The Notion Honeymoon
For about eighteen months, Notion was the centre of my digital life. My project notes, reading lists, meal plans, travel docs, weekly reviews, and a personal CRM all lived there. The flexibility was intoxicating — you could build almost anything, and the visual results looked genuinely impressive. I recommended it enthusiastically to anyone who asked.
Then I started noticing something I’d been explaining away for months. The places where I was most productive — the writing sessions that actually produced things, the thinking that felt genuinely generative — weren’t happening in Notion. They were happening in a plain text file, or in Apple Notes, or on paper. Notion was where I organised my work. It wasn’t where I did it.
What Notion Is Actually Good At
This critique of Notion has to be honest about what it genuinely does well, because the answer is quite a lot. For team wikis, project documentation that needs to be shared and updated collaboratively, databases with related views, and any work that benefits from structured templates — Notion is excellent. The ability to create linked databases, build custom views, and share polished documents with external stakeholders has no direct equivalent in simpler tools.
The problem isn’t that Notion is bad. It’s that Notion is built for a specific use case — collaborative structured documentation — that isn’t the same as personal knowledge work or daily task management. Using it for the latter is using a hammer to do the work of a scalpel.
Where It Fails for Personal Use
Speed is the most fundamental issue. Every action in Notion — opening a page, creating a block, searching for something — requires a server round-trip. On a good connection this is imperceptible. On a slow connection, or when Notion’s servers are under load, the latency is enough to interrupt the flow of thinking. For quick capture — getting an idea out of your head before it disappears — that half-second delay is fatal.
The second issue is complexity creep. Notion’s flexibility means there are always more ways to organise something, more views to create, more properties to add. This is useful when you’re building a team system. For personal notes, it becomes a maintenance burden. I spent more time maintaining my Notion setup than using it to produce anything.
What I Switched To and Why
I now use Obsidian for personal notes and thinking, and Apple Notes for quick capture. This isn’t a universal recommendation — it’s what works given my specific setup, which is Mac and iOS, with a preference for local-first tools and plain text formats.
Obsidian’s key advantages: everything is plain text Markdown stored locally, syncs instantly, and will be readable twenty years from now regardless of whether the company exists. The graph view is occasionally useful for noticing unexpected connections between ideas. The plugin ecosystem means any workflow can be accommodated without compromising the core simplicity.
The Lesson Worth Carrying Forward
The productivity app ecosystem is very good at selling the idea that the right tool will transform your relationship with work. The actual evidence suggests the opposite: the best tool is usually the one that gets out of the way most effectively. Friction matters more than features. Speed matters more than power. The app you use consistently in its simplest form will outperform the app you use intermittently in its full complexity.
Key Takeaways
- Notion excels at collaborative documentation and structured databases — it’s less suited to personal daily work
- Latency and complexity creep are Notion’s main failure modes for individual use
- Local-first tools like Obsidian offer speed, data ownership, and long-term reliability that cloud tools don’t guarantee
- The best tool is the one with the least friction for your most frequent use case
- Using two tools for different purposes (capture + thinking) often outperforms trying to do everything in one
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Sources
- Forte, T. (2022). Building a Second Brain. Atria Books.
- Newport, C. (2019). Digital Minimalism. Portfolio/Penguin.
- Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes. CreateSpace.