How to create an effective Teamspace in Notion

Jack Wallen shows you how to create a Notion team space to empower your teams to collaborate effectively.

Notion is both a productivity and project management tool that can help you maintain high levels of productivity on business, artistic, and/or personal projects. Notion does this a little differently than other project management tools. Instead of focusing primarily on Gantt charts and Kanban boards, create team spaces and then add resources to them so team members always have access to the up-to-date information they need to do their jobs. Of course you can also add charts, boards and other elements to complete your Notion team space.

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I see Notion less as a space for project management and more as a place to think, plan and organize. When building or managing a team, such a space can be crucial for productivity.

One of the most helpful features in Notion is called Teamspace. This feature allows you to create a dedicated place where colleagues can not only learn about a team and its activities, but also collect pages that are assembled into project plans and documentation so that teammates can easily find relevant information about their jobs, projects and the company in general.

Now let’s see how to create an effective team space in Notion.

How to create a new team space

First we create a new team space. To do this, log in to your Notion account, hover over the Teamspaces area (Figure A) and click +.

Figure A

In the resulting pop-up (Figure B), give the new team space a name, choose an icon, enter a description, and select the permissions you want to associate with the space.

Figure B

Once your new team space is created, you can start customizing it.

How to customize your team space to make it effective

After your team space is created, you should see a relatively blank canvas to start customizing. Here’s what you should add immediately to your new team space:

• Surname: Give the Teamspace Home a new name.
• description: Add a description for the teamspace (below the teamspace name).
• contact information: Can include Slack channels, email address, and team manager name(s).
• About section: So that all team members know exactly what the room or project is about.
• resources: All resources you created in Notion.

Almost everything in the list above is self-explanatory. However, you may need some help understanding the Resources option.

Resources allow you to add almost anything you’ve created in Notion. For example, let’s create a collection of documents. For my purposes, I will create an Episode Bible, which will be used to collect important information about each episode of a series.

To create the new resource, click + linked to the teamspace and then (in the pop-up window: Figure C), click Templates.

Figure C

Under Project Management, select Documents, and then click Use this template (Figure D).

Figure D

Once you’ve created the new resource, you can add new documents to it to create a collection of useful resources.

After creating the new resource, go back to the Teamspace home page and click under Resources. Typing @ will open a popup showing all the resources you’ve created (Figure E).

Figure E

Add as many resources to the homepage as you need.

How to add a Kanban board to your Teamspace homepage

Next, let’s add a board to the team space. Similarly, you can also add Gantt charts.

To add a board, click + associated with the team space, then click Board under Database in the pop-up. You will then be prompted to select a data source (Figure F).

Figure F

A new sidebar will appear (Figure G) where you can select the data source for the new board.

Figure G

The notion board doesn’t exactly look like a standard Kanban board, but it makes it pretty easy to review different parts of your project (Figure H).

Figure H

Now that you’ve got the hang of customizing a Notion team space, you should be able to design it in a way that allows your teams to work better together and keep track of what’s happening within a team.

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