Megan Ellis / Android Authority
I’m done with Notion. I used it for years in an attempt to reduce the number of apps I was using, and it worked. The everything app, as it’s called, held my recipes, notes, and all the data related to my job and various side projects.
But the more I used it, the more overwhelmed I got. I wanted to bring a level of simplicity and focus back into my life, so I decided to move back to dedicated apps that serve a single purpose and have minimalist designs and feature sets. I’ve already switched to iA Writer for all my writing needs, and I’ve now moved all my other data from Notion to Google Keep.
Would you ever consider ditching Notion? 13 votes Yes, I would. 31 % Never. 15 % I already have. 54 % I'm thinking about it. 0 %
Here’s why I moved back to Keep
Megan Ellis / Android Authority
I actually used Google Keep for a long time years ago, but eventually decided it was too simple for me. I then switched to Evernote and finally to Notion, and now I have come full circle and am back to using Google’s note-taking app.
Notion has become too much for me. I spent too much time tweaking the UI, selecting things like cover images, icons, and a color palette that was used across my pages. I had a complex workflow set up that required a lot of mental gymnastics, and every time I created a new page, I had to set it up so that it was in line with my fancy system and looked the part.
The more mental energy I poured into the software, the more I felt obligated to use it for every trivial detail of my life. It was a classic case of the sunk cost fallacy: even though I was on a free plan, I had invested so much time in configuration that I felt forced to use the app just to justify the effort. My currency wasn’t dollars — it was the mental energy I spent making the system my own.
Because I wanted to keep track of everything, I ended up writing down things that I didn’t necessarily need to track — and then I just forgot they existed. My Notion became full of pages I didn’t really need, leading to friction every time I opened the app. It became harder and harder to find what I was looking for, and I also forgot the intricate details of that fancy system I had set up, which was a frustrating experience. It didn’t really make me more productive; it just made me busier.
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