[ EN ] AI alone wasn’t enough. How I used Notion on my smartphone to keep creating content consistently.

AI can write.

It can create social media posts.

It can suggest titles.

It can even help structure a note article.

But when I actually tried to keep publishing consistently, I realized that writing alone wasn’t enough.

I needed to know:

* What I had already posted
* What I should publish next
* Where I had scheduled each post
* How people responded after publishing

Without organizing these things, I kept getting stuck and making decisions from scratch every time.

What I was missing wasn’t better writing.

It was a system that helped me keep creating without stopping.

What I Want You to Take Away from This Article

In this article, I’m not sharing a polished success formula.

Instead, I want to document what I’ve actually put in place to keep creating and sharing my side business using nothing but a smartphone.

By reading this article, you’ll get a better understanding of:

* Why AI alone wasn’t enough to keep me creating content consistently
* Why I chose to manage everything in Notion using only my smartphone
* What needs to be organized before connecting Notion with Make and Buffer
* The information I keep in Notion so I don’t stop posting
* The way of thinking that will likely become important when I turn this into a template in the future

I hope this article gives you a clear picture of these ideas.

What I want to leave behind isn’t a guide to writing well with AI.

Today, there are already countless people sharing content about AI, note, and side businesses.

* How to write articles with AI.
* How to make money on note.
* How to attract an audience through social media.

There’s already plenty of information about all of that.

But that’s not what I want to leave behind.

What I want to leave behind isn’t a guide to writing well with AI.

I’m documenting what I’ve learned by actually using Notion, Make, and Buffer on nothing but my smartphone—why my content creation sometimes stopped, and what helped me keep going.

This is the foundation of everything I share.

Right now, I’m building a system that lets me continue sharing my side-business journey using only a smartphone.

* Organize my posts in Notion.
* Connect everything with Make.
* Schedule posts through Buffer.
* Share them on X and Instagram.
* Document the entire journey on note.
* Then expand it beyond Japanese into English, Spanish, and French.

Eventually, I hope this journey will also lead to connect-the-dots picture books and other content that children can enjoy and learn from.

That’s why this isn’t a finished blueprint or a complete success formula.

It’s a record of questions I’m exploring along the way.

* Can all of this really be done using only a smartphone?
* Where do people get stuck?
* What makes it easier to keep going?

This article is a record of that journey.

I Kept Running Into Problems Using Only My Phone

Notion, Make, and Buffer may sound like a clean, well-organized system.

But when I actually tried to set everything up using only my phone, I ran into problems again and again.

What stands out most in my memory is trying to use Make on a smartphone.

Even tasks that would probably be simple on a computer were difficult on a phone. The small connection points used to link modules were hard to tap, and even moving them down to the next section caused the process to stop several times.

At first, I tried to do everything in the app. But the screen did not behave the way I expected, so I switched Safari to desktop view and tried again.

That experience taught me something important:

“It can be done using only a phone” is not the same as “It can be done easily using only a phone.”

That is exactly why I felt it was important to document not only the steps that worked, but also the points where I got stuck.

There were other small problems as well.

Sometimes, the Google Drive image URL would not load correctly. Sometimes, even after a post appeared to have reached Buffer, I still felt the need to check it again. At other times, Make picked up an old Notion page by mistake.

These small difficulties may not appear very often in polished how-to articles.

But for someone starting with only a smartphone, I believe they are an important part of the process.

AI Alone Wasn’t Enough—I Needed Notion to Stay Organized

AI is incredibly useful.

It can help organize your writing.

Generate ideas.

Create outlines.

And even assist with translations.

It has helped me a lot with all of those things.

But even if AI created the content for me, I found that I still couldn’t keep publishing consistently unless everything that came afterward was organized.

For example:

* Where should I store my post ideas?
* Which post should I publish on X?
* Which one should I use for Instagram?
* How should I organize articles in Japanese, English, Spanish, and French?
* How should I review views, likes, and other results after publishing?
* What should I write next?

If these things aren’t organized, you’ll end up rethinking the same decisions every single time.

That’s why I started using Notion as the place where all of my content lives.

The Information I Keep in Notion

Right now, the biggest thing I focus on in Notion is making sure a post doesn’t end with simply “written and finished.”

Instead of storing only the post itself, I also keep track of the following:

* The post content
* Platform
* Language
* Scheduled publishing date and time
* Status
* Post URL
* Views
* Likes
* Comments
* Notes for the next post

Keeping this information together makes it much easier to see the overall flow of my content, even when I’m working only from my smartphone.

* What did I write?
* Where did I publish it?
* Which language did I publish it in?
* Which articles were actually read?
* Where did people respond?

The numbers aren’t big yet.

But by recording everything from the beginning—even while the numbers are still small—it’s become much easier to decide what I should create next.

Even Small Numbers Can Show You What’s Next

My note articles haven’t achieved big results yet.

But when I look at the views and likes for each article, I can already see patterns beginning to emerge.

