Stop Storing Things in Google Drive
Google Drive feels like a gift at first. It’s free, it’s familiar, and suddenly everyone’s in one place together. For a small team just getting started, it can be an obvious solution that seems like more than enough.
The trouble is, the things that make Drive easy in the beginning are the same things that will trip you up later. At some point you’ll hit a wall: either keep patching together your entire business inside a glorified file drawer, or move into a system that can actually govern the work.
The Hidden Costs of Google Drive
PERMISSION CHAOS
Drive’s sharing model is deceptively simple—until it isn’t. Every file and folder has its own settings. Someone leaves (or even just goes on vacation), and suddenly half the team can’t access what they need. Or worse, you forget to revoke access and ex-employees keep a window into your company. There’s no central way to manage access; it’s brittle, stressful, and time-consuming.
ZERO CONTEXT
Drive is just a pile of documents with folders stacked on top. Even if you create a meticulous hierarchy, there’s no way to get a clean overview of how everything connects. Contracts sit in one folder, SOPs in another, marketing plans in a third. You can’t see the relationships. Knowledge gets siloed in surprising ways—even though technically it’s all “in the same place.”
NO SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH
That “final” proposal or onboarding doc? It doesn’t exist in one place—it exists in five different versions, each with “Final” or “USE THIS ONE” tacked onto the name. This isn’t user error; it’s the natural outcome of a tool built only to store files, not to govern them.
A CONTAINER, NOT A FRAMEWORK
At its core, Google Drive is a digital drawer. You can put documents inside, but that’s where the functionality ends. For scaling teams, a drawer doesn’t cut it. You need layers of context, metadata, and relationships between your work—not a bottomless pit of folders.
Why Notion Works Better
Notion is a document builder and a system in one place. That difference matters. In Notion, you can:
Write documents that live directly alongside SOPs, tasks, and project boards.
Link the resources you build so there’s always context — no hunting across five folders to connect the dots.
Govern your information: one canonical version of each doc, nested in the system where it’s actually used.
Scale without chaos: permissions, navigation, and structure are built to grow with your team, not fight against it.
Instead of a drawer full of files, you get an ecosystem where things get done. Living documents that evolve with your business, tied into the workflows where they matter.
The Bottom Line
Keep using Google Drive as a scratchpad if you want, but don’t mistake it for a resource bank that supports your operation. Drive isn’t a system, it’s a digital junk drawer. And junk drawers don’t scale. If you want your team to be set up for success so your business can run cleanly, you need something built to govern, not just hold.
Want help building a Notion system for your team? Let’s talk!