A Reply To August Bradley’s Obsidian VS Notion Video
--
With a new year, there is always a sense of starting fresh, or for me having another stab at it. For me, it was August Bradley’s PPV (Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults) System — though I knew from the outset that I needed a few things tweaked for my system. It was to my surprise when I went onto his youtube channel that I found his latest upload (at the time) to be, Obsidian vs Notion for Knowledge Management? With Life OS. I knew I wanted to create my own response to it and after seeing Santi Younger’s video, I had a springboard in which I can do so.
My Background with PPV and Notion
Before deciding that I needed a better PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) System, I was aboard the Notion train. There was a lot I liked, and still do like, about Notion. I decided to take on the mantra that ‘it is all in Notion’. It was great to start with, after trying multiple setups for organisation I settled on a mix of August Bradley’s PPV, Building A Second Brain, and Marie Poulin’s templates.
However; over time there was one major flaw. The more you put in Notion, the more it slows down. As you connect more databases and have more rollups — the longer it takes to load. Also, what I found with having over one year’s worth of days in my daily log database — there was a lot of friction starting to happen.
I love the idea of August Bradley’s PPV system — but as I was beginning my journey, I found that some of the things that you could do in Notion (Tasks and Habits for me) could be done easier if I had my own dedicated app. It was here that I felt conflict as I felt like I was betraying the system by wanting to cheat on Notion with other apps.
Toolbox instead of Swiss Army Knife
It was Ali Abdaal, in a video, I rewatched that he mentioned an article by James Struber called Use The Right Tool For The Job: The False Dichotomy Of Evernote Vs Roam. In this article he uses the analogy of how the carpenter has a toolbox, each tool having a specific job and doing it well…
