You arrive at college one fine day and complete your first class. “Have you finished the assignment?” your friend asks. And then it occurs to you that you have an assignment due in your second class. We’ve all been there, believe it or not. We’ve failed to finish an assignment or turn in homework by the deadline. And it’s a nightmare as a research student when you forget to prepare reagents for the next day’s experiments. We are always overconfident that we will remember all that needs to be done, but we never do. This is why keeping a journal or a to-do list is necessary. The issue with traditional journals is that you can’t take them with you everywhere. Meet Notion, an all-in-one workplace. A platform to streamline your to-do list, wikis, note-taking, kanban boards, and databases that syncs across your devices.
In May 2020, I started using Notion. It’s transformed the way I take notes, and it’s helped me become a lot more productive. I use Notion to manage my finances, to save useful links or webpages and to jot down things. I even have a movies and series database where I track watched and upcoming movies or series. We use Notion at TSB to organise and plan articles, delegate work, and get things done. Notion has a free personal plan, but you can upgrade to a paid subscription plan to get more features. Unlimited visitors, unlimited file uploads, and version history are included in the Personal Pro plan ($4 per month paid annually or $5 per month paid monthly as of June 2021). Pro tip: The Personal Pro plan is free for students and educators. 🥳 Simply use your school email address to sign up. Click here to learn more about Notion for students and educators. Download Notion iOS and Android app by clicking here and Mac and Windows app by clicking here. You can even download the Notion Web Clipper i.e. browser extension by clicking here.
1. Let’s get started
After you sign up, you’ll be taken to your workspace and greeted with a few templates to get started with. The sidebar on the left helps you to navigate your workplace. For simplicity, consider Notion workspace (the sidebar) to be your bookshelf, containing all of your books (‘Pages’). You can add new books (‘Pages’) to your bookshelf. Inside a book you can add chapters (‘Sub-pages’). And each book (‘Page’) contains lots of text, images, tables and more.
By clicking the + Add a page button you can create new pages. You can personalize pages by adding icons and page cover.
In Notion you can add pages inside pages inside pages……😵 These are called as Nested Pages.
Here in the Personal Home page, there are a few sub-pages, Movie List, Recipes, Yearly Goals and Travel Plans. You can navigate to a specific sub-page, let’s say Travel Plans, by clicking the toggle button (small triangle icon to the left of page name in the sidebar) to reveal pages nested inside the Personal Home page. You can add a sub-page by clicking + or open the page options by clicking the 3 dots. You can Share or Favourite a page by clicking the button in the top right. Shared pages and favorited pages will appear under the shared or favourites section respectively in the sidebar. At the top in the sidebar are account settings. If you want to change to dark mode, you can do that by navigating to the appearance section in the settings. If you want more templates then click on Templates in the sidebar. Quick Find option will help you search for any page or information within a page. You can even hide the sidebar. Hover your cursor on the sidebar and you will see << icon to the right of your workspace name. Or you can even use the keyboard shortcut, cmd/ctrl + \. If you want to quickly navigate between pages when the sidebar is hidden just move your cursor to the left of the page and the sidebar will pop-up. Now click on the page you wish to open and move your cursor away from the sidebar and it will stay hidden. To open and lock the sidebar, move your cursor to the left of the page and when the sidebar pops-up you will see a >> icon at the top or use the keyboard shortcut cmd/ctrl + \.
To the top right of the page are page options (3 dots). From here you can change the page font style, make the content of the page full width and more.
2. Understanding Notion
Everything in Notion is a block. Any content i.e., text, headers, images, videos, to-do list, tables, toggle lists and others are all blocks. Let’s go back to the Personal Home page. Here if you hover your cursor over any content, a + icon and a ⋮⋮ icon will appear to its immediate left, suggesting that content is a block.
⋮⋮ icon is called the block handle. You can click it to bring up a menu of options for that particular block or you can drag it to move the block. You can click + icon to add a new block and select the type of block you want.
Inside a block, you can type / to select the type of block.
You can highlight any text and use the pop-up menu to customize the text.
You can select multiple blocks and move them or change their type.
3. Next step
Congratulations for making it this far if this was your first time learning about Notion! I hope this introduction was helpful. Next, we will dive into writing and editing basics.
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