Hey my friend,

5 years ago, I stumbled upon a little upstart app called Notion when I watched a Youtube video from Notion guru Marie Poulin's on how to manage tasks in Notion.

That video opened my eyes to the possibilities of having an all-in-one workspace to track, manage and organise things that mattered to me.

At the time, I was using:

• Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track my travels, goals and projects.

• OneNote to do my daily journal and course notes.

• Word for content creation and notetaking.

• Google Keep for quick capture notes.

• Trello to organise my tasks etc.

Honestly, it was a bit of a mess.

These tools didn't work with each other.

The tool switching was distracting me from being productive.

The duplication of information across tools that I had to do was frustrating and time wasting.

When I found Marie's video... I was blown away.

Today, I want to talk about the three new Notion add-on tools that have hit the market in the last 1 to 2 years, and how I’m using them.

Now Lets Get into It…

Notion has not only helped me get organised and productive, but it have given me the peace of mind where everything has it’s place and is out of my head.

Information in Notion is also quick and easy to access (as long as you have an internet connection… though might be changing with the latest announcements from Make with Notion conference!)

In the past, I was all for function over form.

If a tool solved a problem I had, I didn’t mind that it was lacking in form.

But Notion is a tool I genuinely enjoy opening up each day and it solves the many productivity and organisation problems I had.

It gave me the freedom and flexibility to design and build workflows that worked for me.

I stopped me spending my limited headspace juggling multiple tools or worrying if I’ve dropped the ball on a task or project.

Instead I could streamline and simplify my work and life so I could free up more time for life outside of work.

In the last few years, Notion has really accelerated it's growth and popularity, hitting 100M users in August 2024.

Competition in the personal and work productivity space has also exploded. There’s an overwhelming choice of digital tools to select from. That’s great for people like you and me.

Healthy competition leads to innovation.

That’s spurred Notion to expand and invest into areas like AI, calendars and now email!

Calendar, AI and Mail

I'm a bit of a tool minimalist. I'm not one to tool-hop and experiment with new tools all too often. Especially when what I have has worked pretty well so far.

But as a Notion Ambassador we do get early access to try out new features and tools from Notion. So I have tried Notion AI, Calendar and now Mail.

I thought for today's issue I'll share my honest thoughts on these add-ons (and it's not what you think).

1. Notion Calendar

I've been a long time Google Calendar user since my calendar needs are pretty basic.

But the big struggle I had with Notion is integrating and time blocking tasks in Notion with a calendar.

In 2024, Notion released their free Notion Calendar.

The biggest benefit of Notion calendar is that you can integrate it with your Notion databases and see your database items in a calendar.

For example, if you track your tasks in a Notion database, you can now time block plan those tasks on a calendar! It's a step in the right direction, but personally it's not yet the complete and seamless solution.

Notion Calendar also has some basic meeting scheduling functions to make booking meetings easier. It’s especially useful if you don’t use a dedicated tool like Calendly

A big drawback is that it only integrates with Google Calendar. If you're a Microsoft Outlook user, you're out of luck.

2. Notion AI

Notion AI has improved leaps and bounds since it first came to market back in 2022 to compete with the likes of ChatGPT.

I'm not a big AI user in general.

The biggest benefit I’ve gain using Notion AI is the powerful ability to search within your own workspace. It generates answers to your query based on inside information, and shares links to the Notion pages where it sourced it’s answers.

Effectively, it’s turning your whole Notion workspace into a Personal Knowledge Management system.

Here are a few examples of things you can ask Notion AI to do:

I think the most practical and powerful use cases for Notion AI are for me are:

• Content creation

• Knowledge management

• Personal productivity (better organisation and summarisation of tasks, meeting notes etc.)

There are also more advanced use cases that are really nifty like turning database properties into AI properties.

(By the way, you can get my Knowledge Hub OS Notion System as part of the 2024 Notion Means Business Bundle. If you get it using my affiliate link, I’ll send you a 50% off discount code that you can use for a 90-minute clarity and strategy call or any or all of my digital products until 1 December 2024.)

3. Notion Mail

This is really hot off the press.

Notion Mail was officially announced at Make with Notion 2024 conference this week!

The mission of Notion Mail is to break free from the 20 year old way of using an email inbox by personalising and beautifying your email experience.

They want to make email management a productive, calm and clutter-free experience. It's a lofty goal, but they're on to something!

I’ve had early alpha access to Mail and have been testing it for a few weeks! And it’s impressive so far!

Like Notion, they want to give us the ability to customise our email inboxes through building personalised views based on our needs and adapting email to our own workflows. 

Think of these personalised views like Notion Linked Views, but for email.

So far they’ve built in productivity features like:

• Creating custom views to organise your emails based on your personal use cases, preferences and needs.

• Saving and using snippets of common texts that you can insert into your emails.

• Integrating with Notion Calendar to make scheduling and booking meetings with you easier.

• Using AI right in your inbox to do things like draft email replies.

Mail is set to launch sometime in 2025 and I truly think it'll be a game changer in how we use email in our digital lives. If you’re interested you can join the waitlist to stay updated.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading.

Just one more thing, any of these tools sounds interesting or exciting to you? Hit reply, I’m curious to hear!

Have a slow week!

Janice

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