I was going to include this in the next newsletter, but wanted to have a dedicated post on Notion, given how useful I’ve found it to be. I first discovered Notion after seeing that it had a use case as a browser extension for saving links for later reference. The company then received much more widespread recognition following their last fundraise on a $2B valuation.

In short, I use Notion for pretty much everything, from daily planning, to weekly planning, to journaling, morning pages, and even as a master task database with Notion’s amazing database features. Using relational databases in particular has been hugely useful, for example for enabling networked thoughts in my various writing databases.

Using Notion also aligns with a mental framework that I’ve developed, which is the concept that the brain should just be for generating ideas, not for storing them. It touches on an emerging body of research that points to the value of personal knowledge management. With personal knowledge management, you’re effectively building a “second brain” to retain all the information that you’re consuming and any piece of content that you happen to resonate with. This is useful if you’d like to reference it later on for example. More on this later, but how often have you read an article or consumed a piece of content that really resonated with you, and wished that you could somehow keep it along with your accompanying thoughts? Notion is perfect for this. If I read an article that I really like, I’ll immediately share it into Notion, write some thoughts I have about it, and save it down.

Moreover, with this framework in mind, your brain is free to just “generate”, not store. It’s quite liberating. I also love the community of Notion users who all appear to have a proclivity for personal development. Check out their template gallery for everything from habit trackers to journal templates, to workout planners. A lovely bunch indeed. Cheerio!