It's been a year since 10X adopted Notion as our document tool. Our document-based communication has only gotten stronger since then, and I've even started hosting this personal website through Notion.

In that time, I've noticed something: there's plenty of content out there about how to use Notion, but very little about why Notion specifically. I want to try to articulate that from my own experience. To explain Notion's value properly, you first have to think about what a good document system should be — and that's what this post is about.

I'll also cover how we actually use Notion at 10X, where it shines, and the areas where it still has room to grow.

Before Notion: Dropbox Paper

We switched to Notion in December 2019 — exactly one year ago. Before that, we used Dropbox Paper as our company document system.

Looking back, Dropbox Paper's greatest strength was simply how good it was to write in. The experience of putting text on the page was satisfying in a way that's hard to explain — a beautiful interface, carefully considered fonts and margins. You could feel the care that went into making writing feel effortless.

Most modern work output takes the form of documents: contracts, terms of service, product specs, and so on. We write things down, share them, align thinking, use them as bases for discussion — collaborating through text to build something intangible. The quality of the writing experience really matters.

Three Axes That Define a Document System's Value

Writing quality is important, but it's only one component when you think about the full lifecycle of a document system — creation, distribution, and use. I think a document system breaks down into three elements, and its overall value is the product of all three.

The first is information stock capacity (how much information gets captured). The second is end-page quality (how readable and usable individual documents are). The third is approachability (how easy it is to find and retrieve information).

Dropbox Paper excelled at end-page quality. But it had problems with the other two. And Notion, while it has a steeper learning curve, surpasses Dropbox Paper as a total system because of how it handles all three.

We also evaluated other tools — Confluence, Kibela, Crowi, Qiita:Team, Docbase — but when I scored them honestly across all three dimensions, Notion came out on top.

Element 1: Information Stock Capacity = Increasing Information Reusability

In any organization, information naturally gets scattered: Slack, email, phone calls, meetings, whiteboards, spreadsheets. Pulling all of that together, refining it into high-quality assets, and making it reusable is a critical challenge.

At 10X, we call this "being open."

Consider Slack: millions of messages flow through it daily, and finding a specific thread later requires high search skill. Reusability is low. Verbal conversations leave no trace at all unless captured.

There's also the problem of tool fragmentation — when documents go in one place, comparisons go in spreadsheets, and task management goes in a kanban tool, information gets siloed and reusability suffers.

The key to improving reusability is breadth of expression — the ability to represent anything as a document. Notion is exceptional here. The flexibility I've seen in Notion is unlike any document tool I've used. That flexibility allows you to consolidate more types of information in one place, which means more gets captured.

Wide expression range → more information can be consolidated → more gets stored. That's Notion's first advantage as a document system.

Element 2: End-Page Quality = Increasing Information Intake Efficiency

The second element is per-page quality: readability and writability. How efficiently you can extract information from a single document matters a lot.

Note (a popular Japanese publishing platform) deliberately offers generous, spacious UI — designed especially for mobile, to make essays and personal writing feel pleasant to read.

Notion, by contrast, is positioned as a workspace for professional use. Its defining concept is the block — everything in Notion is made of blocks, and blocks are both its biggest advantage and its biggest barrier to entry.

(As a side note: whether Notion clicks for you largely depends on whether you can accept the block paradigm.)

The block is the basic unit of content — each line is a block, and each block can be transformed into almost anything. Once you get good at working with blocks, you can create documents that are actually more readable than Dropbox Paper.

The downside is writability — the learning curve for blocks is real. Someone used to Word would find Notion genuinely difficult to pick up. I found this out the hard way myself. It's one of Notion's persistent challenges.

Element 3: Approachability = Making Information Easy to Find

The last element is how easily people can reach the information stored in Notion day-to-day.

Notion gives you extraordinary freedom to build hierarchies — and that freedom creates entropy. Without discipline, layers and branches proliferate endlessly. Once you're in that state, information exists somewhere but nobody knows where. The cost of retrieval becomes high.

Preventing this requires defining and enforcing rules for how Notion is used — and that discipline is entirely on the users. Here's what we do at 10X:

• We maintain a usage guide for Notion that minimizes branching
• Top-level hierarchy changes can only be made by management
• We do regular cleanup passes

Notion is an extremely "software-like" product. For people who approach document systems the way they'd approach product development, it's the tool that makes approachability possible. The value compounds as you use it more deeply. But for someone new, building a good structure is genuinely hard.

A Best Practice: External Sharing + Slack Notifications

One Notion feature that's become central to how we work with partners is external sharing with Slack notifications.

For a given project, we create a shared page — a "project board" — that's accessible to both 10X and the partner. Any changes to that board trigger a Slack notification to our internal channel. We also use Zapier to route partner emails into a dedicated Slack channel.

The result:

• Partner-related documents are collected in one place
• Permissions are granular and controllable
• We get notified immediately when partners update anything
• Both sides can choose how they receive notifications — which consolidates "where to check" and improves approachability

Using Notion as a communication hub in this way has worked very well for project management.

Summary

As a document system that maximizes the product of all three elements, Notion is extremely powerful. The learning curve around blocks is real and worth acknowledging. But Notion's development velocity and feature depth are now in a class of their own — SSO for enterprise security, weekly feature updates, and the kind of consistent execution that only a well-capitalized, product-led-growth company can sustain.

For any organization that wants a tool they can trust for the long term, Notion is one of the most credible options available.