Psychology of Notion — Why everyone is obsessed with it.
The 3 Psychological Key Principles that makes Notion so irresistable that people are having meetups for a note taking app.
Every productivity enthusiast be it Matt D’Avella, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank and so many more rave about Notion. It almost looks like a cult.
I have been using Notion for more than 4 years. And I took it as my personal responsibility to bring all my close friends to use Notion. I didn’t understand the compulsion until I understood the secret psychology behind Notion and what makes it so special.
Once you understand the psychology behind Notion’s brilliant design you will see why everyone is crazy about it.
Notion is
- a note-taking app
- a to-do list
- a CRM
- a project management tool
- a collaboration space.
And it’s not great at any of those things.
So why does Notion has this cult-like following?
Usually wanting to create something that appeals to everyone is a recipe for disaster but for Notion it worked out great.
The founders of Notion took the few things that are absolutely needed from apps like Microsoft Word, To-do ist, Evernote, Asana, etc, and scrapped out the rest.
Want more fonts? Nope.
You wanna choose colors? You only get 10.
And by doing this they distill a solution that was simple enough.
All that is great, but what’s so special about Notion that people are having meet-ups about a note-taking app?
How so many people are obsessed with it?
Well, this is because Notion is based on 3 Psychological Key Principles.
1. The IKEA effect.
People attribute a disproportionately higher value to things they build themselves.
Over the years I have created multiple templates that help me with my write-ups, travel, work, and note-taking. And The time spent creating those interlinked databases makes me value them more.
I have said multiple times on Twitter that my life is literally on Notion.
Other note-taking apps might have some cool features that do the work but it’s not something that’s truly yours.
The paradox of Notion is that often times you spend more time tweaking the template that makes you productive than actually being productive.
But when done right, without running after perfection, creating your own personal system on Notion brings you a sense of fulfillment. Like you have accomplished something.
And this brings us to the second principle that makes people obsessed with Notion.
2. Maslow’s Hammer
Once you have a tool that you are familiar with you wanna use it for everything. It’s a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool.
“Give a man a hammer & everything becomes a nail.”
Abraham Maslow wrote in 1966, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
And this is why people are solving every aspect of their lives with a Notion database.
3. The Metagame
The game about the game.
If Notion is the game. The Metagame is all the infrastructure around it like YouTube videos., dedicated templates, hacks, and meet-ups. Basically, everything that goes around the game and influences it.
There are tens of thousands of videos about the best Notion setup and templates for different areas of life. Entire companies like Super are around Notion.
And all of these things are doing free marketing for Notion. Interestingly, the way Notion makes money is also by following this principle.
Notion is used by most startups and big companies & the sneaky way they are using to get into these companies and have them pay for it is called product-led growth.
Notion wants people to use it for themselves and when these same people find a startup or join one. They would want to use the same app that they used to manage their daily lives.
Until now I have managed to make 2 agencies and 1 startup switch their entire workflow and management system to Notion.
Notion’s strategy is
Step 1: Take unproductive people.
Step 2: Make them so fucking productive that they find 10 startups.
Step 3: Sell Notion to all those startups.
Even after breaking every rulebook and checklist of startups, Notion has managed to check off the biggest of all,
“Making people addicted to their product”
These were the 3 key psychological principles that drive the success of Notion. What do you think about it?