Notion Is Too Complicated for Side Projects

The thing nobody says about Notion

Every Notion review eventually admits the same thing in different words: it can do anything, but that's kind of the problem. The polite version is "Notion has a learning curve." The honest version is that Notion makes you do a lot of work before you can do any actual work.

For large teams with a dedicated person managing tools and processes, that investment pays off. For a solo developer trying to ship a side project on evenings and weekends, it usually doesn't.

I'm going to walk through the specific ways Notion's complexity costs solo developers time, energy, and momentum. Not because Notion is a bad product. It's a good product that's poorly suited for a common use case.

Notion's template gallery is massive and browsable, which is part of the problem. The more you can customize, the more time you spend customizing instead of building.

The setup tax

Before you track your first task in Notion, you need to make decisions. A lot of them.

Do you want a single database for all tasks across projects, or separate databases per project? If separate, how do you get a unified view? If unified, how do you filter effectively? What properties do you need? Status, priority, effort, project, sprint, due date, assignee (even though the assignee is always you)?

Do you want a Kanban view, a table view, a calendar view, a timeline view? Each view needs its own filters and sorts. Should you set up templates for recurring task types? What about a project-level template so each new project starts with the same structure?

This is the setup tax. It's the time you spend building your project management system before you manage a single thing. For a team that will use the system for years, thirty minutes of setup is trivial. For a solo developer starting a weekend project, thirty minutes is a significant percentage of your total available time.

I tracked myself the last time I set up a Notion workspace for a side project. It took 47 minutes before I created my first actual task. I spent that time choosing a template, modifying it, adding properties, creating views, and arranging the sidebar. Forty-seven minutes of setup for a project I ended up abandoning two weeks later.

The maintenance burden

The setup tax is a one-time cost, right? You set it up, then you use it. Except that's not how Notion works in practice.

Notion workspaces need maintenance. Properties accumulate that you no longer use. Views get stale. Pages nest three or four levels deep and you forget what's where. The sidebar grows with every new project, and old projects just sit there, cluttering your workspace indefinitely.

Every few weeks, you feel the urge to reorganize. "I should clean up my Notion," you think. And you should, because it's genuinely getting harder to find things. So you spend an evening reorganizing pages, archiving old databases, consolidating views. You emerge from the reorganization feeling productive and accomplished.

But you didn't write any code. You didn't ship anything. You maintained your tool.

This is the maintenance burden, and it compounds over time. The more projects you create, the more your workspace grows. The more it grows, the more maintenance it needs. Solo developers have limited hours. Every hour spent maintaining Notion is an hour not spent building. This is project management setup fatigue in its most common form.

Contrast this with simpler tools. A markdown checklist in your repository needs zero maintenance. A Trello board needs occasional archiving. Even Linear, which has more features than Trello, requires almost no workspace maintenance because it was designed with opinionated defaults that don't need customizing.

The flexibility trap

Notion's marketing pitch is flexibility. "Build anything." "Your tools, your way." "The all-in-one workspace." For some users, this is genuinely attractive. For solo developers on side projects, it's a trap.

The flexibility trap works like this: because Notion can be configured in infinite ways, you're always aware that your current configuration might not be optimal. Maybe there's a better property structure. Maybe you should switch from a Kanban view to a timeline view. Maybe you need a separate database for bugs versus features.

This awareness creates a background process in your brain. While you're coding, part of you is thinking about whether your Notion setup is right. When you hit a friction point (a task that doesn't fit neatly into your property schema, a project that doesn't match your template), you feel the pull to stop coding and fix your Notion system.

On a team, the PM tool is someone else's problem. You use what's there. As a solo developer, the PM tool is your problem. And Notion makes sure you know it by offering unlimited ways to improve it.

I call this the "meta-productivity" problem. You're being productive about being productive. The tool becomes the project. I've talked to dozens of developers who recognize this pattern — and Indie Hackers threads about this come up regularly. Many of those developers have Notion workspaces with elaborate project management systems that track zero active projects.

When you can build anything, you build the tool

This deserves its own section because it's so common among developer users of Notion.

Developers love building systems. Give us a flexible platform and we'll create something with it. Notion is a flexible platform. You see where this goes.

I've seen solo developers build Notion systems with:

• Project databases linked to task databases linked to bug databases
• Custom formulas calculating velocity, burn-down rates, and estimated completion dates
• Rollup properties computing percent complete from sub-task status
• Relations connecting projects to goals to quarterly OKRs
• Templates that auto-populate twelve properties and three linked databases

All for projects they work on alone, on nights and weekends, for no paying customers.

These systems are impressive as systems. They are terrible as productivity tools because they took days to build and minutes to outgrow. The developer's needs changed, the system didn't flex the right way, and instead of adapting their work, they adapted the system. More time spent on Notion. Less time spent on code.

The best workflow for solo developers is one that takes almost no time to set up and imposes constraints rather than offering options. You don't need a flexible tool. You need a directive one.

The psychological cost of unlimited options

Barry Schwartz wrote about the paradox of choice in consumer behavior, but the principle applies directly to tool configuration. When you have twenty ways to organize your project in Notion, you spend cognitive energy evaluating those options. That energy is finite. It comes from the same pool you use for making architectural decisions, debugging problems, and writing clean code.

Decision fatigue from tool configuration is real and underappreciated. By the time you've decided on your database structure, chosen your views, configured your properties, and set up your templates, you've burned through a meaningful chunk of your daily decision-making capacity. On a team, this cost is spread across people and amortized over time. For a solo developer working in two-hour evening sessions, it can consume your entire productive window.

This is why opinionated tools outperform flexible ones for solo developers. When the tool makes decisions for you, your cognitive budget goes entirely toward your actual project. You don't choose how to organize. The tool organizes. You build.

Simpler alternatives that actually work

The specific alternative depends on what you actually need, so let me break it down.

If you need task tracking and nothing else, a markdown file in your repository is free, requires zero setup, lives next to your code, and never needs maintenance. A TODO.md with checkboxes is ugly and effective. It won't win any design awards. It will track your tasks without stealing your time.

If you need a visual board with minimal overhead, Trello gives you columns and cards with almost no setup. Its limitations, discussed in detail in our Trello review, are real but different from Notion's. Trello is too simple for complex projects. Notion is too complex for simple ones.

If you need project management that actively helps you ship, tools designed for solo developers exist. FoundStep trades flexibility for constraints: scope locking, idea validation, and shipping accountability. You can't spend hours configuring it because there's nothing to configure. The workflow is prescribed. That's the point.

If you need documentation alongside task tracking, consider using two tools. Keep your docs in Notion (it's genuinely good at docs) and track your project in something simpler. This sounds like more tools, but it's actually less overhead because each tool does one thing without trying to do everything.

The side project reality check

Here's the uncomfortable truth about side projects and tool selection.

Most side projects take less than 100 hours of actual building time. Many take less than 50. The scope, even for ambitious projects, is smaller than you think when you strip away the scope creep and the over-engineering.

For a project that will take 50 hours to build, spending 5 hours on project management setup represents 10% of your total effort. That's an enormous overhead for a tool that's supposed to save you time.

Notion's setup cost, plus ongoing maintenance, plus the time lost to reorganization and system-building, can easily reach that 5-hour mark. For enterprise teams working on multi-year projects, that's nothing. For your side project, it's a week of evening sessions spent on something that isn't your product.

The math doesn't work. The tool needs to cost less attention than it saves. Notion, for most side projects, fails that equation.

Recognizing the pattern in yourself

If any of these sound familiar, Notion might be too much for your projects.

You have Notion pages nested three or more levels deep. You've redesigned your workspace more than twice in six months. You've watched more than two YouTube videos about Notion productivity systems. You have databases with properties you've never filtered on. You've spent a weekend "migrating" to a new Notion template. You feel guilty about how messy your Notion sidebar is. You have a "Notion cleanup" task on your to-do list, which is stored in Notion.

These are symptoms of a tool that demands more from you than it gives back. They're not failures of discipline. They're predictable outcomes of using an infinitely flexible tool without a team to absorb the complexity.

What I'd recommend instead

If you're starting a new side project today, here's what I'd actually suggest.

Open a text file. Write down what you're building, what features version 1 needs, and a rough timeline. Use checkboxes for tasks. Put this file in your project repo.

If you want something more structured, use a tool that prescribes a workflow rather than asking you to build one. FoundStep's approach of locking scope, validating ideas, and tracking shipping behavior requires almost no setup because the system is already designed. You fill in your project, not your project management system.

If you must use Notion, treat it as a docs tool only. Write your project spec there. Store your research there. Keep your notes there. But track your tasks somewhere that doesn't tempt you to spend an evening organizing them.

The goal is to spend your limited time on the thing you're building. Not on the thing you use to track the thing you're building.

When Notion still makes sense

Notion isn't wrong for everything. It works well as a documentation tool, a content planning hub, and a knowledge base. If your work is organizing information, Notion is excellent. The problem is using it as a shipping tool for software projects — that's where the mismatch creates real cost.

For side projects with significant documentation needs (specs, research, reference docs), keeping Notion for docs while using a more opinionated tool for project tracking is a reasonable split. See our Notion for solo developers review for a detailed breakdown of what it does well.

The bottom line

Notion is too complicated for most side projects. Not because it's badly designed, but because it was designed for a different scale of work. Its flexibility is a genuine strength when you have the time, team, and need to exploit it. For solo developers with limited hours and a single project to ship, that flexibility creates more problems than it solves.

The best tool for your side project is the one you'll spend the least time thinking about. Notion, by its nature, asks you to think about it constantly. That's a cost you can't afford when you're building alone.

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Why is Notion overkill for side projects?

Notion requires significant setup before you can track a single task. Databases, properties, views, relations, and templates all need configuration. For a side project with 10-15 tasks, this overhead costs more time than it saves.

Is Notion too complicated for simple task management?

For simple task management, yes. Notion was designed as a flexible workspace that can do anything, which means it requires decisions and configuration before it does the specific thing you need. Simpler alternatives like Trello, Todoist, or purpose-built solo developer tools get you working faster.

What's a simpler alternative to Notion for developers?

It depends on your needs. For pure task tracking, Todoist or a markdown file in your repo. For solo project management with scope control and shipping accountability, FoundStep. For team issue tracking, Linear. All of these get you productive faster than setting up a Notion workspace.

Should I use Notion for a weekend project?

No. The setup time alone would eat a significant portion of your weekend. Use a plain text checklist, a simple Trello board, or any tool that requires zero configuration. Save Notion for projects where you actually need a knowledge base or documentation hub.

How do I know if Notion is too much for my project?

Ask yourself: am I spending more time organizing my Notion workspace than working on my project? If yes, Notion is too much. If your project has fewer than 30 tasks and doesn't need a wiki or documentation system, you probably don't need Notion.