Links for all software mentioned 👇 1. BILL Spend & Expense (Expense Management) ↳ efficient.link/r/bill → US Only (Free) ↳ efficient.link/r/airwallex → Outside US (Free) 2. Motion (Task/Project Management + AI Daily Planner) ↳ efficient.link/r/motion (7 days free + exclusive 🎁 in the description) 3. Sunsama (Daily Planner) ↳ efficient.link/r/sunsama (Free 30 day trial exclusive 🎟) 4. folk (CRM) ↳ efficient.link/r/folk (10% annual discount 🎟 in the description) 5. Superhuman (Email) ↳ efficient.link/r/superhuman (2 Free Months Til End of January! 🎉) 6. Slite (Knowledge Base) ↳ efficient.link/r/slite (Get $100 Credit 🎟 in the description)
Thank goodness someone finally said it out loud! I completely agree. Notion doesn't really help you do the actual work-it's just a total time suck, the total opposite of being productive.
"We had to disguise ourselves as a general purpose productivity tool" - Notion CEO Looks like you were onto them from the beginning! And you're our people!!! Definitely gonna upset a few people with this one, but if some people aren't getting upset, are you really saying anything worth hearing? Appreciate your comment and support!
How your using it that turns it into a time suck. Because it doesn't have guardrails and constraints which most people probably need, and thats ok theres certainly apps with those things!
That it's only a Time. Suck if you don't know what you're doing and you're one of those people that constantly likes to make things aesthetic just like anything else that can be a distraction
Sure, Notion hate is very fashionable nowadays. But I had expected that you’d pretend to offer a balanced view by saying at least one positive thing about Notion. Now I can’t take anything you say seriously.
What an incredibly well done video! That trailer portion was so compelling, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. Sucked in immediately. You have really reached a peak with these videos. The editing is phenomenal.
Awe, thanks Morgan 🥹 we really have reached a new peak-I wish we could unsee the intro for the first time so that we could watch it again, because it really is a masterpiece. Our editor (Amy) is SOOOO talented and creative, we couldn't be more proud! 🥲
Problem is, I don't want to have to sign up subscriptions (and PER SEAT) for a dozen apps if I can use a nocode DB app to store the data and get mostly passing grade features that get the job done, with one subscription.
Won't disagree with you here! If a low price is something that you are valuing highly, sticking to a tool that does an "OK" job at everything makes perfect sense. Everything is an opportunity cost. For many businesses the efficiency saved from using purpose-built tools far outweigh the cost of the software subscriptions.
@@efficientapp If you can afford to hire more people for your business, you can probably afford the purpose-built tools, for sure! Until then, we gotta stay scrappy 😂
They are not getting the point that Notion still has everything integrated, calendar, tasks, project management, knowledge base, whereas the other tools have not. By the way, I tried Motion a couple of years ago and it worked like total shit, their AI was stupid AF.
I love notion, its been crucial for my journey to stop procrastinating so much... but its true that for business/teams probably there are better options. I have no money for more subscriptions and i just need to manage my tasks/goals/projects of the year and take notes to brainstorm and build systems, and Notion allows me to do all of this in the same place. The database also allows me to have relations between the pages so i can find and visualize everything easily with the diferent views, filters and page properties. So none of the disadvantages of the video bother me since i dont really need those features or i have found good alternatives. The only thing i dont like is that it takes forever to load sometimes... but i got used to at this point and it compensates i guess xD. That been said, i agree with everything you guys talked in the video! Notion its not for everyone. I think notion would be perfect for personal proyects and for students. (Sorry for my english btw)
First of all, no need to apologize! Your English is great! And you totally nailed it! You caught that in this video, we're talking specifically to businesses-that's the audience our experience and expertise is in. For the student/personal projects side of things, especially those who don't have money (or the need) to implement a more scalable solution for teams, just doesn't make sense. The fact that you're an individual using Notion for some tasks/notes/goals/projects, and you've experience how slow loading it is... Just imagine what a business using it together must feel! Multiply your data by 50 other people, all shared 🙈 You'd think they'd focus on some of these performance issues, but instead they are just building more features, acquiring more companies, and trying to integrate more tools. You bring up a good point and they should listen to you! You should have to settle on it being slow and annoying to load every time you interact with it 🫠 Appreciate your comment!
Great video guys- I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s seen the light when it comes to Notion’s flaws! I’ve been moving a lot of my Notion content over to Craft and much happier. Thanks to the algorithm for showing me this one!
Ayyyy, new friend unlocked 🔓 Thanks Patou! If you love our sense of humor, we think you're probably an awesome human 😁 glad you appreciated the video (and information), and appreciate your comment!
Amazing video packed with so much value. So much more than just a takedown of notion. I love the way you weave in recommendations from your niche knowledge set as well in this great story of one of the most frustrating and seductive time vampires of our era. Subscribed!
Awe, we're SO happy to hear this connected with you! And welcome, by the way!!! What makes Notion so appealing for so many is just such a fascinating thing to unpack! From psychological principles, to marketing, brand, and community. They are a masterclass on how to get people to pay attention and consider them, which is incredibly impressive. Just felt like we wanted to help people understand what was going on behind the scenes, especially for business owners. Most just don't have time to figure out why Notion is as popular as it is, and where it should be used, versus where it's being overhyped. Feeling so proud to be able to share this with others! Thanks for being here and for your thoughtful comment!
@@efficientapp Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I came here directed by George Blackman after I made a Notion rant post in his scriptwriting community. Very glad I did and binged several of your videos last night. One question I couldn't find much dedicated content on is whether or not Motion is a good fit for solopreneurs. I saw you responded to a comment in your Motion video saying that you thought so, but it would be super valuable to have a video specifically for people who don't have a team (yet) and how Motion's features can be most effectively utilised by solopreneurs. For example, which features are NOT useful if you're solo (and so don't have to spend time figuring out) vs which features are SPECIFICALLY useful if you're working independently. Just my selfish 2c there! Have a wonderful day
Alternative to what aspect though? For personal note taking? To-do list? What aspect to Notion? For personal usage though, if you're just looking for something that's free, Notion is fine. We're more focused on recommendations for businesses.
Wow! This is amazing AND so well timed! I am in the process of starting up my business and have seen plenty of Notion videos on different aspects of business! Thanks for taking the time to make this and give alternatives! Also, GREAT video 😂 The editing is wild
Ayyyy, so happy to hear this! And amazing, congrats on making the leap! What type of business is it? Maybe check out this write-up on our site, which is our recommended small business stack: efficient.app/stacks/small-business There's some hidden gems in there 💎 Super appreciate the comment and the subscribe-we are subscribed to a lot of the same channels, so you have great taste my friend 😁
@ thanks for sending that link through. I have had a look and it’s a great resource! My business is coaching small businesses to grow their social medias to get better leads. I am slowly working on it and this channel will be a massive help I can see
Love it! We have tons of helpful content coming that should specifically help a business like yours (and your clients)! Hope to see you around my friend!
Good point! I guess that's what happens when you turn the infrastructure of what was meant to be a note taking app into an all-in-one build everything no-code solution. 🙈
when they initially released the AI it was an absolute slog and buggy mess. My solution was to email them to remove AI features from my notion and every since I never looked back.
I’ve been using Notion since 2020 and I genuinely like the platform and how it’s been growing but the key points you’ve given in this video are really accurate. I spent a lot of time creating my perfect system until I did and I settled on it and still, you will always find a way to “improve the system” even when it’s not really necessary. There are other things you didn’t mention where Notion also fails in my opinion and that is guests management and overall collaboration features. Depending on how you setup your projects database you face the issue of sharing an entry of it or sharing the entirety of the database meaning that someone external to your org can see your data so it loses the point of privacy on the user end. Permissions for sharing content aren’t as good as they should be and Notion has been marketed as a collaborative app too. Which it is, when you have other members on the workspace and you’re actively paying for their seats. If you’re working with guests, good luck.
Yesss, such a good point! When are you "done" optimizing what you built in Notion? There is no theoretical end because you're the one "building" it. Whereas with focused solutions, there is a clear end to "setting it up" if you will, and you can just focus on using it at that point. Also, a fantastic point about RBAC (Roll Based Access Control) and the limitations that stem with the complexity that comes with everything being part of a larger database. You can very easily leak something private through it being referenced in one database, and said person not being supposed to access that related database, and thus people do awful workarounds like duplicating databases and deleting data for certain people to view, and then you end up splitting your data up and having duplicate data to fill a permissions issue. A permissions issue that works out of the box on most project management tools and CRMs for example, because the need for this granular permissions are quite critical. Fantastic point and also a huge cause for Notion becoming a larger and larger mess over time!
Ayyyy Mizko! Awee, that means a LOT coming from you-your production quality is the gold standard 🔥🔥🔥 And wait, someone that understands product design... and literally teaches people product and design for a living... agrees that Notion isn't a good idea in business? 🤯 Feeling super validated right now 🙏
Fantastic video! Thank you for sharing your insights and showing folks the superior solutions that will save them from lots of grief. Keep up the great work! ❤
Super appreciate that Kevin-your support means a lot! Definitely not here to start drama, it's for sure for the goal of exactly that, saving people from lots of grief 🙏 we're on your team people!
I like your people accent and and production quality of the video. As a video editor i can easily see little mistakes in big youtubers, but yours there weren't that easily to find. Good production team Keep up.
Awe, thanks so much, that means a lot! We definitely sweat the details on this one 🥹🥲 and I'm a perfectionist so 🙈 awesome to hear that you were more impressed with our video than some big RUclipsrs! Now I am curious what mistakes of ours you found and if I noticed them already and just decided "we need to get this video out" or if it's something slipped through the cracks? 🤔😏
I like Notion and I think it's like Excel. It is created for specific use cases and yet it is "misused" by users. In the end, what counts is that you get your things implemented
That's fair, although I would recommend giving efficient.link/r/airtable a shot if you're more looking for an Excel replacement. Way more performant, super flexible, and more opinionated in what it is and what it is trying to be (also has a FANTASTIC API). That said, you're right, people do misuse it because of the hype that people have built around what it is capable of it. So showing people more what it is good at, and where it lacks, is what our goal is. For team knowledge base, that is what it was built for at the foundation, and then its "tables" feature turned into databases, and then it just went from there into a totally different beast. So the foundation of what it was initially built for, is still the area that we would recommend it-but as you brought up... "users misuse it", it's just too tempting to do so.
I think it's tough to be user-friendly when at a core you're teaching people to think in "databases" and "relationships" instead of getting "work" done. Each customization you make in Notion brings with it an asterisk (e.g. this worked, but made this not work/or now people can see this data that I didn't want them to/I need to create a duplicate of this database to hide information from some team members or external guests/etc.) The more you learn about how Notion works, the more you actually see how many edge-cases arise and workarounds are needed, which definitely re-enforces your point of it not being user-friendly 🫠
Notion is basically legos and Minecraft for adults…. Which is why I had to leave it alone after having excellent systems built in it…and this is years of using it and not work better with using my own index card system
@ thank you but this video is top notch! Excellent editing and humor! Even though I stopped using Notion for the ungodly amount of times I spent in it 😭 I still couldn’t help but click the thumbnail. Thanks for reminding me to never go back lol 😂
Aweee, passing this along to our editors! And SO happy to hear that we could be what sounds like a good reminder for you to continue avoiding the rabbit hole 😁 Curious, which thumbnail did you click on the video? The one with the broken Notion logo? Or with the crossed out Notion Template creators? 👀👀👀
@@efficientapp it was the broken logo one which sparked curiosity as I thought notion was discontinued before I bothered to read the thumbnail and title so good choice!
Awe, thanks so much! Will have to thank our video editor! She's somewhere in here (bat signal to Amy). We used Adobe Premier + After Effects + efficient.link/r/screen-studio for the screen recordings!
The production quality of this video🔥🔥Great video guys, that's why from the beginning I used Notion in the most minimalistic way possible so it wouldn't distract me from what I'm actually trying to do
Awe, thanks so much! - For screen recordings, we used efficient.link/r/screen-studio - Editing we used Adobe Premier - Unsure what our audio engineer used to mix it, pretty sure Pro Tools and something else Is there anything more specific that you were curious about? I think those are the main software solutions used though 🤔
its so right for my personal use, i only use it as a diary (kinda!) but really seems insufficient for who they're claiming its for! i sometimes watch those template videos and it does feel like there are so many workarounds that people have to do that i resigned to only using the calendar diary entry type database bc its free for me
OMG, it's Dabi! From Twitter!!! 🤯 Literally, Andra used the "come play with us Alex" line this morning to try getting me to come downstairs and make us lattes 😂 the script of this video is literally seeping into our day-to-day life 🫠 so your nightmare is now my reality 😂😂😂 Appreciate the heck out of you my friend! 🤗
New to your channel and subscribed. Totally agree. I used Notion and completely got lost by these databases, making it a task manager, To-Do list , learning formulas, Calender feature etc etc. I went in to a loop of learning notion, rather than doing actual work. Finally STOPPED using notion a month back and i only use apple notes which syncs well with all my apple devices fast and easy . Finally realized SIMPLICITY is the best thing in having productivity.
Yessss, you said it! For "personal productivity", it's about using what is most convenient. Where your personal notes end up at the end of the day is not going to make or break you. Thanks for the subscribe my friend!
Thanks Tausif! Sounds like this is for personal usage, not business usage, correct? Workflowy doesn't seem to be geared toward team/company usage at all.
In the middle of trying to decide between Motion and Notion for project management and the thing I'm hung up on the most with Motion is how to manage external contractors that don't need a full seat. Every other project management software has an option to add guests in some capacity. Do we just work with them over email?
Ah yes, we'll just pay for a full seat for them if they are a close contractor (like 20+ hours per week), and if they are just like a thumbnail designer or someone, we'll just create a reminder task and assign it to one of our team members (essentially as a reminder to follow-up and check-in with said contractor). We actually go over exactly this in our course: efficient.link/courses/motion And we give a discount off the course here: efficient.deals/motion But yeah, Motion's team has said they are building external/collaborative/contractor seats this year, so it's either do the way we do it, or hold tight a bit longer! Hope that helps Jack! Alex
@@efficientapp Yep, found that in your course after I asked. Also good to know that they are working on that feature. Bought the course and planning to test drive Motion for the next few months. Thanks!
