How managers get a clear view of what everyone’s working on in Notion

Managers' plates often look like they’re at a buffet — extremely full. Instead of food, it's many types of work, the people executing it, and balancing all the timelines to keep everything moving. This is even more difficult when teams use different tools to do their jobs.

Most project management apps just point to the work, meaning you’re always switching between different tabs and tools. But in Notion, you can unite project management with the work itself, along with the people and communication to get that work done.

We’ll show you how to set up a system so you and your team can spend less time going back and forth to find information, and more time getting down to important work. You’ll have total visibility into what’s going on, what stage projects are at, and each team member’s current workload.

In the first section of this guide, we’ll look at some of the different ways you can use Notion to coordinate your team’s work.

Time is everyone’s most valuable resource, so set your team up to use it wisely. Make information easily accessible, so teammates aren’t listlessly digging around outdated documentation or disrupting the flow state of a colleague to ask where something is.

Create a top-level homepage, or company wiki, where all employees can access shared information like the benefits policy, the mission, vision and values, and company goals. With things like headers, columns, and more, you can make information quickly accessible at a glance.

Then, each department or team should have its own, top-level homepage in the sidebar.

Team hubs are important for finding and using info — further cementing this self-service mentality where team members can find what they need without always having to ask their manager. Plus, it enables teams to customize their homepages based on their specific needs.

Inside the team’s homepage will live important sub-pages, like one for team structure, or a database of all projects.

As a manager, this foundation is built to grow with your team. As you build out processes or add new tools, this information can be neatly organized in the team's wiki, neatly blending flexibility with structure.

You can store all kinds of complex, diverse information inside databases. When certain information is accessible by your entire team, work becomes centralized, leading to less confusion.

Create three company-wide databases for your roadmap, documents, and meeting notes.

Your company-wide roadmap should be shared by all teammates, so they can see what's planned (and plan for it). Use a board database here, which is ideal for project management.

To categorize the entries in this database, use properties. These can be customized based on the work at hand.

Here are a few that will be useful:

• Deadline — add a Date property and rename it "Deadline"to ensure that everyone knows when work must be completed by.

• Project owner — a Person property allows you to tag others in the workspace by typing @ followed by their name. You can call this "Project owner" to tag the person who is responsible for the project.

• Status — you can assign statuses to projects by using a Select property and creating different labels, such as "In progress," "For review," and "Done."

Every entry in your roadmap opens up as a page. So all project work is collected in one place, enabling cross-functional teamwork because everyone knows where to get project-specific information.

By organizing work in a board, managers get a high-level glance at all the work their teams are executing.

You can create different views in your database which allows you to see the same information in different ways. To create an alternative database view, go to the Views dropdown on the left. Click Add a view, select the type of database you want, rename it, and click Create.

You can customize this further, and here are some views that might be useful for your roadmap:

• Board by status — a board view allows you to group all entries by status, so you can see project statuses, and easily drag and drop projects across from one stage to the next. To group your board by status, go to Group by and select Status.

• Board by person — grouping your projects by the person responsible will allow you to quickly see each team member's workload. In the Group by dropdown, select Project owner. Each person will have their own column in the board, and their project cards will appear underneath.

• Calendar — a calendar view lets you see all projects by their deadlines, as items will appear on the date they are due.

• Timeline — a timeline organizes your projects chronologically, letting you view the timespan of every project. For timeline view to work well, you'll need two date properties, for the start and end date of each project.

You’ll also need a place to store documentation.

A documents database gives your team a place to go to find any documents they might need to help them get work done, from updated processes to design specs.

Your docs database could be a table or list database, and the following properties will come in handy:

• Last edited time — this lets you see the most recen