Email: Superhuman. Can’t imagine going back to Gmail. Would be torture.
Browser: Brave with Vimium. Just installed Workona to assist with tab management.
Mac: Alfred for opening new browser searches, file search, and much more. Spotlight’s archaic in comparison.
I use Notion for my core life/work-flow, such as project management, habit tracking, investor reports, and decks.
Calendar: Fantastical. Unparalleled natural language parsing.
Just started tinkering with Roam. Likely to replace Notion for ideation etc.
Brave blocks ads, which incidentally makes it quicker, and uses much less RAM than Chrome. It's built on Chromium, so all extensions and bookmarks can be imported.
As for other browsers, Safari doesn't have the Notion web clipper, nor a proper Vimium extension.
Hoping to get access to mightyapp.com browser soon enough.
Thanks for sharing!
Just re-joined the Notion boat (still figuring that out)
How are you liking Workona so far? Have you tried other tab management tools? Wondering what you find most unique and beneficial. I've been using it for a bit, but I haven't been great about sticking to my workspaces.
Workona's so far nice. Need more time till it sticks. Haven't tried other dedicated tab management tools, though my workaround till Workona was numerous windows per subject(core, banking, amazon etc).
I'm using a combination of Notion, Todoist and calendar (Google calendar, but viewing it in Fantastical).
I tried having everything in Notion, but especially for tasks and planning, I went back to a traditional todo manager (Todoist) and a calendar. I felt that for some use case, specialized software definitely gets the job done better and outweighs the benefit of having everything in just one tool.
Agreed. I've never been able to get Notion to work well for me for to-do-lists. I've been using Amazing Marvin, which I learned about from @victorquinn, and it's been great so far.
Roam Research! I put essentially everything I think/read/hear about in there and it allows me to mentally forget about it whilst retaining key information for a later date
Awesome, how long did it take to "click" for you?
It took a week or so of using it as a diary and thought dump for it to properly click because that's when I'd forgotten about some of the initial stuff and had Roam connect it back up
Not bad! Do you find yourself linking words a lot, and does that feel like friction when adding notes?
I tend not to do much inline, less because of the friction with syntax and more because of tenses. If I'm writing a thought like '...an effective way to send a cold email...' but my topic page is called 'cold emailing' then it reads oddly.
I mostly stick topics at the end of the entry with simple hashtags (they form the same links as inline mentions and are less prominent). Most notes will have 3/4 hashtags
Super exciting that there's a new nvAlt-type app coming! How's the beta so far?
The beta is great--fast and highly configurable. Like any beta there are sometimes bugs (mostly random crashes once or twice a week) but overall it's a huge improvement on nvALT. :)
Nice! Looking forward to trying it out.
Notion for dashboard & main library of notes and plans. My template here: https://www.notion.so/Personal-Dashboard-b10b501252de4407b13181e604901300
Apple notes for quick brain dump of ideas and notes, later organized /cleaned/ transferred to Notion
I used to try many tools and apps and created complicated systems. But later I realized the most effective way to manage “life” is make good habits dead simple.
What are some of the good habits that have helped you most?
Yoga in the morning. I could never find time for yoga. Lately, I tied “turning on my espresso machine” as the cue to yoga, so while waiting for machine to heat up, I do a 10 min yoga. It gives more energy to the day.
Write. It’s hard to write because it’s hard to commit to an idea, the “IT” idea. I make quick notes about ideas and links in Apple Notes, every weekend I’d review and group them in themes on a Kansan board in Notion. Having a “roadmap” of concepts makes it easier to always have something ready to write about.
That's a clever idea, using coffee as the prompt to do yoga!
And it's definitely easier to write when you have a backlog of ideas floating around, where somehow you'll end up subconsciously fleshing out the idea over time and eventually be able to pull it all together.
For me, it still has to be Notion. I run a mid-sized organization on it, and we have set up some custom dashboards that have become critical to see how things are going. Instead of jumping in and around multiple tools, it is now a single source of truth.
How'd you setup dashboards inside Notion? That sounds very handy.
We are a recruiting company and we are going to build our own platform. However, we started first by being profitable providing recruitment services without writing a single line of code. We use:
- Typeform, for both, candidates and customers. When they finish filling the form, Zapier comes into scene.
- Zapier to connect Typeform answers with Pipedrive, Airtable and email (G Suite)
- Airtable. Our candidate database. We love it, super powerful database where we perform the searches to look for perfect matches using both, the normal filters, but also the blocks. Blocks can be used for further searches, graphs, pivot tables...
- Pipedrive. Our deals are automatically created out of customers' typeform answers (from Zapier). We also have a copy of all candidates but with less information than in Pipedrive (just contact data), so we can link deals, emails and activities to the involved candidates.