Awesome! So glad you found that and that it helped + appreciate you purchasing the course! Really curious to hear how the test drive goes for you and the team-if you remember, would be awesome for you to leave a comment on this thread to update us all with the results!
It's the old adage, use the right tool for the job! I only use notion for just keeping records of assets and notes etc. It does that out of the box . Same with task or project management tools, I use something that does what I need out of the box. So i spend little to no time trying to create a frankenstein tool, that slows me down rather than acts as a great support tool
You got it! It's almost like these old adages came from wise people that ran businesses or something 🤷♂️ they are definitely on to something (as are you) 😉 Appreciate your comment!
Yesssss, Skiff users rejoice! SO glad you found this video-dying to know what you ended up going with, assuming still privacy-focused, your only option really is: efficient.link/r/proton-mail Curious how the migration was for you or what you ended up doing? Would LOVE to hear more about your experience!!!
💯 - We actually mentioned in the beginning of the video what Notion is good for, but I know the segment was brief and right after all after the momentum of the intro. If you're using it for shared team knowledge-base and note taking, then it is a great tool for that (what it was initially built as/for). While we use efficient.link/r/slite instead (because it isn't trying to be anything more than that, which keeps our team more focused), that is the one area that we believe Notion does excel in a business and where it's strengths lie when used alongside other tools for the other areas we mentioned in the video 👌
We actually mentioned in the video, but realized that we referred to it as our team knowledge base-but we've been using efficient.link/r/slite for note taking, actually for 6-7 years now and love it + the team behind it.
@efficientapp Really enjoyed the video! Do you guys keep meeting notes here as well? I currently use (attempting to use!) Notion as my “all in one” but am very open to persuasion. I am a consultant who enjoys having a more professional “portal” for my clients to use (which I currently use Softr x Notion for). How would you recommend replacing that?
Hey Garrett! Awe, thanks, that means a lot 🙏 What type of consulting do you do? And how critical is this portal? (e.g. how much are your clients actually visiting it and getting value from it?) Regarding meeting notes, that's an area where we use a proper CRM, we use efficient.link/r/copper personally, and just take meeting notes in there. We had tried doing our meeting notes in Slite for a couple years, but I think the truth of the matter is we just found we rarely referenced the notes back, and it was more useful to have it be more of a "timestamp" in the history of communication with a client/person, rather than just stacking up notes to stack up notes. We do now use a meeting note taker bot: efficient.link/r/tldv and we have it sync over to our CRM when a call is over, so we don't need to manually add notes in anywhere and we get the AI summaries sent over via email and in Slack if needed. Again, we don't reference them often haha We were a software implementation/integration consultancy for 13 years, so we've experimented with a lot haha I also went the "portal" path for our clients, and found that only 1 was actually using it, and found it was better to set them up with their own documentation software (like Slite for example), and just have the information they needed in there. Super familiar with Softr, we use it right now to give people course access, and we're going to be moving off of it because it gets incredibly expensive at scale, especially when you need to invite hundreds of people to it. I'd just genuinely audit if you're possibly using this "portal" more for yourself, and it being something you're proud of and enjoying, than it is actually of true use to your clients. (I'm only saying this because I've experienced exactly this myself, and it took me years to get over this-realizing it wasn't a good use of my time maintaining, and clients just simply valued my services for what I was doing for them most). All of this to say, it sorta depends on a lot more context behind what type of consultancy you have and what's most important to you. Feel free to add additional context, definitely tough to advise to this degree without more of that!
Thanks Neo! Yeah it's tough to uncover exactly what it is good and bad at from afar due to most everyone on RUclips talking it up. I think this is just the reality with many all-in-one tools, they build too quick, try to be everything to everyone, and then they start acquiring companies to try building faster, but then those tools don't actually integrate in at the degree or depth that their customers would want.
I couldn't find any other app or tool with Notion's database functionality, which is a must-have for me. You also recommend jumping between different tools and applications, which is not ideal. My 2c. (Notion user, but not a fan boy).
Curious what you are using it for exactly? You're mentioning database functionality, so if you're just looking more for a broad database for storing information, more as an intermediary database or something, that's where efficient.link/r/airtable excels. That said, people do fall into the trap of using it for some of these other categories as well and things fall apart. But, if you're looking for a user-friendly and flexible database solution, then that would be a great option. And correct, we are recommending jumping between a couple/few different tools, but as a business, that's completely normal. For example, your expense management tool? It runs in the background and automatically does a lot of what it needs to do. So you login to it separately, yes, but only when you need to spin up a new virtual credit card or to review budget spending and such-this is fine and normal. In the case of the video, we jump into our recommended PM tool 30% of the time, calendar 20% of the time (both of those are the same tool), email 30% of the time CRM 10% of the time, team knowledge-base 7% of the time and expense management 3% of the time in a given week. So 80%+ of the time we are jumping between 2 tools, and I assure you, jumping between a calendar/PM tool and Email are not that big of a deal to move between as separate apps (and for other team members who don't need email as much, it's 2 apps, PM/Calendar and say notes, or whatever). The point is, more team members use no more than 2 apps for the far majority of their work on a given week, and with this model, everyone gets to have those 2 apps be built deeply for what they are working on, not just trying to stuff everything into an all-in-one tool for the sake of it. This concern is not as big as you're making it out to be, especially for a business. It's perceived convenience having it all-in-one tool with the reality of many others on the team being inconvenienced not using the best tool for the job for the majority of their work needs.
If you have some experience with programming then I really recommend Obsidian. It treats your entire collection of notes as a "database" that you can use to create tables, like in Notion. The difference being in that Obsidian there are no limitations, you gather and structure the data for your table using plain javascript code. So you can set it up in pretty much any way you want. I've used it for about 4 years now and I'm very happy with it.
Makes total sense! You see, our channel is geared toward businesses and teams though, this video especially, so having a business embrace Obsidian, brings with it quite a bit of complexity (most team members are not going to be technical or understand git for backing up the data, etc.) Obsidian has done a great job at appealing to technical individuals (usually engineers), it's just not what a business should be looking at as their shared team knowledge base is all. Hope that makes sense!
Failure #6 - Privacy and Local storage. Something happens at their end? You loose your data. Friend of mine lost his whole Notion, just because 🤷♂. I am now moving to AnyType - open source and local alternative. Not as feature rich, but for note taking and organising it's a blessing.
While technically true, I will say that when using a tool for business use-case (beyond just personal), local storage isn't the answer either, makes collaboration impossible. That sounds awful, what happened to your friend-usually the paid business tiers have more backup redundancy though. For personal usage, totally valid point 💯 No businesses run their entire business on local storage anymore though.
@@efficientapp yeah definitely and appreciate your quick response. With anytype it can be set up as both local and on their secure cloud. This way if their servers go south, I still have local backup of my notes and I'm still able to collaborate. Plus, they also offer LAN sync - so if your 2 devices are on the same network, they will sync between themselves - no need for internet.
That's definitely nifty! Sounds interesting for personal notes for sure! Just not quite sure this would scale properly in a business when collaborating on notes with a team of people is all 🤔
I tried notion. I have to say: I like it to some extend. Many apps/ software products have some parts I do not like or need or even hate. The option to build my own productivity- and knowledge-management tool for my needs seemed to be a good idea. But at the end of the day, at least for me, Notion only produced the illusion of productivity because I could sit down for days and weeks to try to build it the way I wanted it. Using the same time to find and test a off the shelf solution and trying to find some workarounds for the things that are not how I like them to be, brings way more to the table in my opinion.
That's such a great point! No solution is perfect, but Notion gives you the illusion that you can make it perfect, so it becomes a huge time sink. But what you're saying is, accepting that a built-for solution while it won't be perfect, that's not the expectation at hand, and you can get it to do most things that are most important to you, leaving the workarounds for the edge-cases, for which results in a better solution with less time spent overall. Totally agree with your sentiment! 💪
Hey Tem, this actually isn't the correct advice here as a blanket statement. Most people who use Notion for CRM need something more simple like folk. That said, we DO like Attio, it's just a different target customer. Attio is a good fit if you're more technical, someone that is used to using Airtable for more complex database layouts, and want tons of customization (again, it has the same risks as the Ikea Effect). Most businesses using Notion would be better off with folk than Attio. Teams that are successful with Attio are ones that understand the discipline of knowing when you should stop building features, are technical enough, are open to spending more on CRM (it's more costly than folk to unlock main features). The ICP of this video (teams using Notion for CRM) are less likely to be successful Attio than they are folk. That said, we like both CRMs for different types of teams. That said, if what I described about Attio fits you more, be sure to grab 10% off Attio here: efficient.deals/attio
I used to think Notion was the answer to all my productivity prayers, but after spending hours building templates that didn’t quite work, I realized I needed something more practical. Amplenote’s focus on simplicity and actual productivity (not just perceived productivity) was a game-changer for me!
This comment, more than most, just made me smile. I think this means that we were fair, while being critical and opinionated at the same time? 🤔 either way, this feels like a HUGE accomplishment and the highest praise to our video editor and team-thanks for sharing this Ricardo! And welcome to the fam! Curious to learn more if you're open to sharing 👀 Are you using Notion for personal or work? And for everything, or just note taking?
@efficientapp i'm a daily Notion user for at 4 years, i've been between using just for knowledge and for everything i can. Usually i have a mix of tools, where notion is the final holy grail. Your video is funny, it touches some of Notion challenges (they exist), although it simplifies them to keep light and funny. Notion can be a notebook for many, Notion can be much more for some, but you need to learn Notion. There's no other way. But there is a lot of value on not having multiple tools and context switching. And even for me sometimes Notion is challenging. But I love it! 😉
This is a fair comeback, and I'll start with these caveats, we are a pretty technical bunch and we have limited needs. The way we collaborate with Obsidian is by putting the project or “vault” under a version control system (VCS) like Git. Each set of changes forms what is called a commit. Commits can then be reviewed by peers, in the form of pull requests, before they can make it to the main history of the vault. This is also an opportunity to run automated tasks on the content, such as formatting and spell checks. This offers us the comfort and speed of having our entire content locally accessible on disk. What we lose in exchange is the ability to edit documents together, which realistically never happens.
That makes sense-yeah I mean our background is in consulting with businesses from 2-200 employees on picking the best software for their team, setting it up, training the entire team on how to use it all, then building integrations/automations where needed to streamline the process. Completely understand if you're a super technical team, but introducing even some non-technical team members in when you scale will cause quite a bit of issues. I get it though, I'm technical, I love the technical solutions, what you're doing is super creative! Should the average business owner do this though? Definitely not 🙈
I completely agree, offering a coherent and efficient setup to many is a big challenge. In that way, my initial message was a bit of a tease, coming from the lean place where I stand. I like the video as it questions whether you can really kill ten birds with one stone efficiently. Something we should all ask ourselves when setting up.
This take is wayyyyy off. Andra is looking at this from a business solution perspective. Notion succeeds for those who are looking for a solution to build databases for them personally. Notion isn't great for business management, I agree. But where it does work is a centralized place for all of my personal organization. From having a database for things I want to buy, to tv shows to watch, it really adds a level of flexibility unseen in any other product. But if this video is specifically targeting those who want to use notion for a business management tool, yes, I agree, notion will fail you BIG TIME.
Haha so it sounds like you actually do agree with us and thus video then! The target for this video is businesses and founders. In-fact, we agree with you, that it feels like Notion was built more for personal usage for students and individuals to try mapping out much of their personal knowledge. Not sure if you've seen the other videos on our channel, but every video of ours is for businesses, reviewing and comparing B2B SaaS tools. So we're on the same page my friend!
Hahaha Sam! That's pretty funny! We find Salesforce to be a good CRM for enterprises (1000+ employees), they are one of the few that can handle that type of scale. But a small business should in no way ever consider Salesforce!
Oh gosh, yeah, 100%-you're exactly right. If you're a small/mid-size business or startup, STAY AWAY from Salesforce-you're not going to have a good time using it, mmmmmkkkayyyy. 😂 We have a full video on what we recommend in that case: efficient.link/yt/crm
Fifty points to Gryffindor for the BALLS to post feedback on the tech community's favorite app. Always go back to the generalist vs specialist dilemma. Hope Notion's product team will watch this video.
Bahahahahaha omg, thank you 😂 so many points! I don't know what to do with myself anymore! And 100% - gosh, I do genuinely believe their product team would have to take a bit of a look in the mirror after watching it, just remember Notion team, we come in peace ✌️
Haha what do you mean? Like there being an intro like that? Broadly it's just a "talking head video", but we obviously did a big intro which isn't normal in talking head videos. Not sure that's what you're referring to though?
someone finally said it perfectly why teams shouldn’t use Notion if they want to be productive.. There’s so much productivity lost when the team im on trying to use Notion to do every collaboration projects… I can now bring this to my team to justify not using Notion.
Definitely couldn't have done it so concisely without a TON of help from others 😂 a big undertaking here, so glad for it to finally see the light of day, nearly 3 months in the making 😶🌫️ SOOOOO stoked to hear that this video can be a tool to help enable you in making your case to the team! This is more than we could have possibly hoped of this video 🙏 super super super appreciate your comment!
i feel like if they listened more to the customers instead of trying to make notion something that nobody needs, it would've been better. just focus on implementing the offline mode (useful for everybody, especially for students), better the features you already have, add the ability for people to use more colors then the default ones, put the ability to hve notion calendar without necessarily connecting google calendar (it can be an option, but not the only one; add apple, add the login with ONLY the notion account you already have) and the ability to put repetitions on events instead of having to copy and paste the same eent over and over again. just look at the features that make other systems great (google calendar for example) and implement those. add more fonts to customize pages with. this is just an example of what can be done, but the notion email app is something i don't think anyone will use. after its announcement, i was very excited for its release, but after looking into it, for me (student), idk if it will be in any way useful, let alone for businesses that already have a system holding it up all together
Good points! I suppose this is just what happens when a startup goes after the all-in-one category, they start off listening to their users, but then as they go more and more broad, their users have totally different needs from one another, so then it's limited resources and "who" should they be listening most to? They hear requests for "build a calendar" and they are like, our infrastructure isn't made for calendars though. Doing calendar well is a VERY complex category, we did a full video on them here: efficient.link/yt/calendar But anyway, they then feel pressure and go "let's just acquire a calendar app and then we'll integrate it and make it 'Notion' later", problem is, like what you're mentioning, you don't just make it deeply integrated. And your requests probably sound reasonable, but they are probably trying to figure out what they can even do with the API limitations and separate databases between both tools, fighting with that more than anything. Rarely does acquiring result in a good tool that integrates in, and now we're diving into Notion Mail as well, same thing. So it's like, you can see how they got here and what led them here, and how difficult it is for them to listen to all of their users, but it does feel like they are approaching it the wrong way and could use a bit more focus maybe.
HAHA yeh like one of the most important customization options for me with something like notion is the colors. The current ones sucks and nobody has thought to just offer a different colour pallete option? Seems like the easiest layup to do
They also literally deleted every workspace of users who EVER paid with Russian card, even if they long don't live in Russia anymore. It didn't affect me even tho I am Russian, but since then I moved to Obsidian and never looked back. And it absolutely worth it, custom themes & plugins are GOLD! Sure, it takes a few hours first to configure everything, but then you can simply duplicate configured vault when you need one, spending no time.
@@efficientapp yes, although it is possible thanks to the rich plugin system. And IMO it will be safer than Notion, because you can use 3rd party sync system with E2E encryption and stuff. Technically it is $50/yr for business, in practice there are no mandatory restrictions so you can just use it for free as well.
Got it! Yeah, it's just tough because Obsidian is definitely geared more toward engineers and technical individuals in its feature-set, privacy features, backup using git capabilities, etc. So the only issue really here is that for a business on dozens of people, especially if not everyone is an engineer, Obsidian does have quite a few hurdles for these companies to get over. Totally get it if you're a technical individual though!
What about as an app for cognitive offloading ie a place for dumping ideas, rants, thoughts you want to come back to and expand on with planning and potentially tasks to pursue the idea?
So it sounds like you're speaking more for personal usage, yeah? If that's the case, we don't "not" recommend Notion. If you just need a free tool for personally jotting down of notes/thoughts/ideas, that's the one area where we actually said Notion is good at. While we use efficient.link/r/slite for our company notes (because it's not trying to be "more" than that, and we like the focus-less getting side-tracked), for personal usage though, I still often throw misc things into Apple Notes/Google Keep, heck, even Bear (if you have an iPhone & MacBook), and then when I want to actually turn the idea dump into a task/project to actually get work done, that's when it gets "upgraded" by being added to efficient.link/r/motion for managing tasks and scheduled onto my calendar to prioritize it. Depends on personal or work usage though, and if you're open to investing into a proper tool, or if you are only wanting to use a free product (in that case, Notion for personal use is fine).
@@efficientapp Thanks for the tips! I've been looking for a tool just to offload my ADHD symptoms, and one of my symptoms is just a reluctance to adopt new habits that involve too many steps. So I've been hoping with Notions flexibility it may help me to just get everything out in one place so that I don't fret about jumping from one app to another to get anything done. I'll be careful not to let it become my all in one solution and will consider motion if I ever become productive enough to start a startup. I'd be interested in your finance app recommendations, but I'm based in Europe (Ireland) and presume your recommendations are US based.
I think notion really works until it doesn't, I kinda felt the ability to convert my notes to task was missing which led to me missing on so many things, I have switched to amplenote and I think its handling notes to tasks far better, I still use notion for some documentation stuff but for daily tasks I have completely switched to Ampletnote
This makes sense, also it sounds like you're using it primarily for personal usage, yeah? Notion when it comes to the documentation side of things is a good fit, it's just as you said though, once you start getting into things like tasks, is when it falls apart. I've also heard good things about Amplenote, but again, more for personal usage, not for businesses or teams.
@@efficientapp yes that makes sense, I try to augment Amplenote over whatever my workplace usually uses, more like a "personal priority todo" for now, I do sync my calendar to Amplenote but most work stuff happens in the default work too eitherways. I think one of the best flows I like in Amplenote or any other similar tool is: "Add email as task" some tools allow me to forward emails to an email ID that automatically converts it to a task, really helpful imo
I mostly use Notion for saving poetry, organizing writing, and managing tasks. It ended up being too complicated for me to spend the time to use as deeply as I had originally desired. It's interesting to see how much time people invest in it, though. Ill look into some of these other apps, thanks for the video!
Notion is good enough for very bespoke operating systems & solutions. For instance, I wanted to keep track of my pin collection lol there’s not exactly a software dedicated to that use case, but I could build what I needed inside of Notion.
Absolutely agree with you, for a hobby like pin collecting and organizing, (sounds cool by the way!), deserves a bespoke solution. I can't exactly say that a dedicated software would be all that successful focusing on that use-case haha, so it's the perfect fit for a tool like Notion or Airtable 💯 Now if you were to scale this into a business at some point, I think some of the other tools in the video would serve you better for the operational bits of running a business 😉
@ I’ve discovered many meaningful, bespoke systems that could benefit from Notion, but yes indeed, I agree that it cannot be the solution for every aspect, and the broader category needs that you’ve identified are certainly areas that I look outside of Notion to solve for. But I do think there is in fact, still great value in having Notion.
Haha tell me you're an engineer without telling my you're an engineer 🙊 I don't think the average business owner understands how to use Git, and it isn't the most collaborative solution for teams (working on notes/knowledge base at the same time), but can see that working well for someone that is technical and looking for more of a personal note taking solution!
@@efficientapp I lost my notes on obsidian before, because I was using iCloud Drive folder, but the app de-synced, hence the git backend. Also thanks :)
Makes sense, yeah that would scare me with how much we have invested in our docs, happy using Slite 😅 but yeah, if I was using Obsidian, I would definitely want to be using it with git, now git is something I can trust and get behind!
Notion is for the creative soul. If you yearn for the freedom to design your own system, to break free from rigid templates, and to build something uniquely yours, Notion empowers you. It's a canvas for your productivity strategy, allowing you to express your creativity and find a workflow that truly sings to you. Remember, true productivity doesn't stem from a tool; it arises from a dedicated heart, a focused mind, and a genuine desire to achieve your goals. Happy creating! 👽✌️
Is this a poem? And are you a bot or a human...? 😅 I don't think businesses should be leading their software purchasing decisions based on whether or not it allows them to be a creative soul or not 🙈
@efficientapp it's not a poem it's a statement. So you're embracing a future where businesses are reduced to soulless, robotic drones, incapable of innovation or independent thought. A future where creativity and individuality are sacrificed at the altar of efficiency. Is that the future you want?"
Right? Something seems off here 😅 but yeah, as a business owner and founder, I'd rather have efficiency and for software to get out of my way so that I can be creative in other areas, like making this video 😊
Completely agree with video! I use Notion as a multi-functional note app and definitely won't go further with it. Maybe one grain of salt would be about the recommendations. Only calendar got more than one recommendation. I understand that this wasn't a focus of yours, but I personally wanted to get a bit more options.
Hey fjorgand! Well done on stopping just at notes, we applaud your constraint 😉 And so, we tried keeping this video quite tight, and yet somehow it still turned out to be nearly 17 minutes. Because of that, we opted to just give our "top pick" for each category. We also didn't want to overwhelm people. With that, we actually have a standalone video for each category we talked about here, so if you are curious more specifically about just one of the categories, you can get our full thoughts and recommendations/overview here (you'll notice that each category has a 12+ minute video each, so imagine all of those in this Notion video haha): - Project Management: efficient.link/yt/pm - CRM: efficient.link/yt/crm - Email (Shared Inbox): efficient.link/yt/help-desk - Daily Planner: efficient.link/yt/planner - Calendar: efficient.link/yt/calendar - Todo List: efficient.link/yt/todo - Expense Management: efficient.link/yt/expense Does this help at all? We also have a full website where we review and compare all of these tools as well: efficient.app
My issue with Notion is that I kept finding myself attempting to build the perfect system and not doing the actual thing. The UI is so neat, that I cannot tolerate anything less than perfect. This turns out to really hurt my productivity. At this point, I'm perfectly happy with Amplenote, which is out-of-the-box useful for taking notes, getting things done, etc. It is not the most intuitive to use if you are so used to the traditional folder system, but once you get comfortable with using tags, things will become really clear. Besides, it is easy to resurface your notes with the search bar and tags, etc. I don't use it for structured data, but when I do, I'd use Google Sheet since it's purely structured. Using Notion for such can also work, but like the video said, I'm always tempted to use Notion for other things, which turns out to be sub-optimal.
Super relatable (as a perfectionist myself) 😅 sometimes "limitations" in software, especially when purposeful, will save people like us from the time sink that often arises when you have the idea that "anything can be done". Especially when it comes to taking notes-that shouldn't be so over-engineered and not everything needs to be this sophisticated relationships with one another. Are you using Amplenote just for personal usage? Or team usage? We're definitely more covering team/business usage on our channel, have always associated Amplenote as more of a personal note taking solution though like Bear and such.
@@efficientapp Just personal usage. I basically use it as my own knowledge base to keep all fleeting thoughts and expand them whenever necessary. I can see Notion playing a role in team usage; i.e. a team home page with the people/contact info, handbook, project management, etc. however in this case, Notion to me will stop being a note-taking app, but a project management app. It just dawns on me that Notion has lots of similarities with some legacy enterprise software suites where a client has 0 chance of implementing the software by himself; instead, he would have to rely on a consultant for the implementation.
100% agree with this video. I wasted SO much time with Notion. Spent a lot of money downloading templates, only to find they didn't work for me, and they broke when I tried to adjust them.
Sounds like you made it out from the rabbit hole that is Notion at least, so congrats on that! 😁 The problem really is that "it's not Notion's fault, it's how you're using it-now buy my template to 'use it right'..." rrrrriiiiigggghhhhttttt 😅
Notion still remains my Go to for everything Literally everything I think it all comes down to control Being able to have everything you need in one place. Notion is meant for productivity not Aesthetics so just customize it as you want and never worry about the Aesthetic focus on the functionality.
Haha that's fair, if you're using it for personal usage-you see this concept/mindset completely fall apart in teams and businesses though. The problem is that Notion doesn't scale when you have "team members customizing it as they need it" instead of working. Think about how you identify as a productivity-focused individual, yes? Most employees are just trying to get their work done, they aren't wanting to learn how to "customize software for their needs". The target of this video was definitely more for businesses and teams, if that makes sense?
what a banger video from a tiny channel I've never heard of with a small amount of views. how do you guys get the money to produce content at this quality? I'm almost freaked out by the disconnect between size and quality. probably paid for by the Chinese government
Hahaha one word: "DeepSeek AI" 😏 Editors? DeepSeek. Script? DeepSeek. Musicians? DeepSeek. Talent? DeepSeek. AGI is here baby! We aren't actually humans, we are just avatars of incredibly good looking and talented individuals. Makes sense, right? But seriously, this is a very nice comment, thank you 😂 feel free to look at our videos from over a year ago in-front of our computer monitors with an iPhone and no script, that's how we started. We ran a software integration/automation consultancy for over a decade, so we made our money in consulting businesses on software, and then we found that we have, well, a lot of insights to share haha We are right now building a software review and comparison website, and Andra pushed us to do RUclips. I'm a perfectionist, so how do we do RUclips without going all-out on videos? Does it make sense? I don't know, maybe it didn't, but comments like this make us feel like maybe it did make sense? We're just super passionate about the B2B software space and felt like no one was doing the MKBHD level quality for it, so that's what we wanted to do, lots of personal passion in it! The video after next is going to be a lot of fun (especially if you liked this one), so definitely be sure to give a subscribe and hope to catch you in the comments section again! 🙏 P.S. oh, and this message? Yeah, written with DeepSeek.
I have been using Notion since 2018, I have quite a bit of pushback, but I'm probably not taking the time to type it all out here. if only we could leave audio comments. You also make some great points of some of the downsides with it as well. At the end of the day, there is no such thing as a perfect PM tool, but whatever management tool/system you're using you have to do just that, use it. If it is not helping you execute then the tool is not for you. and then there’s also the discussion of the user who isn’t disciplined in using it daily and consistently. That’s also a conversation that’s not gonna be held in the comments of a RUclips video. this video was very well done and super high production quality! It kept me glued the whole 16 minutes.
Wooo! Awe thank you! We worked super hard on adding entertaining elements to this video, so thank you for saying that! ✨ And totally agree with the lack of discipline. There isn't one software tool that will work if the user isn't engaged or keeps letting it get out of date. We find that the tools that make life easier with automation is a bit of an unlock here - e.g. with Motion, as long as we keep it up to date with our projects, then everyone on our team more so knows what we're working on, it causes less questions to get asked, it also keeps us on track to getting work done, it gives us timely reminders, then we get to feel more "on-top of things" which is ultimately more about peace of mind. But yeah, if someone is not entering the tasks in any tool in the first place, it becomes a graveyard!
The problem is most peoples templates are rubbish, overly convoluted and cluttered and it ends up being way too much friction. The more simple you make your use case for notion dbs the more effective it is. I use it for docs and a cloud alternative for school notes or capture. The calendar sucks. Task management mostly sucks. Note taking sucks. But its very useful that it can do those things if you need to. I love notion because it does all these things. But just because you can do all these things with it doesn't mean you should
Well put my friend! It does feel like the "student" cohort has become quite a large market for them, so when you double-click in, you can understand their product direction a bit more. It does the things that students need it to do decently enough. Is it the best solution for actual teams and businesses? Definitely not in our experience.
Definitely a bold statement! But not a completely unwelcome one! I also was heartbroken to find that the "working on Notion instead of working" thing is very real, and Notion isn't the only app guilty of this. My team moved on to Clickup, which has its own quirks, but kinda looks and feels like we paid someone to do the 60-100 hours of work building a Project Management system in Notion. I know y'all are big Motion fans and spokespeeps, and it's really neat, but didn't work for us…yet (I will keep my eye on it!) Love Sunsama, though, and Morgen's take on AI and integrations is becoming interesting, too. I do wish that there was a little more talk about other apps and workarounds to Notion's issues in this video. It's harder in 2025 to sell teams sometimes on using/paying for/juggling multiple apps that are not connected: Motion + Slite + Superhuman + etc. etc. when Notion and others do such a good job of selling you on the "One App to Rule Them All". But teach us how, Alex and Andra! You really do make extremely entertaining videos!
