Eleanor Dove 🍂

I aimed mine at building systems.

That's when I found Notion.

The first thing I want to say, before anything else, is that Notion deserves its reputation. When you open it for the first time and realize it can be literally anything, a notes app, a task manager, a project planner, a database, a habit tracker, a wiki, a vision board, all at once, all inside one workspace, there's a feeling that happens. The feeling of finally. The feeling of, oh. This is it.

I built dashboards the way some people decorate a room: with intention, with care, with the quiet satisfaction of making something that actually reflects how you think. I had a page for every subject. Notes organized by topic. A project tracker for group work. A goals page. A habit tracker for the version of myself I was trying to become. A blog section for everything I was writing. A vision board. A calendar with deadlines laid out so clearly nothing could sneak up on me.

I used it across my phone and my laptop. That seamlessness mattered more than it sounds. I could pull something up mid-conversation, check a deadline while waiting for class to start, add a task before I forgot it. The system felt alive. It moved with me.

And here's the honest thing I want to say, the thing that gets lost in every "I quit Notion" story: it genuinely changed the way I worked. Not in the way productivity content promises a tool will change your life, which is usually just marketing dressed up as testimony. I mean it actually restructured how I thought. I started asking questions I'd never thought to ask before. Where does this belong? How does this connect to everything else? What deserves its own page and what can just be a bullet point?

That's not nothing. That's actually a lot.

Looking back, I understand why it worked so well. The pandemic had built the perfect conditions for Notion to thrive. My entire life was already inside a screen, so having my entire system inside a screen made complete, seamless sense. I wasn't moving between contexts, paper and digital, classroom and laptop. Everything was already in one place. Notion just gave that place a structure.

It was exactly what I needed for that season of my life.

I want you to hold onto that. It becomes important later.

When Things Stopped Making Sense (2023)

Then we went back to face to face.

And I don't know exactly when the drift started, because these things never happen in a single moment. It was gradual. Quiet. The kind of slow change you don't notice until you're already somewhere else entirely and you look back and realize you haven't been where you thought you were for a while now.

But somewhere between walking back into a classroom and learning to carry a bag again, I stopped opening Notion as much.

I started writing things down on paper instead. A physical planner, the kind with weekly spreads and little boxes to tick. My deadlines went in there. My tasks went in there. The things I absolutely could not afford to forget went there, in ink, where I could see them without unlocking anything or opening an app or waiting for a page to load.

I told myself this was temporary. Just a supplement. Notion was still my main system. I was just adding a layer.

I was not adding a layer.

I was leaving, and I hadn't said so yet.

My work was complex, so I told myself I needed to come back properly. I redesigned the workspace. Made it simpler, cleaner, stripped out everything that wasn't essential. Told myself this version would be the one that finally stuck.

It didn't stick.

I used the Reminders app for tasks. The Clock app when something needed an alarm loud enough to actually interrupt me. My planner for anything that needed to exist somewhere I could physically see it. Notion got opened occasionally, mostly to move something around, or make a page look nicer, or start a new template I already knew I wouldn't use. The habit tracker collected dust. The goals page went untouched. The vision board I'd made with genuine optimism stared back at me from a tab I kept meaning to click.

I still didn't break up with it.

One Last Try (2025)

In 2025, I got an iPad. And I thought: this is it. This is what was always missing. A bigger screen, a stylus, the full setup. Surely now it would all click into place and Notion would finally become what I had always, deep down, believed it could be for me.

I redesigned the workspace again. Made it even cleaner. Told myself this was the final version.

You already know how this ends.

I didn't use it.

What I used instead was this: Reminders for my to-do lists. Clock for alarms. My planner for deadlines I couldn't risk slipping through. Goodnotes for annotating. Google Docs for notes, because it syncs to Drive instantly and I can find anything in under ten seconds without thinking about it. And Anytype which I found almost by accident, for my blogs and journal entries. It looks like Notion, behaves like Google Docs, and syncs across every device without asking anything of me. I opened it once. Never had to redesign it. Never had to convince myself to go back.

Notion still lives on my devices. As I write this, it has a habit tracker I haven't opened in months, a goals page last updated in a season of my life that feels like a different person, and blog drafts from 2020 that I will probably never touch again. Sometimes I open it by accident.

That's the end of the relationship. Not a blowup. Not a dramatic goodbye. Just the quiet accumulation of choosing something else, every single day, until I realized I hadn't opened it in weeks and felt nothing about it.

Notion is supposed to be the app that replaces everything else.

Mine ended up being the one app everything else replaced.

What I Actually Learned

For a long time, I thought this was my fault. That I wasn't using it right. That the people with the stunning Notion setups on YouTube had found some key I hadn't. Maybe they had. But I've stopped believing that "using something wrong" and "not using it at all" are actually different outcomes. Because functionally, they aren't. A workspace nobody opens does exactly the same work as no workspace at all.

Here's what I understand now that I didn't understand then.

I wasn't looking for the most powerful tool. I was looking for the one I'd actually reach for. When it's eleven at night and I have a deadline tomorrow morning and I am tired and slightly panicking, the question is not which app has the most features. The question is which one I will open without thinking about it. Which one won't lag. Which one won't make me scroll through a sidebar to find what I need. Which one I won't resent by week three.

That's what accessibility actually means.

Not can this tool do everything. But will I open this tool when everything is happening at once.

And the only way to know the answer to that is to stop assuming the most popular choice is your choice, and start watching what you actually reach for when nobody's looking. Not what you aspire to use. Not what looks best in a screenshot. What you already, quietly, consistently open without anyone having to convince you.

That's your system trying to tell you something.

It told me something. It just took me about five years to listen.