
How I Organize My Student Life With Notion and Why You Should Too
Is Notion for everyone? No. Is it for you? Let’s find out.
Why Notion?
As anybody who is into productivity, I have tried a plethora of different productivity apps to get my shit together and stay organized. It wasn’t until I’ve come across Notion and read The Straight-A Student by Cal Newport that I’ve converged to a singular system for my notes and college life.
Some things, like a Google Calendar integration, are still missing. Nevertheless, Notion helped me immensely by clearing my head of mental fog of constant worrying about forgetting an assignment.
If that sounds like something you struggle with, lemme show you what I’ve done.
The Killer Feature
The single best and most powerful thing that you can do in Notion are relational databases. The beauty is you don’t have to know anything about normalization, query languages or Oracle to draw value from Notion’s databases.
Before we get into my setup, I strongly encourage you to experiment on your own and take nothing in my workflow for granted. Everyone has to develop their own system and Notion’s flexibility can facilitate any approach.
My setup
As I mentioned, you can create databases in Notion. The cornerstone of any relational database is a table. The “relation” part comes in when you connect those to utilise information from different places, allowing you to change information at one place and letting it update everywhere else. Automating.
In total, I have 6 tables.
- Assignments and exams
- Courses
- People
- Notes
- Readings
- Lectures
At this point, you might want to follow the article with this public template.
Going through the tables and relations
Starting with the Readings table, here is where everything I have to prepare for each class lives.

Here I keep the following:
- Content: What is it that I need to read (chapters, titles, publication years etc.)
- Material: Is it an article? Textbook? Online resource?
- Files: Any files I want to upload to this piece of reading
- Supplemental: Is the reading supplemental?
Additionally, the Readings table has a relation to Lectures. With relations, you can use something called a “rollup” in property in Notion and display information from the table you have a connection to. In the case of Readings, I am interested in the Date of lecture and the Lecture number.
Last but not least, I use a formula to calculate which course is the lecture from (basically you cannot do a rollup of a rollup). As this is an overview and I aim for it to be digestible and quickly applicable, I won’t go into detail on formulas. Feel free to send me a message or figure it out from the public template.
Moving on to the most important table of all. Lectures. I have an entry (a row in a table) for each lecture throughout the semester.
For the columns (properties), there is
- Lecture number: “native” property
- Date of lecture: “native” property
- Course acronym: rollup from the Courses table
- Lecturer: relation to the People table
- Notes: relation to the Notes table
- Courses: relation to the Courses table
- Readings: relation to the Readings table

This table lets me get an overview of all the lectures, what readings I have to do for them and see the notes I’ve taken for/during the lectures.
Similar magic takes place for all the remaining tables. You are free to explore it on your own. To make it easier, I’ve drawn an illustration of which tables are related below.

The best is yet to come — VIEWS and FILTERING
To ensure we don’t get overwhelmed, we need to create focus. Perhaps we only want to see lectures in the upcoming week. This is possible by using sorting and filters. But setting the filters every time you visit the page would be exhausting and eventually annoying. And what if you wanted to set many different filters?
Views come to rescue! By creating a view, you can
- Save the used filters and sorting options
- Name your view, so you remember what it represents
- Choose between a Table, Calendar, Gallery, Board and a List
While I won’t cover switching to a calendar, gallery, list or board, see if you can discover some of those views in the template!
For example, I have a view called “Table — Overview of upcoming” (I have arbitrarily set the filter to an exact date of February 20, but you can do relative dates! Check out the filtering options yourself!) in my Lectures table. This lets me focus on the future and filter out everything that has already happened.

I also have views that filter lectures for a specific course, so I can gauge how much time I will have to devote to any course.
How to use this setup for your classes
In case you want to use this for your college adventures, I recommend the following procedure. I admit it’s a bit tedious, but stick through and it’ll pay off big time. And of course, you can take a break at any point.
At this point, I will say that if you are a student, Notion is free. Otherwise, you can use this link to sign up and we will both get some monies.
- Duplicate my public template into your Notion workspace.
- Populate the People table with your lecturers
- Populate the Courses table with your courses
- Open your schedule and populate the Lectures table. Create relations to the People (your lecturers) table and the Courses table as you go.
- If possible, populate the readings table. Create relations to lectures as you go.
- Populate the Assignments and exams table. Create relations to the Courses table as you go.
Then there is the Overview page where I make use of linked databases and filters. Try and see if you can get the hang of it by yourself. Check the end for some more resources on Notion setups and templates.
Boom! You are organized and ready to go.
If this article helped you, consider forwarding it to a friend.
Live with joy,
Tomas
