Notion: Productivity Meets Creativity
August 14, 2023technotioncodetools
In this digital age, where information overload is a daily struggle, one platform that helps me to manage my tasks, thoughts, and projects is Notion. An all-in-one workspace application to make your life productive. It assists me in listing things, creating blogs, managing databases, setting reminders, planning trips, and doing anything I can think of when managing my workspace.
Unlocking Creative Possibilities
Over the past few years, I have been using Notion as my personal productivity hub. Lately, I have been interested in creating my dashboard on Notion. As I look for some inspirations online, I was flabbergasted by how much Notion users are so creative! From widgets, life-hack colored blocks, templates, Notion API, and even adding graphic assets, I realize I opened a new door for creative possibilities for my dashboard.
1. Embedding Widgets
Back when Friendster and MySpace were the pinnacle of social media, embedding widgets are the bread and butter of a great page. Those flashy icons, interactive elements were the coolest thing back in the day.
As Notion allows user to customize their own workspace to their heart’s content, embedding widgets are returning! Its one of the reason why I love Notion even better. Notion users can easily add widget with the use of “/embed” block.
As of writing this, there are lot of widgets to add,
- Indify.co - a curated list of free widgets that goes with Notion branding
- WidgetBox - cute minimal widgets that are customizable
- PlusDocs - offers free fun and utility widgets
- Shorouk - free open-source notion widgets
- Ryne.io - yep you read that right! Although its a work on progress
2. Colored block (sticky note)
Wonder how other Notion users created colored blocks that you can insert page automatically (as of the time writing this it's not working)? Funny enough, it's easy and does make sense (I even Googled it just to learn how to make it). Hopefully, shortly, Notion should address this issue.
- Insert a callout, quote or toggle block (These are blocks are containers)
- Then inside the block, just easily add all of the page or to-do list you wanted to included
- Ta-Da!
🙃 Quirks: You need to have the first line as a text title and you cant remove that line block.
3. Templates
A template is nothing new on Notion. After you sign-up and onboard, Notion automatically populates your workspace with templates that you can use for your productivity. Notion provides a long list of templates already, free of use. However, some Notion users take it to the next level and create customize and stylized experiences (this is the very reason I started customizing my dashboard). Some of these templates are free of charge and some eventually need to pay for it.
4. Notion API
Notion also offers their Notion API service for free where you can connect your pages and database to your projects. You can easily create a blog and portfolios from your database, integrate with other applications such as Google Drive, Twitter, Slack, Zoom and etc. With these Notion API.
A good example for this feature is this website. All of its content, blog pages and project database are all maintained in Notion. I can easily edit a title of a blog and its content from anywhere. And right away it will update my website.
Other stuff
There are more ways to customize your Notion experience. Stuff like adding background music, customizing titles and headers with SVG or PNG assets, and embedding pixel-perfect Lottie Files.
Conclusion
This blog article just scratches the surface of Notion users’ creativity. It emerges as a platform for productivity and through its customizable feature and creative potential, it opens a new door for creating workspace beyond imagination. Whether you are looking for a way to organize your daily agenda or thinking of a personalized dashboard, Notion can offer to enhance both productivity and creativity.
Enjoy creating your Notion dashboard!
Credits to Popsy.co for the free Notion Illustration on cover
