Notion Masterclass: Maximise Your Productivity & Organisation

Ali Abdaal built his reputation on productivity content aimed at students and knowledge workers, and this class channels that into 105 minutes of Notion instruction. It runs beginner to advanced across four sections, framed around building a single project: a "LifeOS" personal dashboard. The structure works because there's a through-line. Rather than a disconnected feature tour, each lesson adds another piece to the same page, so viewers end with something usable instead of a pile of disconnected demos.

Where the course earns its keep

The opening section on pages and blocks is genuinely well pitched for a true beginner. Abdaal spends real time on the idea that everything in Notion, text, a calendar, an entire database, is a block that can be dragged, nested, and rearranged, and he demonstrates it by physically moving elements around the screen rather than just asserting it. That's the right instinct: Notion's learning curve comes from not understanding this modularity, and the class attacks that head-on. The workspace and sidebar walkthrough is similarly practical, covering the quick-find shortcut, the trash, and where settings live, without over-explaining things a first-time user won't need yet.

The database section covers the essentials: creating properties, changing types like date fields, sorting, and switching between table, calendar, board, list, and gallery views using the same underlying data. The calendar-view demonstration, where a birthday database is instantly reviewed by "last hangout" date instead, is a clean example of why multiple views matter. But this is also where the course thins out. Relations and rollups, arguably the most powerful and most confusing part of Notion databases, get comparatively little worked-through detail next to the more visual view-switching material, which is a missed opportunity since that is precisely where beginners tend to get stuck later.

Where it falls short

The advanced section leans heavily on embedded widgets from a third-party site called Indify and on Super, a tool for turning a Notion page into a public website. Both are shown briefly, more as "look what's possible" demos than as skills viewers will walk away able to replicate confidently. The Super demo in particular is a couple of minutes of copying and pasting a URL, useful to know the option exists, not enough to actually build a site.

The bonus section, which makes up a large share of the runtime, hands the microphone to Abdaal's team and to creator friends like Thomas Frank, showing their own elaborate systems. These are interesting for inspiration, particularly Frank's pillars-pipelines-vaults structure for organizing an entire life and business, but they are shown, not taught. A viewer watching Frank's dashboard will admire it without learning how to build anything close to it themselves, since the walkthrough moves at browsing speed rather than instructional pace.

Production is casual but functional, screen recording with narration, and Abdaal's delivery is enthusiastic and clear throughout. The 105-minute runtime is honest for what's covered: a properly guided beginner path through pages, blocks, and basic databases, padded with an extended highlight reel of other people's setups that inspires more than it instructs. Anyone wanting to go further with formulas, relations, or automation will need supplementary resources afterward.

What you will learn

• ·How pages and blocks work as Notion's core building units and how to move them around freely
• ·How to build a personal LifeOS dashboard combining pages, databases, and layout blocks
• ·How to create and sort a database, add properties like dates and relations, and switch between table, board, calendar, and gallery views
• ·How to embed third-party widgets (quotes, calendars) via Indify to decorate a dashboard
• ·How to publish a Notion page as a live website using the Super platform
• ·How Ali's own 15-person team structures a shared workspace with linked databases and Slack integrations