Should Notion Be Your Second Brain? | Notetaking App Ratings (ft. Thomas Frank)

in a world that's moving faster and faster we all have to find resources and tools to help us make sense of the noise and the chaos of daily life i'm thiago forte i'm a father a writer and a productivity expert and i'm on a mission to help people use technology to live more productive and meaningful lives today we're talking about using notion as a second brain today i'm talking with my friend thomas frank who is a notion expert a study fiend and productivity guru to really cut through the noise and answer one question should notion become your second brain we're getting ahead of ourselves what the heck is a second brain and why should you consider building one or all this stuff that comes into our life whether it be ideas or events or tasks but where do you put them how do you manage them that's the second brand it's an externalization of the things you shouldn't be trying to memorize a second brain is a trusted place where you keep all the information that matters to you it can be a paper journal or notebook it could be a filing cabinet full of note cards it can even be those random post-its that your spouse or significant other leaves around the house for you as reminders but for most of us today the most common type of second brain is stored in a digital notes app i used to do a lot of note taking in a notebook i used to actually create goal sheets in a notebook and i would track my b-roll charts for videos i was making thomas's note-taking app of choice is notion notion originally came onto the note-taking scene in 2016 and since then has captured the hearts and minds of millions of people i think notion best fits the kind of person who wants to make their own system and wants to make their own customization notion markets themselves as a productivity tool i don't see them as that i see them as a disguised programming language where you don't have to do any coding immediately when i realized you could add things to a database and then you could create another view with a different sort criteria i was like that's a game changer holy crap i have my own list of 10 requirements a piece of software needs to have to some degree to serve as what i call your second brain so 10 requirements plus one bonus requirement oh which you will find out about if you listen to the very end and so i was wondering if we could sort of run through these requirements and see how they map to what you know of notion sure searchability the search function you need to be able to search your notes so how does notion do when you just know what you want to find you know more or less what it's called and you just want to find it as fast as possible notions indexing of its content is very good the speed is not that great so if you're used to something like evernote where you have a literal local database or obsidian maybe yeah it's not going to be quite as fast and i try to compensate for it by good organizational structures of my databases so is that the main way that you you kind of make it work as organizations if i'm looking for a video that i'm working on i tend to just find it through organizational structures if i'm looking for something else like uh a quote or a book that i was taking notes from i often use the search function on a scale of one to ten how would you rate notion search i'll give it a seven it's quite good just you know those extra three points will be awarded for speed in the future [Music] factor number two is duplication the whole purpose of a second brain or note-taking system or whatever you call it is to reuse knowledge knowledge is not single use the more valuable it is the more you want to use it how would that work in notion and how would you rate notions ability to have these these certain assets that you can kind of reuse again and again notion is incredibly good duplication so when we want to make a video we create a row in our database and then there is a youtube video project you click that and we have multiple pages that are spawned for that project topic validation a related content area a script area research area it all just pops up where i will not give it the highest rating you can like in rome research and obsidian grab things you've already created and then sort of embed them or link to them but it's just not quite as robust so for example they just recently introduced the sync block feature so say there's a quote from getting things done that's in my read wise page for that book i can throw in a sync block and i can sync it to maybe an article i'm writing about how getting things done working that's pretty nice but in rome i would just do bracket bracket and i would just search for it and it would find the block instantly yeah so that's like the gold standard for that kind of replicatable knowledge but in terms of making templates reusable checklists things like that i can't think of a better tool so how do you rate on a scale of one to ten notions duplication let's give it a nine amazing hyperbolic here and to get to ten what would it need to get to ten bring in that hyper fast reference linking which is sort of a new concept before rome there wasn't really anybody doing that except for like wikipedia third factor is access anywhere i can show you on my home screen content ideas right there bring me to my ideas area and i can just grab content or track a new idea all my reasons here favorites here it's on my phone it's on every device i use access everywhere it's very good as long as you have an internet connection that's the current achilles heel so evernote their model is native apps database you can't access it on the web but if you're without internet you're still good with notion they do cache things on your local device so if you've used the page often enough and you're not on the internet you can access that page but a lot of your workspace will be totally offline if you're offline so how do you rate notions access anywhere on a scale of one to ten i'm gonna give it a seven and