Automate work with repeating database templates
Automatically create repeating tasks, meeting notes and documents with repeating database templates. It’s easier than ever to keep your to-do list up to date, schedule meetings and generate all kinds of content on a regular basis.
- Build a repeating template once, and it will create database entries automatically
- How to create repeating templates in a database
- Use repeating templates in many different ways with your team
- Create recurring tasks for things you do on a regular basis
- Use recurring docs for weekly summaries, project updates and more
- Schedule recurring meeting notes for regular meetings in your calendar
- Build repeating templates anywhere in your company workspace
Our personal and professional lives are made up of habits, tasks and events that happen daily, weekly or monthly. With Notion’s repeating database templates, you can create a page template once and set it to create new entries in the database as often as you need.
This guide will show you to use repeating database templates to create recurring tasks, meetings and docs in your workspace.
Build a repeating template once, and it will create database entries automatically
Database templates speed up your work and help you standardize your processes. You can quickly recreate a type of document, meeting agenda, task or project based on a template you’ve already created.
Learn more about database templates
Database templates allow you to pre-populate pages in a database, like your weekly sync meeting notes. Every heading, prompt, and bullet point is outlined and ready to go. You can even tag the folks who always attend, and label it with the right category.
Without repeating templates, someone still needs to remember to create that entry every time, and with so much work on your plate, anything that saves energy (and cut down on clicks) is a bonus.
Now imagine a task one of your team members has to do every Monday morning. Do you create a new entry into your team’s “Tasks” database every week? Or, once they’ve completed the task, do they move it back into the “To Do” column and change the due date?
Both of these approaches work, but can be slightly cumbersome, and there’s a risk of tasks getting forgotten.
With repeating database templates, you now only have to create a template for a task, meeting or document once. Then, you can set it up to repeat as often as you need, and the item will automatically be created in the database. All that’s left to do is fill it out or check it off.
How to create repeating templates in a database
To create a repeating template in a database, first create a database template as your normally would - go to the dropdown next to “New”, select “+ New template”, and start editing your page.
Then, click “...” next to your new template in the dropdown menu. Select “Repeat”, and choose how often you want an entry to be created from the template. You can choose every day, week, month or year, or go to “Custom”. Here, you can customize the repeating frequency further, and choose whether you want your repeating template to appear every 3 days, on Tuesday and Thursday every week, or every 2 months, for example.
Once you’ve selected your frequency a new item will appear in the database, based on your template, when the time comes. You can turn any of your existing templates into repeating templates by following the same process. If you ever want to stop a repeating template, you can either delete the template entirely, or go to the template options and turn “Repeat” off.
Use repeating templates in many different ways with your team
Repeating database templates can speed up and standardize your work, so you can spend more time on your most important jobs, and less time on tedious administrative tasks.
You can use them in many different ways to automate a lot of your project management work.
Here are some of the different ways you might use repeating database templates in your workspace:
Create recurring tasks for things you do on a regular basis
Set a recurring template in your task database once, and you can trust it will always appear in your “To-do” list when the time comes.
You can create recurring tasks to fill out your monthly report and the end of every month, clear your desk every Friday afternoon, or even spend 30 minutes a day answering emails.
You don’t have to worry about constantly recreating those repetitive tickets. Instead, you can just focus on getting them done.
Use recurring docs for weekly summaries, project updates and more
You might find yourself creating documents summarizing the status of all your current projects, or provide general team updates, every week. You always do this at the same time every week and use the same format to draft the doc.
This is a perfect opportunity to use a repeating template. Create a repeating template for your document with headers, bullets and text blocks ready so all you have to do is fill in key information. If you already have an existing template, just go to options, select “Repeat” and choose your frequency.
What about the Created By property?
A repeating template will show as being “Created By” Notion automation — be sure to adjust views and filters accordingly when you start using these in your workspace!
Schedule recurring meeting notes for regular meetings in your calendar
Another handy use for repeating templates is for meeting notes. You know that every Monday morning you have your weekly team standup, and every other Thursday is the company’s all-hands.
To save the trouble of creating a new page every time, you can create repeating database templates in your meeting notes database and schedule them for when those meetings occur.
For monthly all-hands, weekly syncs and daily standups, you can automatically create a meeting agenda that’s ready for teammates to add to. They’ll get notified when they’re tagged in it, and you can even create a view of meetings and link it in your recurring calendar invite.
Build repeating templates anywhere in your company workspace
You can use repeating database templates in any database, wherever you want to automatically generate items based on a template.
For example, your company wiki or knowledge base has a database for quarterly goals, you could create a template for planning and documenting your OKRs. You can then set this up to recreate every 3 months, so it’s ready to fill in after the quarterly management meeting.
Or, if you have a database for weekly announcements that everyone can read and contribute to, a repeating template could be useful.
Even the finance team might use repeating templates when it’s time to create their monthly invoices.
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