Three years ago, I spent an entire Saturday—roughly eleven hours—building the ‘perfect’ dashboard in Notion. I had linked databases for my reading list, a weather widget I never looked at, and a gallery view for my ‘goals’ that featured high-resolution photos of mountains I will never climb. By 10 PM, I felt like a god of productivity. I had organized my entire life into a series of neat, aesthetic blocks. The problem? I hadn’t actually written a single page of the book I was supposedly ‘organizing.’ Not one word.
That’s the Notion trap. It’s a dollhouse for adults. We spend so much time arranging the furniture that we forget to live in the house.
The Notion trap is real and I fell for it
I used to be a total evangelist for Notion. I told everyone at my old job—a mid-sized logistics firm where we used garbage legacy software—that we needed to switch. I even convinced my boss to move our entire project tracking there. And for a while, it was great. Notion is incredible at being a ‘manager.’ If you need to know which freelancer is working on which asset, or when the next sprint ends, Notion is unbeatable. Companies like Monzo or Loom use it for a reason: it’s a world-class wiki. It’s a collaborative dream.
But for a person sitting alone in a room trying to figure out a difficult problem? It’s a nightmare. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Notion is a database company masquerading as a productivity tool. It forces you to think in rows and columns. It demands that you categorize a thought before you’ve even finished thinking it. You have to pick an icon. You have to choose a cover image. You have to decide if this note ‘belongs’ in the Personal folder or the Work folder. By the time you’ve done all that administrative overhead, the spark is gone. The thought has cooled down and died on the vine.
I genuinely believe Notion’s mobile app was designed by someone who hates humans. It’s slow, it’s clunky, and it requires a data connection just to see your own thoughts. I once tried to jot down a quick idea while on the subway in Brooklyn—somewhere between the Bedford-Nostrand and G stops where there’s zero service—and the app just spun. A white screen of death while my idea evaporated. I lost that thought forever. I’m still bitter about it.
Notion is where ideas go to be filed away and forgotten. Obsidian is where ideas go to have sex and make babies.
Why I actually started hating my databases
I tracked my focus sessions using a Forest timer for 22 days last summer. I wanted to see where my time was actually going. The results were embarrassing. I found that my ‘time to first sentence’ in Obsidian was 14 seconds. In Notion, it was 2 minutes and 12 seconds. Why? Because in Notion, I always felt the need to pick an icon first. Or I’d see a notification in the sidebar. Or I’d realize my ‘Content Calendar’ database needed a new property for ‘Priority.’ It’s a tool that encourages tinkering over doing.
I know people will disagree with this, and they’ll point to those ‘Life OS’ templates that cost $150 and look like a futuristic spaceship. But if your workspace has more than three colors, you’re not working, you’re decorating. You’re playing The Sims with your to-do list. I’ve bought those templates. I’ve watched the YouTube tutorials. It’s all just high-level procrastination. It’s a way to feel productive without the pain of actually producing anything.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that organization and thinking are two different biological processes. Organization is about entropy—trying to stop things from getting messy. Thinking is about chaos—letting things get messy so you can find the patterns.
Obsidian is ugly and that’s why it works
When you first open Obsidian, it looks like a text editor from 1998. It’s just a blank screen. There are no clouds, no fancy databases, no ‘Gallery Views.’ It’s just you and your words. And that is terrifying for most people because there’s nowhere to hide. You can’t spend two hours ‘optimizing’ a table because there are no tables (well, there are, but they’re written in Markdown and they’re a pain to make, which is a feature, not a bug).
Obsidian works because it uses backlinking. I don’t have to decide where a note ‘lives.’ I just write it and link it to other things. It’s non-linear. My brain doesn’t work in folders. My brain is a messy web of associations. I might be thinking about a recipe for sourdough, which reminds me of a chemistry concept, which reminds me of a book I read about the history of salt. In Notion, those would be in three different databases. In Obsidian, they’re just three notes that happen to be touching each other.
- It’s local. The files are on my hard drive. If the internet goes out, I don’t lose my brain.
- It’s fast. Like, dangerously fast.
- The ‘Graph View’ is mostly a gimmick, but it’s a pretty gimmick that doesn’t get in the way.
- It’s free. (Mostly).
I used to think that having a ‘unified’ system was the goal. I wanted one app to rule them all. I was completely wrong. That’s like saying you want a tool that is both a hammer and a toothbrush. Sure, you could probably engineer it, but it’s going to be a terrible hammer and a disgusting toothbrush. Notion is my toothbrush—it’s for the routine, the hygiene, the ‘life’ stuff. Obsidian is my hammer. It’s for the heavy lifting. It’s for the deep work.
The part nobody talks about
There is a certain type of person who loves Notion, and I’ve realized it’s the ‘Manager’ archetype. Managers love status updates. They love dashboards. They love seeing the ‘big picture.’ But if you are a ‘Maker’—a writer, a coder, a designer—the big picture is often a distraction. You need to be in the weeds. You need the friction of a blank page.
I’ve reached a point where I actively tell my friends to avoid Notion if they’re trying to start a creative project. I’ve seen too many good ideas die because someone spent three weeks building a ‘Project Management Hub’ instead of just doing the project. It’s a form of resistance. Steven Pressfield talked about this in The War of Art, though he was talking about booze and sex, not SaaS products. But it’s the same thing. Anything that keeps you from the work is the enemy. And Notion is a very, very charming enemy.
I’ll be honest: I still use Notion for my grocery list. It’s a very expensive, very over-engineered grocery list. But when I’m trying to figure out why I’m unhappy with my career, or I’m trying to draft a difficult email, or I’m trying to connect the dots between two books I just read? I’m in Obsidian. I’m in the dark, messy, unorganized cave where the real work happens.
I sometimes wonder if I’m just being a contrarian. Maybe some people actually *can* think deeply while staring at a pastel-colored ‘Daily Habit Tracker.’ But I’ve yet to meet one. Most of the ‘Notion Influencers’ I see on Twitter seem to spend all their time making content *about* Notion. It’s a closed loop. It’s an ecosystem that feeds on itself.
If you’re feeling stuck, try this: delete your ‘Life OS.’ Delete the widgets. Go find a tool that doesn’t let you pick an icon. It’s uncomfortable at first. You’ll feel like you’re losing control. But that’s usually the moment you actually start thinking.
Is Obsidian the final answer? Probably not. I’ll probably find something else in two years and write another post about how wrong I was today. But for now, I’m done with the dollhouse.
Total waste of time.
