I have used the Notion app for approximately three weeks now. As a technology sucker, I am always eager to try new gadgets to improve my workflow and productivity. And after three weeks of use, I can say that Notion has some revolutionary features than very few of the note-taking apps in the market have.
First I’d like to introduce myself as a 10-year Evernote/OneNote user. I started using Evernote when I was in college in China, being able to research articles online about different topics and organize them in digital notebooks with tags are fresh eye-catcher to me. Tags were trending at that time and being able to tag an article using multiple tags were proven to be more effective in data searching than typical folder structure. Evernote is also famous for its powerful web-clipping tool allowing you to capture articles or full web-page which still dominates the user market without debate.
- When I started using Notion in 2018 for project management, I had a hard time adapting it for my note-taking needs – so I built this template. The result of months of experimentation, my note-taking template is the closest you can get to replicating the best features from note-taking apps like Evernote, OneNote, and Bear – while still.
- Switching from Onenote to Notion or to Evernote is exhausting. All your friends are doing it.but does that mean you should switch as well? So in this video.
- There’s a fair bit on YouTube about Notion, and I have downloaded it to try: it’s infinitely flexible, very capable and has lots of options.
Thoughts on my new favorite app Notion from an Evernote / OneNote user. Coffeewaitingmug May 16, 2020 Comments Off on Thoughts on my new favorite app Notion from an Evernote / OneNote user. I have used the Notion app for approximately three weeks now. As a technology sucker, I am always eager to try new gadgets to improve my workflow. OneNote’s drag-and-drop interface, tabbed tagging system, and familiar toolbars make OneNote feel like Office might if Microsoft had acquired Notion. Evernote looks and feels very sleek, but its performance and stability issues are problematic.
Notion Onenote Evernote
As an architect, many of my colleagues would argue that without an actual notebook in hand, you don’t look like an architect. Being able to quickly sketch an idea using diagrams and drawings is a huge advantage of a paper notebook. I totally agree. But the problem of a paper notebook is that you cannot quickly categorize the content and apply tags to sort and search later. A paper notebook is definitely the fastest way to capture thoughts on the spot so you don’t lose it. But to curate a digital library for your knowledge and ideas, a paper notebook is not enough in the digital era.
Say I saw a neat house design on Archdaily website, I can definitely take notes on my notebook, drawing the floor-plans and 3d axons views and annotating the material use and the concept. But if I only have 2 minutes to save it as an inspirational reference material due to my workload (hello to our Architect’s reality), I really just need a method to “Ctrl + S” into my library and Evernote was my best friend in school. And thanks to Evernote, I realized that a digital database can be more powerful to stretch my knowledge depth because I can read my notes whenever and where-ever I want without carrying my physical notes with me.
I switched to OneNote at my second job after school because the firm uses Microsoft tools predominantly. The charm of OneNote lies in its Outlook plugin built-in. I send important emails to OneNote for quick referencing. I take OneNote meeting notes directly from Outlook meetings which documents the meeting participants and meeting time automatically. I also like the integrated To-Do function within OneNote, that you can write down a task inside of OneNote and send to Outlook Tasks with one click. The biggest weakness is that Outlook tags completely differ from Evernote tags. Outlook Tags are more action-based than category based.
My complaints about both of the Apps? Probably that they are purely note-taking Apps! In my second job, I started taking more responsibilities in project management and office initiatives. While OneNote has Outlook integration, I did not see it being a powerful management tool. During the craziest period when I was managing 5 projects on my own, I sought help from different project management tools, including Nozbe and OmniFocus. Nozbe is a web-based project management tool while OmniFocus only supports Mac/IOS system. I liked them both but did not stick to them after a while. I ditched OmniFocus because if you cannot access your tasks in a different platform it is basically useless no matter how elegant your UI design looks and how powerful your project management features are. Nozbe was interesting to me at that time because it offered a feature to assign an estimated time length for a task. I used it to plan my tasks throughout a week and determine the priorities. I could have used other apps like Trello and Todoist but I wasn’t introduced to them until this year.
Okay. Back to Notion. I was searching for a tool that can do note-taking, project management, digital archiving the same time so I don’t have to switch between apps and Notion serves as a digital database where I track personal itineraries, books I read, blog posts that I want to write about, articles I read online that I want to save for later as a resource.
Blogging Style Note-Taking Feature
The text editing tools of OneNote and Evernote are still better than Notion. If you are picky about font size or font types, then you probably want to stick to OneNote/Evernote because you have limited options in Notion. You can change your font from a paragraph size to 3 headline sizes but that is all you can have. On the other hand, Notion gives you a trendy “blogging block” writing and editing experience that is consistent with WordPress. The “block” system allows you to quickly rearrange your paragraph. Doesn’t that perfectly match how our brain wires? At least my brain tends to inject thoughts chronologically or sporadically which means re-organizing is a must.
Evernote Vs Notion
Customized Interface and Internal Reference
Unlike most of my apps, Notion has the ability to create customized home-page. Instead of jumping to the most recent edited page like Evernote/OneNote, you can customize your homepage using its web-page concept of the database. You can create a mixed page with page-links and to-do list or bullet-point list. The “move” function allows you to send any “block” to a different page while Evernote/OneNote only allows you to move the entire article to a different Notebook section. This unique database system design equipped Notion a much more powerful organizing feature. The “@” function allows you to quickly reference other pages and create different uses for the same content.
Different Views of Your Data
Why Notion can be used as a note-taking app and task-management app is because it allows you to create different views for different purposes. You can use a list view to curate your book library, and within that list, you can have individual pages for the books with customizable properties. You can instantly have a table-of-contents that is smart and customizable! All of a sudden we have access to a database software that is user friendly!
Evernote Vs Onenote
Will I finally ditch OneNote or EverNote for Notion
Move Onenote To Evernote
My rule of thumb of using tech tools is “less is more”. If I can use one app to handle most of my tasks that would allow me to stick to it and curate content in a consistent way. I still think EverNote’s web-clipper tool is a must-have for “offline mode” reading, and I would continue to use OneNote for business uses as OneNote has better integration with Microsoft Team for team collaboration even though my current team barely uses OneNote. But I can see myself using Notion more and more to better manage my personal life and the ultimate data-center for information management.