Notion at Work: design an Intelligent Workspace to streamline your company’s processes

Far from being a tool limited to habit trackers or student workspaces, Notion is a fantastic tool for businesses that want to streamline their operations, especially in an era of work-from-home remote teams and digital overload (yes, Notion hasn’t yet managed to deal with the physical world in an efficient way!)

Notion is a powerful tool that can help you organize and manage your work more effectively. One way to take full advantage of its capabilities is to craft an intelligent workspace that is structured enough to keep information clean and manageable, but at the same time flexible enough to evolve with new users and fresh content. In this post, we will explore how to create such a workspace in Notion.

The key to crafting an intelligent workspace in Notion is to take a two-pronged approach. The first prong is to centralize your information in master databases. The second prong is to create gateways for accessing that information. By following these two steps, you will be able to create a workspace that is easy to navigate, intuitive to use, and pleasant to work in.

Centralizing your information in master databases is the first step in creating an intelligent workspace in Notion. To guide you in this process, we will reference the "Para method," an organizational method developed by a friend of Notion, Thiago Forte. The Para method segments information into four buckets: projects, resources, areas, and archives.

Projects are initiatives with defined outcomes and a deadline. They are completed through a series of tasks. For example, creating a website, organizing an event, and carrying out an advertising campaign are all projects. Resources are materials for general reference or for use when completing your projects. Examples are photo and video libraries, a contacts database, and educational materials. Areas are the high-level categories of your work. They offer a method of categorizing projects and resources. All projects and most resources will fall within an area. For example, marketing, accounting, and product development might all be areas. Oftentimes, your clients will constitute areas as well. Archives are completed or inactive projects, resources, and areas.

To centralize your information in master databases, you will start by creating your first top-level page that is shared across your workspace, your data page. Within that data page, you will insert four master databases, one for each of the first three buckets of the Para method. Then, you will create one for the tasks that make up your projects. In the data page, you will have an areas database, a projects database, a tasks database, and a resources database.

The areas database has a select property with two options: one for internal operations and one for clients. The projects database has a select property to indicate the status of the project, a person property for the project manager, and a date property with an end date for the timespan of the project. The tasks database has a person property for the person responsible for completing the task, a date property without an end date for the tasks' deadlines, and a checkbox property for marking the tasks complete.

The final step in centralizing your information is to populate the inner page content and create templates for your areas and projects. When you open the page of an area, you want to see a helpful snapshot of all the information associated with that area. For example, for a client of your company, you might include a brief overview, a table of contents, and a project's board. The project's board is a linked database that is linked to the master project database and filtered to show only the projects that are linked to that particular area. The board format groups the projects by their status, making it easy to see which projects are in progress and which are complete.

In addition to the project's board, you will also want to include a list of resources and a list of contacts for each area. These are also linked databases that are linked to the master resources and contacts databases, respectively, and are filtered to show only the relevant resources or contacts.