I have a love-hate relationship with Notion. And yet, I can’t seem to replace it with anything else.

My grievances with Notion.so

  • I get logged out across my devices for absolutely no reason, and cannot find a solution for this.
  • Offline mode still isn’t great
  • Everything Notion COULD do for you, there is a better app for it
    • There are better to-do list apps like Todoist
  • Security issues (not super well-versed but I think staff have the potential to access your files)
  • Mass marketing of Notion as the best all-in-one platform
    • The fact that people store sensitive information (passwords, finances, etc.) because of this
  • Too much friction cross-platform. Cannot use very seamlessly between iPad, Android mobile, and laptop
  • If you have a database with more than like 25 entities that thing is a slow sucker for load-times. I’d rather just go use Google Sheets at that point
  • No integrated email forwarding. There is an extension someone made on Gsuite that I would be willing to try. But, really, Notion is just not somewhere I would want to archive EVERYTHING.

Reasons why I still like/use it

  • I have a lot of notes from maybe since 2018 on there
  • Notion lets me make things pretty. I like pretty things. So, notion has a hold on me.
  • I generally will use it for planning that requires a pretty modular approach, that I would like to be able to access in the long-term, that I wouldn’t be able to plan just in a Google doc or with an analogue method like in my bullet journal or just on a plain ol’ piece of paper
  • OH another thing Notion is really good for is team collaboration. For sure. Like being able to have these really dynamic layouts for team workflows I’ve seen use cases where it works very nicely, but of course there are other programs that could achieve that too
  • I tried Obsidian but it was hard to move over and I missed being able to make it pretty
  • I have dipped my toes into Evernote but I don’t like the idea of storing everything on Evernote
    • not that I use Notion to store everything…

Ways I am trying to walk away/my alternative planning and note-taking systems

I actually want to port a lot of the stuff from my notion into markdown and onto my website? Like, if it’s not sensitive info, it means I can access my stuff anywhere, I’m regularly backing it up to GitHub, and I can easily link friends to resources of mine if I want too. And maybe randos on the web might find it useful or interesting

Anything somewhat sensitive I oddly enough just dump into Google Keep as a little sticky note, forever lost in a sea of random thoughts. Or it goes in my bullet journal/a physical journal

Obsidian is a good alternative? Doesn’t have all the fancy layouts but you are just editing markdown files stored locally on a device. Have to pay for syncing

Evernote has been around for a while? I never really got into using it though