Introduction

Recently in May 2022, a new kind of property has been requested since the conception of the tool, and that is the notion status property.

Notion status property is the out-of-the-box kind of property that allows you to track the status of the elements in your database, and its central default values are “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done”

This new property is added to the existing list of fundamental properties and advanced properties.

Notion Status Property Capabilities

Talking about the main capabilities of the notion status property, the first one is to keep track of the elements of the database, as commented. It provides a default structure and content that will work for most of the use-cases you can have in your database, as you can see in the picture below:

The default status option that will be provided are going to be “Not started,” “In progress,” and “Done.”

One of the great things is that the property allows you to have different statuses inside the same “category” of status. There are always three categories of status that are “To-Do,” “In progress,” and “Complete,” so you can have status inside these categories that are covered in this category. Some examples are the following:

• Planning can be a status on the To-Do category to make the difference with Not started because you have already started working on the task, but it is still not in progress from an execution point of view
• Blocked can be a status on the In-Progress category that shows that a task has been started but is stalled for any reason. It can be because you have some outside dependency or for any reason that tells you that the item of the database is blocked.
• Discarded can be a status on the Complete category to show a task that finally is not going to be implemented but you want to keep in the database to keep track of them.
  

These are some samples of using the new notion status property, but the most important thing is that it allows you to adapt your workflow and the status that you want to use or that you use in other tools or your company.

For each of these statuses that you add, you can configure several things:

• Appearance: You can indeed configure the colors as you do in the Select or Multi-Select to find an appearance that matches what this notion status represents.
• Default: You can select which status of all you have added will be the default one that will be the one used when you create a new element in the database and doesn’t have to provide a specific status.
• Checkbox view: You can also select if you want to show the status as a text similar to a Select or a Checkbox, so this way, when the checkbox is checked automatically completes the task
  

Notion Status vs. Select

On previous days when we wanted to do something similar, we usually used the Select property to perform similar tasks. And to be honest, that period was not wrong because, with the Select property type, you can do things similar to the Status property.

You can create any status that you want as an element of the Select property and use it as you wish, as you can see in the screenshot below:

And the look and feel, as you can see, are pretty similar. Some of the additional capabilities commented above are not present, but the main capabilities were provided.

The main difference between a normal select and a notion status property can be if you want to use a different notion database view such as Board, the option to collapse or group several statuses in its category will help you on the view as you can select if you want to see the specific status available (the similar idea you will get when using the Select property) or if you’re going to use the high-level groups as you can see in the picture below:

You can select the view that you want to use in the Grouping option: