I Killed My Notion Setup After 3 Years. Here’s What Replaced It.

I rebuilt my Notion workspace three times. Not small tweaks. Full tear-downs. New databases, new templates, new linked views, new properties. Each rebuild took a weekend. Each one felt like the version that would finally stick.

The third rebuild lasted about four months before I stopped opening it. Not because anything broke. Because the cost of keeping it running exceeded what it gave me back, and I didn’t notice until I’d already stopped.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 34, after a decade of building elaborate systems to compensate for a brain that doesn’t do maintenance. Notion was the most elaborate system I ever built. It was also, in hindsight, the most expensive procrastination I’ve ever paid for. The building was the dopamine. The using never was.

This is the story of killing it, what replaced it, and the one thing I wish someone had told me before I spent three years and probably 200 hours on a workspace I now can’t remember the password to.

TLDR

I used Notion for three years across customer success and account management roles. It collapsed under its own maintenance weight. I replaced it with four lightweight apps that each do one thing: Drafts for capture, Craft for anything shared, Tot for throwaway notes, and Bike for thinking. Plus a folder of plain markdown files. The total maintenance cost dropped to near zero. The total functionality dropped to about 80% of what Notion offered. I don’t miss the other 20%.

Note: I’m not paid by any tool I mention. No affiliate links. When I recommend something, it’s because it survived my actual working life, which is a harder test than it sounds.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

Here’s the thing about Notion that took me three years to figure out: the construction is the product.

Not the workspace. Not the database. Not the beautifully linked CRM tracker with rollup fields and relation properties. The construction of all of that. The arranging. The configuring. The “oh, I could add a formula property that calculates days since last contact.” That’s where the dopamine lives.

And if your brain runs on dopamine the way mine does (unpredictably, with a strong preference for novelty and a deep allergic reaction to repetitive admin), Notion is the most dangerous kind of tool. It feels productive. It looks productive. You can spend an entire Saturday building a meeting notes database with 14 custom properties and walk away feeling like you accomplished something significant. You didn’t. You built a thing you now have to maintain, and maintenance is the task your brain is worst at.

I know this because I’ve lived it. (Three times, if we’re counting the rebuilds.) The pattern was always the same:

Week 1: Everything goes in. Meeting notes, CRM context, project plans, personal tasks. The workspace hums. I feel organised for the first time in months.

Week 3: A few things start living outside the system. A quick note in a random text file. A task I jot on paper because opening Notion and navigating to the right database feels like friction I can’t afford at 4pm on a Thursday.

Week 6: The inbox page has 40 unsorted items. I know I should process them. I don’t. The guilt of the unsorted pile makes opening Notion feel worse than not opening it.

Week 10: I haven’t opened it in eleven days. When I do, nothing is where I expect it to be. The system has decayed. The databases are full of half-finished entries. The meeting notes stopped being useful sometime around week 4 because I stopped tagging them. I close the tab.

Week 14: I start thinking about rebuilding.

That cycle ran three times before I broke it. Not by building better. By walking away.

What Doesn’t Help

The standard advice when your Notion setup collapses is “simplify.” Use fewer databases. Fewer properties. Fewer views. Strip it back to basics.

I tried this. (Rebuild number two was specifically the “minimal Notion” attempt.) Here’s the problem: simplification is itself a maintenance task. You’re using the tool to fix the tool. You’re spending a Saturday reducing complexity in a system that shouldn’t have needed a Saturday in the first place. And the simplified version still requires you to remember to put things in it, navigate to the right place, and maintain whatever structure you’ve kept.

The other common advice is to switch to Obsidian. I considered this. Obsidian is a genuinely good piece of software. But I’d already tested it for a different purpose and watched the same pattern emerge: the vault organisation became more interesting than the actual work, the plugin ecosystem became its own project, and within two months I was spending more time configuring than writing. Different engine, same maintenance problem. If your brain doesn’t do upkeep, the tool that requires upkeep doesn’t matter. It’ll collapse regardless of how well it’s built.

The real problem wasn’t Notion. The real problem was the premise. The all-in-one workspace promises that everything lives in one place, which sounds efficient until you realise that one place requires constant tending. When you put your notes, your tasks, your CRM context, your project plans, and your meeting prep all inside one system, you’ve created a single point of failure that fails the moment you stop maintaining it. And for some brains, “the moment you stop maintaining it” arrives on a random Tuesday when the energy just isn’t there.

What I Actually Did

The day I deleted my Notion account (well, let it lapse, which felt appropriately anticlimactic for the end of a three-year relationship) I expected something to break. A workflow I’d forgotten about. A database I actually needed. Some critical piece of customer context that only lived in a linked view somewhere.

Nothing broke.

That’s the part that stung. Three years, three rebuilds, probably 200 hours of construction, and the answer to “what do I actually lose?” was: nothing I hadn’t already lost by not maintaining it.

What replaced it wasn’t another all-in-one system. It was the opposite: four small tools that each do one thing, plus a folder. The total setup time was about 20 minutes. The total maintenance required is approximately zero.

