Notion - notes, docs, tasks 4+

You have to know your needs and where your current information storage system is failing you, for this app to be useful.

I used Notion and at first it was overwhelming and couldn’t see the point for it. I came back recently after becoming frustrated with my existing tools. I found the customisation perfect. I love the ability to cross-reference items and organise them in any way I like (with as many sub-pages as I like). The ability to change views and also to embed a variety of media in the page just to make it feel like a space to come back to.

I love Notion, and I was a paid user for about 3”3 years. I used it as my notebook, planner, task manager, knowledge hub, etc. However, after a while I noticed that whenever I had to find something I had saved or documented that wasn’t in a place I looked often, I could almost never find it using the search. Many a time somebody would ask me about something, I’d start searching Notion for a meeting note or web clipped item on the topic and often I’d end up saying “I’ll have to get back to you about this”. In the end, even though I hate the UI in comparison, I ended up moving to Nimbus Notes as a paid user purely because they have a global tagging system and OCR test search that even searches inside attached files. I have been using Nimbus Notes as a paid user for probably around 2 years now as well. I still prefer the flexibility, simplicity, and folderless structure of Notion, but until Notion implements OCR test search and some sort of global tagging system that lets me quickly find pages across the app (not just within a database table), then I’m going to have to stick with Nimbus. The moment Notion implements these things, it will honestly be an unstoppable tool that can do anything and everything. I would happily move back to Notion as a paid user then. However, as a note-taking, or second-brain-style knowledge management app, Notion fails at the fundamentals of easy knowledge retrieval.