For the past couple of years I’ve been using Notion for my daily planning. It markets itself as a highly-customisable digital workspace – one place to ‘find every answer, automate the busywork, and get projects done’.

It’s definitely highly-customisable. I use it as a daily planner, a project management tool, a schedule, and as a database. I have a calendar in it, I have a daily to-do list, I keep track of my meal prep and my meeting notes.

I’ve found it incredibly useful for tracking academic papers in particular – building out a database of literature, storing my notes and original PDFs, tagging items and identifying links between authors and subjects.

Its customisability is a drawback as well though. It is, for the most part, overwhelming to use.

I’ve a tendency in all things to be wildly optimistic in my planning, to overengineer an unrealistic workflow, and to get discouraged by the time sink of the process that I built for myself. Do I really need to maintain citation maps for every paper that I pull in, or is that a shiny object that will be too much work to maintain over the long term?

I think it’s usually unnecessary, but that Notion’s design pushes me to that more often than not. It seems to be communicating to me that adjusting my dashboard is the work that I should be doing. Notion has so much potential as a platform that I frequently find myself fiddling with it – instead of just loading it up and doing the work that I set it up to do, I get distracted by trying to identify little tweaks that might help my overall productivity, in so doing wasting the time I should have spent reading and writing.

I’m not sure, then, that I agree that it removes the busywork and aids with getting projects done. At least not for me – I tend to find I’m more productive when I keep it closed.

Cost is another significant factor. Between Notion, Zotero, Dropbox, WordPress, Airtable, Datawrapper, Evernote, iCloud, and Google’s and Microsoft’s and Adobe’s suites of software, I’ve got bits and pieces spread all over the place, and I’m paying for all of it.

It’s unaffordable even before factoring in the absolutely absurd price increases that are happening: Microsoft’s annual Office365 plan jumped 46 per cent this year to $13/mo. Adobe’s Photography package (Lightroom and Photoshop) is up 68 per cent to $23/mo. Notion is another cost again – $15/mo on top of everything else.

And even if I do manage to keep up with payments, there’s a risk that any one of these services could fail at any time, and take some significant chunk of my life with them. This feels especially true for the work/life productivity platforms in the mix – Notion, Evernote, perhaps even Datawrapper and Airtable – which seem to me like part of an increasingly oversaturated market.

With this risk recognised, the final straw for Notion for me is that it’s such a closed ecosystem. In the long term, I need to know that I can safely pull my data out if I need to, and I don’t have that belief here.

In the short term, if it is going to be one platform to serve all functions, then I need it to straightforwardly and automatically pull in relevant information from everywhere else – my calendar, for example, or my reference manager.

Its integration with other services I rely on is limited. Most significantly this is Zotero and Google Calendar. There’s a workaround to pull things in from the former, but it’s only semi-functional. The latter has no connection at all, so I find myself managing multiple calendar services at once – three, when you factor in that Google and work-imposed Microsoft Office also don’t integrate.

So, wanting to find some off-ramps, I’ve been playing around with Obsidian to take over at least my note-taking. It feels like the antithesis of Notion: it’s open, it’s lightweight, and it’s local-first. It’s free if I use my existing cloud storage, the files are just Markdown and readable by any number of other services, and it uses my ordinary Explorer file system for storage, so I should be able to easily shift to another platform if I need to.

Connecting to Zotero was simple with the Citations plugin and I can easily pull in references, generate a new note based on a custom annotation template and incorporate the citation metadata. It tracks backlinks, which is already helpful for identifying connections between works and will only become moreso as I continue to import and build my library.

It’s a bit of an adjustment moving from an index-style display like Zotero or how I built Notion to the less-structured ‘pile of notes’ of Obsidian. It is a learning curve, but I haven’t found it a particularly steep one. I’m finding it much easier to shut up and write (to use a phrase) because it doesn’t seem to have that extensive customisability – it’s good for its purpose, which is writing, so I’d better get to it.

One drawback is that it doesn’t appear to import tags from Zotero as tags – I can bring them as a plaintext list but then have to manually hashtag them before they’ll function. It’s only a little friction, but it is friction. I can’t write back to Zotero, either – ideally I’d like a proper two-way connection where changing metadata in one would change both; or be able to access my notes in either.

As a replacement for part of how I use Notion (and probably Evernote), I’m quite happy with Obsidian. It’s free, it does what I need it to, and I’m not locked in. The fact that I can take my work with me matters as much as the tool’s functionality, and Obsidian offers both.

Project management is the other major part of how I’ve been using Notion, and that’s trickier to replace. I could spend a lot of time overengineering a system only to find it short-lived if a future job imposes its own tools. At the same time though, I don’t feel the same anxiety about losing a to-do list as I do about my notes or research. It’s a lower-stakes problem, and one I’m fine leaving unsolved for now.