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Notion Databases seem great but I just cannot get them to do what I want. Maybe I’m just too old and traditional RDS is just baked in now :-/
Essentially I want to build a day planner with a section for habit building. I want to keep a back log of habits to build in the future and only work on 2 or 3 at a time. I set up a Habits table with a title and status (backlog, doing, maintaining, done)
And an activity table that related to a habit, this has a date and a checkbox for yes/no. Problem 1 - I cant make the relation only show items with the status doing or maintaining. Everything is shown and is a bit overwhelming and hard to track. Ideally I’d be able to relate..
.. to a filtered view of the Habits table. Problem 2 - this creates a new page with no title and forces the title to be visible in the view (which I get, you need somewhere to link from, it’s just a pain)
Then on the actual day planning page I want to add a Linked Database that manages the data from the activity table. This would be filtered on the date of items in the activity table. Problem 3 - this requires setting the date for the filter every day manually.
Then I’m not seeing the instant reminder of the thing I need to do and have to set up the items in the activity table, which brings us back to having to manually select from the whole list in the Habits table. Ideally the filter (in a linked database would be able..
To pre-populate from a property (date) derived from that day’s page. I know I can use a formula to populate a separate property in the page but can’t seem to access that property in the content. Problem 4 - The habit activity has to be created each day. I’d love to have the ...
Records in the activity table created automatically each day, again giving better visibility into my habit building. I’d love to see some kind of automation built into the product to handle these last two. Eg when a page is created set this block to a ...
property value and create the following records in this table from a loop and a query on another table.
Or make properties available as variables when creating templates for DB pages. Again, this might just be my old man brain being stuck working with SQL style databases (I struggle to get my head around document databases and NoSQL in general)
I’m not saying this is what @NotionHQ should do, these are just my frustrations trying to do something in the product. These ideas would add a huge amount of power to the system but also a massive amount of complexity, problems, edge cases and increase the support teams..
burden for a handful of features that only a handful of power users. Would use.
If I could have only one, then l’d love to get the ability to use Properties when defining blocks in a DB template. Then you could have an embedded block with the date property in the URL and you could write your own little app & embed in page as needed.
Otherwise Notion is a great tool. My frustration is based solely on liking it so much for almost everything else!
