For my son’s birthday this year, my wife and I asked my mother in law to get him a play kitchen. My son, Brooks, loves to play with pots and pans and make us “oatmeal” and “eggs” so we thought having a little kitchen set in his room would be fun for him.
My mother in law, Maura, got the play kitchen for him and like anything else it needed to be assembled. She took it out of the box, along with the instructions, and then we got a call that she wasn’t able to put it together and that a screw had broken off within one of the pieces. While I wasn’t sure how the screw had broke, I do know how confusing these instruction manuals can be some times so I said I would give it a try.
I went over to Maura’s house on a Saturday morning, spread the pieces out all over the living room and read step one of the instruction manual. Step one involved at least six pieces and didn’t designate which direction the pieces should be facing. It took me six tries to complete step one correctly. I eventually was able to get the kitchen put together but it took over four hours because the instructions were unnecessarily confusing.
Instruction manuals, while sometimes confusing, are necessary though. In another story, after I had first moved out, I bought a new bedroom set complete with a dresser and two night stands. The night stands seemed pretty self explanatory as far as how they went together so the person helping me out wasn’t following the instructions step by step. That was almost a decade ago and I still have one night stand where one of the screws that is supposed to on the inside is exposed on the outside of the night stand. Luckily the night stand sits next to the bed and you can’t see it.
In starting the DividuusOne project, I wanted to make sure that I built myself an instruction manual of every action I took. My thought behind that was that I would be able to see the progress I had made on a daily basis and/or I might be able to help someone else build something later down the road. In looking for an application to use for this instruction manual I came across Notion. I have not even scratched the surface of what this application can do, especially based on what I see people doing in the Notion sub Reddit. But I do know that it serves my purpose of creating pages for different aspects of my life, daily notes, I can imbed a calendar to track my blog posts, I can link to the Google Sheets that I have set up, and so much more. I haven’t found anything that I wanted to do and couldn’t in Notion and am looking forward to seeing what else it is capable of. It is the perfect application for my instruction manual.
If you want to check out Notion you can visit:
Back to that kitchen with the ridiculous instruction manual, Brooks loves it. We got him all kinds of food items, a fake toaster and a fake coffee maker. That kid is making all of kinds of fake dinners for us. I am hoping that he continues to enjoy it so he can make my wife and I real dinner when he gets a little older.
DividuusOne 