Dear John, I mean Notion

I never thought I’d be writing this, but, here I am announcing to this corner of the internet that I’m taking an indefinite break from Notion. For those of you that have managed to avoid an impassioned conversation with me about this app over the years, Notion is for note-taking, project management, collaborating with other people, and general life management. Think of it as a hybrid; part kanban board, part database, part document editor, and part calendar, and for the past 5 years this app had been a genuine source of joy and entertainment for me… until it wasn’t. So lets dive in, do a little Notion postmortem and analyze its rise and fall in my life as an illustration of the fact that tools have lifecycles and its important to know when one has run its course so that we can move on to one that suits our current needs.

🌱 Phase 1: Evangelist

I first found out about and started using Notion in 2019 during the first year of my masters program. Then, the app was a hell of a lot simpler but it still had its core offering: databases. And oh, how I loved those databases. I’d just finished an undergraduate degree in spatial design where I’d completely fallen off my digital note-taking game because my ipad-less self wasn’t about to try annotating architectural plans with a PDF and a mouse. So a sketchbook or a notebook was my go-to back then. Now, I was in a masters of information science, and boy oh boy was the information flying at me! I needed a document-based system for organizing notes, planning out projects, and collecting important dates, and Notion was perfect! The aesthetic reminded me of a curated stationary shop, with its mildliner-esque colours and crisp layout options, so I was excited to use it. I also loved that it could be as simple or as complex as I wanted, and I quickly veered towards the complex side while touting its benefits to my fellow students. Surprise surprise quite a few of my fellow information-loving classmates were also super into it and it was cool to give each other tours of our Notions to see how we were using it differently and learn from each other. Notion was great while I was in school and because it was so flexible I was able to adapt it when it came to preparing for the post-grad job hunt. Honestly, if you’re a student I’d still highly recommend giving it a try, it’s great for note-taking and project planning!

🧠 Phase 2: Second Brain

Then I got my first full-time industry job and how I used Notion had to shift. I couldn’t use it for work for some logistical reasons, so I pivoted and started using it just for my personal life by adopting Tiago Forté’s idea of the Second Brain and using Notion to build that. Tiago’s concept came about when he realized the finitude potential of his own brain after having issues with his memory, deciding to delegate that memory work to a digital space for life management which became his Second Brain. This was something that really resonated with me given my own issues with fluctuating working memory and executive function, so I reorganized my Notion using Tiago’s PARA methodology (tl;dr all information can fit into the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) and my Notion became a catch-all for everything from planning my goals and projects, storing important information, writing notes on whatever I was reading/listening to/watching, managing my tasks, all that stuff. It became a hybrid Getting Things Done/Bullet Journal/PARA/any other personal knowledge management system that I was excited about and I loved it! I would get inspired by an app like Habitica and spend the next two days in a fever dream-like state redesigning all the databases and their relations so that it mimicked the app, down to reward systems for completing tasks with points allocated based on effort and impact that would then give me money to spend “in the shop” aka on my wishlist. This was my golden age of Notion; it was a playground where I could explore any productivity system or advice that piqued my interest and I wanted more of it in my life.

So I did a work lunch-and-learn on it, as one does, presenting my fabled closet database to my team. My coworkers thought it was cool, quite a few of them were already Notion fans at this point as its popularity was rising, but one of my coworkers really pointed out its true value to me. An engineer-turned-designer said that they were impressed by the systems thinking skills that I’d demonstrated through my closet database. This was the first time that it clicked that Notion was actually secretly teaching me skills that could take me to new places in my career! A job and specialization change shortly thereafter was the final proof that Notion was more than just a Second Brain for me, it was also a tool to improve my craft as a systems thinker.

⚙️ Phase 3: Over-Optimizer

Cue the next phase in my relationship with Notion, what I now look back at as the over-optimization phase. For the next two years, I continued to play around with my Notion setup. YouTube was a constant source of inspiration as I had a feed full of Notion tours and tutorials. The tool and its functionality had also continued to grow, now I was learning about formulas and other metadata that I could use to dial in databases. I could have so many different views of the same information so naturally making dashboards was the next step. Templates pushed for standardization and optimization… but I was still just managing my own life. I had no side hustle and no desire to start one, no time-sensitive projects like when I was a student, so guess what I did? I subconsciously made my life more complex to validate the over-engineering that was possible with Notion. My Notion, slowly but surely, morphed into a place that was screaming objectively unnecessary obligations at me instead of a place of purpose and intention. Especially once I got into using it for habit tracking and personal journaling my home dashboard became an overwhelming to do list. The addition of Notion Calendar was the final nail in the coffin, because now that my to do list was omnipresent and followed me around throughout the day it made everything seem more time-sensitive than it actually was. I found myself slipping away from checking it everyday and as the frequency of my updates waned it became a bigger and bigger burden, fed by automated recurring tasks and projects I had planned in an overly-optimistic state. I had created my own, personalized monster that lived on every digital device and insidiously whispered that I wasn’t keeping up. All. Of. The. Time.

👋 Phase 4: TTUL

So I took a break. I got rid of all my databases (except my closet one) and archived everything while I took my version of a mini-sabbatical. For my to do list, when I need to write things down like “clean the toilet” or “make a dinner reservation” I went back to the simplicity of the Apple ecosystem and started using my Apple Watch to quickly capture whatever tasks popped up into the Reminders app. I kept my Reminders off my iCal to avoid the overwhelm from false deadlines, and as I focused on just keeping things simple I realized that, at least for right now, compartmentalizing different parts of my life works better than trying to have one place for everything like the Second Brain method evangelizes.

I also realized over the course of my relationship with Notion that my Achilles heel is my desire to optimize and that tools like Notion really make it easy for over-optimization to creep into my personal life. Especially as tools like Notion shift to more of an business-focus in terms of their features, it pushes us to treat ourselves like companies or mini-corporations. But we are people, and we shouldn’t try to be companies. As Oliver Burkeman said in Four Thousand Weeks: “The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.” Moving away from Notion to more low-tech tools that are either built to be simpler or that have other kinds of intentional friction built into them, like physical journaling, has been really helpful by keeping me in check and reminding me that I don’t have to squeeze more out of my day or my life.

Take a step back and think about your own methods and systems for keeping your life together. Question what is and isn’t working for you? What subconscious shifts have happened because of the tools that you’re using? Do you like how its going, or, are you too ready to try something different?

Now go smile at a neighbour,

xx Alex