Staying organized and focused at this moment feels nearly impossible—distractions and doomscrolling can divert even the most productive. On TikTok, the hottest new trend involves organizing your life on an app called Notion.
As the Verge reported last week, Notion is very popular on TikTok right now—there are countless tutorials and how-tos for teens and young adults, who appear to be the main demographic. Notion is essentially workflow/project management software, but it’s organized in a way that’s apparently appealing to people raised with the Tumblr aesthetic. You can personalize mood boards and scroll through other organizational blocks for to-do lists, calendars, and documents, or track goals and expenses.
On TikTok, Notion blew up among students: The aesthetic contains elements of Studyblr, which grew out of Tumblr-centric study blogs, and it flows through StudyTok and productivity TikTok.
The San Francisco-based Notion Labs has been around since 2016, but last year it announced it’d raised $50 million and been valued at $2 billion, just as COVID forced students and workplaces online. Its About page positions it as the next evolution of Google Docs—which teens have previously transformed into a communication tool. A couple of videos from early January seem to have kicked off the current TikTok wave—one from the account CURTAS, which claims to be a “Group of 7 Students from Ryerson University,” has more than 1 million views. But there are also videos from September singing its praises. Its popularity on TikTok might be tied to the start of school semesters.
There are even dedicated, though unofficial, Notion TikTok accounts. The Notion hashtag has more than 13 million views and there are TikToks documenting the site being down, possibly from traffic. On Twitter, people looking for Notion tutorials and templates are being directed to TikTok.
So is this just a serendipitous word-of-mouth moment or was Notion trying to market to TikTok? We reached out to see if the company had any reaction to the virality and were told Notion “has no official comment on any trend right now and it’s a matter of personal opinion, anyway.”
But why comment when you’ve got this kind of organic community engagement?
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