# Intro
From the mid of 2021, I used Notion as my primary notebook because of its rich functionality and usability, while I can feel the team behind Notion is a group of people who desire a breaking through product. Indeed, they made it! Today, I still feel thrilled and surprised about every update. I won’t deny that Notion is an excellent tool, and I will keep using it, but not longer for knowledge management because I realize the essential purpose of note is review rather than reading.
# Why Anki
In the past, I spent too much time on taking notes because I want my notes to be comprehensive. I leveraged the database function to organize my notes, so they are in apple-pie order.
However, it leads me to fall into a beautiful trap, appreciating my notes more than reviewing them. I know it’s more about use habit rather than the fault of the software, while people should prefer to choose the tool that fits their habit, right? I started using Anki from the end of the last year, and here are the advantages I found:
- built-in review function: without review, your notes never come to your mind.
- offline editing: sometimes you have no internet access, especially in Australia, you know.
- study statistics: it indicates how much time and effort you put on your study
- force me to input atomically: the most important point I want to mention. It allows you to manage knowledge through points, so you have to extract knowledge points from your learning materials, which force you to understand the materials and express them in your own way. As we know, the process of learning is Input-Output, so it is a straightforward and efficient way!
- open source and manual backup: you don’t need to worry about service interruption and extra costs later on as long as the project is getting maintained (with so many users and developers of Anki worldwide, no maintenance is unlikely to happen)
# Will I Leave Notion
Of course not! The strength of Notion is its flexibility, while you can design your own workflow on it. Recently, they released Notion Calendar that deeply integrated with Notion’s database function, so I believe it has potential to be an excellent time management tool, let’s stay tuned.
All-in-one is an ideal expectation, but don’t stick yourself to something monolithic. Use the right tool to do the right things.