I used Notion for taking notes for five years. Here's why I stopped

For five years, using Notion for taking notes was basically my whole study system. I opened it on my first day of college and never closed it: every course, every lecture, every exam date went through there. If you're wondering whether Notion is good for class notes, here's the short answer: yes, it's genuinely great, as long as you're willing to keep maintaining whatever system you build.

This year I switched. Not because Notion got worse, but because I realized a big chunk of the time I spent in it wasn't studying. It was organizing. Here's how I used it, what it gave me, where it turned into busywork, and what I use now. Fair warning: what I use now is Filmina, the app I built, so keep that in mind as you read.

My Notion note-taking setup

My system was one big database with a row per lecture. Every row had its properties:

• Course, with a filtered view for each one.
• Term, so last semester didn't bleed into this one.
• Professor and section, because the same course with a different professor was practically a different course.
• Lecture number and date, so I knew what came before and after.
• The syllabus schedule, with midterms, finals and deadlines on a calendar view.

Inside each row went the actual notes: headings, bullets, the odd code block, screenshots of the slides that looked important and, when I remembered, a couple of review questions at the bottom. With a lecture template, starting a new page was one click and the structure was already there.

One more thing: my notes were never just mine. I always shared them with classmates, and a lot of my Notion pages ended up being community pages, with students from other years adding their own stuff. I liked that so much that I eventually built an app for my university where anyone could upload and share notes, and it passed a thousand users. But that's a story for another post.

What Notion does really well

I want to be fair here, because I used it for a long time and for good reasons:

• Writing is effortless. One block per line, / to pick what each block is, nested lists with Tab. When a professor is flying through a lecture, that matters a lot.
• Everything lives in one place. Notes, dates, to-dos, links. No more guessing which notebook something ended up in.
• Once the system is built, it's built. By my second semester I didn't think about organization at all. I duplicated the template and kept going.
• Sharing is one link. For study groups, or for sending notes to someone who missed class, it's hard to beat.

If you can only pick one tool to run your student life, Notion is still a very good pick.

Where it started to feel heavy

The problems didn't show up in the first month. They crept in over the years.

Everything was manual. I filled in every property. I cropped and pasted every slide screenshot. I linked every lecture to the next one by hand. None of it is hard, but all of it takes time, and time spent organizing is time not spent understanding.

The learning curve is steep. Building my first database took an entire weekend of YouTube tutorials: relations, formulas, filtered views, rollups. Whenever I showed it to someone, the reaction was almost always the same: that's amazing, and I am never doing all that.

Sometimes it was complex for no reason. I had properties I never looked at and views I made for one exam and never deleted. The system kept growing faster than what I was actually learning.

A lot of it already existed somewhere else. This is the one that really got me thinking. The professor's name, the syllabus, the schedule, the exam dates: all of that was already on the university's course site, posted by the department. I was copying it by hand into another place and then not using it, because whenever I needed a date, I checked the course site anyway.

That's the core of it. Notion is excellent at storing what you've already understood, but it doesn't help you understand. A lecture slide with three words on it that made no sense still made no sense, no matter how neatly it sat in its database row.

What studying from my notes actually looked like

When finals week came around, the routine was always the same: lecture slides in one window, my Notion notes in another, and me trying to match them up by hand. This thing I wrote down, which slide was it about? This slide with a chart on it, what did the professor say? My notes and the course material lived in two separate places, and the one stitching them together was me, at 1 a.m.

It was the same story with every other app I tried: each one held a piece of the lecture and none of them held the whole thing. I wrote about that in more detail in I tried every study app.

What I use now: Filmina

So after five years, I swapped Notion for the tool I ended up building to study. Filmina is an app that runs in your browser and explains your lecture PDFs and slide decks out loud, slide by slide, pointing at the part of the page it's talking about. And I made sure to keep what I loved about Notion:

• Notes work like Notion. One block per line, / for headings, lists, checkboxes, quotes and dividers, and Tab to indent. Anything you paste from Notion keeps its formatting, so I didn't have to start from scratch.
• They live inside the lecture. The note isn't in another window. It's attached to the document for that slide deck, and Mina, the voice that explains it, reads your notes when explaining that lecture. What you wrote down from class shows up in the explanation of the right slide, without you tagging which line goes where.
• You don't even have to type them. You can dictate them, pull the text out of a photo of your notebook (it reads handwriting too), or transcribe the lecture live while the professor talks. It's all in class notes.
• Lectures go in folders by course. No properties, no relations, no formulas: one folder per course with its documents inside, plus a search that finds what's on every slide and in your notes.
• The summary goes wherever you want. When you finish a lecture, you can copy the summary as text and paste it into Notion or your notebook.

And since it lives in the cloud, your notes follow you to any computer or to your phone.

What Notion still does better

To be honest, Filmina doesn't replace Notion for everything, and it doesn't try to:

• As a home for everything else, Notion still wins. Projects, group assignments, reading lists, clubs, anything that isn't a course: it's still better at that.
• Sharing is easier in Notion. One link, real-time collaboration.
• It works offline. Notion lets you save pages to read without a connection. Filmina needs one, because the explaining happens in the cloud.

What changed for me is where my lecture notes live. They used to sit in Notion, far away from the slides. Now they're attached to each lecture, and the voice that explains it actually uses them. I still open Notion, just for other things.

If you'd rather stick with Notion, here's the advice I wish someone had given me: build the simplest system that works (a page per lecture inside a page per course is plenty) and don't copy over what's already on the course site. The time you save there is time for actual studying, with a method like the one in how to study from lecture slides.

Frequently asked questions

Is Notion good for taking notes in college?

Yes, it's very good. Writing is fast, everything stays in one place, and a lecture template saves you a lot of setup. The catch is that you build and maintain the system yourself, and it doesn't help you understand the material.

How should I organize class notes in Notion?

The simplest setup that works: one page per course, and inside it one page per lecture with the date in the title. If you want more, use a database with course, term and lecture number. Don't copy what the department already posts on the course site.

What's a good Notion alternative for studying?

It depends on what's missing. If you want to actually understand your professor's slides, Filmina explains them out loud and keeps your notes inside each lecture, written just like in Notion. For organizing everything else, Notion is still a great choice.

Can I move my Notion notes into Filmina?

Yes. Copy the note from Notion and paste it into a note on that lecture, and it keeps its formatting (headings, lists, checkboxes). From then on, Mina takes it into account when explaining that slide deck.