I Didn't Replace Notion with One App
Part 3 of 4 β A Good System Has Its Role
I know what you're expecting.
You've read the last two posts. You know I broke up with Notion. You know my dashboards went untouched and my habit trackers collected dust and I kept redesigning the workspace instead of using it. You've been reading this whole time, waiting for the reveal.
So what did she switch to?
Here's the twist: I didn't switch to anything.
I didn't find a better Notion. I didn't discover the one app the productivity community had somehow missed. I didn't replace one all-in-one system with another all-in-one system and call it growth.
I replaced one app with seven. Each one doing exactly one thing.
And that, more than any single tool I could recommend, is the thing I actually want you to take from this series.
The Problem with All-in-One
The dream that Notion sold β and that every productivity framework since has sold in some form β is the dream of consolidation. One place. Everything in one place. No switching between apps, no losing things across platforms, no wondering which app holds the file you need. The all-in-one system is appealing because it sounds like simplicity.
But here's what I found: when one tool is responsible for everything, it ends up fully owning nothing.
Your notes compete with your tasks. Your tasks compete with your habit tracker. Your habit tracker is three pages away from your vision board, which is two clicks from your project database, which exists in the same space as your grocery list. Everything is technically accessible. Nothing is immediately accessible. And the more you build into it, the more maintenance it requires, and the more the system starts working for the system instead of working for you.
What I have now is the opposite of that. Not one place for everything, but one place for each thing, and a very clear agreement between each tool about where its job begins and ends.
Let me show you what that actually looks like.
This one surprises people the most.
My planning system is a piece of bond paper. Sometimes two. It lives on the wall beside my desk, or pinned somewhere I will absolutely see it, and it holds my tasks, my deadlines, the things I need to do this week that I cannot afford to lose track of.
The reason is simple, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out: a physical list cannot be minimized. It cannot be buried under a notification, hidden behind a locked screen, or forgotten in a tab I closed three days ago. It is just there, in my direct line of sight, every time I sit down to work. I do not have to remember to open it. I do not have to unlock anything to see it. It exists in physical space, which means it occupies a part of my attention that no digital tool has ever successfully claimed.
There's also something specific about writing things down by hand that makes them feel real in a way that typing them doesn't. When I write a deadline on paper, my brain registers it differently than when I add it to an app. The act of writing is also the act of acknowledging. The deadline exists. I have to deal with it.
Bond paper does one job: it shows me what I need to do this week. It does not take notes. It does not store files. It does not track my habits. When the week is done, I replace it.
That's the entire system.
Every piece of writing I do β notes from class, drafts, reflections, any document that starts as words and needs to become words β goes into Google Docs.
Not because Google Docs is the most beautiful writing environment. It isn't. Not because it has the best features. It doesn't. But because it opens instantly, saves automatically without asking me to think about it, lives in Google Drive where I can find it from any device in under ten seconds, and requires nothing from me in terms of setup or maintenance.
The friction of Google Docs is almost zero. That matters more than it sounds.
A writing tool with low friction means I actually start writing instead of spending the first ten minutes adjusting settings or choosing a template or deciding how to organize the sidebar. I open it, I type, it saves, I close it, I can find it later. That's the entire interaction. For something I do multiple times every day, the absence of friction compounds into an enormous amount of saved time and avoided irritation.
Google Docs has one job: it holds my words while I'm working on them and after I'm done.
If Google Docs is where I write, Google Drive is where everything I've written lives. PDFs from professors, finished documents, shared group files, old notes I might need again β all of it goes into Drive.
The reason Drive specifically is partly because it integrates seamlessly with Docs (every document I create automatically lives there), and partly because it's where school collaboration already happens. Group outputs get shared via Drive. Professors share resources via Drive. I was already there; it made sense to centralize.
But the more important reason is searchability. I can type the first few words of anything I've ever put in Drive and find it. Not navigate to a folder and hope I remember how I organized it. Just search. The organizational structure almost doesn't matter because the search is fast enough that I can find anything without it.
