A Notion desktop app for Mac that keeps two accounts open

The Notion desktop app for Mac gets installed for one of two reasons. The first is that the browser tab keeps getting lost in a row of forty. The second, and the more common one for anyone working across companies, is that there are two Notion logins in play and switching between them has turned into a small ritual of logging out and logging back in.

The app fixes both, but only one of them in the way people expect. The account handling is genuinely built for this, documented, and better than most tools manage. What it does not change is where Notion sits relative to everything else on the Mac, and that is where the remaining friction lives.

Accounts and workspaces are two different layers

Almost every confused Notion setup starts with these two words being used interchangeably. They are not the same thing, and the fix for a problem depends entirely on which layer it sits on.

An account is a login tied to an email address. A work address and a personal address mean two accounts.

A workspace is a container inside an account. One account can hold several: one for personal notes, one for study, one for freelance projects. Notion's own help page suggests exactly that split.

The workspace switcher at the top left shows both layers nested together, accounts on the outside and their workspaces indented beneath. Knowing which layer to add to saves a lot of unnecessary account creation. Splitting projects within the same company needs another workspace, not another account. A second account is only required when the email address itself is different, which in practice means being invited into a client's organisation or wanting a separate personal space.

One financial detail follows from this structure and catches people out later. Notion's help states that paid plans apply to one workspace and do not cover the whole account, and that workspaces are separate silos with no content linking between them. Anyone planning to split work across five workspaces to stay organised should know that each upgraded one is billed on its own, and that a database in one cannot be referenced from another.

Adding the second account

Notion supports being signed into several accounts simultaneously, and its help page says so directly: logging in with multiple accounts at the same time is supported, so that every workspace can be viewed at once.

The steps are short. Open the workspace switcher at the top left, click Add another account, and sign in with the other address. From then on the switcher lists both accounts and every workspace belonging to each. A new account can also be created at that step rather than signing into an existing one.

Logging out is granular in the same place. The three dot button to the right of an account logs out that account while the others stay signed in. The Log out all button at the bottom of the switcher clears everything at once, which is the one to use before handing the machine to someone else.

There is no stated cap on how many accounts can be signed in, though Notion notes that performance may degrade when logged into ten or more at once. For a consultant holding a client workspace each, that ceiling is worth knowing about before account number eleven.

The one blocker worth checking before troubleshooting anything else is the email domain. Notion's help states plainly that a personal address such as gmail.com or outlook.com, or a school address, cannot auto-join other workspaces. Someone who cannot see a client workspace in the join list is often not hitting a bug: they are using an address type that auto-join does not apply to, and the way in is an invite from an admin.

The 90 day token

After a few months of running two accounts, one of them will quietly disappear from the switcher. This is documented behaviour, not a fault.

The behaviour is spelled out in the help page for workspaces.

Login tokens expire after 90 days. When you're logged out of your accounts due to token expiration, you will need to re-add any additional accounts by using the Add another account button in the workspace switcher. Source: notion.com

Two things follow from this in daily use.

The first is that it lands on the accounts that matter at the worst moment. A client workspace opened twice a month is exactly the one most likely to have crossed the 90 day line, and the discovery happens on the day something is needed from it urgently. With two factor authentication in the loop, that is several minutes gone before any work starts.

The second is that the recovery path does not look like recovery. There is no re-login prompt for the missing account sitting in the switcher. The route back is the same Add another account button used for a brand new account, which reads as adding rather than restoring and is easy to walk past.

The practical answer is small: open every account at least once a month. The token refreshes on use, and a low effort habit removes the whole category of surprise. For anyone holding several client accounts, a recurring monthly reminder to open each one costs less than the one emergency it prevents.

Switching quickly once both are in

With both accounts signed in, the remaining cost is the switch itself. Two features shorten it.

The first is the keyboard shortcut. On desktop, ctrl and shift and a number key switches workspaces, where the number matches the position of that workspace in the switcher dropdown. Ordering matters here: the workspaces used most should sit near the top so the numbers stay in the range the hand already knows.

