I love using Notion, but here’s why I’m quitting it

Notion has been the anchor of my digital life for the past few years, but apart from a handful of resource pages I don’t have time to migrate, here’s why I’m switching to other apps/tools to manage my digital life. 

Notion is great for pseudo-productivity 

Doing work on Notion feels great. The no code, drag and drop block system makes me think I’m building & creating stuff of value. In reality, more than 90% of my Notion pages are just really well organised. 

If I were to translate this to the real world, it means I’ve just been doing nothing more than tidying up the warehouse of my digital life. 

I set up my Notion system to be a creator, but for the past 4-5 months, it hasn’t helped me create anything at all. The bulk of this blog has been managed on Notion, but right now, if there’s no blog that’s being written, then it makes managing it on Notion redundant.

At work, we used Notion for a fair bit, but even that has been more of a distraction than a tool for producing anything good. I had to learn the hard way that  if something isn’t effective, then it’s being destructive. 

I used to have a complex Calendar database to manage my personal life, but this isn’t something Google’s Calendar & tasks can’t handle. 

I love journaling, and had both a morning & night journal set up on Notion. But they’ve both been getting harder to use because Notion’s inferior mobile app (sometimes I just don’t want to use my laptop) makes me not want to journal as much as I’d like to. The DayOne Journal app on my phone has solved this. 

I’m writing this post on a plain old Google Doc. It’s not as exquisite as using Notion I would say, but the main difference is that this post is going live, while the 30+ drafts sitting on Notion are still drafts. 

That’s pretty much it. Pseudo-productivity has killed a lot of what I could have done by now. But no point crying over what was lost.