Notion 101: How to make Notion part of your personal tech stack
A few years ago, I fell in love with Notion. It's a powerful, easy-to-use tool for knowledge management, project management, and tracking your own to-dos.
When I ran projects and teams at Articulate, I used Notion for project dashboards and tracking, team resource sharing, meeting agendas, and 1-1 tracking with my managers and directs.
As an independent consultant, I build a Notion workspace for each client to make an easily shareable archive of our shared work, upcoming and past meetings, and project documents. Folks love it, even if they've never used Notion before. For folks itching to add Notion to their toolkit, here's a getting started guide.
What is Notion?
Notion is software that you can use in your browser, on your desktop, or on your phone. It allows you to create content in many different formats, manage sharing and collaborating on that content, and publish it to the web if you'd like. You can create text, multimedia, and databases that you manage in different workspaces. The super-simple database management makes it really easy to create trackable content calendars, archives of meeting agendas/notes, project updates, and tons more.
I use the free version of Notion and it meets all my needs — but larger orgs who want SSO, more data storage, and possibly integration with other tools will love the plus, business, and enterprise plans.
Why use Notion when there are so many options?
Of course you can use Google Drive apps, Evernote, Trello, and probably several other apps to accomplish the things I use Notion for, but the key advantages I find with Notion are:
Everything in one place, with clear inter-linking: Build your dashboards, docs, and databases in one spot. Everything is easily bread-crumbed so you can find it.
Databases: I love using the databases to make simple, filterable records, particularly of meeting agendas and project updates.
Visual simplicity: For folks who are easily distracted (hello, this is me, I am the problem, it's me), Notion's very clear and clean interface provides a focused workspace with minimal space for side quests.
How to
I'll walk you through some of the key features you'll love using in Notion in this video. Then, explore my free PM toolkits and templates for more examples of using Notion in real life. Questions? Send me an email.
