It started, as these things do, with a feeling. I was staring at my Notion workspace — 240 pages deep, six nested databases, a web of relations so intricate I'd forgotten what half of them were for — and I felt tired. Not tired like a long day. Tired like the tool had become the work. I was spending more time maintaining the system than the system was saving me.

So I did what every productivity blogger eventually does: I threw it all out and went to the opposite extreme. For one full year, I ran my entire life from plain text files. Here's what happened, what I learned, and why I eventually came crawling back to Notion — though not to the same Notion I left.

The Case for Plain Text

The argument for plain text is almost philosophical, and it goes like this: a .txt file will open in 2050. Notion might not. Your markdown notes will outlive every app you've ever installed. Plain text is the only format that is simultaneously human-readable, machine-readable, future-proof, and utterly portable. It has zero lock-in, zero dependencies, zero corporate overlords who might pivot to enterprise SaaS and abandon you.

This is all true. I believed it deeply. I still believe it. The problem is that "true" and "sufficient" are different words.

What I Built

My plain text system lived in a single folder called notes, synced across devices with a git repository. The structure was flat on purpose — no nesting beyond two levels. Every note was a markdown file. I used a lightweight editor (first VS Code, later Obsidian in "no database" mode) and a CLI search tool (ripgrep) to find anything.

The categories were simple:

This felt clean. For about three weeks, it felt like the cleanest thing I'd ever built.

What Worked

Speed

Opening a file is instant. There's no loading state, no "syncing," no waiting for a database query. I typed rg "dentist" and had my answer in 12 milliseconds. Notion, by comparison, often took 3–8 seconds to return search results, and sometimes forgot what I was searching for mid-query.

Ownership

My notes were mine. No subscription, no API rate limits, no worry that a feature I relied on would be paywalled next quarter. I could grep them, script them, pipe them into other tools. I wrote a 20-line Python script that generated a weekly summary from my daily files. It felt powerful in a way Notion never had.

Honesty

Here's something I didn't expect: plain text made me write more. When there's no formatting toolbar, no template, no property fields to fill in, the friction of starting a note drops to nearly zero. I opened a file and started typing. My journaling depth increased noticeably. I wasn't performing for a pretty database view — I was just writing.

What Broke

Structure Decay

By month four, the flat structure I'd so carefully designed began to rot. Files accumulated in inbox.md that never got sorted. Project notes multiplied. I'd search for something and find three files with nearly identical names, each containing a slightly different version of the same information. Notion's databases had, without my realizing it, been enforcing a discipline I now lacked.

Relational Memory

The thing Notion does that plain text genuinely cannot is relationships. In Notion, a meeting note could link to the project it was about, the people who attended, and the task it generated — and I could query any of those directions. In plain text, I could link with [[wiki-links]], but there was no reliable way to ask "show me every task from last month tied to the website redesign." I tried. I wrote scripts. The scripts worked, sort of, but maintaining them became its own form of the work-the-tool problem I'd fled Notion to escape.

Mobile

On a phone, plain text is a disaster. Every app is a compromise: slow sync, awkward editing, no quick-capture that matches the desktop flow. I stopped capturing notes on the go because the friction was too high, which meant I was losing the fleeting thoughts that are the entire point of a capture system.

"The tool had become the work. I was spending more time maintaining the system than the system was saving me."

The Verdict After a Year

At the twelve-month mark, I audited my plain text setup. I had 1,847 files. I had opened maybe 300 of them in the last month. The rest were archaeological. My search worked, technically, but I no longer trusted it — I'd search for something and half-believe the result was incomplete.

The honest truth: plain text won on freedom and lost on structure. Notion had won on structure and lost on freedom. What I needed was not one or the other. I needed the structure where structure helped and the freedom where freedom helped.

Coming Back — Differently

I moved back to Notion in February. But I moved back with rules, and those rules are the actual takeaway of this entire year-long detour.

  1. Maximum two database levels. No more six-deep nesting. If a database needs a sub-database, the sub-database probably shouldn't exist.
  2. Journaling stays in plain text. The reflective, unstructured part of my system lives in markdown files. Notion is for things that benefit from structure — tasks, projects, references. The two systems talk via a single "today" page that links to both.
  3. No property I won't actually filter by. If I add a property to a database, I have to be able to name a view that uses it within a week, or it gets deleted. This killed about 60% of my properties.
  4. Weekly export to markdown. Every Sunday, I export anything I'd grieve losing. The future-proofing argument is real; I just don't need to live inside the export.

What I'd Tell You

If you're drawn to plain text because you're tired of your tool, the tool probably isn't the problem — your relationship with the tool is. Switching won't fix that. You'll just rebuild the same over-engineering in a new medium, the way I did. The fix isn't the format. It's a set of constraints you actually enforce.

That said: try it. Live in plain text for a month. You'll learn more about how you actually think in that month than in a year of refining a Notion template. The detour was worth it, even though I ended up where I started — because I no longer believe Notion is the answer. I just believe it's a decent tool, used with constraints, by someone who has now seen the alternative.

This is part of DaveLog's Tool Reviews series — long-term, real-use reviews of productivity tools, with no affiliate links and no sponsored content. If you've run a similar plain text experiment, I'd like to compare notes.