Notion is the opposite and that flexibility makes it incredibly useful in some situations, but sadly also distracting and mediocre for most use cases.

Observing this makes me feel really drawn to tools like Basecamp, which are very rigid, very opinionated, funneling you through workflows that make sense, because they’ve been proven over time and iterated upon. One way to do things! Focus on your work, not the tool!

With Notion building the tool often becomes the end in itself. Notion doesn’t get out of the way, it’s malleability always invites you to tweak your boards further, to add another property, to connect another relation, to add another view, to go through your board and complete data on all cards.

While it’s impressive that Notion can handle all of these different use cases, it’s not particularly good at any of them. It doesn’t invite discussion because its comments are tiny and hidden. You also can’t call attention to certain properties of a card/page because all meta-data becomes one long list of properties.

Notifications don’t keep up. It you’ve built a ton of different tools in Notion, then notifications simply aren’t useful anymore … you receive emails that list 86 changes all across the board(s); they are not organized and they don’t correspond to mental buckets, like separate apps would.

Notion is a meta-tool: a tool to build tools and it’s so malleable and makes inventing your own workflows so easy.