34 Unique Tips and Tricks in Notion

Fancy Divider Colors in Notion-Learn how to change the color of the divider lines in Notion to add a bit of flair to your pages.

Excel-Like Dragging and Double Clicking in Notion Databases-Learn how to use Excel-like dragging and double clicking in Notion databases to make data entry and organization more efficient.

Easier Columns in Notion-Learn how to easily add and manage columns in Notion, to better organize your information.

Aligning Images in Notion-Learn how to align images within columns in Notion, to give your pages a more polished look.

Peek Pages in Notion-Learn how to "peek" at pages within Notion, to quickly view and navigate related pages.

Mobile Carousel in Notion-Learn how to use the mobile carousel feature in Notion, to easily flip through pages on your phone.

Notion Enhancer Chrome Extension-Learn about the Notion Enhancer Chrome Extension, which adds additional functionality to Notion, such as customizable hotkeys.

Notion's New Icons-Learn about the new icons that have been added to Notion, and how to use them in your pages.

Custom Icons in Database for Notion-Learn how to create custom icons in databases within Notion, to better organize and visually identify different types of information.

View Your Databases as a Gallery in Notion-Learn how to view your databases in Notion as a gallery, to easily flip through and interact with your data.

Change Properties from Gallery View-Learn how to change properties of items within a Notion database while in gallery view, making data entry and organization more efficient.

Use the Timeline View to See the Week Ahead-Learn how to use the timeline view in Notion to see what's coming up in the week ahead, and to better plan and organize your time.

Create Recurring Tasks Using Recurring Templates in Notion-Learn how to use recurring templates in Notion to easily create recurring tasks and events.

Use @ Symbol to Mention Person, Page, or Date in Notion-Learn how to use the @ symbol in Notion to quickly mention people, pages, or dates in your notes and tasks.

Use Calendar View for Recurring Tasks in Notion-Learn how to use the calendar view in Notion to see and manage your recurring tasks and events.

Create a Quick Capture Database in Notion-Learn how to create a quick capture database in Notion, to easily capture and organize information as you come across it.

Use Notion’s Progress Bars-Learn how to use progress bars in Notion to track the progress of your tasks and projects.

Check Out Our Notion Templates Store-Learn about the Notion Templates Store, where you can find templates for different types of pages and databases to use in Notion.

Create Multiple Views in Your Database in Notion-Learn how to create multiple views in a Notion database, to better organize and interact with your data.

Utilize Sub Pages in Notion-Learn how to use sub pages in Notion, to better organize and structure your information.

Create Sun Groups in Notion-Learn how to create sun groups in Notion, to easily group and filter information within a database.

Hold Shift and Scroll for Horizontal Scrolling-Learn how to use shift and scroll to achieve horizontal scrolling within Notion

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Hello, my name is Carter Surach and I am the host of the "Productive Dude" YouTube channel. In today's video, I am bringing you 34 fresh tips and tricks to help you get along better in Notion.

The last video I created, "49 Marvelous Notion Tips," got over a quarter million views and you guys are still watching it and loving it like crazy, so that's why I wanted to bring you an extra 34 tips and tricks in today's video. At the end of this video, I'll have an end screen that takes you to that 49 tips video, so after these 34, if you want 49 more, then just stick around a little bit longer.

By the way, there's tons of resources down in the description, so if you scroll down there and open that up, you can find all of the resources that you need, and you can skip around to the chapters and find the tips that you're looking for.

Before we get into this one, guys, please leave a like. This took a ton of work and research on my end, a lot of filming hours into it, and then also we have the editor team and the bloggers that are going to be creating even more great content around this, so please go ahead and drop a like for all of us.

Without further ado, let's jump right in.Tip number one is to use this code right here. I'm just going to copy it and paste it, and you can create these amazing colorful dividers of all different colors. Let's try blue or yellow and you can also change the size of them. Let's just change it to Black to show you an example of that. Let's change the length to 200 pixels, let's change the width to 50. That would make a super thick divider or we could even go down to three pixels here, and we could make this side longer. Let's go 100 and we can create vertical dividers as well. I'm going to hit done, and then let's just go ahead and delete this one.

As you can see, we have this nice vertical divider and I can even drag it between columns.Tip number two is going to help you quickly edit databases. This is a feature that we've seen for years in Excel. Jumping right in here, if you go to the Border in any of your databases between the properties and you double-click it's going to size it down to the area of the longest name. In this case, if I wanted to, I could do the same with tags.Another cool feature is if you go down to this bottom right corner here, and you click and drag vertically, you can quickly add the same tag throughout all of these names. This even works for the relation property and other properties as well.

It used to be a whole lot harder to create columns but tip number three is to create easy columns using Notion's new column block type. This is super simple, all you have to do is hit slash, and then start typing out column, and you'll notice that you have this new Advanced block that Notion has somewhat recently added, where you can add two, three, four, or five columns. So let's just hit three columns, and as you can see, we have one, two, and three columns built for us right here. It was super easy. We didn't even have to do any dragging or creating of these columns ourselves like we used to have to do in Notion.

It used to be that we couldn't align our images to the left, right, and center of the page, but now, Notion allows you to align your images to the left, right, and center. So, tip number four is to align your images properly to make them look nice. To do this, you're just going to hover over the image, hit align, then you can align it to the left, right, or center.

Tip number five is to change the way that your pages open in Notion. To do this, you're just going to hover over your database, click these three dots, go to layout, and then at the bottom here, it's going to say open pages in. Here you can click and you can set a default of side peak, center peak, or full page. Side peak looks like this, where it opens up, and you can even change how far out the side peak goes, if you just want it to come out a little bit, like that. I've dragged it there. Now, if I click out, I can open the next one and it will actually save that setting. So, if I drag that and open up this next one, it will stay at wherever I set it for that side peak. Now let's change it to center peak. If I hit open, it's going to open it up in the middle like so or I could opt for the full page option which opens up a full page. To get back, I would just hover over here and I would just hit this button to pull me back to that database.

Tip number six is to check out the mobile carousel feature on the phone. They just added this new feature that allows you to quickly jump back into a page that you've been working in, and it's this nice mobile carousel which I find to be quite intuitive. It allows you to just find a page that you're interested in, and then click into it, and you can continue working from here.

Tip number seven is to dive into the Notion Enhancer Chrome extension and see what it can do for your workspace. If you focus your attention on the upper right-hand corner here, this is what the Notion Enhancer Chrome extension looks like. I'll have a link to the download page in the description. Once you have it installed on Chrome, you're just going to click on that little button and it's going to open up the Notion Enhancer menu which has tons of different features such as simpler databases, custom font chooser, indentation lines, scroll to top button, and that's just to name a few. Then you can jump over to the themes section and you can make Notion look completely different from what it does right now. Let's throw on this Nord theme and then I'm going to hit reload to apply changes. And as you can see, this Nord theme gives it a nice blue overlay here and it just looks super unique to my own workspace.

Tip number eight is to try out Notion's custom icons that they've just recently added to spice up your pages. If you go to any page and click in the top left corner around where this icon is showing up here, you can now add a custom icon. It used to be you could just do emojis or upload a custom photo of your own, but now Notion has a whole library of icons that you can choose from. So, if I wanted to click on this gavel for instance, I could even change the color of this custom icon.

Notion has recently added a feature where you can implement custom icons in your tables and within your database views. This is a pretty cool feature and let me show you how it works.

Tip number 9 is to use icons for your database properties and database views. Here we have a test database and if I wanted to, I could add an icon for this name column by clicking on the top of this name column and then clicking this little box here. From there I can search for any icon that I want, let's say name. I can add in that nice little name icon and then for tags over here we could add a tag icon. You can also edit the icon that shows up here where it says table by going over to these three dots and then clicking on this button right here. From there we can add an icon for our table.

Tip number 10 is to view your database as a gallery and toggle your card size. This looks super nice. So right here we have a database of all of our Notion templates that we make available. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click on this button right here where it says edit view layout and we're going to change the layout to gallery. And then what you can do is you can go down to card size and you can change to small, medium or large. I find that this is a really nice feature for displaying different things that you want to show off in a database and then isolating each of your data points into a nice rectangle like so.

For the next tip, we're staying in the gallery view, and this is something that Notion has recently done. Tip number 11 is to change your properties from the gallery view. So what I'm talking about here is, you used to have to click into these databases to mess with your properties, but now you can change the property from your database view. So if I hover over the status here, where it says free Notion template, I could change that to premium template, all from my gallery view, without having to click into a page and then change it here.

What you're looking at here is a calendar view of my month, but if you wanted to view this in a weekly view. Tip number 12 is to use the timeline view to see just the week ahead. So you're going to click on these three dots up here and then you're going to change your layout out to a timeline. Now we're looking at the whole month within a timeline, but if I wanted to change this to a weekly view, I would just click on this button here. And as you can see they have tons of different options, but I'm just going to select week. And that's going to show me just my week ahead, so Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

What if you have a recurring task that you want to be reminded of, but you don't want to have to go in and manually create that task every time that you want to create it? Well, Notion has just introduced a recurring templates feature. So, tip number 13 is to create recurring templates in Notion to keep track of tasks that have to happen on a repeat basis. To do this, you're going to want to have a checkbox, a task column, where I can enter my task like water the plants. And you're also going to want to add a property called created time. Once you have these three properties, you can go up to the new button in the corner here, and you can hit new template. From there you're just going to name the task so, water the plants.

Here we're Services edit this template you're going to click those three dots and then you're going to change how often you want this to repeat. You can do every day, every week, every month or every year. So, I'm just going to go to every day for the sake of example and I'm just going to change the created at to 11:48 A.M. and I'm going to hit save.

And now you'll see up here it says every day and I'm going to put my hands up here so you can see that I'm not touching anything and at 11:48 this task is going to appear up here. Alright, any time now, boom there it is.

Tip 14 is to use the @ symbol in your page title to mention a person, a page or a date in notion and this is actually very useful for these templates here. So, if I edit my template that I just created where I watered the plants I can hit the @ button and then I can type in today. One of the nice features that it allows for is it allows you to have the date here populate for the date when this was duplicated. So, you can see right after water the plants it will tell you that day.

As I said this also works with people so if I wanted to remind myself that this is happening I could tag myself so that when this appears I can get notified or I could also link to another page.

Tip number 15 is to use the calendar view to view your recurring tasks. So, you will have to have this created time property created once you do this. And you're going to want to click on these three dots here, go to layout, and then calendar and make sure that your calendar is set to created time. And then it's going to show all of your automatically populated recurring tasks within a calendar. If you want to you can also go to properties, completion and you'll get the completion check box as well. If you check these off they won't disappear right away but if you want them to disappear as you check them off you can add a filter here for completion and you're going to want to set it to is unchecked. So, now as I check these off they're going to disappear. I'm loving this new recurring templates feature because it makes notion into a more capable task manager.

Tip 16 is to create a quick capture database by using some simple filtering. So, we're going to be taking advantage of a property that we've already talked a little bit about called created time. In my workspace here I have these little databases here and they don't look like databases because they don't really have any information in them. But when I click new, it's going to add a new task. So, let's just quickly add new task here walk the dog. And I'm going to change the priority level to main focus and boom it's right here in my task manager and it was that quick.

This also works for notes and bookmarks so I'm here in my bookmarks database and I'm going to show you if I hit new on bookmarks here and then I enter something like print productive dude. I can then enter productivedude.com and as you can see it populates right into my bookmark manager without showing any pages in here. Now the way that I accomplish this with this quick capture database is I go to these three dots right here and I turn the layout to list so it looks super clean. And then we also click on these three dots, go to filter and we set a filter for created time is empty.

As you can see, there's a hidden property in here called "created time" and it's not empty, so that's why it's not showing up here. But it's just giving us this nice little new button and keeping things clean in our workspace.

