Notion for Web Development Teams

well hello friends this is the first of a three-part series on software called notion that is no joke my absolute favorite piece of software in the last couple of years it's just amazing what it can do so the URL is notion dot o so go ahead and sign up you know there's a free plan for you to evaluate it a quick note that all my plans are paid plans on there I find it a tremendously affordable piece of software kind of a no-brainer for me but you'll have to make that call for yourself but as I'm using it here you'll see that my my accounts are paid accounts so what notion is notion is documents and those documents can take lots of different forms you might think of a document as just like a Google Doc or a Microsoft Doc or word doc or whatever and it's kind of like that they can be that but they can be so much more and that's a big deal and how organized and nested they are and stuff and how it really keeps teams on the same page so I'm Chris coy I'm from CSS tricks code pen shop talk show I work on multiple teams with different people digital teams remote teams and we need software to keep us on the same page on a lot of stuff like like long term herding software you know for our projects and for our planning and for talking to each other and for meetings and for assets and for all kinds of things documents are the answer to so much of this stuff and there's lots of software out there for working on teams almost too much software you can spread yourself thin on how much software there is around this and as we'll see later that notion I think I think for me replaces and consolidates a lot of those apps now if you have some specialty app that works great for you fine but I think you'll see that what notion can do when you wrap your mind around it is it's just consolidate things in a really friendly nice productive way so again notion so sign up there it is a web app so you can use it on the web they have native apps for iOS and Android so you can use it on your phone and in fact of course I have it here on my phone and their their mobile app is amazing and in fact they won awards early hon for how good their mobile app is so don't discount that it is not at all a second-class citizen of notion is definitely a first-class citizen beautiful mobile apps but it works on the web so of course anybody can use it and then they have Windows and Mac apps as well not because of the nature of the screencast I'll probably be using the Mac App mostly here and I use that probably mostly to just cuz you know you sit at work and have my desktop machine open I love using it that way so this is I'm just looking at one document in team code pens notion here it's just happens to be one of our like home documents now in reality of day-to-day usage of notion I probably don't look at this document that much but as you'll see because we use it for really specific things more so but this is just a document and it's immediately editable team home you know I can just type and change things and it's all real time and immediate so if somebody else was looking at this document with me at code pen they'd be able to see me type they'd see my avatar lit up up here and I'd see their avatar lit up there and everything works in real time in that way now the real-time stuff is nice but just the fact that we both have shared editing access to this document is a big deal so typing stuff you know yeah it can be absolutely anything now notion documents are block based in that everything's a block if I type something that's like a piece of text block if I drag an image on here that's an image block if I have bullet points or to-do list things or anything they are little blocks and they can be dragged around and behave like blocks and that's just kind of a big deal it's you know the WordPress Gutenberg editor works in that way the you know more and more editors are moving towards this block based thing notion was early and great it's just a really nice way to make documents I could make a new document here and I usually I operate with the sidebar open here I just wanted to show you kind of that clean look at first if I want to make a new document any document in the workspace is everybody on this team will have ax to it now you can use notion as an individual person as well but let's cover team usage first just make a brand new document of brand new documents I can call it anything I want I could say hey we're about to kick off a new thing it's important because yada yada now this is that moment where it's like it's so great that everybody on the team can see this they can open it they can look at it they'll be able to comment on it and it's just this is the knowledge sharing at its best to me we could there could be to-do items in here you know review design choices implement design choices you know you know wow now it's a to-do document you know it could be a mood board it could be Kanban or a spreadsheet or all kinds of stuff that we'll see but my point is that notion is documents now this document could be a part of that document I just dragged it inside and now it's down here and now there's organizations starting to happen this document wasn't very useful so I'll delete it here's an onboarding document for new employees that code pen notice that each document has a little emoji - that's a nice touch we'll get to design stuff later but here's a here's a you know a new employee needs all this software and they need some setup steps so you need to talk about workflow and things that happen at code pen a super useful document for that it doesn't have to just stay this one document I could duplicate that document open this one say it onboarding for one and then