For three years, I was a power Notion user. Databases, templates, linked pages—the works. But something kept nagging at me: latency. Every action took 400ms to render. Every search required a round trip to the cloud. And when I needed to jot down a quick thought while my train went through a tunnel, Notion was useless.
The breaking point
Last December, I was in the middle of debugging a production incident. I opened Notion to check my runbook and got a spinning skeleton loader for eight seconds. By the time the page loaded, I had already fixed the issue from memory. That's when I realized: my "productivity system" was adding friction, not removing it.
I decided to move everything to local Markdown files. No cloud dependency. No loading spinners. Just Cmd+N, type, Cmd+S.
The migration
Moving from Notion to Markdown wasn't a direct export. I had to rethink my entire note-taking taxonomy:
- Databases became folders. Each Notion database got a directory. Items became files.
- Linked pages became relative paths.
[Reference](./project/design-doc.md)replaces cryptic UUID links. - Templates became snippets. I use VS Code snippets instead of Notion's template buttons.
The migration took about six hours spread over a weekend. I wrote a quick Python script to export Notion pages to Markdown (Notion's native export is surprisingly good). Then I manually reorganized the output folder by folder.
What I gained
The switch wasn't just about speed. Local Markdown files unlocked capabilities I didn't have with Notion:
- Full-text search via ripgrep is faster than any SaaS search I've used. Results in under 100ms even across thousands of files.
- Version history via Git gives me diffs. I can see exactly what I changed in a note three weeks ago.
- Offline-first by default. No internet? No problem. My notes are always available.
- Future-proof format. Markdown isn't going anywhere. My notes won't be trapped in a proprietary database.
"The best notes are the ones you can actually access. 100% uptime requires 0% cloud dependency."
What I lost
To be fair, there are things I miss about Notion:
- Inline databases were genuinely useful for tracking projects with multiple status fields.
- Collaboration is harder with Git than with Notion's share button. My partner still uses Notion for shared grocery lists.
- Mobile editing isn't as polished. Working Copy on iOS works, but it's not Notion-smooth.
My setup now
If you're considering the switch, here's the stack I landed on:
- Obsidian for daily note-taking and graph view (I don't use the sync service)
- VS Code for writing and editing Markdown files with formatting
- iA Writer for distraction-free writing of longer posts
- Git + GitHub for backup and version history across machines
- buildnscale Markdown Notes for quick capture during work hours
# Quick grep across all notes
rg -l "incident-response" ~/notes/
The setup isn't as visually polished as Notion, but it's dramatically faster. And after three months, I can confidently say: I'm never going back.
