Notion's core principles

0:00 This course is structured to be your ultimate roadmap for 2026, combining foundational basics with cuttingedge features like AI, advanced formulas, and custom automations. Are you looking to master Notion? You've come to the right place. Over the past years, I spent thousands of hours in Notion. I quit my job as a lawyer to build Europe's number one Notion consultancy. And my team and I have helped companies all over the world adopt Notion as their single source of truth.

0:47 And in this video, I've collected all our best tutorials from the past 12 months to give you the perfect Notion course for 2026. From your very first steps in Notion all the way to mastering advanced concepts like automations, formulas, or permissions, everything in one video. Of course, this is quite a long video, so to make it easier for you to follow along or to jump right into the specific area that you want to learn more about, I've added timestamps and chapters for you in the description.

1:10 Overall, we have six big chapters. We're starting with number one, the foundation. Then we move on to two, core productivity, and three, business systems. In chapter four, we take a look at how you can make the most of Notion AI. And number five, we will look at advanced concepts around formulas and automations. Last, but certainly not least, chapter number six introduces admin concepts, plus a bunch of collected tips to really get your skills to the next level.

1:34 So, buckle in, bookmark this video, and let's go. All right, let's start at the very beginning. Before you can build complex systems, you need to understand the basic building blocks and principles of notion. And that's exactly what this section is about. So even if you've never opened the app before, after this you can take your first steps in notion. Are you just starting out with notion and feeling a bit overwhelmed? You've come to the right place.

2:19 I am a certified notion consultant, a speaker at notion conferences, and I have spent thousands of hours in the app. And here is my super condensed quick start guide so you can start to understand and use Notion in just a few minutes. Ready to go from an empty page to your first small setup in Notion? Well, let's start with the two most important principles. Number one, in notion, everything is a block. Think of doing anything in Notion like building Lego.

2:41 Basically, Notion thought, well, isn't all software just made up of the same blocks? We have sometimes headings. We have regular text like here where we have special style text. We can have color, we can have columns, images, buttons, right? But at the end of the day, all the tools that we use are made out of the same core components. So in notion, whenever you do something in the background, you're actually adding these blocks. For example, if you whenever you hit enter, what you'll notice, it tells you, you know, you can write something, press space or slash for commands.

3:03 And we'll talk about slash in a second more. But if you type slash, you now see all these basic building blocks that you can add to the page to make it up. And of course, if it's just text, right, then it looks similar to a word document. But the difference is that it's actually all separate. And you see that also if you hover with your mouse over these different blocks, you see these six dots appearing on the side.

3:26 And all every time the six dots indicate this is a new block. So this empty line is a block, this heading is a block. And I can click on these six dots and I can drag that block around. Right? And you see then now this blue indicator line that indicates where I would drop this block. So I can drop it below this one. Right? Now it's actually inside uh the code. I can drop it and take it out again.

3:48 Right? I can drop it below this one. I can also move it into a column. And you see if I move it anywhere here, this blue indicator now indicates that it's only taking up half the space because it is in one column. We will talk about this block concept in more depth in a moment. For now, just remember that whenever you press enter in notion, right, and you add a new line. This is actually a separate block, it behaves differently.

4:11 You can move it around. you turn into things and when you you know create your pages whether it's just writing text or building complex hyper trigger putting Lego blocks together to build something cool out of components. Now for the second concept in notion there are no folders just pages. This is probably the thing that's most confusing about notion to new users because it's so different to how other tools work. Traditionally, right, we're used to this sort of structure.

4:34 we have folders and inside our folders we have subfolders and then at some point we have our actual files a text file or a spreadsheet but in notion there is not really this concept of folders everything is directly a file or in this case a page let me show you what I mean so here if we look at our site which we get by clicking here on the top right corner and then having this show currently we see under this private section I have this element right which is has the same title as this one like Lego for my systems now if I click on plus here to you know would usually create a folder folder here.

4:57 I actually add a page. So I have a new page, right? And I could call this notes. Now it shows up here on the sidebar. So far so good. But now after a while as a new user, right, I might might add some new ones. I might add some a shopping list, right? I might add my habits and so on and so on. And all of a sudden my sidebar here keeps growing and growing until I have like dozens of pages here and nothing is structured.

5:20 And that is of course very overwhelming. But just because these are pages where you can write something doesn't mean that they have to stay just that. Instead you can use them like supercharged folders. And with that what I mean is that you can actually create pages inside pages. So if we let's say for example we have uh we create a new page for um my uh private life right sort of as as a folder or if you follow the para methodology right you might know that one.

