Is Notion really that good for note taking/productivity?

Productivity
1

Personally, I feel that Notion is overhyped and overrated for these reasons:

  • Notion has sponsored almost all the large productivity YouTubers so that they promote the product, and thus YouTube is filled with inauthentic reviews of the app
  • It isn’t really designed for students - and doesn’t even support stylus notes - even though it is partially marketed toward students
  • The program has a steep learning curve, and is trying to be a fancier version of Google Sheets/Excel while providing half the functionality
  • You must be connected to the Internet to use it, otherwise it won’t work
  • The upgraded plan includes extra features you could probably just get in Google Sheet/Excel
  • It takes up a decent amount of ram/processing power and the desktop app is a cheap Electron version, not an optimized app
  • Notion Calendar is basically Google Calendar with only a couple other features/integrations

Let me know your thoughts below. Are there any alternatives you guys use for productivity?

2

You might be interested in some of the discussions in the note-taking section.

Do you mean like writing on a tablet? (like Apple Pencil on an iPad)

Apple Notes can do that. Maybe OneDrive if on Windows.

3

Thank you for telling me about the other discussions. By stylus support I did mean taking notes by hand, like in Apple Notes, a feature Notion lacks even though I believe it should have it. Are there any niche tools you use for productivity?

4

I take most notes by hand on paper at the moment: What are your preferred note-taking tools?

Sometimes I put quick ideas in Apple Notes or Voice Memos, because they sync between my laptop and phone.

Here’s another discussion about Notion: Who is using Notion? [note-taking]

1 Like