Managing your team in Notion
When a new manager decides to stop keeping everything in their head, the first stop is usually Notion, Apple Notes, or a single long doc. That's a sound instinct, and you can get a real distance on it. Here's a setup that works, followed by an honest account of where a plain notes tool starts to strain.
A Notion setup you can build in ten minutes
Make a database called People, one row per report. Give each person a page. At the top of the page, a short "Current read" callout: two or three plain sentences on how they work and what you're watching right now. Below it, a running log: a new dated entry each time you write something up, newest at the top, each with a couple of tags (a "theme" like ownership, clarity, or pressure; a "direction" of up, steady, or down). Two database views earn their place: sort People by "last edited" to see who you've gone quiet on, and filter the log by theme when you're prepping a specific conversation.
That's genuinely useful. It captures well, it searches, it bends to however you think, and, in a personal workspace, it's yours. For a small team and a manager who keeps up with it, it can carry you a long way.
Where a flat notes tool starts to strain
Three things get harder as the read matters more.
A read is just text, so its history is lost or buried. Your view of someone changes; that's the whole point of paying attention. In a notes tool, when it changes you either overwrite the "Current read" (and the earlier version is gone) or you append a new one (and the current read sinks under older entries). Either way you lose the one thing worth having later: how the read formed, and when it moved. A flat document can't hold that history, and the history is the part worth keeping.
Nothing connects a note to the read it changed. You log "shaky in the incident review" as an observation and, separately, you carry a belief that this person is a calm operator. The notes tool keeps both as unrelated text. It never tells you the second should update the first, so the connecting has to happen in your head, which is the place you were trying to offload.
Everything weighs the same, forever. A rough note from March and a good one from last week sit at equal weight in the log. There's no sense of recency, so old observations keep pulling on your read long after they've stopped being true, and "what's current" is something you reconstruct by rereading. That's the exact memory problem the setup was meant to solve, moved into a document.
None of this makes Notion the wrong choice to start. It makes it a starting point you'll feel the edges of, usually right when a review or a promotion case asks you to show how someone has changed over months.
Keeping notes on people, responsibly
Whatever tool you use, notes about the people you manage carry a duty, and a few rules keep them fair.
Write opinions, not verdicts: a read is provisional, so say how sure you are and revise it, rather than logging a person as a settled fact. Keep only what helps you do the job, and leave out health, home life, and the rest of a person that isn't the work's business. Go back and prune stale or unfair reads; an old note you'd no longer stand behind is a liability, not a record. Know your local rules: in some places, including the EU and UK, people may have a legal right to read what you've written about them, opinions included, so write as if they will. And mind the privacy basics a tool makes easy to get wrong: keep this in a personal space, not a shared team workspace where a stray permission exposes it, and put a passcode and disk encryption on the machine it lives on.
Do that, in Notion or anywhere else, and you've turned a private habit into a fair one. The tool matters less than the discipline. What the tool changes is how much of the discipline you have to supply yourself.
Full disclosure: I make Continuum, a Mac app built for the three places above where a notes tool strains. A read is a first-class thing you revise, with every earlier version kept beside the current one; the notes you tag flow into the reads they touch and leave a record of what changed; and older notes fade unless you see the same thing again, so what surfaces is what's live. It opens on the people and reads that have gone quiet, so you're not relying on memory to know where to look. It never scores anyone, everything stays on your Mac, it's free for up to three people, and Pro is a one-time purchase if you'd rather not subscribe. If Notion is working for you, keep using it; this is for when you've felt the ceiling.