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Notion Galaxy

4 min readDec 19, 2021

Notion serves as my bullet journal for life, work, and my business. This newsletter will introduce you to the platform and its features. First, Notion has a learning curve, but this is meant to help guide you to start using the tool by providing tips and tricks to make it work for your needs.

Introduction & Signing Up

There’s the paid version of Notion and the free version. Currently, I use the free one because it fits my needs. If you would like to sign up for Notion, you can use your email account and will be presented which plan you would like to enroll in-pick whichever suits your day to day the best, but I would suggest starting with the free version to see if you enjoy the tool and all its features after this video.

You can sign up here: Notion Sign Up

Templates

Out of the box, Notion comes with a ton of templates depending on your needs. See examples below. However, I started from scratch to really understand the ropes and see what other ideas people have created- my main place of inspiration is Pinterest. See examples of some templates I used for ideas below. If you rather use some templates provided by Notion, you’ll find a wide variety-anything you need is practically available and FREE!

What do you want to capture?

A good starting place is picking pages and templates you want to work with when using Notion. I started with the idea of Agenda, Content Planner, Personal Journal, Study Planners, and more. It helped me get an idea of what I would want my templates to showcase and visually look like.

Design, Font & Appearance

Once I have my page templates created, it’s time to design them. Notion is great because you can customize your entire page. I’ve seen so many cool ideas on Pinterest suited towards that individual’s profession, goals, or topic they are writing on. Here’s an example of a student using Notion for their class schedule.

Now that you have selected a template, it’s time to change the font! You can also change the font, size, and width to see more on your page and add a splash of personal design. Please follow the steps below to update and change your text.

Adding Icons and Header

Notion allows you to add any emoji you want to customize your template, however, if you’re looking for an icon outside of the typical emoji’s you won’t be able to add it. If you want emojis outside of the typical ones offered, you can use Apption.co which has a lot of free animated icons. If there is an icon you like, simply download and upload it into the icon section of the notion template.

Background Color & Keyboard Shortcuts

You can click this link here to learn all the shortcuts.

Duplicate Blocks

Renaming & Creating Bullet List

So if you are a person who creates a lot of bullet lists, then this shortcut is for you! Instead of doing the long process of creating a bullet list, you can simply hit the dash key then space and it will turn into a bullet point automatically. Happy listing!