Drafts: Where Everything Starts

Drafts is the capture inbox. Text starts here. Every thought, every quick note, every “I need to remember this from the call I just finished.” I open it, I type, I close it. There’s no decision about where the note goes. There’s no navigation. There’s no database. There’s just a blank screen that’s ready the moment I press the keyboard shortcut.

What makes it work for my brain: the app opens to a new blank draft every time. No friction. No “which notebook does this belong in?” No decision tree between me and the actual writing. It’s the anti-Notion in that respect. Notion asks you where a thing lives before you’ve finished thinking it. Drafts asks you nothing. (It’s free, with Pro at $19.99/year for workspace and action features, but the free version does the core capture job fine.)

After I capture something, I triage. Quick things get acted on and archived. Longer things get moved to Craft or to a markdown file. Most things, honestly, just stay in Drafts and get archived after a few days because they turned out not to matter. That’s fine. The cost of capturing something useless is two seconds. The cost of not capturing something important is a week of trying to remember what that client said about their renewal timeline.

Craft: The Shared Layer

Craft handles anything that needs to look good or be shared with someone else. Client-facing docs, meeting prep I want to send to a colleague, structured notes that might become a deliverable. It’s the polished layer.

I already used Craft for client writing work, so this wasn’t a new addition. It just absorbed the fraction of Notion that actually needed structure. The key thing: Craft’s structure is visual and spatial. You arrange blocks, you see the layout. There’s no hidden database logic. What you see is what exists. For a brain that loses track of things it can’t see, that matters more than features.

(The free tier handles most of what I need. Pro is about $5/month if you want unlimited file uploads and advanced sharing.)

Tot: The Scratchpad That Doesn’t Pretend to Be More

Tot is seven coloured dots in my menu bar. Each one holds a small amount of text. That’s it. That’s the entire app.

I use it for the notes that don’t deserve a file. The account name I need for the next 20 minutes. The three bullet points I want to reference during a call. The thing someone said in a meeting that I want to think about later but definitely don’t want cluttering up an actual notes system.

Tot is free on Mac. There’s no organisation. No tags. No search. No sync (well, iCloud sync to iOS if you want it, but I mostly don’t). The constraint is the feature. Seven dots. When they’re full, I clear one. The lack of permanence is the point. Not everything deserves to be stored. Some things are useful for an afternoon and then they’re gone. (Notion never understood this. Everything in Notion was permanent and searchable, which meant everything accumulated and nothing got cleared.)

Bike: The Thinking Tool

Bike is an outliner. Plain text, hierarchical, foldable. I use it when I need to think through something with structure: a customer escalation plan, a quarterly review framework, the shape of a project before I start it.

What makes Bike different from just using a text file: the folding. I can collapse everything except the section I’m working on, which means my brain only sees what it needs to see. For someone who gets pulled into tangents by visible text (which is roughly every time I open a document), the ability to hide everything except the current problem is worth the price of admission.

Bike is Mac-only, one-time purchase (around $30 from the developer’s site). No subscription. No cloud. No account. Files are stored as HTML, which means if Bike disappears tomorrow, I can still open every file in a browser. That portability matters when your trust in tools has been damaged by three years of building on a platform you eventually abandoned.

The Boring Folder

The last piece is a folder of plain markdown files in iCloud Drive. Meeting notes, customer context, reference material. Organised by client name. No fancy structure. No linked databases. No rollup properties. Just folders and files, the way people have been organising things on computers since 1985.

I find files with Raycast. I search file contents with Spotlight. When I need something, it takes about five seconds to find it. When I don’t need something, it sits there costing me nothing. No maintenance. No inbox to process. No guilt when I don’t open it for two weeks.

This is the part that would have horrified 2023 me. A folder of markdown files? That’s the system? Where are the relations? Where are the views? Where’s the dashboard?

Gone. And nothing meaningful was lost.

The Ugly System Principle

Here’s what I wish someone had told me three years ago: ugly systems that work beat beautiful systems you abandon.

My Notion workspace was beautiful. Colour-coded. Linked. Filtered. Relational. It looked like something from a YouTube productivity channel. It survived about four months of real use each time I built it. (Four months of declining use, to be specific. Probably two months of actual consistent use.)

My current setup is ugly. It’s dispersed across five places. There’s no unified dashboard. There’s no satisfying “everything in one view” moment. When someone asks me what productivity system I use, I can’t show them a screenshot. I just gesture vaguely and say “folders, mostly.”

It’s been running for over a year. I haven’t rebuilt anything. I haven’t reorganised anything. I haven’t spent a single Saturday on it. The total cost of maintenance is zero because there is nothing to maintain.

The principle underneath this: every layer of organisation you add is a layer you have to maintain. Tags, properties, databases, views, templates, relations. Every one of them costs future attention. If your brain has limited attention for admin (and everyone’s does, not just brains like mine), every layer of organisation competes with the actual work for your finite attention budget.

