[ito]

For years, I experimented with paper, org-mode, text notes (Sublime Text, TextEdit) to manage my thoughts and life. What I ended up with was folder after folder of disorganized notes, files like daily.txt, todo.txt, log.rtf that ended up disgusting me.

I would so strongly recommended everyone reading this to check out Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/). At it's core, it's a collection of text notes in the cloud. Just open it up and start typing your thoughts down. No folders or hierarchy. The key enabler is that is that you can link together different pages. Roam Research helps you make so much better sense of your thoughts - I use it personally to plan out goals, projects, brainstorm research, track meetings/dates, and keep a daily log of everything I go through. I can't recommend it enough - even my dad started using it everyday after I showed him.

Just try it out and starting typing a few notes. It'll start off as a simple graph for text notes / documents, but there are so many more powerful features to discover, too.

EDIT: Roam is a cloud-based service, notes are not end-to-end encrypted. It doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you, there are many open source, offline-first alternatives that the community has created (emacs-org, Foam, Obsidian, etc.). I am in no way sponsored by Roam, I don't know anybody at Roam, I don't run any of those bullshit Roam courses, and Roam is expensive as fuck, but let me tell you this: there are so many features and UI optimizations that make Roam have the best user experience. Don't compromise your time and user experience.

[pps]

After exactly year of using it, I moved back to Notion, even though I have Roam for free. Thanks to Roam's hype they have backlinks now (+ it's possible now to create new page in another page/db with "[[", that will leave only link/mention to that new page), which means both structured and flat zettelkasten-style notes (done in some master notes DB) are possible, plus regular DBs and all of the other cool stuff. This is a complete solution for me, all of my notes are much better organised now. And yes, I know, Roam has much more features than backlinks, I was using all of them, queries and block references, and sidebar, and ..., but for real work I'm not missing anything else than a sidebar. Sidebar is the best part of Roam IMO, even Obsidian with their multipane can't compete with that. With Notion I can open new tab in browser or new window in desktop app and keep it side-by-side and it's ok too, not as good and fast experience as with Roam, but good enough.

[ito]

Thanks for sharing your experience - I have both for free as well, and I started with Notion. The problem is that Notion never stuck with me because it's hard to create pages/links at the same speed that you think / not as flexible, and I think Notion is better suited as a knowledge base with collaborators. Strong agree on the sidebar point, I don't use queries but am a strong user of references and embeds.

[coffeeling]

Wouldn't a Zettelkasten in Notion be most natural as a page with a template button to create a new note, and the new page had a template button to create children, etc...

That way it'd end up as a branching tree the way an actual zettelkasten would and would probably be more searchable.

[0x008]

Obligatory mention of foam for vs code here.

[mimischi]

As well as org-roam for Emacs! https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam