Notion isn't your second brain. It's a dumpster fire without adult supervision.

Notion doesn’t need love. It needs governance. It needs a boss.

Notion isn't your second brain. It's a dumpster fire without adult supervision.

Notion sells the dream: a clean, aesthetic workspace where all your teams collaborate in perfect harmony—roadmaps, wikis, onboarding guides, strategy decks—linked and synced like a Swiss watch. Every page is a beautiful cathedral of productivity.

Reality? What you get is a graveyard of stale docs, competing templates, and ghost-town sidebars filled with forgotten QBRs and broken promises. People get excited about Notion for three weeks. Then they abandon it like a New Year’s resolution gym membership.

Here’s the truth no one tells you: Notion doesn’t scale without structure. It’s not a magic knowledge platform. It’s a blank canvas that turns into digital landfill the minute you let multiple teams in without a grown-up at the wheel.

Notion isn't broken. Your org is.

The problem isn’t the tool—it’s the absence of governance. Notion works beautifully for a 3-person startup. But the minute you let marketing, product, and sales touch it without rules? The whole thing implodes.

Here’s the lifecycle of a Notion workspace without adult supervision:

• Phase 1: Wow, this is amazing!
  One team sets it up. It’s elegant. Pages are clean. Templates are shared. Everyone loves it.

• Phase 2: Wait, can we use this too?
  More teams pile in. The sidebar explodes. Everyone brings their own flavor of chaos.

• Phase 3: Who’s in charge here?
  Suddenly you’re dealing with 17 admins, all fighting over whether the sales wiki should use emojis.

• Phase 4: This is a mess.
  Nothing’s updated. Pages contradict each other. The search function becomes an archaeological dig.

• Phase 5: Burn it to the ground.
  Someone proposes migrating to Confluence. Again.

Notion doesn’t turn into a mess. Your organization lets it become one.

“But our Notion is fine…”

Sure. For now.

Notion is like a compost bin: if you don’t actively manage it, it doesn’t just rot—it smells. The same people who treat it like a digital sanctuary end up rage-slacking, “Where’s the latest version of the onboarding flow?”

The worst part? Everyone assumes someone else is managing it.

• IT assumes product owns it.

• Product thinks ops has it.

• Ops gave it to the intern who’s now at Duolingo.

• The only person actually maintaining it is the one who didn’t know they were “the Notion person” until you yelled at them for a broken page.

Notion doesn’t need another evangelist. It needs a managing editor.

Let’s stop pretending Notion will self-organize. It won’t.

It’s not an AI. It doesn’t know which roadmap is the real one. It doesn’t know which onboarding doc is current. It doesn’t know which pages need to be archived. It just holds whatever trash you throw at it and politely lets you search for it later.

What it needs is a governance model, just like any other critical business system.

Here’s what that looks like:

• 1 content lead
  The person who says, “No, we don’t need 8 different project templates.” Think managing editor, not IT admin.

• 1–2 workspace admins
  They handle access and permissions, not page structure. Think sysadmin with taste.

• Team-level stewards
  Every department gets one. They clean up their own mess. They know what’s current and what’s not.

• An exec sponsor
  Without one, this turns into janitorial work. With one, it’s operational strategy.

You don’t need more templates. You need authority and a trash can.

If IT owns Notion, it’s already dead.

Let’s be blunt: giving Notion to IT is like handing your brand voice to the cybersecurity team.

They’re great at managing risk and uptime. They are not great at content architecture, onboarding clarity, or why the QBR doc should not live in a folder called “Random.” IT doesn’t care if the company wiki makes sense. They care about SSO and password resets.

When IT owns Notion, it gets locked down and forgotten. You end up with a secure, compliant knowledge base that nobody reads.

IT thinks in systems. Notion needs editors. You do the math.

What makes a healthy Notion workspace?

Metrics. Governance. Reviews. Notion isn’t a “set it and forget it” tool. It’s a system that requires continuous tending. That means:

• % of content updated in the last 90 days

• Number of orphaned or outdated pages

• Average time it takes a new hire to find critical info

• Adoption by team (not just number of users, but % of active contributors)

If you’re not tracking these, you’re not managing a workspace—you’re hosting a digital flea market.

Don’t say yes to owning Notion without conditions

If someone dumps Notion in your lap (“Hey, can you just organize this?”), congratulations—you’re about to inherit a graveyard with no map.

Here’s what to demand before saying yes:

1. Decision rights: You can archive, rename, reorganize. If you don’t get that, walk away.

2. Exec backing: If nobody senior will back you, they’re not serious.

3. Time and support: This is work. If they won’t give you hours or headcount, it’s not a priority.

4. Mandate clarity: You’re not there to rewrite everyone’s pages. You’re there to build the system they work inside.

And if you don’t want it? Say this:

“Happy to contribute structure, but without authority and sponsorship, this is just a maintenance nightmare—and I’m not signing up for that.”

How to rescue your Notion before it implodes

If you're already knee-deep in Notion hell, here's the actual fix. It’s not sexy, but it works.

1. Run a full audit
   What’s stale? What’s duplicated? What makes zero sense? Tag it, archive it, kill it.

2. Define governance roles
   Name people. Give them titles. Write it down. No more “who owns this?” debates.

3. Standardize your structure
   Pick a format for policies, project plans, onboarding docs. Make templates. Enforce them.

4. Clean up access
   No more 40 admins. No more “Everyone at [company]” permissions. Lock it down.

5. Create a quarterly review rhythm
   Don’t let it rot again. Book calendar time. Make it part of planning cycles.

6. Announce the new rules
   Notion is now a governed platform. Not a free-for-all.

You can’t scale knowledge without gatekeepers. Notion’s beauty is the trap. Structure is the savior.

Final thought: You don't need another productivity tool. You need boundaries.

The problem isn’t Notion. It’s the fantasy that your teams will magically organize themselves.

They won’t.

Notion’s greatest strength—its flexibility—is also its biggest risk. Left unmanaged, it becomes yet another place where knowledge goes to die.

If you want it to be a source of truth, not a source of suffering, give it the structure it needs:

• Assign roles

• Set rules

• Clean regularly

• Say no to chaos

And if nobody wants to own it? Don’t blame the tool. Blame your culture.

Every abandoned Notion workspace is a management failure, meaning a SharePoint admin gets their wings