I spent forty-two hours in October 2021 migrating 1,200 notes from Notion to Obsidian. Forty-two hours. I tracked it on a spreadsheet because I’m that kind of neurotic. By the end of it, my eyes were vibrating, my neck was a knot of tension, and I realized something devastating: I hadn’t actually learned anything new. I had just moved digital boxes from one warehouse to another. I felt like a glorified data entry clerk for my own life. It was the single biggest waste of time in my professional history, and I’ve sat through a lot of three-hour budget meetings.
We are obsessed with finding the perfect “system” because it feels like progress. It isn’t. Most of us are just procrastination-shopping for software. But after three years of bouncing between these three specific apps, I’ve realized they aren’t just tools. They are reflections of how you think—or how you wish you thought. If you pick the one that doesn’t match your actual brain, you’re going to spend your life fighting the UI instead of doing your work.
The 42-hour mistake and the data of distraction
During my Great Migration, I decided to actually measure how much time I spent “working” versus “fiddling.” I’m not a scientist, but I kept a stopwatch on my desk for three weeks. The results were embarrassing. I know people will disagree with this, but I think Notion is actually making most of us worse at our jobs. Here is what my personal “testing” showed over 21 days:
- Notion: 28 minutes a day spent on formatting, choosing icons, and adjusting column widths.
- Obsidian: 14 minutes a day spent tweaking CSS snippets and looking for plugins.
- Roam: 0 minutes on formatting, but 45 minutes trying to remember where I actually put a specific thought.
The metric that matters isn’t “features.” It’s friction. I found that in Notion, the friction is aesthetic. In Obsidian, the friction is technical. In Roam, the friction is conceptual. I used to think I needed a “comprehensive”—wait, I promised not to use that word. I used to think I needed a system that did everything. I was completely wrong. You need a system that gets out of your way before you lose the spark of the idea.
Notion is a dollhouse (and I’m tired of decorating)
Notion is for people who want to feel organized. It is a digital dollhouse where you spend more time decorating the rooms than living in them. I’ve seen people spend four hours building a “Content Calendar” with custom database views and cover photos from Unsplash, only to never actually write a single blog post. It’s a trap. It’s an incredibly seductive, beautiful trap.
I have a specific, probably unfair hatred for the Notion mobile app. It is garbage. It takes 4.2 seconds to load a page on my iPhone 13 Pro. If I’m at the grocery store and I need to see my list, I shouldn’t have to wait for a spinning wheel of death. By the time the app opens, I’ve already bought the wrong kind of oat milk. It’s a tool built for people who sit at desks with 32-inch monitors, not for people who have ideas while walking the dog.
If you enjoy the process of building the tool more than using the tool, you are a Notion person. That’s not a compliment.
I still use it for my day job at the firm because the team needs a wiki. But for my own brain? Never again. It’s too heavy. It’s too performative. I don’t need my grocery list to have a “header image” of a rustic kitchen in Provence. I just need to know I need eggs.
Roam is a cult, let’s be honest
I’m going to say it: Roam Research is for people who think they’re smarter than they actually are. I tried it for six months. I paid the $15 a month, which is honestly a scam considering how often the graph used to break. The “Roam Cult” on Twitter—those people who call themselves “Roamans”—are basically the CrossFitters of the productivity world. They won’t stop talking about bidirectional linking as if they discovered fire.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Roam assumes your brain works like a hyper-connected web of genius. My brain works like a pile of laundry. Trying to use Roam felt like being a conspiracy theorist in a basement, pinning red string between photos of my tax returns and my grocery lists. It creates a lot of “connections” that don’t actually lead to any real insights. It’s just noise. Total lie.
Obsidian is for the hoarders
This is where I’ve landed, but I have major gripes here too. Obsidian is for the people who don’t trust the cloud. I’m one of them. I lost a Moleskine notebook at a bus stop in Seattle back in October 2017—it had all my notes from a project I was working on—and I’ve had trust issues ever since. Obsidian keeps files on your hard drive. If the company goes bust tomorrow, I still have my notes. That matters to me more than any fancy feature.
But Obsidian has a “hoarder” problem. Because it’s so easy to link files, you end up with 4,000 notes that you never look at. It’s a file system with a fancy hat. I’ve found that I spend too much time looking for the “perfect” plugin. There’s a plugin for everything. Want a calendar? Plugin. Want to track your water intake? Plugin. Want the app to tell you you’re a good person? Probably a plugin for that too.
I know people will disagree, but I think folder structures are actually superior to tags. Tags are a chaotic mess that grow like weeds. Folders force you to make a choice. Choice is good for the brain. It forces a tiny bit of discipline. I use a very boring system: 01_Projects, 02_Archive, 03_Daily. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
The part nobody talks about
We talk about these apps like they are going to change our lives. They won’t. I used to think that if I just found the right setup, I’d finally write that book or start that business. But the truth is, the more complex your “Knowledge Management System” is, the less actual knowledge you are managing. You’re just managing software.
Anyway, I digress. The real question isn’t which app is better. It’s what kind of friction you can tolerate.
If you need to collaborate with a team and you care about things looking “professional” (whatever that means), use Notion. Just don’t try to use it on your phone if you value your sanity. If you are a mad scientist who wants to see how your thought about “The Roman Empire” connects to your thought about “Types of Cheese,” use Roam. But if you just want a place to put your thoughts where they won’t disappear and you don’t mind a bit of a learning curve, use Obsidian.
I still think back to that Moleskine I lost in Seattle. It had a blue cover and a coffee stain on page 12. I can’t remember a single thing I wrote in it, which probably means none of those “important” notes actually mattered. Maybe that’s the real lesson. We spend all this time building these digital cathedrals, but the only stuff that actually sticks is the stuff we use. The rest is just digital dust.
I’m still using Obsidian for now, but I’ve turned off 90% of the plugins. It’s just me and a bunch of plain text files. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t look good on a YouTube thumbnail. But I’m actually getting my work done for once.
Which one are you currently using to avoid doing your actual work?