Haha we appreciate the balance in your comment and thank you for the compliment 🙏 Noted that you would have preferred to hear about other apps we considered/tried along the ones that we mentioned. In fact, we are working our our next script today (which will be released 3 videos from now) and because of your comment we are specifically adding in more app alternatives we tried so keep an eye out! 👀 It will be out at the end of March (best estimate). In the meantime, we do have a full software review site where you can search/read about other apps we evaluated: efficient.app And hear you that software fatigue can be real! We've seen that it has to come from the top. E.g. if the leaders of the company are on board with using "the best tool for the job" and allocate time/resources to onboarding the team to show them how it will make THEIR life easier, then we find adoption is more likely to happen. How do you empower your team to feel more organized, find the info they need faster, so they can spend their time contributing rather than...looking for stuff. I have met anyone complain about getting to use Superhuman if the company pays for it, most people find this an awesome perk as you can also connect in your personal email accounts and email is then just amazing across the board 😄 Another example, with Motion once projects are set up, if you tell team members "okay just look at your calendar and it says the highest priority thing to work on next" - it makes for an easier onboarding. Making little training videos with Looms showing your team how to use different tools is what we do along the way and focus on one piece being adopted at a time. Maybe we will do an "how to onboard your team" video one day! Anyway, appreciate you being here and writing this comment 🙏
A lot of these popular, trending tools don't have their flaws talked about enough I feel like. I personally love Notion, but there definitely are better alternatives for certain specific tasks like recording finances.
Hey Thomas! Appreciate you, as someone that loves Notion, is open to hearing criticism about the tool they love. We believe that this is exactly what needs to be done, to make a product be better. Notion is slow to load when using it for many different things is something we hear and see all the time, "but Notion is free so I'll just deal with it" is what many people also say. What if Notion actually got pushback on these flaws, and were forced by the community to improve what is broken or lacking, versus pushing on to the next big thing like Calendar or Email? I've been in product for over a decade, and the biggest change comes from hearing the negative feedback, otherwise the creators of the product are in a bubble with only positive feedback/thoughts/emotions around them, which feels great I'm sure if you're them, but it results in a worse product being built at the end of the day. I hope Notion's team takes this video (if they watch it) in the same way you have. This is product feedback, you have more than enough people talking about all the great things, let's balance some of that out, so that a better product is made at the end of the day, yeah? That's our goal at least.
sigh. one one hand , gut punched as i've spent almost 9 months been building this MASSSIVE interactive universe , dungeons and dragons/pokemon go-esque Frankenstein world to manage my entire life and archiving - and I now feel myself side eyeing the creepy notion calendar icon in my system tray - that IVE NEVER opened. NOT ONCE. and sudden "ive been punked" syndrome making me a weeee bit nauseous. ON THE OTHER HAND... INSTANT sub. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 I mean, good content and real talk,. you guys are hilarious. Im still in love with notion for the databases - i mostly use them for that, and i've created some gimmicky custom AI blocks that really do all the work for me, but youre right about all that programming STOPPING me from actually working and getting the work done for me or my clients. i've spent more time trying to catalog my creative workflows and some how squeeze abstract creative thinking and processes into a set of interchangeable properties , cause im convinced they need to be rolled up and related 🙄so that i can later "look at" , "observe"? and analyze for "something" - this video has at least given me an A-B comparison which is really important. anyhow thanks for the great content! - ps i HAVE YET to really understand formulas on notion. jeff and frank are alright tho i think they've got their rhythm . I am far too abstract and airy to be as rigid or structured as either of them - .
Hahaha thank you Alex!! Yep, you totally got the message of the video - it's all fun if you enjoy the building aspect, we're just encouraging business owners especially to reflect that its not the most productive. But if its for a hobby/fun/the awareness is there, there is nothing wrong with it. Also for the record, we are fans of Thomas and Jeff-think they got a good thing going!
I like some of the features Notion offers and had started building a knowledge base. I ended up going with Craft instead. It’s a bit different but I really like the creative aspect of Craft. Also, it’s much more visually appealing :-). It has the ability to display a calendar as well through Apple, and also can import Apple reminders. Also, I’m a former database and Salesforce admin and app developer. I totally agree with what they’re saying in the video. There’s a reason there are products like Microsoft Project And Salesforce as well :-)
Hey Steve! Fun to hear from a former database and Salesforce admin/app developer's take on things! Curious though, are you using Craft for personal usage? As someone who clearly worked at huge organizations on database and Salesforce admin, I'd be surprised if you saw very much Craft usage in businesses? Definitely seems more of a personal usage type of thing when we evaluated Craft. And you're so right! I'm curious what your take is on Salesforce? It obviously serves its purpose for huge enterprise companies, but surely you would agree that it's a pretty dated UI, and quite overwhelming to use, especially for small/mid-size businesses? Seems more like it's one of the few CRMs with enough enterprise integration and talented Admins (like yourself) that allow it to be integrated with other tools and be the back-bone, almost data warehouse for businesses with thousands of employees, but I don't feel like we've met an employee at a big corp that has actually "enjoyed using Salesforce"? Would love to hear your thoughts though! Thanks for your comment Steve!
i been saying this for years, you spend more time in notion than working in the real things. i just use some random shit to keep a checklist of my to-do .
Hahaha so what do you use for note taking then?? Best use-case ever though, I think Notion would be upset to hear that THIS is your use-case for their tool 🙈
I've tried Motion several times and got overwhelmed every single time 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬 But that said, I am a freelancer who - as you've said - has tweaked my Notion set up to grow with my needs over time. It certainly was not a set and forget. That said - no friggin idea how people make the PARA method work in Notion because, my babes, you can't just move whole projects around willy-nilly - relations do NOT work like that 😂
That's totally fair! Using Motion for project management as a solo freelancer doesn't exactly give all the benefits of what it does, for example, we set it up for our team to use (and we've invested the thought into how it should be set up to manage a team of 8 others). But wasn't the PARA method literally created by Tiago? One of the largest Notion proponents? 😁 But yeah, moving around projects in that way I can see would be super super messy 🙈
Finally! Thank you, this video was a breath of fresh air from all the Notion buzz. Personally, I like to use eagle app to capture all media assets (videos, images, web links, etc), and Obsidian for building a second brain. I own all the data and able to use these apps OFFLINE.
Ayyy! I recently stumbled upon Eagle App as well! Huge fan! Super appreciate the kind words and for someone finally appreciating a different opinion from the otherwise gospel of Notion on RUclips 😮💨
The moment I saw the thumbnail, I knew I had to make a reaction video, as I could already sense what was coming. 😂Wow, what a journey that was! I completely agree with your conclusions, as I shared here: ruclips.net/video/N72GUFChW7A/видео.html. Amazing work, Alex & Andra! I love your straightforward, no-nonsense approach to apps. Let’s make the productivity space on RUclips a no-BS zone!
Omg, what a fun comment to see! Going to respond here with the same comment I left on your video: Tom!!! Omg, Andra and I were in the middle of a movie, and we had to literally pause it to instead watch your video in full on the big screen while holding our breath hahaha My heart rate is through the roof, was NOT expecting this to ever happen, such a fun experience, so thank you for that. This video was 100% intended for business owners, so you 100% "got" what we were saying. Andra and I were nodding along with you when you were sharing your thoughts. We believe there's more than enough productivity channels on RUclips, just not enough that understand and care about actual Business Efficiency. You do though, so we've definitely found our tribe! Regarding Expense Management: The quickest wins we saw for clients were in the spinning up of virtual cards, putting them on file with each software vendor, then having each payment automatically categorize itself and sync to the accounting software. It also does things like managing budgeting across your company, employee reimbursements, receipt matching, and categorizing, etc. so teams of even 500+ can definitely benefit from it-we didn't go too deep on it in this video though. We do have another video coming out which goes through our entire finances stack, you'd definitely be using this tool alongside proper accounting software, bank, etc. (with your accountant just living in your accounting software, not Notion, as you so rightly mentioned). Regarding Project Management: So I would say hold off in watching the video linked at the end, that was from nearly a year ago-it's a placeholder that we're going to swap out in a few weeks with our next video that shows the updated Motion and how we're using it. It has come a LONG way in the past few years (I'd genuinely say it wasn't even a PM tool 3 years ago). Finally, just want to say thanks for doing this, made our Sunday. It was just SO nice having a business person reacting to this, because we're all trying to shine a spotlight on what business owners actually need. Half of the comments on our video are likely consumers/students, so to see our target audience (someone like you) that understands the actual needs of a business, reinforcing all of the points, just makes us feel, well, seen, and is motivating for us. Thanks again for doing this!
Holy shit..What a video...Concept, editing and general video quality..top notch guys...well done...Been thinking about diving deep into Notion, might have to reconsider.
Aweee, this means a lot! Just passed along your amazing comment to a few people on the team that we couldn't have done this without!!! (Amy - editor, Karey - assistant editor, & George) 🥹 Given that you've been thinking about diving into Notion, sounds like this video came up at the PERFECT time! Guessing you're referring to a business use-case? Or that of personal?
I knew some one would definitely make this video on Notion. And for the influencers out there, cmon..we all should know what Influencers stand for? They get paid for talking BS :D
Haha we felt like the right people to make it because we've been dealing with the repercussions for the past decade of businesses listening to these Notion influencers and then feeling defeated because the solution they had wasn't actually fixing their business problems. That said, I do believe that many of these creators we mentioned mean well, and do truly believe they are helping people out. And they are, we just believe most of them don't have experience with actual businesses, teams of 5-200 people, because that's when it becomes beyond apparent that you're not going to scale a business using Notion as your all-in-one business solution. So if you view the creators we mentioned more as those helping students and individuals, I'd say it checks the box more for what they are talking about. It's just that very few people on RUclips actually talk to founders and business owners, and that's our aim with our content.
Interesting. I use notion for a bunch of stuff. I created all my databases and systems in like 2 days. I almost dont change anything, They are pretty simple, but effective and track pretty much everything I need. Just keep simple and do the sh** you have to do!
Links for all software mentioned 👇
1. BILL Spend & Expense (Expense Management)
↳ efficient.link/r/bill → US Only (Free)
↳ efficient.link/r/airwallex → Outside US (Free)
2. Motion (Task/Project Management + AI Daily Planner)
↳ efficient.link/r/motion (7 days free + exclusive 🎁 in the description)
3. Sunsama (Daily Planner)
↳ efficient.link/r/sunsama (Free 30 day trial exclusive 🎟)
4. folk (CRM)
↳ efficient.link/r/folk (10% annual discount 🎟 in the description)
5. Superhuman (Email)
↳ efficient.link/r/superhuman (2 Free Months Til End of January! 🎉)
6. Slite (Knowledge Base)
↳ efficient.link/r/slite (Get $100 Credit 🎟 in the description)
I don't use Notion, but came here to check new video. You made it so funny that I stayed till the end :P Good job guys! :)
Pat from Poland!!! Awe, this means a lot! Will be passing along your sweet comment to our video editor who made it extra special 🥹🥲
Thank goodness someone finally said it out loud! I completely agree. Notion doesn't really help you do the actual work-it's just a total time suck, the total opposite of being productive.
"We had to disguise ourselves as a general purpose productivity tool"
- Notion CEO
Looks like you were onto them from the beginning! And you're our people!!! Definitely gonna upset a few people with this one, but if some people aren't getting upset, are you really saying anything worth hearing?
Appreciate your comment and support!
I hated Notion 😂
Guessing you tried using it for business Chase?
How your using it that turns it into a time suck. Because it doesn't have guardrails and constraints which most people probably need, and thats ok theres certainly apps with those things!
That it's only a Time. Suck if you don't know what you're doing and you're one of those people that constantly likes to make things aesthetic just like anything else that can be a distraction
Sure, Notion hate is very fashionable nowadays. But I had expected that you’d pretend to offer a balanced view by saying at least one positive thing about Notion. Now I can’t take anything you say seriously.
was looking for this comment
We have an entire section dedicated on what we think Notion is good at (1:50 aka the first section of the video).
Did you miss that?
What an incredibly well done video! That trailer portion was so compelling, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. Sucked in immediately. You have really reached a peak with these videos. The editing is phenomenal.
Awe, thanks Morgan 🥹 we really have reached a new peak-I wish we could unsee the intro for the first time so that we could watch it again, because it really is a masterpiece. Our editor (Amy) is SOOOO talented and creative, we couldn't be more proud! 🥲
@@efficientappAmy needs a raise 🎉
Problem is, I don't want to have to sign up subscriptions (and PER SEAT) for a dozen apps if I can use a nocode DB app to store the data and get mostly passing grade features that get the job done, with one subscription.
Won't disagree with you here! If a low price is something that you are valuing highly, sticking to a tool that does an "OK" job at everything makes perfect sense.
Everything is an opportunity cost. For many businesses the efficiency saved from using purpose-built tools far outweigh the cost of the software subscriptions.
@@efficientapp If you can afford to hire more people for your business, you can probably afford the purpose-built tools, for sure! Until then, we gotta stay scrappy 😂
I agree with you. And it's not only about cost but also having to switch from app to app, not being able to fully cross information through them etc
With how slow Notion starts to load when you're using it for everything, you'll wish you could simply jump between a couple different apps 😅
They are not getting the point that Notion still has everything integrated, calendar, tasks, project management, knowledge base, whereas the other tools have not. By the way, I tried Motion a couple of years ago and it worked like total shit, their AI was stupid AF.
I love notion, its been crucial for my journey to stop procrastinating so much... but its true that for business/teams probably there are better options. I have no money for more subscriptions and i just need to manage my tasks/goals/projects of the year and take notes to brainstorm and build systems, and Notion allows me to do all of this in the same place. The database also allows me to have relations between the pages so i can find and visualize everything easily with the diferent views, filters and page properties. So none of the disadvantages of the video bother me since i dont really need those features or i have found good alternatives. The only thing i dont like is that it takes forever to load sometimes... but i got used to at this point and it compensates i guess xD.
That been said, i agree with everything you guys talked in the video! Notion its not for everyone. I think notion would be perfect for personal proyects and for students.
(Sorry for my english btw)
First of all, no need to apologize! Your English is great! And you totally nailed it!
