Just stop for a moment and think. When was the last time Evernote created joy or snappy productivity in your life?

Evernote doesn’t and it wont.

So how many times have we tried to dump the elephant in the garbage? Many. The fundamental problem though is Evernote does everything. It does it all. How can anyone compete with such an incumbent? Truth be told though, Evernote does nothing well. It might support most functionality but it falls short almost every time.

Many times I tried to move away from Evernote to alternatives but it never worked, I always came back. There as no app that could do all of what Evernote could do. This exact reason though is what also made using Evernote miserable.

Finally though there is an alternative, notion.so and it isn’t green.

Notion is a full fledge information management system with many was to organize thoughts and data within pages. The exciting part of Notion is it moves past the basic concept of notes, journals, and tags.

The design philosophy of notion is clean and functional. There are no distractions and it gives you the ability to customize notes with different visual headers and add emojis to each page title. Their clean design mixed with iconography speak joy and excitement for an activity which now feels like shoveling elephant shit.

As I said earlier one of the major reasons I never dumped Evernote was because no other note taking app had the same amount of features. But this is also why Evernote sucks so bad. While it tries to do everything it ends up doing nothing well. Every feature of Evernote, even the fundamental core of storing knowledge and retrieving it is miserably slow.

Notion can’t do many things, you can’t take handwritten notes, you can’t manipulate photos once you import them just to name a few. And this limitation has lead to an even better overall experience for me because I use Notability for handwritten notes, and the native photo editor for manipulating photos. This lets me do what I need to do most: write, organize and find information. Plus I can enjoy the process.

Next up — how I migrated everything from the elephant and moved to Notion. Along with organizing information in a productive and fun way.

Dumping the Elephant 🐘 was originally published in Roger Roger on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.