Projects, no matter how small, have a set of tasks that need to be completed for them to be successful.
Take organizing a team lunch, for example—it may seem like a simple endeavor, but it involves a series of carefully coordinated tasks to ensure its success, such as planning the event, making a reservation at a restaurant and providing them with an expected number of attendees, creating a menu based on choices from the team, confirming the headcount, preparing necessary material like welcome cards, etc.
Now, what if you have many such events planned, all running concurrently? It would get super chaotic to track all of them. However, by using a Notion kanban board, you can tell in a glance the status of any event plan. You can, for example, create board columns for each activity mentioned above and record events under them as cards. When an activity gets completed, you can simply drag the card to the next column to indicate progress.
Now that we know how useful kanban boards can be, let’s get to the section where we create them in Notion.
Here are the five steps to creating a kanban board in Notion:
1. Create a Notion database in board view
To create a Notion database, type “/board” anywhere inside the Notion page. Notion will display the “Board view” block, as demonstrated in the image below. Click on it to create the database in a board view.
Next, you can import an existing database or create a new one.
We will create a new database from scratch for demonstration. By clicking on “New database”, as indicated in the above image, you will be able to set up an empty kanban board.
2. Fill out the details
We created a content calendar in the kanban view as displayed in the image below.
Each card in the view is a content piece and the column headers — content brief, in progress, published, etc — represent the current status of the articles they contain.
For example, the articles “How to stay up to date with the market” and “Black hat SEO - Guide” appear under the “Ready for Design” column. This indicates that both pieces are awaiting input from the design team.
3. Move cards
The “How to find BOFU keywords” article is under the “Create Brief” column. Once the brief is ready, you can move the card into the “In progress” queue by clicking on the card and dragging it into the pertinent column.
This way, the writers will know which articles are in their queue.
4. Arrange cards based on another property
The Notion kanban board is currently arranged based on the status of the articles. But what if, say, you want to arrange the cards based on who owns them?
Notion makes doing that super-easy. Simply click on the three-dots icon and then click on “Group”, as indicated in the below image.
Click on the “Group by” option next.
Finally, change the property to owner.
This will arrange all the articles in a new view based on who owns them. You can even create a new view exclusively to identify who owns what. You can even reassign content if a writer is not available.
5. Fine-tune your kanban board
While your Notion kanban board is ready, there are some tweaks that will make your board look clean and aesthetically pleasing.
For example, if a writer has no articles left in their queue and you want to focus only on writers who have pending items. You can use the “Hide empty groups” option to hide writers who have finished their quota of articles for the month.
You can even color the columns based on the current status, as displayed in the below image.
Finally, you can also make some columns disappear. For example, if you want to exclude published articles from the view, you can click on the tiny eye icon next to the “Published” option in the above image.
