There’s Nothing Wrong with Notion, So I’m Messing with It (Premium)

Notion has emerged as one of the best apps I use every day. Naturally, I've intensified my efforts to replace it with something else.

OK, I'm kidding. Mostly.

Surveying the software and services I use each day, Notion is the rare example of a no-brainer, a nearly ideal tool that just works and has never really let me down. When you think about it, most software is like most people, potentially interesting at first, but also something that will likely disappoint you the more you grow to rely on it. But in this capacity, Notion is somewhat unique. I replaced OneNote--a tool I had used daily since the first beta two decades earlier--with Notion over two years ago, and I've never looked back.

Except, of course, I always look back. Well, not back, there's no version of me returning to OneNote. But I do look, by which I mean I consider alternatives, to everything I use, all the time. And if you were to Google anything about note-taking or Notion alternatives, as I do from time-to-time, you will find that there is a universe of Notion-like apps out there, including Microsoft's top-heavy Loop. (From an experience perspective, Loop is the anti-Notion in that it lets me down every time I give it another try.) These apps all share the Notion design aesthetic, which is modern and pleasant, but also makes them hard to tell apart. But each is unique in some way, sometimes subtly, with advantages of whatever kind over Notion or all the other me-too apps out there.

As I wrote in Notion is So Sticky It’s Hard to Walk Away (Premium), the bar here is high. Whatever advantages another app may have over Notion, they're typically small, and things that either wouldn't impact me day-to-day or would only impact me in minor ways. Why upend the apple cart?

Honestly, I have no good answer to that. Certainly, there are other tools I use that are perhaps more lacking and deserving of attention. On the other hand, I'm looking to the future a bit here, and in addition to a rote testing of things I routinely engage in, I'm also working on this Online Accounts thing, and a key part of that effort will involve me moving to what I think of as a local (NAS-based) storage solution. These NASs (there will be two of them) will be at the center of my storage/backup scheme, so to speak, instead of various online services (like Google Photos/Drive and OneDrive). And ... yeah, there you go. There's a rough rationale for this experiment. I knew I could get there.
☀️ Wouldn't it be nice
OK, I can do better than that. The thing is, this idea has been in the back corner of my mind for a while now, since before I decided to finally properly organize and manage (declutter?) my online accounts. Notion is terrific. But it's not quite perfect. And there are a couple of things--I wouldn't elevate them to "problems"--I consider from time-to-time.

The first is that Notion is good enough as an editor that I could, in theory, use it for general writing. What puts that over the...