Why Everyone Is OBSESSED With Notion

Learn how I ACTUALLY made my most successful videos (such as this one) with hands-on, practical behind the scenes breakdowns: www.enricotartarotti.com/storybehind?utm_source=pi…

The ikea effect is maybe why people love minecraft so much, you are putting dedicated hours into building your perfect treehouse. And the meta game comes along with it as well

Every time I look at Notion, I think “wow that looks like a huge pain to configure and I don’t feel like doing that.” I guess that’s kind of what they’re counting on: that sunken cost fallacy from having dumped so much time into making it something you want to use just incentivizes using it.

Takeaways: • Notion is a software tool that claims to transform one's productivity and organization skills. • It combines different features of other software tools such as note-taking, to-do lists, project management, and more. • Notion's success can be attributed to its simplicity and user-friendliness, which is the result of its founders' efforts to distill the most essential features of existing software. • Notion is based on three key psychological principles: the Ikea effect, Maslow's hammer, and the metagame. • The Ikea effect describes how people attribute more value to things they build themselves, which applies to Notion since users spend time building their perfect templates. • Maslow's hammer refers to the tendency to use familiar tools for all purposes, which drives people to try and solve every aspect of their lives with a Notion database. • The metagame describes how Notion's user community has created a vast infrastructure of tutorials, events, strategies, and more, which has contributed to the software's success.

Notion is big for a reason. When i found it about it, i wanted to cry because i immediately thought about how freakin useful this would have been if i knew about it back in highschool and college. The organization, the databases, the side-view options to view two pieces of data at the same time, unbelievable. I've got my own customized dashboard now that i know exactly where everything is and where to go when i have a sudden hyperfixation pop up. The three main things you mentioned in the video are true, but i think there's also something to be said about how Notion is just a really really good product. When it works for one's organization method, it works amazingly.

I remember I had so much fun setting up my Notion. Of course I never used it.

I have recently started watching your videos and I am blown away by the content you have here. I love that you get right to the topic (no clickbait stuff), cover it from quite a lot of angles and present it in a manner that allows the viewer to understand and consume it at their own pace. Keep up the great work! Hope you reach millions and millions of subscribers soon!

I agree! Personaly, I can't use Notion for any planning or todo lists, but I still use it to organise my notes or ideas. Something like a personal website with everything I need. :D

In a way, Notion became that hammer for me. I could organize everything that I had spread all around the computer into a single place and all that even became searchable. I replaced random todo.txt files, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Evernote's .... notes. It surely is not great at everything, but it is enough to keep me organized (or at least feel like it). For most stuff the setup was minimal, but moving the notes with tags was quite the nightmare 😅

If it wasn't clear, I actually am a fan of Notion and find the way they leveraged these psychological principles in their product so fascinating. I currently use it to manage making these YT videos + having my fulltime product manager job so it looks like it's working! This video is not sponsored by Notion, but if you want to try it, doing it via this link affiliate.notion.so/enritarta helps supporting the channel if you ever end up purchasing a paid plan!

You nailed it. Ikea effect + Maslow’s hammer. There’s one more effect, that I might call the Lego effect: if, instead of making a deep, narrow tool, you make a wide shallow tool, like Legos, that lets you build anything with it, that has a real value in its flexibility. Minecraft, HyperCard, pencil, and paper, HTML, and programming languages all have this quality. Having bought a couple Notion templates, however, there is one big caution — it takes a lot discipline to build something that someone else can use.

Mate, this is some sick content. Please never change your  style of content in the future for simplification. It's very rare to find detailed videos like this.

I clicked so fast :D haha, always thought there is some conspiracy about Notion :D

I totally get the appeal of Notion, but it is so daunting to get into. Everything being on the cloud meant that it took a while to load what I wanted quickly; making it extremely cumbersome. Obsidian is a lot easier to get into, but the linking of notes isn't really useful until you get a handful of notes. I did try to get most of my notes on there, but I ended up just using Samsung Notes for everything. Both Notion and Obsidian are really cool for what they are. But they seem like solutions for problems I don't really have.

These are the same reasons that Obsidian is treated in a similar way. But Obsidian is even more flexible and has many many extensions. I've spent soo much time tweaking on both Notion and Obsidian D:

I especially love what you say at the end about notion users going from unproductive to founders 😂😂😂😂 as I'm literally in the process of understanding the nature of my business and using notion a lot to keep track of expenses, quarterly projects and hope to one day upgrade the plan when I'm able to hire an assistant.

Take this with a grain of salt, because I’m a Notion fanboy - but I think a key reason people love it so much is because of how powerful the relations are. What you mentioned certainly play a part, but leveraging the database relations really puts Notion above and beyond any other productivity tool. I think putting to-do lists and other items into a separate app — essentially in a vacuum — is a huge mistake and a missed opportunity.

I like that you find an interesting and educating aspect to your videos. Really makes you stand out! Quality stuff!

I just discovered your channel today and your videos are really well thought-out and interesting. Thank you for taking time to make them!

exactly what you said but notion kinda worked out for me. in the beginning, my adhd brain found it so attractive. i immediately downloaded, learned all about it and made these very pretty pages. for a whole two months all i did was change it or add new things and never used them. when i was close to perfecting my setup like having everything i wanted over here and finally reaching that level of satisfaction, i took a single glance at my tasks page, it overwhelmed me so much that i deleted everything. well i started again a month later or so, with the simplest setup ever and gradually added more but still kept it super simple. i often tell myself "no changing at all" whenever i am on there. i take out like 2 hrs every end of the month for the customizing. so ya, i have been using it very consistently.