AESTHETIC NOTION SETUP | 7 Tips to Beautify Your Workspace!

If you're going to reference Notion every day, don't you want it to look pretty? I find that layouts that are visually inspiring can help us reach our goals, keep us organized and on task, and are just a joy to work in. Plus, you're more likely to use a tool if you actually like the way it looks. I've received a lot of compliments about my Notion setup and how pretty it is. Thank you so much for the compliment. It did not start out that way. This is how it looked like before when I first started using Notion, and it's not terrible, but it's definitely not my ideal style. It took a while for me to figure out how I wanted Notion to look just as much as I wanted it to function well. In this video, I'm going to share how you can elevate your Notion workspace with just a few simple tips and tricks and give it a digital makeover. But if you're new here, make sure you subscribe, especially if you love planning, personal growth, productivity tips, and of course Notion. That's what we talk about here, and I'd love to have you on the journey with me. The first thing you can do is obviously customize Notion's overall appearance by using light and dark mode. So you just have to go into settings and then go into my settings, and then the appearance is where you can switch from light to dark. You can also change the font of your page by going up to the three dots on any page and switching your style to serif or monofont, depending on what look you liked the best. You can also make the text a bit smaller, although I feel like the default size is just really good. The only problem with this is you are going to have to go in and change every single page, say if you wanted the serif or the monofont, just because the system wide default is going to be that sans font. So make note of that if you don't want to do the extra work to make it look a little bit different every single time. You can of course create a Notion template and apply that font so that anytime you duplicate the page, the font then applies. The second way to visually upgrade your workspace, which I'm sure you've already used and found out, but I've got a lot to say about it, are icons. So you have icons in a few different places. The first is of course the page icon, which is going to visually represent what your page is about. When I first started using Notion, I only used these emoji icons that came with it because they didn't have the more minimal icon set that I use and enjoy now. But these ones come with 10 different colors and I just find they're a little bit cleaner. So if you want to visually upgrade your workspace, I would say use those icons instead of the emojis. You can also go to iconfinder.com and filter it to free icons, put in a keyword of the icon that you're looking for, and then add it as a custom link to that image or upload the file. That's just in case you didn't like the look of a certain icon that Notion came with or it didn't have something that you really wanted and were looking for. My other tip is to use the same color pretty much across the board. I tend to just go for the black and if I don't use black, then I typically use pink or a yellow. Sometimes I want a different colored icon so that it stands out. Like over here, my personal dashboard page has a pink icon, but it really stands out because that's the one that I reference most often from my list of pages on my sidebar. Where I really start to use the more color coding is when it comes to my task list. So normal business tasks are all going to be that gray and then any personal tasks is going to be purple and then any open roading tasks that is going to be in orange. And it just helps me visually to know when I'm looking at my task list like what big umbrella those tasks are under. Now here's a trick. If you don't want to choose an icon every time you make a new page, let's say every page in a task database or a workout database, you want to have the same icon for it, then you can just create a template. You can click the drop down icon over here, new. That's going to be on the top right of every single database. Click new template, fill it out with the icon that you want it to be, and then don't miss this step. You have to go to the three dots and set that template as default so that anytime you add a task it's going to default to that icon. So I can click new here under brain dump, immediately has my default icon and it also has some properties that I have preset for this template like status is now and priority is high because generally that's what I apply to my tasks. A couple other places you can change icons are on those properties that I was just talking about. Any database is going to have a set of properties and you can click rename and then you can click the little icon next to it and change the icon. They only come in the one color but it can really make it more aesthetically pleasing. You can also add icons to your database views. So you can see here on my task list on my personal dashboard each of these tabs is just an icon and I only got the icon to show by doing this little asterisk trick where I can right click on it, click rename, and then put an asterisk in the text section. Now someone did let me know that well you can't not have anything in there which is why I put the asterisk. You can do a space and get out of there and it doesn't even have anything besides the icon which looks actually really nice. So there's a hack for you. Moving on to notion covers they can also visually represent your page especially if you want to have a gallery view of your database and show those page covers. That is something that I use quite liberally around my workspace are gallery views because I love just seeing the visual look of these pages. You can see here on my personal dashboard the life areas that is a gallery view, the this week section is a gallery view, the location section, the education, the course that I'm currently going in, the workouts I'm doing this week, and my currently reading section. All databases in a gallery view and that's one of the things that I think can really add a visual element to your notion workspace. Now a quick hack with the covers or I guess a PSA or FYI. I don't know one of those things you should know this. With covers and the notion free plan you only have five megabytes to be able to upload which you are going to go through really quickly. So to get around that you can actually grab an image link from the internet and paste it into the cover. So I'm just going to go here and search for feel good productivity book and show you how to grab the image link because not the actual link. Let's go into images. We'll choose this one here from Amazon. Right click it and you can see here copy image address that is what you want. Go over back into notion. Click on change cover the link and paste that image in there and click submit and then it will upload to your page and it's being hosted elsewhere on the internet. So I mean if it breaks it's going to break in here but in general it's going to be a much better workaround than using up all of your space and having to pay for notion if that was the only thing you wanted to use notion for. Number four headers dividers and columns. These are essential to make your notion aesthetic. I always always always toggle off the database title because I like to use the heading blocks instead. So here on the three dots of the database if you go to gallery you can always toggle on and off the show database title. Toggle it off and add like an h3 heading which I have done here on all of these spaces here on the personal dashboard. I also like to italicize the headings. I add a background by clicking the domino icon and going to color and choosing the brown background and then I like to add a dividing line underneath it because it's just really