check off the things as we as we do it and then maybe I'd be like maybe that's not the perfect place for that document anymore I'm gonna you know move it over here or here or move it outside of there you have this you know everything in notion is a block and a document and they can be nested and organized however you want so it's unup enya nated in that way and we'll talk more about that later but I wanted to just cover that notion is documents and you know just know that and then we'll get into just how powerful that can be in all kinds of use cases for as we move along you know notion really shines when you're using it with a team now you can use notion by yourself and I do I have a workspace specifically for myself because I find that useful but most of my usage and most of the value of notion is working with a team so remember this team home document here on cone pen this is you can even see some avatars up here of team members up who's seen this document and when they've seen it you can see who's edited it and stuff like that let's make a new workspace real quick we'll show you those other workspaces in just a moment but we'll say you know our screencast team we're really small company people and we do marketing cool it's gonna spin up a new workspace for us and you see when I opened up that drop-down up there of course there's some nice onboarding here but I'm gonna onboard you there there's other teams in here they're called workspaces though in notion and so I have a workspace for code pen and my team there and CSS tricks and my team there there's my personal workspace in my podcast workspace and up workspace I share with my wife and a community organization and a special project that I'm working on each one of those has some isolation of who are the members of that team and it's just a nice way to work and it's very easy to hop between these you can see there's even shortcut keys for getting between them so this is our brand-new one and we'll have all this new stuff in here now they've given you some documents because it's nice to see example documents to get started like there's some embedded YouTube videos for there's examples of what meeting notes might look like and and tables might look like in calendars might look like we're gonna get into all that that's so great though that they give you these examples and if you don't need them of course you just ditch them you know deleting things is no big deal and notion in fact they go in the trash where you can retrieve them it's a pretty nice system so on code pen here's our team home you know and and I can invite people to that team now I would do that in our screencast team and go under memberships and I would just like add member input in you know if there are a member of some other workspace already I could invite them by their username but in here I type in emails and invite them now the notion permission an invite system I think is just best in class it's really nice how all that works we'll look at permissions and stuff later but you know you know how to paste in an email and click the invite button they get an email they can accept it boom they're part of your team and they all have access to everything that's public to that team so under team code pin if I click settings and members here you'll see our membership list here now I can't show you that because of that it shows you their email addresses which don't necessarily need to be public here but you can see how that works you just invite people and then they're part of your team and they have access to everything that's in the workspace there and they're kind of can use it themselves anyway they can make documents that are private to themselves in this workspace and they can share documents with just them and other people within the workspace or outside of the workspace they get their own private notion experience as long as well as the shared experience in the in the workspace so great for teams notion is tremendous for keeping people on the same page and working on planning together and distributing that information about the planning to the whole team of all the years I've been involved on product teams and building things I'm always surprised at how often two people just aren't in sync they don't understand things in the same way and to some degree that's just kind of a people problem in a management problem and you can fix it through just being better at those things but software can really help in notion is great at that because it's this living document that everybody sees together with their own eyes and the way they experience the thing and they can look at it and it's harder to not understand what you're looking at in different ways you know it's like it's like what did we decide on hmm do I have to ask my brain that question no I don't it's just written down here in a document that we look at and can work on together so here's our you know the the team that we made for this little series together and the the workspace came with some some pages already now these are great templates I think but for the sake of this video I'd like to just start from scratch and talk about project planning project planning so we're gonna make our own parent document now this is always a fun part you know like what's the perfect emoji for this one how about an open book I really like the look of the book icon maybe we'll add a cover really quick just for fun covers can you can pick from different designs and and search for things what comes up if you look for project planning and unsplash just something checklists sure why not that's fun we'll get into more design stuff lately but now we have this already beautiful looking if yes be a document