Google Drive has one job: it is the place files go to exist permanently and be found later.
Goodnotes lives on my iPad, and it does the thing that nothing else I've tried has done as well: it lets me read, annotate, and study from PDFs in a way that actually feels like studying.
This one is specific to how I learn. I annotate heavily. I write in margins, underline, add my own notes alongside the text, sometimes redraw diagrams in my own hand to make sure I've actually understood them rather than just read them. Goodnotes makes this feel natural because I'm using a stylus on a screen that's the size of a page. It's the closest thing to reading a physical document that a digital environment has ever given me.
There's also something about the spatial element of it. I remember where on a page something was. I remember that the important part was in the lower left, or that there was a diagram on the right side of slide twelve. That spatial memory doesn't work the same way when I'm reading text on a screen I'm also using to do everything else.
Goodnotes has one job: it is where I read and engage with study material.
Anytype β Blogs and Journaling
This is the app I mentioned finding almost by accident, and it's the closest thing to Notion in my current setup. The interface is similar. The concept of pages and blocks is familiar. But where Notion wanted to be my entire life, Anytype doesn't seem to want anything from me at all.
I write my blog drafts here. I write journal entries here, on the days when I don't have my physical journal close enough. It syncs across my phone, laptop, and iPad without asking me to think about the sync. I've never had to redesign it. I've never opened it to rearrange things instead of write things. It just holds what I put into it and gives it back when I ask.
The reason writing goes here rather than in Google Docs comes down to context and purpose. Google Docs is for work. For academic output, for documents that might get shared, for things that exist in a professional or educational context. Anytype is for writing that's more personal β the blog, the journal, the things I'm still working out. Keeping them separate keeps my headspace separate. When I open Anytype, I'm writing for myself. When I open Google Docs, I'm writing for something.
Anytype has one job: it holds my personal writing.
I don't have much to say about this one, which is sort of the point.
Gmail does email. My professors send announcements there. Group members coordinate there. Administrative things arrive there. I check it, respond, archive, move on.
I did not attempt to turn Gmail into a task manager, a document storage system, or a project hub. I did not install seventeen plugins to make it do more. I did not star emails as reminders and then ignore the stars. Email is email. Gmail handles it.
Gmail has one job: it is where email lives.
The last piece of the system, and the one that probably needs the least explanation: when something needs to interrupt me at a specific time, I set an alarm in the Clock app.
Not a reminder. Not a calendar notification. An alarm. One that makes sound loud enough to reach me wherever I am and whatever I'm doing, that I have to physically dismiss before it will stop.
The reason this matters: I used to rely on notification-based reminders for things I genuinely couldn't afford to forget, and I kept missing them because dismissing a notification is almost involuntary for me now. My thumb moves to dismiss before my brain has processed what the notification said. An alarm that needs to be actively turned off doesn't have this problem.
The Clock app has one job: it interrupts me on purpose.
Seven tools. Seven jobs. None of them overlapping.
Bond paper doesn't take notes. Google Docs doesn't manage tasks. Goodnotes doesn't store blog drafts. Anytype doesn't handle email. Gmail doesn't have a habit tracker. The Clock app isn't a planning system.
Every tool has one responsibility, and none of them are trying to do everything.
That constraint β giving each tool exactly one job and not asking it to be anything else β is the thing that makes the system work. It means I never have to decide where something goes, because the answer is always obvious. It means I never open the wrong app and have to go looking. It means nothing in my system competes with anything else for attention or purpose.
It also means the system is almost impossible to break. There's nothing to maintain. No hierarchy to reorganize, no database to update, no template to redesign when my workflow changes. If a tool stops working for me, I replace that one tool. Everything else stays the same.
This is what I mean when I say I didn't replace Notion with an app.
I replaced it with a principle.
The principle is this: a good system isn't built around what a tool can do. It's built around what each tool is allowed to do. And the moment you stop asking one tool to do everything is the moment your system stops feeling like a second job.
Last one: Part 4 β What Does This Mean for You? Because the point of all of this was never my system. It was yours.
