Tools: Solved: What are your favorite Notion hacks that have simplified your workflow?

🚀 Executive Summary ## 🎯 Key Takeaways ## I Audited Our Notion Workspace. It Was a Graveyard of Good Intentions. ## The “Why”: The Curse of the Blank Canvas ## Hack #1: The Quick Fix – The “Global Dashboard” with Synced Blocks ## Hack #2: The Permanent Fix – The Relational Database System ## Hack #3: The ‘Nuclear’ Option – Enforce Structure with Buttons TL;DR: Chaotic Notion workspaces often become ‘graveyards of good intentions,’ leading to critical information being lost and significant time wasted, particularly during high-pressure situations like outages. The solution involves applying engineering discipline to Notion’s flexibility by implementing synced blocks for personal dashboards, establishing a robust relational database system for team-wide organization, and using Notion buttons to enforce structured workflows and templates. Unlock your team’s productivity by taming your chaotic Notion workspace. Discover three battle-tested hacks, from quick wins with synced blocks to a full relational database system that will finally organize your projects, tasks, and documentation. I remember the incident that broke me. We had a P2 outage on prod-billing-api-01 around 2 AM. The on-call engineer was scrambling, looking for the runbook. He knew it existed, but where? Turns out, the engineer who wrote it had tucked it away on a private sub-page of his “Q3 Brainstorm” doc from six months ago, with no links from our main tech wiki. We wasted 20 minutes finding a document that should have been instantly accessible. That’s when I realized our Notion “single source of truth” had become a multi-headed hydra of digital clutter. Look, the problem isn’t Notion itself. The problem is its greatest strength: its flexibility. It gives you a blank page and says, “Go build something amazing!” For an engineer, that’s both a siren song and a trap. Without a strong, opinionated structure from day one, every new project, every new meeting note, every quick to-do list becomes a disconnected island. Entropy takes over. You end up with a dozen different “Sprint Planning” pages, tasks living in random bullet points, and critical documentation that’s impossible to find under pressure. It’s not about finding the one perfect tool; it’s about applying engineering discipline to the tools we already have. Let’s fix this. This is the 80/20 solution you can implement in the next 15 minutes. The goal is to stop hunting for your most important information. You’re going to create a single source of truth for yourself, and then embed it everywhere. Now, that “My Open Tasks” view from your private dashboard is mirrored. When you update it in one place, it updates everywhere. I have my dashboard synced to our main engineering wiki homepage and our on-call rotation page. It’s my command center, and it follows me around. Pro Tip: Don’t just use this for tasks. Create a synced block with links to the three most critical dashboards (Grafana, Kibana, etc.) or the CI/CD pipeline status page. Put it at the top of every project doc. No more “Hey, what’s the link to production logs again?” in Slack. Alright, synced blocks are great for personal workflow, but to fix the team’s chaos, you need to think like a database architect. Stop making pages; start building interconnected databases. This is how we run everything at TechResolve now. We have four core databases that power our entire engineering org. When you open the “Q3 Kubernetes Migration” project page, you don’t see a messy wall of text. You see a dashboard with linked views of only the tasks, meetings, and documents related to that project. Everything is automatically organized. This is the single biggest change we made, and it eliminated 90% of our information retrieval problems. The relational database system only works if people use it. How do you stop someone from just creating a blank page and calling it “Meeting Notes”? You make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. Enter the Notion “Button”. This is a bit of a “hacky” feature, but it’s incredibly powerful for enforcing standards. Instead of telling people to “create a new project page and fill out the properties,” you give them a button that does it for them. On your team’s main page, create a button block (/button). Configure it to “Insert blocks” or “Add page to”. Let’s make one for creating a new project RFC: Now, when a junior engineer needs to write an RFC, they don’t have to remember where the database is or what template to use. They just click the big, friendly button. It creates the page in the right database, applies the correct template with all the required sections (Problem, Proposed Solution, Alternatives), and pre-fills the properties. It’s guardrails for your workflow. Warning: Don’t go overboard. Create buttons for the 3-5 most common actions: New Project, New Meeting Note, New Bug Report, etc. If you make too many, people will just ignore them. The goal is to reduce friction for the most critical workflows, not automate everything. At the end of the day, Notion is a tool, and like any powerful tool, it can create a mess if you don’t use it with intention. Stop treating it like a digital notebook and start treating it like the operational database it can be. Your 2 AM on-call self will thank you for it. 👉 Read the original article on TechResolve.blog If this article helped you, you can buy me a coffee: 👉 https://buymeacoffee.com/darianvance Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse CODE_BLOCK: Button Name: [ + New RFC Document ] Step 1: Add page to... - Database: Documents - Name: New RFC - @Today - Type: RFC (a 'Select' property in your DB) - Status: Draft - Template: Engineering RFC Template Step 2: Open page - Open page in: Side peek Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode CODE_BLOCK: Button Name: [ + New RFC Document ] Step 1: Add page to... - Database: Documents - Name: New RFC - @Today - Type: RFC (a 'Select' property in your DB) - Status: Draft - Template: Engineering RFC Template Step 2: Open page - Open page in: Side peek CODE_BLOCK: Button Name: [ + New RFC Document ] Step 1: Add page to... - Database: Documents - Name: New RFC - @Today - Type: RFC (a 'Select' property in your DB) - Status: Draft - Template: Engineering RFC Template Step 2: Open page - Open page in: Side peek - Implement a ‘Global Dashboard’ using Notion’s synced blocks to mirror critical personal information (e.g., ‘My Open Tasks,’ ‘Key Projects’) across multiple pages, ensuring consistent access. - Establish a relational database system with interconnected databases (e.g., Projects, Tasks, Meetings, Documents) to automatically organize team information and eliminate retrieval problems. - Utilize Notion ‘Buttons’ to enforce workflow standards by automating the creation of structured pages with pre-filled properties and templates, making it easier for users to adhere to the system. - Create a new private page called “My Dashboard”. - On this page, create sections for things you look at daily. A great start is a “My Open Tasks” view linked from your main team task board, and maybe a “Key Projects” gallery view. - Now for the magic. For each of these sections, click the six-dot block handle and select “Turn into synced block”. It will get a red border. - Go to any other page you use frequently—your team’s homepage, a specific project page, your meeting notes template. Type /synced block and choose “Paste and sync”.