34 tagged decision notes. That's all it took to realize my Notion database was lying to me.
I run three revenue streams — ad ops automation, two niche content sites, and a CRM sync product still in beta. A year and a half ago I built a "second brain" across Notion and Obsidian with one rule: everything touching a client or a revenue line gets captured. Last month I ran my annual review. The numbers were interesting. The process was more interesting.
Here's the thing nobody says about Notion: the rows tell you what happened, not why you believed it was the right call. I had a row that said "paused client X" with a date stamp. That row is useless during a retrospective. It tells me nothing about whether I paused for good reasons or bad ones. Meanwhile, I had a note in Obsidian — written the night I took on a fourth ad ops client — with the actual reasoning: the revenue upside I was chasing, the risk I knew existed, and the part I consciously chose to underweight. That context is irreplaceable. The Notion row is noise.
I spent six months trying to fix this by building a Decision Log database in Notion — fields for context, alternatives, outcome, the works. I updated it eight times in six months. The problem isn't discipline. The interface is too formal for mid-thought capture. By the time I'd opened a new record and filled in the fields, the thinking had already collapsed into a conclusion. An Obsidian daily note with a #decision tag takes 90 seconds. The Notion database took 10 minutes per entry and the quality was worse. I killed it in month seven.
The annual review format I landed on has four passes, and the fourth one — decisions that aged badly, cross-referenced against what my notes actually said at the time — is where the system either earns its keep or doesn't. For me, it only worked because Obsidian was capturing reasoning in motion, not just outcomes.
I wrote up the full breakdown — including the specific rollup structure I kept in Notion, the Dataview query that surfaces old decision notes, and the two revenue calls that looked right in the moment and weren't — over on dailyfocusmag.com.
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