Thoughts on Notion

I felt that Notion was clunky in a lot of its interactions. When making bulleted lists it was easy to fall out of a bullet or lose the list. The behavior is custom to Notion and is seemingly not derived from any other paradigm or application on the market. The software wanting to select pieces of a document as blocks appeared to as an unhelpful over-optimization for a very specific use case that also threw out other user cases. Again, a custom Notion behavior not modeled after anything else but Notion. Losing shortcuts that work across the Mac OS ecosystem like Cmd+Shift+Up to select all above or Cmd+Shift+Down to select all down was also relatively frustrating - again a very Notion-specific and unnecessary behavior.

Creating databases and the nesting of pages is also a difficult learning curve that does not seem to be derived from any other mental model in the industry. It feels like a lose-lose, as there is a difficult learning curve even if you're a CTO with years of programming and database experience - sometimes requiring hours of fidgeting. (this is a commonly held belief by other users of Notion as I'm sure you're aware)

I am switching back to AirTable because it behaves in extremely predictable ways. Takes a lot of editing a usability queues from Google Sheets, but behaves like an RDBMS (tough to aggregate rows and what not, fair enough). Very solid features and solid UX that seems to know what it is trying to be and highly predictable. Your applications shouldn't make you think, they should get out of your way so that you can be productive.

I'm also switching to Obsidian for the note-taking side, as simple and networked markdown files are easier to reason about and provide a smoother editing experience across the board.