Notion. The only productivity app where it’s users spend more time designing the app than they do actually using it’s features for productivity. Well I have the solution.
The sidebar. The cleanest quickest way to navigate Notion on both mobile and desktop.
I’ve gone through a huge amount of Notion setups. Huge dashboards with databases thrown everywhere, minimal dashboards with widgets and cute colours and just simple links to pages. All of them just consumed time as I endlessly customised and re-arranged them. But not anymore. After sinking hours upon hours into making my IKEA-esque build your own Notion setup I realised I was wasting my time on making it look nice while pretending to be productive.
So exactly what sort of sidebar setup are we using here that creates such a magical productivity experience. Nothing fancy at all. After I finished university I archived all of my univeristy pages and notes and other bits and pieces into a project marked as completed and a seperate archive of documents and information hidden away in my workspace where if I ever need it again it can be easily found but doesn’t cause clutter. My sidebar currently has 4 items in the “Private” section and 5 in the “Favourites” section. Take a quick look here:
The solution to all of your Notion black hole of time-wasting lies in the sidebar. You know that annoying little menu that you always hide to give you more space for your super detailed dashboard of widgets and tables and colours and other distractions, well as it turns out it’s actually probably the most effective way of jumping around your Notion. Now don’t get me wrong dashboards have their place but only in very specific scenarios like for a project homepage or for a design mood board. But the sidebar is so simple, so quick and so plain that you can’t waste time on it if you tried. No fancy blocks, no database, no build it yourself.
Not a dashboard in sight. “Tasks” is a database of my current to-do’s. It includes mostly items with larger overarching projects or resources (this was especially true during university). Smaller tasks like “hoover the car” or “phone the dentist” generally just get chucked into Google tasks but more complex tasks like posting a blog post or something related to my business are generally managed in Notion.
“Post Planner” is inspired by an Ali Abdaal Notion system for creating his YouTube videos. I belive he calls it the content pipeline or something along those lines. Essentialy mine does the same job for blog posts. A kanban board for the status of the post is the main view and I use this to just quickly chuck ideas for posts into whether I end up writing them or not so I’ve always got a bank of ideas for inspiration.
“Overload” is actually more of a self contained section of the workspace. It has it’s own tasks and resource storage and databases as there’s quite alot of information and having it all spill into my main workspace would make it a nightmare to navigate and I feel like it gives me a nice split between work and non-work. Notion’s sharing setttings also work better if there isn’t overlap in databases so all my personal tasks aren’t accessible via the Overload page so it maintains a nice split.
“Content Storage” is actually the Readwise managed database. If you haven’t used Readwise before it basically a big funnel for all of your highlights and notes from various sources. It takes data from Kindle – for book highlights, Snipd – for podcast highlights, Twitter – for saved tweets suprisingly and from Reader – Readwises own document reader app. Readwise also then offers a Notion export option that creates a database in your Notion workspace that syncs any time Readwise gets a new highlight. This is a very slick and friction way of recording all of your highlights and notes with almost no effort (for a small price of course).
And finally “Projects” is a higher level overview of the current projects I’m working on. Technically there is a higher level to this called “Areas” but I can’t honestly remember the last time I looked at it. Projects is better for an overview as I can decide whether something is actually worth investing my time in anymore when compared against the rest of my active projects.
So that’s my sidebar, nice and neat and a super quick way to get chucked into all of the important parts of Notion. And it’s even super mobile friendly. Notion’s mobile app, although pretty comparable in features to the desktop experience, isn’t the nicest to look at. All of your pretty little dashboards get crushed into a big list and become almost unusable. But the sidebar doesn’t crumble like your dashboards do. In fact the sidebar becomes even better because both iOS and Android have widgets that allow you to put your sidebar right on your homescreen so you can go right into your Notion pages without even having to rummage through the Notion app. Honestly could the sidebar should be selling itself at this point.
So, Notion, although you could spend time building super complex pages to satiate your IKEA furniture building cravings, I would instead reccomend you get very acquainted with the sidebar when you actually want to get things done. It really is one of the best ways to get around Notion.
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