Among the apps I used most in the last year, Notion should be the most impressive one. Not just by its "comfortable" UI (this is true.. I just feel comfortable using it and writing more), but also a bunch of templates offering an organized way to do so many different tasks in it.
So let's explore what we can do with it in this specific case -- our developer's daily life.
If you "hated" meetings… Try this
Talk is cheap. Show me the code
For any pro and cool developer, possibly it is hard for them to say "love" for the meeting when they need to trade focus time in. However, the logic for meaningful meetings is we are part of a team, not alone. No matter passing the understanding on certain information thru the group or going thru the thinking and discussion process, the meetings are the things for this role.
So try taking notes during the meeting. There is a template, especially for note-taking. One line here, we could take notes (right), write keys to guide review, and write reviews(bottom). Put the research results aside. It is natural for us to focus more when trying to catch the points, think more about the meaning, and note down the keys and thoughts.
Also, I didn't believe in my memory too much. And meetings could easily get stacked up for a specific issue, so why not keep them organized for the big picture?
Sprint Planning on our self
It will not be a strange word when we are talking about Sprint. I believe one of the effective factors is the cycle the Agile methodology built -- planning, doing, tracking, and reviewing in a general sense.
Naturally, as a developer, I think about what else I could apply this "framework." An issue we meet in daily life is that many things are coming, life and work. It was challenging for me to keep the balance. I thought it was a problem...then forgot...got into struggling again...thought something needs to be done...not sure or forgot what I should...etc.
So I tried the template for Roadmap. It offers a Jira-like swimming channel where we could park issues as tickets in different states. You must be very familiar with the rest of things -- fill in information for the problems, break into actions, update progress and results, and review.
So here, with perhaps a minor effort from our working exps on Sprint and the template, I got another level to structure our daily life.
Database on everything
Have you ever imagined the world is just a composition of data? It is just a naive angle to view today's flood of information every minute and seconds.
Saving the data meaningful and helpful for our work is like collecting stamps. This kind of work doesn't make enough sense till we collect and insist on it for some time. Therefore, we could locate the most related to our problems in a flash, observe patterns and write out from these data points, and keep it safe to be used anytime and anywhere.
So try the templates based on the spreadsheet database.
In a word, Notion is a lovely app and still keeps its iterations to get better. It is an ideal choice to organize the information in life and work.
