Project management that evolves with your team

You’ve outgrown managing your projects in a chaotic spreadsheet or document where it’s hard to find information.

However, specialist project management tools overcomplicate your processes with rigid workflows and unnecessary steps.

What you need is a system that evolves with your team and lets you build exactly what you need—from simple to-do lists and Kanban boards to charts that track complex projects across several teams.

Notion gives you the building blocks to create project trackers that reflect how you work.

Later, connect your docs, wiki, notes, and more in one workspace where team members have everything they need.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create a custom project management system with Notion.

Project management is more than just tracking tasks: it’s about seeing the bigger picture.

In Notion, you can scope projects in your tracker, link tasks to projects, or write outlines and drafts right inside your editorial calendar.

Instead of just linking out to other tools, all your work is in one place, blurring the lines between docs and project management.

Unlike standard spreadsheets, Notion databases give your information a structured home where you can assign dynamic properties and categorize, sort, and filter information in numerous useful ways.

Linking databases with a Relation property means that updates in one place reflect across the system.

For example, if you have a tasks database linked to your content calendar, whenever a job like “Draft social media post” or “Create visuals” is marked as done, the corresponding project moves a step closer to completion.

Some recommendations for your Projects database:

• Track projects with a Status property— Add a Status property to your Projects database, and customize the property to include all the steps in your workflow.

• Drag and drop projects to update their status— Choose a Board layout grouped by Status to view each project as a card. When you want to update a project’s status, just drag the card across the board.

• Assign owners to your projects— Use a Person property to tag members of your team as the owner of a project.

• View your project progress over time— Add start and end dates to your projects. Then, you’ll be able to visualize projects over time using the Timeline view.

• Prioritize your work— Create a prioritization system with the Select property. Tag each project according to priority (P0, P1, etc) to help your team achieve high-priority goals.

You can add a similar set of properties to your Tasks database: a Status property to track progress, a Person property to assign owners, and a Date property to keep deadlines clear.

Pages in a database are infinitely customizable. Combine text blocks, images, videos, embeds, and files ****to plan and execute directly in your project tracker, so all your work is easy to find.

You can draft and edit blog posts inside your content calendar, outline and scope a new project within your tracker, or add a checklist to a task page to ensure every step is completed.

Project pages can also have as many sub-pages as you need to keep related work organized and accessible.

Database templates improve consistency and help your team work faster. Set up and customize templates for outlines, project scopes, or content briefs, so team members don’t have to start from a blank page.

Once you’ve built the foundations of your project management system, you can experiment with different ways to organize your information.

For example:

• See your projects in various layouts— There are seven different database layouts in Notion. Try viewing your Projects as a Timeline, Table, or Chart.

• Choose which properties show up on your board— In the Properties menu, you can select all the properties you want to show up when you’re looking at the Board.

• Group and Sort information in different ways — You can group your tasks by project and sort them by priority. Projects can be sorted in date order, and grouped by Status.

• Visualize project progress— Use a Rollup property in your Projects database to display the percentage of completed tasks per project. You can view it as a progress ring, bar, or percentage.

• Filter databases to view subset of information— Add a filter to show only high priority tasks, tasks related to a particular project, or projects owned by a person.

• Get a dynamic summary of projects — Use the AI summary property to automatically generate a summary of the project, making it easy to get an at-a-glance view of where your project stands. The AI summary automatically updates as the Project changes.

In Notion, one database can have several saved views.

Add a new view, rename it, and organize the information however you want.

Then, tab through your database views to see the same information in different ways.

Tech teams often depend on specialized tools. But, with Notion, you can bring work from other tools into your Notion pages, bridging the gap between departments for smoother collaboration.

• Embed pages from other tools— Use an Embed block to insert Figma files, Google docs, Miro boards, Loom videos and much more onto a Notion page where they can be seen by all.

• Importing existing content— Notion has a simple importer allowing you to easily migrate existing content from tools like Confluence or Asana.

• Sync content across technical tools— Create synced databases that mirror the work happening in specialist tools like Jira or Github, to avoid silos and give everyone total visibility.

• Collaborate through Slack— Connect Slack accounts for smooth collaboration to ensure nothing gets missed. You can set up database automations to ping team members on Slack when a project’s status is updated, or a task is assigned to someone.

Plus, you can resurface your projects and tasks in different places across the workspace.

For example:

• View projects in the team wiki— Add a linked view of the projects database to your team wiki so it’s easy to see what’s on everyone’s plate.

• Tasks appear in your personal home page— Each member of your team has a custom, dynamic home page that surfaces relevant information for them. They’ll get a widget of tasks assigned to them appear in their home page.

• Reference a project or task— You can use the @ to tag a project or task page anywhere in the workspace. For example, you can link back to a project or task in a doc.

• Link meeting notes or docs to projects— Use a Relation property to connect other databases, such as your meeting notes or docs databases. This helps you access relevant meeting notes or docs from a project page.

• Comment and mention team members on a page – Start a conversation on any page either at the top of the page or on a specific block, and tag someone in your team to draw attention to something.

Once you’ve started managing projects and tasks in Notion, you can expand into other areas of work.

Having everything in one place makes it easier for your team to stay focused, find information and collaborate across departments.

• Track all your meetings— Use a database to store meeting notes so you can easily refer back to them.

• Record user feedback in a database– Make a customer feedback database to organize what customers say. You can use the AI property to extract key insights from the data.

• Build a roadmap for your product team— Track product development with a roadmap and launch calendar.

• Manage customer relationships— Create a lightweight CRM to manage your contacts and build relationships with customers.

• Document your processes— Use Notion as a documentation tool. Docs are aesthetic and clean by default, so there’s no need to spend hours on formatting. Share documents with team members or guests, and even publish them to the web.

• Create a wiki for your company— A wiki keeps all key information structured and easy to access for everyone on your team. You can build and customize a simple wiki that gives your team access to all the information they need daily.

• Be more efficient with AI— Notion AI is a powerful tool built right into your workspace. Ask questions and get insights about workspace content, draft and edit documents in minutes, refer to content in external tools and much more.