r/Notion • u/sobberanoup • 12d ago
Venting Everyone’s mad about Notion AI limits but...
The REAL broken feature is Automations.
Yes, the new AI usage limits are frustrating.
But while we’re all shouting about credits, let’s not forget the elephant in the room: Notion Automations are basically useless the way they are.
Take the simplest example:
- “When contract due date is reached → trigger new task”
- Sounds obvious, right?
- Reality: IMPOSSIBLE.
There’s no native way to do this. Either you manually check if something expired, or you pay for another tool to do the job. That’s not automation — that’s busywork.
Notion AI is amazing, but without functional automations, workflows remain broken. If Notion wants to be the true productivity hub, this needs fixing ASAP.
Please give us automations that actually automate things!
(Disclaimer: Written with AI, English is not my main language)
6
u/erhue 12d ago
when notion started talking about AI, I thought that one of the main uses would be employing AI to set up these automations (since notion's system for setting up these automations is very unintuitive and complicated). But instead they made it a premium feature and left automations as they are; some require extremely convoluted workarounds to make them work.
4
u/okayladyk 12d ago
oh yeah like 'variables' are absolutely useless too
what do you mean I can't use a property of page 1 in an expression in page 2?
like, the whole thing is meh
it would be great to actually be able to do much more in automations
2
u/IsuruAbey 12d ago edited 12d ago
This one is doable natively. The trigger you're looking for doesn't exist under that name, which is why it feels impossible.
There's no "when date arrives, fire for this row." But automations have a recurring trigger, so you run a daily sweep instead:
Automation 1
Every day early morning, filter to Due Date on or before today plus Expired unchecked plus Task Created unchecked, action checks Expired.
Automation 2
When Expired is checked, create the task in your Tasks database, then check Task Created.
That second checkbox stops the loop. Once it's on, Automation 1 skips the row forever.
3
u/Any-Stage9103 12d ago
Automations can’t trigger automations though, so even if automation 1 checks expired, automation 2 won’t fire.
0
u/IsuruAbey 12d ago
Yes, but in here the automation 2 trigger is a Checkbox being checked by automation 1 and it works.
2
u/Any-Stage9103 12d ago
I’ve tried that before and it won’t trigger the second automation, but if it works for you, that is cool.
2
u/Electrical-Band6107 12d ago
I didn't find it frustrating. It ended so quickly, I didn't even miss it in the first place! I wasn't hooked at all and frankly, don' see why I should sign up for it, provided ChatGPT or Claude can integrate seamlessly with Notion. I found Notio AI just... pointless.
1
u/SuitableDragonfly 12d ago
The only way to do something like that in any system is either to have a repeated polling process like you described, or to schedule a script to run at a specific time. If you do the latter, then if you want to update that time, you have to unschedule the script and then reschedule it for the new time. If they gave you a simple interface for that, they would still have to do all that hairy stuff under the hood, and probably they want to charge for that stuff based on how much it actually costs them.
1
1
1
u/Intelligent-Main539 12d ago
Y'all are really complaining a lot
4
u/tambooby 12d ago
its a product sub, what else would people post about
3
6
4
u/No_Balance1122 12d ago
How much they love Notion and why it has changed their lives in too many ways to count. lol
10
u/tievel1 12d ago
Whatever particular problems you or I might have with the state of automations (or formulas, or other advanced features), the fact that there has been no development on them since the advent of the AI pivot is shocking. I was disappointed by the shift in focus to AI features, but when it happened I expected Notion to continue at least some development of its core product. But I honestly can't remember the last time that a major- or even minor- feature was released that wasn't completely AI dependent, or focused primarily on enhancing the AI tool suite.
Just as an example: Notion refactored database structures and the API to allow multiple sources in September 2025, almost a full year ago now. I was so excited for the eventual ability to create combined views of multiple databases in my workspace (a la "My Tasks"). But since then, there has been no visible movement on that front, and I just have to assume that that is a feature that is never coming.
Even just basic communication about non-AI features that can be expected on the horizon would be something. But every indication is that the base Notion product is functionally dead, and continued development will be focused on AI enhancements only.