Tip number 17 is to use progress bars that are natively built into Notion now. So, if you take a look at this projects database that I have here, I have this "done" column. This is actually a roll-up column that's pulling from another table, but since it's rolling up numbers, if I click into it and hit "edit property", it's now going to allow me to show as a number, a bar, or a ring. So, let's change it to bar and then you can change what you want to divide by. So, let's say we want to divide by five or three, and then we can change the color. And as you can see, it's going to show our progress right here. You can also turn off "show number" if you don't want to see the number and you just want to see the bar. And then as I check tasks off over here, it's going to fill that bar up.

Tip number 18 is to check out our template store on Gumroad. You can find the link in the description. We have tons of Notion templates over there, some of them are free, some of them are paid, but they're all going to help you get along better and learn Notion.

Tip number 19 is to create multiple views within your single database of different databases or just different views of that database. I can create a database by hitting "slash" and then typing "database". I'm just going to hit enter on the inline database, and now I can give it a name. And from here, if I hit the plus button up here, I can create another view of this database. So we could look at it as a board, for instance. And then if we add some tags in here now, we could toggle between our board and our table view. If you type "slash" and then you type in "linked", you can get this linked view of the database, and if you click on that, you can select from multiple different data sources. So, maybe here we want to show our public templates. So we could rename this to "public templates" and then, if you click on the new button here, it's going to allow you to select another data source. So we could even pull from a different database like our bookmarks for instance. And now, if I open this as a full-width page, you'll see that these are side by side and they're two different databases. So we have our public templates and our all bookmarks databases right next to each other.

Tip number 20 is to utilize sub pages in Notion. So, right here, we are looking at a CRM database that I built and within the CRM, I can click on one of my companies like "Productive Dude" here, and you'll notice that it has some relations to it, right? We have people and deals. So if I click on this "people" button right here, you'll notice that we have the people that are related with this company, me and my brother. And if I click into this button right here, I can show different properties that are related to these as well. So I could even throw in our email or our phone if I wanted to. And then if we click on those, it'll call or email directly. You can also view this as a sub-page.

Click on these three dots and then go to layout. I'm going to want to change this to a board view. Now that we're in board view, it's grouping them by author but what I want to do is Group by let's say genre. Then I'm going to hit the back button and then we're going to go down to where it says subgroup. I'm going to click on that and then we're going to click rating. Now if I want to, I can see each genre sorted by rating.

So, if I go to three star you'll see that the Epic and tragedy books don't really get that high of a rating as I go down the list to this four star here I'll see that satire has a four star and so does tragedy and then this five star is for a Coming of Age.

Tip 22 is to hold shift and scroll to scroll horizontally throughout your databases. So, if you're not in the full width view sometimes you can't see your entire database but if you hold shift and you scroll, as you can see it Scrolls horizontally. If I let go of the shift button, it's just going to go up and down but if I can hold that shift button while I scroll, it's going to go from side to side.

Tip 23 is to create one-way relations if you don't want to see the info in your other database. So, in this case let's say I wanted to be able to see my notes in my books database but I don't want to see the books in the notes database. So, I'm just going to hit this plus button here I'm going to type in relation and it'll pop up right here. I'm going to click relation and then we're going to find My Notes. I'm going to click on notes and by default this will now relate books to notes but it's not going to relate notes back to books. If I wanted to relate this two-way, I could click this button right here to toggle and as you can see in the visual here now it's a two-way relation. But if we want to keep it one way, we're just going to turn that off and hit add relation. Now, I can see my notes here and I can select a note like let's say go with outbound strategies as if Don Quixote has anything to do with outbound strategies but now it's going to show up in this database but it's not going to show up on my outbound strategies note.

This could be useful if you didn't want to Cloud your notes with a bunch of different books and YouTube videos that you're sending over to them. This could also go the other way though and you could just do a one-way from your note to your books so that you can just see the books from your note. I hope that makes sense.

Tip 24 is to hide your database titles. By default every database starts out with a title like this but if I want to hide it, I can just click these three dots right here and I can click hide database title. That's a lot cleaner and if I want to bring it back, I can click these three dots right here, go to layout and then I can hit show database title.

