Notetaking Journey
I know that my notetaking journey may not be as extensive as others, but here are my thoughts on how I ended up where I am today with my notes and why I may never be finished on this journey.
When I first started using computers, my needs were…not much. So every single thing I needed to keep track of I put in a text file. I started learning about computers on Windows, so naturally I would use the one-and-only Notepad. When I finally got around to learning *nix, I used whatever text file editor came preinstalled, or good ‘ol vi. This met my needs at the time and I ended up using .txt even into my first few IT jobs.
Keep
When I said that I used .txt files for my first few IT jobs, well I actually meant for most of my IT jobs. In 2018, I decided that .txt was no longer a justifiable way to keep tasks, notes, etc. The job I had at the time used GSuite, and so I decided to give Google Keep a try. Now, I know what some people are thinking, Google Keep isn’t meant for taking notes. It is more meant for quick “sticky note” type things. Well, you’re right. I figured that out pretty quick, and then moved on.
Slack
I was still at the same company as I previously mentioned and they used GSuite and Slack. I tried taking notes in Slack messages to myself. Once again, this didn’t last long but was surprisingly better than Keep. Slack format editing was nice, and being able to search was a nice function to have as well. Even still, organization was lacking and wow do I love organization.
OneNote
Ultimately, I decided that instead of going with software that whatever company I was currently at used, it was better to just do my own thing. I did some research and decided on OneNote. I liked the cloud capability of it and I was able to use the browser to access and take notes since I wasn’t able to install the software on my work laptop. OneNote covered many of the things I was looking for: formatting, section organization, code formatting, add images, color coding, etc. It was wonderful and worked well for me for quite some time.
Notion
Present day, I am currently using Notion. I just recently started using it about a month ago. I was pretty content with using OneNote, but someone mentioned Notion and I started looking into it. The features in Notion really impressed me. Not only did it have similar features as OneNote: formatting, section organization, code formatting, etc. It also had a ton more. I decided to give it a try. After using it for a week, I ended up moving all my notes over to Notion and am now using it as my go-to notetaking app. Here is a list of some of the features that I love in Notion:
- Page group organization trees
- Table of Contents pages
- Build out wikis
- Goal/Task Boards
- Tags (I can’t even describe how much I love this feature)
- Icons for pages (Small feature but useful)
- Timeline Views
Now, don’t get me wrong. Notion is not perfect. There are some frustrating things that I wish were included/integrated that currently aren’t, but they aren’t deal breakers. For example:
- No OneDrive integration (Has Google Drive)
- Calendar can use a lot of improving
- No repeating events
- Only 1 reminder
- Learning curve
The frustrating things are easier to deal with when you have really good feedback from the company that makes it. I reached out to the Notion twitter through direct message with my “improvements” of Calendar and OneDrive. They passed along the feedback to the development team and are looking into the priority of those features. I don’t know how many others have requested those things, so priority could be very low, but getting a response to my feedback and saying they were doing something about it makes me feel like as a user of their product, I am being taken care of.
Future Notetaking
I am currently very happy using Notion. It meets all my needs and I am enjoying getting to explore all its capabilities that I didn’t have in OneNote. I use it every single day and I’m loving it. Who knows what Notion will integrate into the future to make it even better or if any new notetaking apps will come out with massive features that aren’t available somewhere else. Maybe even OneNote will come out with a really big upgrade to enhance features. Overall, I love being able to have these options to explore the best way to keep me on task, organized, and reminded of all that needs to get done.