about project planning where we can talk about things like let's make sure the projects we are working on together matter mm I think that's you know that's thing this is just like Chris talk in a way like I like to start documents like this well like giving some vision two things you know I have my own version of this in indifferent like in the code pen project planning and stuff but we might have for example this is for individual project so there might be like for example some things might be too small for here some things might be too big for here now what I mean by that is these projects that we're gonna put into here are what I think of as like medium sized projects like a bug that just needs to get fixed that's probably gonna go somewhere else and as matter of fact you could use notion for bug tracking why not maybe that would be a separate thing that you work on an ocean bug but the little isn't that the classic bug one sure that's like too small or just like a little idea and it just takes a data to knock out kind of think barely needs any planning too little for a big project document and some things are too big because they just they represent some major sea change at the company like we're gonna change the entire way we approach this thing that's just too big I like to think of most of my project planning in these medium sized chunks so how would I organize them well I could just make a page for each project so I could make a new page now I've just type slash in in notion that brings up this kind of block menu I can also hit plus and get this menu and they can be all sorts of things now we haven't talked too much about the different block types in in an ocean but I'd rather just get into how you actually use it and why it's valuable so let me just make a new page and that could just I project new user menu or something like that and I and we could get into it from there that way this project planning document then has multiple of these on it and each one of those projects has a home base so project you know fancy sidebar or whatever it's gonna be in your digital project and then what's in these documents well of course it's entirely up to you now at code pen we have a bit of a template for that and we'll get into that in the future but I wanted to focus on like what does it look like to have this home base for project planning now I generally don't go that route we go with a table and this is a moment where it's kind of like a spreadsheet so it's gonna be this kind of rows and columns things but notice they call them a a table not a spreadsheet now it has and there's there's a difference here between inline and full page this is a worth worthwhile thing if we go full page so table full page it's just gonna be another document type but it's gonna be literally the entire page so this is like my spreadsheet or whatever and I can customize the rows and columns and different types here this is really beautifully done itself to me it's a lot like air table if you've seen that and how you know nice it makes spreadsheets essentially it's almost not fair to call it a spreadsheet but I have no choice I like I can't see this spreadsheet unless I pop into it here so let me delete that and make an inline table you just hit return hit plus hit I can type table 2 to get a little shortcut there and say you know upcoming projects for example now I have a little more structure to what's happening with my project so what were those projects again fancy sidebar and there was the you know new user menu now these have become projects - they're still documents though that's right and the interesting aspect of notion I can open this and it's gonna open in kind of a modal but I can open it as a page as well and this is a document like any other it can have to do z' and it can have photos and embeds and all the stuff any other document could have but its parent just happens to be kind of an item from a table now as we were in there we noticed we got some kind of breadcrumbs as well so there's a new user man it's a child of upcoming which is a child of project planning look at how much structure we've implied immediately you know and of course everyone has access to this and can help organize it and help work on it I just love that so we might say that like this is a UI project for example and it requires you know database people to because we need some new stuff there maybe that's useful for you for organizing projects because perhaps there's dozens of these and it's nice to be able to add a glance see what it involves and who and such it could literally be people so I could type that Chris is on this project now there isn't in my little fake team here I'm the only person on the team but isn't that interesting who's on what project do you need files attached to it you know that's interesting but let's say we don't well if you don't then you could just change it to something else or delete the column it ends up you know I made the err table comparison this is a table but it's also a database you can also do database like things to it relational things to it which is just cool I don't know how much we'll get into that but but know that this is a quite advanced in that way when is the thing do is it done or not now that's a that's a big one for me done I like this right so let's say this one is done and this one isn't and we'll make a third one too what's another great project to do like implement design system or something who knows when this is a database like aspect to this I can say add view and I'm gonna make a brand new view and I'm gonna say it active projects okay so there's the view for active projects I might actually call this whole thing just projects because