Tip 25 is to wrap your columns if it makes sense. In this case let's imagine that we have a summary that has tons of text within it. If I wanted to be able to see this, I could right click this summary property and then I can hit wrap column and that's going to make it so that we can see everything right here. I'm going to quickly go in and unwrap that column and then just so you guys

If I wanted to individually lock a specific database in Notion, I could click on the three dots located next to the database and select "Lock Database." This will prevent any changes from being made to that specific database, but I can still change the genre.

Another way to lock a database is by unlocking any views and going to the three dots in the corner and selecting "Lock Page." This will lock all databases on the page and prevent any changes from being made to them.

Tip 27 is to hide the vertical lines within your database. To do this, I can click on the three dots located next to the database, go to "Layout," and turn off the switch labeled "Show Vertical Lines." This will give the table a cleaner look by removing the thin gray lines that separate different pieces of data.

Tip 28 is to create a public link that auto expires within a certain set of time. To do this, I can select the "Share" button, choose "Share to Web," and select the option labeled "Link Expires." I can then choose a specific time for the link to expire and share it with others. After the time expires, the link will no longer be accessible.

Tip 29 is that on an iPhone, I can now interact with text within pages on my phone. I can take a picture of some text and hold over any text within the photo. I can then copy the text and paste it wherever I need.

Tip 30 is to view Notion pages as a slideshow. This feature allows me to double click on a page containing images, hit the "next" button, and slide through all the images in that page. I can also hit the "download" button and zoom in and drag around the images.

The Notion Blog for your Creations build a business or professional brand with support from the Notion team and gain access to exclusive resource hubs.

There's kind of different levels to this. They have the Notion Essentials badge, the Notion settings and sharing badge, and then they also have the Notion certified consultant which is a highly coveted program that not a lot of people get to join. But these are the different certifications you can get. I'll have a link to this Notion certification page below and I'm going to be continuing to strive for this certification and I hope that you guys can get this certification as well. Let me know below if you are Notion certified.

Tip 32 is to resize individual rows within your columns on a Notion page. Let me show you what I'm talking about because that might sound a little bit confusing. So right now we're viewing this in a boxed layout, meaning it's not a full width page. If you want to turn it to full width you can right there, and that'll make everything full width. But let's go back to our boxed layout and what you can do is you can actually drag just this image if you want to so that everything else is within a boxed layout but this image isn't.

Tip 33 is to add columns within columns in Notion. So right now we have a column here and we have a column here and let's say I wanted to have two columns or three columns underneath this side. To do that, you have to go ahead and hit slash Page, hit enter, and now we're on a new page. I'm just going to call this three columns and then we're going to hit slash and I'm going to type in column, and we're going to hit this three columns, and then I can enter something here, enter something here and finally enter another thing here.

Now, if I go back to that original page and I scroll down to where our page called three columns is, I can right-click it and hit turn into text and now it's going to include our three columns. I can delete that initial page name there and now we have three separate columns which is pretty neat. It's kind of hard to do that, there's this is somewhat of a workaround to get the columns within columns but I still think it's pretty neat because you might need to use that sometime.

Tip 34 is to use the Notion widgets on your iPhone. So if you hold down your screen and click this plus button in the upper left-hand corner then type in Notion, you'll see Notion pop up then click on the Notion app and just select the first one page and hit add widget. Now if I hit this tap and hold to set up, it's going to open up that page. I can choose my workspace and then I can go deeper here on page and I can choose which page I want this to pull me to. Let's say I want it to pull me to my notes page. I would click on notes and hit done, and now that link will quickly take me to my notes within Notion.

Thank you so much for watching all the way through. Now, if you're ready for some more Notion tips, check out my 49 Notion tips video. All of the tips in that video are unique, and you can find even more tips that you probably didn't know about Notion. Thank you so much for watching, subscribe and hit post notifications to stay updated with our content like this video for the YouTube algorithm. Alright, we'll see you in the next one.

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