These Three Free Notion Templates Helped Me Become a Better Writer

It took me three years to become a professional writer — could have taken me just one if I had known about these free notion templates

Afnan Jalil
Writers Daily
5 min readJul 13, 2023

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Notion website illustration
screenshot from the Notion website

I never knew that the internet was full of resources that could help me climb my way sooner than I did all on my own.

But as we all learn, so did I.

I was never a schedule or planner girl. Never planned anything in life or made any lists. I had everything in my head and I thought that’s how I’ll keep it forever.

Only to my surprise that it would help me later on with my procrastination excuses.

Time went by and I began to find myself in more mess every day.

I had nothing planned or organized, my client deadlines would go past my attention, and trust me that wasn’t much fun.

I had no system to keep my work in place. It was all unprofessionally painful.

Then I came across this cute doodly software called Notion, at first I thought it was just a planning or note-taking app or maybe some planner thingie.

But then I came across this huge vault of free notion templates that changed everything for me as a writer.

It’s okay if you have never used Notion or have no idea what it is and how it can or may help you.

I’ll break it down for you.

What is Notion?

Your wiki, docs, & projects. Together.

Notion is the connected workspace where
better, faster work happens. Now with AI

Imagine a place where you can write, collect, manage, plan, learn brainstorm your novels, collaborate, present to people, and even teach.

Sounds scam right? But it’s not. This software is specially designed to cut down on excessive tools and increase your productivity.

Instead of signing up for five different expensive software, you can just get one.

That’s what Notion offers, a workspace to build anything with anyone. Literally anything. It’s like Legos or even Minecraft.

Get Notion from here

How I use Notion templates as a writer

Notion offers a wide range of Paid and free templates to help you begin creating a personal workspace.

The gallery of templates is not only limited to creating your own personal content calendars, team managers, lists, and projects but also offers AI notepads and even landing pages.

Coming across Notion templates was the best thing to happen to me as a freelance writer.

Everything that was slowing me down, became easy to ditch.

It surprised me how using only these 3 free notion templates helped me become better at serving my clients and even myself as a writer.

They helped me

  1. Save my time by three hours
  2. plan my content in a blink
  3. Showcase my written samples

Three free Notion templates that every writer must have

1. Content Planner

This has to be one of my ultimate favorite templates. It has helped me organize my ideas, plan my content and keep the progress of my work.

It’s literally all in 1 template.

This template comes with:

  1. An inbuilt time and weather dashboard
  2. Content planning calendar
  3. Twitter embed
  4. Content ideation bar
  5. Goals and deadlines

Access this template from here, duplicate the template in your workspace, and begin using it.

If you don’t have Notion, get it from here.

Free notion template- content calendar and planner
Content planner template preview

2. Writing Portfolio

This is a very good one. Not because I made this template but because it was something I had been in need of for years.

A FREAKING PERFECT WRITING PORTFOLIO, tadaaaaaa.

Every time I would get a lead or some client approached me, the very first thing they would ask me was:

“CAN I SEE SOME SAMPLES?”

“CAN YOU SHOW YOUR PORTFOLIO?”

I would send them google docs links or sometimes half-baked blog links.

It lost me leads. This wasn’t professional at all.

I needed a clean, minimal space to showcase my written samples. So I built my portfolio on NOTION AND IT HAS NEVER BEEN SO CUTE.

It includes:

  1. Links and names to samples
  2. Description
  3. Word count and date

Access your template from here, duplicate it in your workspace, and start building your own portfolio.

Free notion template-writing portfolio
Writing portfolio preview

3. Dashboard for Medium Writers

Did you ever wish you had a place to plan and brainstorm your articles?

A place where you could easily dump your swipe files and later use them right at that place to outline, ideate and create your work?

well if you wished it once even, Good news. Abracadabra you can use this template.

It includes a space to

  1. save your ideas for articles
  2. Track performance
  3. Create and save articles

You can access this template from here, duplicate and customize it however you want to.

Free notion template- Medium for notion
Notion for medium-template preview

and well that’s a wrap, my friends.

I hope these free templates can help you a tad bit, do let me know if you use or find any of them helpful.

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning that at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

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Afnan Jalil
Writers Daily

I am a young chirpy writer, Skimming the streams of solopreneurship and marketing to learn, create and earn