Notion

From Sustainability Methods
Type Team Size
Collaborative Tools Software Personal Skills Productivity Tools 1 2-10 11-30 30+

What, Why & When

Notion is an all-in-one online workspace that allows you to take notes, organize your knowledge, manage yourself and collaborate on projects. If you feel overwhelmed by managing your lecture notes and connecting everything study- or work-related, Notion might be a good tool to integrate all your different activities.

Goals

Notion is extremely useful if you need to organize yourself and your team(s) and have your very own knowledge database.

Getting started

Getting started with Notion is easy. First off, you need to create yourself an account. If you're a student or an educator, you can have a pro-license for free:

For students: https://www.notion.so/students
For educators: https://www.notion.so/educators

Once you have done that, you can go to http://notion.so/ and start building your very own Notion workspace. While most features are pretty self-explanatory, here are two very good introductory videos that you may use to acquaint yourself with the platform:

Notion Beginner Training (8 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA7si7AmPkY
Notion Advanced Training (13 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxQjqYN23vc


Some general features we found especially helpful

  • By typing "/" on any given page, you can do pretty much everything in Notion: create To Do Lists, new pages, tables, calendars, kanban boards, timelines and lists; or embed videos, pictures, documents, websites, tweets, maps, code... The opportunities are almost endless.
  • Through the use of "@", you can easily tag everyone that also uses your Notion space (e.g. in group projects) for any task, info, or question you type on any page. They get notified, and you don't have to notify them yourself.
  • You can make pages refer to each other: a table can grab information from another table, and a task that is created on one page pops up on another page.
  • There is a smartphone app for Notion which is actually very useful.
  • You can grant external users the rights to work on selected pages only if you want to restrict collaborative access.

That's it, you're ready to dive deep into Notion. See the "Links & Further reading" section for templates and tips!

Links & Further reading


The author of this entry is Matteo Ramin.