then we'll we'll use the views for filtering so active projects is going to have a filter on it and the filter is going to be that done is unchecked great so notice the one that is checked is just totally gone if I click another one of these it's just gonna disappear because the active projects filter doesn't show those now I can make another view I'm gonna say finished projects and it's going to have a filter on it as well and that filter is gonna say that the done is checked great so now let me just get rid of the default view just firk for clarity delete now there's only two views of this there's active projects and finished projects and I can just swap between them now that's really useful to me I use that for all kinds of stuff just that that boolean filter back and forth but those can be as exotic as you want them to be they could have different sorting for example that's tremendously useful too so everyone can have their own view and in fact if you're just a developer maybe you could just make your own view be like Chris's favorite view and I don't have to mess with anything else I don't have to mess with the data of the table I can just say you know what I prefer to look at this project list like this with these filters and dis sorting and I can just do that and not interrupt anybody else's workflow so that's nice a nice way to I think for structurally look at this type of thing for projects and then within with project then what do you do now this is one of my favorite things so like I said there's there might be a template involved here you might have like for your company be like you know every project really should have six stages and so you might go like you know stage one you know agree on foundation of the project or something and stage two is UI planning or something if you do design driven development and stage three is you know resource management you know figure out who's on it and all that type of stuff who knows what your how you want to structure this but that's the beauty of notion they're just documents they can be anything I think that's cool uh in ours we do this type of thing but then eventually we get down to a really important thing where we do a it's not it's it's it's like a table but it's a board and what's interesting about this is that tables our boards our calendars they're all kind of related but for right now let's not focus on let's just think of a board as a special thing let's do it in line for now now look at that what it what is it what are we looking at what is the thing where you drag the cards between the columns the Kanban board and this is a big deal to me Khan bonds are like my life in project planning I think it is shaken out to be and I agree with this the perfect way to plan and manage a project really all projects have this have this deal of a bunch of stuff you got to do one of the things that are happening now and then when are they get done now different projects have different columns and different statuses for that kind of stuff but this is very much how we do often just hide this first column and just rock a three column system this is absolutely how we do it at code pen and we get together and we think about what these cards need to be and it can be an ever evolving process but you've got to just do it at some point so everybody knows what little bite-sized pieces of work are so project planning becomes this kind of it starts at the very highest level like things that are too big like having absolute vision for the for the product then there's these medium-sized things which are individual projects that might take a week or two weeks or a month or a couple of months or something they're worth needing some planning having some agreement keeping people on the same page with and it's like this ball sized thing that you can ship and those are tracked in notion in the this is how I like to do it in a board and any given one you can open up and see where it is see what the project was see what was agreed upon see what was talked about and then look at the status you know look at the Kanban see who's doing what and if it's like you know you're rolling in for the morning you're about to get to work crack your knuckles the ideas you come look at see what needs to be done you grab a card which could be something like you know you know graph QL you know migrations or whatever it needs to be you don't really migrating graph queue but you know what I mean like get some new stuff ready for graph QL I can grab that card drag it into in progress it can even attach my name to it I can continue conversation about it get to work on it and hopefully get it so completed and that's how projects get done you know now I said that this is very much like a table and it kind of is you know member in this table you can open a document and it opens a document you know like just because it's a table row doesn't mean it's just a spreadsheet each one of these rows is a document to itself well in a Kanban each one of these cards is a document unto itself so at any one of these cards is a full-fledged document it can have anything and everything inside of this this can be its whole world if you have a huge company and lots of documents and lots of planning you know my whole life could take place in a card for a week you know I just think that's fascinating ok this could have a Kanban in inside itself you know that would be weird but it could you know a Kanban card could have a Kanban card in it you know that's the that's the beauty of notion for you now notice this is table like in that it has all these properties on it I can add more of them you know I could say that okay this card remember is me and I could have like kind of