Notion Part 1: 10 Tips to Get Started
I get a LOT of questions about Notion.
I thought it might be helpful to write a mini-series about Notion and how we use it.
This series is divided into 3 sections/posts:
(this post) For total beginners: Why I’m obsessed with it, and how to get started with Notion at your company.
For those with Notion experience: The #1 most important Notion page that you must have.
For those who already have a robust Notion buildout: How you can use Notion’s AI feature to drastically reduce repeat questions, save labor costs, and reduce mistakes.
How To Get Started With Notion
Our company policies, process and tasks are all documented in a central company wiki that looks like this:
How we use Notion at our small business
This Notion buildout is what a fully documented business looks like.
It has cut down on the questions I get from my team by 95%.
It has allowed me to take the month of June off 3 years in a row.
It lets me take REAL vacations throughout the year, without checking email or calling the office to find out how things are going.
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If you want to build something like this for your own company, here are the steps I recommend to my friends who ask how I did it:
Sign up for Notion. You can probably start with the free plan.
Create a primary “home” page or main page. There won’t be much on it except for a nice graphic and links to other pages (this is the screenshot above).
When you create a new sub-page, it will automatically drop a link to that sub-page on the main page. You’ll probably want to move that link around and create some nice category headings.
Rather than trying to create an entire company wiki from scratch (which feels like boiling the ocean), start with information you already have and just copy it into a new Notion sub-page under the home page. You almost certainly have tons of relevant information buried in various emails, Word documents, Google sheets, Dropbox files, printed-out binders, forms, etc. Find that stuff and move it into Notion.
Once you move something into Notion, its page in your company Notion is now the single source of truth for that knowledge. All other sources of that information should be deleted or clearly marked as “Deprecated — see Notion.” Otherwise you will have confusion as people try to rely on two conflicting sources of information.
I recommend you (the person leading this effort) be in charge of the overall structure of the company wiki. You don’t need to build out every page alone (see below), but you will need to create the initial framework and populate a dozen or two pages so everyone gets the idea of how it’s supposed to look and function.
Create a page in Notion about Notion. Here’s ours, feel free to duplicate it.
You can’t do this by yourself. You’ll want to identify one or two people at your company who like Notion and want to see the project be successful. They will help drive change through your organization and champion it with other employees.
To keep the momentum up, consider adding a metric to all your direct reports that they must create or significantly update 1 Notion page per week (and they must send the link to you afterward for review). Keep this going until you’ve gotten things to 90% of where you’d like them. This is my #1 tip to get the buildout to the point where it has critical mass.
I don’t recommend using Notion for workflows or task management. It’s not set up for that. We use Notion to store reference information that rarely changes, not project management or live processes.
Wrap Up
I know that’s a lot, but once you get started, it’s kind of addictive.
Good luck and contact me with any questions that come up!
P.S. Recently, I started quietly selling our full company Notion buildout again, exactly as shown in the video above. If after reading this issue you’re interested in jumpstarting your own property management Notion company wiki, you can buy it right here.