Why I Dropped ChatGPT (and everything else) for Notion AI

What if I told you there was a way to use AI and actually get work done too?

This article is the first in a series on using Notion to accelerate your creative work. Removing friction, making life simpler, and buidling templates and systems to speed up your work. And let Notion AI handle the busy work so you can get to your life’s work.*

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TL;DR:

1. Ditch ChatGPT and other premium tools for one consolidated tool

2. Consolidation beats tabs. Research, drafts, and prompts in one workspace. Less copying. Fewer decisions. More writing.

3. The win isn’t model IQ. It’s proximity, your functional AI lives where the work lives, so switching cost disappears.

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I had a problem with shiny objects.

I try new things all the time, searching for the best tool, the best workflow. It’s so bad, my mentor** specifically banned new tools for September.

But this is not one of those times.

This is different.

This isn’t just incremental—it’s transformative compared to my previous leaky, cobbled-together system of multiple apps.

I’ve struggled with AI’s potential for years - it’s not about raw IQ

I’ve been using AI to accelerate my writing since GPT-2, using the OpenAI’s playground, way before they first launched Chat.

It’s promise even then was immense.

And that promise feels like it’s always been at the cusp of delivering. But for me as much as AI has helped it’s also slowed me down in many ways.

Chat windows like WhatsApp are terrible places to story information (parents on any school info groups will know what I mean).

My fiction became fragmented across way too many tools.

• Claude and ChatGPT have piles of ideals, plans and outlines.

• I had novel drafts in Reedsy’s free editor which I migrated to the AI-enabled (and paid) Novelcrafter.

• Perplexity for source-based AI answers.

• And I still had Notion for notes, saving bookmarks, ideas and quotes from the web.

I’ve been championing Notion at work to consolidate knowledge for years.

I architected a system used by 400+ health tech professionals from the CDC, PATH and many others around the world. Helping them share, consolidate and manage projects across continents and timezones.

AI’s promise isn’t it’s raw IQ.

But it’s value when properly integrated with actual work tools.

Enter Notion AI.

I’ve been bullish on Notion for years.

But it’s with a recent project to build a Second Brain for our company that I started to see the potential for my fiction.

This second brain is a store of all our company project knowledge. It helps me communicate and promote our company’s impact on projects I’ve never been involved with.

Then Notion integrated AI, powered by the same premium ChatGPT and Claude models (now available through a single Notion subscription).

And it’s right inside the app where I already do my work. Now I can draft faster with an AI that doesn’t hallucinate and can reference this second brain.

Not in another tab. No need to copy and paste between windows. Or connect and reconnect multiple tools.

Or heaven-forbid work in a chat-only model.

Not another chat window

Chatting is not the most efficient way to store information, structure it or build reusable prompts and templates.

But Notion can be.

I brought all my stories, all my chats, into one place and use one tool for ai-accelerated workflows. All without the friction of chat or multiple tabs.

I write out prompts in a separate page and refer to it in chat. That prompt is now reusable, has a version history, and Notion AI can improve it too.

Notion AI can:

1. Answer questions about your notes → Does my story make sense based on my outline?

2. Then do Deep Research using the web (Perplexity) → Give me a history of the Numbers gangs in South Africa

3. Finally analyze your draft with context (NotebookLLM) → which scenes can I strengthen with this “Short History of the Numbers Gangs?”

All while saving your notes for use again later

And now they’ve released Notion 3.0, with Agentic AI.

A builder bot that takes an instruction and does the grunt work inside your workspace, not just chat back.

Concrete time-saving things like:

1. Create a Characters database from my Road Trip draft and link it to Scenes.

2. Create a Locations database from place mentions and link those pages to the relevant Scenes.

The biggest learning curve and cost with Notion used to be knowing how to do this. Now it can do it for you → No more Novelcrafter.

Notion AI can now can build your Codex.

While you go make another coffee.

One Tool to Handle It All.

Notion isn’t perfect, and the “Lego of Software” can be a terrible time suck if you’re not careful. Over the years I’ve learned a few lessons on how to stay lean.

But I’ve lost too many stories forgetting which tool they’re in, or spent hours trying to find that one crucial chat where I solved a story problem.

“Reedsy was the latest one, right? Or was it Patreon? Or…”

No more.

1. All my chapters are in one place with automatic AI summaries.

2. Project management to visually track chapter status (Novelcrafter)

3. AI where I need it, not in separate chat windows (ChatGPT, Claude)

4. Character and location databases with references (Novelcrafter)

I can think clearly, create structured prompts, and get the AI to action them—all in one customized system.

AI works better with Context

Tiago Forte has a great video on how to better prompt ChatGPT by increasing the level of context it has available to it.

That’s the key insight here: context is everything.

Nothing beats the context you can give Notion AI. I have my entire novel in a database (NotebookLLM), I have my article style guide which Notion can update if we need to (ChatGPT), it has everything I want to include searchable across the workspace.

This is a knowledge-based helper that knows me and my work far far better.

By consolidating everything in one place, my AI assistant can see the full picture of my projects, making its suggestions more relevant and powerful than ever before.

If this is exciting to you, smash the like button and let me know.

There’s more coming in this series.

Tutorials, templates, and deep dive examples using my Side Quest novellas.

I’ll show how I discovery write the backstories of key characters from my novel. Learning more about them and their and practicing the Hero’s Journey, while accelerating the process using Notion AI to handle all the chores.

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*This brilliant marketing copy is from Notion, it’s so clever I had reshare it.

** Sorry Lee, I’m late I know. But I’m building something useful.