Notion is not a productivity tool. Notion is a tool for feeling productive while accomplishing nothing. It is a creativity sink disguised as a workspace. It is where work goes to become content about work.
I have watched people spend more time building their Notion setup than actually doing the tasks the setup was meant to track. I have done it myself. This is not productivity. This is procrastination with better aesthetics.
You are building a system, not doing work
The Notion trap works like this. You decide to get organised. You open Notion. You create a database for your tasks. But wait, tasks have projects, so you need a projects database. And projects have areas, so you need an areas database. And you should link them with relations. And you need different views. And maybe a dashboard that shows everything. And some templates so you can create things faster.
Three hours later you have built an elaborate system. You have not done any actual work, but you feel accomplished because the system looks impressive. You share it on Twitter. People ask for the template. You are now a productivity influencer.
The tasks remain undone. But the system is beautiful.
Notion enables infinite customisation, which is the problem
A tool that can be anything is a tool that invites endless tinkering. Notion lets you build whatever you want, which means you will spend forever building instead of using.
A simple todo list does not have this problem. You write tasks. You check them off. There is nothing to customise because the tool has already made the decisions for you. You cannot procrastinate by reorganising because there is nothing to reorganise.
Notion outsources every decision to you. How should tasks be organised? Your choice. What fields should they have? Your choice. How should they be displayed? Your choice. Every choice is an opportunity to stop working and start designing. Most people take that opportunity.
The tool is too flexible for its own good. The flexibility is the feature and the failure.
Second brain people are not getting things done
There is a whole community of people who use Notion to build second brain systems. They have databases for notes, projects, areas, resources, archives. They have complex tagging systems. They have daily templates and weekly reviews and quarterly planning rituals. They have turned note-taking into a lifestyle.
I am not convinced these people are more productive than someone with a paper notebook. They spend enormous effort on capture and organisation. The output is often the system itself. Look at my dashboard. Look at my linked databases. Look at how everything connects.
Great. What have you shipped? What have you created? What exists in the world because of all this organisation?
The goal of a productivity system is to produce things. If the system is the thing you produce, you have missed the point.
The template economy
Notion templates are a whole market now. People sell them. People buy them. Premium templates for writers, entrepreneurs, students, developers. Each one promises to transform your productivity.
They do not. What actually happens is you import the template, poke around, realise it does not quite fit your workflow, and either abandon it or spend hours customising it. Then you find another template that looks better. Repeat forever.
The template economy exists because Notion is too hard to set up from scratch. This should be a warning sign, not a business opportunity. If a productivity tool requires purchasing third-party templates to be useful, the tool has failed at being simple enough to use.
What I actually use
I use a text file for tasks. Sometimes I use pen and paper. When I tried Notion, I spent a week building systems and accomplished nothing. When I switched to a text file, I started finishing things.
This is not a productivity hack. It is the opposite. It is admitting that the fancy tool was making things worse, not better. The features that seemed valuable were actually distractions. The customisation that felt empowering was actually paralysing.
The best productivity system is the one you actually use to produce things. For most people, that is the simplest system they can tolerate. Not the most powerful. Not the most flexible. The simplest.
Notion is great for some things
I am not saying Notion is useless. It is good for wikis. It is good for documentation. It is good for shared knowledge bases where multiple people need to contribute and the structure genuinely matters.
It is bad for personal productivity. It is bad for todo lists. It is bad for anything where the goal is doing things rather than organising things. The same flexibility that makes it great for collaborative docs makes it terrible for getting work done.
If you are using Notion for tasks and feeling unproductive, it might not be you. It might be the tool. Try something simpler. See what happens.
Your productivity system should be boring. It should be invisible. It should fade into the background while you do actual work. If your system is interesting, if you enjoy tinkering with it, if you ever think about sharing it on social media, you have built the wrong thing.
Notion is interesting. That is why it fails.