I Used Notion for Everything for 30 Days — Here's My Honest Review

I have a productivity tool problem. At any given time, I'm juggling Todoist for tasks, Google Docs for notes, a spreadsheet for client projects, a different spreadsheet for invoices, and a random notebook for journaling. It's chaos. And every few months, I get the urge to consolidate.

This time, the target was Notion. One tool. Everything in it. For 30 days.

Here's my honest report.

The Experiment: One Tool to Rule Them All

The plan was simple: migrate everything into Notion. That meant:

Daily to-do lists
Client project management
Meeting notes and research
Journaling
Invoice tracking
A content calendar

Ambitious? Yes. Naive? Also yes.

I gave myself one weekend to set things up before going live on Monday. I did not finish setting things up that weekend.

Week 1: Setup Hell

I lost three full hours on Sunday building a database I never ended up using.

The Notion rabbit hole is real. You start with "I'll just make a task list" and four hours later you've built a relational database with 14 properties, custom views, filtered boards, and a gallery layout that looks beautiful but serves no functional purpose.

My week one mistakes:

Overbuilt everything. Every database had too many fields, too many views, too many automations that I set up but never triggered.
Confused organizing with working. I was "being productive" for hours without actually producing anything.
Tried to import too much at once. My old docs, my old notes, my entire Google Drive — I wanted it all in Notion. Bad move.
Got distracted by aesthetics. Spent 45 minutes picking a cover image for a database that I ended up deleting a week later.

Week one was humbling. By Friday, I had an elaborate Notion setup and zero actual work completed.

Week 2: Finding the Floor

I had a realization around day 10: I needed to strip everything back to the minimum useful structure.

What did I actually open every single day? What was I actually using?

Turns out: just three things.

A simple daily to-do list (not a fancy database — a literal checklist page)
A client projects tracker (database with basic status columns)
A quick-capture notes page (just a dump page, no formatting)

Everything else I'd built? I never opened it. The elaborate journaling system? Abandoned by day 8. The custom content calendar? Still used my old spreadsheet because it was faster to open.

Week two lesson: find the floor before you build the ceiling.

Week 3: The System That Worked

By week three I had landed on a setup I actually liked:

3 databases:

Projects — each client or project gets a card with status, deadlines, and linked documents
Tasks — weekly to-dos with priority tags and a "this week" filter view
Finance log — basic invoice tracker with client name, amount, date sent, date paid

1 dashboard: A home page that pulled in the week's tasks, showed active projects, and had a quick-capture note area at the top. Opening Notion started with this page every time.

1 daily habit: Every morning at 9 AM, I'd spend 5 minutes on the Notion check-in: what's the priority today, any deadlines this week, any client updates?

When I kept it this simple, Notion was genuinely great.

Week 4: The Honest Verdict

By the end of the month, here's where I landed:

Where Notion wins:

Client hubs (one page per client with all their documents, notes, and project tracker)
Project management with multiple moving pieces
Building a knowledge base or reference library
Anything where you need links between different pieces of information

Where Notion wastes time:

Simple daily task lists (a sticky note is faster)
Calendar scheduling (it's still not a real calendar)
Quick lookups when you're on your phone (the mobile app is slow)
Journaling if you want it to feel natural (it doesn't)

The Freelancer Use Case: This Is Where It Shines

As a freelancer, the thing Notion does better than anything else is client hubs.

Each client gets a page that contains:

Their brief and project scope
All meeting notes and feedback
A linked project tracker card
Invoice history and payment status
Files and reference material

When a client emails me a question, I can pull up their hub in 10 seconds and answer it with full context. That alone made the whole experiment worth it.

The project tracker and invoice log also kept me from losing track of what was owed and what was overdue — something that used to happen embarrassingly often when everything lived in scattered spreadsheets.

Pre-Built Templates vs. Building Your Own

Honest take: I wasted days building stuff I could have downloaded in minutes.

The Notion templates I built from scratch took forever and were worse than the pre-built ones I eventually found. The client hub, project tracker, and invoice log — all of those exist as polished templates that are ready to use out of the box.

If I were doing this experiment again, I'd start with proven templates and customize from there, instead of building everything from scratch and discovering their limitations the hard way.

Would I Recommend Notion for Freelancers?

Yes — with conditions.

Use it for client management, project tracking, and knowledge organization. Don't try to make it your calendar, your email, or your journaling app. Keep your setup simple. Start with templates.

When Notion is used for what it's actually good at, it's one of the most powerful freelance tools available.

Want a Notion Setup That's Ready to Go?

If you want to skip the three-week setup struggle and start with a Notion workspace built specifically for freelancers, the Freelancer Starter Pack has you covered.

It includes client hub templates, project trackers, invoice logs, and the full freelance system — everything set up so you can focus on work, not on building databases.

$22 — and worth every penny compared to three days of setup hell. 👉 Grab the Freelancer Starter Pack