a priority column that's a number I could say this has a you know a level this is a level five priority for example and you're gonna see that stuff open s page in here in here if you want to you know you have to change some of these view properties to expose what you're going to see at any given moment properties I think you can turn these things on what do you what do you want to see in here you know now is it redundant to see the not started label and they're sure so maybe we would turn that one off so the status is off but that might be useful for example when you're looking at this as as a table let's see that's the board view let's create a table view now all the sudden our Kanban board looks like a table well that's what it kind of is you know that's the beauty of of data in a way is that it can be visualized all these different ways believe it or not you could have a calendar view to which totally doesn't make sense here because it absolutely nothing has dates to it but the second these these things start to have dates attached to them let's give this date you know now that there's a calendar view it just knows you need a day of May 13th now if I viewed the calendar view we didn't name it it'll show up on the 13th there isn't that just fascinating I hope that's not too much but it's like it's almost like you don't need to care about this it's mostly just like oh I need a Kanban give me a Kanban but it's cool to know that it like it doesn't matter it's just if that happens to be useful for me I'll look at it that way if somebody on your team is like I hate Kanban so it's like well you know hopefully you can get used to it because it's I think it's a great way to work but you could just make your own table view if you prefer to look at things in that way so notion is planning and that's just a high-level view of how you could organize your planning but of course you could do anything you want to because notion is just documents and just feel free to do whatever you want you know I'd like to make the point that notion is work it's not this side tool that's like I guess we could use that that'll help us you know in some minor X Y or Z way at our team it's not like that for me notion is the job in a way now ultimately we need to for me I need to write code and ship code and be a developer around a product but I'm also responsible for communicating what I'm doing to teams making sure everybody's on the same page planning the future evaluating the past that kind of stuff that all happens in notion notion for me is literally work so for example you know we're doing project planning here you can't you can't just not do project planning you know that's just wild by the way it's gonna mention you know I could just flip on public access here and just like grab the URL and share it and and then have had the world see our project planning map if I wanted to nah not the world's biggest plan of sharing public roadmap of everything you're doing with everyone but it could be a trimmed-down version of this document or something I think that's interesting but notion is the job is the point I'm trying to make if I look at our CSS tricks team here one of the top documents here is our publishing schedule that's what's going out what's what articles are going out on what date are they paid are they not are they ready do they need editing is it you know what type of article is it what's the URL who's the author very important information to us now I have different views because different people at CSS tricks care about different things like if it was already published that's a lot more interesting for accounting to pay that person then then then what's upcoming but I'm very interested in what's upcoming making sure that that schedule is full of good stuff you know actually our lead editors more interested in that I'm interested in sometimes a holistic view or a calendar view I can do that you know isn't that funny we don't even have a calendar view you'd think we would but it's like I I prefer looking at days as a list like that anyway that's important that is the job here like this needs to get done to stay on the same page we can do future design work planning in here planning for a redesign is a that's that's the job that's the work you know a nun code pen you know we're we're having meeting notes in here we're doing real project planning we have a publication calendar for our challenges and for the code pen spark and for our podcast all of that stuff happens in here you can do half of your workday in notion you know I think that's big and it keeps everybody on the same page no guessing about what other people are working on chop talk show with our release calendars the same way what are the sponsors what shows are they on who are the guests are they booked or not when are we recording it all very important like that is the work you know that is the work it's not an email it's not in some other tool the work happens in oh sure you notion in we've alluded to this and cover this a little bit already it has this infinite nature is that you're not limited in the number of documents you can make as a matter of fact even on the free plan what you're limited to is the number of individual blocks which i think is a fascinating and cool and fair way to handle the data storage era but you're not really limited on the pro planner in that way you can make as many documents as many blocks as you want so it's on you to stay organized and I like that it has a few suggestions of templates and things you can use but really you're on your own as far as how you want to structure things now I think it's important to keep this kind of clean like the you know if you're just being really