How to Organize Your Ideas in Notion & Increase Your Output as a Writer
Quick and easy setup with a template and lots of screenshots
“What am I going to write about today?”
That’s a question you might have asked yourself just today. And if you’re a writer, it's arguably the question to answer because everything else flows from it.
To write, you need an idea. And ideas, sadly, don’t grow on trees. Ideas are all around you, but very few of them are actually of any use. And if they are, they are capricious beasts — one moment they’re there and you’re basking in their brilliance, and the next moment they’re gone, replaced by a thought about food, sex, or something else. Being human (and a writer) is hard.
To combat the fleeting nature of ideas, have a place to collect them. A place that allows you to organize, tag, and move the ideas around as you work on them. And I know just the right place — Notion*.
A former Evernote-evangelist, I’ve been using Notion for a few months now and I’m stunned by how helpful it is for writers.
What problems does Notion solve?
1. The initial period of not knowing what to write about? Notion solves that. Once you fill in the ideas, they accumulate. Too few ideas turn into too many up to a point where you’ll appreciate the filtering function.
2. Do you have multiple areas of interest that you want to write about? Notion allows you to create multiple views that, with a click of a button, show you only the relevant ideas. This helps tremendously to focus and zero in on what’s important to you at the moment.
3. Do you need a place to jot down quick notes that’s pretty and useful enough you often stick around to write the whole post? That’s Notion. Each idea can serve as a page for your notes and all other resources (sources, quotes, etc.). It supports Markdown too.
Let me show how I use Notion to collect and organize my ideas and share my template with you. It’s best that you open it alongside reading this article so you can integrate the knowledge immediately.
Let’s jump in.
Greetings from Notion
There’s a lot to unpack here. But we’ll focus only on the important things.
First, you can see it’s a Kanban board. Nestled next to each other are different columns, such as “All ideas”, “Vetted ideas” and so on. That’s the heart of the calendar and what we’ll talk about next.
How it works — the pipeline of ideas
When an idea pops up, it goes into the “All ideas” column. There it sits before I review it alongside other ideas I collected over time (usually weekly). If the idea still resonates with me after a week, it gets bumped up into the “Vetted ideas” column. Those are the ideas with the potential for stories. From there, I pick 3–5 ideas to work on during the week (labeled “To-Do Next Week”). As soon I start drafting, I move the fledgling stories into the “Work in Progress” column where they sit until ready to submit (“Submitted for publication” column). What you don’t see (too small screen) is the last column labeled “Finished”. Once the story is published, this is where it’ll collect dust for all eternity.
A quick aside — why is it important to have a system
I find this system very helpful because it lets me collect loose ideas and process and refine them over time, all in a standardized manner. This is important because it saves precious mental energy you’ll need for actually writing the article. When you want to dish out 15+ articles per month all the while having a full-time job and other responsibilities or hobbies, it’s a must.
How it works — multiple views
Since we’re working in Notion, there are perks. One of them is that you can have multiple views of the same data that, once configured, are simply a click away. Allow me to demonstrate.
What you see here is that on the top left of the table, the “Chronological order” changed to “Sorted by tags”. Now, whenever you feel like writing about a certain topic, say philosophy, you can go directly to the source and write about stoicism strategies, for example.
When you use the template I linked, you’ll have the tags I use myself, but you can easily add yours or remove mine. Also, if you feel that stoicism strategies rather fit into the column of self-improvement, you can drag & drop and the tag will change. But there’s more.
Multiple views — the focus screen
What’s been dubbed as analysis paralysis is a state of not knowing what to choose because one is overwhelmed by choice. Surrounded by myriad choices, I’m sure you can relate.
By having too many options, it’s hard to choose any. So, we need to narrow down. This is what the focus screen is for. It allows us to sort our ideas based on priorities.
What I do is to comb through my ideas once or twice a week whenever I’m not writing and bump ideas into possible priorities (just 1 or 2) and for the chosen one there’s the prime spot of “Focus on now” column.
Multiple views — make your own
Those are the default views that I use. But you can easily create your own. Like so.
By clicking on “Chronological order” (or whatever view you currently have active), you can “Add a view” and choose whatever you like.
The table view is great to work with while adding tags or other properties of the data (you needn’t concern yourself with that in the beginning, though, to avoid overwhelm). Board is the view we’ve been using the whole time. Calendar, should you be a fan of that, helps you to have an overview of the pieces you want to finish by a certain date. I don’t work well with deadlines, but if that’s your jam, Notion has you covered.
How to create a new entry for an article
Each column has this little plus on the top right. When you click it a new entry will pop up. What I do is to write the idea or the headline that struck me. When I want to follow up on the idea or maybe draft immediately, I click on the entry which opens its page. Like so.
As you can see, the top part is filled with various properties (these aren’t our focus for now). But below “add a comment” you have a beautiful white space for all your resources, notes, quotes, or whatever.
How to work with text — the basics
Now here’s another cool feature of Notion: Markdown! By commands such as “/H1” you can turn each line of the text into whatever you’d like. And not just that, you can create callouts (brings attention to a certain block piece), equations, quotes, and many, many more.
To do so, click on the 6 dots that show up when you hover over the left part of the text.
This is the screen that should follow.
When you hover over “turn into” you can see your options. Adjust your text accordingly.
To avoid overwhelm, start small and build-up
Those are the mere basics for working with the template I provided. When you want to adopt Notion, I found the easiest way is to watch some videos, use templates in their template library, and experiment with all the options it provides.
Since Notion has so many options, it can intimidate at first. But don’t feel discouraged if you don’t get how it works the first or the second day. Open it for a few minutes each day, see how it works, and try to adapt it to your needs. A simple google search usually leads to a helpful video or an answer from a person who already faced the same issue.
The best advice is to treat Notion like a deer that shows up in your backyard. You can’t barge in on it the first day and expect it to come close to you. No, you creep in gingerly and make tiny steps each day. Before you know it, the deer is eating from your hand and you’re best buddies.
Although daunting at first, Notion is a powerful tool that helps you to organize the flow of your ideas in a way that lets you focus on writing itself. It has been a boon for my productivity and I strongly believe it can work wonders for you too.
Here’s the link to the template once more.
Use it, adapt it to your needs, and keep your focus where it matters — on writing.
*while I use Notion I can imagine you can create a similar system in Trello, for example, or Evernote. I prefer Notion because I use it for all other areas of my life.
