Notion encourages busy-work

By far the biggest gripe I have is that a tool should be a means to an end and get out of the way—but with Notion building the tool often becomes the end in itself.

Too often people can’t handle the great power Notion gives them: they frequently build the most sophisticated, most complex solution for a problem because that makes them look smart. Gardening Notion boards becomes an activity 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. It has become a perpetual joke within our team to “create a Notion board” for any problem we encounter.

But make no mistake: All of this busy-work has little value. Of course better tools provide efficiency gains, but in Notion you usually reach a “90% there” level quite early—but that’s not when people stop. People revel in activities of diminishing returns and make everything unnecessarily complicated. A card in a table on a card in a board on a page? Sure!

Most times a mundane bullet point list would have been fine. Maybe a to do list. Maybe adding those todos to a calendar. But that wouldn’t make you look smart, would it? A Notion board with 5 views, 3 relations to other databases and 20 properties per card does … it shows you’ve really thought of all the edge cases! Good job!

Not only is the initial time spent on this busy-work wasted … you end up with solutions that need a manual to comprehend and use them. This is not a joke, we’ve actually been there: We’ve seen endless Slack messages explaining how a new Notion board is supposed to be used. This needless complexity slows everyone down who needs to use these tools later on.

Now … of course all this is not Notion’s fault — of course it can be used sensibly and responsibly. This whole post is a bit like criticizing a programming language for the bad code beginners write with it. Maybe we simply haven’t grown our Notion legs yet. But the reality is that not everyone on your team will want to become an expert tool builder: The flexibility that Notion offers simply invites you to use it for the wrong things and make everything too damn complicated. It invites excessive gardening. And worst of all: With Notion an even better, even more refined setup is always possible, always just around the corner, so people never settle … they simply won’t stop tweaking their tools, instead of focusing on the actual work.

The final stage of galaxy brain might simply be … Basecamp

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. Somebody decided, after careful consideration, that this is the feature set the tool should offer and that’s it. Somebody thought about how it all connects, how it’s designed and how it all comes together. The feature scope is fixed. No adding of stuff. No rearranging the core interface. No more obscure properties for edge cases. No discussions about relations. One way to do things! Focus on your work, not the tool!

Notion is the opposite and that flexibility makes it incredibly useful in some situations, but sadly also distracting and mediocre for most use cases. Maybe we had to go down this way, to see the benefits of more opinionated software again — to embrace constraints and to focus on the actual work. Understanding usually comes in sine waves … we’ve been at the top of the flexibility hill and now it might be time to bounce back.

But that’s just my opinion. Even in my team people will probably strongly disagree. Maybe someone will write a follow-up blog post with a counter take? That’d be great, I’d like to have that conversation!