What you will learn

• Operationalize documented processes more effectively with teams or clients in a beautiful shared space
• Get started with Notion and leverage its power in your business
• Automate the flow of data into Notion

Presentation Segments:

00:00 - Introduction
01:36 - Overview
03:11 - What is Notion?
5:02 - What Tools can Notion Replace?
7:02 - Notion Pros and Cons
17:21 - Lessons Learned with Notion
19:18 - Introduction to Networked Thought
20:21 - Useful Notion Templates
21:20 - Notion Demo
43:00 - App Project Management Template in Notion
1:10:04 - Readwise Tool

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Empower your team with shared knowledge

Learn how Notion and networked thought can empower your team to make an organic connection through the intentional storing and linking of notes, articles, customer interviews, tutorials, tools, etc.

With Jon Kinney, Partner & CTO at Headway, you'll be introduced to zettelkasten, a personal tool for thinking and writing that creates an interconnected web of thought. Using free templates you'll achieve more effective knowledge management through networked thought and intentional review.

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Presentation notes

Useful Notion templates

We have a full list of useful Notion templates are available here in presentation notes.

What Headway uses with clients

Client Dashboard and App Project Management Template

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Why Notion?

• How does it compare to other tools?
• Why Notion at Headway?
• Notion's shortcomings

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Integrations

• Official API
• Readwise
• Web Clipper

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Embeds

• Figma
• Whimsical
• Charts

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What is Notion?

A Wiki?

A Database?

A PM tool?

A ToDo list?

A Journal?

A Workout Tracker?

A Read Later App?

An LMS?

Yes

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How does Notion compare to other tools?

It can replace most of them, for most things, if you take the time to set it up properly...YMMV.

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Which tools can it replace?

• Asana
• Jira
• Todoist
• Things
• MS OneNote
• Evernote
• Google Keep
• Roam Research
• Obsidian
• Coda
• Airtable

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Why Notion at Headway?

Things we tried

• Google Docs
• Github Wiki
• Vim Wiki

What we actually wanted

• Shared knowledge, connected with insights, in a way that would let us resurface knowledge at key times.
• More power than just notes → databases!
• Amazing keyboard driven note taking experience.
• A  beautiful UI.
• Easily extensible and configurable.

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Notion's Shortcomings

No API (yet)

But it's coming later this year!

No offline mode

• Unclear when this will be solved.
• Hasn't generally been a problem for me or our team.
• Does Confluence has an offline mode?
• Embed

Development is slow

• Fair, until recently.
• See whats' new.

What's New?

Mobile apps are bad

• Fair. YMMV.
• Mobile sort of is what it is. Still good for consuming content.
• iPad Pro experience w/ keyboard was not good until recently: Oct 15th.
• Also supports Scribble with Apple Pencil.

Shared editing isn't as smooth as google docs

• True. But individual editing is better.
• Hasn't been too big of a problem.
• We use shared editing for doing retros at Headway.

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Integrations

1. API coming later this year
2. Readwise
3. Uses spaced repetition to re-surface content you care about
4. Sync highlights from Kindle
5. Sync Tweets via DM (save thread)
6. Sent Airr podcast clips to Notion
7. Send content to Mailbrew (unrelated to Notion)
8. Notion Web Clipper vs Notion Saver
9. Saver is muuuuuch better
10. Edit the forms
11. Send highlights with a right-click

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Embeds

• Figma
• Whimsical
• Google Forms
• Other Google Docs (to a lesser degree)

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What else can Notion do?

• Host your website
• Log purchases in a database (manuals, extended warranties, receipts)
• Headspace’s product design team stays mission-focused with Notion
• They embed figma design specs into notion pages

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Lessons Learned

• Use databases for as much as you can
• Use multiple filtered views of a single database rather than multiple databases for the same thing
• Database permissions aren't quite where we need them to be for a full external PM tool w/ clients (hopefully soon!)
• If you can't find a database or page when trying to link to it, prefix the entry with a special char like ++ or >>

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Networked Thought

• Wiki
• Zettelkasten
• Roam Research
• Pillars, Pipelines, Vaults - August Bradley
• Knowledge Vaults → Global Tag Database

A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.

• Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive

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Notion keyboard shortcuts

1. Esc to get to "normal mode"
2. Esc then Enter to get to end of the line (like Vim's capital A)
3. Esc then /  to change the block type (just start typing new type, toggle for instance)
4. Esc then Backspace to delete blocks or rows in a database
5. / to start creating a certain type of block from scratch (turn this into a toggle, then show creating a new block type)
6. Change block by doing /turn at the end
7. Change color by doing /blue at the end
8. Move a block to another page by doing /move at the end
9. /toc creates a table of contents in a page
10. ⌘ + v Paste link over highlighted text
11. Toggles + background colors to separate sections in a page and condense things. Headway client portal example.
12. Full page width setting for pages with embedded databases
13. Hide properties for columns only used for calculations, etc.
14. Save bookmark of a certain page (Action Zone) to iOS home screen

Creating pages with various characters

• [[ to create new pages (like in Roam)

Markdown style

• * + space to create a bullet (or - or +)
• 1. + space to create a number (they auto re-order)

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Notion shirts and apparel

Check out the Notionware Shop!