Everything you need to know to really get started with Notion

Notion is a tool a lot more people should know about, because it's so flexible that you can set things up in exactly the way that works for you.

People often call Notion a "note-taking tool," but that makes about as much sense as describing Excel as a "table tool." It can do so much more than that. You can use it for everything from automatic meeting notes to task and project tracking, and to build your own CRM, knowledge bases, and plenty more.

One of Notion's real strengths is that it lets you create relationships across everything you build in it. That means the things that should be connected actually are, by default, instead of you having to build integrations to get different tools to share information with each other.

It also has a built-in AI (Notion AI) that you can use to search your content, make changes, set up automations and skills, or build simple agents. And last but not least, other AIs talk to Notion really well too.

The goal of this article is to give you what you need to know about Notion and help you avoid the classic traps people fall into when they first start using this brilliant tool.

A quick note on what to expect

Before you start with Notion, there's one thing worth knowing: its flexibility is both the superpower and the challenge. Yes, you can build great overviews and "systems," but only once you understand the building blocks and the logic behind Notion. If you open it up without grasping that, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.

That's exactly how my first encounter with Notion went, more than three years ago. I opened it, felt confused, and got annoyed by the minimalist interface with no obvious signposts. I built a simple to-do list, never quite saw the point, and gave up.

Today I use Notion every single day, and it's one of the main tools behind a lot of the daily work and content in our company.

By the end of this article you'll know what Notion is built for, why it works the way it does, and how to get started the right way.

Who is Notion for?

If you often get frustrated that things in a system don't "talk to each other" even though they obviously should, you'll probably love Notion.

It can be especially useful for:

Small businesses that don't have the time or budget to build integrations between different tools
Organizations that don't need to maintain complex platforms like Microsoft 365
Anyone who likes putting things in order and dreams of a flexible tool that lets them organize and connect information exactly how they want.

The simple principle to understand before you start

I think the best starting point for getting going with Notion is this: forget everything you know about files and folders.

In Notion, everything you build starts with a single page. This is the most basic building block, the thing everything else grows from. What does that mean in practice? It's simple: whatever you want to build, whether it's meeting notes, a task list, a project plan, or a CRM, you always create a page first.

How is Notion structured?

Here are the three concepts in Notion you should understand before you start.

Workspaces

This is your virtual Notion home. If you use Notion as a private person, you have one personal workspace. If you use Notion as a business, you most likely just need one shared workspace for the whole company (for small companies). You can also have several workspaces for different teams, but then the experience gets more fragmented, and it can work against you if the whole point was to get things to talk to each other.

Individual people on a team can also create their own personal pages and content in Notion, visible only to them and not the whole team.

Pages

As mentioned, everything you build in Notion starts as a page. It's the universal building block. A page can hold text, images, files, checklists, links, or one or more databases. Notion doesn't use folders, so if you want to gather several things in one place, you just create a page and add more (sub)pages to that existing page.