🎶 I guess that's just the Notion 🎶

Writing every day is testing my creative abilities, mainly in picking something every day and writing about it.

Consistency is key, the ‘ship it’ philosophy is keeping me honest, even if I usually publish very late at night to keep my more experimental ramblings to a smaller audience.

Tonight I’ve actually been playing with Notion, described by some as an ‘app du jour’. It’s a very customisable note taking app, with all sorts of functionalities beyond just jotting down your thoughts.

The ability to embed clippings from around the web, whole documents, videos or photos, means that you can create quite beautiful workspaces, backed up by referencing tables of actual data.

In my creative stylings so far I’ve learned to scrape data into a spreadsheet, eliminating some very painful copy and pasting, have experimented with some Pinterest style tiling to beautify a client space in the app and have been assembling boards based on different topics. The possibilities seem numerous, versatile and aesthetically pleasing.

Khe Hy, the curator of the online community Radreads, is a real Notion evangelist and has been of great help its his tutorials and advice. I’ve got some big ideas that I’ve been struggling to implement and I think that Notion could be a facilitator and delivery vehicle for some of them, enabling me to communicate with clients in a multimedia manner, not limited to words, emails and phone calls. The ability to go beyond those mediums and personalise a space for someone could be key to pulling off some of my ideas.

In the health space, creating a curated set of resources, how to videos of recommended recipes and accountability trackers could help a client create and stick to a regimen, able to see their progress and collect their data over time.

Events can have a dedicated space with maps, links to social accounts, to do lists and much more. I’m building databases around certain concepts that i’ve got in mind - where once there would just have been a written piece with the odd photo, now I can have manipulable data and embedded resources that enrich the written experience.

Notion is a high leverage app, able to create something much richer and with greater depth than otherwise. At the moment, it’s giving me the ability to turn things around much quicker due to the mass of resources that I’m accruing, even if it’s turned me into a nerd with annotations and bolded text. I’ve almost happy to send something I’ve read to be annotated, knowing that it’s fun to cover it in virtual yellow highlighter. Really sad stuff.

If you’d like to know more about Notion then get over to rad reads or just shoot me a message.