I spent forty-five dollars on a Notion template back in March of 2021. It was designed by some productivity guru on Twitter whose name I can’t even remember now, but the screenshots looked like a minimalist dream. It had progress bars for my fitness goals, a relational database for my reading list, and custom icons for every sub-page. I spent an entire Saturday—roughly nine hours—migrating my life into it. I felt like a god. I felt organized. I felt like the kind of person who actually finishes things.
I stopped using it by Tuesday. Tuesday at 2:14 PM, to be exact, when I realized I had to click four times just to write down that I needed to buy more lightbulbs. That was the moment I realized that most ‘Second Brain’ advice is absolute garbage because it ignores the most annoying variable in the equation: you.
Your brain has a specific way of handling chaos. You’re either someone who needs to build a house before you move in, or you’re someone who just wants to throw your stuff in a pile and hope you can find it later. Choosing between Notion and Obsidian isn’t about which app has better features. It’s a personality test. And if you pick the wrong one, you’re just going to end up with a very expensive, very digital graveyard of half-finished lists.
Notion is for people who like playing house
Notion is a digital dollhouse. I know people will disagree with that, and they’ll point to how Sephora or Pixar or whatever massive company uses it to manage global workflows, but for the individual user? It’s a dollhouse. You spend all your time arranging the furniture and picking out the wallpaper. Notion appeals to the ‘Architect’ personality. If you’re the kind of person who gets a dopamine hit from color-coding your physical bookshelf or spent more time in The Sims building the house than actually playing the game, you’re a Notion person.
The problem is that Notion makes you feel productive when you are doing absolutely nothing. I’ve seen people spend three hours setting up a ‘Content Calendar’ for a YouTube channel they haven’t even started yet. It’s a trap. You’re performing organization instead of doing the work. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Notion is a stage. You’re setting the scene for a version of yourself that is much more disciplined than you actually are.
I used to think this was a good thing. I thought the friction of the setup would force me into better habits. I was completely wrong. For me, the visual clutter of Notion became a source of anxiety. Every time I opened the app, I saw all the empty databases and the ‘Goal Trackers’ that I hadn’t updated in three weeks. It felt like a house full of chores I hadn’t done. If you have a high tolerance for ‘admin’ work and you genuinely enjoy the process of building systems, Notion is incredible. But if you’re just looking for a place to think, it’s a minefield of distractions.
Also, I’m just going to say it: if you use the ‘Gallery View’ for your cooking recipes and include a high-res photo for every single one, you’re probably insufferable at dinner parties. Nobody needs that much aesthetic in a grocery list. It’s performative.
The 14-day ‘I’m actually a fraud’ test
Last year, I got obsessed with tracking my actual utility. I ran a test for 14 days where I logged every time I entered a piece of information into a digital tool and every time I actually went back to retrieve it. I used a simple click-counter app on my phone.
- Total notes created: 87
- Total notes retrieved for actual work: 4
- Time spent ‘fiddling’ with layouts: 6.5 hours
- Actual output: One 800-word blog post.
That 4% retrieval rate was a wake-up call. I realized I was hoarding information like a digital packrat. This is where the choice between these two apps really matters. Notion encourages you to categorize everything immediately. Obsidian lets you be a mess. I found that when I switched to a messier system, my retrieval rate actually went up because I wasn’t exhausted by the process of filing things away.
Obsidian is where thoughts go to hide (and that’s okay)
Obsidian is the opposite of a dollhouse. It’s a dark, cold basement where you keep your most private thoughts. It’s for the ‘Gardener’ or, more accurately, the ‘Hoarder.’ There are no cover photos. There are no progress bars. It’s just text files on your hard drive. Obsidian is for people who are obsessed with longevity and privacy.
I know people who treat Obsidian like a religion. They talk about ‘backlinks’ and ‘graph views’ like they’re uncovering the secrets of the universe. I tried the graph view for six months. I have 1,402 markdown files in my vault. You know how many times the graph view actually helped me find a connection I didn’t already know existed? Zero. Not once. It looks cool in a YouTube thumbnail, but in practice, it’s just a digital ball of yarn. Total lie.
But here is why I actually prefer it: it doesn’t judge me. Because it’s so ugly and basic by default, I don’t feel the need to make it pretty. I just write. Obsidian is for the person who has a million browser tabs open and feels a physical pang of fear at the thought of a company like Notion going bankrupt and taking their data with them. I might be wrong about this, but I think the ‘local-first’ movement is mostly driven by a specific type of neuroticism that I happen to share.
The Risky Truth: Most people building a ‘Second Brain’ are just procrastinating. They are terrified of the blank page, so they spend their lives preparing to write instead of actually writing.
Anyway, I digress. I was talking about the basement. The thing about Obsidian is that it requires a certain level of technical comfort. If the phrase ‘CSS snippet’ makes you want to throw your laptop out a window, stay away. I spent three hours once trying to get a specific theme to make my headers a certain shade of forest green. It was a waste of my life. I’m still mad about it.
The part nobody talks about: The ‘Maintenance Tax’
Every app has a tax. Notion’s tax is paid in ‘Setup.’ You pay it upfront and then you pay a ‘Maintenance Tax’ every time you want to add something new. You have to decide which database it goes in, which tag to use, and whether it needs a custom icon. It’s exhausting.
Obsidian’s tax is paid in ‘Search.’ Because you aren’t forced to organize things upfront, you have to be really good at searching for them later. If you’re the kind of person who loses your car keys twice a week, Obsidian might be a nightmare for you. You’ll have a thousand notes named ‘Meeting Notes’ and no way to tell them apart.
I refuse to recommend Evernote, by the way. I know some people still swear by it, but it’s bloated, expensive garbage that feels like using a piece of software from 2008 that’s been hit by a truck. I actively tell my friends to avoid it. If you’re still on Evernote, you’re not an Architect or a Gardener; you’re just someone who hasn’t realized the world has moved on.
I’ve bought the same $120 leather-bound notebook four times now—the Midori MD ones, if you care—and I don’t care if something better exists. Sometimes the best ‘Second Brain’ is just a piece of paper. But when I need digital, I have to be honest with myself about who I am that day.
Which one are you?
It really comes down to this: do you want to feel like you’re building a library, or do you want to feel like you’re writing a book?
If you want the library—the rows of organized shelves, the beautiful catalog, the sense of order—go with Notion. Just admit that you’re going to spend 30% of your time maintaining the library instead of reading the books. It’s a trade-off. Some people need that structure to keep their brains from melting.
If you want to write the book—to just dump your thoughts into a pile and sort them out later, or maybe never sort them out at all—use Obsidian. But be prepared for the fact that it will never look ‘finished.’ It will always be a work in progress. It will always be a bit of a mess.
I still struggle with this. Some mornings I wake up and I want to be a Notion person. I want to have a ‘Life Dashboard’ that tells me I’ve drank 64 ounces of water. Then I remember that I don’t actually care about the dashboard; I just want to not be thirsty.
Which one makes you feel more anxious: a blank white screen with no structure, or a complicated template with twenty empty boxes? Your answer is the only feature list that actually matters.
I still haven’t found a way to make my ‘Reading List’ actually make me read more books. Maybe that’s the real problem. No app can fix a lack of intent.