You caught that in this video, we're talking specifically to businesses-that's the audience our experience and expertise is in.
For the student/personal projects side of things, especially those who don't have money (or the need) to implement a more scalable solution for teams, just doesn't make sense.
The fact that you're an individual using Notion for some tasks/notes/goals/projects, and you've experience how slow loading it is... Just imagine what a business using it together must feel! Multiply your data by 50 other people, all shared 🙈
You'd think they'd focus on some of these performance issues, but instead they are just building more features, acquiring more companies, and trying to integrate more tools. You bring up a good point and they should listen to you! You should have to settle on it being slow and annoying to load every time you interact with it 🫠
Appreciate your comment!
Yes! I use it only for personal projects and I am a student and it is perfect lol
yooo, what is this editing, WOW, please teach me ;o
Haha awe, thanks! It's our amazing editor Amy! Will pass along the nice words 🙏
Great video guys- I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s seen the light when it comes to Notion’s flaws! I’ve been moving a lot of my Notion content over to Craft and much happier.
Thanks to the algorithm for showing me this one!
Woo! Thank you for the comment 🚀🔥🙏 And to the algorithm! haha
I love your sense of humour and delivery! Not to mention you share great information… Thank you
Ayyyy, new friend unlocked 🔓
Thanks Patou! If you love our sense of humor, we think you're probably an awesome human 😁 glad you appreciated the video (and information), and appreciate your comment!
My pleasure. I will be checking out some more of your content.
Amazing video packed with so much value. So much more than just a takedown of notion. I love the way you weave in recommendations from your niche knowledge set as well in this great story of one of the most frustrating and seductive time vampires of our era. Subscribed!
Awe, we're SO happy to hear this connected with you! And welcome, by the way!!!
What makes Notion so appealing for so many is just such a fascinating thing to unpack! From psychological principles, to marketing, brand, and community.
They are a masterclass on how to get people to pay attention and consider them, which is incredibly impressive. Just felt like we wanted to help people understand what was going on behind the scenes, especially for business owners.
Most just don't have time to figure out why Notion is as popular as it is, and where it should be used, versus where it's being overhyped. Feeling so proud to be able to share this with others! Thanks for being here and for your thoughtful comment!
@@efficientapp Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I came here directed by George Blackman after I made a Notion rant post in his scriptwriting community. Very glad I did and binged several of your videos last night.
One question I couldn't find much dedicated content on is whether or not Motion is a good fit for solopreneurs. I saw you responded to a comment in your Motion video saying that you thought so, but it would be super valuable to have a video specifically for people who don't have a team (yet) and how Motion's features can be most effectively utilised by solopreneurs. For example, which features are NOT useful if you're solo (and so don't have to spend time figuring out) vs which features are SPECIFICALLY useful if you're working independently.
Just my selfish 2c there! Have a wonderful day
any suggestions for people who just want alternatives for personal use, non-business related stuff?
Alternative to what aspect though? For personal note taking? To-do list? What aspect to Notion? For personal usage though, if you're just looking for something that's free, Notion is fine. We're more focused on recommendations for businesses.
Wow! This is amazing AND so well timed!
I am in the process of starting up my business and have seen plenty of Notion videos on different aspects of business!
Thanks for taking the time to make this and give alternatives!
Also, GREAT video 😂
The editing is wild
Ayyyy, so happy to hear this! And amazing, congrats on making the leap! What type of business is it?
Maybe check out this write-up on our site, which is our recommended small business stack: efficient.app/stacks/small-business
There's some hidden gems in there 💎
Super appreciate the comment and the subscribe-we are subscribed to a lot of the same channels, so you have great taste my friend 😁
@ thanks for sending that link through.
I have had a look and it’s a great resource!
My business is coaching small businesses to grow their social medias to get better leads.
I am slowly working on it and this channel will be a massive help I can see
Love it! We have tons of helpful content coming that should specifically help a business like yours (and your clients)! Hope to see you around my friend!
What do you recomend for students? I use Notion to take notes on the class and for now its working for me.
Notion for notes is great for students! Nothing wrong with that! 🚀
RemNote
Notion is also a very resource intensive app. It takes up to a full minute sometimes to load on my Mac when I need to reference an old document
Good point! I guess that's what happens when you turn the infrastructure of what was meant to be a note taking app into an all-in-one build everything no-code solution. 🙈
when they initially released the AI it was an absolute slog and buggy mess. My solution was to email them to remove AI features from my notion and every since I never looked back.
What a great video. This came up on my feed and do glad I watched to the end. Very entertaining and informative!
Appreciate that, and glad to hear it resonated with you! 🙏 Thank you RUclips for showing this on your feed 🥹
I’ve been using Notion since 2020 and I genuinely like the platform and how it’s been growing but the key points you’ve given in this video are really accurate.
I spent a lot of time creating my perfect system until I did and I settled on it and still, you will always find a way to “improve the system” even when it’s not really necessary.
There are other things you didn’t mention where Notion also fails in my opinion and that is guests management and overall collaboration features.
Depending on how you setup your projects database you face the issue of sharing an entry of it or sharing the entirety of the database meaning that someone external to your org can see your data so it loses the point of privacy on the user end.
Permissions for sharing content aren’t as good as they should be and Notion has been marketed as a collaborative app too. Which it is, when you have other members on the workspace and you’re actively paying for their seats. If you’re working with guests, good luck.
Yesss, such a good point! When are you "done" optimizing what you built in Notion? There is no theoretical end because you're the one "building" it. Whereas with focused solutions, there is a clear end to "setting it up" if you will, and you can just focus on using it at that point.
Also, a fantastic point about RBAC (Roll Based Access Control) and the limitations that stem with the complexity that comes with everything being part of a larger database. You can very easily leak something private through it being referenced in one database, and said person not being supposed to access that related database, and thus people do awful workarounds like duplicating databases and deleting data for certain people to view, and then you end up splitting your data up and having duplicate data to fill a permissions issue.
A permissions issue that works out of the box on most project management tools and CRMs for example, because the need for this granular permissions are quite critical.
Fantastic point and also a huge cause for Notion becoming a larger and larger mess over time!
I couldn't agree more with you guys!!!!
This is insane production. Love it.
Ayyyy Mizko! Awee, that means a LOT coming from you-your production quality is the gold standard 🔥🔥🔥
And wait, someone that understands product design... and literally teaches people product and design for a living... agrees that Notion isn't a good idea in business? 🤯
Feeling super validated right now 🙏
Fantastic video! Thank you for sharing your insights and showing folks the superior solutions that will save them from lots of grief.
Keep up the great work! ❤
Super appreciate that Kevin-your support means a lot! Definitely not here to start drama, it's for sure for the goal of exactly that, saving people from lots of grief 🙏 we're on your team people!
I like your people accent and and production quality of the video. As a video editor i can easily see little mistakes in big youtubers, but yours there weren't that easily to find. Good production team Keep up.
Awe, thanks so much, that means a lot! We definitely sweat the details on this one 🥹🥲 and I'm a perfectionist so 🙈 awesome to hear that you were more impressed with our video than some big RUclipsrs! Now I am curious what mistakes of ours you found and if I noticed them already and just decided "we need to get this video out" or if it's something slipped through the cracks? 🤔😏
I like Notion and I think it's like Excel. It is created for specific use cases and yet it is "misused" by users. In the end, what counts is that you get your things implemented
That's fair, although I would recommend giving efficient.link/r/airtable a shot if you're more looking for an Excel replacement. Way more performant, super flexible, and more opinionated in what it is and what it is trying to be (also has a FANTASTIC API).
That said, you're right, people do misuse it because of the hype that people have built around what it is capable of it. So showing people more what it is good at, and where it lacks, is what our goal is. For team knowledge base, that is what it was built for at the foundation, and then its "tables" feature turned into databases, and then it just went from there into a totally different beast.
So the foundation of what it was initially built for, is still the area that we would recommend it-but as you brought up... "users misuse it", it's just too tempting to do so.
I LOATHE notion... with a passion. It's just not user-friendly, and nothing is customizable like they want you to think
I think it's tough to be user-friendly when at a core you're teaching people to think in "databases" and "relationships" instead of getting "work" done. Each customization you make in Notion brings with it an asterisk (e.g. this worked, but made this not work/or now people can see this data that I didn't want them to/I need to create a duplicate of this database to hide information from some team members or external guests/etc.)
The more you learn about how Notion works, the more you actually see how many edge-cases arise and workarounds are needed, which definitely re-enforces your point of it not being user-friendly 🫠
5:30 I forgor cause of those eyes that I had in my head the entire second half of the video. 😂
Hahahaha 👀👀👀👀👀
Finally. I tough it was me who thought that its a total time waste but seems like other people have same issue.
Rarely will you ever be the only one!
You guys are too good. Fantastic content :)
Aweee, thanks John! You've always been the most supportive 🤗 we've been leveling up quite a bit the past few months!!!
Fantastic video! You guys have incredible production quality, very entertaining delivery, and extremely useful content.
Awe, that means a lot Joseph! 🥹 we put a lot into this one especially, means a lot that it's being appreciated to this degree-feeling super proud!
Notion is basically legos and Minecraft for adults…. Which is why I had to leave it alone after having excellent systems built in it…and this is years of using it and not work better with using my own index card system
Good analogy 🔥
@ thank you but this video is top notch! Excellent editing and humor! Even though I stopped using Notion for the ungodly amount of times I spent in it 😭 I still couldn’t help but click the thumbnail. Thanks for reminding me to never go back lol 😂
Aweee, passing this along to our editors! And SO happy to hear that we could be what sounds like a good reminder for you to continue avoiding the rabbit hole 😁
Curious, which thumbnail did you click on the video? The one with the broken Notion logo? Or with the crossed out Notion Template creators? 👀👀👀
@@efficientapp it was the broken logo one which sparked curiosity as I thought notion was discontinued before I bothered to read the thumbnail and title so good choice!
Forgot "Notion", The video editing is suuperb! Which software you use for video editing?
Awe, thanks so much! Will have to thank our video editor! She's somewhere in here (bat signal to Amy).
We used Adobe Premier + After Effects + efficient.link/r/screen-studio for the screen recordings!
The production quality of this video🔥🔥Great video guys, that's why from the beginning I used Notion in the most minimalistic way possible so it wouldn't distract me from what I'm actually trying to do
Awe, thanks so much! Using Notion minimally for what it's intended and not falling down the rabbit hole is definitely the way to do it! 🕳️🐇💨
Greatly done video! Would you mind sharing which software you used to create it?
Awe, thanks so much!
- For screen recordings, we used efficient.link/r/screen-studio
- Editing we used Adobe Premier
- Unsure what our audio engineer used to mix it, pretty sure Pro Tools and something else
Is there anything more specific that you were curious about? I think those are the main software solutions used though 🤔
its so right for my personal use, i only use it as a diary (kinda!) but really seems insufficient for who they're claiming its for! i sometimes watch those template videos and it does feel like there are so many workarounds that people have to do that i resigned to only using the calendar diary entry type database bc its free for me
Yep, that makes total sense! And for personal usage for taking notes like you are, go for it! It definitely works for that 👌
COME PLAY WITH US ALEX 🤣🤣🤣 new nightmare unlocked. This video is amazing guys 🫶❤️
OMG, it's Dabi! From Twitter!!! 🤯
Literally, Andra used the "come play with us Alex" line this morning to try getting me to come downstairs and make us lattes 😂 the script of this video is literally seeping into our day-to-day life 🫠 so your nightmare is now my reality 😂😂😂
Appreciate the heck out of you my friend! 🤗
New to your channel and subscribed.
Totally agree. I used Notion and completely got lost by these databases, making it a task manager, To-Do list , learning formulas, Calender feature etc etc.
I went in to a loop of learning notion, rather than doing actual work.
Finally STOPPED using notion a month back and i only use apple notes which syncs well with all my apple devices fast and easy .
Finally realized SIMPLICITY is the best thing in having productivity.
Yessss, you said it! For "personal productivity", it's about using what is most convenient. Where your personal notes end up at the end of the day is not going to make or break you. Thanks for the subscribe my friend!
Excellent video. That's why I moved to Workflowy 2 years back. I realized I was spending more time on aesthetics than on "being productive"
Thanks Tausif! Sounds like this is for personal usage, not business usage, correct? Workflowy doesn't seem to be geared toward team/company usage at all.
In the middle of trying to decide between Motion and Notion for project management and the thing I'm hung up on the most with Motion is how to manage external contractors that don't need a full seat. Every other project management software has an option to add guests in some capacity. Do we just work with them over email?
Ah yes, we'll just pay for a full seat for them if they are a close contractor (like 20+ hours per week), and if they are just like a thumbnail designer or someone, we'll just create a reminder task and assign it to one of our team members (essentially as a reminder to follow-up and check-in with said contractor).
We actually go over exactly this in our course: efficient.link/courses/motion
And we give a discount off the course here:
efficient.deals/motion
But yeah, Motion's team has said they are building external/collaborative/contractor seats this year, so it's either do the way we do it, or hold tight a bit longer!
Hope that helps Jack!
Alex
@@efficientapp Yep, found that in your course after I asked. Also good to know that they are working on that feature. Bought the course and planning to test drive Motion for the next few months. Thanks!
Awesome! So glad you found that and that it helped + appreciate you purchasing the course!
Really curious to hear how the test drive goes for you and the team-if you remember, would be awesome for you to leave a comment on this thread to update us all with the results!
I respect the content but when you are trying to gather business from Notion to your "choice" looks like a info commercial.
We understand! How do you think we could have done a better job at presenting alternatives?
It's the old adage, use the right tool for the job! I only use notion for just keeping records of assets and notes etc. It does that out of the box . Same with task or project management tools, I use something that does what I need out of the box. So i spend little to no time trying to create a frankenstein tool, that slows me down rather than acts as a great support tool
You got it! It's almost like these old adages came from wise people that ran businesses or something 🤷♂️ they are definitely on to something (as are you) 😉
Appreciate your comment!
i was a former Skiff user. now i dont just no use Notion, I hate it.
Yesssss, Skiff users rejoice! SO glad you found this video-dying to know what you ended up going with, assuming still privacy-focused, your only option really is: efficient.link/r/proton-mail
Curious how the migration was for you or what you ended up doing? Would LOVE to hear more about your experience!!!
guys this video is so attractive lol, a round of applause for the person who edited it and the girl's charisma!
