How to effectively manage your Notion workspace
With so many features and options, how can you organize the Notion workspace without letting it overwhelm you and your team?
Notion is becoming increasingly flexible, not just for using directly, but also for building tools on Notion via the developer platform (Agents SDK, Workers, External Agents, and more).
As a consequence, the left sidebar and workspace settings are increasingly crowded. There is a drastic potential increase in data flowing through and within Notion, either natively or from connected third-party tools and AI agents.
So, how do you maintain governance of the Notion ecosystem without hindering the platform’s utility to you and your team?
As I continue working with teams through the ever-evolving situation, here are a few observations I can offer.
Build the Notion workspace foundations to make the space a place where you and AI agents can find what’s needed to do work elegantly. This means starting with a few key data sources, possibly focused on a narrow use case (e.g., Marketing Campaigns management and/or Knowledge Base). One situation teams often face in Notion over time is that outdated information remains searchable and orphaned in the workspace, which creates noise in the system. If you maintain a humble, focused approach to the workspace, you can avoid this pitfall and make the platform work in your favor.
Appoint one person responsible for the ongoing Notion workspace governance and evolution for each team. If you use Notion with other people, there must be a shared effort to leverage the platform to everyone’s advantage. Responsible individuals help make this possible. Tying the Notion workspace (work management) efforts to Objectives/Key Results is also important to ensure there is a tangible review and incentives system. Otherwise, responsibility remains theoretical and fake, which fosters neglect.
Establish your principles of the Notion platform usage. There are many workspace settings you can adjust, and it is a good idea to do so, instead of going with the defaults. For example, you can set a monthly limit on AI credits consumption, restrict MCP access, restrict URLs in AI search, and more. If you do this strategic work upfront and review it once per quarter/trimester, you set yourself up for success because you make your workspace your own instead of following the defaults blindly.
Establish a review system for Custom Agents. It is easy in Notion for everyone to build custom agents. Since they consume paid credits at the workspace level, it is a good idea to have a clear review and approval system for custom agents, to avoid uncontrolled costs, duplicates, or agents that should be a deterministic automation instead of AI-driven. Practically, this means appointing at least one responsible person to manage custom agents at the workspace level via the dedicated workspace admin settings. There can be a regular review and approval process from there.
Do some training with all Notion users in your team. Allow them to be owners of the tool and truly use it to do their best work. Especially due to the many features and frequent new launches, ongoing upskilling and training make a difference. For one, it shows that you care about the way you do the work; second, everyone is given the chance to explore how they can work best, which positively trickles down all areas of the business and produces value for the whole ecosystem, all the way to the final customer.
These considerations can help you leverage Notion as the single platform to organize all your work. I’ve seen them directly influence the success of Notion usage across teams, and as the platform keeps evolving, these principles enable you to continue being in the driver’s seat and taking advantage of your tools.
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