this doesn't seem that fair because they do a really good job of having apps for basically every platform it's just the lack of offline access is definitely a weakness especially for people who maybe don't have great cell phone reception or who are offline for other reasons often factor number four is shareability how do you think about notions ability to share an idea that you have into your network of people it's pretty great we do a lot where i'll just like grab the url to a page and throw it in slack with other people outside my organization it's very easy to just like toggle the share to web button throw it up anywhere i want like is there ever a person or a situation that for some reason you can't share content from notion and you have to even put it into google docs or some other platform nope with youtube descriptions if i write something in notion and then i try to paste it from notion directly to the youtube description it doesn't work very well so i'll just throw it in a code block inside of notion which converts it to plain text the one thing i want if i have say an agency and i've got multiple clients what if i want to have like a master database for all the projects i'm working on for that agency there is the limitation if i have a client right and they want access to their pages i would either have to individually share each page with the client or give them access to the entire database my biggest wish for notion now is can i create a filtered view of a database where whoever i give access to that view they only have access to whatever shows up in that view not the entire database scale of one to ten shareability for notion shareability 10 out of 10 permissions if you want to add that in there probably subtract a couple of points factor number five being editable and this is something i think people go like is there anything that's not these days but i i think there's an interesting tension with productivity apps where it's a two-way thing so you are both a consumer of that information you are reading you are taking it in but you're also the producer you have to be able to change it to format it restructure it put it into bullet points add check boxes like you said tables it made it as easy as possible you know notion has like different layout tools or you can make multi-column layouts so there's that in terms of like editing pure text i think that the industry is sort of solidified new method that it's not just on notion it's on whimsical docs dropbox paper it's the block method so you can drag blocks around they have implemented the markdown where instantly formats for you but you can also use a menu and you can also use keyboard shortcuts pretty much any way you want to edit and format it's in there and that seems to have sort of propagated across a lot of different tools do you do your writing like straight up free-flowing writing in notion i do yep being easily editable in the flow of what you're creating how would you rate notion from one to ten i mean i think it's pretty darn good let's just say nine there's probably something else that we could do better in the future but like for rearranging creating your own layouts all that kind of stuff like it's pretty good factory number six upgradeability so something i noticed is often you just download a little notes app to just jot down your grocery list yeah to take some notes on a book maybe and then over time it starts becoming a productivity system and a knowledge management system and a second brain and by that time you're sometimes so far deep into it they're like oh i don't want to move i just want to use what i've always used so how do you find notion basically scales from the first little ways that you use it to more more sophisticated things i think it's probably the best tool that i personally used for that purpose because with evernote like i started using it as a student and it was great for that purpose and then when i wanted to start doing collaborative scripts with my team that's when we started running into some difficulties or if i wanted to start like managing tasks or i wanted to do some more project management kind of stuff i couldn't do it in there so i had to use a different tool that's sort of the strength of notion is because it is almost like a software builder tool there is the ability to add in other workflows over time i think a lot of people just get it because they're like oh hey i can make a you know a page and i can drag blocks around or i can do a task list things like that my top videos on notion are my task manager videos so i think a lot of people are looking at how do i use this as a task manager scale of one to ten how does notion upgrade and scale over time i guess 10 being a javascript framework or a literal programming language we'll give it an 8 or a 9. perfect 8.5 cut my face in half that's pretty good that's pretty good it it can stay with you for quite a long time yes faction number seven uh transferability if you're gonna be pouring your knowledge your ideas your life's work into one of these tools are you locked in are you now trapped inside this ecosystem or if you want to at some point in the future can you can you leave yeah i think the vendor lock-in is pretty high with this one they have export tools you can very easily export into markdown or to pdf you can even export a an entire page with many sub-pages and it will do its best to kind of create a pdf that has all of it in there but in terms of like my entire custom-built workflow i'm not porting that to another system do you ever feel a sense of personal risk like even if notion were to make a decision whether culture were to go in a certain direction the product were to go in a certain direction like you wouldn't feel sort of trapped in there i mean i would have a long weekend of coughing stuff out i guess it's a risk i take i realize the risk there's always some way to get out it's the cost that you incur yeah so i mean the cost in my case is either me or hiring somebody on my team to literally go through every