Getting started with Notion

Having Notion as your second brain

Notion includes a high amount of possibilities to level up your work environment. Of course, as with all good platforms, there’s a paid version. However, I’m not going to cover any of that in this post and I’ll share tips for the free version. Even though the paid version might be the key in making Notion useful for some, I’ve managed well without it. And why fix something that’s not broken?

The most common reason for people not to use Notion in my opinion is it’s complexity/learning curve. It’s clearly not as straightforward as writing markdown files and organizing them to folders, but with complexity there comes an amazing set of features that have helped me build a second brain for me. I personally didn’t like Notion as I installed it the first time, it was just awful. Too complex! How is this even usable? STACKING PAGES?? WTF - those were roughly my thoughts of Notion, which I now use to organize literally everything in my life.

So yeah, it truly can be hard to settle down with Notion. That’s mostly the reason I made this blog post - to give you an overview of Notion’s most useful features and how to adjust Notion to your needs. Adjusting Notion to your needs takes time; not minutes, rather hours, but once you’ve setup it you’ll love it.

List of amazing features

Notion has a lot of interesting features. Now the best way to find them and how to use them is search from the internet, or you can mess out with your Notion workspace for a few hours (this is the method I prefer). You can also create a new workspace from a template.

However there’s a few features so awesome I’d like to share them with you for starters. You might not like them at first or think they’re just extreme bloat but trust me - you’ll really like them when you start building your Notion.

  • Databases: useful for plenty of stuff. helps you stay up-to-date with everything, in a nice looking way (when used right)
  • Built-in page organization features: helps you organize pages as you like them
  • Integrations: include GitHub issues and pull requests to a project’s control page
  • Incredible embeds and nice rich text editing experience

Databases - organized centres of information

Databases are an incredibly good way to save information. However, they may be a bit cumbersome at first. I personally had no idea on how to use them as I started using Notion, but after a while I use them on almost every situation. A good way to find usages for databases is to create a new workspace from a template that uses databases in multiple situations.

Databases primarily store subpages. That might sound weird at first, but it’ll get used to as you learn to use them.

You can for example make a database like following:

  • Courses database
    • Math course 5 (exam 29.10., important)
      • Notes for lesson 1 - something
      • Notes for lesson 2 - something else
      • Notes for lesson 3 - something even more important
    • Chemistry course 2 (exam 20.10., not important)
      • Lesson 1
      • Lesson 2
    • Biology course 6 (exam 10.10., important)
      • Lesson 4

Now here’s the fun part: you can create views for sorted and filtered lists, for example important courses sorted by exam date or all exams sorted by importance etcetera.

You can also create subpages under the database records, which I find extremely useful for specifically school.

So, what are my uses?

  • Having a sorted, categorized and nice-looking list of my notes
  • Saving project ideas and keeping myself up-to-date with existing ones
  • Organizing my school courses, exams and notes in a single place