Notifications

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Introduction

Now, let’s talk about something easily lovable and hateable – notifications! (😅)

Since Notion both:

• Lets us set dates and reminders in a bunch of different ways
• Is a collaborative platform where other people can tag and chat with us

We do have a pretty large notification system within the app. I’d argue it is often the most overlooked feature in the whole app, even by expert users. In this lesson, we’ll go through everything you need to know about Notion’s notification system.

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What triggers a notification?

First up, let’s talk about what can actually trigger a notification. There are four main triggers to be aware of.

You’ll get a notification when;

• Someone @-mentions you anywhere in Notion
• Replies to a comment you previously made
• You have notifications set to All comments or All comments and updates for a page and someone comments or updates said page
• You’re added to a Person property in a database
• You’ve set a reminder for yourself, or someone else has set a reminder for you, either in a database property, or inline using the @-mention menu
• You’re manually invited to a page (as in, a page you didn’t have access to before)

All these actions will trigger a notification that will first and foremost be delivered to your Notion Inbox right within the app. This is a section on the left sidebar we’ll explain in just a second. For now, let’s talk about notification settings.

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Notification settings

Other than delivering the notifications to your inbox, Notion can also deliver push notifications to the desktop and mobile apps, if you have them installed. By default:

• You’ll get pop-up notifications if you have the desktop app open
• You’ll get push notifications on your mobile device(s) if you don’t have Notion open on any device, or don’t view a notification within the Notion app within 5 minutes after it was sent
• You’ll get email notifications for all trigger conditions listed above (if not active in the Notion app within the past 5 minutes) + recurring “digest” emails that recap latest activity from your workspace(s)

Of course, these settings can be modified. Personally, I’m not a big fan of email notifications, so I have them turned off on all of my accounts.

You can find Notification settings in the main Settings panel, which you can find at the bottom of your left Sidebar, or by hitting cmd/ctrl + , in the desktop app.

We’ll explain the Settings panel in much more detail in a dedicated lesson later on, but for now just know that you can adjust your push & email notification settings there. Notification settings are per account, meaning that they’ll sync across all workspaces across a single account. Mobile push notifications can be only turned on or off on a mobile device.

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What notifications are really designed for

To be perfectly honest, notifications in Notion can get a little bit clunky and overwhelming at times. If you’re using Notion solo, then they’re easier to manage – you’ll only see notifications from reminders you set.

Using Notion collaboratively is a different story though – if you get a lot of mentions, get things assigned to you often, carefully managing your notification settings will be very important. We’ll talk about this in much greater detail in our Teams expansion for this course.