5:43 In para you have um projects areas uh resources and an archive. Now instead of creating you know like folders what we can do now is we can create in this page other pages and to do so what we can do is simply click on plus or type slash and then search for page and now it tells us we embed a subpage in here so let's do that and let's call this projects and what you see now if you uh you know move here you see the spread comes at the top and tells you what projects lives inside pava and if I here on the sidebar also look at my pava page right if I open this toggle I see there's a page inside and this now already looks like a folder structure.

6:28 So I can go back to my main page and I can type / page again and I can call this areas and we see I have now under my top level page two subpages nested. So this behaves like a folder uh but it is better because not just can you store elements inside power but you can also just use any other blocks. So unlike in a folder right where you can just sort it um maybe alphabetically um you can also say here okay I could add some context.

6:50 or for example my uh most important uh uh pages right I could bold this and then I could have um like another section you know my uh other pages and then again [music] add pages below here so just because there's no element that is called a folder doesn't mean we don't have something that can behave the same way in now there is actually a far more powerful way to organize your elements in notion and it includes databases but we'll talk about that in the end [music] for now just remember that pages are actually better than folders because they can both contain the actual information, right?

7:13 Some text or some article. Um, but they can also serve as an area where you then group elements and other pages together. So, basically supercharged folders that can have both context and structure. Now, let's start actually working with these pages. So, I've added resource and archive as well. And I will hide a sidebar just so we don't get distracted. And then I will click into resources. Again, we can see here at the top right I'm inside para resources.

7:37 This is my notion page. In terms of elements of a notion page, what you'll always have is a heading, but this is the actual title. There's no way to uh have this removed. I can delete it, but it will then keep telling me, you know, new page, so I I better just give it a title. As long as I hover over the title, I see also these three options here to add an icon, a cover, and a comment.

8:00 We can ignore comments for now, but icons and covers are how you add style elements to it. So, if I click on add an icon, this page now allows me to pick an emoji or a specific minimal icon. Under the minimal icons, I can also change the color, right? If I want them all in blue, for example, and I wanted to give it a notion logo or in this case, right, since it's an archive, maybe let's look look for a box and then we can use that.

8:24 Advantably, you can also upload your own custom icons and emojis if you want to, but I want to go with this box. And now you see I get this icon above the title and I also get it to show up here. Plus, if you look at the sidebar, the um resources now has this blue icon as well. So, this is a great way to visually separate your different pages, right? and make it much easier to recognize it.

8:47 So, I recommend that you set [music] icons on all your pages. Moving on, we can then click on add a cover uh to add this top level element, right? And it will automatically pick some of the standard ones. We can reposition it, right? If you want to see a different part of this image, uh we can cancel this and then change the cover. And here, Notion has a few preload options. It's a bit cut off now because I'm so zoomed in.

9:09 So, let's actually go out a bit. H and we can upload our own ones. We can uh link to something or we can use Unsplash to search for images. It's nice to add a little bit of personality to the page. And if you ever want to remove it again, you click on change cover and then on remove for a more cleaner look. Now, the last styling for the page is hidden behind the three dots in the top right corner.

9:32 Basically, wherever in notion you see either three or six dots, you will find more options. And the options in the top right corner apply to the whole page that you're looking at. So, if I click on these three dots, one thing that I see is that I can actually change the font. So I could say actually I prefer a font or I prefer the mono font. Very very important though this applies only to this specific page.

9:55 Right? So if I select now my mono um font here and I go to one of my other pages for example to areas I see that this has still the default one. So I would need to go in here as well and click on mono to apply it. That's of course very annoying if you have to do it individually. But there is a tip and I'll share that with you at the end of this video how you can make sure that all your pages have a certain look if you want to.

9:55 The other option that is sometimes quite interesting here is the small text option, right? If you want to have it much smaller or the full width. Now, in order to really see that, actually, let me zoom out a little bit more because if you're like very zoomed in, we don't really uh notice it. But here, you'll see now if I click below resource the title, I can start writing here. But this leaves quite some white space here on the side.

10:18 And if you are on a big screen, this leaves can potentially leave a lot of white screen. If you want notion to take up the full width of your page, again, three dots and then full width. And then you have the whole screen available to type. Although often if it's just about text in notion, the smaller width looks quite good because it automatically centers everything here. On a new page, you also see that notion will suggest you some starting resource, right?

