The Future of Work: 5 Ways Notion is Better Than Slack
Teamwork, leadership, and collaboration via a writing culture.
We’ve been using Notion at Tophatter for about 10 months now, and I was reflecting on the ways it has changed how we work (for the better).
To give context, our company barely uses email for communication as it is. We currently live off of Slack and Notion. If Slack is the current way of working, then Notion is the future way of working, leading, and collaborating.
In a nutshell:
The benefits we have learned thus far is that Notion makes teamwork more efficient, effective, iterative, collaborative, and surprisingly open to creativity and expression of ideas in writing, WHILE producing less stress and mental disruption.
(It’s not the best for actual real-time collaboration, but I’ll get into that later.)
What is Notion?
Notion is like a mashup of Google Docs and a wiki, with new age accoutrements like emoji, drag and drop, and the tag-ability of Twitter. But these are not new age fluff; they are part of the Alive Design that is key to the adoption and effectiveness of the tool as I will discuss further below.
Sidenote: In my personal life, I love Quip (which is now owned by Salesforce) but have not used it for team collaboration.
5 Ways Notion has helped us move fast effectively:
1. It’s easier to lead and get people on the same page.
2. There is less urgency and anxiety about being left out of real-time Slack conversations and impromptu decisions.
3. It’s a more coherent way of communicating: you get more substance and focus, yet it helps you move faster.
4. Alive Design means that people know the content is fresh and they are motivated to use it.
5. It gives space for substantive ideation.
Let me dive into why:
1. It’s easier to lead and get people on the same page.
“To figure out whether you really understand an idea, write it down. Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking.”
— Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author and Wharton professor
Notion makes it easier to get people on the same page, both at the high level AND also in the details. Being able to get people on the same page at the high level is important for leaders. Getting people on the same page on the details is additionally important for those building the product (like myself and my teammates), or anyone in roles of execution or operations.
Especially in a fast-moving, ever-evolving company and product culture, it’s hard to communicate effectively and make sure everyone knows why we’re doing what we’re doing and the latest decisions we’ve made.
I like to use the analogy of the Burning Man art car: you’re all in it together in this creative chaos, you can’t see that far in the dust storm, sometimes the wheels are barely on, and at any given moment people could fall off, but you still gotta still keep going and keep everyone on the art car.
Because Notion is a medium that lends to writing, it inherently gives more influence to the leaders and people who are good writers and able to communicate their ideas well through writing. Writing forces clarity of ideas and reasoning.
At Tophatter, our leadership and company culture is very open to trying new things that could substantially improve our work and the business. Our CEO Ashvin Kumar and VP of Engineering Matt Rubens led the way to get us to try Notion back in January. It was amazing that within 2–3 weeks, all of Product and Engineering were using it, and then the entire company soon thereafter. Both Ash and Matt are excellent writers, which helps drive a strong writing culture and inspires me to write more and improve my writing as well.
I’ve come to realize that writing as a leader allows you to scale direction and vision, and share ideas or strategy that might seem clear or obvious to you because you’ve been thinking and debating about it a lot, but are not necessarily clear to your teammates or others.
A writing culture is very different from a documentation culture. There is deeper written-out thought on the strategy and reasoning, on the “why” and “how this fits into the bigger picture” and “where we’re going.”
Jeff Bezos and Amazon folks are big proponents of their writing culture, and I can see why by living it myself. I feel like we’ve “leveled up” as a company now that we’ve started cultivating a writing culture at Tophatter. I used to think of writing about work mainly as something for CEOs or execs writing books (for an external audience) or people with cool insights like TED talk speakers or people with blogs (also for an external audience), or alternatively, that writing at work mainly comprised of cut-and-dried business requirements or “documentation.”
Our adoption of Notion and building a writing culture has shown me that you don’t need to be at the level of Jeff Bezos or Oprah or Arianna Huffington, or any of those bigwigs who write a lot. It’s useful for anyone who leads and works in teams at all levels.
You don’t even need to do six pagers like they do at Amazon. We do one pagers; sometimes we even do quarter pagers (thanks to our VP Engineering Matt for breaking down the mental barriers even further!). The important thing is to get ideas going in writing.
At startups, you often don’t feel like you have time to write much, but writing clear thoughts can save time down the road by getting people on the same page upfront and having written principles to guide debates and decision-making. Clarifying your reasoning via writing for any project is an invaluable skill to hone and practice. It seems obvious when I say that, but that power wasn’t apparent to me until I lived it this past year working in Notion, and having the space, tools, and encouragement to write a lot more.
2. There is less urgency and anxiety about being left out of real-time Slack conversations and impromptu decisions.
One issue we’ve discussed at our company in the past was that some people felt pressure and anxiety to constantly keep checking Slack and stay on top of all the channels. They didn’t want to miss out on Slack chats that led to impromptu decisions with whoever happened to be chatting in that moment. No one was intentionally trying NOT to include people. It was a by-product of being a nimble, fast-moving startup that survived off Slack and in-person conversations.
This might be more applicable to startups of our scale but it is also partially symptomatic of the chat medium. Surface-level ideas pop up in short snippets, or more substantive ideas can come out of real-time synchronous bouncing ideas off each other in Slack. Both can result in creative ideation and useful decision-making, but are limited by the attention span and shorter message length of the chat medium.
A medium like Notion allows the team to cultivate and communicate more thought-out ideas and reasoning. It also is more helpful for overall mental well-being when there is not as much anxiety and mental disruption to constantly check all your channels in case you’re missing out on important conversations (and jump in before a decision is spontaneously made). Since we’ve adopted Notion, we amazingly don’t seem to have this stress and anxiety anymore. 🙂
“Frazzled, exhausted,and anxious? Or calm, cool, and collected? These aren’t just states of mind, they are conditions caused by the kinds of tools we use, and the kinds of behaviors those tools encourage.”
— Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp which makes a group-chat app (from Nir Eyal’s book, Indistractable)
3. It’s a more coherent way of communicating: you get more substance and focus, yet it helps you move faster.
Instead of people wasting time constantly checking Slack to keep up with real-time conversations or to parse through disjointed back-and-forth conversations in Slack threads, Notion is a better way to communicate substance for faster digestion AND feedback.
The nature of Notion forces the writer to synthesize ideas into clear arguments or rationale. This makes the collaboration feedback loop much faster: the faster teammates and key collaborators can digest the strategy and thinking behind an idea, the faster they can give useful input or feedback.
Examples of how we collaborate in Notion:
- Writing and iterating on one pagers for new projects (problem/opportunity we’re addressing and why, how it aligns with current business goals/strategy, and potential solutions).
- Debating pros/cons on divergent product designs or prototypes.
- Summarizing experiment results and next steps to give company-wide visibility on product learnings and progress.
In Notion, we keep all relevant decisions and details in one place. It’s easy to point people to a specific sentence or paragraph since you can automatically link to any row in a page in Notion.
You’re probably thinking, “Yeah that’s great. That’s why we have Google Docs.”
True, Google Docs as a medium is similar to Notion in that regard, allowing for long-form writing and synthesis of strategy and results. We also used to rely on Google Docs (and we still use it, just not very much). However, Notion helps us move faster than we did with Google Docs, which brings me to my next point…
4. Alive Design means that people know the content is fresh and they are motivated to use it.
As described previously, Notion is like a new age mashup of Google Docs and a wiki, but a major differentiating point that makes Notion special is its Alive Design (as opposed to static design).
In wikis and Google Docs, the product design mentally feels static. Once it’s written, it’s done.
Notion, on the other hand, is like a living organism.
By Alive Design, I mean the culmination of all the features designed into the user experience that make it mentally easier to create and contribute, and thus keeping content fresh (keeping it “alive”), which then motivates people to keep using and contributing since they know others are using it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
In old school wikis, it’s more painful to create/edit/update/organize. The creation and contribution mechanisms are much more lightweight in Notion. It’s analogous to how it’s mentally more lightweight to send a WhatsApp message versus an email, or add a quick snap to Instagram Stories versus making a beautiful witty Instagram or Facebook post.
Examples of ways that Notion incorporates Alive Design:
- You can tag the names of people and titles of documents to show up inline.
- Ability to link to any specific line or section of text (you can link directly to a specific sentence).
- Drag and drop sentences/paragraphs within a doc, as well as to other docs.
- Duplicate paragraphs/sections within a page.
- Keyboard shortcuts for formatting, such as bullet points, divider lines, etc., and for inserting emoji.
- You can see who wrote or last edited each row/sentence and the date/time in any doc.
- Auto-complete search by name for docs.
- Anyone in the company can “Follow” any page to get notifications on edits, e.g. our Customer Support team follows one pagers for upcoming new features that might impact customers.
- You can “Favorite” pages to have it show up in your shortcuts sidebar (I use this often for current WIP (Work in Progress) projects and then un-Favorite when it’s done and use search when I need to find the doc again).
- You can create different custom templates to standardize and expedite your processes. We now use Notion for product development task tracking (in lieu of Asana, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, etc.). For anyone submitting tickets for features, bugs, or technical explorations, our VP Engineering Matt created a different mini-template for each type of submission, all embedded within the main generic ticket template.
- Archive page: This is a Tophatter thing that our VP Engineering Matt started. For any product/engineering doc, we like to keep only the latest relevant information on the page so that it’s free of clutter. For any now-outdated notes/discussions, we create a sub-page off the main page, name it “Archive,” and move all the old notes to this page (in case we want to reference previous debates and ideas).
All this Alive Design makes updating, writing, and collaborating faster and more seamless. The easier to update or change things, the more Alive Design it can be. It’s easier to keep it fresh.
I personally think that’s why many people had inherent mental barriers to using wikis for teamwork. It was more painful to create, update, and organize, than gave positive benefit. Lowering the mental barrier is key to being able to move fast. At startups, you don’t want to overinvest in writing when decisions change and evolve quickly. But if the tool helps you move faster and you know other people are using it and writing in it, then it doesn’t feel like a waste of time.
Emoji also add to the joy of creation and the fun alive design! Emoji are no longer just cute frivolous things you text to your BFFs, but are actually very prevalent in our work communications and writing. And yes one can write proper grammar and use emoji at the same time. Emoji doesn’t mean your writing degrades into “HEY IF U R INTO THIS IDEA💡✅, holla back 🗣📣with commentz!! 😜👀🔥😂✏️🤘💃🏻”
In Notion docs, emoji make it more fun to create and tell a story, easier to quickly scan and digest a document, and each Notion doc can have a main emoji symbol at the top of the page, which serves as a handy visual cue to quickly find and identify pages or projects.
I’d even venture to say that Notion almost makes it a joy to create 😂(which is not something I’d normally say about a work tool). That is, besides the times when words disappear off the page when you’re typing in Notion. But back to the main points…
5. It gives space for substantive ideation.
To build upon points #3 and #4:
Substantive communication + Alive Design = Substantive collaborative ideation
Before Notion entered our lives, we lived off Slack and Asana for product development communication at Tophatter. However, neither medium was ideal for substantive ideation. Ideas get easily lost in fleeting Slack chats of the moment, as well as in backlog tickets in Asana, JIRA, or other tracking systems.
A tracking system like Asana isn’t conducive to ideation by nature, either on an individual level or in collaboration with others. Asana’s “medium-form” medium makes it hard to write, read, format, and edit thoughts in a tiny ticket (and we ended up linking to a Google Doc for meatier projects anyway). The Alive Design is lacking, in terms of easy group-shaping and group-evolving of an idea. For us, the mental model for Asana was “baked ideas ready for product development.”
Slack is better for real-time, spontaneous ideation in the moment, but is not conducive to meaty ideas that are better asynchronously baked and evolved by different people at different times over time.
Notion, on the other hand, can be a playground of ideas.
Notion, by design, creates a mental model that revolves around synthesizing and evolving ideas. Notion’s long-form medium gives the physical and mental space to asynchronously evolve ideas, and the nature of the long-form medium beckons you to add more depth.
At the same time, Notion’s Alive Design makes it more lightweight and easier to collaborate at this deeper level. It’s functionally easier to read and edit in Notion than in a Slack thread or Asana ticket. Substantive thoughts from various individuals are easily combined to produce even better substantive team ideation for stronger product ideas.
This is a perfect tool for people like me, who as a product manager, can add value to the organization by synthesizing many moving parts and disparate pieces of information to get everyone on the same page about why we’re doing what we’re doing, what goals we’re trying to achieve and how we’re measuring against that, and ALSO by driving synthesis of good ideas from different people to brainstorm smarter product solutions that no one person would have come up with on their own.
The ability to effectively synthesize is especially leveraged in a fast-moving startup where constant change and changing decisions is our normal life.
Again, you might be thinking, “OK that’s great, Christina, but again, Google Docs!” Totally valid point — you can do asynchronous ideation in Google Docs. However, it doesn’t feel like a “living thing” like a wiki, which is important to cultivating the “evolving” part of “synthesizing and evolving ideas” mentioned above. A key differentiator is the Alive Design of Notion, which shapes the mental model of how people think about Notion as a “living thing” — where it is a space to evolve ideas because you know other people are constantly in there writing and updating. For us, Google Docs is very effective for commenting and editing off a draft during a short period of time, but then we didn’t usually go back to that document and keep working off of it.
Our mental approach to Notion is that we keep going back and working off of the docs.
For an example of how Notion helped us synthesize and evolve a substantive idea:
Example scenario:
- We had a new idea for a week-long special event called Tophatter Day (our own unique holiday inspired by the likes of Black Friday, Amazon Prime Day, Alibaba’s Singles Day etc.).
- Marketing team wanted to do this new special event for the first time.
- Product/Engineering team wanted to test new fun achievements/badges that were tied to a special event.
- Analytics team was exploring creative ways we could leverage customer segmentation, which all teams involved were interested in testing.
- AND we all had different ideas about what this event could be like!
The evolution looks something like this:
Step 1: Brainstorm by yourself. Everyone asynchronously adds different ideas to the Notion page on their own, over a time span of say a few days.
Step 2: Brainstorm together. People skim the doc before meeting. Then we meet in person to converge on the divergent ideas. Miraculously we all easily organically converge on a mashup of ideas, mainly because we’re aligned on the business goal and also our company culture encourages openness (“strong opinions, weakly held”).
Step 3: Strategy/Details. Product team writes a Notion one pager on the high-level strategy and business goals. Marketing writes a Notion doc for the marketing strategy and execution for push notifications, email marketing, in-app messages. Product and Engineering co-write the product development details, including decisions in collaboration with Design and Analytics. The Notion docs are easily linked together and we all cross-collaborate across these docs as we’re iterating. This includes updating Notion on the fly, as we change scope or decisions based on expected but unpredictable new factors to consider along the way.
Step 4: Ship the experiment. After an experiment or feature goes live, we still work off the same doc(s) and write about the progress and analysis/learnings. If it is something that gets positive traction, we build upon it with subsequent iterations in additional milestones (new Notion docs), including building upon the original Notion docs.
Step 5: Still “alive” even in the future. Whenever we mention Tophatter Day in our writing, we link back to these docs. Notion’s Alive Design makes it very easy to do so by allowing tagging document names inline.
This LinkedIn post below aptly captures the power of being able to effectively synthesize the best of everyone’s brains at fast-moving, scaling startups. Molly Graham (former COO of Quip; also Facebook, Google) says it so well:
And you don’t have to do it all by yourself! Tools like Notion help us synthesize while moving faster at breadth and depth.
But never fear, Old Collab Tools! TV isn’t dead, and email, Google Docs, and Slack are not going to die anytime soon either. One area that Google Docs is better at than Notion is real-time collaboration in the same document. Notion doesn’t handle that as well, though hopefully they’re working on it. Hence we use Google Docs for things like Team Retrospective, where 15 people are writing in the doc at the same time. In the end, we still need Slack and other forms of communication, including in-person collaboration of course, for actual buy-in and informal influence.
Recap on how Notion has helped us move fast effectively:
- It’s easier to lead and get people on the same page.
2. There is less urgency and anxiety about being left out of real-time Slack conversations and impromptu decisions.
3. It’s a more coherent way of communicating: you get more substance and focus, yet it helps you move faster.
4. Alive Design means that people know the content is fresh and they are motivated to use it.
5. It gives space for substantive ideation.
These are some thoughts on what the future of work could look like. Our company still lives off of Slack, in addition to Notion, and I believe the balance between the two has been better for both our operational efficiency AND our mental health. 😄 Notion makes you a better thinker and leader because through writing, you are forced to become more intentional, clear, and smarter with your strategy, decisions, and ideas.💡
“Good writing is clear thinking made visible.”*
Much gratitude to Angie Chang for feedback on drafts of this post.
*This lovely quote has been variously attributed to Ambrose Bierce, William/Bill Wheeler, and fortune cookies.