- Confluence. I love Confluence, everything is there :) Everyone creates every week our "weekly log", which is a page where we plan our week and days publicly, together with our objectives. We document our iterations, services, projects, processes, meetings, everything-product-related... plus personal stuff (we are a remote first company) like who we are post (first week in the company), Xmas pics...
- Nailted. Nailted is the way we have to check the team's temperature, see if all we are aligned, get feedback, identify problems, boost morale...
That's so cool you actually hit profitability without writing code.
Did you end up building a custom platform, or are you still using the no-code stuff?
Hadn't come across Nailted yet—what led you to pick that for internal polling?
Hi there!
We are starting now (yesterday I wrote the first part of the candidate journey) to build it, but we are going to launch pieces of the platform to replace parts of our system e.g., drop Typescript to welcome candidates in our platform, later replace Zapier and trigger ourselves Pipedrive and Airtable... step by step :) no need to rush
We started using Nailted because I personally know the founder, the talked to me about it, and I loved it, so we had to try it. And it's worth every single $
Ha perfect, personal sales is the best :)
Best of luck on building it out and the transition!
Bullet journaling (and you can do it in notion), it's not a product but it's a really great framework and tool that does wonder to clear your mind and get things done, you feel like you have your life together (not everything has to be solved by tech!).
I use a very basic version of bullet journaling with my paper to-do lists, but never did really use all of its features (I basically just write a to-do list with a square to check off tasks and an exclamation mark for important stuff, and check completed tasks, cross off stuff I decided not to do, and then copy remaining tasks to the next day's page as needed). Do you find yourself using all the symbols in bullet journaling to organize stuff, or did you find your own middle-ground to make it work for you?
I use pretty much all the symbols but what I found ground breaking was actually the migration part of the system (and the index, and the collections, and everything): going over what you've down during the past month, then the past 3 months, etc, really helps you see the progress you've made, and it also helps you remembering stuffs. I write down a bunch of things in my notebooks (events, quotes, ideas, etc) and when I didn't fully use/understand the system I used to think "why am i doing this? i'm never going to read this again, should i not compute all of this somewhere so I can find it later if I need it?" but just going over stuffs while you migrate (meaning, go from one month to the next, deciding which tasks you keep, etc) helps you memorize, and you also realise that you have to trust your brain to know where to find the info, not to memorize all the infos and the index helps with that a lot, as well as the monthly collection. I really recommend reading the book, it changed a lot of things for me (and it's really not about doing pretty lettering). Plus, the relationship brain-hand is very different to brain-keyboard/computer. Paper gets a bad rap in tech, I'm here to put an end to this ✊🏼😉
Really helpful, thanks for sharing! Reviewing is what I've skipped with both GTD and bullet journaling; I need to give that more of a try.
I have noticed the memorization aspect; just by writing down my tasks, I find I'm more likely to remember and do stuff even if I don't look back at my paper to-do list.
I'll put the book on my reading list!
Paper is still great—and you can always snap a picture to digitalize it if you want!
Both Notion and Roam are pretty popular right now in the spot OneNote and Evernote filled before—they're all great ways to write down everything in your head and use the software to remember things you might otherwise forget. I actually use a writing app (iA Writer) for much the same purpose, but anything could work, including the basic Notes app on an iPhone, even. The trick is to write things down consistently, save anything you'd want to remember there, and then search the app when you need to find something.
Some of the apps recommended in this discussion about bookmarking tools could also help:
Neat! Are you using it on your own, or with a team?
Love the idea of Notion and had a friend who invested time to make it work for him, but ended up not sticking. So much of this depends on how you prefer to think. Notion seems to be great for more OCD types? Or maybe great for companies since managing a company is way more complex than managing your life, and colleagues benefit a lot from things written and organized well.
I use Bear (all of my notes, thoughts, etc), Workflowy (daily tasks), Google Docs (for weekly / monthly / quarterly goals), Google Sheets (for habits).
You've got a good point there. I've found Notion best for company notes that are shared with everyone, and detailed organization tasks. Say I need to research a list of 100 apps. In Notion I can list everything in a spreadsheet inside the document and write the article outline and notes in one place. That's handy.
But for most of my longform writing and standard text notes, I still prefer dedicated writing apps. I use Ulysses for what it sounds like you're using Bear.
I keep a private blog (journal, really) and have tried a number of options over the years. I used to use Jekyll to statically generate the site. I would write in markdown and then would just review my posts locally. I wanted an easier workflow, so I moved to Ghost which I can self host but also has a nice UI for writing posts. In order to access my blog from anywhere, but ensure that I was the only one with access, I used Cloudflare Access with Google Login so that I can limit who has access.
It was surprisingly easy. Cloudflare Access is actually a really great alternative for companies running their own internal tooling within a VPN too. Lots of non-technical folk have a hard time remembering how to connect to the VPN, and cloudflare access lets you easily just slap SSO provider login page on top of your sensitive, internal services.
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