Notion as a personal wiki
One of the personal tasks I set out for myself after being laid off in August was up my Notion game. As a writer, marketer, and (now) job hunter, I’m usually swimming in research for pitches and personal projects I have underway.
I made the extra effort to create a wiki in my Notion workspace to give me a central point to access my primary research and notes. Notion makes it easy to start a simple wiki. I like that you don’t need Confluence or even SharePoint experience to get a wiki live. It was easy to follow the Notion docs and use a wiki template to get a quick start. Then all I had to do was drag and drop pages across my workspace that I wanted to show up in my wiki.
Focusing my Notion workspace on a wiki eliminates the "dumping ground" approach I previously took with my Notion usage. I recently got done pitching some freelance articles, and I’m trying to tweak my job-hunting strategies, so my Notion workspace is filling up with content and links.
In the future, I hope to see Notion focus more on the wiki model. I commend them for their drag-and-drop approach, but I’d like to see some more out-of-the-box templates and plug-ins for wikis join the Notion ecosystem. For example, I’d like to implement tags and have some way to focus a search tool just on the wiki. I suppose the tags are already possible, but not out of the box.
I upgraded to a paid version of Notion once I got all my archives off Evernote and deleted the account. You can still create a wiki using the free version. Notion uses a simple column layout in its wiki template. It was a bit awkward for me to create columns at first, but the Notion user interface forgives you for making mistakes in placing titles and links in columns.
Notion is very trendy right now. I came to Notion because Evernote was no longer a solution for various reasons. For myself, Notion is a worthy successor, but I’m wary that they may make some of the mistakes that Evernote made during their rise and fall.
Being laid off finally gave me the time to do the Notion course on LinkedIn Learning and finally read through some of Notion’s documentation. While not necessary, both acts made a difference for me as a Notion user, as before that, I would delve into Notion to learn more and get sidetracked by one thing or another.
Will Kelly is a writer and analyst focused on DevOps and the cloud. He’s a recovering “collaboration geek,” having made SharePoint and other platforms work for teams throughout his career. Will also believes that collaboration is more than just platforms. It requires a culture change to happen. Follow him on Twitter: @willkelly.
Originally published at http://willkelly.blog on October 2, 2022.
