Notion encourages busy-work and I’m tired of it

The knowledge worker’s productivity stack is increasingly fragmented. The familiar story of all data infrastructure companies, “Your data is everywhere, get easy access to it all in one place with our tool” holds additional weight for Notion. Notion is essentially a highly abstracted no-code tool. It has created a series of highly artistic, unusual... See more

And despite the breakthroughs Roam has made in rethinking note-taking, the software itself leaves a lot to be desired. Its bare-bones, brutalist design has all the charm of a command line. Enhancing its functionality often involves searching for some arcane bit of CSS written by a fellow Roam obsessive and inserting it as a code block in your daily... See more

Take the humble “document” as an example. For decades, document editing programs like word processors effectively emulated a printed sheet of paper, onto which the user typed with an emulated typewriter. Other software tools like spreadsheets did better, managing to escape complete skeuomorphism in favor of an infinite canvas. Notion is another goo... See more

A huge part of your job today may be simply resolving and reconfiguring the natural entropy in your office, but poorly communicated deadlines will remain so whether they’re written on an index card, sent in an email, or appended to a “task” in Asana. If you put something on a digital kanban board without enough information, it is no more useful tha... See more

After many years of building and tens of millions of users, Notion now describes itself this way: “Every department’s work. In one tool.”  You can almost feel their internal struggle with language—the search for the right words. How can you describe something that is genuinely novel? What happens when something is so fundamentally different th... See more

The idea behind tools like Notion is to solve this problem by using just one tool for all your different knowledge documents. Instead of Google Docs AND Asana AND Trello AND Airtable, you just do everything in Notion. This reduces complexity because you don’t have to switch and search across different apps.

After many years of building and tens of millions of users, Notion now describes itself this way: “Every department’s work. In one tool.”  You can almost feel their internal struggle with language—the search for the right words. How can you describe something that is genuinely novel? What happens when something is so fundamentally different th... See more