Notion

Notion

Presentation

Notion is an all-in-one workspace for notes, docs, wikis and projects. Teams use Notion to collaborate by maintaining a knowledge base which every other team member can access and enhance.

Through its powerful system of core components (page, database, views etc.), Notion allows teams to organize themselves by distributing and tracking the progress of tasks.

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Get an overview of your work

In Notion, teams can quickly end up with tasks scattered between multiple databases, pages and comments. As a result, it is hard to get a full picture of all the tasks to consider working on at any given time.

By integrating Notion, all the tasks assigned to you in Notion are visible in Routine, giving you a complete overview of all your tasks, no matter where they come from.

Universal inbox with unanswered meetings, untitled notes & unplanned tasks coming from integrations
Universal inbox with unanswered meetings, untitled notes & unplanned tasks coming from integrations

Plan your tasks & optimize your time

Planning your work in Notion can be difficult because tasks are scattered between databases but also because Notion is not well integrated with your calendars.

Routine allows you to plan your work and organize your day by easily scheduling Notion tasks for a particular day or postponing them for later.

Plan a integration-synchronized (e.g Notion) task
Plan a integration-synchronized (e.g Notion) task

Quickly capture on desktop & mobile

Notion is an amazingly powerful tool. Unfortunately, it is sometimes too slow when you want to capture an idea, thought, task or else very quickly or on the go.

Routine has been designed with speed in mind, allowing you to capture anything in a fraction of second, both on desktop and mobile

Set Up

The Notion integration allows you to convert pages from a Notion database into Routine tasks.

Create a Notion account

If not already the case, visit http://notion.so and sign up.

Prepare your databases

The databases you want Routine to pull tasks from need to have at least one property to represent the status of a task. The property types supported to represent a task status are:

  • Checkbox
  • Select
  • Status

The following is an example of a database that will be used throughout this tutorial:

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Activate the Notion integration

  • In Routine, go to ⚙️ Settings, and open the Integrations submenu
  • Select Notion and activate the integration by clicking on the toggle on/off:
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Connect your Notion account

  • Click the button to connect your Notion account; you will be redirected to your browser for authentication:
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  • Click on Select pages to proceed to another screen in which you will need to select the databases which Routine will import tasks from:
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⚠️
Once you click Allow Access, Notion does not redirect you to another Web page. However, Routine should be brought to the foreground. Unfortunately, if Routine is opened on another of your desktop's Spaces, you might not notice it. You will need to manually go to Routine to continue setting up the Notion integration.

Select your user

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This step is automatically skipped if your Notion workspace has a single user.
  • Once back on the Routine app, select your Notion user:
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Add a database

  • Add a database by clicking the Add button:
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  • Select the database from which to pull tasks from:
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  • Select the Notion's database property that is used to represent the status of the tasks:
    • ⚠️
    The Notion integration needs one property to represent a "status". The app will update this property in Notion whenever a task is marked as completed/incomplete in Routine.
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  • The window will expand with more fields to fill in:
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  • Indicate what values represent a task as completed. Likewise, for a task that is restored i.e marked as incomplete.

    • Whenever you complete/restore a task in Routine, the specified statuses will be assigned to the associated page in your Notion database.

    For this example and in relation to the sample database above, we will consider that completing a task should assigned the Completed status and that a task being restored should go back to the Launchpad status.

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  • It is unlikely that you want all the items of the Notion database to end up in Routine.

    • This is why the integration allows you to define status values to ignore. All tasks with such values will never appear in Routine.

    For our example, we will decide to ignore all database items with the status Backlog or Published.

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  • As a final step, you can further filter based on a Person property value.

    • This is particularly useful when you "assign" database items to colleagues and you only want to see the items that relate to you.

    You can either select a Person database property, in which case Routine will only import database items whose property match your Notion user. Or you can leave it to None if you want Routine not to filter based on this property.

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  • Click Save to validate the integration configuration for this database
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Operate the Notion-imported tasks

The tasks from your Notion databases should now be present and manipulable in Routine as any other task.

With the example we used throughout this tutorial, this is what you would see:

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You might wonder why only two tasks are being displayed so let us recap based on our example:

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  1. All the tasks with the status Backlog or Published were ignored as indicated in the configuration
  2. Because Routine considers the task "Call Henry" as completed (status Completed), the task is not displayed. However, if you go to Routine's journal, you will see it there 😉
    3. 💡
    If you go to the Journal and restore this task, the status you set for the Restore status will be used. Try it!
  3. Of the three remaining tasks (two in Launchpad, one in In Progress), one has an assignee property (Owner) that does not match our user (Julien Quintard) and is therefore ignored ("Set up dashboard")