Automate Notion for productivity - Harshil Agrawal

all right uh hello everyone i am really excited to talk today about automate notion for productivity because internally we use notion a lot and i have been discussing this with max and we wanted you know to automate a lot of our notion workflows so let's first you know talk about what notion is because i feel you know if i before jumping into that it's better to understand you know what the tool is and understand how it can be used

used so notion uh they specified an all in one workspace so with notion you know you can have your own database you can use it as a database where you can store all the information so you can replace you know the postgres nodes that ban showed and you can add the notion node over there and you now have all your pokemons in your notion database you can even use notion as your as a crm so you know this can be a personal crm or a company crm that you want to use for and the other thing is uh you can use it for your to-do list so uh i kind of started with this using notion as a to-do list because it allows you to use it gives you a different views it can be a kanban view gallery list view it can be a table user it's pretty uh amazing to you know use it in different ways and talking about you know how companies use it so one of the common use case the companies have is you know use it as their wiki so all the information about the company that they want to share internally with the with the team they use notion for that so those were you know a couple of use cases that uh you can do with notion so enough of talking about notion let's

see a couple of workflows uh in action so i have three workflows to show you let me just quickly pull this down all right so the first workflow is it's a very small workflow it what it does it gets all the newsletters that i receive on my email and adds it to notion because i have this i don't know this habit of you know uh i don't the notifications they kind of annoy me every time you know you get a new email so now what this workflow does it just you know automatically adds all those incoming newsletters to notion so i kind of executed it before uh so that you know just to make sure that everything is working fine so let me go to notion so i am using a simple list view over here we have a couple of properties going in there let me execute it once you key in and then you can see how it looks in notion so for the imap node over here i am filtering out based on the uh sender so right now i'm just using uh looking out for only two of the uh two of the people i subscribed to it's info at cfp land so if you are in you know into talking about uh giving talks at conferences this is you know something that you should subscribe to and then there is another newsletter by sam julian which is really great if you are just starting your journey or if you want to you know get more uh into content creation or developer in general so now that i have some data coming in you can see we have four items over here i using the set node i just you know specify all the information that i need so i get you know on which date this particular email was sent to me who was they sent from and the subject and then in the notion node i am just you know adding all these values over here so i'm adding the name basically the title the author and then the date so if i come to notion over here you can see now we have all this information i wanted to do i wanted to bring all the content in notion as well but uh notion does not allow you to you know uh bring everything in there does not render html correctly so that was a bit annoying part over there and i'm still you know trying to figure out if i can you know get it working in notions somehow so that would be something really interesting so i don't have to go back to my email i just know read it over there it can be simply done on notion the another thing that i want to do in this particular workflow is have a check mark so when i'm done reading with that you know i can just you know do a check mark and i know like okay i'm done with reading this and then it can be you know automatically archived or you know something like that now talking about the next workflow now this is something that i have built for an internal use case so we often talk to our community members our users and you know try to understand how they use na10 and we take notes for that obviously but then you know when we take notes we and when we're done with the call we have to you know manually go to the team and say hey i've edit i've talked to this person you can check out the note over here which was a bit annoying for me because like hey this is the if it's if uh sorry if it can be you know automated why not do it right so now over here i use the notion trigger node which triggers the workflow every time a new entry is added so for now it's configured to you know run every day at 9 00 pm sorry 9 a. m so whenever you like every day at 9 00 a. m it checks for all the entries that are stored in this particular notion uh page let's see it's called user call yeah so user call and over here or maybe it's user research yeah sorry it's user research so over here now there are two different kind of research that i do it can be you know someone who i interview with or someone who i am on boarding on anytime so now uh this node fetches that information it runs the switch node to check you know what kind of uh what kind of call it was it an onboarding call was it an interview and based on that it routes to the particular page sorry the particular uh channel so over here i'm using discord just for the demo purposes but i would then uh replace it with the metamorse node to send it to the specific metamorse channel so again because now this is in testing it is going to just give me one input over here from notion so just going to go to the first route because the incoming value is interview and then it sends me a message on discord so if i open the discord the interviews channel you can see over here it sends the uh information and it also you know this gives me the link so i can just click on the link open it and view all the notes the another cool thing that i kind of built with integrating notion discord nna 10 was a slash command with which you can simply add new uh interesting articles that you come across so you just do slash link so this come out so this workflow will get executed and it will extract the title from that and it will add that link to the notion workspace currently i have disabled it because i'm improving it and working on it to make it more uh friendly not user friendly but you know add more features to that so i don't have a demo for that but i have a youtube video which you can follow and you know just uh play around with it and try it on for yourself so that's it for you know this particular uh lightning talk coming back to my slides so what's next so i am now planning to have built a habit tracker which would you know when i tap on the nfc chip it automatically adds to the notion like hey herschel you completed this particular task and i also want to automate some journaling so every time i work i keep i make a notes now i want to you know have a centralized platform where all my notes go into the place and when at night you know i'm journaling i know okay these were the things that i did so that i don't have to go back again you know to maybe obsidian or another tool where i'm taking the notes it's already there in my notion and then i can add more thoughts to it and another interesting use case that i want to try out is you know scheduled social media post so again with notion a lot of people use it uh for managing their content so this case another use case that you know i am very interested to try it out and we have recently published a blog post which you know talks about different use cases uh and it also has the links to the workflow so you can always you know go to ndn dot io slash blog and read the blog post you know just try out the workflows as it is