Notion AI: Three Months In — The Honest Productivity Report
I went into this experiment genuinely hoping Notion AI would be useful. I already used Notion heavily for project management, notes, and documentation. Adding AI capabilities to a tool I already lived in seemed like it should be a natural win.
Three months later, the reality is more nuanced than I expected.
What Actually Saved Me Time
The "Improve writing" feature is legitimately good. I write a rough draft, highlight it, hit "Improve writing," and usually get something that's 70-80% closer to what I actually wanted without needing to do a complete rewrite. For internal documentation where good-but-not-perfect writing is sufficient, this is a real time saver.
The summarization feature works well for long meeting notes. Dump a wall of bullet points from a meeting into Notion and ask AI to summarize the key decisions and action items — you get a clean, usable summary in seconds. This alone probably saves me 15-20 minutes per week.
Action item extraction is similarly useful. Paste in messy notes and ask it to extract all the tasks mentioned. Not perfect, but good enough that I use it regularly.
Where It Disappointed Me
The brainstorming and content generation features are weak compared to just using ChatGPT directly. If you type a prompt into Notion AI expecting ChatGPT-quality output, you'll be disappointed. The responses feel less thoughtful and more templated.
The "Find in Notion" AI search is still pretty bad. In theory, you should be able to ask it questions about your own documents and it finds the answer. In practice, it often returns wrong or irrelevant results. I've mostly given up on this feature.
The AI also doesn't seem to have any memory across your workspace. It can't connect information from different notes or notice that you've asked about the same topic before in a different context.
The Pricing Question
Notion AI costs $10/month per member, on top of Notion's existing pricing. If you're a solo user on the free plan, that's a significant add-on.
Is it worth it? For heavy writers who live in Notion, probably yes. For project managers using it mainly for task tracking, probably not.
My Actual Workflow
I use Notion AI for three things: cleaning up rough drafts, summarizing long notes, and quickly generating first-draft outlines when I'm stuck staring at a blank page. For everything else, I switch to ChatGPT.
The tool works best when you already have content to work with, not when you're trying to generate content from scratch.