Follow me on my journey to test if Notion can be my default app or organize my daily activities and my learning experience along the way.

This is the second post in the Adoption Notion series that I have started a few weeks ago, so If you would like to know more about this, please take a look to the post below:

I have been used Notion for some days now, and I need to say that at the beginning I thought I was going to quit this exercise because it seems so complex and chaotic to me, but after a while, things are starting to make sense to me.

NOTE: I have looked to some online resources regarding Notion but to be honest I am doing this on my own as I feel this can work for me, so maybe the adoption process is all wrong, but this is just my adoption process.

I have started taking a look at the available templates thinking that the things that I would like to do should be similar to anyone else. There are some main topics that I needed to cover as part of this process:

• Work Stuff: As a Software Architect I work for several clients so I need a way to manage the task that I need to accomplish, projects, and meetings so I can have a single view of the status of my collaboration with each of the customers.
• Personal Stuff: As a writer, I would like also to use Notion to help me in the creation process for Medium but also I need to be able to keep track of my personal things: Travels, Year Goals, and so on.

So, the first thing that I did was to start applying templates available in the Notion app to cover some of these topics starting with the common ones:

• Meeting Notes: I have started with these templates for the meeting notes and this should cover most of your needs, but to be honest this is too focused on specific software work, but it can do the work to start with.
• Travel Planner: I have started with this template for managing my Travel Plans and this is something that I can leverage as a whole even just removing some parts as I just need some empty space to put the different links and things that I need to manage as part of my travel. I don’t need a detailed set of fields to fill it is more a generic organization process.
• Additional things: I have completed this with a Movie List template and Yearly Goals that are pretty basic but cover pretty much what I needed.

After that, I just need to provide some solution to the other topics that I need to cover, mainly my work stuff and this is how I introduce it in the creation process of Notion, and this is being the best part of it.

The truth is that there are a lot of templates available that are just awesome, much better than something that somebody like me can create even I have all the knowledge of the platform ( that I do not have at all) but in the end, each template is being created with some needs in mind and those needs could be different than yours and that’s why some of the awesome templates that you see at first are not useful for you because it doesn’t adapt to your work process.

So I have created several things to be able to have something that works for me. I have created a Customer database with some of the data that I needed for a customer:

• Customer Name
• Collaboration Status to differentiate my active customers that my past customers or the ones that are currently on hold.

And then I have linked to several databases that I have created to have under control the main things that I need:

• Meetings
• Tasks

So I have created two properties which the Reference type to be able to link with the different databases to be able to show only the meetings or tasks for a specific customer.

At the end we got a visual like the picture that you have below:

The process of creating these pages is pretty simple, you just need to define some properties and some components such as tables or databases in a very WYSIWYG way, but things starting to get tricky with you want to go a little bit behind that, for example, I have struggled a lot to link a page with existing databases until I discover that the reference property could make the trick, even if that was not perfect that helped me. I am sure there are lot of more complicated things that I can do and I need to do and probably I would do, but this is a learning process as well so I am using only what I know at the moment

And this is my current setup for now for my work needs and in the next article, I will comment on how I set up the part of my personal zone to be able to use medium also to handle my writing process 🙂