A Founder's Daily Log — Why I Switched From Notion to Jottii
A Founder's Daily Log — Why I Switched From Notion to Jottii
I've kept a daily founder journal for about four years. It started in a Moleskine, moved to Apple Notes for two months in 2021, and lived in Notion from late 2021 until recently. I now write it in Jottii. This is the unvarnished story of why, what changed, and what stayed.
I'm one of the founders of Jottii, so this isn't an unbiased review. It is a real personal workflow, and the decision to switch was driven by friction that turned out to matter more than I'd thought.
What I needed from a daily log
Four things, in order of how often they bit me when missing:
- Open and write in under three seconds. Founder days are interrupt-driven. A daily log that takes more than a few seconds to open will be skipped on the days you most need it.
- Searchable across years. I revisit old entries to remember decisions and check whether things I worried about actually happened. Most don't.
- Private from the company that hosts it. Daily logs include hiring decisions, financial figures, candid views on co-founders and investors. None of this should be readable by an analytics team.
- Cross-device. I write from a laptop most evenings, a phone on the go.
Notion handled (4) perfectly, (2) acceptably, (1) poorly, and (3) not at all.
Where Notion fell down
Notion is the best collaborative-doc tool I've used. As a personal journal, it has specific gaps:
Cold-start latency. On a slow Wi-Fi or a busy laptop, opening Notion to my Daily Log database takes 5–15 seconds. That's enough to derail the impulse to write. I started catching myself thinking "I'll log this later" and then not.
The database overhead. A Notion database is a beautiful thing for project tracking. For a daily journal, it's a calendar of entries, each of which is a sub-document, each of which has properties. Adding a new entry takes more clicks than it should. The act of journaling shouldn't require schema cooperation.
Cloud-first. Notion is not offline-friendly in any meaningful sense. On a flight, you get cached pages or nothing. When I traveled, my journal disappeared.
The privacy model. Notion encrypts at rest. Notion staff have access. Notion ships AI features that touch your content. A daily founder log includes things I wouldn't want training a model or sitting in a tier-3 support tool's view. (Background: Why Most Note Apps Aren't Actually Private.)
Drift. Over four years in Notion, my Daily Log database sprouted properties — mood ratings, tags, links to OKRs. Half of them were never used. The system was carrying weight I'd added in a moment of optimism. A clean slate appealed.
What changed when I moved
The first week in Jottii felt like the first week back at the gym after a long break — uncomfortable in a clarifying way.
Speed changed the practice. Open the app, start typing. The friction is gone. I started writing 2–3 small entries on busy days instead of one long evening post-mortem. The texture of the journal shifted from "summary at end of day" toward "running log of the day." That turned out to be more useful for the kind of decisions I actually need to remember.
Privacy changed what I wrote. With Notion, there was always a low-grade self-edit ("would I be embarrassed if a Notion employee read this?"). With end-to-end encryption, that voice quieted. Entries got more honest. Some of the most useful retrospective material has come from entries I would have softened in Notion.
Offline changed where I wrote. I write on flights now. Cabs. Coffee shops with bad Wi-Fi. The "I'll log this when I'm online" excuse is gone.
Searching back is faster. Less because Jottii's search is better than Notion's (Notion's is fine), more because the entries are shorter and there are more of them. Granularity helps recall.
What I miss from Notion
I'm being honest. Three things:
Inline databases. I used to embed a small "decisions made today" mini-database inside each Daily Log entry, with rows for big calls. Jottii doesn't do nested databases. I now keep decisions as bullet points in the entry, plus a separate weekly "decisions log" entry I review on Sundays. It's actually simpler, but it took adjustment.
Linking between docs. Notion's @mention and inline-link UX was great. Jottii has hashtags and titles; not as fluid for cross-referencing. I'm less rigorous about it now and that may or may not be a loss.
Image-heavy entries. I sometimes drop a screenshot of a chart into a daily log. Jottii is text-first today and doesn't handle media. I now keep visual artifacts in a separate folder and reference them by name.
For most users, these are small. For some founders who treat the daily log as a knowledge base, they'd matter more.
What stayed the same
The actual practice. Two-line floor on bad days. Long entries on heavy ones. Weekly re-read on Sunday morning. Yearly re-read in late December. The routine was the same; the substrate changed.
Why this matters beyond me
Daily logs are infrastructure for self-management. The tool you keep them in compounds in two ways: the friction it adds, multiplied by how often you log; and the privacy it leaks, multiplied by how candid you want to be.
Notion compounded both costs gently for years. The switch surfaced how much they'd added up to.
If you're doing the same calculus — and your daily log includes anything you wouldn't want on someone else's server — try Jottii. Free tier is enough; the Daily Log mode is the simplest workflow we ship. (For why offline-first matters in a daily-log context, see Offline-First Is a Privacy Feature.)
Open Jottii and start your daily log right now. The first entry can be one line.