More than saving time, automating recurring tasks saves mental juice. It removes the need to remember stuff, do it, and do it right - time and time again, which, let's admit, consumes a lot of mental space. Automation is a must-have feature for productivity tools because people use them to organize their life, save time, and be on top of their deadlines, as seamlessly as possible.
Among the most popular of those tools is Notion. The database automation feature it offers makes automating basic tasks a breeze. Notion, however, does not allow you to apply conditions — you can’t command it to do-this-if-that. However, the automation applies for events.
For example, you can’t command Notion to increase the record of your savings in the budget tracker when a company pays dividends (until you use rollups). However, you can program it to categorize such cash inflows under Income the moment Dividends are logged as line items in your tracker. In other words, you can’t make comparisons, add conditions, or calculate while using the database automation feature.
However, you can set some Notion automation rules to make managing databases easy. And that’s what we’ll cover in this guide. We will take the example of a habit tracker and demonstrate the process of setting up an automation rule in a Notion database.
Here are the five steps to that:
1. Open your Notion database or create a new one
We have covered the process of creating a database in Notion in another guide. For now, we only discuss automation and use our Notion habit tracker database for demonstration purposes.
Here’s what it looks like:
2. Decide what you want to automate
While database automation is a cool feature, not every database needs it, especially if you can’t compute or apply comparative conditions. It’s important to decide what you want to automate and if that would actually solve a purpose or an embellishment. Nothing wrong with making stuff look cool but when simple works, why fix it?
Nevertheless, we will use the automation feature in this database for motivation purposes. Here’s the idea - every time the user wakes up at 7 AM and checks the relevant box in the tracker, the database would offer positive reinforcement in the Comments column.
As soon as the tracker database records a check mark in the second column, it will update the eighth column with this text: Well done!
Let’s implement the idea in the subsequent steps.
3. Click on the ⚡icon at the top-right corner, then select the New automation option.
Refer to the below image to locate the icon and the New automation option in your database.
4. Update the automation view
You will find the below options in the automation settings view:
1. Name of the automation
2. Pertinent database view
3. The trigger for automation
4. What the automation is supposed to do - action
All highlighted in the below image.
Let’s fill out the details.
1. Name the automation
Assign a name to the automation based on its purpose. In our case, automation is supposed to provide positive reinforcement to the user when they wake up at 7 AM. So, we named it Positive Reinforcement.
Naming your automation is important especially when you have many automations hosted from the same database. This enables you to find them by typing relevant keywords into the search bar.
2. Select the view that hosts the automation
This option is useful if you have multiple views and filters within the same database. Click on the drop-down to select the master view or any other view you want to automate.
In our example, we will stick with the master view - Building Good Habits.
3. Add triggers
Trigger is essentially an event that sets off the automation rule. There are primarily two types of triggers - when the user adds a row or when they update a cell.
As shown in the image below, you can trigger the automation by adding a new page in a line item or by updating any property type.
We will get more specific with the trigger because we know what property initiates the automation – Waking up at 7AM, we will select that property as the trigger.
We want Notion to be on the lookout for when the user checks the box, so we selected the Checked option, as indicated in the above image.
4. Add actions that you want to automate
The Action button allows you to determine what happens when Notion encounters the Trigger.
As noticeable in the below image, you can add a new page, edit an existing page, update a cell in the same row as the triggered component, or even send a Slack notification to an individual or a group.
We just want to add a comment in the pertinent cell of column 8 when the user ticks the box in column 3. So we will select the Comments property, as demonstrated in the above image. This tells Notion that it’s the Comments property that must be updated.
But what must it be updated with? Simple text - Well done. We set that up in the textbox displayed in the above image.
5. Add more triggers and actions (optional)
We used just one trigger and one action but you can use more if needed. For example, if you want to add the Well done comment if the user woke up at 7AM and they called their family, you can set two triggers and one action.
After you have filled out all the details, click on the Create button to finish setting up automation.
5. Test the automation
Now comes the fun part! Let’s see automation in action.
The automation icon turns blue once an automation is in place. This is the first indication that the automation setup was successful.
Let’s check the Waking up at 7AM box for Monday. About five seconds later, the comment Well done appears in column 8, as indicated in the below image.
The automation was successful!
Is Notion automation free?
All Notion database automation features are available with the Free Plan. However, they can not edit automations, they need to delete them and build from the scratch if the set up process goes wrong.
Paid plan users, however, have complete access to the automation features.
