Three Lessons After 6 Months Using Notion
After six months of playing around with Notion, here’s what I learned.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
6 Signs Your Notion Workspace Needs a Clean-up
When you start your day, which scenario feels more like you?
Scenario 1
You don’t even need to open Notion. Its already open and ready for you.
Because yesterday, when you closed up your laptop, you knew at start-up that Notion would open up on a beautiful “Start My Day” page where you can simply have a look at what’s on your plate, take a moment to maybe move a few things around and then dive into work.
Throughout the day when you’re looking for some piece of information, you either go straight to the page you need (it’s in your favourites after all), or you do a quick search that finds what you need (because you have a system that simplifies your page templates and make things recognisable quickly).
Or are your more like this ⬇️
Scenario 2
You sit at your desk, open a browser and start scrolling through the news and social media to see what you might have missed or what happened. Then you spend a bit of time in your email inbox. You delete some emails, reply to a few and think “oh yeah, I should do this at some point”.
Time for a coffee break, so that’s what you do. And then, you relaise the thing you need to do your work is somewhere in Notion. But jumping into Notion just doesn’t feel appealing at all. Actually, it’s starting to feel like a drag and you just don’t want to.
You need a thing, but you can’t find it. You update a status and the item disappears (where, you don’t know). You feel like this 👇
If you answered scenario #1, good for. You probably have a pretty clean and functional Notion workspace. But don’t stop reading yet.
It doesn’t take much time to go from the first scenario to the second, and then you feel like setting up your Notion space was a big waste of time. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can clean it up and make it work for you again.
Not sure a clean-up will fix things? Let’s see what hints to a messy workspace, and how fixing this, might improve the efficiency of your workspace.
Sign #1 - Your left sidebar is too crowded
How many items are on your sidebar?
I’ve seen extra minimalist workspaces with a maximum of 5 items.
And I’ve seen some where the list is never ending and none of the pages are nested under others. Pure chaos (in my opinion - if it works for you, why are you here?)
A crowded sidebar makes your Notion workspace messy simply by having too many things to look at.
Many of the improvements that were made last year make it even easier than before to minimise the number of things you see, choose the order of your pages you prefer and even choose the order of your sections.
Here’s what mine looks like (even though I’m sure there are thousands of pages in my workspace)
Here’s what you can do
- Keep the number of items of a maximum of five.
- Give yourself a rule to do this for your favourites as well (that section is the only one where you can’t set a maximum number of items).
- For a bigger workspace, creating a Teamspace can help you separate either parts of your business, or you could create a personal one that is independent from your business Teamspace.
- Create a “Resource”, “Archive”, or “Sandbox” page where you can simply move all your experimental, old or hard to file away pages. Use this as much as possible.
- Make a practice to review your sidebar a couple of times per year.
Sign #2 - Your “Inbox” is way too full
Which Inbox?
By “Inbox” I don’t mean your emails. I mean the Inbox on the left hand side of your Notion workspace. It’s a space dedicated to notifications from within your workspace.
If you’re getting multiple inbox notifications, and you don’t even look at them or ever try to mark them as read, it may be time to change your settings and make this feature work better for you.
After all, research shows notifications are causing stress, lower concentration levels and lower productivity. If you got Notion to become productive (that’s the motivation for many of us), and then the numbered red dot gets higher and higher and higher and you get less productive, what was the point of it all?
A lot of people simply don’t realise what causes these notifications and they don;’t necessarily need them.
So let’s change that.
Here’s what to do
Let’s start be “declaring bankruptcy”. Open your Inbox, look for the three dots, and choose “Mark as all read”. You can do this whenever the number is too high and overwhelming. You can even go a step further and “Archive All”.
To change the settings if your notifications, there are a few things you can do.
- In the overall settings section, under Notifications, you can simply toggle off a lot of notification types.
- You can also look at individual notifications you already received, click on the bell (🔔) and adjust your preferences from there.
- Each page can have its own Notification set-up differently. You can choose to see all updates, all comments, or only @mentions of your name and replies. Choose the level that’s right for you.
