How I Use Notion (For Home, Work, and Personal Goals)
UPDATE: get my templates
I regularly update all of my Notion pages, and I thought since I’ve pared down to just what I need, I would share templates of what I use so you can copy them for yourself. Get all of my templates that you can copy here.
I’ve been using Notion for most of 2019 and it’s improved my life greatly. I thought I’d take you through how I use it, so that you can get some example ideas to use for yourself.
Notion is kind of like a note-taking app, but I use it for so much more than that. I use it as my main planner, project manager, workspace, and writing program. I’ve replaced my previously favorite applications with Notion - it’s replaced Evernote, Trello, any calendar/to do list app, and most uses for Google Docs for me. And you KNOW I was an Evernote superfan in the past, so that means a lot to say that it’s completely replaced it.
If you want to learn more about specifics of using the app, I recommend:
the official Notion template gallery. these are pages you can use for yourself, already set up, so you can start working right away.
these helpful Notion video guides. if you want to dive deeper with step-by-step instructions.
You can get Notion for yourself here. (And if you use that link, you’ll get $10 in credit. It’s a free app, but you can get more out of it with their paid plan. Not sponsored at all, I just love it!)
So here are my main pages, how I use them, and hope that you find it helpful in creating your own setup. You can click any image to see it larger. I’ll also have some of my pages directly linked, so if you sign up for Notion, you can use them for yourself. :)
THE BASICS
Here’s a basic page to give you an idea of how Notion works.
It acts a lot like Squarespace, or any other drag & drop page builder. You can add any variety of items to a page, like text, checklists, bullets, images, PDFs, tables, kanban boards, and SO much more. Just by clicking on the page and typing a slash “/” it’ll show you all the options you have. (See image to the right.)
You can have pages inside of pages, you can make columns, you can create simple or complex systems. It’s really up to you!
The page above is a pretty simple page I have - it’s just a home page for all of my teaching work. I keep plans & storyboards for my online class I’m filming, notes for in-person classes, email addresses for people who are interested in being a beta tester for my online class, and general notes for my existing in person classes.
A couple of small things for even a basic page: you can add a cover photo (either one you upload, one they provide, or stock images you can search through) and an icon, if you want! They give you emojis to choose from for the icon, or you can upload your own.
DATABASES
Here’s another pretty simple page I have. This is my "Clients” page, for all the different freelancing jobs and projects I work on through the year. I just used an “Inline Spreadsheet” here.
You can create whatever data points you want in any spreadsheet. Here I’ve got the project name, date, amount paid, type, payment status, work completed, client name, and “needs.” (Since all of those are completed, they have no “needs”, but when I’m working on them, they can say “needs contract” “needs first draft” etc.) This image on the right shows what types you can add, and how it looks in a note.
(To use any of my pages, just click the “Duplicate” button on the top right of the page you’re on, and it’ll copy it into your workspace for you to use!)
I LOVE the databases in Notion.
Each line is its own page, so I can open each up and put in client info, when they paid a deposit, add inspiration board images, whatever I want.
You can add different “views” to each database. This one is in a spreadsheet view, but I could also view it as a gallery (like a portfolio), a kanban board (like Trello), a calendar, or a few other options. You can customize the views, too, based on —
Filters! You can filter any board by any data point you add. So I could see JUST the clients who haven’t paid me, or just the work I haven’t finished, or just my teaching work - whatever I want my filter to be.
Properties. You can change what data points you see, if you want images to show, what size cards you want, lots of options!
Formulas. I’m not TOO big into formulas, but I can do simple ones - like on this page, I can click the bottom of the “Amount” column to see what my overall income is this year. Or I can see the average, or many other formulas.
You can create page “templates” for easy entry, and link back to any database from any page, which I’ll show later. :)
WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY (SHARED PAGES)
So, there are four main areas of my Notion, and three of them are shared. How it works is that i just share the main page to whoever needs it, so only I’m the one paying for the pro subscription. They still have free accounts, even though they’re administrators on the pages, because the data is technically on my account. The advantages of sharing are:
You can simultaneously work in a page, and see each others’ icons moving around. (Like Google Drive.)
You can assign each other tasks, or mention someone on a page to get their attention.
You can comment on pages and resolve open questions.
Here’s one of the main pages - the wedding photography business I share with my sister-in-law. Our “system” is pretty simple - a series of pages, and a to do list. (The to-do list is a “database”, just like the spreadsheet from above, so you can change the views, add a filter, it’s very flexible!)
Here are a couple of pages inside of our dashboard:
This is our “documents” page, which just has some email templates put inside of toggles. We can copy & paste important info for our clients from here. (The one in red we haven’t completed yet!)
And we have a backup embedded PDF of our wedding contract here, too.
This is our shared clients list for portraits and weddings. It’s really similar to my personal clients list, just with a few added data points. I’ve added a spot to show which client goes to which photographer, and some check boxes for marking that our post-photo-delivery work is done. (These are all unchecked because we added them in after they were already done, because we started using this halfway through the year.)
You can see the different views we have for this board that we can toggle between. For this one, we have a list for this year, future years, and one for just me and just her. They’re just filtered views, but all exist in the same list. :)
MAGAZINE WORK (REMINDERS + TEMPLATES)
Here’s another shared workspace - for the magazine I run along with my partner. This is our main page that we use as a dashboard. It includes a few pages, a couple big alerts (for our holiday season! They’re temporary.), and a general task list. Here are a few of the more important/interesting pages:
Our meeting notes page is where we do a lot of our work. We have two meetings every week - a big Monday meeting where we go over expenses and goals, and another smaller check-in on shipping and customer service. To make sure we don’t forget, we just type “@” in the meeting note and bring up whatever date it’ll be, and create a reminder. It’ll pop up on our phones when the time comes.
