll bars to appear in the middle of the page
• Subpar UI performance on most platforms - All 3 major desktop apps (electron based) / Android app / Web app

I could go on.

How does it work?

In Notion, each page is treated as its own document. They have their own metadata, content and exist somewhere on the hierarchy structure. You can nest them like a wiki, put them on a board like a kanban or both. The usage of these documents is very flexible.

In a way, everything exists as a document in the hierarchy structure and Notion puts it all together.

Views - a way to organize your documents

Since documents are linked together by their metadata, the view can be changed easily to reflect the user's needs. The documents can be placed in a view, allowing them to be represented and visualized by their metadata.

In the Kanban View, each document nested within is viewed as a ticket. Allowing the status of the ticket to reflect the progression of the task.

With a simple switch, the Kanban view is changed to a table view. It allows the user to view the overall progress of all the documents combined as a table.

Who is this for?

It is a good step up from note taking tools like Trello and Evernote, but it is a significant step down from established solutions such as Jira+Confluence.

The lack of CI/CD tools makes it hard to appeal to DevOps or software-development teams. The lack of integration with external tools and plugins makes it hard to recommend to existing agile teams who are already using multiple tools.

If you are a startup or a small business team looking for a cheap, flexible and easily reconfigurable productivity tool, this is a good solution. Just keep in mind that external integration with CI/CD workflows will be near to impossible further down the road.

TL;DR

If you are coming from Evernote, Onenote and you want a more powerful tool, take a look at Notion.

If you are a developer who wants automation, integration features, stick with Jira.

This is written in July 2019. Everything listed here is the latest available version as of the time of writing. They are based on the free tier without any version control or team features.

Correction

Added on 19 July 2019

1. You can "embedded" some external features (think of it like adding an iframe pointing to a gist on GitHub). But that is still not the type of extensiveness that Developers/DevOps users are looking for. My original view that it doesn't cater to that audience remains.
2. You could set certain parameters to control your views to sort/hide some data. it acts more like a query rather than a script.

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