How to Use Notion to Organise Your Life
Anna Lenkovska
A relaxed personal tour of one YouTuber's Notion setup, useful for absolute beginners but too thin on the actual mechanics for anyone past week one.
"How to Use Notion to Organise Your Life" is exactly what its title promises: a personal tour of one creator's workspace, wrapped around a beginner walkthrough of Notion's core features. It runs 76 minutes across two clearly split halves, and that split is both its structure and its biggest limitation.
What the first half actually covers
The opening section is a straightforward feature tour. It starts with account creation and the choice between personal and work workspaces, then moves into templates, explaining the difference between Notion's own curated set and the much larger community gallery. From there it covers blocks and pages, including the drag-to-create-columns technique and the slash-command shortcut for turning one block type into another. A lesson on decorating pages walks through adding icons, cover images pulled from Unsplash, dividers, and background color, treating visual polish as a genuine retention tool rather than a cosmetic afterthought. The database lessons that follow are the meatiest part of the course: creating a table, understanding property types like select, multi-select, and date, and switching between table, board, gallery, and calendar views of the same underlying data. A short lesson on Webclipper and one on keyboard shortcuts round out the section.
The formulas lesson is where the course is most honest about its own limits. It shows two working examples, a percentage completion formula for a habit tracker and a date-comparison formula that flags a task as overdue, but explicitly declines to explain Notion's formula language in any depth, directing viewers to outside YouTube tutorials instead. That is a fair thing to admit, but it also means the course cannot be relied on as a real formula reference, only as a demonstration that formulas exist and look intimidating.
What the second half delivers
The second half abandons instruction almost entirely in favor of a guided tour of the creator's own Notion pages: a workspace built around monthly goals, a personal dashboard, a habit tracker, and a goal tracker. Two lessons rebuild the habit tracker and goal tracker from scratch on screen, which is the closest the course comes to a real project, and following along step by step would let a viewer end up with a working replica of both. But most of this half is narration over an existing setup rather than teaching, closer to a workspace show-and-tell than a lesson plan. Content-creator-specific pages like a video schedule and sponsorship tracker take up time that will be irrelevant to most viewers.
The course's honesty is its strength. It does not oversell what it can teach, flags gaps openly, and keeps a casual, unpolished tone that makes Notion feel approachable rather than intimidating. Its weakness is depth: nothing on relations between databases, no discussion of linked databases or rollups, and formulas are shown rather than explained. For a total beginner deciding whether Notion is worth adopting, it does the job. For anyone who wants to build a serious system, it is a starting point, not a destination.
The standout
The walkthrough of building a habit tracker formula that converts checked boxes into a weekly completion percentage is the one technique concrete enough to copy directly.
What you will learn
- How to create a Notion account and choose between personal and work use
- How to install and customize templates from Notion's gallery and the community template site
- How to work with blocks and pages, including turning blocks into other types and creating multi-column layouts
- How to decorate pages with icons, covers, dividers, and color to build a personal aesthetic
- How to build databases with different views (table, board, gallery, calendar) and apply filters and sorting
- How to write basic formulas for percentage-based habit trackers and date-based status flags
Best for: Someone who has never opened Notion before and wants a gentle, example-driven first look at its building blocks.
Skip it if: Anyone who already has a Notion account running or wants a rigorous, systematic reference on databases, relations, or advanced formulas.
