I Was Looking for a Project Manager and Ended Up Notioning It

For the last few months, I've been building projects by myself.

Some of them were small experiments, some became actual products, and some simply turned into things I wanted to put out into the world. I built and published my website. I worked on a client project. I started several other projects that are still somewhere between an idea and a finished thing.

The problem is that, at some point, I started losing track of all of them.

This is partly because my brain keeps jumping between projects. I can be deeply involved in one thing for a few days, suddenly become interested in something completely different, disappear into that for a while, and then come back to the first project without necessarily remembering where I left it.

This is particularly annoying with projects that are already published.

Whenever I want to work on one of them again, I sometimes find myself opening the repository and asking Claude Code to brief me:

"Okay, what is the current state of this project?"

Which is a rather ridiculous way to manage your own work.

So I decided that I needed a project manager.

The search

I immediately ruled out the usual suspects.

Jira was never really an option. It has always felt like too much for the kind of work I do, and, frankly, I've never particularly liked using it.

Then there was Trello. I had used it before, and my experience with it had never been particularly great.

I started looking at alternatives: Plane, Linear, ClickUp, and a few others.

They were all good products in their own ways. But I kept running into the same problem.

They seemed to have an idea of how I was supposed to manage my projects.

And I didn't want that.

I wanted something flexible.

I wanted to decide what a project meant to me, what information I needed to keep about it, how tasks should relate to features, how roadmaps should work, how I wanted to track time, and what I wanted to see when I opened the system.

Basically, I wanted a project manager that didn't have too many opinions about project management.

Which is probably a very unreasonable thing to ask from a project-management tool.

That's when I discovered Notion.

I didn't know Notion could do this

I've known about Notion for years, of course.

But somehow I had never really thought about it as a project-management system.

I started experimenting with it and got hooked.

What started as "let me see whether this could work" turned into an entire day of building.

I started creating databases: projects, clients, proposals, tasks, features, roadmaps, time tracking, invoicing. Then I started connecting them, creating different views, progress indicators, dashboards.

Then I started thinking about how the different pieces should relate to each other.

At some point I realized that I wasn't evaluating Notion anymore.

I was building my own project manager inside Notion.

And honestly, it was incredibly satisfying.

My brain loves novelty, but it also loves systems. Giving me an empty, flexible space and letting me figure out how everything should fit together is probably one of the most effective ways to make me disappear for an entire day.

Which is exactly what happened.

The rabbit hole

After spending the whole day doing this, I eventually had to admit that I was probably going down a rabbit hole.

I wasn't really solving my original problem anymore.

I was enjoying the act of designing the solution.

So I stopped and started looking for inspiration.

And that's when I discovered the Notion community and how rich it actually is.

There are people building incredibly sophisticated systems inside Notion, and there is something strangely enjoyable about seeing how other people structure their work.

Eventually I came across a template by Groundctrl that immediately felt right.

It was simple enough to understand, but structured enough to give me something to build on.

That was exactly what I had been looking for: not a rigid project-management methodology, not an enormous enterprise system, just a good starting point.

Why Notion makes so much sense to me

The more I use it, the more I think Notion is particularly well suited to freelancers and small teams.

Not because it is the most powerful project-management platform out there—it probably isn't.

But because it doesn't force a particular workflow.

You can start with a simple project database, then add clients, proposals, tasks, subtasks, whatever else you need.

Then suddenly you realize that your project-management system has become a small operating system for your work.

And you can stop there.

Or keep going.

That flexibility is particularly appealing to people who are opinionated about how they work.

And I am definitely one of those people.

I don't necessarily want someone else's idea of the perfect workflow.

I want my workflow.

For my projects, I wanted a system that adapted to how I worked, not one that made me adapt to it.

That's probably also why I became so obsessed with building my own version.

I wasn't just organizing projects.

I was designing a system that made sense to me.

The tool you actually need

Sometimes the right tool doesn't exist because what you're looking for is too specific to your workflow. Maybe you're opinionated about how things should work. Maybe you just want something simple and flexible. And that's okay.

Notion doesn't come with prescriptions about how you should work. It gives you space to build what you need. To say: "Here's what matters. Here's how I organize it. Here's what I want to see."

Most tools won't do that. They want to teach you their way. Notion sits back and says, "Build it however you want."

And that's powerful when you're opinionated about your workflow.