I want a second brain: one place for notes, half-formed ideas, doctor’s appointments notes, shopping lists, recipes, and travel planning, ready whenever I need them, so my memory doesn’t have to carry every single thing. I got the idea from Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, and right now Notion is where mine lives.
The usual questions
When I tell people about this, I mostly hear some version of:
- So you’ve just stopped remembering things?
- What about privacy? Who knows who can see all that.
- Why Notion? I hear Obsidian is good.
- Isn’t it a lot of work to write it all there?
All fair. I don’t have a perfect answer to each, but here’s where I’ve landed.
On memory: that’s the point. If I know I can find something, I don’t need to keep it in my head. The important things stay there anyway, and the trivial ones free up space. It’s like birthdays. Some you might remember intuitively, and you end up thanking your calendar (or relative, or social media) for the others you might have missed.
On privacy: this is the real trade-off, and I haven’t found a better alternative yet (and, honestly, I haven’t looked very hard). Obsidian is the usual answer: everything is local and end-to-end encrypted. But getting my notes onto my phone without paying a ton isn’t simple. Like most things, it depends on what you’re willing to invest, whether money or time. Switching also has a cost. For me to move, a tool would have to beat Notion on most fronts, and that keeps getting harder as Notion adds more features and integrations. Maybe an idea for a product? Private Notion end-to-end encryption.
Why it works for me, as a designer
What keeps me here isn’t the feature list. Some people are absolute wizards with Notion. I’m not there yet. What keeps me here is that its structure matches the way I think.
Pages inside pages is how I already organise life and projects: a big topic, broken into smaller ones, broken down again. Notion doesn’t make me adapt to its model. It mirrors mine. That’s the best compliment I can give a product, and it’s the feeling I try to create in the tools I design, where the information architecture feels obvious because it matches the user’s mental model.
Add a simple, calm UI with just enough playfulness, and I’m hooked.
Other small things done well
- How can you resist making a little avatar? It’s a tiny feature that makes the product feel like yours. I got mine on the About page.
- Buck studio’s motion work on Notion AI’s little face is a great interaction design case study. The short animation clips are informative, on-brand and they give the AI feature a playful personality without getting in the way.
Details like these are why I pay attention to products I love. They remind me that delight is usually in the small things.