Notion Project & Task Template

As a Notion Campus Leader — a role you apply for, with a small cohort per campus — I helped run events to get students using Notion. For a fall 2024 workshop with ~40–50 design and engineering undergrads, I designed a template to teach one specific idea: how relational databases work.

A project-and-task tracker was the vehicle — familiar enough that students immediately got the point, and a natural way to show two databases linked together rather than one long list.

Two connected databases:

• Projects — one row per initiative, with status, priority, a date range, and a rollup showing what percentage of its tasks are done.
• Tasks — one row per task, each linked to a project through a relation, with due dates, priority, and tags.

The teaching moment is the link: change a task's status and the project's completion bar moves on its own. Grouped and filtered views show the same records organized different ways — by project, or on a single project's page — without duplicating anything.

Students got a deliberately minimal version — two databases, the relation, a rollup, and a few views. Automations were left in the template but switched off, so anyone could turn one on and extend it rather than reverse-engineer it. The point was for the database concept to stick, not to show off every property Notion offers.

Afterward I built my own copy out further, to see how far the pattern goes:

• A Delay formula (dateBetween on the due and completed dates) flagging how late each task ran.
• Project-to-project dependencies (Blocked By / Is Blocking), shown on a timeline.
• Charts — a status breakdown, and weekly throughput of completed tasks.

Simpler categorization. Multiple task lists per project got noisy fast — a project needs one clear list, not five.

And I'd orient it around individual progress. The template leans on an assignee / team model, but in my own use I was the assignee on nearly everything. It was really a personal task board, and it would've been more useful built that way from the start.

Designing something for beginners forces you to be clear about what actually matters — the relation and the rollup, not the fifteen properties you could add.

And there's a real skill in sizing a task: a line item that's genuinely trackable versus one so granular it's just noise.