I really Like Notion. I would go as far as saying that I love basically everything Notion does. Apart from one thing…
Notion is online only, so this equation explains the issue:
No internet connection = No notion.
It’s something that constantly worries me. Also, a while ago I realised that while I love Notion, it’s not actually a note taking application. It works as one, but its not really one.
Its not text focussed. Not at all. Not even a little bit. You can write in it, and you can enter text pretty quickly BUT Notion is a ‘workspace’ first and foremost. The thing it’s good at is quickly making a thing that looks great with no effort, and then sharing it with a colleague, public link, pdf or whatever.
Notion is designed for other people.
Because of this, my personal Notion ‘repo’ (is repo right? should it be ‘hole,’ or ‘vault’ ? What word do we use?) is a mess. I try and organise it but I end up duplicating a lot of data and files. like, A LOT and its annoying. Notion has very little in the way of organisation tools and the side bar is a mess.
For every task/topic and trapped thing in Notion there is a moment where I have to stop and put my designer hat on, thinking about the best way to store and manage the information, which, is fine, because when I take the hat off, I get a nice workspace section to use.
Somewhere in the back of my brain I’m also aware that Notion locks me in. One day it will do something that annoys me or become restrictively expensive and I have no real exit strategy. It’s a concern, not now, but one day.
Obsidian
Obsidian was a bit shit when it came out. It didn’t really offer me anything that I couldn’t get with VS-Code and I shrugged, ignoring it forever, or so I thought.
I can’t remember why I installed it to ‘check something’ recently but I quickly started seeing its value. It’s got a LOT better in the time I was away.
The fact that its offline (with syncing) mean I never have to look at the “Offline, Okay” dialogue box that I see from Notion occasionally is awesome. Using a 100% markdown which is VERY compatible on the internet. makes me warm inside too.
Obsidian is crazy fast, mad customisable and once some plugins are installed I can just use it without the endless designing that Notion seems to encourage.
It’s not all sunshine and markdown rainbows though. Obsidian lacks the visual flare of Notion and it’s not at all very collaborative (unless you and your buddy both have obsidian sync) without some tinkering.
It also doesn’t let me embed any random file I find, the way Notion does and until I mess with the over priced publishing service I don’t know if it would be a viable blogging platform. Though because its markdown, it would be pretty trivial to convert it all to HTML, I guess.
I’m not quite ready to leave notion, but I must say, its been a pleasure to work with these last week or so.
Anyway, all this post is mostly just a way of saying, I made some videos that I think explains all this better…. I was wrong OBSIDIAN is good? - YouTube Showing off some basic, cool Obsidian stuff (A pointlessly long video) - Anti content - YouTube Obsidian for writing novels - Writing things - YouTube Obsidian Sync - How it works and how much it costs - YouTube