This doc is an evolving and improving set of important tips and tricks (🔹), limitations (🔸), pitfalls (❗️), and technical notes (Σ ) on using Notion effectively.

Started internally at Holloway by @ojoshe—but we might publish more broadly if it proves valuable. Please add comments with ideas to add to this doc here! (We'll fold more updates in.)

General Organization

When and where to create docs

The question of how best to organize files on a team so they are maintained and all find and use them is a perennial challenge. This is true in every system—Google Docs, wikis, Confluence, Dropbox, Quip, Notion, and other team shared docs.

Bob Woodward famously declared that "democracy dies in darkness." Online documents die when they are unmaintained or don't have readers. This can be because they are forgotten or lost, they become out of date due to lack of maintenance, or people lose trust in them.

The way to counteract this is:

So how many docs should you create, exactly? As few as possible, but not too few! In general, a good principle is to divide things into a single doc only when three considerations align, and separate them if any of these are different:

For each doc or folder you create, formally or informally know the answer to these three things, and your docs will be better organized, better used, and better maintained. Informally or formally, your team should know the answers to these three attributes for all docs.

Here are some guidelines that flow from that principle: