Notion: Notes, Tasks, AI

I literally only use this app for calendar view and data transfer between Apple and Windows devices (Google Drive works too but you have to click more buttons). Notion's calendar view is so beautiful, customizable and functional, plus you can add MULTIPLE views and filter + sort them all differently! I say functional using a 5th Gen iPad Pro, my less powerful old iPad Air doesn't run anything that well, so beware if you don't have Pro anything. But wow! I love that you can add tags to pages in the calendar, and show the Status of it so you can check it off when the task is complete! Way more fluid and easy on the eye than Google Calendar. My only quibble is the lack of color customizability across all of Notion, but the page icons and tag colors function just fine for color coding purposes. I only use the free version, so the fact that Notion offers all that for free is amazing, but if you pay you get things called automations which I've never been able to try but I'm sure that would be even more convenient. A downside is you can't use Notion offline, which is tough when a place's WiFi disconnects every 5 minutes. My home WiFi has never given me trouble though. I've been using Notion since December 2023. It takes a bit to learn and other apps do some things better, but calendar view really has changed my life and made planning a lot more fluid, fun and aesthetic!

I’ve had fun using Notion. I thought, “This is my new ultimate database. It does things other apps can’t do. It’s a lifesaver.” Now, I’m thinking of unsubscribing at the end of the month. The inability to support PDF Export in 2024 for just about any page or document I desire AS IS, with no weird formatting changes or outright non-transferring of whole swaths of information is downright unacceptable. I’m on the $10 per month plan, so maybe they have that feature in the $20 per month plan, but no. It’s a feature that should be available in all plans, by default. I feel like all the work I put in over the last three days is near-wasted, because it feels like it’s all held hostage by either an underpowered PDF feature or a locked-out PDF feature. I’ve looked up alternative methods by other users and those didn’t work for me either. Oh, well. It was a fun three days, I guess. Hope there comes a massive overhaul of issues like these in the future, but despite Notion’s popularity and cost the debugging and development sector of their business has historically not been up to snuff. Hope this changes, but for now, I’m leaving. Please be warned of issues like these before you dive head-first into a new app/service like I did. Hindsight’s 20/20.

I use this app every day, countless times a day. I regularly wonder what would happen to my brain if the internet was out for a prolonged period and I couldn’t access Notion. I started out using basic pages for note-taking, but it quickly became clear that I could create templates for my weekly work tasks and personal projects in almost no time at all, customized to how I work. Now all my crap lives in this app, and it honestly gives me so much peace of mind knowing if I need to remember to do something or want to look something up, I just have to jot it down in Notion or do a search, and I can find it without a second thought. I will say, though, after years of using this app, the thing that prompted me to write this looong thing is that Notion inexplicably changed the color of their checkboxes. To a normal person this wouldn’t be a big deal, but their original sky blue is one of my favorite colors and I have come to associate it with the calm you feel when crossing things off your list. Now, the new checkbox blue is more harsh, and the vibe is *decidedly* different. Take it from an over-user — y’all should change it back, please!