The second is Command Search. Notion's desktop app can be searched from outside the app, triggered by a customisable keyboard shortcut or from the Mac menu bar, without bringing the app to the foreground. When the destination is a known page rather than a known workspace, this skips the switcher entirely.

Command Search is on by default, and turning it on also sets Notion to open at login. Anyone who does not want it resident can remove that by right-clicking the Notion icon in the Dock, choosing Options, and unchecking Open at Login. Command Search itself is toggled under Settings and Preferences, along with the setting that opens a search window every time a new tab is created.

	Desktop app	Browser tab
Push notifications	Yes, for mentions, assignments, reminders	Delivered as browser notifications, mixed with every other site
Command Search from outside the app	Yes, shortcut or menu bar	Not available
Workspace shortcut	ctrl, shift, number	Depends on the browser
Multiple accounts at once	Yes, through the switcher	Yes, same switcher
Appears separately in Command and Tab	As one app called Notion	No, it is inside the browser

The last row is the one that decides how much the app actually helps.

Keeping the switcher readable as accounts accumulate

The switcher is fine with two accounts. At five, with a few workspaces under each, the dropdown becomes the thing being searched, and the number shortcuts stop mapping to anything memorable because positions shift every time something is added or removed.

Three decisions keep it usable.

Put the daily workspaces at the top. The number shortcut is positional, so the ordering in the dropdown is what determines whether the shortcut is worth learning. A workspace opened ten times a day sitting at position seven is a shortcut nobody will use.

Close out finished engagements properly. When a client project ends, the workspace stays in the switcher until it is left, and it keeps taking up a position. Notion's help is specific about what leaving does: access to everything inside is lost, so anything worth keeping should be exported first, and getting back in later requires an admin to re-add the account. Leave is under Settings, then General under Workspace, at the bottom of the danger zone.

Consolidate within an account rather than across accounts. Content can be moved between workspaces that belong to the same account, using the three dot menu next to a top level page and choosing Move to, then picking the destination workspace at the bottom of the menu. Sub-pages travel with the parent and land in the Private section. Notion's own recommendation is to use the smallest number of workspaces that works, and to organise with top level pages instead. Between accounts there is no such path, which is another reason to reach for a new workspace before reaching for a new account.

Where the app stops helping

Two accounts inside the desktop app are handled well. The part the app cannot touch is everything around Notion.

To macOS, the desktop app is one application. Command and Tab offers Notion as a single destination, and choosing it lands wherever the app was left, after which the account and workspace still have to be selected. The browser has the same shape, one destination containing many things. In both cases the operating system sees one door and the sorting happens after walking through it.

That is tolerable when the day is mostly Notion. It stops being tolerable when the day is a loop: a spec written in Notion, a question answered in Slack, an approval waiting in Gmail, a draft made in an AI chat window. None of those crossings pass through any Notion setting, so no amount of account configuration improves them. The switcher was never the bottleneck for that part of the work.

The number where this turns from an annoyance into a cost is lower than expected. Past roughly five destinations visited repeatedly, the time spent locating the right window starts to accumulate, and what gets lost is not really the seconds. It is the thought that was in progress at the moment of the switch.

The alternative shape is to give each service its own persistent window so that switching between services becomes the same gesture as switching between applications. That is the model behind browsers built for app aggregation, where each web app gets its own window and its own session rather than a tab in a shared pile. Whether Notion and the rest of the daily set are supported in one of these is a question of fact rather than preference, and the supported apps list settles it quickly. Grouping by client or project, so a whole set of services switches together, is what workspaces in that context refers to, which is a different layer from the Notion workspace discussed above and worth not conflating. Free tiers in this category differ mainly in how they count, some by number of accounts per service and some by number of services, so the pricing terms decide whether two Notion accounts alone are enough or whether Slack and Gmail need the same treatment.

What to change first

Add the second account through the workspace switcher, learn the ctrl, shift and number positions for the two or three workspaces opened daily, and put a monthly reminder in place to open every rarely used account before the 90 day token runs out. That handles Notion completely.

If the switching that still hurts is between Notion and four other services rather than between two Notion accounts, the layer to change is the one above the app, and SpaceDeck is built for that layer.