How I use Notion as a developer

Notion is an amazing tool that helps you organize your work and you can pretty much adjust to all of your needs. Also, there are a lot of templates to choose from made by incredibly creative people.

My Overall Setup

I use Notion for a lot of stuff (activity tracker, money manager, diary) but it all started when I realized that I had way too many development blog posts saved in my browser's bookmarks. Once I took a clear look at them I said to myself

There's no way I would ever find here, even if I wanted

So, something had to be done about it and that's when I started using Notion! My first database was Reading List.

Reading List

The Reading List serves as my organized collection where I put the articles or tutorials that I find interesting for stuff that will surely be useful for my career. More than being a collection of stuff that I haven't read before, it's a collection of stuff that I know will always be useful for me and that I should always take into consideration.

Yes, a Google search might serve the same purpose but here I'm capable to organize the info as I want

And that's what I do. Since Notion allows you to add tags and filters, it's the perfect way to only what you actually want to see, which facilitates search. I also ended up using Gallery mode because, for me, having a list of links isn't particularly interesting and I want something that is eye-popping and I can find easily. I would say that the images do the trick!

However, I ended up realizing that not everything belongs to the Reading List and they are just stuff that I find around the internet that seems interesting but I don't really have time to read them right when I find them so that's where Quick Links appear!

Quick Links

Quick Links pretty much represents what I don't want my Reading List to look like but when you're on your phone you don't have time to make an incredible-looking database. Instead, you just copy & paste the link and title and you're all set for when you actually have time to study whatever you've found. It basically serves as a triage for whatever comes into my Notion. The material does the check-in here and then they are properly dropped in their own place! I try to have this page as clean as possible since I don't want to repeat my mistake with the bookmarks!

Task List

I don't like to program my day or even week but, sometimes, when you actually want to have side-projects, you need to organize your life! If you don't, you'll never find the time to work on them so that's why this Task List exists. I mostly use pen and paper for work but for my side projects, considering that I only have the weekends to work on them, it's a great tool and helps me assess the project's progression.

Blog

I think this one is self-descriptive but I write all my content on Notion before assessing if it's good enough to be published. It's also where I take note of topics that I might want to cover or links to other blog posts that I may want to expand upon.

Note Taking

Here stands the important notes that I take (well, duh!) from my Reading List or books. Some things aren't worth taking notes on and some others deserve a special place to which I can quickly refer to. For example, Rework and The Opinionated Guide to React are two books that I read, enjoyed, and took some notes along the way and I want to preserve them without having to get to the original material again!

App Ideas

I guess that we all have this section on a paper, note app on the phone, or a word document but here stands my quirky ideas for apps, including with technologies that I have no idea on how to work with. Some are supposed to be personal projects, others might turn into actual products. The important part for me here is that I classify these projects on their type (personal or product) and degree of execution ("As of now, how easily can I build it and how motivated am I to do so?"). For me, the degree of execution plays a huge part in it because while all ideas are great, I may just not feel incline to elaborate on them... but I don't want to lose them as well.

Learning X

This is basically a sub-division of Note Taking but I also insert here resources for these specific technologies. I'm still starting to build a system for this section but at least I have a visible section for something that I'm currently learning and that's the important part!

That's pretty much it!

If you read this far, thank you so much for it! Hopefully, this post ends up helping something that might need some organization in their life! I usually ramble a lot on Twitter so you can find me there!