How to use Notion to have better meetings

We’ve all been in those meetings, those could-have-been-an-email meetings. Those turn your camera/mic off and put the washing on meetings. 

British professionals spend the most time in meetings every week, with a staggering £45.5 billion wasted annually in ineffective meetings.

Has your VA introduced you to Notion yet?  Upsource’s favourite productivity tool, Notion is a wiki, project management system, you name it: Notion can help.

Especially when it comes to meetings.

Here’s our top 5 tips for using Notion to make your meetings more efficient:

First, bonus point: Could this meeting be an email?

Create a meeting notes database

This is your meeting metaverse. You can create a different database for each type of meeting you have (weekly check ins, performance reviews, stakeholder etc) and for each create a tailored template with agenda, notes, actions, shareable content, whatever you need to make sure that nothing gets missed.

Make it infinite

You can create databases of types of meetings, you can also create rolling notes and pages within pages, link your database to action pages and vice versa – so the information you can store within a meeting space is theoretically endless (Let us know if you reach the limit of Notion!)

Make it tailored

You can share meeting content with specific team members, and tag them in action items with deadlines whether they were in the meeting or not.

In Notion you also have the ability to manipulate data from your central source of “truth” to suit different business needs, like meeting types or ways of working.

Make it smart

Using a third party integration like Zapier, you can automate Notion to create a new database/page/action list, whatever you need when a meeting is added to your calendar, so the quotidian admin is done for you, without needing to think about it.

Make it fun

Yes, this might sound like an oxymoron, but Notion is a visual, dynamic and creative space, so use it! Use videos, gifs, emojis, colour to set the tone for the meeting and encourage creativity in the team.

Our resident Notion Queen, Sian has been invaluable to her clients, helping them to get the best out of Notion to make their teams more effective. ‘Supporting the wider exec team of a tech client, I was able to leverage Notion databases as the single source of truth for their collective meetings whilst tailoring the way that information was presented and used by each person, according to their preferences. With the ability to link web pages, other notion pages, people in the organisation and create pages within pages, it allows you to keep all of your agenda setting, brainstorming, action tracking, researching and note keeping under one roof, while Notions page by page access control ensures people only see what they need to’

Notion has a huge resource of templates, How To guides and demos to help you get it set up as your new favourite tool. But it can be overwhelming! If you’d like your own Sian to create your Notion universe and help you create and implement better meeting processes, drop Caroline a line.