First Look at Notion - Getting Notions?

There’s a cast-iron rule in the IT world: Never change a running system. While I may not be the strictest adherent to that rule, I’ve generally subscribed to it when it comes to the productivity system that I’ve built up to manage both this blog and its German counterpart. That is using Todoist as my task manager, and OneNote for all my notetaking and brainstorming needs, with Rocketbook later thrown in for variety. Recently though, a new tool has popped up on my radar, one that on the surface promises to combine all the tools that I need into one effective package – Notion

It certainly seems to be beloved by productivity gurus and entrepreneurs, but is it useful for a small blogger like me? Or is this new tool simply a bridge too far? If you know me, you’ll know that I had to try this out of course, all the more so since it is free for private individuals like yours truly!

What is Notion?

The trouble starts right here at the beginning, because it’s actually pretty hard to properly describe Notion. It’s described as a productivity suite, but I’ve found that to be about as accurate as describing a tornado as a sudden gust of wind. At its heart, it is an all-in-one suite for notetaking, project management, task management and pretty much everything else under the kitchen sink. It is simultaneously easy and breathtakingly complex. In preparation for this blog post, I used Notion as a project tracker and note-taking tool, although there are numerous other uses for it out there.

While you originally sign up online, there are desktop and mobile apps available for all major operating systems. There are some unsupported apps available for Linux as well, though you might be better off using the web app there. Whatever option you go for, when you’re using Notion as an individual, you will be able to use all of them for free, without any loss of functionality. You will need to fork out money if you’re planning to use Notion in a team but apart from that, there’s really no reason to pay for it. At least, I haven’t found anything along those lines for me.

First Impressions

A decent-sized screen is definitely a must for Notion. Even my 23" wide-screen is not enough to eliminate scrolling on some of my pages.

Signing up to Notion is easy and straightforward, especially since signing in with providers such as Google or Apple is available. Once you’re in, there are no fancy animations, no quirky mascots or assistants to guide you through the app, you’re led straight towards an example notebook and are free to take it from there. It literally is a blank canvas. Don’t let that apparent simplicity fool you though, Notion offers a lot of complexity beneath its simple surface. This is not the type of program you can set up and get to grips with after a long workday or on a Sunday night. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience here!

One thing that did come as a surprise to me was just how resource-intensive Notion is. It takes a surprising amount of time to load on my Surface Go 2 and even my MacBook Pro gets surprisingly warm while running notion. Performance-wise, it isn’t too bad once its loaded up, even on the aforementioned Surface Go 2, though Notion is definitely one of those apps that work better on a larger screen, otherwise you’ll find yourself racking up the miles on your scroll wheel or trackpad!

Everyday Use

For the last three weeks, I’ve been using Notion to stay on top of my writing efforts for both my blogs. This includes both note taking and research as well as listing ideas for future blog posts, allocation between my different posts and keeping track of their status. Coming from years of working with Microsoft OneNote, it took quite a bit of re-thinking to adapt to Notion, particularly when it comes to organising and arranging your notes. Here, Notion sticks to a strictly hierarchical structure. Moving a block of text around and plopping it to the left or right of another bit of text is simply not possible, which is a bit of a drawback for me, since I subscribe to the “write it down now, structure it later” school of note-taking. This is particularly galling when you want to have a To-Do list and a link list next to your article outline. It is possible to do this in Notion, but I found it to be a bit clunky.

When you first start using Notion, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. It seems deceptively simple.

Once you get used to it, it becomes quite a powerful tool though. Both this screenshot and the one above show the same page, one right after I started using it and the other after a few weeks of use.

What really sets Notion apart though is it’s underlying structure. Everything you write is either a block, a database, or a page. You can have multiple pages within a database, while each of these pages has databases of its own, which can also be linked to other pages. And those blocks? They can literally be anything, from text to code to images, to links, whatever you need. This is where Notion’s real power lies, and it allows for some really clever features when it comes to project management. The big one here for me is definitely Kanban-style boards. I’m using these boards to keep track of what still needs to be done for each blog post that I’m currently working on, as well as for keeping an overview of the status of each blog post as a whole. 

Kanban boards, such as seen at the top of the Notion page for this article, are a quick and easy way to track the progress of a project. I personally love them!

One Dashboard showing all of my wild ideas and blog articles in progress for both of my blogs - That's certainly something that I've been missing!

With all this functionality, Notion also looks surprisingly good. It may simply drop you into a blank page when you start, but between customizable thumbnails and headers for each page as well as colouring options for each individual block, it is quite easy to create a pretty compelling visual structure for whatever page you’re working on in Notion. I’m personally using this to structure my notes and give them a bit more consistency. This is one area, together with the flexibility mentioned above, where Notion definitely blows OneNote out of the water!

Even Header Images and Thumbnails are fully customisable. It may not help productivity, but it certainly helps aesthetically.

That’s not to say that everything is sunshine and roses in Notionland. There are definitely areas where the tool’s complexity almost becomes its downfall. One is definitely the steep learning curve and lack of flexibility in some areas. The other, surprisingly, is templates. For the last two weeks I’ve been struggling to find a way to create a template out of the page structure that I use for my blog posts, without success. There might be a trick that I’m missing and I may have to read up on that a little more but honestly, that shouldn’t be required for something as simple as creating and saving a template.

In Closing

Where do I stand at the end of this blog post? Well, I’m honestly torn. Notion is a powerful piece of kit, no doubt about it. It is flexible and looks deceptively simple while allowing for eyewatering amounts of complexity and customisation. However, it is this customisability and complexity that makes it hard for new users to get into Notion, and it has also soured my experience with the tool a bit. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the myriads of possibilities this tool can offer teams, or even individuals who work on more complex projects than just a simple blog, but it simply doesn’t feel quite right for me. Having said that, I’m only three weeks in, of which one week was spent dealing with a pretty persistent sinus infection, so it’s early days yet, and it would simply be unfair to make my call based on this limited experience alone. This will likely be one of those subjects that I’ll need to revisit later.