Feb 3, 2024
Notion, our everyday favourite note taking and project management system in its quest to become your all in one productivity tool to pretty much do everything has just introduced a first of its kind stand alone app called the Notion calendar📆 .
If you’ve been an avid user of cron this wouldn’t come off as much as a surprise because the app was acquired by Notion in 2022.
So It’s pretty much just a redesigned, Notion-ified version of the app.
Cron was always a fast, simple, smartly designed calendar app, with some clever features and at its core, Notion Calendar is a free next-gen version of Cron with a built-in, Calendly-like scheduling tool (more on this later).
Here’s what you need to know get started using with the Notion calendar and some of my favourite features about this calendar
Adding a calendar
To set it up I definitely recommend downloading the app as It’s available on only Mac, Windows, iOS and on the web. An Android app is also in the works i believe
Getting access is as simple as ABC
All you’re gotta do is just log in with your google calendar account or previous cron account and away you go
You’re greeted with a beautifully fully featured and functional calendar app that collates all your commitments and brings them to one place.
From here, you can see your schedule at a glance,
Let’s get into some pretty awesome use cases
If you or your company uses Notion, you’ll be able to create or link Notion documents inside a calendar invite. If you have a database filled with due dates, you can add that as a calendar to Notion Calendar. It sounds like a much better way to handle agendas and notes than sending them around before and after a meeting or hunting for them in your Slack. Putting everything in the calendar event is a good move.
if you’ve got a team that uses Notion, you’ll be able to overlay your team mates schedule on your calendar so you get to see everyone’s availability to meet or collaborate on your calendar allowing you to skip what often takes numerous back and forth conversations and a few many clicks on other calendar apps.
In Notion calendar pressing Ctrl/Cmd + k gives you a menu showing the different possible actions and the associated keyboard shortcuts as well.
So if you wanted to overlay a team mates calendar you can hit Cmd/Ctrl + p and just like that you can see the calendar of all the people in your organisation
Now if you’ve been following my productivity journey you’ll know that I absolutely love time blocking. well guess what? It’s now very much easier and more seamless with the Notion calendar
And the cool thing is these are tasks right from Notion in the calendar
And if you were to go back you’ll see that it has added the time in here straight into our native calendar in Notion automatically and this updates in real time no matter how many times you change or sort the order/time frame
Absolutely incredible!
Things to note
Connecting a database to your Notion calendar is only possible when the core or main database and NOT a linked view of the database has an existing calendar view
Onto one of the final and niftiest feature on the list, is the ability to use Notion Calendar as a replacement for a scheduling service like Calendly🤯. The feature set here is still a bit basic, but the Notion team is only getting started. Unlike Calendly, you can’t set up recurring schedules, for example, but I haven’t found that to be an issue. Instead, you simply click on “share availability” and drag and drop the times you want to make available for this meeting in your calendar.
I also like the fact that Notion Calendar can also simply give you a written version of your availability [“Would 30 min anytime today Wed Jan 17, 10:30 AM – 12 PM (PST) work for you?”] that you can then copy into an email — all while the calendar app itself put a hold on those times.
It’s simple, but it works.
As for mobile: The best I can say at this point is that it runs smoothly, but feels a bit more like a companion app than a complete mobile version of the desktop and web apps.
You can easily see your upcoming events and add new ones, but the advanced scheduling features are still missing for now.
other calendar backends like Microsoft Outlook aren’t supported, though those may come in the future. “We learned that a vast majority of Notion users are on the Google ecosystem, so we are prioritizing [that] for launch,” Schaad - head of Notion calendar says
Conclusion and final thoughts
Notion really is becoming an all in one planning tool and with the addition of the Notion Calendar includes a built-in scheduler and makes it easy to merge content from the productivity ecosystem’s notes, docs and project dates.
With that little but very vital information this could be just be the very beginning of Notions plan to incorporate more Tight platform-wide stand alone integration apps as that will be the appeal for Notion’s “tens of millions” of users in the future.
And frankly I’m here for it !😤
P.S — When You’re Ready, Here’s How I Can Help You!
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