fast and loose and sloppy with your documents every document you make could be a high level top top-level document in the sidebar but you know it's kind of a mess you know it's like this thing could get super long and it'd be scrolling forever I think it's really like worth your time to stay organized and think about how you're organizing things in notion despite its kind of infinite and unup enya nated way of handling you so team home is fine you know I'm not even like I don't even find this document particularly useful at code pen you know it's nice to have some kind of generic top-level doc that the kind of miscellaneous things can go under so that's kind of think of it in that way but the rest of this sidebar to me is super useful all hands is well you know I think it's not like a unique name for us it's our meeting we have them once a week we have it on Monday and we we talk and all hands is-is-is let's see can we peek in there there's always the one for this week we duplicate that document drag the old one to the archive so we have this forever history of what we talked about that week and this has you know personal planning stuff in it uh and it changes over time now that's interesting too is that notion doesn't care how you hold your meetings of course so as a matter of fact we went through a recent change where in the past we used to just go person by person what'd you do that week did you have any blockers what are you gonna do next week and that was kind of fine but we're such a small team it ended up being like we ended up just talking about projects and where certain projects are so we changed that now our All Hands document goes project by project and we have a different structure for individual team members and what they do so these these documents now be have become this like what's going on with each individual project and it's working great for us so come this coming Monday one of us is gonna come in here and duplicate this I think it's notable that it doesn't matter who does it as a matter of fact anybody does it and they just know the structure you just copy the document drag the old one to the archive and then use the new document to update all the projects in there and then stuff and everybody does it and everybody has access and then nobody's like weirded out or uncomfortable about how this process works I think that's great okay so so so that's great that's a big thing that we do like all hands is like it's a moment that code Bend it's important thing and we do at code man of course our projects are important that's a high level thing now we looked at that in the screencast team and we kind of faked the project's structure this is exactly what we do at code time support is a big deal there's tons of documents that are related to support like who's on when how do you handle all kinds of different particular issues you know Maria our head support person does a great job of that so if you know because we all do support at some level at code pen there's always that you know a document that Murray can send us you know if we're like oh how does this work again well just look in notion cuz there's probably a document on how it works there's our own internal documentation that's like this is these are our coding guidelines this is how billing works this is you know this is how our conversations we've had about you know what document titles are and all kinds of stuff that's super useful to have and that's ever evolving as well in fact just the other day I was just like oh yeah I need to add an integration test and to this particular the site how does that work where's that code how do I do it I found it in two seconds here in the documentation and was able to do it was tremendously useful now there's also like just on going forever projects that code pen like the our newsletter like our podcast like the challenges if it's a chunk if it's like a thing at your company like a high-level thing that we do this at this company I think it deserves a high level document here and from there it can go down like if it's a like with the newsletter there's an issue of each newsletter so there's a parent page the issue has a newsletter it could have a Kanban of individual items for that newsletter the Kanban can have to do items things in it so when I say notion is infinite I mean it really is it can be really doc it could be really nested I mean let's just be weird about it for fun let's say there's a bug and it's it's you know bug number one and bug has a details document and the details document has an inline table on it that has like you know detail number two in it and details number two has you know to-do lists on it to do one to do two I mean we've gotten pretty deep there you know there's a bug tracking document with bug number one that has a details document that has a Kanban of individual details that has to do is I invented that structure just immediately and quickly but you can see how that you know how unup enya nated and quick and fast it is to just do whatever you like in notion now feels like isn't that dangerous am I gonna get in trouble with this like why is it in parts no opinions at all I think you'll find that it's nicer than it is you know like oh what do I do because of how many things it does limit on you you know I'm not you know I can't change basic aspects of how this table works or where these buttons are or even for the most part what fonts and colors and things are I have some control and look into that later but not enough that it feels overwhelming it's like I'm still working the basic confines of what notion can do and that's that has enough rigidity and structure that it just feels fine talking about you know how we