I enjoyed Notion at first for certain tasks, but it became much less enjoyable as everyone tried to force everything into emoji-laden Notion docs. The Notion spaces used by the Product and Program managers I worked with in the past few years have become a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date, hard to find, and often superseded by some new Notion page they created but forgot to tell us about until we had spent weeks following the old one.

In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.

I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.