🤔 What is Notion and how could a writer use it to improve their creative business?
The main software tool we'll use to redesign our productivity and creative pipelines.
👋 Welcome to all the new writers who joined the Reader Experience this week!
I use Notion every day
I use it at work to build a collaborative work space for a three-letter US Agency and its partners around the world.
In July, I delivered a successful live training to 40+ remote health professionals working out of five or six countries and about as many time zones.
And, I’m also busy working on my certification, doing the Notion A-to-Z course.
This is all to say that I love Notion.
I can’t stop playing with it and building things. It’s like digital Legos.
I have this moment from my childhood. Whenever anyone asks about my happiest moment, it’s this one.
I’m sitting as a kid, about six or seven, during my summer holidays. Endless warm sunny days ahead of me, to do exactly what I wanted. And I’m playing with Lego.
Lying on the grey carpeted floor in a sun beam building endless cities, castles and moon bases. Then, making up stories to tell my brother what I made and how this was the best yet.
Notion’s kinda like that again.
Lego Blocks for Software
With its draggable, arrangeable blocks, from headings to images to tables, Notion has become a no code version of Legos. Democratising software design and letting any one build their own tools, and workflows.
Allowing non-technical people, not software developers, build what they need by arranging elements how they like them.
And even sharing them as templates for others to build off and customize.
Not just a note taking tool
Notion is a note taking app with superpowers, beyond producing clean and minimal documents.
You can use it for building collections of notes, recipes, and read later lists.
Or use it for project management and productivity.
Or build customisable dashboards to run your entire life.
And with a bit of help, Notion can even power your website as a streamlined content management system.
Powering Global Collaboration
At my day job working with that three-letter US agency (the one with a Zombie Emergency plan) I’ve built an entire software platform using Notion as the basis.
From collaboration spaces for teams or events, projects management areas, approval process and product tracking to a simple JIRA clone and document repositories.
And a super simple publishing engine for non-technical people to share their expertise with the world. So that any lower-income country can download open source software, documents and toolkits to run their hospitals.
It’s a really massive and impactful project, and I’m lucky to be part of it. 😇
Now, this has to be useful for Fiction, right?
What that means is we’ll be doing some pretty amazing things with Notion.
Leveraging all these day-job lessons for far more fun fiction-based projects.
Building a Fiction Machine
Notion has helped me overcome my own chaotic creative mind.
I’m finally getting ahead and scheduling articles, prompts and flash fiction pieces weeks if not months in advance. Microcosm’s prompts are now outlined until October.
My co-editor Paul used to “nag” me on a Thursday to see if I had anything at all ready for Friday. Often I’d be polishing minutes before it was due to be published.
Unnecessary stress and not good at all for working on larger projects like a novel.
I’ve used Notion to build a system that matches me. Instead of trying fit into someone else’s thinking. Something my rebellious creative side doesn’t like.
The Anything Canvas
Notion’s power and its weakness is that it’s any anything canvas, you can arrange the blocks any way you choose. There’s not only one way to do most things.
But that blade cuts both ways, and it’s easy to fall into the perfectionist’s trap of searching for the best way or the ultimate layout.
We’ll avoid those issues by working on simple focused templates. Templates you’re free to copy and convert with your own reader persona, ideas, and research.
Or world-building mood boards to visualise what you’re cooking in your head.
Or when we get to it, your own website info, blog posts and serial fiction.
But we’ll build up to that.
Think a friend will like this? Then please share the Reader Experience to help it grow.
Simple But Powerful Integrations
There are many, many ways to integrate Notion with other tools on the web, but it all boils down to two main things.
Adding information into Notion or sending data from Notion to something else (like Super.so for a website).
Two of the best I've come across are:
Save to Notion, a free Chrome extension.
Forget Notion’s Web Clipper, this is far more powerful, allowing you to create multiple forms that plug into any of your databases. Great for bookmarking and saving articles.
Tally.so an intuitive form builder
The designers of Tally re-used some of Notion’s design language to create a very familiar experience. If you learn Notion’s basics, then you’ve learned 60% of Tally’s. Very smart on their part.
Why does this matter?
I use these tools to empty my head.
To save everything shiny I find on the internet
Smash them back together to create something new (like these articles)
To structure my world building like World Anvil.
To build a Fiction Engine to get more done
Number one is priceless for a creative like me with a thousand ideas a minute.
But the combination of all of them is a clearer mind, more productive research process (avoiding rabbit holes) and far richer articles and world-building.
Your homework is super light this week:
Create a free Notion account (if you don’t already have one), everything we’ll do can be done with a free account.
And if you’re excited, dive into the basics with Notion’s Start Here page.
Two quick questions to get to know you better 😊
Asking your users (in our case readers) about their experience is very much at the core of user experience design. If you’re not asking users it’s not really UX.
Your answers will improve my reader persona for Treya the time-strapped writer. Which I’ll use when creating future content for you.
The first question, is about how much time you have for these articles and how much detail are you looking for?
Do you want shorter punchier pieces or longer more in-depth reads. The second lets me know which device size to spend most of my testing time on.
This article is on the shorter side (before the quizzes) with a more mobile-centric formatting style for instance.
So thank you for those extra clicks, they’ll be really useful going forward.
Until next week, happy writing! 👋