How I Use Notion to Think Through Projects

Before a project becomes a design or a website, it has to exist somewhere less defined. A place where the shape can move a little. For me, that place is Notion. I don’t use it in a productivity sense — no dashboards, no complex systems. It’s more like an open table where I can lay things out before they become fixed.

I keep a working space in Notion for Circle Electrical. It isn’t polished. It’s just a loose stack of stages: discovery, customer definition, naming, visual identity, verbal identity, IA, prototypes. None of it is arranged to impress anyone. It’s simply the structure that makes sense while the project is still unfolding. If I need to move something, I move it. If a new layer appears, it gets added without ceremony. It’s a thinking space, not a deliverable.

A lot of the early work lives there. Sometimes it’s a single line that arrives before the rest — a potential top-level message, a phrase that might matter later. I collect those in one place because they don’t belong anywhere else yet. They’re too unformed for a document and too important to lose.

Other times I drop in a rough outline of a page just to see the weight of it. Not a wireframe — more like a vertical stack of ideas to test the order. A few days ago I shifted three sections in a homepage draft and the whole thing suddenly felt lighter, even though I hadn’t touched the design. Seeing that in Notion first saves me from forcing the structure later.

What I like most about working this way is that nothing feels final. There’s room for the project to breathe, to be messy, to contradict itself before the clearer shape shows up.

Notion holds all of that without asking me to tidy it. I can think in fragments, loops, half-ideas — the kind of early material that doesn’t survive in tools built for finished work.

At some point, the project moves out of Notion and into design. But even then, I find myself returning to it. It’s the place where the original logic lives — the thread that everything else is built on. When a design stops making sense, I usually discover the answer back in the structure I mapped when the project was still loose.

Notion isn’t the tool that makes the work happen. It’s the space that lets the work become clear enough to begin.

— Elia