Trying out Notion AI for the first time
I remember the first time I clicked that little sparkle icon in Notion. It was late at night, too many tabs open, Slack pinging in the background, and I just wanted a starting point for some blog notes. The thing looked magical at first. I typed in something like write me a description of Zapier triggers and—boom—it spat out a neat paragraph. Except… it was bland, like reading cereal box copy. I immediately felt that mix of excitement and doubt: okay, this is fast, but do I trust it?
What I had to learn quickly is that Notion AI does not think for you. It just fills space. So my first little trick was to treat it like a terrible intern who is really good at typing but knows absolutely nothing. I let it draft, then I hacked it apart, rewrote in my own distracted voice, left some sarcastic margin notes in between. If you expect polished copy right away, you will be frustrated. But if you think of it as raw material—like clay—it works much better 🙂
Cleaning up the repetitive tone problem
Every time I generated several paragraphs in a row the AI fell into this weird rhythm. Sentences started feeling mechanical, like “This tool is useful for productivity. Another benefit is how it improves collaboration.” I don’t talk like that, you don’t talk like that. What helped me break the pattern was forcing variation. I tricked Notion AI by asking it questions in completely different tones, like “Explain this in casual terms to a beginner” or “Pretend you are annoyed that this still does not work.” The second prompt came out oddly funny, but at least it gave me sentences that sounded human.
Then I got into the habit of only keeping one out of three outputs. It became a sort of mini editing game: generate, skim, salvage a line or two, delete, repeat. Strange workflow—but better than sitting there staring at a blank page until my brain melts.
Real quirks when using it inside shared workspaces
One unexpected snag hit me when trying to use Notion AI in a shared page with my team. Someone else edited the same doc while I was letting the AI generate, and suddenly the section disappeared. Just gone. No warning. I thought I imagined it, but the activity log confirmed the AI content had existed and then been overridden in seconds. That was the moment I learned: always duplicate the page before invoking serious AI text, because sync collisions are brutal.
Also, team reactions were mixed. Some folks typed in prompts that made no sense, then complained at the nonsense output. Others thought it was cheating. So part of the automation here is not just convincing the AI to work—it is convincing coworkers that you are not losing your mind using it.
Integrating Notion AI with external tools
Since I live in Zapier half the time, I tested pushing AI generated notes from Notion directly into another workflow. That meant setting a Zap that watched for a new page in a certain database, then shipped the text into Google Docs. The first discovery here: formatting does not survive gracefully. Headings turned into random bold text, bullet points sometimes squished into run‑on sentences. But for quick drafts it was fine.
I also tried grabbing Notion AI text as an OpenAI‑like API—but that requires slightly ridiculous back‑and‑forth setups. In practice, it was often faster to just copy paste. Automation nerds hate hearing that, but sometimes the five minute manual step beats spending three hours debugging webhooks that are mysteriously sending twice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Does it actually save time in writing
Here is the honest reality. It saves time if you would otherwise spend hours staring at a blank doc, waiting for inspiration. It does not save time if you already know what you want to write. In fact, it can slow you down because you edit more aggressively, correcting tone so it does not sound like Notion AI wrote it.
An example: I asked it for a few paragraphs on describing Airtable vs Google Sheets. Within seconds it produced something that technically compared features but it read like a high school essay. I rewrote the whole thing anyway. That took about as long as writing it from scratch. But on another day, when I was completely stuck and just needed filler text to nudge my brain, it helped a lot. Kinda like having someone brainstorm with you, even if their suggestions are half wrong.
How the pricing feels against actual usage
The free plan capped out way too fast for me. I hit the wall within one morning of testing prompts. At that point the upgrade decision felt less about money and more about whether I wanted to keep pretending Notion AI could become part of my writing habit. The subscription sits in that awkward range of not too high to completely ignore but high enough that you regret if you do not use it daily. For me, it became one of those “well, maybe if I cancel Netflix this month” tradeoffs 😛
When evaluating whether to pay for it, I compared with just copying text out of ChatGPT and pasting into Notion. That was cheaper and gave me more flexibility. The only reason to justify the Notion AI upgrade was the convenience of hitting that sparkle button right inside a doc and not switching windows.
Who should and should not be using it
Absolute beginners who feel terrified of writing more than a sentence will probably find it freeing. It gives them something to edit, and editing is easier than inventing from scratch. On the flip side, writers who already have strong voice and ideas may find it more annoying than helpful. You will spend time smoothing out its clumsy phrasing instead of actually writing.
Also worth noting: it is not suitable for fact heavy content. I asked for references once and it literally invented book titles that did not exist. Basically hallucinations in paragraph form. If accuracy matters, double‑check everything manually. If creativity matters, treat it like brainstorming noise with occasional gems you polish later.
Practical workflow set up that worked
The sequence that stuck for me looks something like this:
1 Write down my own messy outline in Notion with bullets like “intro joke about tabs” or “complain about webhooks”
2 Highlight one bullet at a time and ask AI to expand
3 Delete half of what it generates while keeping a few phrases
4 Rewrite everything in my actual tone
5 Push the clean version into my publishing tool via Zapier
This avoids the blank page curse, uses AI minimally but effectively, and keeps my voice intact. Graphically, you can even imagine it like:
My outline → AI filler → My edits → Final draft → Automation tools
Each arrow is a filter, stripping out fluff until something workable remains.
It still glitches. Sometimes hitting the button returns an error that politely says something like “please try again.” Sometimes it outputs the exact same paragraph twice, like a ghost echo. But once you accept that, the workflow works decently well.
Final thoughts while it runs in the background
I do not leave it on autopilot. It is not smart enough for that. But as a trigger for momentum, it does heavy lifting when my brain is fried late at night. The main lesson I keep relearning—the AI does not replace me, it just gives me scraps I can shape. And the scraps are only useful if I stay in control of the page, or else I end up with something generic and soulless that reads like it came from a committee that never met in real life