Leonid Mamchenkov - Life, universe, and everything else

Fascination with Notion

Over the last couple of months I’ve been really fascinated with Notion. It has really grown, improved and matured!

If you are not familiar with Notion, let me tell you about it. Like many cool things, it’s difficult to describe in one sentence. So here are a few.

Think of content management systems, like WordPress or your favorite wiki. Now, think of only the good parts of that. Now, add the ability to easily create and manage basic database tables. Now add templates. Now add some basic automation to it. Now add API. Now add collaboration. Now, once again, think of the good parts of all that. And that’s what you have – Notion!

Once you imagine all that, probably, the first and most important question you’d ask is: What do I use it for?

The simple answer is – pretty much for everything. But you’ll have to figure it out yourself. Same things will and will not work for different people, because we are all different.

Here are a few things that I either have done already or still playing with in Notion:

CRM. Our company CRM was getting outdated pretty fast and we were looking for an alternative for a while now. Notion came along, and we tried to adopt it for this particular need. It took me around a week to build up all the tables, templates, and automation scripts, and then another 2-3 weeks to prepare, cleanup, migrate, and enrich the data. The result is not perfect, but it is significantly better than what we had. And we have space to grow and improve. Our old CRM has now been in read-only mode for a couple of month, and we are checking it less and less. I’m pretty confident it will soon be decomissioned.
Personal Journal. Not to be confused with the blog, although there’s a huge overlap. For my rare and occasional blogging, I still prefer and will use this WordPress. But for more private things, Notion does it really well. My personal journal includes a whole lot of things like notes, habbits, lessons learned, and even affirmations – something that I’ve learned from other people’s templates.
Weight Track. In preparation for the yet another sailing regatta, I started tracking my own weight and exercise. This works particularly well with goals and milestones.
Personal Finance. Over the decades, I’ve probably tried a gadzillion personal finance applications, tools, and approaches. In Notion, I’ve built the one that works for me. And it only took me a few hours of clicking around, while figuring out how to convert between accounting and databases (spoiler: it’s easier than you think).
Quick Notes. Again, one of those areas where I shift from tool to another tool after a few years. My latest choice was Google Keep. It turns out, I can build a better (for me) version of Google Keep in Notion in just a few minutes. All I need to do now is import the content from my old and forgotten Evernote account (or do I really need those notes? probably not).

And that’s just me. And that’s just in the last few weeks. Other people have been using and building in Notion for a lot longer, and for their own needs.

I’m pretty sure that if you give it a try, you’ll find something that it works for really good really quick. And also you’ll keep or revert to some of your current tools and applications as a better alternative.

Quick Summary of 2023

Now that most of the Christmas and New Year celebrations are behind us, I think it’s a good moment to recap the year 2023 (in my yet another attempt to get back to writing here).

Reflecting on the year past, it seems that I was mostly consumed by two things: work and sailing.

In terms of work, the year started off with rather pessimistic forecasts for AlleoTech Ltd. We were still wrapping our heads around the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, crypto-winter, and the Russian-Ukrainian war. But, after all, we did a lot better than expected. Mostly, this was due to the retention and growth of the old clients, as well as some expansion into Germany and Israel. And yes, the Israel situation affected us as well, but it looks like everything is getting under control.

In terms of industries, maritime / shipping was the largest one for us this year, with fintech, marketing, and technology following closely behind.

Apart from work, I’ve done quite a bit of sailing this year. I have finally created the logbook, where I keep track of the sailing trips, miles traveled, night shift hours, and other useful tidbits. Here are some statistics from the logbook for the year 2023:

Number of sailing trips: 12
Nautical miles traveled: 1,290
Days at sea: 39 (spread across 10 month, with September and December being the only exceptions)
Night shift hours: 18
Boats sailed: 8
Countries sailed: 4 (Cyprus, Greece, Croatia, UK)

Just to put the above into a bit of context, I’ve started logging my trips from May 2021 (covering 2.5 years until now). Since that starting point, I’ve had 32 sailing trips, traveling a total of 4,048 nautical miles (80 miles a skipper, the rest as crew). I spent 91 days at sea 7 countries (adding Turkey, Spain, and Italy to the above), with 96 hours of night shifts. That’s been quite fun and I hope this continues this year and on.

The rest of my time on shore, was spent with friends and family, enjoying food and drinks.

Overall, 2023 was quite a challenging year, but it was good. Hopefully, 2024 will be even better!

Writer’s block and the power of good habits

Back in a day when I was blogging almost on a daily basis, writing a new blog post was a zero effort for me. That includes coming up with the idea for the post, the actual content, typing, formatting, and every some promotion around social networks and among my friends and colleagues.

The last few years, however, I stepped away from blogging and shared my thoughts, ideas, and useful links on a variety of media, such as internal company Slack, and a multitude of instant messengers, like Telegram and WhatsApp.

All that brought me to where I am now. Most of the content that I shared on social networks and instant messengers is buried in the archives, never to be seen again. My creative powers are diminished to the point where I’m struggling to verbalize a tweet. And my publishing productivity as practically non-existent. Even when I want to write up a short blog post just like this one, every cell of my brain is resisting the idea.

However, I want to bring that skill back. I’ve setup daily reminders to blog. But they aren’t doing much. At least for the last month or so. I’m constantly distracted by the ideas of reorganizing this website, catching up with history first, and so on. But nothing ever happens.

So, I guess, for the next few weeks you’ll see my hectic attempts at restoring order. For now, I will write for the sake of writing. Just to get back into the habit of it. And while I’m at it, you’ll probably be puzzled by the unusual randomness of subjects, inconsistency in length, quality and schedule, weak attempts to fill in the blanks, and other weirdness. Bare with me. Or not. After all, the web is huge.

Lavrion – Corfu sailing: Day 4 – Antikyra to Missolonghi

The weather forecasts for today was not very certain. Either there will be no wind again, or there will be way more than we need. So we decided to have a plan with options. If the weather conditions allow, we will cover about 70 miles and pass under the iconic Rio-Antirreo bridge. If not, then we’ll do about 30 miles and dock in one of the many marinas to regroup.

At first, it looked like there won’t be no wind. But a couple of hours later, we got lucky. For 7 hours straight we had solid 25 knot wind, with gusts up to 30 knots.

In the evening, we crossed under the Rio-Antirreo bridge. It is an epic structure – one of the largest suspension bridges in the world!

The Rio–Antirrio Bridge, officially the Charilaos Trikoupis Bridge, is one of the world’s longest multi-span cable-stayed bridges and longest of the fully suspended type. It crosses the Gulf of Corinth near Patras, linking the town of Rio on the Peloponnese peninsula to Antirrio on mainland Greece by road. It opened one day before the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics, on 12 August 2004, and was used to transport the Olympic flame.

About 30 miles later, we stopped for the night in a rather weird place – Missolonghi marina.

The entrance to the marine goes over a wide but very shallow channel. The water is green and stinky from all the growth within, and there are plenty of mosquitoes. However, the mariners are very welcoming and there is an excellent tavern right in the marina with amazing food and superb service.