Notion SubTask (or subitem) has been included out-of-the-box in the product to establish a relationship between database items. This feature has been on the top list of requests done to the Notion team to be incorporated, and it has been replaced until now with the creation of custom properties, but nothing of that is required.

How does Notion SubTask Work in Notion Database?

We first need to know that Notion has decided to call this feature Sub-Items instead of SubTasks, but I would prefer to use this word as it seems more used in the outside community. To enable this feature, we need to use the following option in the Database created:

We would have the option to rename the created properties or to use the default names “Sub-Item” for the properties that would reference the child items on the relationship and “Parent Item” for the properties that would reference the parent item on the relationship.

The result would not be much different than the situation we had until now because this will create the parent and child properties, as you can see in the picture below:

And you can assign any other element from the database to the value of these properties, as you can see in the picture below:

How Many Sub Task Properties Can You Add To A Notion Database?

There is no limit on the number of sub-task properties you can add to a Notion Database, that you can use to establish different relationships of this type in case you find a suitable use case for this purpose. Once you have already one property added, you will see an option to add a new property as well as you can see in the picture below:

What Features SubTask Can Provide OOTB?

Additional to the primary capability of linking the properties from one of the items, other features make use of these new properties that we can add to our database. One of them is the option to see this relationship in the Notion Database Timeline View, as you can see in the picture below:

Summary

It is expected that the number of properties that will be added in the future based on the establishment of this relationship will increase a lot, so the recommended approach is to start to migrate our custom properties to the standard ones to be able to make use of all these capabilities and ease of management that we already have today as well as all the new features that will be added shortly.