There will be notifications you might feel are useful to you. Keep those turned on. But mute the rest so have a “cleaner” workspace.
Sign #3 - You haven’t chosen starting page
Each time you open Notion, you simply end up at the last page you viewed. But you don’t have a standard page that you can always use that points you in the right direction.
Changing this need to be done in two steps.
Here’s what to do
- You need to have a page that’s useful to you whenever you open up Notion. You can either create your own (I did that), or you can choose to use the default Home page and customise it so that it works for you. This is my starting page 👇
- You’ll need to go into your settings, chose to open to a specific page, and then pick what page you want. Mine is called “Start Here”, I added it to the very top of my favourites, which I leave at the very top of my sidebar, and that’s always what shows up for me. In my settings, it looks like this:
Sign #4 - Your have too many duplicate pages and database
That one is pretty simple. Basically, because you can’t find a thing, you make a new one. And later on when you search for the latest one, you somehow land into your old one. And then you get very confused and you’re not sure what your working on anymore.
While Notion’s search engine is not bad, it’s not the best either. It has plenty of quirks which sometimes means it won’t show you what you need as a first result (even if the term you searched is in the title of the page).
Finding and cleaning up duplicate pages can be quite tricky, but Matthias Frank’s got your back with this great video:
Sign #5 - You don’t have a system to catch random notes
Being able to add random notes when the inspiration strikes, bookmarks of cool stuff you find online, random to-dos that sneak up on you should be an essential part of your system.
And it should be a pretty easy, simple set-up that doesn’t require you to even ask yourself “where should this go”.
Here’s what I do
I have a “Quick Notes” page where I can add random things. These are usually tagged as “Note to be processed” which means I can write it down quickly, then go back to what I was doing (or move on to my next task).
I keep in in my sidebar (under Start Here) and there’s a button to make adding a note super easy.
I keep in in my sidebar (under Start Here) and there’s a button to make adding a note super easy.
To take this one step further, you can use your phone’s widget to create a “Quick Add” button. I’m on Android so it looks like a super boring plus sign, but I can simply click it, it creates a new note and I can write my idea down.
Just a note, while this systems speeds up adding info into your systems, it won’t work well unless you take care of the next sign of a messy workspace…
Sign #6 - You don’t take the time for a weekly review
I feel like I need to put on my mum hat for this one. Just give me a minute…
There is no Notion function that’ll do the clean up for you, and help you stay on top of it all. You might have a cute template, or a super powerful one, but if you never take the time to clean it up, it’ll get messy, confusing and useless pretty fast.
Like I tell my kids, you’ve got two choices:
- Wait until the mess is unbearable and then do a mega big clean of your
roomNotion workspace. It’s less work on a daily or weekly basis. But it could ruin a whole weekend/week/month further down the line.
- Do a little bit each week to place things back where they belong,
dust a bit, change your bed sheets. You can even do 5 minutes per day, so that your weekly session gets done in under an hour. Yeah, it’s hard to add a habit like that, but it doesn’t take too long to feel pretty good.
Here’s what I do
- Most days (definitely not all), I use my “Closing Time” page. The most important part of that page is where I go to process the unprocessed. What that means is that I add the tags, tasks, projects and any other bit of information I need for this note to be where it belongs. It doesn’t mean I start drafting a social media post from an idea I had. It means the idea gets moved into my Content Hub and is tagged as “Use Next” so my idea bank is not empty.
- Once I week, I meet up (online) with a couple of awesome ladies (hi Kate, hi Ruth 👋🏻) and do a full review of my week. It’s a habit that started when I joined Notion Mastery, and it’s often my favourite moment of the week. If I skipped my daily Closing Time session, this is when I’ll catch-up on it all.
What’s comes next?
So you’ve got ideas to clean up your workspace and make it work better, but you’re not sure what to start with?
Keep it simple. Start with the first suggestion.
They’ve been listed in order of quickest and simplest to implement, while the last two will take more time to put in place, because by then, we’re also dealing with setting new habits, and that’s never an easy thing to do.
And if you’re still struggling to keep things, send me an email. I’d love to help you feel like you can stay on top of the Notion clutter.
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