Notion starter kit: My 100+ learnings about Notion over the past 7 years
How to get the most use out of Notion
Getting started with Notion can be intimidating.
When I was first introduced to it in 2019, I fled back to the cherished OneNote system I’d dutifully created. But the seed had been planted. A couple months later I returned with a determination to give it a proper go.
Since then, I’ve become the Notion guy in my circles. I track, I document, I dashboard, and I design personal products to sandpaper any and all of my life’s frictions.
My sleep tracker has a personality. My finance tracker has values. I design my systems to make me feel a certain way when I visit them. I treat Notion less like a tool and more like a space I’m building a relationship with.
I tried to write a simple post sharing a few tips for new Notion users. But unbounded ideation got the best of me, and I ended up excavating over 100 lessons from seven years of experimentation. So this officially became a 10-part series. This is chapter 1.
I’m Lamar. A product designer, developer, psych grad, and recovering self-quantifier. I use Notion for everything from meal prep and movie tracking to re-architecting my memory and aligning my life with my values. My hope is that anyone who reads this walks away with at least one spark they’ve never considered before.
In my Notion starter kit series, you’ll find my favourite Notion learnings over the years which can be summed up by the following 10 lessons:
Make it useful: The current post about how to get the most use out of Notion
Make it easy to access: How to streamline your setup to enable faster input
Make it easy to find information: How to design your space to find information faster
Make it easy to reverse mistakes: How to make mistakes safely
Make it easy to learn: How to learn its tools without feeling overwhelmed
Make it easy to read: How to structure information so it’s intuitive
Make it easy to maintain: How to stay consistent with less effort
Make it easy to start: How to find your best use cases
Make it pretty: How to make it aesthetic
Make it smart: How to level it up
Make it useful
The best tools are mirrors. Reflecting back the problems we have and opportunities we hope for.
I’ve built a lot of Notion systems for myself over the years.
Some of them have still got have greased up gears turning like clockwork. Others have rusted out entirely.
The ones that survived were the most persuasive. They knew how to appeal to me. They were the ones that aligned with what I actually cared about.
The sleep tracker that knows I dream of learning to lucid dream is the one who defeated the sleep tracker who supplied me with a sleep score every night.
The finance tracker that understands my value for financial confidence beat out the one who focused entirely on financial security.
Defining our version of ‘useful’ is the key to the success of any system.
The lessons below are the ones I’ve used to help me define it for myself.
Lesson 1
Personification: The power of personifying pages
Pages feel valuable when we give them life.
I’ve always loved giving life to the world around me. It was well into my teens that I felt compelled to thank my elevator for the ride up to my apartment.
Recently, I discovered I can also give life to Notion pages. And when I do give a page a taste of personhood a few things happen:
It develops a personality
It develops a perspective
It develops a purpose
And we develop a stronger collaborative bond.
In practise
When I personify a page, I write:
- An introduction (in its voice)
- Its purpose (why it exists)
- Its responsibilities (what it’s accountable for)
- Its aspirations (what it dreams of becoming)
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Example: Meet Lamar’s Sandman
- My purpose: I’m Lamar’s Sandman, it’s my goal to give him the dreams he dreams of having. One of Lamar’s most steadfast goals in life has been to learn to lucid dream. He realized that sleeping 8 hours a night means he’s sleeping 1/3 of each day, and therefore 1/3 of his life. He believes that by learning to lucid dream he’ll be able to reclaim that third of his life by continuing to live in his dream world.
- My responsibilities: Track his dreams: In his daily pages is a Dream catcher property where he wakes up every morning and attempts to record every dream he can remember. The act of recording his dreams has made him dream even more.
- My aspirations: Lucid dreaming focus: Work with him on more focused strategies for lucid dreaming, rather than just dreaming.Lesson 2
Transformation: Don’t forget to feel
Designing for feeling is designing for function.
In the same way a walk in a forest makes me feel more grounded and a retreat under my blanket makes me feel safe, I try to engineer the visit to any system in my digital space to feel transformative.
The fact that a space can be designed to evoke any emotion is too powerful a tool to overlook.
In practise
- Pick an important page in your space.
- Ask “how do I want this page to make me feel?”
- Consider how you might design your system to better evoke that feeling.
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Example: How a Financial Tracker could change based on the feeling it aims to foster
- Financial security: If I want to feel as though my finances are in tip-top shape, then I might design views to highlight my net worth and assets.
- Financial confidence: If I want to feel that regardless of what happens, I’ll have the skills needed to make money, then I might design views to highlight the variety of financial properties I have in the works.Lesson 3
Neediness: Don’t design something that needs you more than you need it
We should get more than we give.
Breaking a streak is painful, but not more painful than the realization that I’m vulnerable to turning into one of the machines that I program.
Some of the hardest refactors I’ve done involved halting the habit of tracking something I’d been tracking for a while because I ultimately realized it wasn’t benefiting me enough.
In practise
1. Audit your inputs: Identify what information you add to your systems each day / week
2. Take notice if there are any systems that require you to spend too much time or effort for the service that they offer.
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Example: Sleep tracker
For years, I was tracking the time I went to bed and the time I woke up. It was something small, but I was consistent. Until I realized that not only wasn’t I doing anything with that information, but my sleep was pretty stable overtime. I wasn’t really experiencing any notable friction around it that needed to be resolved.
Retiring that was a small slice of my morning and mind that I was able to reclaim for myself.Lesson 4
Minimum valuable product: What if it could only do one thing
Good systems highlight the main ingredient.
I don’t consider myself to be a perfectionist. To me, that word implies holding myself to unreasonably high standards, which I don’t believe I do. However, I do often tend feel a strong force toward “just one more thing”.
I think of it like those recipes with an endless number of ingredients. Instead of just leaving well-enough alone, I can picture the cook tasting their dish and muttering, “just one more thing”. (Personally, I’m convinced that no recipe really needs that quarter teaspoon of coriander.)
I try to think about my systems in a similar way. Aiming not to confuse the focus with tiny tastes of distraction.
In practise
1. Select a page
2. List out its responsibilities
3. Sort them by order of impact / importance by asking yourself what is the one thing I need this page to do well?Lesson 5
Value ties: Cultivate products that care
It’s easier to care about a system that cares about something.
I mentioned earlier in a previous example, that one of my top goals in life is to learn to lucid dream. I, of course, created a Notion system that tracked my dreams. It morphed into a full Sleep Tracker: times I went to bed, times I woke up, the number of hours I slept per night, the dreams I remembered, whether those dreams were lucid. It came with data visualizations comparing my sleep across months, and study notes about official Sleep Quality Indexes and other extraneous sleep concepts.
I tracked my sleep data for months and ended up losing track of my main goal: lucid dreaming.
This is Goodhart’s Law in action: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. My system cared about sleep metrics. What I needed was a system that cared about lucid dreaming.
By giving a page or project a clear value, we determine the value we expect in return.
Goodhart’s law
Goodhart’s law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Imagine a person going to their doctor and being told that they’re at greater risk of a heart attack because of their high blood pressure. But instead of improving the lifestyle factors that caused their problem, they opt to reduce their blood pressure by gaming their numbers using a medication that lowers their resting heart rate. This is the warning of Goodhart’s law: it’s easy to lose sight of our priorities when we start chasing scores.
In practise
For any page with a purpose, ask yourself what that page would want for you if it cared about you.
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Example: Netflix’s values
There are an endless number of angles to approach any product.
A Netflix that values constant attention ends its movies with a promise for a sequel.
A Netflix that values provoking critical thought ends with invitations to share video essays.
Same platform, different values, different outcomes.Lesson 6
Deprivation test: Break your capture habit
It’s a good habit to build a habit of breaking habits.
I once came across the following tweet and it really resonated with me.
I’ve found that, if I’m not careful, I can too easily fall into an automatic routine of capturing information.
I used to record everything in my Daily Tracker. Every meal I ate. Every person I talked to. Every emotion I felt. Overwhelming details that felt deceptively productive to log.
But there were nights when I was too tired to add information. And those nights felt so much lighter. But also, a bit guilt-ridden, for missing the day.
Those are the kinds of signs I now listen out for.
When skipping feels liberating, that’s when it’s time to reevaluate whether our systems are still serving us, or whether we’ve devolved to serving our systems.
In practise
1. Pick a page or a system that’s been consuming too much of your time.
2. Abandon it for a week.
3. Return to it and reflect on how the week felt and how you now feel looking at your emptier space.Lesson 7
Productization: What if you were to sell it tomorrow
We’re better at designing for others than for ourselves.
