A Beginner’s Guide to Notion: How to Get Started with Your Productivity Journey

Nadine
4 min readApr 9, 2023

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This is not my first article on Notion. I use Notion for most aspects of my life as it is a powerful productivity tool that allows you to manage tasks, projects, notes, and more in one place. However, getting started with Notion can be overwhelming at the beginning. In this guide, I will walk you through the basics of setting up and using Notion.

Create Your Notion Account
The first step to getting started with Notion is to create an account on their website. Just go to notion.so and then sign up using your email address, Apple, or Google account. Once you have created the account, you will be taken to your Notion dashboard.

Screenshot by the author

Creating Pages and Your Workspace
You can use your workspace as a container for all your content. It can be a personal workspace to take your notes and tasks or you can share your workspace and collaborate with others. When you begin you already have a workspace set up with some categories you can either use, adapt or delete.

To create a new page you only have to click on the “Add page” or “New page” button. You can edit the page name, add Icons and even use one of the many templates such as To-Do lists, Calendars, and Travel planners.

Add Your Content
After you have created your first page, you can add content. Notion allows you to create content such as text, code, images, videos, tables, and more.

To add content to your page, click on the blank space and start typing. You can also start typing using a slash (/) and you will get a dropdown menu and add tables, quotes, numbered lists, headlines, etc. This is an easy way to format your text.

Screenshot by the author

Organize Your Content
With Notion, you can organize your content by using databases, tags, and filters. A database is a collection of related information, such as a list of tasks or a database of contacts, or even a list of your favorite recipes. To create a database, type slash (/) on your new page and then click on the kind of database you want to create (you can still add different database views later in the process).

Screenshot by the author

Another great tool is to use filters and tags to help you sort and categorize your content. To add a tag, simply type “@tagname” anywhere on your page. You can then filter by clicking the “Filter” button at the top of the page and selecting the criteria you want to filter by.

Customize Your Pages
Notion lets you customize your pages. You can change the color scheme, add custom icons, add a cover, and rearrange the layout of your pages.

By adding sub-pages you can organize your pages in different categories such as Learning/Books; Learning/Code; Learning/English etc.

Screenshot by the author

Try collaborating with others
You can also use Notion to collaborate with others. You can invite team members to your workspace and share pages and databases with them. If you want to use the collaboration function with a larger team you will probably need to upgrade your Notion account to the Plus version.

Notion is one of my favorite productivity tools that helps me to stay organized at work and in life. I hope that by following the above steps you can also get started using Notion. With a little practice, you’ll be a Notion pro in no time!

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Nadine

Aspiring writer, information risk manager and tech enthusiast; Mastodon: @ me.dm/@nadinebliedung Twitter: https://twitter.com/Natschun