10:39 It shows you AI to help you write something. It asks you whether you want to create a table, a form or look of any uh look at any templates. You can also click on the three dots to see more options. But actually, you want to start from scratch without any help. So in order to do that, we simply click below the title. And you see the second I do this uh it gives me this again like this the little highlight, write something or press space.

11:02 So we can simply say you know uh hello world uh exclamation mark and then if you wanted to we could press enter and remember everything in notion is a block. So here is my one block and I just created my second block. Whenever I press enter I get a new block and if I hover over any block these six dots right that I used before to drag things around. I can of course do this here as well reorder these blocks but I can also click on these six dots because as I said if you ever see three dots or six dots that means settings in notion.

11:26 So let's click on it and see what we can actually do. You see that we can comment and suggest, we can ignore it, ask AI, delete, all nice, we can duplicate it. But the magic is turn into. If you hover over turn into, we see all the block types that this block could be. And by simply clicking on another block type, we just modify it. So even though we create a text because by default whenever you write something uh right, it is always text.

11:51 But we click on the six dots and we can now say actually hello world that is supposed to be a heading. So I click on the six dots. I say turn into and I turn it into my heading one. Voila. And for my second block, right, I could again click on the six dots, say turn into maybe a heading level two. And then for the last one, we can turn it into heading level three. And these are now the three uh heading available in notion.

12:14 You see it automatically also adds some spacing between them so that everything looks nice on your page. Pretty cool. Now instead of doing it like this right you know creating a text and then turning it into something you can also simply click on plus that will allow you to scroll through all the options right and add a heading that way or and that I highly recommend that you start using this typing slash now the slash command is probably the most important thing that you can learn in the beginning in notion because it gives you access to all the blocks that you have and it's much much faster to add them not just can you then scroll through list but you can actually also start typing it will filter it out so if you have you know something specific in mind you are curious with notion has it?

12:59 Well, just search for it. For example, maybe we want to add a list. So, let's just type list. And we see there's [music] this database list view. Let's ignore it for now. But basic blocks, we have a bulleted list, numbered list, or a to-do list. Let's add this to-do list. And we see, okay, item one, I get this check box in the beginning. And if I press enter, I have now item two, and so on and so on until I press enter twice, right?

12:59 And I go back to my normal text. And checkbox items can be ticked off. So, that's pretty cool. Now, we don't have time to go over all the blocks in those because there are ton of them. So I just recommend that you go anywhere, type slash and then look through a few options, but I want to highlight some of the most useful ones. We already have headings and checkbox items. Now another one that is super super useful is a toggle.

13:21 So if you type / toggle, you see this toggle list. Now if I add this, I can you know just like know hide or show. Let's give this a title. And then I have this little arrow and I can open it to expand. And then I have inside this toggle again blocks. So, you know, my block uh another block and I can close this to just hide it, which is super super useful. It's like hard to emphasize just how useful is to have information on a page and being able to hide it.

14:08 Now, inside this tool, you can add any other type of block. So, I can type also/h1, right? And I can get a very big heading in here. Uh, and I can hide it again by clicking here. And you can use the six dots from previously to move things on. So, if I actually want to have this H3 inside my toggle, I can start moving this around, right? And when I'm inside a toggle, it will highlight the whole thing, which tells me I'm about to drop it in here.

14:29 And of course, the other way works as well, where I can drop things outside. Next up, let's organize our page a little bit better by adding columns. To do so, let's again type slash and search for column. And we see we can create two, three, four, or five columns by default. So, let's add two columns. And for now, nothing really seems to have happened. But you notice that now our text here racks. And if you hover over it, you actually see that the second I go to the side, I get another plus icon and six dots, which indicates, well, even if I don't see it, there's another block here.

14:53 Right? So, we have block one. And then if I go over here, we have uh block two. You can also create these columns by actually dragging text to the side of it. Right? So, if I take any block and I move it not below something, but I move it to the very side, you see my line changes to the side indicator. And that's also how I drop it next to it. H. And now I can create these columns um by dragging and dropping.

15:16 But usually typing slash is just easier. And again of course in any column right you can have any type of information. So I can now look click at this block and write and transform it into [music] a mediumsized heading. This one as well. And now I have some nice page sections. And the last block that I want to talk about is a call out which is probably one of my favorite blocks in notion. So let's type /all.

