What Makes a Good Notion Workspace

The reason many fail at building a growth companion tool and what to do instead.

Notion is trending, everyone wants to give it a try, maybe even you did, but at some point it feels like… the relationship is not working anymore.

I get you.

There are some common mistakes that many beginners make when building their Notion Workspace and here I want to teach you how to successfully avoid them. Just so it helps you scale your business… instead of holding you back.

1. Too many top-level pages

It doesn’t matter if you’re using Teamspaces or just pages to organize your content, but one of the most common mistakes is creating a main page for each and every new aspect you want to integrate into your Notion.

Now think about it this way: if you were trying to build a mind map or a flowchart, you don’t position everything at the same level, right?

You create a hierarchy that helps you navigate and find the correct box quickly. The same applies to your Notion Workspace. Think of the structure and hierarchy you want to achieve first, thank yourself later.

2. Abuse of Databases

Notion Databases are so cool. I know, they are beautiful, their properties make everything look so organized, it’s just hard to resist the temptation. But you shouldn’t be using them to organize your pages. Why?

Here’s how the sidebar looks when you create sub-pages from a parent page vs when you use a database to create new pages:

Do you know what’s inside posts? No… you have to navigate to the page, and see the content inside each database page by opening it. With the use of sub-pages? Just at a glance!

So make your life easier and use databases the correct way.

3. Same problem, different cause: Use of Inline Databases

Look, I promise you, I’m a fan of databases, I really am! But they are tricky, and can easily make your workspace a nightmare to navigate if you don’t use them mindfully.

And here’s the thing, I only use Inline Databases 1% of the time. On certain, super specific moments when I am 100% sure it will be a small database, without relations, allocated to a page that will not have any children, ever.

Now my tip: for each top-level page, create a subpage called databases. Create all the databases you need there and use linked views to visualize the content you want in each of the pages.

Was I dramatic enough? I hope so.

Remember, you want your Notion Workspace to grow with you, not against you. And this is a must if you don’t want to go crazy finding your stuff. It’s supposed to save you time!

So, what makes a good, scalable, Notion Workspace?

1. Hierarchical Navigation
2. Use of pages to create content inside them
3. Use of full-page databases and placing them on a specific page.