<aside> ❓ *Anne-Laure Le Cunff (@anthilemoon) asked on Twitter "If you take notes, which note-taking tool do you use?" and "Did you try several alternatives? Why did you choose this one over options?"*

</aside>

• Original Tweet

If you take notes, which note-taking tool do you use?

I have a single Notion Database named Notebook (previously "Zettelkasten") where all of my notes go. I have a Homescreen shortcut on my iPhone that allows me to hop straight to that page and start creating new notes.

Did you try several alternatives? Why did you choose this one over options?

I tried the other alternatives, each for about a month:

• Markdown in Dropbox using 1Writer and VS Code (the longest, I used this for about 4 months, gathering around 300 notes)
• Obsidian
• Foam (extension for VS Code)
• Roam Research
• Emacs (org-mode with org-roam extension)

Why I chose Notion

<aside> ⚡ I landed on Notion because it supercharged the way I was able to visually discover ideas by leveraging a database with various linked properties and properties that I find interesting for filtering on.

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All of these other tools are well-built visualizers for graph-based Zettelkasten, but I wanted the following things:

• I don't want to be bound by "wikilinks" as my only form of pivoting filters
• I want to be able to easily see visualizations of Generated/Generated From as a separate entity from Links (to)/Links (from)
• I want to be able to think about how to use any kind of metadata I can to guide ideas.
• I want to further connect all of these notes to my tertiary databases.
• The ability to explore combinatorial creativity with pivotable filters has been one of the most amazing parts of this system for me.