Notion lets you add infinite layers. That’s the pitch. It’s also why it breaks.

Who Should Consider This

If you’ve rebuilt your Notion setup more than once, this article is for you. If you’ve ever felt guilty about not using a system you spent hours building, this article is for you. If you’ve ever described the feeling of opening an unmaintained workspace as something between dread and resignation, this article is for you.

This isn’t for everyone. If Notion works for you, genuinely works, and you’ve been using the same setup for over a year without a major rebuild, keep it. You have something I don’t, which is a brain that does maintenance, and you should protect that.

But if the maintenance is the part that always breaks, the answer probably isn’t a better Notion setup. It might be no Notion setup at all.

Where This Falls Short

I should be honest about what I gave up.

I can’t see all my customer context in one view anymore. The linked database that showed me every account, their last meeting date, and the status of their renewal was genuinely useful when it was current. The problem was that it was current for about six weeks per rebuild.

I also can’t share my system with anyone. In a team context, Notion’s collaborative features are real. If your team runs on Notion, switching to a folder of markdown files isn’t realistic. My switch worked because I was the only user of my workspace. If I’d been part of a team setup, the calculus would be different.

And I lost the search. Notion’s search (when it worked, which was inconsistent in my experience) could find things across databases in ways that searching across five separate apps can’t perfectly replicate. Raycast plus Spotlight gets me most of the way there, but it’s not identical.

These are real costs. I made the trade knowingly. The cost of maintaining the unified system exceeded the benefit of having it, and I reached that conclusion the hard way.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Won’t you end up with notes scattered everywhere and no way to find things?

Yes, technically. Notes live in Drafts, Craft, Tot, Bike, and a folder. In practice, the Drafts inbox catches everything and I triage from there. It takes less effort than navigating Notion’s sidebar ever did. And Raycast file search means I can find any markdown file in about two seconds.

2. Doesn’t this mean you’re paying for more apps than you need?

Tot is free on Mac. Drafts is free for the basics. Bike is a one-time purchase around $30. Craft has a free tier. My total annual cost for this stack is lower than a Notion Plus subscription. Even if I pay for Drafts Pro ($19.99/year) and Craft Pro (~$60/year), I’m still under $100/year and the maintenance overhead is near zero.

3. What about Obsidian? Isn’t that the obvious Notion replacement?

I tested Obsidian for a different use case and watched the same pattern play out. The vault becomes a project. The plugins become a hobby. The organisation becomes the work. Obsidian is excellent software, but if your problem with Notion was maintenance overhead, Obsidian can develop the same problem. The file format is better (plain markdown), but the temptation to over-organise is just as strong.

4. How do you handle meeting notes without a database?

I type them in Drafts during or right after the call. If they need to be shared, they go to Craft. If they’re just for me, they become a markdown file named with the client and date. No tags. No properties. No database. I find them by searching the client name. It’s less elegant than a Notion database and far more likely to actually contain notes, because the capture friction is close to zero.

5. Is this an ADHD thing or does it apply to everyone?

Both. My ADHD makes the maintenance problem more acute because my brain has a genuine bottleneck around repetitive admin tasks. But I’ve talked to plenty of neurotypical friends who’ve had the same cycle: build an elaborate Notion setup, use it for a few months, quietly abandon it, feel guilty, rebuild. The maintenance cost hits everyone. Some brains just hit the wall sooner.

6. What if I’ve invested years into my Notion workspace and it has everything I need?

Then keep it. Seriously. If it’s working, the absolute worst thing you could do is blow it up because some stranger on the internet told you to. The test is simple: have you rebuilt it in the last twelve months? If yes, consider whether the pattern will continue. If no, you’ve got something that works and you should leave it alone.

7. How long did it take to transition away from Notion?

About a week of slightly disoriented capture, followed by a month of things settling into place. The hardest part wasn’t the transition itself. It was the anxiety of not having a system. The feeling that I should be building something. That took a few weeks to quiet down. (Turns out the urge to build a system is itself the pattern you’re trying to break.)

8. Don’t you miss the templates?

I thought I would. I had templates for meeting notes, quarterly reviews, project kickoffs, customer health checks. In practice, I’ve found that the things I actually type in meeting notes are roughly the same every time, and I don’t need a template to remember them. I just write “what we discussed, what they need, what I owe them” at the top of a note and fill it in. That three-line structure does about 90% of what the template did.

9. What would make you go back to Notion?

If they shipped a version where the maintenance happened automatically. Where the databases cleaned themselves, where unsorted items filed themselves, where the structure repaired itself after two weeks of neglect. Basically, if Notion could survive being ignored, I’d use it again. The features were never the problem. The upkeep was.

10. Can you recommend a specific setup for someone thinking about leaving Notion?

Start with Drafts as your capture inbox. That’s the only change to make in week one. Everything goes there. After a week, you’ll notice what kinds of notes you actually produce, and you can decide where they should live. The key insight: don’t build the system first. Capture first, and let the system emerge from what you actually need. It’ll be smaller than you think.