28-Sept-2021
Hygiene tricks for Notion as used by the Crux design team
In the last quarter, our team moved all its documentation practices to Notion. Notion being a great tool and the team having the chance to organize all collaterals in a fresh way tickled our OCDs somewhere. So, on the journey, we picked up a few tricks to maintain good Notion hygiene. This blog is a list of all those learnings.
We, the design team at Crux Intelligence are a bunch of super enthusiastic folks designing a google-search like product for business data. We are determined to bring B2C values to B2B design. If you are someone who shares the same enthusiasm then, join our team!
On that note, here are the nine notion hygiene tricks…
1. Have a home
Instead of populating your Notion sidebar with multiple pages. Collect all of them into a single homepage. This will not only help you find pages but also find the ones you are not specifically looking for.
2. Avoid pages in templates
When you keep a page inside a template it will make copy pages of it every time the template is used. This will only cause unnecessary copies & system overload when you search. Instead, if you need to have a page in a template; link it instead
3. Personal filters
If you are on a shared database and you would like to filter the view in a certain way to suit a personal use case then make mention that database on a separate personal page & filter it there. This way the filter will only be visible to you and the original database will remain as is.
4. Lock before sharing
It might seem obvious but I have often forgotten to lock pages that I share just for reference purpose. This is specially useful when you are working in a shared workspace & you do not want some pages to be edited without you doing so yourself.
5. Reading layout
When you are making a document which is purely a reading material maintain ONE column even though Notion’s multi column functionality can be very enticing.
6. Callout for notes
Avi Agarwal very creatively uses callout texts for personal notes. This enables easy spotting of document edits & note-taking actionable of a document.8. Backlinks
7. Backlinks
Place your page in the master page that makes sense to your most logical hierarchy & then just keep mentioning them in multiple place wherever necessary. This is somewhat the SEO equivalent practice in Notion.
That's all! Thank you for reading.
If you have more tricks that have helped you do share by dropping me a ping on Twitter!