Productivity In Notion
The "Productivity In Notion" Series has a new home right here on Substack!
This post will tie together most of the Notion content that we’ve produced over the past few years. Don’t forget to subscribe so that you get new parts to the series straight to your inbox!
The full set of articles here describes my journey through Notion, but this aggregation will reorder things a bit to make it more intuitive for someone looking to setup their own Notion environment.
But we do have to start at the beginning: I started using Notion in 2020, and honestly I was giddy once I discovered it’s capabilities.
From there, we should jump to the Notion architecture that I still use today - focusing on Apps, Projects, and Databases:
These are still basically the only 3 top-level pages that I have today: 99% of my Notion content falls into each of these. The importance is that it sets the organization of what you put in Notion.
Let’s say then you want to create a Task Tracker. A task tracker is an app, so you add a page to the App Database which will be your task tracker. The database that contains each task will then be a Database. Once you’ve created both, you can start to build out the Task Tracker app, likely adding a linked view of your task database.
And I mention that since task management is a great way to start in Notion! Here are a few posts on the evolution of my task management in Notion:
Going through a basic task tracker app should give you a sense of apps and databases and how they can interact within Notion. Next, a good area to dig into is Projects. If you’d like to dig around, my basic task management template is available to use in Notion here (you can click “duplicate” in the top right to import it into your Notion).
Projects are essentially pages for things that don’t quite merit their own app, but is something that you are working on that you want to track in Notion. Here’s how I started with Project Management in Notion:
Another base to start at (especially if it is December) is around New Year Planning. I created a great New Year template for 2022:
And improved it for 2023:
Taken together, that’s a good base course. From here, we’ll dive into some other core architecture pieces that I use, followed by use specific use cases I’ve built out.
Other Core Architecture
The Topic Database
A topic database hosts various “topics” that you can tag in other parts of your Notion so that all the data you have gets linked together:
Monthly Metrics
Having a database for Monthly and/or Years functions similarly to topics: it let’s you tag various information and things you are tracking to specific months and years:
Memory Database
Web Serving in Notion
Other Specific Use Cases
Habit Tracking and Daily Tracking
Habit Tracking or Daily Tracking is something I’ve tried in many different ways over the years, and within Notion. I have several pieces that describe my journey here:
Fitness Tracking
I highly recommend setting up some fitness tracking in Notion. I have an integration in Zapier to send any Strava workout over. From there, I have some goal setting and scoring mechanisms that you can read about here:
Experimentation Plans
My CRM (Personal Relationship Manager)
That’s all for now! But if you got this far, please consider subscribing! We’ll be sharing more updates over time as Notion and my setup continues to evolve.