page we have and copy the content through it somewhere else scale of one to ten let's give it like a three factor number eight is linking because our personal knowledge bases are like mini internets yes how would you rate notions ability to link from one place to another internally within your workspace it's quite good it's not the fastest i guess the best illustration of how not fast notion is when it comes to linking is i tend to go to a page grab the url and paste it where i want to create the link even though i know i can hit the double bracket and start searching with roam i can literally link to blocks specifically in notion i need to create a synced block and then paste it directly i can't search for a block of text currently it doesn't feel like a huge limitation to me personally something that i think about a lot is what are the features of these productivity tools that we get excited about because they're novel versus what do we really actually use on a long term basis to be productive and to get our work done so personally i don't bring in all these linked references all the time and i'm not entirely sure if i need to a scale of one to ten linking in notion i'll give it an eight factor nine multimedia in your work how many different kinds or what different kinds of formats like media do you use and how does that work in ocean notion is good for basic stuff so images come in just fine you can embed videos uh one thing that i actually do for my own study is i will take a video of myself trying to explain a concept that i've done some learning on and then i embed that via an unlisted youtube link in my notes and then i'll do a critique of my own thing i embed a lot of screenshots uh one thing that i like is that if you have an image on your clipboard it is just just instant paste in a notion so this makes it very easy for us to make documentation for processes i'll just take a screenshot of every step and throw it in the notion or i'll make a loom recording and embed that in the notion that's pretty nice there are definitely some things that i would love to see better support for drawing and writing with a stylus on the ipad but it would be nice if you could just say like all right drawing block and let me expand it and let me actually draw things that would be super cool how would you rate notions multimedia capabilities uh i'll give that an 8 as well bring me handwriting [Laughter] factory number 10 is metadata the data about the data it's stuff like when this was created who created it and what context it was created is there any intelligence that notion adds beyond what you directly write in a random just regular notion page has things like a word count there's probably hidden metadata if you put things in a database now you have the ability to create pretty much any kind of metadata you want so you can create what they call a select property and that's how you could tag things you could do a multi-select so you can multiple types of tags you could do create a date updated date who made it assign people things like all kinds of different stuff there you're almost creating your own metadata system yes if you create a database and you create a property for tags and you create a property for last updated date well now you can all of a sudden start filtering by your tags and now you can have like a page for your fitness notes and for your pkm notes or whatever it is you can start sorting by last updated date or start sorting by alphabetical whatever you want so you have to set it up first but once you do you can tailor it to what you want specifically something that i always wanted them to have is a tagging feature i think rome has a thing where you can literally just like put pound sign to create a tag on a block and then you can search by tag that is not a notion so how would how do you rate uh notions metadata i'll give it a nine i'm a diy person i like to make my own media i would love tagging like real tagging bonus factor the bonus factor automation okay do things happen without you needing to do them is there an example from another tool that you have you think of as like gold standard for automation the notes app that i use evernote using readwise you can sync in my case kindle what i know on my ipad which is here when i make a highlight that will be automatically synced through read wise and just appear in my notes yes that is a notion too and then in terms of automation so a notion has an api so depending on your level of knowledge and your ability to use things like zapier or automate that io or your coding knowledge there's a lot you can do people have been using it to do google calendar sync for notion they've been using it for things like the read wise thing like that fascinating so what is notions rating for automation this is a tough one i mean it's really really good compared to other tools but there's a lot more that i could do so let's give it a 9 with some wiggle room for adding extra endpoints and extra block support for the api and things like that but the fact that they have an api is pretty great if someone is like i'm sold i'm convinced i love everything you've said how would you recommend they get started with notions go over to thomasjfrank.com fundamentals there's a free open web page where i'm trying to make the best beginner content for notion possible adding together all of thomas's ratings we come up with a grand total score for notions suitability as a second brain of 78.5 and with bonus points 87.5 out of 100 it's kind of not fair though the bonus points right 110. to learn more about how to harness the power of your second brain whether it's in notion evernote apple notes or any other note-taking tool go to buildingasecondbrain.com or follow along by subscribing to this channel thanks for watching and i hope you'll join us on your own journey toward building a second brain [Music]

Channel: Tiago Forte

Views: 45,998

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Id: 50hWDN21ZC0

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022