started here which is that notion as this individual app replaces tons of other apps now I don't mean to say like you know gives notion and throw away every other app you're using like if you have a lot of success using some other app I think that's fine like what I want you to have is success so so please do I'm just saying that for me bringing some stuff under one roof was uh it just felt great to some degree so this is what I mean I mean I mean that I love con bonds I think that the con money is a really nice way to work and I think Trello was well known for that but github has it too and get lab can do it and I think there's enough people I've kind of copied the Kanban and what I mean by comma is like literally cards and columns that you drag around to different columns is an awesome way to work and the fact that you can just do it in notion means that I don't need some other tool to do combining for me in fact if that's the only thing the notion did I'd be like this is a good app I like it I think the way it does there's this there's the project itself there's the individual cards in that project and then and then being able to take individual cards and have detail and talk about it and comment on things that's just an amazing thing so I don't need another con bonding app because that's built into notion now the just base level documents is awesome to like let's say we had a public job posting and we wanted to talk and you know we need a front-end developer you know that is good at you know Apollo and graph QL or something you know I don't know what you're hiring for but you'd be elaborate and talk about now that's a document you might use a Microsoft Word document for it or or something you know like there's a million ways to do this but just it's like this is just a document we might collaborate on it and talk about it of course this can do this and I find it like if you're using Google Docs fine and you like that like the has some decent stuff that it can do but I find notion entirely replaces that and in fact the the like sharing nature and organizational nature of Google Docs I find it terrible compared to notion I mean this is like if you're just doing Docs and that's all you ever do and all you do is collaborate on these basically text documents notion does that amazingly well and that's great so no longer do I need that kind of that Google suite now once in a while I find myself in there but mostly when other people invite me to their documents if I'm inviting somebody else chances are I'm going to be asking them to use notion with me because I think that's nice and in fact inviting somebody else into a notion document just like inviting them to the team itself is tremendously easy in their permission system is wonderful so so that's great the fact that there's spreadsheet you know we looked at tables and all that for the most part it can do anything a spreadsheet can do you know like I feel like that's maybe underselling like hard core Microsoft Excel people that like do incredible calculations and stuff in spreadsheets I don't know exactly where the limits end with notion but for anything I've ever made a spreadsheet for notion can do so that's you know straight up a table like a spreadsheet oh so I don't need a separate spreadsheets app ever if I'm gonna make a spreadsheet app I do it in notion and it works great for me so so documents gone spreadsheets gone Kanban apps gone note-taking app totally gone and note-taking note-taking sometimes can be a little tricky because it you know my notes tend to be a little sloppy at first so I'll tend to be like on a phone call I'll be like phone call with you know Suzanne I might have the date in there 3/4 or 20 or something like this is a bad way to do notes you know it's like Suzanne who why is this just text date you know and I'll just have bullet points like they like the team's feature but something-something and so then I just just sloppy notes why would I want the whole rest of my team to see that well they're not it's a my private section so they don't have to see it and maybe I'll clean this up and to another document and move it publicly so that other people can see what that you know bizdev call was like if that's what I was doing or whatever so I don't really need another note-taking app because I just do my notes right in notion and I do that on purpose for another reason too is that there's the really nice mobile app a lot of my note-taking ends up being kind of a mobile experience and I don't have to be like oh well notion doesn't work on mobile now of course it works on mode works great on mobile so a lot of my note-taking happens there because I know we synced across all my devices and computers and I can access it anywhere and I know it won't lose it or anything like that it's just in the cloud I don't really need another note-taking app I use notion for that I don't really need a to-do app either traduz especially team two dues are part of notion you know that can be a really default document it's just a you know to-do list and you just like markdown and go left square bracket right square bracket and you can do lots of to do is here's a little trick this is I like this one there is a great little feature of notion called a template and there's different types of template so for one thing there can be a whole page template then there can also be like you can just duplicate a page and that's kind of like a template but this is a template button which is a little different which is just like what is the the name of the button this is like my special button but it'll be like add new to do and it just adds a to do block fine so if I click click click click that's cool but they don't