soft and really adds a visual element to the page. Basically anytime I think a page needs a little ump or wow factor I add a dividing line to it. I'll show you I do this with buttons. Let me go into where is this? Do I do it in the goal planner? Yes. Here I have in the button actions section I do a dividing line between all of the buttons. I just like that it separates them out a little bit so when in doubt add a dividing line. Columns are also going to help structure your page in a visual way and almost every dashboard that I have in Notion is split into two columns so to be able to get the second column to appear you can always just drag the domino icon to the right of another block or section and you can create a new column. Now that doesn't always work sometimes Notion's a little finicky about it so you can also do a slash in a new block space and type in the number and col and that's going to give you the number of columns here. You can see when I hover I've got three different columns. Now let me show you a trick that I found when I was building the Christmas planner. So let's go back over into that. I found that you could do columns within columns. So here the navigation section that's in one column. This command center title that's in the second column but underneath the command center are two more columns and how I got that is I did the slash command and then I did two columns col and added that underneath the command center heading. So play with like how you want to structure your page, how things are looking. I really think it's going to give you a lot more ideas to arrange the elements on your page in a way that where you actually like the look. Oh and before we move on to the next one you can also shrink or expand these columns as much as you want. Just hover in between until you see the dividing gray line and move it to the right or left. All right call out boxes number five. I know I professed love for the dividing line but I also really really really really love callout boxes and use them for all of my navigation sections. Again I have that dividing line underneath the title. To get a callout box you can do the plus slash command callout and then it always pulls in the last icon that you had used for a callout box. So you can go in and change that. You can add a title. You can add a dividing line to it. So let's just do a quick shortcut of three dashes for a dividing line. Put it under add some pages to other parts of your Notion workspace. Like there's so much you can do with callout boxes. So navigation section I have used them to house buttons. Back on my personal dashboard page again navigation section I have one here that is a brain dump box that is a callout box. Do I have any other callout boxes? I don't think I do on this page but you can call out a quote. You can call out important information. You can use them for so many things and you can change the background too. Like the brain dump box is just a default plain background. This quick links box the color is a brown background. So you can change it to match whatever color scheme you are going with. I also think just like grouping pages together like that instead of feeling like they're floating. Oh it just looks so much better. Okay number six of making Notion aesthetic. You can embed photos and widgets in your pages. Now I don't embed a lot of photos in my pages. Here in my goal planner I do embed them when I'm going towards a goal and I want a reward for it. So here I have some running shorts that I really would like for this health and fitness six-week sprint that I'm doing. I also on my personal dashboard I have a quote that just was really inspiring to me and that I love. Today's your opportunity to build the tomorrow you want just to motivate me, keep me going. So you can find images that really speak to you on the internet. You can create mood boards. You can put them in here and you can do the same embed trick that I showed you with the cover photos by just doing the slash command and clicking embed and then you can just put in the link in there and it will pull it up. Again because you don't want to use up your five megabytes worth of space if you don't have to. When it comes to widgets there are two places that I like to go for to find Notion widgets. One is indify.com which is where I pulled this weather dashboard. So if you go into indify.co sorry not dot com you can see here that there is a weather widget that you can click on and customize and change the colors with. I really do not find that I need the pro version for this because I'm only using this widget. I think you have up to three widgets that you can use for free. You can also explore some other widgets like a countdown clock or some quotes or I think oh this you can embed google calendar apparently which I have not played with. I wonder if that's a pro version. I'll have to look into that but you could look at indify.co and see if there's anything that you wanted to spruce up your Notion pages with. The other widgets website that I go to is widgetbox.app and let's log in there because that is where I pulled this calendar widget that is on my goal planner pages. So let's go into there and it's loading show yep showing up right there so you can change the color of that and it's just going to be a simple calendar that adds a fun element to your page. You can also add a clock this one has a weather widget as well quotes so get in there and play with it and it could just be something really fun that you add to your workspace. Now the last section that I want to talk about is the sidebar because when you look at Notion and you're first starting out and all these new pages that you're adding get added directly to the sidebar first and you don't have your dashboard pages set up it can just look really cluttered. So streamlining your icon color is going to help a lot if you just have one color that you go for for the entire Notion workspace but don't keep something on your sidebar if you really don't need it to be there. How I look at Notion organization is I have my main dashboard pages so I have the personal dashboard page which goes into each of my life area dashboards here. I have a daily journal section that's just the calendar of my daily journal. I have a goal planner which is how I set my goals a roadmap for 2004. So those are like high level pages that I need to access and then inside I have links to other relevant pages related to that high level page. So just look through what pages are on there if you don't reference them often enough maybe they belong on a dashboard page. The thing is you don't want to have like so many pages on your sidebar just because it's going to look really cluttered. Basically you want to keep your main dashboard pages on your sidebar or within your personal dashboard just to clean up the sidebar so it doesn't look as cluttered. Honestly when it comes to visually improving your Notion workspace you're going to want to think of like the overall theme and vibe that you want your workspace to have because if it's a conglomeration or mishmash of different colors and emojis and cover photos it's not going to look aesthetically pleasing. Let me know in the comments below if you're going to use any of these Notion tips and tricks that I shared with you and if your afternoon or evening is going to be full of reorganizing and reworking your workspace. I don't know I love like those are my favorite evenings to get in and reorganize something change it make it look a little bit better. Notion workspaces are never complete and I don't want that to sound overwhelming or discouraging for you. Look at it as fun you're constantly growing and constantly improving and making it better. The next video I have for you are these Notion do's and don'ts. I'm dropping some major truth bombs in that video so go watch it I'll see you over there.