The #1 Rule for Every Notion Workspace

Notion is essentially an app for creating custom apps. It’s a “no-code app builder.”

The apps you create organize your information and streamline your workflow. They’re “productivity apps.”

Take a critical look at any leading productivity app, and you’ll see that it’s fundamentally a system for managing particular types of information.

• Project managers like Asana, ClickUp and Todoist contain projects, tasks and goals.
• CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot manage people, organizations and deals.
• Knowledge bases like Guru and Document360 use variations of articles or cards.
• Multimedia libraries host images and videos.
• Outlook, Google Calendar and Cron manage events.
• Customer support systems like Intercom facilitate tickets.
• In the case of Monday.com, you explicitly select the entities you want to manage.

Behind the scenes, these apps organize your information in databases. The app is simply a graphical interface for the data.

In fact, all apps and websites are interfaces for information structured in databases.

When you create an app with other no-code builders like Bubble or Glide, you connect a data source containing a table for each type of content. If you’re building a CRM, you connect databases of people, organizations and deals. Google Sheets and Airtable are commonly used as the “backends” of no-code apps. The apps display the information in various layouts and filtered contexts.

Without exception, that’s how every Notion workspace should work:

Structure all information in related master databases. Access it through contextual views.

Many of the apps inspired by Notion are preconfigured with this strategy. Anytype, Capacities and Tana are among the many emerging competitors built around core object types.

Endless Benefits

The benefits of this approach are immense beyond measure. To name a few, it keeps your information:

• Tightly organized
• Intuitively accessible
• Accurate and consistent
• Versatile
• Scalable
• Automation- and integration-friendly
• Transferrable
• Beautiful

Common Databases

I include these databases in nearly every Notion workspace:

• Events

Relationship Management:

• People
• Organizations

Project Management:

• Projects
• Tasks

PARA-Inspired:

• Areas
• Resources

I commonly use these as well:

• Posts
• Products

Time Periods:

• Days
• Months
• Quarters
• Years

Goal Tracking:

• Objectives
• Key Results

Finance:

• Accounts
• Transactions
• Invoices

Supercharged by Relations

Relating these master databases unleashes the unique power of Notion to create a system that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

It allows you to maintain a single source of truth for each object type, and most notably, it automates your contextual views. Using database templates, you can automatically populate every database page with the related items from other databases.

That means each organization can display its related people and projects:

And each project can display its related tasks and resources:

Bulletproof

Related master databases is the foundational principal of my Bulletproof Method, which underpins the widely employed Bulletproof Workspace template.

Members of Notion A-to-Z enjoy access to the template, and more importantly, a deeper dive into the implementation of Bulletproof so they can expand it to serve their unique needs. If you’ve yet to join, hop aboard and make the most of Notion. 💪