📝 Tech-lead Notion setup

7 min readApr 25, 2022

⏩ Skip this part if you familiar with Notion

Notion is a great tool for everyone. You can organize any text and media data with it.

✅ But why should you use Notion instead of other apps

First of all, Notion is a free app. You have unlimited cloud-storage for your notes. But even Pro version is only 4$/month (you need it mostly for collaboration with other people as far Free version allows you to share your documents only with 5 members. Note: web sharing via link is unlimited).

The second thing is Notion has more features than its opponents. For example Databases and Kanban boards

Also, Notion has a lot of integrations with third-parties, such as Whimsical, Miro, Invision, …

❌ Are there any disadvantages?

Sure, as var it is individually. As personally I would say that Notion is pretty slow as far if is based on Electron. It is a JavaScript framework that helps you create applications for all platforms with one code base. It means that feature delivery time is reduced and also Notion is a cross-platform application.

For example, Craft is an application only for Apple-devices. It is super fast and modern-styled, but not so powerful as Notion in most cases.

💡 The resume is 👉 you have to choose the application you need for your tasks. So, let me share you how I work with Notion as a tech-lead developer.

Introduction

✅ First of all let’s take a look main structure elements.

👉 Page. That you can see on the left side. Red-underlined. It is a main structure element we’ll use. Pages could consist of other pages. Deep level is unlimited.

👉 Database. It is a most comfortable place for data storing. You have to know about database tags and views to start.

👇 My Notion view 👇

💡 Explanation:

“Desktop view” 👉 is a regular page in Notion. Also, it is only an interface to see and edit data in other pages that are behind the scenes. It means that if I remove this page, it doesn’t reflect on my data. It is only about how I see my data it comfortably formats.

❓Why it is important❓
Because, tomorrow, you can change usual activity and data you would like to see on the first page.
⬇️ Take a look the simple proof of concept scheme ⬇️

🟦 👉 Notion page
🟨 👉 Notion database
⚪️ 👉 Includes page or database (Vault includes Areas, Activity, … pages)
🟢 👉 Database relations (For each element in “Activities” database I have an Area property, and also for each article in “Technical stuff” database I have Technical tag property)

⬇️ In Notion it looks like below:

💡 Each element explanation

“Areas” 👉 database with names of areas (something kind of global life tags. Such as: Development, Health, Technologies). I use areas to set them as properties in other databases.

“Activity” 👉 all my life global activities (Job, medium posts, YouTube channel, etc…). It is a storage of pages you can see in “Desktop view” as a Jobs dashboard. It could be a place for your projects if you need.

“Personal workspace” 👉 the database with my personal pages (Family, Bookshelf, etc…). Also, here I keep my weekly and weekly/annually goals and English learning board. For annually goals, I use Related property to the “Areas” database.

“Topics” 👉 the database with articles, notes, etc I’d like to keep. Here I also use Related property to the “Area” database.

“Technical tags” 👉 the database like Areas, but created only for the specific database below.

“Technical stuff” 👉 the database like “Topics” but created to keep specific articles, related only to main general activity (Technologies, Development, Cybersecurity). Here I use Related property to the “Technical tags” database.

🕵🏻‍♂️ How it looks inside

Let’s take a look Activities database for example.

💡 Also, here you can see that I use “Area” property with relational property type.

⬇️ Go deeper…⬇️

Simple projects Kanban-board in on of activities

⬇️ And inside the specific project page ⬇️

Okay, now we can see that we can create a page inside the page inside the page, inside the…. Stop ✋⛔
Remember that keeping it simple much better than complex. Avoid unnecessary nested pages and databases if it is possible.

Let’s roll back to the “Activities” database and “Areas” related tags.
To see the power of it, I’d like to show you one more Database of Pages 👉 “Topics”. All articles here have Area tag as well.

Take a look at the red rectangle with multiple database views!
I would recommend you to create several database views for different needs.
Let’s select database view By area.

🤔 Much more interesting I would say…
Now let’s create an additional view that will show us last 10 modified articles and add it to the “Desktop page” ⬇️

Create a new view by pressing + Add view and setup Layout configurations as on the picture below

2. Press back-arrow and fill properties as below
⚠️ Also add sorting by Last edit property with Descending parameter.

3. Now open the “Desktop view” and app the link to the database view we just created

👨🏻‍💻 Technical setup

I keep a huge part of code snippets, comparing, benchmarks, etc in my Notion.
If you work as a developer, you might know that it is impossible to remember everything, and it is better to have the place where you store knowledge about how you solved something before.

But actually, there is one more problem become even if you store all your experience in one structured place. It’s “How to find” this snippet, benchmark, blablabla…

Tags approach solves this problem actually and that’s why I use another database with tags for my “Technical stuff”…

Technically, this database has no difference from “Topics” database. I use “Technical tags” database for Tags property in “Technical stuff”.

View by tag in **Technical** **stuff** database

💡 Also, one interesting thing that I use Configuration file property of Relation type to itself database as far I have configuration files for some guides.

💡 Explanation:

Graphical view on several relations for one page

🏷 What tags give us?

Now let’s go to the “Areas” database. Here you can see all your related palces where you used any kind of tag

The same also for “Technical tags”

🤔 But why I need different views for my setup?

If you use 2 or more devices you might wanna use Notion on all of them. But for example you don’t need to read technical stuff from your phone and in that case you just create a “Mobile view” with necessary parts of your knowledge.

For that, you can use Widgets on your device.