On the page, there’s a database of meeting notes, so we can always go back and check what happened, or view it as a spreadsheet to track numbers if we want. Below that is our quarterly/yearly meetings, and a time tracking sheet, too.
What’s important to note here, is on the right of the weekly meeting notes - TEMPLATES. These are an amazing time saver! You can create templates for any database. It’s basically just a page where you can put in whatever you like - we use checklists for tasks we always go over during the meeting, and a spreadsheet for tracking expenses. Then every time you open a new meeting note, you can use the template so you don’t have to remember everything to go over, and it’s already built for you.
Here’s another pretty simple page in our Chickpea dashboard. It just holds some email templates, reference information, and ideas for the future.
There’s the “task templates” section, which includes a couple of “template buttons” - another Notion feature. You can create anything you like in those, but we just made some checklists we use every season when we start/finish a new magazine issue. When we press the “plus”, the checklist appears so we can use it.
This right here was my biggest use of Evernote, and I love it way more here on Notion. This is a database of every single article, recipe, DIY, etc. we’ve ever run in the magazine. You can see, it’s one huge database, split into different category views. Each view is just a filter to show only one category, so that it’s not too overwhelming. You can see how I organize them by the data points in the image to the right.
The “SM tags” point is just for whenever I want to create some social media posts, I can tag it there, and it’ll show up in a special list I created. Then, I can know “oh, I want to make that recipe this week, and talk about that topic on instagram stories.”
I’ve seen plenty of people use this method to create recipe books for themselves, using recipes from their favorite blogs. I don’t need to go super in depth with it, but you can if you want to!
HOME DASHBOARD (LINKED DATABASES, EXPENSE TRACKING)
This is my last shared page - my & my partner’s Home dashboard. We’re currently renovating our 110 year old house, as well as keeping up with regular maintenance and housework. So this is our family corkboard, kind of!
On it, there’s some big picture focus items, a couple of pages for us to reference, a general to do list, a weekly check-in database, and a home projects database. Like the magazine page, we also do a weekly meeting, just for personal stuff.
We use a template (explained above!) to go over the same topics each week - mostly budgeting, housework, and anything we want to bring up. The questions are specifically there to make sure we’re making progress on all our goals, not just busy work.
The expenses get put into data points, so we can look at it like a big spreadsheet every month to see how we’re doing.
We also have a page in our dashboard to make note of monthly (and yearly) subscriptions, so we know what money is going where, and if we need to adjust it or unsubscribe.
(I know these could be linked better using linked databases, I just haven’t done it yet.)
This is something I just completed and I’m pretty happy with - a yearly home maintenance list. I was sick of forgetting that we needed to clean the gutters or replace the air filters, so I made a little database!
In addition, I created a page that automatically shows what’s due this month - and if I didn’t finish something last month, it’ll show as overdue.
This is accomplished by using “linked databases.” All it is, is referencing a database you made, just on another page. From there, you can customize it to just show a certain view, filter, and sort - which is how I made this.
On this page, I created a linked database to my main Maintenance board. I then created a “list” view to just show the title, and what the task was. I filtered it to only show “december” tasks.
In the “overdue” section, I used the same method, except I filtered it to only show “overdue” tasks.
MY DAILY PLANNER (bringing it all together)
Okay, now this is how I bring everything together. Again, you don’t have to do anything complicated like this if you don’t want! You can just create pages of text and checkboxes if you want. I really like my method because it will automatically show tasks that are urgent or coming up, all in one place.
This is my personal, main dashboard. On it, I’ve got:
a short, quick Projects list. they’re a few things I want to dive into before the new year, while I’ve got free time.
my habit tracker. you can make this as elaborate as you want, with checkboxes and numbers. right now I’ve just got a few simple things I’m tracking. But the important part is that they’re just datapoints attached to a page - so I can use each day’s page as a planner/bullet journal AND a tracker. AND, I just add a photo in the header from each day, so I can view it as a gallery - like a photo diary. :)
to do lists. I created a bunch of linked databases, and filtered them to JUST show what’s pertinent. The HOME lists only show up if I’m tagged in a task. The MAGAZINE tasks only show up if I’m tagged and it’s an unfinished task. The FREELANCE tasks only show up if the client has something in the “needs” tag (like, “needs contract” or “needs delivery”) AND isn’t marked as complete.
a really simple “meal plan” of things I can make quickly and easily in between shoots.
seasonal “bucket lists” so I’m not just working all the time. :)
Other ways I use Notion that I didn’t really go over here:
vegan nutrition & overall health reference
journaling
reference files for my camera, software, etc.
“brain dump” scratch pad
reading list (both physical books and links to blog posts/articles)
social media planner
recipe book
The current cons of Notion are that it doesn’t work well (if at all) offline, its mobile apps are a little lacking (but fine on iPhone if you’re looking to do basic things) and the search could be improved even though it is still functional. But overall, it’s the most flexible, powerful application I’ve used in a super long time, and it’s replaced so many apps for me already.
There are tons of ways you can use it - these are just the ones I find helpful for me. I highly suggest looking through their templates (one of mine is on there!) to get inspired to see what you can do with it.
Again, here are the pages I’ve made that you can use for yourself when you sign up for Notion.
Let me know if you have any questions about using Notion, and I’ll try my best to answer back right away! <3