Notion greets new users with a blank page and a slash key. That is either liberating or paralysing, depending on how much time you have. If you have ever opened it, felt quietly threatened by a friend's colour-coded dashboard and closed the tab again, this is for you. What follows is a straightforward setup you can finish in about half an hour: a home screen, a small handful of pages and one database that does something useful.
Start with the two building blocks
Everything in Notion is a block. A line of text is a block. So is a heading, a to-do, a bulleted list, a divider, an image or a table. A page is a stack of blocks. A database is a collection of pages. That is the whole model, and once it clicks, the app stops feeling mysterious.
To add anything, type / on an empty line and a menu appears. Keep typing to narrow it down: /todo gives you a checkbox, /h2 a section heading, /divider a line to break up a long page. Press Escape if you change your mind. To move a block, hover over it and drag the six dots that appear on the left.
Pages inside pages
A page can live inside another page. Hover over a page in the sidebar, click the small + beside it and you have created a subpage. Handy, but easy to overdo. Three levels is plenty: Home, then a project, then its notes. If you find yourself four levels deep, you probably want a database instead.
Build a simple skeleton of pages
Spend the next few minutes creating structure you can name out loud. Vague page titles are the main reason people abandon a workspace after a fortnight.
- Create a page called Home. This becomes your dashboard.
- Create two or three more pages alongside it, such as Notes, Projects and Tasks. Use words you would say in conversation: "House jobs" is better than "Misc 2024".
- Click Add icon on each page and pick something you recognise at a glance. Icons are faster to scan than text.
- Drag pages in the sidebar if you want them nested. Keep the top level to five pages or fewer.
If you cannot decide what you need, create just Notes and Tasks. You can always add more once you notice what you keep writing down.
Add one database that earns its keep
A Notion database is a table where every row opens as a full page. This is the feature worth learning early, because it turns a flat list into something you can filter, sort and group.
- Open your Home page and type /table. Choose Table — New database and name it Tasks.
- Rename the columns. Click a column header, choose Rename, then set the type. Status as a Select with the options To do, Doing and Done. Due as a Date. Priority as another Select.
- Add five real tasks. Not examples, not placeholders. Real ones.
- Click the + beside the view tabs, add a Board view and group it by Status. Now you have a table and a kanban board showing the same information.
Properties versus page content
The columns hold short facts: a date, a status, a priority. Click any row to open the page behind it and write your longer notes there. Beginners often try to squash everything into a column, which makes the table unreadable and the notes useless.
Keep the first database small. Two or three properties you actually update will beat ten you ignore.
Make a home screen you will open
The Home page is not a place to show off. It is a launchpad. Add a date, your pages and the Tasks view, then stop.
- Type a heading at the top, something like Home, and add today's date beside it.
- Type @ and start typing a page name to insert a link to it. Repeat for each page in your skeleton.
- Type /linked, choose your Tasks database and drop a second view of it onto Home. Filter it later, once you know what you want to see.
Resist columns, widgets and progress bars for now. A plain page of links gets used; an elaborate dashboard often becomes a project in itself.
Four habits that keep things tidy
- One page per topic, not per thought. Six short notes about the same project belong on one page, not six.
- Use dates, not day pages. A "Monday" page becomes dead weight by Tuesday. Put the date in a database property instead.
- Archive rather than delete. Create an Archive page and move finished work into it, so search still finds old notes.
- Tidy for five minutes on Friday. File stray notes, close loops, delete anything that turned out to be nonsense.
What to do in your first week
Use what you have built for seven days before adding anything else. Keep a running list of the things you reach for and cannot find; that list tells you what to build next, and it is far more reliable than guessing. Add one feature at a time and give it a few days to prove itself.
Templates are worth exploring once you know the shape of your own work. Before that, they are somebody else's system wearing your name, and you will spend more time adapting them than building something simple from scratch. If you get stuck on how a feature works, the ? in the bottom corner opens Notion's own help and it is searchable in seconds.
Half an hour from now you should have a home screen, three or four named pages and one database with real tasks in it. That is a working workspace. Everything else is optional.
Photo: KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA / Pexels
