Over the last few months, swaths of users have been fleeing Evernote. (Private equity, mass layoffs, and price increases tend to do that.) I suspect that many Evernote refugees will wind up in the Notion camp.

About 18 months ago, I started noodling with it and quickly fell in love.

Notion’s UI is ridiculously clean. It’s easy to add pages, unlimited subpages, wikis, tasks, subtasks, dependencies, images, databases, blocks, and much more. (For those of you who think that you can do all of these things in Google Sheets, allow me to disagree. There’s a reason the company launched Tables a while back.)

Take a look at an anonymized version of a simple project database that I’m using on my current ghostwriting gig:

Side note: This experiment ultimately fueled my desire to build and launch RacketHub.

The Late view is just one that I’ve created. Along with filters, timelines, Kanban boards, and other views allow everyone on the project to see what they need. (To be fair, Notion isn’t a unicorn. Tools like Coda, ClickUp, and Monday.com serve similar purposes.)

The $47.99 that I spend each year on it is the easiest tech decision I make.

On this project, the team needs to complete about 100 tasks, yet the view above only shows the overdue ones. Hiding future tasks didn’t take much effort thanks to Notion’s über-useful formulas. I defined the Past Due as follows:

Conditional logic at its finest. Note how creating a ustom view requires zero coding chops—a key point in my last book. Citizen developers rejoice.

Simon Says

I can see why Microsoft (via Loop) and Salesforce/Slack (via Canvas) are attempting to ape Notion’s robust functionality.

No, Notion isn’t perfect—far from it. Still, the $47.99 that I spend each year on it is the easiest tech decision I make.