15:37 And what happens is you automatically see I have some color and I have an icon here. And I can now, you know, write something uh and if I press enter, I have more space inside this uh call out, right? And I can have something where I say, okay, this is very important for this page. But you can actually also take these callouts a step further. For example, if you want, you can click on this icon. You can of course change it, but you can also remove it, which then gives you just this very clean look.

16:00 And you can even take it one step further and remove the color. Now, we anyway need to talk about color. So, let's start here. If you click on the six dots, we can see that we have this color option at the very bottom. And in notion there are generally two color options. There's the text color which is the font itself and then there's the background. And we see here currently we have the gray background highlighted. So if I move this to orange right I see now the whole thing is orange.

16:22 And if I click again on color and I move it to um the default one it's just white with this small little outline. And this is a really nice design element for your pages because that way you can give it a little bit of a border. And of course you can use these colors also in columns. So I can drag my uh call out to this side. Right now I have this here. I can add a heading to it.

16:44 And then [music] I can take the whole thing, click on the six dots and say, well, duplicate. I like this. Now I have it twice. And I can take the second one and drop it in the other column. Oops, that was dropping it above. Dropping it in the other column for this clean look on my page. Now we can color nose blocks this way. So if I click on my heading and the six dots here on the side, I also see these color options and I can, for example, say, well, let's actually give me some blue text.

17:06 Now I have blue here as the font color. Alternatively, whenever you have some text, you can also simply highlight that text and this will open up the context menu. So, we have this explain in AI features at the beginning comment and uh you know suggest edits can ignore those for now. But here in the back that those are our formatting options first. You see instead of like clicking on the six dots, I can also click here on the no adding two and change for example to adding three.

17:28 This will apply to the whole block not just the second, right? But I have then also my formatting options. For example, I could um you know make this italics or underlined. I can also give it strike through. I can format it as code which gives it this little padding. Right? Let's remove the other two. So we just see it gives us this red color and this little padding. Um or I can here at the very end add the text color manually.

17:28 Let's remove this also quickly. Go here and say well this actually should be orange. Perfect. Or I can say well actually I would like you know this highlight effect. I would like a yellow background. And now I have this orange font color on a yellow background. So quick recap. And if you want also a little exercise after you finish watching this video, go to notion, add a new page, give it an icon, click onto the body of the page, and just start typing.

17:52 Then use the slash command, right, to add a specific block. Use the six dots to move the block around. Use the um six dots by clicking on it to change it, right? Turn it into a different type of block. And then experiment with all the different blocks that we can add to your not page. Now, let's use what we just learned to build an about page similar to this one where we have some information, right? We have a title.

18:15 We have my picture. And then you have some sections where you share some information. All right. In order to do so, right, if you just look at it, the first thing we want to do is we want to create a new page. And remember in notion, we do this by clicking either on plus here or on uh the slash and then creating a page. We're going to create it as a subpage inside resource. We don't want to just clutter up our sidebar.

18:39 So let's add a page. And let's call this, hey, I'm Matias. Awesome. This is our title. Now, let's add an icon. So I click on add icon. And I want to look for the wave hand, right? I like this one. I don't want to have an emoji here. Waving hands. Perfect. Now, if we look at the other page again, the first thing that we had up here, right, are two columns. So, let's go by typing /all.

19:02 And we want two columns. And in the left hand, this is actually a quote book because it gives you this line on the side. You can also see this by clicking on the six dots, right? If you ever copy anything into your notion work, you're going to figure out what is it. Click on turn into and then scroll until you see where it has currently this check mark. So I type slash and quote and then let's just grab this text over here so we don't have to watch me type and paste it into this area.

19:24 One thing that I haven't shared yet but which is a great opportunity to do it now is actually if you click on the six stops you also see the options form block. Different blocks in notion have different options. So it will differ whether you click on a normal paragraph or in this case a blog book. So always a good idea to check out what you can do. So let's click here and then let's scroll down. And we see here this is the contextualized option the quote size and we can change it between default and large.

19:47 So I can make this also uh a bit bigger or smaller depending on what I like. Perfect. So on the other side this is where we want to have an image. So let me just grab an image for a second and then I can paste it here simply by pressing command V right to paste an element. Alternatively you can also type slash and say image. And now it gives you the option to upload a file here from your laptop.

20:11 But in my case I have it already copied. Oops. This is actually a good learning opportunity. If you delete everything in a column, then your column disappears. So, let me just read a column / H. And now, drag this code block back in here. So, we have the