Notion – the overachiever, do-it-all, productivity queen that we all now seem to want in our lives. Notes for a lecture? Notion. Making a meal plan for the week? Notion. Keeping track of your finances? Notion. It seems this aesthetically pleasing platform has managed to entirely monopolise our lives, claiming to provide a one-stop solution for all our organisational desires.
I can’t imagine my academic or organisational life before this platform and constantly joke to friends that my entire life would descend into chaos if it somehow got deleted. Since the studyblr YouTubers of 2016, I’ve always appreciated the importance of creating aesthetic notes and organisational planners. Notion seems to have completely re-birthed this era in my life, and over the past year, I have become entirely dependent on it. I spent an embarrassing number of hours changing the pictures and colours to perfectly match my desired aesthetic and it now provides a lovely home for my weekly meal plans, travel plans, finances, daily to-do lists, habit trackers, and most importantly, all of my notes for university. As a student, I love being able to keep track of daily assignments, important semester dates, lecture notes, and any admin info about each of my courses all in one space. You can embed pdfs of articles, links to websites and pictures, all of which make taking lecture notes or researching for an essay a seamless process.
Unfortunately, as I previously learned in my studyblr days, just as writing the tasks out in my bullet journal with my muji pens and pastel highlighters doesn’t actually count as completing the tasks, neither does spending hours on notion. While I do think that the platform has many incredible tools for note taking and organisation, it can provide a false sense of productivity. For those who don’t use it and glance over at someone else’s page during a lecture, it can very easily cause a feeling of academic inferiority. In the age of social media, there is a prevalent pressure to not only have a perfect life, whether that be in experiences, career and academic success, and beauty, but to also portray these in an aesthetically pleasing way. While sharing these beautifully organised calendars can be inspiring, hyper-fixating on its aesthetic value (which is a key aspect of the platform) can create a false image of perfection.
At the end of the day, the best thing is to stay in your lane. If making your uni work aesthetic motivates you to study, absolutely go for Notion. If you like keeping everything digital, once again go for it. But if you are someone who prefers a classic scribbled notes on pen and paper or random to-do lists on your notes apps, there is most definitely nothing wrong with that. Stick to what you know works for you, and the rest will follow.
“Notion Mobile Cowork Memo App” by TheBetterDay is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.& “Notion Mobile Cowork Memo App” by TheBetterDay is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
