Who is Marie Poulin?
Designer, educator and creator of Notion Mastery. Known for Notion Mastery, a year-long Notion program delivered entirely inside a Notion workspace, and for teaching workspace design as a permaculture problem.
This page recognises Marie Poulin for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I am deciding whether to hand Marie Poulin $799 and a year of my attention for Notion Mastery, or whether her free videos would get me to the same place.”
This page sets out how she came to Notion, what her program actually contains, how it is structured and priced, and what she has published recently. It is a credit page, so it carries no review of the course and no comparison against other Notion training. Pricing and curriculum change, so check notionmastery.com before you commit.
Marie Poulin opened Notion for the first time in 2017 and walked away from it. She describes that first attempt on her own course page: it "didn't quite click", and she "knew it had potential, but wasn't sure how to harness it." At the time she was running a design practice across Evernote, Asana, Dropbox and Google Drive, and by her own account her planning, tasks, files and resources "felt messy and fragmented." She had an Honours Bachelor of Design and a Design Thinking and Innovation Certificate behind her, and had been teaching online since 2013 through Oki Doki, the studio she runs with her husband Benjamin Borowski.
What changed was a side interest. In 2018 she began studying permaculture, and she needed somewhere to keep the notes. She told Ness Labs: "I needed a place to store my permaculture notes. I was so excited about everything that I was learning, and I wanted to do a good job of taking notes." That one concrete job did what the general pitch of an all-in-one workspace had not. She moved everything into Notion, later calling it "a complete game-changer" and the first setup that "worked for my ADHD brain." She started publishing what she built, and in 2019 turned it into a course.
Notion Mastery has been running since 2019 out of Oki Doki Digital. Poulin lists herself as a Notion Ambassador and Notion Certified Consultant, has spoken at Notion's own Make with Notion conference, and keeps a creator profile on Notion's Template Marketplace. She writes and teaches from Canada, mostly about workflow design, capacity and energy management, ADHD, and how permaculture principles apply to a digital workspace.
A permaculture diploma was the thing that made Notion click
The order matters here. Poulin came to Notion carrying a specific pile of study notes she cared about, with no business plan attached to them. Permaculture had already reshaped how she thought about work: on her about page she writes that when she began studying it in 2018, "I saw how so many of the principles and frameworks I was learning applied well beyond the garden, and it opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about what it means to design a sustainable and resilient business." She holds a Permaculture Design Certificate and has been working toward a Permaculture Diploma. Reading a productivity tool through that lens is what separated her material from the tutorial content around it, because she was asking what inputs a system demands and what it gives back, questions that have very little to do with Notion's feature list.
The sales page opens by telling you templates will not save you
Notion Mastery is unusual in arguing against the thing most Notion creators sell. Its own page states plainly that templates do not add up to a system, and that anyone without established routines will simply recreate their old mess inside a new tool. The program costs $799 for twelve months of access, with an optional $79 per quarter to stay in afterwards, and parity pricing for Canadians and for buyers in countries where the US dollar stretches further. The curriculum runs in four levels, from Level 0 "Hello Notion" up to Level 3 "Notion Zen Master", and the whole thing is delivered inside a Notion workspace that students are invited into as members. There is no finished all-in-one template on offer. Students get a component kit of databases and dashboards and build with it, supported by office hours twice a month, a guided weekly review session, a forum, and a "Solves" library of walkthroughs for tricky student-submitted problems. Formula Fundamentals, the formula mini course bundled in, was built by Borowski, who helped shape Notion's formula language.
Notion's CEO went on the record about her
Poulin's course page carries a quote from Ivan Zhao, CEO and founder of Notion: "Marie is one of the most knowledgeable Notion users in the world", and "When Marie showed the Notion team what she was able to build with the product, it blew our minds." On the Creator Science podcast she recalled the company reaching out early on, telling her something to the effect that she was clearly excited about the tool and using it in ways their own team did not. That relationship turned into Notion office hours, ambassador and certified consultant status, a creator profile on Notion's Template Marketplace, and in November 2024 a talk at Make with Notion in San Francisco titled "Notion as a curiosity engine", which Notion published on its own channel. The independence is stated on her site too: the footer of notionmastery.com notes the program is an Oki Doki Digital Inc. product and is not affiliated with Notion Labs.
ADHD, a slower year, and what shipped after it
In April 2024 Poulin published a piece on how her life changed after an ADHD diagnosis, and in December that year a guide to designing neurofriendly Notion workspaces, built out of a student question and organised around a blunt premise: what works brilliantly for one person can be completely overwhelming for another. In September 2025 she released "Productive by Nature", a roughly 25 minute permaculture-inspired workshop on productivity originally made for Jessica Abel's Autonomous Creative conference series. Her 2025 year in review is candid about the pace: "This year was the year I designed and renovated my kitchen, recovered from injury, spent more time outdoors, shifted gears around my work, and grieved the loss of both family and friends," and she notes flatly that "This wasn't a year of business growth, workshops, masterminding, and Youtube videos." She returned to YouTube in April 2026 with a walkthrough of recurring tasks using Notion database automations, and in August 2026 the studio shipped Architecting Workspaces, a course on rolling Notion out across a team. She opened a Bluesky account in November 2024 and posts there as well.
Why Marie Poulin is on this list
Poulin was one of the earliest people to treat Notion as a design discipline and then teach it as one, at a point when most Notion content was feature demos. Thousands of people in the Notion community learned the tool through her YouTube videos, the office hours she ran with the company, and Notion Mastery. Her most durable contribution is probably an argument the Notion community now repeats without attribution: that a downloaded template is not a system, and that a workspace has to be designed around the person using it. Her writing on neurofriendly and ADHD-aware workspace design gave that argument a vocabulary, and gave a lot of people permission to stop blaming themselves for a setup that was never built for how they think.
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