For about a year, my favorite hobby was reorganizing Notion. I told myself it was work. It was not.
I had a dashboard for my dashboards. A database that fed three other databases. A "second brain" so elaborate that finding a single phone number meant clicking through four linked views and a filtered gallery. The setup had quietly become more complex than the work it was supposed to hold.
The day I quit was the day I opened Notion to jot down one idea, got distracted "improving" a template, and looked up forty minutes later having written nothing. That's when it hit me. The tool wasn't helping me think. It was a very pretty place to avoid thinking.
I quit Notion because the maintenance cost outgrew the value. I replaced it with a deliberately boring stack: a plain-text notes app for capture, a single Google Doc for active projects, a calendar for anything with a date, and a few small automations to move things between them. Less surface area, less fiddling, more actual output. If you spend more time tuning your system than using it, that's your sign too.
Here's the trap nobody warns you about. Productivity tools give you the feeling of progress without the discomfort of progress.
Real work is uncomfortable. Writing the proposal is hard. Making the call is hard. But coloring a database property green and dragging a card into a new view? That feels productive and costs you nothing emotionally. So your brain, which is lazy in the way all brains are lazy, gravitates to the easy thing and calls it work.
I started noticing the pattern in my own behavior:
The system had become a sophisticated form of procrastination. The more powerful the tool, the more elaborate the avoidance it enables. It was the same trap I later recognized in my two years of perfecting a morning routine — polishing the container instead of doing the work it was meant to hold.
When I stripped it back, I asked one honest question: what does a tool need to do for me? Not what could it do. What do I genuinely use every single day?
The list was short.
That's it. Four jobs. I'd been using a Formula 1 car to drive to the corner shop.
Everything else — the relational databases, the rollup properties, the synced blocks — was capability I admired but didn't need. And admired-but-unneeded capability isn't free. It's a tax. Every feature is a small invitation to tinker.
I'm almost embarrassed by how plain this is. That's the point.
| Job | Old (Notion) | New |
|---|---|---|
| Quick capture | Inbox database | Plain-text notes app (Apple Notes) |
| Active projects | Linked databases + views | One Google Doc per active project |
| Dates & deadlines | Calendar database | Google Calendar |
| Reference | Wiki of nested pages | A flat folder of docs |
| Moving things around | Manual drag | Small automations |
The plain-text app wins because there is nothing to configure. There's no template to perfect, no property to add. You open it and type. Friction-free capture is the single most underrated feature in productivity, and the fanciest tools usually have the most of it. Research into attention from the Nielsen Norman Group has long shown that small interaction costs quietly add up — and a tool that taxes you on every capture is exactly that cost compounding all day. The whole philosophy is part of what eventually became the leaner productivity system that survived my burnout.
For active projects, one document each. Top of the doc: what "done" looks like. Below that: the actual work. When a project finishes, the doc gets archived. No status field, no kanban, no ceremony.
The best system is the one you forget you're using.
I didn't go fully analog. I'm not a monk. The one piece I kept — and expanded — was light automation, because automation only pays off when it removes a repeated manual step, not when it adds a clever feature.
A few examples of what I let run quietly in the background:
#review into one place so my weekly review takes minutes, not an hour.The difference between this and my old Notion habit is direction. Notion invited me to do more configuration. These automations remove work I'd otherwise repeat. One adds friction disguised as features; the other deletes friction silently. That's the whole distinction, and it's the one I now use to judge any tool.
This is also where AI assistants started to matter for me. Instead of building a database to organize my reading, I let an assistant summarize and tag things as they come in. The organization happens without me becoming the organizer.
In the interest of honesty, I did lose things.
I lost the dopamine hit of a beautiful dashboard. I lost the ability to show people my "setup." I lost relational databases, which are genuinely powerful if your work needs them. Mine didn't.
What I gained was quieter and more valuable: I stopped thinking about my tools. For the first time in a year, the question "is my system optimal?" simply left my head. That mental real estate went back to the work.
If your work genuinely needs a relational database — you're managing a content calendar for ten people, say — then Notion might be the right call. I'm not anti-Notion. I'm anti using a powerful tool as an excuse not to do the scary thing.
You don't have to track your hours for a month to diagnose this. There are a few honest questions that surface it fast, and they apply to any tool, not just Notion.
Ask yourself: when did you last change your system versus use it? If your edit history is busier than your output, that's the tell. A tool you keep redesigning is a tool that's failing you, no matter how good it looks.
Then look at the gap between setup and use. I had databases I'd spent an afternoon building and opened maybe twice. That ratio — hours of construction to minutes of use — is the clearest signal that you're playing with the tool, not working with it.
Here's a quick self-audit I now run on any tool before I let it into my life:
The pattern underneath all of these is the same. A good tool is invisible — you use it and forget it. A bad-for-you tool is present, always asking for attention, always offering one more thing to optimize. The Notion that ate my year was never quiet. It was a constant, pretty invitation to fiddle, and I accepted it every single time because fiddling felt like work and the real work felt like risk.
Run the audit on whatever you're using. Not to shame yourself — to free up the attention you've been spending on the container instead of the contents.
If trading a fussy setup for a quieter one sounds like a relief, try the boring stack for a week and see what your attention does with the room — and if it helps, stick around for more notes on building calm, durable systems.
Q: Isn't a pile of Google Docs just disorganized? Less than you'd think. A handful of active project docs and a flat reference folder is plenty when you only keep what's current. Disorganization comes from volume, and the boring stack keeps volume low because there's nothing fun to hoard.
Q: Don't you lose things without a proper database? I lose less, because capture is now instant. Most "lost" notes were never captured in the first place — they died in the friction of opening the right database and picking the right template.
Q: What about the automations — do I need to be technical? No. The ones I described run on consumer no-code tools. The principle matters more than the platform: automate repeated steps, not occasional ones.
Q: Would this work for a team? For a small team, mostly yes, with a shared folder and shared calendar. Bigger teams have coordination needs that justify heavier tools. The trap I'm describing is personal-system over-engineering, which is its own specific disease.
I didn't have a productivity problem. I had a tinkering problem dressed up as a productivity solution.
The lesson stuck: a tool you maintain is not a tool, it's a pet. Feed it only if it earns its keep. If you're reading this with forty open Notion tabs and a vague sense that your system has become a project of its own, you already know.
So here's the only question worth asking before you open your favorite app today: am I about to do the work, or about to arrange it? Sit with that one for a second. It changed everything for me.
One person, output that looks like five. It isn't about working more hours — it's about a kind of leverage teams rarely have.
One idea a week to a published issue in under an hour. The boring system behind a newsletter I never dread sending.
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