Awe, thanks so much! Passing along the kind words to our video editor! And go Andra! 🎉
i just use apple notes. I'm happy
For personal usage, totally-it's more when you have a team and need to collaborate/share notes with one another that it starts falling apart 😞
@@efficientapp yeah I know, of course :)
I’ve thought this for a long time. Notion does a lot of things, not all of them well. \so what SHOULD you use Notion for?
💯 - We actually mentioned in the beginning of the video what Notion is good for, but I know the segment was brief and right after all after the momentum of the intro.
If you're using it for shared team knowledge-base and note taking, then it is a great tool for that (what it was initially built as/for). While we use efficient.link/r/slite instead (because it isn't trying to be anything more than that, which keeps our team more focused), that is the one area that we believe Notion does excel in a business and where it's strengths lie when used alongside other tools for the other areas we mentioned in the video 👌
What note-taking app do you guys use?
We actually mentioned in the video, but realized that we referred to it as our team knowledge base-but we've been using efficient.link/r/slite for note taking, actually for 6-7 years now and love it + the team behind it.
@efficientapp Really enjoyed the video! Do you guys keep meeting notes here as well?
I currently use (attempting to use!) Notion as my “all in one” but am very open to persuasion. I am a consultant who enjoys having a more professional “portal” for my clients to use (which I currently use Softr x Notion for). How would you recommend replacing that?
Hey Garrett! Awe, thanks, that means a lot 🙏
What type of consulting do you do? And how critical is this portal? (e.g. how much are your clients actually visiting it and getting value from it?)
Regarding meeting notes, that's an area where we use a proper CRM, we use efficient.link/r/copper personally, and just take meeting notes in there.
We had tried doing our meeting notes in Slite for a couple years, but I think the truth of the matter is we just found we rarely referenced the notes back, and it was more useful to have it be more of a "timestamp" in the history of communication with a client/person, rather than just stacking up notes to stack up notes.
We do now use a meeting note taker bot: efficient.link/r/tldv and we have it sync over to our CRM when a call is over, so we don't need to manually add notes in anywhere and we get the AI summaries sent over via email and in Slack if needed. Again, we don't reference them often haha
We were a software implementation/integration consultancy for 13 years, so we've experimented with a lot haha
I also went the "portal" path for our clients, and found that only 1 was actually using it, and found it was better to set them up with their own documentation software (like Slite for example), and just have the information they needed in there.
Super familiar with Softr, we use it right now to give people course access, and we're going to be moving off of it because it gets incredibly expensive at scale, especially when you need to invite hundreds of people to it.
I'd just genuinely audit if you're possibly using this "portal" more for yourself, and it being something you're proud of and enjoying, than it is actually of true use to your clients. (I'm only saying this because I've experienced exactly this myself, and it took me years to get over this-realizing it wasn't a good use of my time maintaining, and clients just simply valued my services for what I was doing for them most).
All of this to say, it sorta depends on a lot more context behind what type of consultancy you have and what's most important to you. Feel free to add additional context, definitely tough to advise to this degree without more of that!
Nice catch. Always felt like something was missing although everything is there. Although i've made some setups in notion and now it feels smoother
Thanks Neo! Yeah it's tough to uncover exactly what it is good and bad at from afar due to most everyone on RUclips talking it up. I think this is just the reality with many all-in-one tools, they build too quick, try to be everything to everyone, and then they start acquiring companies to try building faster, but then those tools don't actually integrate in at the degree or depth that their customers would want.
I couldn't find any other app or tool with Notion's database functionality, which is a must-have for me. You also recommend jumping between different tools and applications, which is not ideal. My 2c. (Notion user, but not a fan boy).
Curious what you are using it for exactly? You're mentioning database functionality, so if you're just looking more for a broad database for storing information, more as an intermediary database or something, that's where efficient.link/r/airtable excels. That said, people do fall into the trap of using it for some of these other categories as well and things fall apart. But, if you're looking for a user-friendly and flexible database solution, then that would be a great option.
And correct, we are recommending jumping between a couple/few different tools, but as a business, that's completely normal.
For example, your expense management tool? It runs in the background and automatically does a lot of what it needs to do. So you login to it separately, yes, but only when you need to spin up a new virtual credit card or to review budget spending and such-this is fine and normal.
In the case of the video, we jump into our recommended PM tool 30% of the time, calendar 20% of the time (both of those are the same tool), email 30% of the time CRM 10% of the time, team knowledge-base 7% of the time and expense management 3% of the time in a given week.
So 80%+ of the time we are jumping between 2 tools, and I assure you, jumping between a calendar/PM tool and Email are not that big of a deal to move between as separate apps (and for other team members who don't need email as much, it's 2 apps, PM/Calendar and say notes, or whatever). The point is, more team members use no more than 2 apps for the far majority of their work on a given week, and with this model, everyone gets to have those 2 apps be built deeply for what they are working on, not just trying to stuff everything into an all-in-one tool for the sake of it.
This concern is not as big as you're making it out to be, especially for a business. It's perceived convenience having it all-in-one tool with the reality of many others on the team being inconvenienced not using the best tool for the job for the majority of their work needs.
If you have some experience with programming then I really recommend Obsidian. It treats your entire collection of notes as a "database" that you can use to create tables, like in Notion. The difference being in that Obsidian there are no limitations, you gather and structure the data for your table using plain javascript code. So you can set it up in pretty much any way you want. I've used it for about 4 years now and I'm very happy with it.
Makes total sense! You see, our channel is geared toward businesses and teams though, this video especially, so having a business embrace Obsidian, brings with it quite a bit of complexity (most team members are not going to be technical or understand git for backing up the data, etc.)
Obsidian has done a great job at appealing to technical individuals (usually engineers), it's just not what a business should be looking at as their shared team knowledge base is all. Hope that makes sense!
Failure #6 - Privacy and Local storage. Something happens at their end? You loose your data. Friend of mine lost his whole Notion, just because 🤷♂. I am now moving to AnyType - open source and local alternative. Not as feature rich, but for note taking and organising it's a blessing.
While technically true, I will say that when using a tool for business use-case (beyond just personal), local storage isn't the answer either, makes collaboration impossible.
That sounds awful, what happened to your friend-usually the paid business tiers have more backup redundancy though.
For personal usage, totally valid point 💯
No businesses run their entire business on local storage anymore though.
@@efficientapp yeah definitely and appreciate your quick response. With anytype it can be set up as both local and on their secure cloud. This way if their servers go south, I still have local backup of my notes and I'm still able to collaborate.
Plus, they also offer LAN sync - so if your 2 devices are on the same network, they will sync between themselves - no need for internet.
That's definitely nifty! Sounds interesting for personal notes for sure! Just not quite sure this would scale properly in a business when collaborating on notes with a team of people is all 🤔
@@efficientapp Another good point :) For now better for freelancers or small teams only.
yeas, - make sure you are in a "safe country zone" for notion
I tried notion. I have to say: I like it to some extend. Many apps/ software products have some parts I do not like or need or even hate.
The option to build my own productivity- and knowledge-management tool for my needs seemed to be a good idea.
But at the end of the day, at least for me, Notion only produced the illusion of productivity because I could sit down for days and weeks to try to build it the way I wanted it.
Using the same time to find and test a off the shelf solution and trying to find some workarounds for the things that are not how I like them to be, brings way more to the table in my opinion.
That's such a great point! No solution is perfect, but Notion gives you the illusion that you can make it perfect, so it becomes a huge time sink.
But what you're saying is, accepting that a built-for solution while it won't be perfect, that's not the expectation at hand, and you can get it to do most things that are most important to you, leaving the workarounds for the edge-cases, for which results in a better solution with less time spent overall.
Totally agree with your sentiment! 💪
This channel saved so much time looking through CRM, and social scheduler. Thank you, finally no bullshit software review channel
Woop woop! So glad to hear! Thanks for the comment, more to share and more to hopefully help in the many months to come!
For CRM, use Attio, not Folk.
Hey Tem, this actually isn't the correct advice here as a blanket statement. Most people who use Notion for CRM need something more simple like folk.
That said, we DO like Attio, it's just a different target customer. Attio is a good fit if you're more technical, someone that is used to using Airtable for more complex database layouts, and want tons of customization (again, it has the same risks as the Ikea Effect). Most businesses using Notion would be better off with folk than Attio.
Teams that are successful with Attio are ones that understand the discipline of knowing when you should stop building features, are technical enough, are open to spending more on CRM (it's more costly than folk to unlock main features).
The ICP of this video (teams using Notion for CRM) are less likely to be successful Attio than they are folk. That said, we like both CRMs for different types of teams.
That said, if what I described about Attio fits you more, be sure to grab 10% off Attio here: efficient.deals/attio
I used to think Notion was the answer to all my productivity prayers, but after spending hours building templates that didn’t quite work, I realized I needed something more practical. Amplenote’s focus on simplicity and actual productivity (not just perceived productivity) was a game-changer for me!
Sounds about right! You're using this for personal usage, not for business and team usage though, correct?
Super, super thorough and informative. Well done!
Awe, thanks Brian! A lot went into this one 🥹 glad to hear it was informative, we wanted to have fun but also be helpful 👏
I'm a Notion lover and loved your video. That's weird!
This comment, more than most, just made me smile. I think this means that we were fair, while being critical and opinionated at the same time? 🤔 either way, this feels like a HUGE accomplishment and the highest praise to our video editor and team-thanks for sharing this Ricardo! And welcome to the fam!
Curious to learn more if you're open to sharing 👀 Are you using Notion for personal or work? And for everything, or just note taking?
@efficientapp i'm a daily Notion user for at 4 years, i've been between using just for knowledge and for everything i can. Usually i have a mix of tools, where notion is the final holy grail. Your video is funny, it touches some of Notion challenges (they exist), although it simplifies them to keep light and funny. Notion can be a notebook for many, Notion can be much more for some, but you need to learn Notion. There's no other way. But there is a lot of value on not having multiple tools and context switching. And even for me sometimes Notion is challenging. But I love it! 😉
This was a fun comment to read, makes total sense! Thanks for adding some brightness to our day! 🚀
From the get go, I knew Notion was no Obsidian.
Guessing you use Obsidian for personal use (aka not with a team/business)?
This is a fair comeback, and I'll start with these caveats, we are a pretty technical bunch and we have limited needs. The way we collaborate with Obsidian is by putting the project or “vault” under a version control system (VCS) like Git. Each set of changes forms what is called a commit. Commits can then be reviewed by peers, in the form of pull requests, before they can make it to the main history of the vault. This is also an opportunity to run automated tasks on the content, such as formatting and spell checks. This offers us the comfort and speed of having our entire content locally accessible on disk. What we lose in exchange is the ability to edit documents together, which realistically never happens.
That makes sense-yeah I mean our background is in consulting with businesses from 2-200 employees on picking the best software for their team, setting it up, training the entire team on how to use it all, then building integrations/automations where needed to streamline the process.
Completely understand if you're a super technical team, but introducing even some non-technical team members in when you scale will cause quite a bit of issues.
I get it though, I'm technical, I love the technical solutions, what you're doing is super creative! Should the average business owner do this though? Definitely not 🙈
I completely agree, offering a coherent and efficient setup to many is a big challenge. In that way, my initial message was a bit of a tease, coming from the lean place where I stand. I like the video as it questions whether you can really kill ten birds with one stone efficiently. Something we should all ask ourselves when setting up.
Love it! Yeah, makes total sense! Appreciate your comment and for being open questioning the norm 🔥
This take is wayyyyy off. Andra is looking at this from a business solution perspective. Notion succeeds for those who are looking for a solution to build databases for them personally. Notion isn't great for business management, I agree. But where it does work is a centralized place for all of my personal organization. From having a database for things I want to buy, to tv shows to watch, it really adds a level of flexibility unseen in any other product. But if this video is specifically targeting those who want to use notion for a business management tool, yes, I agree, notion will fail you BIG TIME.
Haha so it sounds like you actually do agree with us and thus video then! The target for this video is businesses and founders.
In-fact, we agree with you, that it feels like Notion was built more for personal usage for students and individuals to try mapping out much of their personal knowledge.
Not sure if you've seen the other videos on our channel, but every video of ours is for businesses, reviewing and comparing B2B SaaS tools. So we're on the same page my friend!
The neat thing is you could remake this whole video, just replacing Notion with SalesForce.
Hahaha Sam! That's pretty funny! We find Salesforce to be a good CRM for enterprises (1000+ employees), they are one of the few that can handle that type of scale. But a small business should in no way ever consider Salesforce!
@@efficientapp Indeed. But the many small businesses that attempt to use it totally end up deep into the Ikea effect with it.
Oh gosh, yeah, 100%-you're exactly right.
If you're a small/mid-size business or startup, STAY AWAY from Salesforce-you're not going to have a good time using it, mmmmmkkkayyyy. 😂
We have a full video on what we recommend in that case: efficient.link/yt/crm
Fifty points to Gryffindor for the BALLS to post feedback on the tech community's favorite app.
Always go back to the generalist vs specialist dilemma. Hope Notion's product team will watch this video.
Bahahahahaha omg, thank you 😂 so many points! I don't know what to do with myself anymore!
And 100% - gosh, I do genuinely believe their product team would have to take a bit of a look in the mirror after watching it, just remember Notion team, we come in peace ✌️
whats this editing style called?
Haha what do you mean? Like there being an intro like that? Broadly it's just a "talking head video", but we obviously did a big intro which isn't normal in talking head videos. Not sure that's what you're referring to though?
Notion works for me.
Are you an individual? Or a business? And what are you using it for?
someone finally said it perfectly why teams shouldn’t use Notion if they want to be productive..
There’s so much productivity lost when the team im on trying to use Notion to do every collaboration projects… I can now bring this to my team to justify not using Notion.
Definitely couldn't have done it so concisely without a TON of help from others 😂 a big undertaking here, so glad for it to finally see the light of day, nearly 3 months in the making 😶🌫️
SOOOOO stoked to hear that this video can be a tool to help enable you in making your case to the team! This is more than we could have possibly hoped of this video 🙏 super super super appreciate your comment!
