today vs Notion for daily planning: the case for dedicated tools over flexible ones
What it takes to use Notion as a daily planner
Notion can be configured into a capable daily planner — many power users have built elaborate daily planning templates with time blocks, habit trackers, daily journals, and weekly reviews. But these configurations require significant upfront investment (2–5 hours to build a robust system), ongoing maintenance as the system evolves, and the discipline to resist Notion's feature breadth (it's easy to spend more time building the system than using it). Notion is a flexible tool that can do many things reasonably well. Today is a purpose-built tool that does one thing: daily planning and execution tracking.
What Notion does better than today for knowledge management
Notion is vastly superior for knowledge management: notes, project documentation, wikis, shared team pages, embedded databases, and the kind of long-form thinking capture that daily planning tools don't attempt. If your workflow involves significant documentation, team knowledge bases, or personal note-taking alongside daily planning, Notion handles those needs in a single tool. Today doesn't attempt any of this — it's exclusively a daily planning and execution tool with no notes, documentation, or team features.
What today does better than Notion for daily planning
Today provides daily planning infrastructure that Notion's flexibility can't match out of the box: live calendar sync, focus session logging with outcome tracking, energy check-ins, friction logs, and an opinionated daily structure designed around the single-outcome model. These capabilities require zero setup in today and significant custom development in Notion. More importantly, today's opinionated structure enforces the habits that produce good daily planning — Notion's flexibility allows those habits to erode as the system gradually accumulates complexity and maintenance overhead.
The flexibility trap in all-in-one tools
Notion's flexibility is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness for productivity habits. Because everything is customizable, there's always a reason to rebuild the system, adjust the template, or add a new property. This 'system tinkering' can become a form of productive procrastination — you're working on your productivity system rather than doing your actual work. Purpose-built tools like today eliminate this trap by offering no customization beyond what serves the daily planning use case. The constraint is the point: you can't modify the time blocking structure or the reflection prompt, so you use the tool instead of designing it.
Frequently asked questions
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