Your team needs a default, glue system for knowledge - use Notion

Why use Notion?

Every company needs a central place to store and find information. This article explains why Notion is often the best choice for this "glue system", when you might want to use other tools instead, and how to handle the migration if you're currently using something else.

My least favourite work activity is searching for documents that I know exist *somewhere*. I know I'm not the only one - knowledge workers spend hours each week just trying to find information.

Notion works well as the default glue system for a few reasons:

• It has best-in-class editing, including easy linking between documents, toggles to show/hide details, multi-level bullet points, and a nice hierarchy of pages, etc. Notion focuses on text structure rather than formatting, and includes the most useful 80% of features from Google Docs.
• The Notion AI chatbot (the little face in the bottom right corner) acts as a good search and chat interface. It provides links and citations for all of its responses, so you can easily double-check them. This alone is a big improvement over Google Docs search.
• Notion has lots of integrations with other systems, including Google Docs and Slack, and the Notion search should also look inside those other systems.
• Beyond text, Notion has a pretty capable database system for storing tabular data. You can sort, filter, group, and even add formulae (although for anything complex, you're better off with Google Sheets). For small teams, you might well find this adequate for project management, tracking suppliers, sales outreach, etc.

That said, Notion isn't perfect for everything. Here are some cases where there are good reasons to pick other tools, and how to handle that:

• If you're working with people outside your company, they may be more familiar with Google Docs.
• If you need rich formatting, visuals, complicated equations, spreadsheet cell-level commenting, visualisations, or other specialist features, then you're better off using the right tool for the job - whether that's Google Sheets, Miro, Linear, or something else.
• If you do pick another tool for a task, take the extra moment to leave breadcrumbs back and forth:
  • Add a link from the Notion project page to the external tool
  • And add a link from the external tool back to the Notion project page.
• The Notion collaborative editing experience isn't quite as fast or seamless as Google Docs, though in practice it works well enough - even for an Idea Stampede!
• Notion has an API, but it doesn't seem to be a high priority for them. There are some features that you can do in the interface but can't do with the API. It's also quite low-level. So if you want to interface with your content programmatically, you may be better off with something else.
• Sharing - the Notion sharing model is well-designed but works differently from Google Docs, and takes a little getting used to. The key thing to remember is that it's hierarchical. So if you share a page, any pages underneath it will also be shared with the same people.
  • Default to making all pages across all teams visible and editable to anyone in the company. You have to trust that people won't randomly delete or edit pages in other teams' areas without good reason. The benefits far outweigh any minor risks.
  • Of course there are exceptions to this. For example, HR policies might be read-only. And if you have particular sections that need to be private, e.g. for the senior management team, then you may want to create those in separate workspaces to avoid accidentally making them public to the whole company.

When choosing tools, there's a tension - we want sharp tools specialised and honed for particular tasks, but there are powerful network effects to having everything in a central place. Notion is a good choice for that central place because it's the best or second-best way to store many different kinds of knowledge, and it provides hooks into lots of other systems. And for network effects, people start to unlock its richness as they use it more frequently, and the AI search becomes more useful when it has more to work with.

Setting up a single default glue system for your team's knowledge saves time and, more importantly, reduces friction, freeing us up to have better ideas, insights, and collaboration.

Postscript - but what if we're already using Google Docs (or similar)?

Maybe you already have years of stuff stored in Google Docs and Drive. Is it worth the effort to migrate? How do you convince everyone else?

In most of the cases I've been involved with (usually a senior role within smaller startups) the benefits of migrating outweigh the costs, but your mileage may vary.

On making the decision to migrate:

• As the ancient Chinese knowledge worker proverb goes, the best time to plant a Notion knowledge base was years ago, but the second best time is now.
• Being an agent of change depends on having trust and credibility. You need to invest in building relationships, otherwise your proposals for change will be resisted.
• Any such company-wide migration needs to be driven top-down. So if you don't have buy-in from the CEO/CTO, and at least some willingness from the rest of the C-suite, then this won't work.
• Start by trialling Notion within a single small team. Build up expertise, and assess whether you think it's the right move for your company. Later on, it will help to have a positive, concrete example, to have advocates within your team, and for others to see the benefits you're getting from it.
• I don't recommend a company-wide discussion before making a decision, since this rarely adds information and may entrench positions. Instead, make the decision top-down, but then be proactive about communicating why, training, and helping people to address blockers.
• It really helps to do a short, sharp burst, because otherwise you'll quickly lose momentum. Straddling two systems is miserable, because you'll be constantly battling with finding stuff that could be in either. If the migration peters out half-finished, it'll be much harder to convince people a second time to try the switch.

Once you've decided to migrate:

• Set up critical integrations, e.g. Slack, Google Drive. Having a good system for using AI to transcribe meetings and inject them into Notion is a particularly big win.
• Arrange an all-hands session focused on this topic:
  • Ask one or two senior leaders to introduce it, giving reasons for the change.
  • Give a short tutorial on the most important things people should know about using Notion, emphasising basic editing, and organising pages in the hierarchy, and the AI chatbot.
  • Then spend the next half hour collectively doing some wiki-gardening, perhaps broken into teams. Each team should set up its own area, agree on how to structure things, and populate it with a handful of key pages to make it easier for people to figure out where things should go.
  • Ask each attendee to process a handful of Google Docs that are in active use. Copy and paste the contents into a new Notion Doc, create a banner at the top of the old Google Doc linking to the new Notion doc, and delete the old contents (or highlight them in red). It's important to burn your bridges in this way, and to add breadcrumbs signposting the way - this way, you'll avoid confusion and edits to both versions.
• Over the next few weeks, spend a couple of minutes in each all-hands meeting providing Notion tips. Half the barrier to adoption is overcoming the feeling of clumsiness and unfamiliarity with the new tool.
• You'll still have lots of old Google Docs that you reference occasionally. The rule, enforced by management, should be to migrate old docs over to Notion as you notice them.

Within a couple of months, almost all the Google Docs in active use will have been moved, the habits will be ingrained, the benefits become visible, and you can move on as a company to higher-value questions.