Notion

Ali Abdaal is a Junior Doctor (sort of like a Resident in the US) practicing in Cambridge, UK. He’s also a YouTuber producing videos on productivity, efficient study habits, tech reviews, and life as a Junior Doctor. I’ve been following him since his medical school days after I saw his excellent video on how (and why) he uses an iPad and Notability to take notes in medical school. If you’re still in school you must watch this video.

One of his favorite topics is productivity apps and how he uses them to organize his life and manage his many activities. His latest favorite is Notion, a notetaking app with many features and ways to display your data. Normally, I wouldn’t pay any attention to something like this because I have the power of Emacs and Org-mode to do everything that Notion does and much more but when Abdaal gives such a positive review of an application, it’s worth taking a further look.

My quick take is that it’s a nice application that has much of the Org-mode note taking capabilities all wrapped up in a pretty GUI. It is, of course, mouse-centric so if you aren’t a point and clicker you might not like it. If you’re not an Emacser—or more generally, don’t live in your editor—you may find it a useful way to organize your notes and data. It will probably appeal to the same sort of person who likes and uses Evernote. There are mobile as well as desktop versions so you can have access to your data on the go and make notes when you’re out and about without a laptop.

All-in-all it seems to be a pretty nice application if you don’t mind the point and click aspects. Or it would be except for one fatal flaw: Your data lives on someone else’s server¹. If you want more than the free version, you have to buy a subscription to the service. That would be Okay—after all, you’re renting space on someone else’s computer—but what Notion really is is software as a service and that’s inherently dangerous as Eric Raymond had occasion to point out just the other day.

Of course, a huge number of people aren’t bothered by this—until they are—and happily commit their irreplaceable work to Google apps despite Google’s record of freezing accounts if they detect what they suspect might be BadThink. I don’t know anything about the people running Notion and what their thoughts are on this sort of thing but I’m not willing to risk my data and workflow to someone else’s whim. Especially not when Org-mode gives me the same or better functionality and I can keep control of my data.