For example:

* My Japanese articles are getting more readers.
* People respond well to my hands-on experiences with Notion, Make, and Buffer.
* I can publish articles in multiple languages, but without good organization, they quickly become difficult to manage.

These are things I never would have understood without actually publishing my work.

So right now, I’m not focusing only on sales.

Instead, I believe it’s important to keep a record in Notion of:

* Which articles attracted the most readers.
* Where people engaged the most.
* What I should write next.

I believe it’s important to keep recording these things in Notion.

Before / After

Before I organized everything in Notion, this was my situation.

Before

* My content ideas were scattered everywhere.
* I often forgot what I had already scheduled.
* My Japanese and multilingual articles became mixed together.
* I wasn’t using readers’ reactions to improve my next articles.
* I had to rethink everything from scratch every time, which was exhausting.
* I thought building a workflow with only a smartphone would be impossible.

After

* I can now collect all my content ideas in Notion.
* I can prepare posts while keeping track of my publishing schedule.
* It’s much easier to organize content by language.
* I can use views and likes to help decide what to write next.
* I built a solid foundation before connecting everything to Make and Buffer.
* I now feel that it’s possible to build a workflow little by little—even using only a smartphone.

It’s still not finished.

But little by little, I’m getting closer to building a system that lets me keep creating and sharing without stopping.

Keep Going in a Way That Fits You—Not by Copying Others

When I read about AI or side hustles, I see a lot of impressive people.

Beautiful success stories.

Well-designed workflows.

Finished templates.

Huge sales.

Sometimes, seeing those kinds of posts makes me wonder if I’m still too early in my own journey.

But I have my own circumstances.

* I want to build everything using only my smartphone.
* I want to rely mainly on free tools instead of spending money.
* Even on busy days, I want a system that helps me keep publishing.
* Eventually, I want this work to lead to my connect-the-dots picture books and other content I can leave for children.

Because I’m building under these conditions, I’m discovering things I wouldn’t otherwise notice.

The frustrations of using a smartphone that don’t appear in PC-focused tutorials.

The uncertainty of being in the middle of the journey—something polished success stories rarely show.

How to record small results and improve step by step, even before the numbers become impressive.

I believe sharing these experiences is what makes my articles different.

I’d Like to Turn This into a Template in the Future

Right now, I’m still improving and organizing my own Notion workspace as I use it.

But as I’ve been using it on my smartphone, I’ve started noticing things like:

* “This property might be useful for beginners, too.”
* “This part could probably become a template.”
* “A checklist here might help people avoid getting stuck.”

These ideas have naturally come up through everyday use.

In the future, I’d like to organize everything into a Notion template for people who want to manage their social media posts using only a smartphone.

But I don’t want to start selling it right away.

First, I want to keep using it myself, recording which properties are truly necessary and where people are most likely to get stuck.

I hope that sharing this process—not just the finished product—will be helpful to someone else.

Beyond Sharing: What I Really Wanted to Create

As I focused on building a system for creating and sharing content, I realized that the dot-to-dot picture book I truly wanted to make had come to a halt.

So instead of stopping my posts on X, Instagram, and note, I decided to return to sharing the lessons and discoveries that come from creating my picture books.

After finishing the cover, I completed the title page—the entrance to the story—today.

I saved the finished artwork from Canva to Google Drive and also recorded the progress in Notion.

Instead of treating content creation and sharing as separate tasks, I now think of them like this:

* Create something.
* Let the system handle sharing it.
* Then return to creating again.

It took a bit of a detour, but I finally found a workflow that I can truly stick with.

Looking back, I feel that this system wasn’t created just to keep posting online.

It was something I needed so I could keep creating the things I truly wanted to make.

Summary

AI can help us write.

But writing alone was not enough for me to keep sharing consistently.

What I needed was:

* A place to collect my post ideas
* A system for deciding when to schedule them
* A process for checking reactions after posting
* Records that could lead to the next article
* A way to keep going using only a smartphone

That foundation is what I now use Notion for.

I collect my posts in Notion, connect them through Make, and schedule them with Buffer.

From there, I expand them to X, Instagram, note, and multiple languages.

Beyond that, I want to create more time to keep working on my dot-to-dot picture books.

I am still in the middle of building this system.

But because it is still a work in progress, there are things worth recording now.

I now feel that I needed this system not simply to keep posting, but to keep creating the things I truly wanted to make.

From here on, I will continue building this system little by little using only my smartphone—

while also nurturing my picture books, one book at a time.

Before I wrap up, I’d like to ask you one last question.

If you were managing your social media posts using only a smartphone, which part do you think would be the most difficult?

① Building up a bank of post ideas
② Deciding when to schedule each post
③ Organizing everything in Notion
④ Connecting the tools with Make
⑤ Scheduling posts in Buffer
⑥ Reviewing the response after each post

Just reply with the number if you’d like.

Your feedback will help shape my next article and the templates I plan to create in the future.

In my next article, I’ll share the specific points where I repeatedly got stuck while connecting Notion → Make → Buffer using only a smartphone, along with the solutions I found through my own experience.