Five days after the start of the year, TikTok’s hottest trend for 2021 is for teenagers using corporate software to go viral.
As if the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t already blurred the boundaries between work and home enough, students and teenagers are going viral on TikTok after making Notion panels that mimic teenagers’ Tumblr feeds. Some users have filled Notion’s headers with vibrant photos of cafes or anime or other characters that inspired them.
Browsing the Notion website, many people would not expect to see a lot of teenagers using the software as a replacement for their school planners. The site features tweets from people like XOXO Festival organizer Andy Baio and other pseudo-celebrities from Silicon Valley, publicizing how they use the fashion app to keep their tech teams organized like marketing. It is quite clear who the main audience of the application is!
But this week, Notion totally exploded on TikTok.
In a video, the @ cur.tas account gained over 1.1 million views in less than two days, showing its Notion setup. They imported GIFs and images of anime characters and the Lofi Study Beats girl for their models, mirroring the popular studyblr and studytok aesthetics that have become popular on platforms like Tumblr and TikTok in recent years. Think Donna Tartt’s The Secret History find productivity tips – this is the aesthetics of the study in 2021. Going through the comments on the video, dozens of users begged the account to make a tutorial explaining how they configured their concept.
Other users, like @promeat, have duplicated the video by setting up their own Notion accounts. After posting his original video learning how to use the app, @promeat made another video showing people his “daily notions routine”, explaining what they do when they log into the app every day.
When asked about the app’s growing popularity, a Notion spokesman said, “We are delighted to see it!” but did not comment further.
As someone who used to spend a lot of time as a high school student leafing through the hashtag studyblr on Tumblr, I have the concept’s appeal to young people. Like Tumblr, Notion is a blank slate, providing users with many different models to build and customize what best suits their (and aesthetic) needs.
Outside of customization, the coronavirus pandemic can play a significant role in why Notion took off with young people. I am sure that almost none of these teenagers are entering physical classrooms anymore. I imagine it is difficult to keep your life and schoolwork in order when your only classroom is the dining room table.
Business software has been making its way into personal life and relationships for some years. In 2019, The Atlantic wrote about how parents were starting to use business software and applications like Asana and Trello to assign tasks to their children. Perhaps, as more and more of our professional lives merge with personal ones, corporate software like Notion can become a little more fun.