Notion: An Ongoing Love Story
The evolution of how I use Notion.
Introduction
I didn’t fall in love with Notion all at once. It was more like a long, slightly suspicious courtship. At first, I treated it as a fancy junk drawer. A place to put things I didn’t want to lose but also didn’t want to think about. Over time, it became something else entirely: a living map of how my brain actually works, not how productivity books say it should work.
One of the earliest wins was realizing Notion is fantastic for reusable things. Snippets. Phrases I use over and over. Bio variations. Workshop blurbs. Email lines I’ve tested in the wild. Prompts. These aren’t “projects.” They’re ingredients. Once I stopped forcing them into folders and instead gave them a database with tags and context, they became usable instead of buried.
Then came content meant to be shared. Brand guides, tone notes, accessibility principles, color palettes. Notion shines here because it lets me hold nuance without flattening it. My brand colors live there not just as hex codes (Regal Navy #243c64, Magenta #af0a4c, Dark Amethyst #2a1d45), but as intent: when to use them, what they signal, what they’re not for. It’s less “style guide,” more “this is how I think in public.”
Where Notion really earns its keep is interactivity. Databases for research. Linked notes for client workbooks. My interactive client intake form. Fields that let me track status, audience, or emotional weight, which is a very real variable for me. This is where templates stop being helpful and systems start being personal. My ADHD brain needs many places to put content. One bucket has never worked. PARA is elegant, but elegance isn’t the same as fit.
Learning any tool will get you much further than grabbing a readymade template. Templates assume you already know what you’re building, or that your brain works the same way as the builder's; creating and refining categories are always in lockstep, each informing the other. Sometimes you have to research something for a year to discover what your categories or chapters even are. Learning how databases relate, how views change meaning, how friction shows up—we all have to learn what works best for us.
The quiet superpower, though, is review. Coming back to Notion regularly lets me see how my thoughts have evolved. Old frameworks I’ve outgrown. Ideas that keep resurfacing. Projects that stalled for emotional reasons, not strategic ones. It’s a time machine with metadata. Occasionally humbling. Often clarifying. Mostly horrifying.
And then there are the tiny tricks that change everything. A one-click button to add a movie to my “to watch” database when someone mentions it. A frictionless capture for ideas that arrive half-formed. These aren’t productivity hacks. They’re compassion hacks. Small design choices that respect how my attention actually behaves. Notion didn’t fix my brain. It learned how to live with it.
In Conclusion...
Notion: An Ongoing Love Story
The evolution of how I use Notion.
I didn’t fall in love with Notion all at once. It was more like a long, slightly suspicious courtship. At first, I treated it as a fancy junk drawer. A place to put things I didn’t want to lose but also didn’t want to think about. Over time, it became something else entirely: a living map of how my brain actually works, not how productivity books say it should work.
One of the earliest wins was realizing Notion is fantastic for reusable things. Snippets. Phrases I use over and over. Bio variations. Workshop blurbs. Email lines I’ve tested in the wild. Prompts. These aren’t “projects.” They’re ingredients. Once I stopped forcing them into folders and instead gave them a database with tags and context, they became usable instead of buried.
Then came content meant to be shared. Brand guides, tone notes, accessibility principles, color palettes. Notion shines here because it lets me hold nuance without flattening it. My brand colors live there not just as hex codes (Regal Navy #243c64, Magenta #af0a4c, Dark Amethyst #2a1d45), but as intent: when to use them, what they signal, what they’re not for. It’s less “style guide,” more “this is how I think in public.”
Where Notion really earns its keep is interactivity. Databases for research. Linked notes for client workbooks. My interactive client intake form. Fields that let me track status, audience, or emotional weight, which is a very real variable for me. This is where templates stop being helpful and systems start being personal. My ADHD brain needs many places to put content. One bucket has never worked. PARA is elegant, but elegance isn’t the same as fit.
Learning any tool will get you much further than grabbing a readymade template. Templates assume you already know what you’re building, or that your brain works the same way as the builder's; creating and refining categories are always in lockstep, each informing the other. Sometimes you have to research something for a year to discover what your categories or chapters even are. Learning how databases relate, how views change meaning, how friction shows up—we all have to learn what works best for us.
The quiet superpower, though, is review. Coming back to Notion regularly lets me see how my thoughts have evolved. Old frameworks I’ve outgrown. Ideas that keep resurfacing. Projects that stalled for emotional reasons, not strategic ones. It’s a time machine with metadata. Occasionally humbling. Often clarifying. Mostly horrifying.
And then there are the tiny tricks that change everything. A one-click button to add a movie to my “to watch” database when someone mentions it. A frictionless capture for ideas that arrive half-formed. These aren’t productivity hacks. They’re compassion hacks. Small design choices that respect how my attention actually behaves. Notion didn’t fix my brain. It learned how to live with it.
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