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The 1-Sentence Journal That Replaced My Entire Notion System
I spent 3 years building a 47 database Notion second brain. It looked beautiful. It made me anxious and I never used it. Now I write one sentence a day in a $2 notebook. I have never been clearer.
My Notion system had 47 databases.
I had a database for tasks, a database for tasks linked to projects, a database for projects linked to goals, a database for goals linked to my life vision, a database for books linked to notes linked to highlights linked to evergreen notes linked to my second brain.
It had relations, rollups, formulas, gallery views, timeline views, and a dashboard with 12 widgets that showed me everything.
I spent 8 hours a week maintaining it. Updating properties, linking pages, cleaning tags, watching YouTube videos on how to make it better.
And I never once opened it when I actually needed clarity.
When I was anxious at 10 PM, I did not open Notion. When I had a big decision, I did not check my life vision database. When I wanted to know how I was really doing, I stared at a pie chart of tasks completed and felt nothing.
On January 14th, I deleted it. All of it. 3 years, 1,200 pages, gone. I exported to PDF first, so my ego would not panic, and I have never opened that PDF.
