David Neira is an official Notion Ambassador and the founder of NotioStore, where he builds custom Notion operating systems for architecture, construction, and interior design firms. He run 40 Notion Setup Sessions per week and writes here about making Notion hold up under real client work.
You signed up excited. You’d seen the screenshots, those beautiful colour-coded dashboards that made your own scattered mess look solvable. Then you opened Notion, and there was a blank page, a blinking cursor, and no idea what to do next. A week later you hadn’t been back, though the guilt of the abandoned tab lingered.
If Notion feels overwhelming, you’re not failing at it. You’ve run into the exact thing that makes it powerful and, at first, miserable: it will do almost anything, which means it does nothing until you tell it what. Every tutorial shows you someone else’s finished mansion, and you’re standing in an empty lot holding a single brick. The fix is the opposite of what you’d expect. It isn’t learning more of Notion. It’s deliberately ignoring almost all of it.
The obvious cost is the money and hours you’ve already sunk trying to “get” Notion. The course you half-finished. The £40 template with two hundred pages you opened once and closed forever. The evenings watching videos of other people being productive instead of being productive yourself. That’s real spend, and it bought you a feeling of falling behind.
The bigger cost is the problem you never solved. You came to Notion because something was broken: work scattered everywhere, no idea what’s due, chaos you wanted to tame. While Notion sits abandoned, that chaos is still running, still costing you exactly what it cost before. The overwhelm didn’t just waste your setup time. It left the original fire burning.
And there’s the quiet one: you’ve started to believe the problem is you. That you’re “not organized enough” or “not a systems person.” You’re not. You were handed a workshop full of tools and told it was a finished product, and then felt bad when it didn’t assemble itself. That’s a setup problem, not a you problem.
Most apps are a finished thing. A to-do app opens to a to-do list. A calendar opens to a calendar. They decided what they’re for, so you don’t have to. Notion decided almost nothing. It’s a toolkit, not an appliance, and it hands you the raw materials plus infinite freedom, which is thrilling for about ninety seconds and paralysing after that.
Freedom is the whole problem. When anything is possible, no single next step is obvious, so you freeze. It’s the blank-page feeling every writer knows, except the page can also become a database, a calendar, a wiki, a dashboard, and a dozen other things, all shouting their potential at you at once.
On top of that, the internet shows you Notion at its most elaborate. The dashboards that go viral are the maximalist ones: forty databases, formulas stacked on formulas, dark-mode dashboards that look like a spaceship. That’s not the starting line. That’s someone’s third year of tinkering, and comparing your empty page to their finished cockpit is the fastest way to quit. The people running calm, useful Notion setups mostly built something small and boring, and then stopped.
Here’s the reframe that ends the overwhelm: you don’t need to learn Notion. You need to solve one problem. Notion is just where you’ll solve it, and you only ever need the five percent of it that the problem requires.
So pick the one thing that annoys you most right now. Not your whole life. One thing. “I never know what I’m supposed to do today.” “I can’t find anything.” “I don’t know who owes me money.” Then build only that, as small as it can possibly be. One simple table, a few columns, done. Everything else in Notion stays invisible until a real need pulls it in.
The other half of the fix is subtraction. When you first open Notion it comes cluttered with sample pages and suggestions. Delete them. Start from one page with your one thing on it, and let your sidebar stay almost empty. An empty sidebar isn’t a sign you’re behind; it’s a sign you haven’t added anything you don’t yet need.
Then use that one small thing for two weeks before you add anything else. Let need be the only reason you ever reach for another feature. When you find yourself thinking “I wish I could also see these by date,” then, and only then, you add a calendar view. Features earn their way in by being needed, never by being available. That’s how the calm setups get built, one actual need at a time. If you want to understand the single building block that underpins nearly everything, it’s the database, and honestly that’s the only concept worth learning up front.
Here’s the honest part most Notion articles won’t tell you: it isn’t for everyone, and overwhelm is sometimes a real signal rather than a beginner’s hurdle.
If you try the start-small approach, genuinely try it, and Notion still feels like friction every time you open it, that’s useful information. Some people think better in simpler, opinionated tools that made the decisions for them, and there is nothing wrong with being one of them. Forcing yourself to use Notion because it’s popular is its own kind of waste.
And some needs are just too simple to justify it. If all you want is a grocery list or a single reminder, a plain notes app will beat Notion every time. The goal was never to use Notion. The goal was to solve your problem. If a simpler tool solves it, that’s a win, not a failure, and you can close the guilt tab for good.
Where Notion genuinely earns its place is when your problem has moving parts that connect, work tied to clients, tasks tied to projects, the sprawl that comes from juggling too many tools at once. If that’s your situation, the overwhelm is worth pushing through, because there’s a real payoff on the other side. If it isn’t, you’re allowed to walk away.
Don’t build a system today. Do something smaller than that. Write one sentence: the single problem you most want to fix. That sentence, not any dashboard, is the cure for the blank page, because it tells you the only thing you need Notion to do this week.
Then build just that one thing, as plainly as possible, and use nothing else. Two weeks from now you’ll have one small setup that actually works, which is worth infinitely more than the elaborate one you never finished. Everything good in Notion grows from one brick that you actually laid.
If you’d rather skip the overwhelm entirely and have that first working setup built for you, so you start from something that already fits your business instead of a blank page, book a discovery call and we’ll set it up together.
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Built for the businesses that build everything else.
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