Whether or not you’re new to Notion I can guarantee that using pre-made templates is gonna make your life a whole lot easier.

We’ve all got a lot going on in our business 🌪 (not to mention our personal lives) and making the time to learn yet another new platform just isn’t doable most of the time.

Creating a template yourself it’s a money-making-activity 💸 (at least not directly) and no one’s paying you to learn, experiment, tweak and otherwise F around with Notion or to Google things like “Notion formula to calculate today’s date” (because no, regular Excel formulas do not work in Notion 🤦‍♀️ *face palm*).

And maybe you love learning new things and Notion templates are fun for you to create. But still, you’ve got 1,001 things on your to-do list 📝 and really just need to prioritize, well, the priorities in your business.

So until you’re in a place where you can make the time for non-money-making or fun-creative-joy-joy activities (however you personally look at it) like Notion template creation, you’ve thankfully got the option to let others build those templates for you. 😉

3 Ways Notion Templates Will Make Your Life Easier

1️⃣ They Save You Time

As mentioned, pre-made Notion templates will save you tons. of. time.

To be totally honest, Notion is a huge learning curve for most people because it’s not exactly intuitive.

Wowza the formulas alone will blow you away. They are one of the most amazing features on Notion and can help you do so much fancy calculating, data analysis and business tracking. But if you’re not familiar with terms like “concat”, “boolean” and “slice” (yep that’s English), then buckle up because you’re in for a ride if you want to get started with Notion.

With the freed up time you won’t be spending on Notion template creation, you’ll be able to spend more time in your own area of expertise, doing what you know and love and being of better service to you clients and customers.

2️⃣ They Relieve Overwhelm

Without a template, you start with literally a blank white canvas (aka: screen) in Notion. That can be hella overwhelming for some of us, and templates avoid that problem from the get-go.

Looking at the blinking cursor on the white screen, it can be hard to know where to start and what to do first much less how to link up all the databases, pages and workspaces together so you actually have an efficient, helpful and functional template.

This is both the beauty and the challenge with Notion template creation: there is so much possibility (way more than other project management platforms like Trello and Asana) but that possibility can be intimidating and confusing for newbies.

3️⃣ They Help You Learn Faster

If and when you get to a point that you do want to start creating your own Notion templates, I personally found that I learned how Notion worked so much faster by investing in some templates myself and playing around with those first.

There’s a plethora of YouTube tutorials out there if you learn best by watching, but if you learn by doing like me, others’ templates are your life line. Everyone has their own “Notion style” and I’m still discovering new techniques and ways of doing things (that’s how much possibility lies within the Notion universe).

And by getting some templates now you won’t just save the time and overwhelm, you’ll also learn as you go and be so much more ready to tackle Notion template creation yourself later on.

Finding The Perfect Notion Template For You

Notion templates are definitely in high demand but also in high supply – in this sea of templates you’ve got to choose from it can get real overwhelming real fast and out of hand buying #allthetemplates left right and center.

Here are some tips to get clear on what exactly you need in a Notion template before you start searching 👀 so it’ll be easier to recognize the right template for you when you see it.

Ask yourself the following questions (and be as detailed and thorough as possible in your answers):

• What is the purpose of the template you’ll use?
• What will the template be used for exactly?
• What outcome or goal to you hope to achieve with the template?
• Is visual appeal and aesthetic important to you (aka: are images, colours and branding a priority)? Or do you just need to see numbers, words and/or data?
• Do you want to see everything on one page? Or do you want the data split up into various views, summaries or pages?
• Will this template only be used by you? Or will you be sharing it with anyone? If so, do others also need to be able to edit the template?
• Will this template be used once, or over and over again?

Make a list of exactly what needs to be included within this template:

• If you do need various views, summaries or pages included, list each required one.

Think of: do you need to view things by day/week/month/quarter, by status, by date, by deadline or something else.

• Then list each and every piece of data you want to be included on each of those views, summaries or pages.

Think of: dates, deadlines, numbers, names, tags, status updates, calculations, images, links, references, overviews, totals, files, media and lists.

• If you’ll be tracking data, make a list of exactly what you need to be tracked within the template.

Conclusion

Templates or not, Notion can do almost anything you need it to do. 🥳 That blank white canvas contains so much potential and possibility, it’s for sure one of the best project management platforms out there for your business.

If you take only one thing away from reading this, let it be that ready-made Notion templates are your best option when getting started with the platform. Whether you stick with them or eventually start to create your own is totally up to you!