🏅 How Notion won me over
I’m a serial app-experimenter and Notion was the only one that could break the cycle.
I feel comfortable talking about the bad-fit systems cycle because I was stuck in it for years. I always thought that the next app would be the thing that changed the game. But that was never true. Until Notion.
A couple apps came close — Asana, Trello, and Monday all had a shot but here’s why none of them worked for me, and how Notion swooped in and won me over.
Asana didn’t work because
Too many layers of sub-task depth (pretty sure it goes to infinity)
Interface wasn’t intuitive for me
Wanted better ways to see all of my tasks in one place and still have some better organization for projects
Wasn’t successful for my client-facing work, getting feedback and having review rounds
Trello didn’t work because
Found the layout too restrictive
My brain doesn’t love the Kanban style for everything
but It did make collaborating on shared tasks feel pretty easy
Monday came close, but ultimately didn’t work because
Again the layout was too restrictive
Can’t manipulate the data as effectively as in a spreadsheet
Some basic functions that feel intuitive to me weren’t available
Not enough power in creating custom views
Notion won because
It combined the features of the ones that came before
List view like Asana, Board view like Trello, and Database view like Monday
Can combine different types of views on a single page — images, databases, lists, etc.
More visually appealing and intuitive for me
The right balance of features and simplicity. It didn’t take too long to get comfortable and the learning curve to become more expert felt quicker than the others
I actually use it.
Features are important, there is no doubting that. But the best system is always going to be the one you actually use. Notion is my first and last stop every workday and usually a few stops in between. It houses my projects, my tasks, and personal information all in one home. It has the power to separate or combine any of that information so that I can tailor how much or how little I want to focus on at once.
If you’re curious about Notion, join me for the month of September on Instagram Live every Tuesday @ 10am Pacific as I share my favorite Notion features and how you can use them in your systems!
