A tech journalist just cancelled her Notion subscription. Her reason? Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI tool, figured out how she takes notes and now handles the boring work for her. For Ghanaians paying for Notion or other note-taking apps, this story matters: you might not need to anymore.
The problem with fancy note-taking apps
The writer’s story sounds familiar. She spent hours building the “perfect” Notion setup with color-coded tags, linked dashboards, and custom templates. For two weeks it worked. Then it collected dust.
Why? Because during class, she was spending more time deciding where a note belonged and how to format it than actually listening to the lecture. By the time she’d filed one note, the professor had moved on. The system meant to help her learn was actually making her learn worse.
She needed something simpler: just dump messy notes somewhere, let AI clean them up later.
How Claude Code became her note-taking system
According to her account, she created a folder on her desktop and opened Claude in the terminal. The journalist reports that this approach eliminated the friction she experienced with traditional note-taking apps, allowing her to focus on capturing information during class rather than organizing it in real time.
The appeal of this method is straightforward: no menus to navigate, no clicking through options, no decisions about formatting while the teacher is talking. Just write during class, then process the notes afterward using AI assistance.
What this approach offers
The core advantage she describes is removing organizational decisions from the moment of learning. Instead of maintaining complex databases and templates while trying to follow a lecture, the system lets you capture messy notes first and structure them later.
This matches what many students struggle with: elaborate note-taking systems that require so much maintenance they become barriers to actually taking notes.
What this means for you in Ghana
If you’re paying for Notion (or considering it), here’s the practical angle:
- AI-assisted note-taking tools are available. Various options exist that can help organize unstructured notes after the fact.
- Lower friction can improve learning. Spending less time on formatting during class means more attention on the material itself.
- Simple systems may work better. A basic folder structure with AI cleanup might serve you better than elaborate database setups.
You don’t need a fancy app. You need a system that gets out of the way while you’re learning, then organizes everything after.
How to try this yourself
If you want to experiment with a similar approach: focus on capturing notes however works fastest for you during class, then use available AI tools to help structure and organize them afterward. The key is separating the act of note-taking from the work of note organization.
The writer reports she hasn’t opened her Notion notes section in days and cancelled her subscription. If you’re paying for a note-taking app mostly because it feels “proper” but you’d rather just write freely, this approach is worth testing first.
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