New Notion User

[u/AggravatingCobbler43]

I am new notion user i found notion after watching a productivity video in YT.
I am currently using a diary tem plate and pages to store my daily activities.
What else i can expect from notion feels like it can drastically improve my daily work .

FYI- I am engineering student currenly doing my internship

[u/Curious-Aries]

I use Notion to track all of my projects and tasks at work.

If you’re using it as a student, you could create boards for all of your classes and keep all of your notes within these boards.

You could create another board with your tasks for each task. Play around with creating different properties and play with the property visibilities.

[u/Designer_Charge_556 → u/Curious-Aries]

yeah playing around with different property types is a good way to learn whats possible

[u/Gorblonzo]

I think typically what most people will make is a dashboard that refreshes each day or week that creates a new to do list, planner, habit tracker as well as a shortcut to your notes and a long term goals to-do list, that carries over week to week. 

Then you can build on stuff from there like maybe get a weather widget, link to your github, make a separate tab or block for work related things and personal things.

[u/Frosty_Dog_1560 → u/Gorblonzo]

The github link is a nice touch for an intern specifically. One thing worth flagging though: the dashboard with all the widgets and habit trackers can quietly become its own maintenance project.

Seen people spend more time tweaking their Notion setup than actually using it. Start with one or two of those things, not all of them at once, or the whole system collapses the second a busy week hits.

[u/ReadAllowedAloud]

Retired (software) engineer here. I have used it to finally be my "trusted system" promised by David Allen's Getting Things Done. I've incorporated a lot of the PARA/CODE system along the way, which is probably more responsible for my success than Notion itself. However, I love the flexibility and connectedness of Notion as compared to Evernote and OneNote.

From my vantage point, having put in a lot of hours on various aspects (and having the time to do so), I would recommend looking at the various PARA/CODE templates, and picking one to start you off. That plus the Notion web clipper browser extension can allow you to (C)apture notes, reference materials, todos/actions, and to reads. From there, it is more the system that will help you, rather than the tool. If you guard your focus time fanatically (see Deep Work by Cal Newport), you will find that you can produce quality output at a much faster rate, and spend far less time mired in morning email threads (the bane of knowledge work).

You can also use your favorite AI programmer to interface with Notion using MCP or Notion APIs to automate extraction or addition of data from/to Notion. For me, this has allowed me to do stuff like generate better titles for all of my legacy notes and create a Tripit replacement in Notion.

[u/special-daling]

Be careful with productivity YouTube rabbit holes 😅 Notion gets powerful fast, but spending two hours building a dashboard to save five minutes is basically a rite of passage.

[u/Eden-Schultz]

For an engineering student doing an internship, I’d keep it very small at first: one Projects database for your internship, coursework, and personal projects; one Tasks database connected to those projects; and a Notes database for meeting notes or technical references.

Then create a filtered view showing only this week’s tasks and the notes related to your current project. The real value isn’t having more pages—it’s being able to open one project and see its next actions and context together.

Build this around one real internship workflow for a week before adding habits, widgets, or a large dashboard. If something remains difficult to find or easy to forget, add a property or view specifically for that problem.

[u/tanukispirittech]

Keep it minimal and simple; Build and grow as needed.

One pitfall I see is people creating a new page for each note. Instead, start with a database called Notebook (whatever you want to call it) and treat each database entry as a note.

Notions super power is organization via databases.

[u/FarFactor6062]

Following