Why I Keep Coming Back to Notion for Task and Project Management

Later this week, I’ll be sharing my updated task management workflow — it’s what I’ve used over the past 2 months and even today, I’ve made small changes that further shape it to my needs.

In the mean time, I just couldn’t help but marvel at how one tool can adapt over time into an evolving system, and I just have to tell you about it.

In my last task management article, I shared a bit on my journey with to-do list apps as well as the workflow that I used at the time.

This workflow has since changed, becoming even more tailored to how I’m working right now. What marvellous fun it is to witness evolution in this way.

While this is certainly part of a broader love letter of sorts to one of my favourite digital tools, I have to say that for a period of time, I could not use Notion for task management, no matter how hard I tried. Back then, I just didn’t have the experience of dabbling in other tools to learn what worked best for me. Now that I’ve trialed multiple workflows over time, I know what I need and how I get things done.

Blank canvas

I group no-code tools into two broad categories: fixed and flexible. Tools like ClickUp, Airtable, Trello and Asana have a fixed interface whereas tools like Notion and Tana have a more flexible interface where you can build and structure your page from a blank canvas.

This is by far my favourite part about working in Notion: the flexibility that the blank canvas provides feels like building exactly what I need with Lego blocks.

My task database, in all its various incarnations, has lived throughout my Notion workspace in a multitude of places:

Homepage → archive → projects database → 12 week year weekly plan → starred, full page task database → homepage.

At the moment, I’m happy with it being in the action base on my homepage but that doesn’t mean it will be here forever and that’s the beauty in working with flexible tools.

Curated views

Board view grouped by relative do date is my task database view of choice for a few reasons:

• It allows me to see my workload capacity over 3 important time horizons: today, tomorrow and the next 7 days.

• I can also see my daily capacity in hours at the top of each column grouping where I try not to pass 8 hours a day.

• I can easily move tasks around as my schedule changes.

• I can quickly change task status as I work.

• It’s sorted by status and do date ascending so that completed tasks go to the bottom of the list and my current focus is at the top.

My beloved board view

Easy project management

The second way that I view tasks is in a table grouped by project, with sub-tasks turned on. This view lets me zero in on a particular project where I can add tasks and sub-tasks in bulk. I can assign do dates and deadlines and because it’s the same task database, these will also show up in my default board view!

Task database grouped by project

This is one of three way to have sub-tasks show up in board view:

Better connections

Quick add buttons

I have buttons to quickly add tasks in two parts of my homepage at the moment.

The first is what I call my button bar, located just above my action base:

My quick add button bar

The second is within the body of the page for each task. I often open task cards in center peek to aid focus. If I think of another task while this page is open, I can add it to the database using this button:

New task template with quick add buttons

Notes

I connect tasks with notes via hubs. This is a concept that I learnt from R.J. Nestor in his book, Rhythms of Productivity. When I enter a new task, I also add its related hub via a relation property. When this hub is populated, a rollup property gathers all notes related to that hub. This has been a huge game changer for my workflow as these connections give me deeper insight into what I’m doing and allow me to easily access related tasks and notes.

Time-blocking with Notion Calendar

I am 99% sure that the reason task management works for me in Notion right now is because of the connection between my task database and Notion Calendar.

I usually plan my day with Notion Calendar on the left of my screen and Notion on the right.

I identified time blocking as one of my core practices early on and it hasn’t failed me yet. Being able to see tasks in my calendar alongside events helps real world Renee communicate better with delusional Renee who thinks she can do everything in one day.

Did I mention that time blocks in Notion Calendar sync to my task database in Notion and vice versa??

Heaven.

Smaller quality of life features that I appreciate:

• Ability to hide page icons — having to add icons to pages to please my perfectionist tendencies got very annoying very quickly. I ended up creating templates for each of my databases with a set icon just because I couldn’t stand seeing those page icons. Now that Notion has shipped the ability to hide them, most icons in my master databases are hidden and I love that it gives the database view a cleaner look.

• Command search — whenever I need to find something, I hit Cmd+K and start typing. Sometimes, I don’t even type as recently used pages are shown by default. No more hunting for anything, ever.

• My Tasks widget — while I don’t have use for the new-ish My Tasks widget in Notion Home just yet (all of my tasks live in one database and I’m the only one in my workspace), I’ll be testing it out in the shared workspace that I have with my partner soon. I’ll be writing more about this feature soon as I think there’s a lot of potential for it in specific use cases.

• Same command to toggle light/dark mode in both Notion and Notion Calendar: Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+L (it’s really the small things 🙌🏾).

Closing words

To say that I’m happy and at peace with my current workflow is an understatement. I love every aspect of it right now and I look forward to using it everyday. What a privilege it is to reach this point.

To workflows that flow.