Notion has become integral to my daily workflow. During the week, there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not in Notion for at least a few hours, if not most of the workday. Here’s how Notion makes both my personal and professional life so much easier.
Notion keeps track of all my work
Here at How-To Geek, I write quite a few articles every month. At any given moment, I have 30 to 40 ideas I’m working on and a dozen or more articles in various stages of the outlining or writing process. This is a lot to keep track of, and I’ve tried out several tools over the years.
Eventually, after going through Trello, ClickUp, Obsidian, and Asana (often trying the paid plans), I landed on Notion’s free plan to keep up with everything. Notion can easily organize each article idea in every stage from ideation to outline to writing and finally submitting. I’m also able to keep other key information with each article, like internal tracking notes and much more.
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Like I said, I used to pay for tools in order to get the custom fields areas that I rely on for my writing, but Notion makes it extremely easy and free to create various custom fields—and that’s what really sold me.
I also love that I can write all of my articles right inside of Notion using Markdown and then copy them into the backend editor, and all formatting comes with me. That’s something I was never able to achieve with other platforms.
It’s safe to say that I couldn’t do my job as efficiently as I do without Notion.
I’m able to track my Facebook Marketplace trades with ease
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | ShotPrime Studio/Shutterstock
Earlier this year, I started trading handmade goods for items on Facebook Marketplace. I’ve made some pretty great trades, like a cutting board I made for a M1 MacBook Pro and a few random tech items I had lying around my office for an M3 iMac.
I like to keep track of what trades I’ve done and the value of both the item I gave out and the item I received. Why do I track this? I’m not sure really, but I like to be able to remember what items I traded for when I go to sell things later on.
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Using Notion, I was able to build out a quick form that integrates with a database. I simply fill out the form with the names of the items, values, date the trade finalized, and attached pictures. This all imports into the database and becomes easy to search, view, and modify if I need to in the future.
One of the best features of Notion that I use heavily for this project is the unlimited uploads of 5MB or smaller files, which is really nice as I can attach several pictures of a project if I want to.
Vacation planning became simple once I made a template
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
My wife and I recently went on two vacations to very different locations: Texas and Florida. We used Notion to plan everything out because of just how organized it can be.
We took the time before the vacation to not only plan out the actual trip, but build out a template that we can use for future trips. One thing that I really like is the packing list that my wife and I made together, as it has checkboxes so we can tick off each item as it gets packed in order to make sure we don’t leave anything behind. I was also able to make a full dashboard area that had all the hotels we were staying at with phone numbers, addresses, confirmation numbers, and dates of stay in one easy area.
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Then, I used multiple databases to track everything from where we wanted to eat, what sites we wanted to visit, places we wanted to shop, and more. It was really nice to have individual pages for each location and then be able to bring it all into one dedicated page for each day so we could have everything neatly organized.
Now, when we go on another vacation, I just head to the template we made, copy it, and start inputting all the things that we want to do on the trip. Notion made our vacation planning so simple.
Notion is way more powerful than I need, and that’s a good thing
I am only starting to scratch the surface for how powerful Notion is. I do use it for other things that I didn’t go in-depth here about, like note-taking at church and for my Sunday School lessons, writing down settings for my lasers, and much more. But Notion really is far more than just a note-taking or database tool—it can be a hub for your entire life. That’s what my goal is with Notion down the road.
Right now, Notion is just a simple note-taking and lightweight database tool for me. But I hope to turn it into so much more than that as time goes on. I’ll be integrating it with my n8n workflows to automate various things like moving articles between stages, creating drafts for me, and more.
OS
masOS, Windows
Supported Desktop Browsers
Web Clipper Extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari
This customizable workspace simplifies and combines the processes of note-taking, task creation, and date planning to create an all-in-one productivity workspace.
