Anyone else use Notion to organize their life?

[DoWhatWorks]

I've known about it for years but dismissed it as too confusing.

Friend told me about it and I've been in a 3-hour rabit hole personalizing my own page and I'm loving it lol

Looks like a potential game changer and curious how other people have found it or know anything better...

 

[Chase]

That's a neat find, @DoWhatWorks.

I hadn't heard of it before. Looks like it's a sort of cross between Scrivener, Jira, and a calendar system.

The "day history" on their pricing plans is ridiculously short. 7 days for the free plan, then you're paying $8/seat per month for a 30-day history and $15/seat per month for a 90-day history. It's obviously designed to push you toward the enterprise plan. I know with Jira I sometimes find myself leafing through projects from several years ago. I don't know what their enterprise pricing is, but if it's, say, $25/seat, if you need 10 seats you're looking at $3000/year.

There are some open source alternatives... the leader seems to be Trilium, which strongly resembles Notion and is free. Trilium is something I have heard folks mention again and again (kind of like you with Notion) but hadn't really looked into. There are some rave YouTube reviews on it (one, two).

(I'm a bit of an open source junkie, personally. Open source software lets us do all kinds of things we'd probably go bankrupt having to pay these big enterprise companies for if we wanted to do)

Chase

 

[DoWhatWorks]

Looks like it's a sort of cross between Scrivener, Jira, and a calendar system.

Yep they’ve added all major collaboration/productivity tool features in one.

Pretty cool

The "day history" on their pricing plans is ridiculously short. 7 days for the free plan, then you're paying $8/seat per month for a 30-day history and $15/seat per month for a 90-day history. It's obviously designed to push you toward the enterprise plan

Yeah no doubt want you to start paying quickly. I’m only using it for Personal use & just make do with Google Docs & Height.App (free Trello alternative) for business.

Trilium, which strongly resembles Notion and is free. Trilium is something I have heard folks mention again and again

Hadn’t heard of this… Thanks will take a look found a Reddit thread that mentioned it & get outline.

I'm a bit of an open source junkie, personally. Open source software lets us do all kinds of things we'd probably go bankrupt having to pay these big enterprise companies for if we wanted to do)

Open source makes a lot of sense, I always get scared off by the self-hosting but have a knack for finding underrated cost-effective alternatives

Did you just stick with it / learn via YouTube or just pay a consultant to set it up one time?

 

[PaulieFlyn10]

Notion is overrated

 

[Chase]

Open source makes a lot of sense, I always get scared off by the self-hosting but have a knack for finding underrated cost-effective alternatives

Did you just stick with it / learn via YouTube or just pay a consultant to set it up one time?

I haven't taken the dip into Trilium yet.

But we use an open source ad server for GC, an open source Bitcoin payments processor, an open source clicks tracker, and of course Girls Chase itself uses an open source CMS. Then when we can't find a good open source option, we go for closed source self-hosted, because it's always both way, way cheaper than the hosted version, and because then no one else controls your data and you also aren't dealing with additional points of failure, where if any of websites 1, 2, 3, or 4 go down, suddenly your process is broken. So long as our servers are up, everything at GC is working.

It's pretty simple setting up your own hosting for self-hosted (open or closed source). Steps:

1. Buy a domain. DoWhatWorks.site $2/yr from Namecheap, for instance.
   
   
2. Sign up for hosting from a good host. You can get this for $3/mo from InMotion Hosting or Mochahost.
   
   
3. Either upload the software zip file to your main (public_html) folder, or create a subdomain for it. e.g., trilium.dowhatworks.site.
   
   
4. Unpack the zip file.
   
   
5. Follow the instructions to set up. You will probably need to create a database... which takes like 20 seconds through your hosting company's database setup wizard (in the cPanel).
   
   
6. Done. Enjoy your new self-hosted note-taking software with infinite calendar days for $3/mo!

I didn't hire anyone to help us do anything tech-related until I'd been running GC for 5 years.

That was 9 years after I set up my first website (a music site back when I was in college).

All this stuff is usually designed to be simple to install, set up, and occasionally update when an update is needed (a lot of software is basically a one-click update: "click to update to the latest version").

Chase

 

[DoWhatWorks]

Beautiful stuff - thank you!