notion have a brand new feature out and it's called home and it allows you to do a range of
different things centralizing your workspace into one location to access popular pages and your task
database we're going to show you how that works and how I believe it's step one into killing
databases hello everyone my name is Franchesco welcome to keep productive uh if you're new do
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naturally get the beat of notion every single uh big release uh to your inbox straight away
so do check that out below so I have naturally uh been very excited to check notion home out it's a
very interesting experience and essentially it's very much to evot home uh where you get
widgets and you can essentially organize uh a like a homepage of your most popular stuff but
there's not too many widgets for now but it's a good starting point now inside of this area you
can find recently visited popular Pages trending pages per teamspace and a really powerful function
called my tasks which essentially takes one of your databases and essentially pins it to this
area allowing you to really refine it of the tasks you need to do you can even set things
like um uh sorting filtering so you can have any tasks you need to do today and every time you go
to the homepage it will obviously update it and keep it most refreshed so homepage essentially
becomes your starting point inside of notion and it is really looking good it's a really
good first step for notion and that's why I believe it's going to help support the future
of notion which is a great first move now there's a few additional things you can do you can change
your nickname at top to anything you like and that will show across a day with good morning
good afternoon whatever you want recently view pages will pop up at the top as little panels you
can't change that as well as the my tasks area and the suggested for you suggested for you obviously
pulls the information that you're tracking with uh notion and brings up suggested stuff that you
would commonly click on potentially at the time of that and then you've got trending as well in the
bottom right hand corner many people won't notice but there's an Ask AI function still is populated
on the homepage too so why do I believe that this will kill databases now in the long run this is a
conversation that is over 3 to 5 years and it is a lot of different things it's not just AI it's
spatial Computing and also uh the the potentiality of a voice AI as well uh being a proponent of your
work management so what I'm about to explain is something that spans probably not just in the
short term but the long term as well and why I believe this is going to be looked back on
in the future as a first step even though they probably don't know it is so this conversation
actually sparked when I wrote an article that was about the future of notion where I discussed some
of the future products that I believe notion will come out with like notion mail notion whiteboards
as a next step in Notions multi-product lineup but I also discuss the element of databases being
killed and what I want to start with is the artificial intelligence side and one of the
problems I've had for notion for probably 3 to 4 years now is that databases are wicked awesome in
terms of creating the perfect productivity block that you want but they are also detrimental I
think to the future of AI in notion because it's different to other productivity applications let's
take a look at a notetaking app a to-do list app and a calendar app the core elements of what you
add you know what they are and AI in the future will know what they are as well a calendar entry
with will be related to a calendar entry uh a task is tick and clickable and understand what
it is when you add it and the same with a note as well this whilst the context is different
in a note you'll still be able to understand that that is something that you want to refer to later
and is documenti information so with those core components databases can be pretty much anything
now of course you may have the ability in the future to scan a database and understand but
this is where I believe databases can potentially be an issue because the AI might not know what it
is going to be about and that's where I believe in the future for the complexity side notion
will probably scale back uh their mainstream product for databases so that they create the
the actual core database for you so that it is in line with what artificial intelligent needs
to understand what the task is for the job now think in 5 years notion will probably organize
your day notion will probably organize your um your wedding it can literally uh be very
flexible as a tool and for the databases to be Progressive it needs to be able to understand
what those core components are and we can see that with home for example if we had um little
areas or little spaces inside of our home that can be prepopulated and understood what the databases
is without any manual Interruption then that could be completely beneficial to us for example maybe
you're going on a flight and there's a block or a widget in your notion home that has your flight
information and that you saved through email and it's automatically bringing up pre-flight uh so
that that's contextual information and the AI knows what it is so that's what I mean when it
comes to being able to sort of strip back uh the information that you're providing to notion the
understanding of the artificial intelligence and the second uh element of this is spatial Computing
which I believe will be a very core component to the experience of notion in the future if you
take a look at a driverless car obviously at the moment those driverless cars still have a steering
wheel they still have a clutch they still have an accelerator and likely a brake hope um and
in that same capacity um in the future we won't need those functions and those functions will fall
away and we won't think about them uh there'll be more space to move around in the car and in that
same capacity when we look at spatial Computing in the future um when a experience is up on uh
the display or looking at and you're using your fingers to manage that display for work and pro
probably at home in this case a database with a complex and vast array of features and uh
information will not be helpful to the job at hand we need the thing that I was priorly talking about
is widgets experiences that contextually move with us in the workplace and for our personal
lives the manualization of databases will die and the administration that we formerly did will
become maybe even a mindfulness Habit in terms of us not doing it for productivity but doing it for
mindfulness in that same sense and that finally brings me on to that final component of voice AI
um obviously one of the biggest things that we have been doing with our uh management of notion
is with the keyboard and with our um our Mouse as well and those um peripherals I think will change
to um being able to interact with it with your hands and finally voice which will be I think the
new mouse and this voice artificial intelligence very much like um Iron Man Needs uh some context
to what those things that you're interacting with is if it's a database that you have that's just
titled something and you have some information in it that might not be enough context for the
artificial intelligence to truly understand what it is so being able to strip back the databases
and bring it back to the core uh object Studio that they build in the background to this will
be something I think is fundamental to Notions growth so the way that I see this happening is
largely notion will probably roll this out in the workplace uh in the future obviously I don't know
an information but this is my predictions and where I think it's going now you're probably
wondering Franchesco these are mental claims and actually I have had these claims for about 3 or 4
years um I've written about modular productivity software and I normally think within that window
of like three to four years in advance when I look at schols so in in 2019 2018 I was talking
quite a lot about artificial intelligence and how I believe the next phase of um productivity
software will start to kill the manualing a of it um so that's where I believe my thoughts are
on the space and we have to think as well that productivity software largely isn't going to be
about organizing yourself it's going to be about doing more so when we put that in mind we think
about the different ways that uh it can activate a task or maybe even manage a system for us as
agents versus is uh us doing the work at hand but our core interest comes from decision making
and creativity so when you think of it like that I've got to make decisions about what information
I'm presented with or I've got to make creative Direction about that information I'm presented
with then that changes your perception of productivity software as a whole so um
obviously take this with a pinch of salt um when I say killing databases I mean very much long term
and I was in a fantastic discussion with Thomas Frank and August brandley about this who are both
really respectable well-renowned notion experts and their points that they were making largely
I I 100% agree with in the short term um but in terms of the long term I still haven't changed my
opinion in about four years on this uh this move and the main reason it's so prevalent with notion
is primarily because notion is such a complex system in terms of what it's trying to offer
it's a very flexible module at all so we need to keep that in mind um in terms of why I bring
this up in comparison with other productivity tools the same issues will probably be found
with other applications like coder air table and many more so my opinion extends across them all
but of course notion is something that I've talked about for some time now now obviously I'd love to
hear your comments and opinions and if you're interested you can join in the conversation I
will link the article below that I mentioned about where I believe Notions future is going so you can
have some more context but hopefully I think I've outlined where I believe everything is heading
as a big picture this is a big video so at the same time it's an opportunity to dissect it and
I really want to learn how you view this and from other opinions in the productivity space as well
because I'm growing my own opinions at the same time too so it's really always so nice to hear how
I can shape my opinion at the same time so notion homes out that's the The Bard down to it but I
thought I'd talk about that sort of interesting topic that has been on my mind for many many years
um so exciting future for notion I think this is a really great new re addition to the lineup that
notion has if you are interested folks you can subscribe and check out notion news but a pleasure
as always and I look forward to reading all of your comments thank you very much I'm cheerio