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Comment by pigtailgirl | Hacker News Reader

-- having consulted to many startups who use either Notion or Google Drive - I strongly feel that business who run on a well organized google drive are considerably more productive than those who are running in notion - Two general reasons I see - Notion itself isn't particularly snappy for everyone - especially team members on weaker internet connections - plus - it encourages strange rabbit holes of information in hacked together structures - hard to put my finger on that last one, but having been in multiple companies notions - they seem generally more difficult to navigate / find useful information quickly in --

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> google drive

I've been using Google Drive for years (at work). I still don't know where my files are and what the UI is doing. It is like a black hole of files that are shown in various ways. Google Drive IMO is one of the worst products out there. I hate it with a passion. I can pretty much say, in the list of 100 apps that I use, it ranks at the very bottom. Last.

-- sounds like my local hard drive ;=) - jokes aside - it can be a huge pain - but it requires only two things to be successful - you're extremely disciplined about using folder structures - you're extremely disciplined about using the "my drive" function - Company Folder Name (add to my drive) Sub folders > Marketing (don't add to my drive because I don't work in marketing) > Personas > Persona Iteration > a/b testing.doc | Sub Folders > Engineering (add to my drive, I work in engineering) > Release Planning > shipit.doc - etc - you can use notion this way - however in my experience most orgs don't --

They get shared at work and there is like a giant labyrinth of files. I have no idea who owns what, whose folder structure I am looking at, what files are mine and which ones aren't.

Good lord. What a piece of shit. I'm sorry to vent here, but I wish I was not forced to use this thing.

In Dropbox, the file structure is prominent UI feature. In Google Drive, I feel like I just don't have the brains to use it. I am not smart enough. I don't have what it takes. I accept complete defeat and I surrender.

I think links are helpful to navigate in Google Drive. The normal navigation via Folders and clicking is slow and so I prefer to just use links as well as reducing the number of folders to a minimum.

-- maybe an issue of organization within your organizations - not the tool? :=) --

sure maybe (not gp), but i think it's a contraindication to your original statement -- i think organizations that use google drive instead of notion or a wiki tend to be disorganized and have information siloed away to people who create docs.

if an organization happens to be very organized on gdrive because they put in the heroic level of effort (if it's not just being constantly done as glue work by 1-2 people at the expense of recognized/rewarded work), that just shows the competence of the organization that would be true regardless of using gdrive / notion / a wiki / clay tablets.

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