Notion, the super-popular Swiss Army Knife of the productivity apps world has been updated to work on Apple’s new computers with M1 chips.
Notion for macOS can now be downloaded from their website in either Intel or Apple Silicone flavours and it’s nice to see an update so soon after the new machines were released.
I updated immediately and my first impressions are that it definitely feels snappier. I’m relying more and more on Notion, so this is excellent news.
Is it just me, or are the updates from Notion appearing more frequently these days?
MacPsych on the move 
I keep dibble-dabbling with Notion. That ‘Swiss Army knife’ design is what keeps me intrigued, but I don’t feel I have an actual _need_ for it. Then again, I remember being a young IT guy in 1991, tipping away at Excel for the first time and thinking “it’s so cool but I don’t have a need for it.” Now spreadsheets rule and I can’t imagine working or organising without one. It’s the ‘island universe’ syndrome that keeps me from jumping right in, however. All these apps are great, as Evernote was back in its day. But they come and go, and I don’t want my content to either be locked in or be redshifted away as time progresses. The dominance of Excel and the subsequent import/export that other spreadsheets _had_ to employ meant that the spreadsheet became a document-type. Today, the spreadsheet’s survival is assured, at least until it evolves into the Next Big Thing. One could argue that apps like Notion and Airtable (and Microsoft’s catchy-uppy ‘Lists’) are the evolutionary successors to spreadsheets. However I won’t feel comfortable using them until they too become a ‘document type’; that you’ll be able to open your Notion base in the latest and greatest app to come along next, and that your data won’t be hobbled just because you chose to start using bases with one specific app. I always said that Evernote’s jealous hoarding of your content would be its downfall. If they had only sought to incorporate the notion of _throughput_ so that your notes, attachments, tags, etc could exist away from the app itself, they would have had a real shot at defining a new kind of document-type. Amazing do-all apps that cling on to you make me want to bolt, and that’s a key reason why I don’t want to get too tied in with Notion. Then again, as I throw my hands up in despair at the dog’s dinner that Microsoft is making of OneNote, and as January 2022 looms ever closer, maybe I’ll make my final 12 months with my employer my big “try out Notion” experiment? OneNote has been my professional go-to notebook for the past fifteen years, I couldn’t have lasted as long as I did without it. But with the Exit Door now not so very far away on the horizon, perhaps it’s time to put it to one side and start the next chapter? Speaking of chapters, yet again I’ve used your blog comments as my own tech blog – time to stop writing!
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Love it! Best comments ever from you, young man. I hear you loud and clear – it’s something I have a look at every time I’m tempted to wade into new app. ‘How can I get my stuff back out of this?’ I think I’m less bothered by Notion as all my notes are in Apple Notes (thanks for the recommendation) and what lies in Notion is a collection of more temporary stuff: the status of projects I’m working on etc. I just like the way I can type a few word, then a few phrases more, then turn it into kanban board in seconds! How I can set up a Gallery of images, that each represent my clients, making relevant information easy to find. How I can set up simple databases in moments and have them relate to each other with a click. It definitely doesn’t do everything. As I say, notes are still in Apple Notes and tasks are still in ToDoist. But for getting a bird’s eye view of my projects, I can’t beat Notion. For now!
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PS: Lovely to see your comments on this blog too 😀
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I _should_ start my own blog, but this dashed idleness… 😜
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