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A few weeks ago Notion dropped new databases onto our heads, and I’ve now had a while to play with them and figure out if the extra clicks needed to get stuff done is justified giving it’s new features...so let’s dive in!

One of the things that I’m personally a huge fan of, is to be able to build dashboards within your Notion account that let you see all of your data that is especially relevant for you in one location - and that’s where the new database views come in.

Let’s first create a database that links to all of our blog posts with a simple view showing all of the blog posts currently published:

Now we can simply add another view to this linked database view by pressing ‘Add View’ - and we will again be presented with the choice of which database we’d like to show.

Let’s say we want to get an overview of all of our content - so we will select the Podcast Episodes next.

We now have both databases linked up in one view, which is awesome when you’re looking to create dashboards that are compact and powerful.

In the past doing this would have required adding multiple linked databased onto one page, which either takes up a huge amount of space or requires toggles to make the whole thing more condensed - however on the flip side it means that you’re also needing to complete more clicks when you’re creating new views.

This is a feature I LOVE about the new databases.

When you’ve already created a view in the past, you can simply duplicate that view and change the ONE parameter that you need to switch - this is particularly useful when you’re building for example a dashboard and you want to show all tasks a person has due today, within 7 days and all tasks for example.

Here are 2 examples of Views that I created to help me visualise my tasks better:

I have one view showing me the tasks that are due TODAY and one that show me the tasks in the next 7 days. This helps me to not get lost in my work and also estimate my upcoming workload.

Now when you’re setting up something like this, you don’t want to have to constantly re-create the filters time and time again, so it makes sense to just copy your existing view and then amend the date criteria.

And you can now very easily do that right during the creation process for a new view, just press ‘Add new view’ and then select which view to duplicate:

And for those of us that like minimalist database you can now hide the title of the database so that the information is more condensed.

This is particularly useful when you’re using something like Super.so to build your website as well.