This video is great, your vibes are great - keep it going 🎉🎉🎉
Awe, thanks Zack! That means a lot 🙏 and right back at ya! 👏👏👏
i feel like if they listened more to the customers instead of trying to make notion something that nobody needs, it would've been better. just focus on implementing the offline mode (useful for everybody, especially for students), better the features you already have, add the ability for people to use more colors then the default ones, put the ability to hve notion calendar without necessarily connecting google calendar (it can be an option, but not the only one; add apple, add the login with ONLY the notion account you already have) and the ability to put repetitions on events instead of having to copy and paste the same eent over and over again. just look at the features that make other systems great (google calendar for example) and implement those. add more fonts to customize pages with.
this is just an example of what can be done, but the notion email app is something i don't think anyone will use. after its announcement, i was very excited for its release, but after looking into it, for me (student), idk if it will be in any way useful, let alone for businesses that already have a system holding it up all together
Good points! I suppose this is just what happens when a startup goes after the all-in-one category, they start off listening to their users, but then as they go more and more broad, their users have totally different needs from one another, so then it's limited resources and "who" should they be listening most to?
They hear requests for "build a calendar" and they are like, our infrastructure isn't made for calendars though. Doing calendar well is a VERY complex category, we did a full video on them here: efficient.link/yt/calendar
But anyway, they then feel pressure and go "let's just acquire a calendar app and then we'll integrate it and make it 'Notion' later", problem is, like what you're mentioning, you don't just make it deeply integrated. And your requests probably sound reasonable, but they are probably trying to figure out what they can even do with the API limitations and separate databases between both tools, fighting with that more than anything.
Rarely does acquiring result in a good tool that integrates in, and now we're diving into Notion Mail as well, same thing. So it's like, you can see how they got here and what led them here, and how difficult it is for them to listen to all of their users, but it does feel like they are approaching it the wrong way and could use a bit more focus maybe.
HAHA yeh like one of the most important customization options for me with something like notion is the colors. The current ones sucks and nobody has thought to just offer a different colour pallete option? Seems like the easiest layup to do
They also literally deleted every workspace of users who EVER paid with Russian card, even if they long don't live in Russia anymore. It didn't affect me even tho I am Russian, but since then I moved to Obsidian and never looked back. And it absolutely worth it, custom themes & plugins are GOLD! Sure, it takes a few hours first to configure everything, but then you can simply duplicate configured vault when you need one, spending no time.
Guessing you use Obsidian personally? Not with a business?
@@efficientapp yes, although it is possible thanks to the rich plugin system. And IMO it will be safer than Notion, because you can use 3rd party sync system with E2E encryption and stuff.
Technically it is $50/yr for business, in practice there are no mandatory restrictions so you can just use it for free as well.
Got it! Yeah, it's just tough because Obsidian is definitely geared more toward engineers and technical individuals in its feature-set, privacy features, backup using git capabilities, etc. So the only issue really here is that for a business on dozens of people, especially if not everyone is an engineer, Obsidian does have quite a few hurdles for these companies to get over. Totally get it if you're a technical individual though!
I’ve never been able to get on board with Notion and couldn’t understand all the hype and fuss about it. Awesome video!
Thanks Nick, glad you enjoyed it! ✨
I still don’t know what Notion does or how it could benefit me.
Well, in our eyes, that's totally fine lol! What software stack do you use on the daily?
entertaining video. great info too thanks
Means a lot! And so happy to hear it helped! 👏
What about as an app for cognitive offloading ie a place for dumping ideas, rants, thoughts you want to come back to and expand on with planning and potentially tasks to pursue the idea?
So it sounds like you're speaking more for personal usage, yeah?
If that's the case, we don't "not" recommend Notion. If you just need a free tool for personally jotting down of notes/thoughts/ideas, that's the one area where we actually said Notion is good at.
While we use efficient.link/r/slite for our company notes (because it's not trying to be "more" than that, and we like the focus-less getting side-tracked), for personal usage though, I still often throw misc things into Apple Notes/Google Keep, heck, even Bear (if you have an iPhone & MacBook), and then when I want to actually turn the idea dump into a task/project to actually get work done, that's when it gets "upgraded" by being added to efficient.link/r/motion for managing tasks and scheduled onto my calendar to prioritize it.
Depends on personal or work usage though, and if you're open to investing into a proper tool, or if you are only wanting to use a free product (in that case, Notion for personal use is fine).
@@efficientapp Thanks for the tips! I've been looking for a tool just to offload my ADHD symptoms, and one of my symptoms is just a reluctance to adopt new habits that involve too many steps. So I've been hoping with Notions flexibility it may help me to just get everything out in one place so that I don't fret about jumping from one app to another to get anything done. I'll be careful not to let it become my all in one solution and will consider motion if I ever become productive enough to start a startup.
I'd be interested in your finance app recommendations, but I'm based in Europe (Ireland) and presume your recommendations are US based.
I think notion really works until it doesn't, I kinda felt the ability to convert my notes to task was missing which led to me missing on so many things, I have switched to amplenote and I think its handling notes to tasks far better, I still use notion for some documentation stuff but for daily tasks I have completely switched to Ampletnote
This makes sense, also it sounds like you're using it primarily for personal usage, yeah?
Notion when it comes to the documentation side of things is a good fit, it's just as you said though, once you start getting into things like tasks, is when it falls apart.
I've also heard good things about Amplenote, but again, more for personal usage, not for businesses or teams.
@@efficientapp yes that makes sense, I try to augment Amplenote over whatever my workplace usually uses, more like a "personal priority todo" for now, I do sync my calendar to Amplenote but most work stuff happens in the default work too eitherways. I think one of the best flows I like in Amplenote or any other similar tool is: "Add email as task" some tools allow me to forward emails to an email ID that automatically converts it to a task, really helpful imo
I mostly use Notion for saving poetry, organizing writing, and managing tasks. It ended up being too complicated for me to spend the time to use as deeply as I had originally desired. It's interesting to see how much time people invest in it, though. Ill look into some of these other apps, thanks for the video!
Yeah! Using Notion for those use-cases makes total sense. Thanks so much for the kind words 🙏
Oh my. Lots of funny and true sarcasm.
Hahaha thanks for enjoying our silly moments being able to show our personalities, and yes, lotsss of sarcasm 🙈
Notion is good enough for very bespoke operating systems & solutions. For instance, I wanted to keep track of my pin collection lol there’s not exactly a software dedicated to that use case, but I could build what I needed inside of Notion.
Absolutely agree with you, for a hobby like pin collecting and organizing, (sounds cool by the way!), deserves a bespoke solution. I can't exactly say that a dedicated software would be all that successful focusing on that use-case haha, so it's the perfect fit for a tool like Notion or Airtable 💯
Now if you were to scale this into a business at some point, I think some of the other tools in the video would serve you better for the operational bits of running a business 😉
@ I’ve discovered many meaningful, bespoke systems that could benefit from Notion, but yes indeed, I agree that it cannot be the solution for every aspect, and the broader category needs that you’ve identified are certainly areas that I look outside of Notion to solve for. But I do think there is in fact, still great value in having Notion.
Totally fair 🙌
I've been thinking to use Obsidian with git backend instead of notion, because it is just Markdown manager, and it works sooo much better than Notion.
Haha tell me you're an engineer without telling my you're an engineer 🙊
I don't think the average business owner understands how to use Git, and it isn't the most collaborative solution for teams (working on notes/knowledge base at the same time), but can see that working well for someone that is technical and looking for more of a personal note taking solution!
@@efficientapp I lost my notes on obsidian before, because I was using iCloud Drive folder, but the app de-synced, hence the git backend. Also thanks :)
Makes sense, yeah that would scare me with how much we have invested in our docs, happy using Slite 😅 but yeah, if I was using Obsidian, I would definitely want to be using it with git, now git is something I can trust and get behind!
Notion is for the creative soul. If you yearn for the freedom to design your own system, to break free from rigid templates, and to build something uniquely yours, Notion empowers you. It's a canvas for your productivity strategy, allowing you to express your creativity and find a workflow that truly sings to you. Remember, true productivity doesn't stem from a tool; it arises from a dedicated heart, a focused mind, and a genuine desire to achieve your goals. Happy creating! 👽✌️
Is this a poem? And are you a bot or a human...? 😅
I don't think businesses should be leading their software purchasing decisions based on whether or not it allows them to be a creative soul or not 🙈
@efficientapp it's not a poem it's a statement. So you're embracing a future where businesses are reduced to soulless, robotic drones, incapable of innovation or independent thought. A future where creativity and individuality are sacrificed at the altar of efficiency. Is that the future you want?"
Written by notion AI XD
Right? Something seems off here 😅 but yeah, as a business owner and founder, I'd rather have efficiency and for software to get out of my way so that I can be creative in other areas, like making this video 😊
@@efficientapp talking 💩 about other people's business you call that creativity. I don't sponsor your unethical black magic marketing!
Completely agree with video! I use Notion as a multi-functional note app and definitely won't go further with it.
Maybe one grain of salt would be about the recommendations. Only calendar got more than one recommendation. I understand that this wasn't a focus of yours, but I personally wanted to get a bit more options.
Hey fjorgand! Well done on stopping just at notes, we applaud your constraint 😉
And so, we tried keeping this video quite tight, and yet somehow it still turned out to be nearly 17 minutes. Because of that, we opted to just give our "top pick" for each category. We also didn't want to overwhelm people.
With that, we actually have a standalone video for each category we talked about here, so if you are curious more specifically about just one of the categories, you can get our full thoughts and recommendations/overview here (you'll notice that each category has a 12+ minute video each, so imagine all of those in this Notion video haha):
- Project Management: efficient.link/yt/pm
- CRM: efficient.link/yt/crm
- Email (Shared Inbox): efficient.link/yt/help-desk
- Daily Planner: efficient.link/yt/planner
- Calendar: efficient.link/yt/calendar
- Todo List: efficient.link/yt/todo
- Expense Management: efficient.link/yt/expense
Does this help at all?
We also have a full website where we review and compare all of these tools as well: efficient.app
My issue with Notion is that I kept finding myself attempting to build the perfect system and not doing the actual thing.
The UI is so neat, that I cannot tolerate anything less than perfect. This turns out to really hurt my productivity.
At this point, I'm perfectly happy with Amplenote, which is out-of-the-box useful for taking notes, getting things done, etc. It is not the most intuitive to use if you are so used to the traditional folder system, but once you get comfortable with using tags, things will become really clear. Besides, it is easy to resurface your notes with the search bar and tags, etc.
I don't use it for structured data, but when I do, I'd use Google Sheet since it's purely structured. Using Notion for such can also work, but like the video said, I'm always tempted to use Notion for other things, which turns out to be sub-optimal.
Super relatable (as a perfectionist myself) 😅 sometimes "limitations" in software, especially when purposeful, will save people like us from the time sink that often arises when you have the idea that "anything can be done". Especially when it comes to taking notes-that shouldn't be so over-engineered and not everything needs to be this sophisticated relationships with one another.
Are you using Amplenote just for personal usage? Or team usage? We're definitely more covering team/business usage on our channel, have always associated Amplenote as more of a personal note taking solution though like Bear and such.
@@efficientapp Just personal usage. I basically use it as my own knowledge base to keep all fleeting thoughts and expand them whenever necessary.
I can see Notion playing a role in team usage; i.e. a team home page with the people/contact info, handbook, project management, etc. however in this case, Notion to me will stop being a note-taking app, but a project management app.
It just dawns on me that Notion has lots of similarities with some legacy enterprise software suites where a client has 0 chance of implementing the software by himself; instead, he would have to rely on a consultant for the implementation.
You guys are great. The lego bricks are crumbling.
Haha appreciate that!
🧱🪨💨
"It keeps falling apart 😥"
100% agree with this video. I wasted SO much time with Notion. Spent a lot of money downloading templates, only to find they didn't work for me, and they broke when I tried to adjust them.
Sounds like you made it out from the rabbit hole that is Notion at least, so congrats on that! 😁
The problem really is that "it's not Notion's fault, it's how you're using it-now buy my template to 'use it right'..." rrrrriiiiigggghhhhttttt 😅
my only reason to use notion is, no ads and free sync
Sounds like you're using it for personal usage then, right?
They should have their own cloud infrastructure and platform architecture, so that it can be the everything app.
Just wait, "Notion Cloud" coming soon, why use AWS when you can use Notion? 😏🫠
This video felt personal
Awe, this is nice! In what way do you mean that? Like it felt like we were your friends? Or just what we were speaking to felt personal? 🤔
Production quality from the get go-👌🍒
👏👏👏 we appreciate you noticing 🙏🥹
Notion still remains my Go to for everything
Literally everything
I think it all comes down to control
Being able to have everything you need in one place.
Notion is meant for productivity not Aesthetics so just customize it as you want and never worry about the Aesthetic focus on the functionality.
Haha that's fair, if you're using it for personal usage-you see this concept/mindset completely fall apart in teams and businesses though. The problem is that Notion doesn't scale when you have "team members customizing it as they need it" instead of working.
Think about how you identify as a productivity-focused individual, yes? Most employees are just trying to get their work done, they aren't wanting to learn how to "customize software for their needs".
The target of this video was definitely more for businesses and teams, if that makes sense?
Its why I moved to Obsidian
Makes sense! Obsidian is just focused on personal note taking and isn't trying to boil the ocean, amazing what focus can do for ya 🙈
what a banger video from a tiny channel I've never heard of with a small amount of views. how do you guys get the money to produce content at this quality? I'm almost freaked out by the disconnect between size and quality. probably paid for by the Chinese government
Hahaha one word: "DeepSeek AI" 😏
Editors? DeepSeek. Script? DeepSeek. Musicians? DeepSeek. Talent? DeepSeek.
AGI is here baby! We aren't actually humans, we are just avatars of incredibly good looking and talented individuals. Makes sense, right?
But seriously, this is a very nice comment, thank you 😂 feel free to look at our videos from over a year ago in-front of our computer monitors with an iPhone and no script, that's how we started.
We ran a software integration/automation consultancy for over a decade, so we made our money in consulting businesses on software, and then we found that we have, well, a lot of insights to share haha
We are right now building a software review and comparison website, and Andra pushed us to do RUclips. I'm a perfectionist, so how do we do RUclips without going all-out on videos? Does it make sense? I don't know, maybe it didn't, but comments like this make us feel like maybe it did make sense?
