Ali Abdaal, whom I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, is a physician and YouTuber from Britain. He’s a geek who at least once a week uploads a video usually about medicine, tech, or studying and learning. If you’re a student, you should definitely take a look at his videos on Evidence-Based Study Tips in which he discusses the scientifically-determined best ways of learning new material.
In a recent video he discusses the best note-taking app for students. That app is Notion, which Abdaal has increasingly been using to organize his life. As you can see from the video, Notion is, indeed, a very nice app that has many ways to organize and display your data and make it available across multiple devices. The problem with it is that it violates the important principle that you must maintain control of your data. With Notion, your data is held on the company’s servers and not stored locally. For that reason alone I don’t consider Notion a viable solution and I couldn’t recommend it to others for the same reason.
Still, Notion is an obviously useful and flexible app as you can see from Abdaal’s video. Fortunately, Emacs users can have essentially the same features that Notion offers while maintaining control of their data. Any Org Mode user watching the Abdaal’s video will immediately recognize the almost one-to-one correspondence between the ways Org and Notion operate. To be sure, Notion has a pretty GUI and may have capabilities that Abdaal hasn’t mentioned but as I’ve mentioned before, you can do the same things the video demonstrates with Org mode.
If you’re an Org mode user, take a look at the video and see if you don’t agree. The video is 24 minutes, 12 seconds so plan accordingly.