Whenever someone asks me for advice on their Notion setup, I feel the pressure to offer them something impactful.
I try to hone in on their ultimate goal and design the easiest setup from there.
But when working in my own pages, I often find myself letting my dreams run wild. What once began as a clear singular goal, falters into frantic fur ball of fun-to-have features.
I fall victim to Solomon’s paradox. The tendency to reason more wisely about other people’s problems than our own.
When the problem is ours, we get emotionally entangled. We fantasize more. When it’s someone else’s, we step back, see trade-offs, and give more balanced advice.
Now, when I notice one of my systems acquire a bit too many bells-and-whistles, I try treating it like a product I plan to sell. Forcing me to think like a consultant, rather than a creator.
In practise
Many of our pages and systems will feel useful to us. But something will still feel off. Some unknown friction. In those scenarios, I find it helpful to consider some of the following product questions:
- What are the pain points that this is solving for?
- What are the opportunities that this could unveil if it were working ideally?
- If I was to sell this as a template to someone, what instructions would I give them on how to use the page?
- If this page were stripped of all styling and formatting, how would I make it intuitive for someone to understand?
- If I broke this down into several features, which ones would people (and I) be most willing to pay for?Lesson 8
Evolution: Knowing when it’s time to add
Don’t build for a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet.
Features are deceptively opinionated and persuasive. The more we build, the more we want to build. But the more we do, the more we risk scope creep.
When I originally built out my Body Block (the system I use to facilitate everything related to my physical wellbeing), I created a page for every body related function I could think of: aesthetics, fitness, mobility, blood, gut, energy, flexibility…
My plan was to house a well-balanced system where everything could be goal-oriented and tracked.
But what I developed was an overly complex system of dozens of goals that weren’t my top priorities at that time in my life.
Most of that database became dusty.
I learned something so stupidly simple. The time to evolve a system is when you really need to.
Products love to have a vision of their future. But useful features don’t tend to look that far in advance.
In practise
My body block today: Instead of designating an entire page to each item in that long list of physical functions I mentioned, I now keep them as a simple bullet / toggle list and only convert them into pages when I’m ready to make them a priority in my life.Lesson 9
Devolution: Knowing when it’s time to delete
Remove features to upgrade systems.
Subtraction Neglect describes people’s tendency to add when solving a problem, even when the better solution might be to take something away.
I used to track as much information about my habits as possible. I believed that the more we knew about ourselves the more we could improve our lives.
But the upkeep became so overwhelming that I found myself too tired to record anything.
When I pared that back and started recording the things that mattered to me most, I became much more consistent.
When something isn’t working, fight the instinct to add a new feature and ask what you can subtract instead.
In practise
Ask yourself:
- What’s one piece of information that I add to this system that has the smallest impact?
- What was the last feature I added? And how has it been living up to my expectations?
- What would it look like if I removed all the information at the bottom of my page?
(I find that the least important info in my setup gets pushed to the basements, so that's often a good spot to start looking for opportunities to minimalize)Lesson 10
Show it off: Give someone a tour
Brag about your work for better results.
When we walk someone through a system we’ve created, we are much more likely to uncover our blind spots and areas for improvement.
I dedicate so much effort to building out my spaces that I love talking to people about all the details I considered.
But it happens every-so-often that someone follows up by asking to see my Notion and I invariably start to feel self-conscious. I open it up and immediately start to see all of its flaws.
Even writing out this list of lessons has made me realize how much better my digital environment would be if I followed my own advice more devotedly.
So even if you don’t want to actually share your space with others, pretending to do it works too.
In practise
- Take some screenshots of your Notion workspace.
- Share them with me (I’d love to chat about how you’ve thought through your space! 😁)That’s all for this one!
In summary, here are the lessons I mentioned in this chapter about how I’ve learned to get the most use out of my Notion:
The best tools are mirrors. Reflecting back the problems we have and opportunities we hope for.
Pages feel valuable when we give them life.
Designing for feeling is designing for function.
We should get more than we give.
Good systems highlight the main ingredient.
It’s easier to care about a system that cares about something.
It’s a good habit to build a habit of breaking habits.
We’re better at designing for others than for ourselves.
Don’t build for a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet.
Remove features to upgrade systems.
Brag about your work for better results.
In the next chapter, I’ll share a bunch of screenshots showing how I’ve streamlined my setup to enable faster input ⚡
See you next Sunday! 👋😁