just have to be - duze of course and I shouldn't say of course you're just maybe learning this for the first time but there can be any sort of blocks in here this could be like you know name or you know thing and then maybe the structure of the thing is that you have let you use like a link to link to some resource and that's the structure of the to do that you want so now when I had to do it adds that so like that I just don't have to type that thing but this can be configured to be much more it could have you know a header and it could have multiple things you know duplicate so that this isn't not do to do anymore it's a new to do section so if I need to make sections really quickly I can do that like look at how look at how fast it that's just such a nice little feature anyway it's a it's nice it's well done what this is a way you can make it to-do list without having to be to do specific software you know pretty nice so I don't really need a separate app for that I don't really need something like asana because like my team is here the to dues are here the project planning is here I don't need like an overall team app because my overall team app is notion you know the first thing we ever did with notion at code pen is we had a wiki with our like coding guidelines and stuff in it there and our like company directory and stuff I moved those files over an ocean that was like hmm this is nice I like how easy it is to edit mostly because if you think of how a wiki works you know wiki you you know that's in git probably you you have to explicitly click Edit on the page the page turns into an editable document might look totally different you make some changes and you save it you might have to enter a commit log message for the change I hate that you know I much prefer the just being able to open the document I'm trying to open and you just type and you change it and that's the change you know like that's a big deal to me that low-friction change stuff is is so great so anyway wiki I don't need no wiki this is my wiki this is my much much nicer wiki I don't need separate software for that I don't need separate software to make a public job posting like a little website that I need to publish this is my little website I can say turn on public access copy page link and there's that well they won't see my sidebar they won't have any access to any other documents unless they're nested in this document they just see this and so I can like this can literally quite be a beautiful public document of Mead you know talking to the world super super useful in that way and I don't need like a special app to save links in anything that that's kind of a separate thing but they have this thing called a Web Clipper and it's a Chrome and it's a browser extension that's like you're looking at a document and you want to save it you just click the thing and it pops into notion I use it for like whoo this looks good I want to write an article about it for CSS tricks I click the button and it just kind of becomes a to-do it becomes this clip document and it's not just a link to it like a bookmark but it pulls the whole document so in case you need to like you know save it forever our reference it the actual article copy within notion you can do that pretty good think of how many apps that replaces now my goal isn't wasn't with motion isn't to just replace all kinds of apps but the goal was to because it does replace apps it feels good you know it might actually save you some money it just you know different I know sometimes it's just nice to have everything in one place and and that's really cool not I've had this notion page open in the background the whole time it's worth exploring their website too because they of course have a beautiful website this new remote work section obviously related to some coronavirus stuff here goes into some stuff that we haven't been able to look at in this first video here about how just how well it works for teams and how clearly it is good for collaborating together on teams you know these beautiful documents the fact that you can comment anywhere and I mean we didn't even look at commenting but that's like you know the fact that I edited some text here I would do that because it doesn't matter who wrote it it doesn't matter where who or when wrote that but we could say you know what if I had a comment about this and be like you know do we really want to call out a specific technology in opening line you know that'd be some feedback that we could have a conversation about within any document anywhere on notion at all you know so cool it's just nice to see examples like this really clear examples on on their website together you know this commenting feature is great when someone leaves a comment you can see in fact look I could see right now somebody left a comment for me I can't click it because who knows it could be something secret that I can't show in this in this screencast but that that is a it's just really nice it becomes a more a real-time app to like conversations happen here in conversations that could and should be documented that other people can look in on and say oh I have something to say about that too you know so so so notion is documents notion is teens notion is planning notion is work notion is infinite and notion replaces other apps that is just one of three videos and then fixed ones we're gonna get into some deeper features I hope you'll stay with me cuz and I hope you'll try no shouldn't [Music]

Channel: Chris Coyier

Views: 12,671

Rating: 4.8833332 out of 5

Keywords: css, notion, web design, documentation, documents

Id: KPiz2Xpn0Bc

Length: 49min 34sec (2974 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020