We're just super passionate about the B2B software space and felt like no one was doing the MKBHD level quality for it, so that's what we wanted to do, lots of personal passion in it!
The video after next is going to be a lot of fun (especially if you liked this one), so definitely be sure to give a subscribe and hope to catch you in the comments section again! 🙏
P.S. oh, and this message? Yeah, written with DeepSeek.
I have been using Notion since 2018, I have quite a bit of pushback, but I'm probably not taking the time to type it all out here. if only we could leave audio comments. You also make some great points of some of the downsides with it as well.
At the end of the day, there is no such thing as a perfect PM tool, but whatever management tool/system you're using you have to do just that, use it. If it is not helping you execute then the tool is not for you.
and then there’s also the discussion of the user who isn’t disciplined in using it daily and consistently. That’s also a conversation that’s not gonna be held in the comments of a RUclips video.
this video was very well done and super high production quality! It kept me glued the whole 16 minutes.
Wooo! Awe thank you! We worked super hard on adding entertaining elements to this video, so thank you for saying that! ✨
And totally agree with the lack of discipline. There isn't one software tool that will work if the user isn't engaged or keeps letting it get out of date. We find that the tools that make life easier with automation is a bit of an unlock here - e.g. with Motion, as long as we keep it up to date with our projects, then everyone on our team more so knows what we're working on, it causes less questions to get asked, it also keeps us on track to getting work done, it gives us timely reminders, then we get to feel more "on-top of things" which is ultimately more about peace of mind.
But yeah, if someone is not entering the tasks in any tool in the first place, it becomes a graveyard!
The problem is most peoples templates are rubbish, overly convoluted and cluttered and it ends up being way too much friction. The more simple you make your use case for notion dbs the more effective it is. I use it for docs and a cloud alternative for school notes or capture. The calendar sucks. Task management mostly sucks. Note taking sucks. But its very useful that it can do those things if you need to. I love notion because it does all these things. But just because you can do all these things with it doesn't mean you should
Well put my friend! It does feel like the "student" cohort has become quite a large market for them, so when you double-click in, you can understand their product direction a bit more. It does the things that students need it to do decently enough. Is it the best solution for actual teams and businesses? Definitely not in our experience.
Definitely a bold statement! But not a completely unwelcome one! I also was heartbroken to find that the "working on Notion instead of working" thing is very real, and Notion isn't the only app guilty of this. My team moved on to Clickup, which has its own quirks, but kinda looks and feels like we paid someone to do the 60-100 hours of work building a Project Management system in Notion. I know y'all are big Motion fans and spokespeeps, and it's really neat, but didn't work for us…yet (I will keep my eye on it!) Love Sunsama, though, and Morgen's take on AI and integrations is becoming interesting, too. I do wish that there was a little more talk about other apps and workarounds to Notion's issues in this video. It's harder in 2025 to sell teams sometimes on using/paying for/juggling multiple apps that are not connected: Motion + Slite + Superhuman + etc. etc. when Notion and others do such a good job of selling you on the "One App to Rule Them All". But teach us how, Alex and Andra! You really do make extremely entertaining videos!
Haha we appreciate the balance in your comment and thank you for the compliment 🙏
Noted that you would have preferred to hear about other apps we considered/tried along the ones that we mentioned. In fact, we are working our our next script today (which will be released 3 videos from now) and because of your comment we are specifically adding in more app alternatives we tried so keep an eye out! 👀 It will be out at the end of March (best estimate).
In the meantime, we do have a full software review site where you can search/read about other apps we evaluated: efficient.app
And hear you that software fatigue can be real! We've seen that it has to come from the top. E.g. if the leaders of the company are on board with using "the best tool for the job" and allocate time/resources to onboarding the team to show them how it will make THEIR life easier, then we find adoption is more likely to happen. How do you empower your team to feel more organized, find the info they need faster, so they can spend their time contributing rather than...looking for stuff.
I have met anyone complain about getting to use Superhuman if the company pays for it, most people find this an awesome perk as you can also connect in your personal email accounts and email is then just amazing across the board 😄
Another example, with Motion once projects are set up, if you tell team members "okay just look at your calendar and it says the highest priority thing to work on next" - it makes for an easier onboarding.
Making little training videos with Looms showing your team how to use different tools is what we do along the way and focus on one piece being adopted at a time.
Maybe we will do an "how to onboard your team" video one day!
Anyway, appreciate you being here and writing this comment 🙏
A lot of these popular, trending tools don't have their flaws talked about enough I feel like. I personally love Notion, but there definitely are better alternatives for certain specific tasks like recording finances.
Hey Thomas! Appreciate you, as someone that loves Notion, is open to hearing criticism about the tool they love. We believe that this is exactly what needs to be done, to make a product be better.
Notion is slow to load when using it for many different things is something we hear and see all the time, "but Notion is free so I'll just deal with it" is what many people also say.
What if Notion actually got pushback on these flaws, and were forced by the community to improve what is broken or lacking, versus pushing on to the next big thing like Calendar or Email?
I've been in product for over a decade, and the biggest change comes from hearing the negative feedback, otherwise the creators of the product are in a bubble with only positive feedback/thoughts/emotions around them, which feels great I'm sure if you're them, but it results in a worse product being built at the end of the day.
I hope Notion's team takes this video (if they watch it) in the same way you have. This is product feedback, you have more than enough people talking about all the great things, let's balance some of that out, so that a better product is made at the end of the day, yeah? That's our goal at least.
sigh. one one hand , gut punched as i've spent almost 9 months been building this MASSSIVE interactive universe , dungeons and dragons/pokemon go-esque Frankenstein world to manage my entire life and archiving - and I now feel myself side eyeing the creepy notion calendar icon in my system tray - that IVE NEVER opened. NOT ONCE. and sudden "ive been punked" syndrome making me a weeee bit nauseous.
ON THE OTHER HAND... INSTANT sub. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 I mean, good content and real talk,. you guys are hilarious.
Im still in love with notion for the databases - i mostly use them for that, and i've created some gimmicky custom AI blocks that really do all the work for me, but youre right about all that programming STOPPING me from actually working and getting the work done for me or my clients. i've spent more time trying to catalog my creative workflows and some how squeeze abstract creative thinking and processes into a set of interchangeable properties , cause im convinced they need to be rolled up and related 🙄so that i can later "look at" , "observe"? and analyze for "something" - this video has at least given me an A-B comparison which is really important. anyhow thanks for the great content! - ps i HAVE YET to really understand formulas on notion. jeff and frank are alright tho i think they've got their rhythm . I am far too abstract and airy to be as rigid or structured as either of them - .
Hahaha thank you Alex!! Yep, you totally got the message of the video - it's all fun if you enjoy the building aspect, we're just encouraging business owners especially to reflect that its not the most productive. But if its for a hobby/fun/the awareness is there, there is nothing wrong with it.
Also for the record, we are fans of Thomas and Jeff-think they got a good thing going!
I like some of the features Notion offers and had started building a knowledge base. I ended up going with Craft instead. It’s a bit different but I really like the creative aspect of Craft. Also, it’s much more visually appealing :-). It has the ability to display a calendar as well through Apple, and also can import Apple reminders. Also, I’m a former database and Salesforce admin and app developer. I totally agree with what they’re saying in the video. There’s a reason there are products like Microsoft Project And Salesforce as well :-)
Hey Steve! Fun to hear from a former database and Salesforce admin/app developer's take on things!
Curious though, are you using Craft for personal usage? As someone who clearly worked at huge organizations on database and Salesforce admin, I'd be surprised if you saw very much Craft usage in businesses? Definitely seems more of a personal usage type of thing when we evaluated Craft.
And you're so right! I'm curious what your take is on Salesforce? It obviously serves its purpose for huge enterprise companies, but surely you would agree that it's a pretty dated UI, and quite overwhelming to use, especially for small/mid-size businesses?
Seems more like it's one of the few CRMs with enough enterprise integration and talented Admins (like yourself) that allow it to be integrated with other tools and be the back-bone, almost data warehouse for businesses with thousands of employees, but I don't feel like we've met an employee at a big corp that has actually "enjoyed using Salesforce"?
Would love to hear your thoughts though! Thanks for your comment Steve!
i been saying this for years, you spend more time in notion than working in the real things.
i just use some random shit to keep a checklist of my to-do .
Makes sense! You got the message of our video! 🚀
@@efficientapp taskade it's called the tool i use.
Makes sense, guessing that's more for personal use though, not for a team/business?
😅 I actually use it as a text editor just for formatting.
Hahaha so what do you use for note taking then?? Best use-case ever though, I think Notion would be upset to hear that THIS is your use-case for their tool 🙈
@efficientapp I use Obsidian (the most silent and calm note taking app) and my crm for notes on my Leads.
I've tried Motion several times and got overwhelmed every single time 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬 But that said, I am a freelancer who - as you've said - has tweaked my Notion set up to grow with my needs over time. It certainly was not a set and forget.
That said - no friggin idea how people make the PARA method work in Notion because, my babes, you can't just move whole projects around willy-nilly - relations do NOT work like that 😂
That's totally fair! Using Motion for project management as a solo freelancer doesn't exactly give all the benefits of what it does, for example, we set it up for our team to use (and we've invested the thought into how it should be set up to manage a team of 8 others).
But wasn't the PARA method literally created by Tiago? One of the largest Notion proponents? 😁
But yeah, moving around projects in that way I can see would be super super messy 🙈
Love this video.
Sooooo much appreciate that, thanks Josephine! 🙏
Finally! Thank you, this video was a breath of fresh air from all the Notion buzz. Personally, I like to use eagle app to capture all media assets (videos, images, web links, etc), and Obsidian for building a second brain. I own all the data and able to use these apps OFFLINE.
Ayyy! I recently stumbled upon Eagle App as well! Huge fan! Super appreciate the kind words and for someone finally appreciating a different opinion from the otherwise gospel of Notion on RUclips 😮💨
I'm a notion fan boy, and Even I admit that is a great hobby more than a working tool.
Haha your comment made us smile! 🙏 Thanks for being fair and sharing!
Everytime I tried to use notion - I would waste more time trying to build a "system" instead of getting anything done
Yeah, you got the message of the video! 🚀
The moment I saw the thumbnail, I knew I had to make a reaction video, as I could already sense what was coming. 😂Wow, what a journey that was! I completely agree with your conclusions, as I shared here: ruclips.net/video/N72GUFChW7A/видео.html. Amazing work, Alex & Andra! I love your straightforward, no-nonsense approach to apps. Let’s make the productivity space on RUclips a no-BS zone!
Omg, what a fun comment to see! Going to respond here with the same comment I left on your video:
Tom!!! Omg, Andra and I were in the middle of a movie, and we had to literally pause it to instead watch your video in full on the big screen while holding our breath hahaha
My heart rate is through the roof, was NOT expecting this to ever happen, such a fun experience, so thank you for that.
This video was 100% intended for business owners, so you 100% "got" what we were saying. Andra and I were nodding along with you when you were sharing your thoughts.
We believe there's more than enough productivity channels on RUclips, just not enough that understand and care about actual Business Efficiency. You do though, so we've definitely found our tribe!
Regarding Expense Management:
The quickest wins we saw for clients were in the spinning up of virtual cards, putting them on file with each software vendor, then having each payment automatically categorize itself and sync to the accounting software.
It also does things like managing budgeting across your company, employee reimbursements, receipt matching, and categorizing, etc. so teams of even 500+ can definitely benefit from it-we didn't go too deep on it in this video though.
We do have another video coming out which goes through our entire finances stack, you'd definitely be using this tool alongside proper accounting software, bank, etc. (with your accountant just living in your accounting software, not Notion, as you so rightly mentioned).
Regarding Project Management:
So I would say hold off in watching the video linked at the end, that was from nearly a year ago-it's a placeholder that we're going to swap out in a few weeks with our next video that shows the updated Motion and how we're using it. It has come a LONG way in the past few years (I'd genuinely say it wasn't even a PM tool 3 years ago).
Finally, just want to say thanks for doing this, made our Sunday. It was just SO nice having a business person reacting to this, because we're all trying to shine a spotlight on what business owners actually need. Half of the comments on our video are likely consumers/students, so to see our target audience (someone like you) that understands the actual needs of a business, reinforcing all of the points, just makes us feel, well, seen, and is motivating for us.
Thanks again for doing this!
Maybe we like to do someting manually as Notion lovers. So notion is motion, ;)
Hahaha there ya go! You're the Motion in Notion that makes Notion feel more like Motion 😏😂
Holy shit..What a video...Concept, editing and general video quality..top notch guys...well done...Been thinking about diving deep into Notion, might have to reconsider.
Aweee, this means a lot! Just passed along your amazing comment to a few people on the team that we couldn't have done this without!!! (Amy - editor, Karey - assistant editor, & George) 🥹
Given that you've been thinking about diving into Notion, sounds like this video came up at the PERFECT time! Guessing you're referring to a business use-case? Or that of personal?
Never believed in Notion. I'm happy i never did.
Smart one you are 👨🎓
I knew some one would definitely make this video on Notion. And for the influencers out there, cmon..we all should know what Influencers stand for? They get paid for talking BS :D
Haha we felt like the right people to make it because we've been dealing with the repercussions for the past decade of businesses listening to these Notion influencers and then feeling defeated because the solution they had wasn't actually fixing their business problems.
That said, I do believe that many of these creators we mentioned mean well, and do truly believe they are helping people out. And they are, we just believe most of them don't have experience with actual businesses, teams of 5-200 people, because that's when it becomes beyond apparent that you're not going to scale a business using Notion as your all-in-one business solution.
So if you view the creators we mentioned more as those helping students and individuals, I'd say it checks the box more for what they are talking about. It's just that very few people on RUclips actually talk to founders and business owners, and that's our aim with our content.
Interesting. I use notion for a bunch of stuff. I created all my databases and systems in like 2 days. I almost dont change anything, They are pretty simple, but effective and track pretty much everything I need. Just keep simple and do the sh** you have to do!
Sounds like you have a lot of restraint then my friend! 😂 But would be curious, is it more for personal usage? Or for a business?