Introduction
In this lesson, we’ll cover quite a big feature – Home. This is a pretty new addition to Notion that is meant to help you navigate a busy workspace. In my opinion, it still require some polish, but it’s already a very capable and exciting feature. Let’s dive in!
On your left sidebar, you can find a few sections at the top – those include Search and Inbox (already covered) Notion AI (covered in the next module), and Home – covered in this lesson!
Home is supposed to be a custom home page for any Notion workspace – giving you a quick preview of some key information. This page is not a regular page, as in, we can’t add the usual blocks to it. Rather, the home page is composed of Sections – or Widgets. They’re somewhat custom and different from what we’ve learned before.
Copy link to headingHome Sections
On the home page, we have a few different sections, or Widgets, as they’re officially called, that we can hide or show to customize the Home page to our liking. If you open the home page in your Notion workspace right now, you’ll see a big “Great morning/afternoon/evening” banner at the top, and then a few widgets added by default. Let me walk through all of them now!
First up, by clicking the top-right three-dot menu on the Home page, you’ll be able to both change the default home page (it can be either Home, your last visited page, Notion AI, or the top page on your left sidebar), as well as hide and show different widgets as needed.
One widget that we can’t hide is the Recents section – this is always a part of Home and will show your most recently visited pages in descending order. It’s just that!
Then, we can have Upcoming Events. This section can display your upcoming calendar events, if you have set up Notion Calendar and connected it to your Notion account. We’ll talk about Notion Calendar in great detail further in this course – for now, you can skip this Widget and set it up while setting up Notion Calendar. Once set up, you’ll be able to filter down what events to show in this Widget by clicking on the top-right three-dot menu within it.
Then, we have My Tasks. This is yet another widget that we’ll have to explain later because it relies on a pretty complex feature (Tasks Database) that is not super easy to set up. Just to give you an idea of what it can do – the My Tasks section can display Tasks assigned to you from multiple databases. This is especially useful when working in a team workspace, when oftentimes there might be multiple databases where tasks are assigned to team members.
Then, the last key section is Database Views – this one is pretty self-explanatory, we can just display any already existing Database View on our Home page. This is useful in bringing in any key information not already covered by the other Widgets. This widget can display multiple views, but each will show up in a little selector – as in, we can’t have multiple views showing one after the other. Rather, in this single widget, we can choose which view to show from multiple options.
There are a few extra Widgets available, such as Suggested for you, Trending (this will display pages suggested for you by the algorithm or currently trending in your workspace), as well as Learning and Featured Templates (this will link to Notion’s own Help Center and Template Marketplace.
Copy link to headingSummary
Home is a great addition to Notion – I like it. Though, to be honest, I don’t use it that much, mostly because it’s not as customizable as a regular page which can serve as a very powerful dashboard. What’s definitely helpful is the Events widget – something we can’t access anywhere else in Notion yet.