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Notion… Again?
I’ve used Notion since uni. I kind of forgot about it after I finished my degree as I didn’t need the same level of information storage and organisation or the level of notetaking complexity that Notion offered. But now I’m looking to organise my writing for my website a bit more and Notion once again seems to be the perfect tool.
What you’re seeing right now was written, planned and structured in Notion.
Some of my previous posts were written in Notion and some were just written straight in the WordPress editor, which is more than adequate to be fair. However the issue with writing for me is consistency. I don’t quite have the habit formed to write regularly and I’m also not a perpetual fountain of ideas. So here’s how I use Notion to dump ideas, decide what’s actually worth writing about and eventually make what you’re reading here.
The Great and Powerful Database
If you’re not using databases in Notion, I hate to say it but you’re doing it wrong. Notion truly excels when you use it’s databases for virtually everything. Sure you could store all your stuff in quirky checklists on a dashboard for each week but then you can’t filter, sort, group and view your data in all of the magical ways that Notion allows. You thought a database was just a table? Don’t be silly, tables are the worst way to view data in Notion. I’m a fan of the gallery view and the board view myself. They’re especially good at adapting to mobile usage when compared the other database views.
The Idea Dump
When I have an idea of something that I “could” write about. Not will write about, not should write about, not desperately want to write about, just could, it goes into Notion. This means I have a perpetual pile of options if I want to skim over them and write about what tickles my fancy or if I just think the idea needs developed a bit I can plan ahead and just make sure I’ve noted that I want to write about it sometime soon.
You can see just how well Notion does at visualising all the relevant info for each of my ideas on these nice little gallery cards. The way Notion seems to default the use of these cards is for showing off the cover of each of your pages but I don’t think I have a single page that actually uses a cover in Notion. I don’t need my pages to be artistic masterpieces. You’re lucky if you even see an emoji as the page icon on most of my pages.
So idea pops into my head, or even the tinies parts of the beginning of an idea and it gets chucked in here. It might get tagged at the time with categories and tags that I think fit it but that can also just get sorted at the time of publishing.
Up the Priority Board
This is actually a new-ish way I’ve started organising my writing. I’m not really committing to certain dates but rather just organising writing by which ones I should actively be working on based off of how developed I think the idea of them is and what sort of mindset I’m in for writing.
For example, I moved this post up to “High” priority and from “Planning” to “In Progress” when I started properly filling it out with content but I haven’t necessarily committed to having it written by a certain date or anything like that, I’ve just moved it up the priority board based off of what I fee like I would be the most effective at writing at this moment in time.
This system also works quite well visually as the more important items slowly work their way up the board as they become more developed ideas and closer to the left if they are oh a higher priority to me. So generally speaking the closer a post becomes to being completed the closer to the top left it moves.
Notion to WordPress
Now you may think oh how does he get those fancy Notion pages from his Notion database into WordPress? A fancy plugin, some third party software? Nah. I just copy and paste it. Like some sort of caveman. There are plugins out there for that sort of thing, but honestly what’s the point? Copy and paste from Notion just kind of works. It’s actually quite surprising given the nature of how Notion treats it’s content. Everything is grouped in blocks but when it comes to good old copy and paste it just works as you would expect.
Sidebar Loyalist
Oh and the sidebar still remains my main navigation method for Notion. No over-developed dashboard with gifs and widgets and nonsense just a few databases that link up nicely.
You may also notice there’s less in there than there used to be. That might be a post for another day. Oh also, who actually uses Notion AI? Anyone? Can’t say I’ve ever touched it. Wish they spent their time on something more useful like an offline mode.
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