Productivity Tools — Part 4 (Notion Templates & Customizations)
This article is the concluding part of the series on Notion. Please check out the previous posts if you are missing on continuity.
Some of you who have tried Notion initially might have experienced the zone of unfamiliarity. I agree, there is a bit of learning curve to this tool. But once you cross it and understand how it operates, you practically can tweak it to your needs. One of the best things about Notion is the concept of templates. Notion has a template library from where you can download templates (they are free) based on what you want to accomplish. If you build a new template, you can submit it too to Notion and they will make it available for all (after review).
There are templates for many things — right from simple to-do lists to recipe books to habit trackers to reading lists to classroom notes to project roadmaps to new-hire onboarding etc. You need to download a template that is close to your need (if not in perfect alignment) and then you can customize the template to suit your knowledge management system. My Life Orbit dashboard is taken from “Life Wiki” template that is available in the template gallery.
In addition to the templates, watch Notion Gurus invent new ways of unlocking the potential of Notion can really help you with some new ideas. There are many small but rich ideas that make Notion very intuitive. For example, you can write a task and just type “@remind tomorrow 10pm” next to the task which will automatically convert it into a reminder. Powerful.
During the initial weeks of using Notion, I lamented the lack of a single consolidated view of all the tasks I enter in various pages and databases. I have multiple pages within my work orbit, each for a different project or sphere of work. And every day, I make note of many of my tasks in those pages. Notion is missing a central task aggregator that picks all tasks from multiple pages and displays like a dashboard. But I recently watched a video in which a Notion user (Jesse Showalter) invented a smart workaround. He created a Master Task List — a database first, which had all the tags and categories.
And then, within every page, he embedded this Master Task List, so that it appears like a table within each page. And inside this table in each page, he applied some filters which made that table show only those tasks that correspond that specific page. He repeated this exercise in multiple pages, applying different filters that pertain to different pages. And since the database (table) is connected to Master Task List, any change made to the table within a page resulted in the same change in Master Task List. I found this idea terrific and immediately implemented it.
So now I have a Master Task Database and microcosms of it embedded in multiple work-sphere pages (as smaller filtered out tables). When I make changes to these small tables in these pages (by updating tasks), the tasks also get updated in the Master Task List, which gives me a holistic and consolidated view.
This is another example of the versatility and flexibility of the tool, which empowers the users to tap into its capabilities in multiple ways. And like I mentioned before, there are many such powerful features embedded in Notion, which I think subsume the capabilities of many other productivity tools. There are people who are using Notion as their workspace (literally their office) and there are some organizations which have adopted Notion as their main workflow management tool. While not all of us might have the flexibility to use Notion that way, given our jobs and related policies, I see that Notion could be used tremendously for personal productivity — more in the sense of arranging information and using that information to do specific tasks. Check out YouTube for some Notion gurus (For example: August Bradley) who demonstrate some powerful features of Notion. There are tons of videos, which made feel that I am merely scratching the surface.
Often times, we squander many thoughts and ideas only because they come and go in siloes, in our mind. Notion can help you store those ideas and also explore the interconnectedness of those ideas, so that you can probably look at things from a holistic perspective and also may be write or express or even form a viewpoint on things and issues. I treat it like my 2nd brain, so that I am conscious about what information I am consuming, my learnings or observations from that and how best I can share stuff with the world. I use Notion for all this, in addition to managing mundane processes like task management, reminders, bookmarking etc.
Great design is always about simplification. And in today’s world where information, tasks, deadlines, personal “stuff”, work — all explode and intermingle to compete for our attention, any tool that combines great design with intuitive features that help us organize information, is a life saver. Notion, for me, right now is not only a life saver but is also something that is changing the very paradigm of my information management system and behavior — as it aids my (1st) brain. And hence, it is indeed my 2nd brain at the moment, until something more powerful comes along.
Note: All these articles have been written on Notion.
