Who is Mert Gül?

The introduction to Notion came through work. Assessing tools for his organisation, Mert Gül found the product overwhelming at first, then found the flexibility underneath it and stayed. Seven years on he describes it as his dijital beyin, the place that holds notes from books, articles and podcasts, weekly and monthly and yearly plans, and a page per project with its own databases and workflow. He built a people database structured like a CRM specifically to teach himself how database logic works, then project and task databases on top of that. The newsletter he publishes is drafted, edited and tracked through a content database that records status by platform and by date, so the writing about the system runs on the system.

The February 2026 post that redirected the newsletter is explicit about the gap it is aiming at. Mert Gül had used Notion for years without writing much about it, and decided that the useful thing he could add was Turkish explanation of a product whose documentation and community output are overwhelmingly English. He set out what the series would carry: Notion features, the systems he has built, the tips he has picked up, and his own experience with them. What followed held to it. Between February and April 2026 he published on Custom Agents, on permissions becoming quietly much easier to manage, on dashboards that pull everything into one surface, on working with AI inside a page, on automations for repeating work, and on wiring databases together with relations.

His Medium essays on Notion are about workspace decay. In one he names documentation debt as the failure mode: pages that were designed beautifully and then stopped being true, until the workspace becomes an information graveyard people route around. His remedies are structural. Give every major section a single named owner so nothing is orphaned. Run verification cycles using the Verified marker. Add breadcrumb blocks so people can tell where they are inside a deep hierarchy. Archive actively. Test readability by handing a process to someone unfamiliar with it and watching where they stall. The companion piece on collaboration culture argues for treating the workspace as living institutional memory, with linked views to personalise what each person sees, database templates to standardise how projects start, and a deliberate move off static PDFs, up to and including blocking PDF sharing for a while to force the new habit.

His recent writing follows AI into the workspace and stays sceptical about spectacle. In "Sessiz Bir Ayna Olarak Yapay Zeka", published 15 June 2026, he argues the value sits in simplification and in retiring repetitive decisions, and he wants assistants that run quietly on triggers the user defines. He works through Notion Custom Agents as the practical case: filtering email into Notion pages, surfacing connections between scattered notes, and planning the week of the newsletter. He is firm that the user decides what data an agent can reach and automates only where the time saved is real, and he points out that the Notion Credits budget imposes its own discipline about which automations are worth spending on. The May 2026 posts sit alongside this, one on building a digital memory that matches how the mind actually moves between things, one on finding a quiet working rhythm under the noise of new tools.