Summary

Notion has launched a new feature called database automations, which allows users to automate actions based on triggers in their Notion workspace. This includes features like native time tracking and creating default tasks for new projects. The automations are triggered by actions such as adding a new page or editing a property, and can perform actions like adding or editing pages in databases or sending Slack notifications. The feature is currently available for paid Notion accounts only.

In this transcript, the speaker discusses two examples of using automation in Notion. The first example is setting up Slack notifications for new tasks and task updates. The second example is automatically creating default tasks for new projects. The speaker also highlights the potential dangers of using the 'edit pages in' action.

It is important to be cautious when using this action, as it can unintentionally edit all pages in a database. The speaker emphasizes the need for setting up filters to avoid accidental data changes. In this video, the speaker discusses the dangers of using the 'Edit pages in databases' feature in Notion. They explain that clicking 'nuke my data' can lead to the loss of important titles in a database.

They suggest not using this feature or educating team members on its potential risks. They also recommend setting permissions for databases and being cautious with access. The speaker emphasizes the importance of setting filter criteria to ensure safe automation practices. They request that Notion add a warning pop-up for actions without filters.

The speaker clarifies that the automation feature is primarily for paid Notion accounts but showcases alternative options for free users like using the Notion API or no code tools such as Pypedream and Zapier. The speaker also mentions their full tutorial on the Notion API. Lastly, they mention that they will focus on educating viewers on building their own automations rather than adding them to templates.

Transcript

Notion is really up in their automations game. And this week, they just launched a brand new feature called database automations, which lets you do some really cool stuff, such as doing native time tracking directly inside of Notion. That's right, we are hopping directly into examples. So in this database, I've got a little automation that will create a timestamp in this completed date property anytime my status on a task goes from in progress to complete.

And then I'm gonna be able to see how long the task took, which might be nice for some time tracking purposes. Let me show you how it works. If I alt click this little status property, I'm gonna set this to done. And then a couple of seconds, I'll have my timestamp pop it into completed like that.

And we can see that this task took two hours, 42 minutes and zero seconds. But automations get a whole lot cooler than that, my friends. What about creating default tasks whenever I create a brand new project inside a project database, such as a content projects area where I might have YouTube videos I'm working on? Well, if I go ahead and add a brand new project, I'm gonna see all of these default tasks popping in in just a second.

And not only do I have these default tasks, but I have assignees for those tasks automatically set. And if I go into any of these projects, I'll be able to see all of those tasks directly in them. I've got my assignee set up. So this automation is allowing us to do a lot of really cool things directly inside of Notion auto-magically.

Now, Notion's database automations feature is essentially an if-this-then-that style automation feature where something is gonna happen inside of your Notion workspace. Maybe you create a new page or you edit a property of an existing page. And that is going to trigger one or more actions that are going to automatically take place. So let's just dive right into this feature and I'll show you exactly what we're working with here.

And then we are going to get right into some examples so you can see exactly how to build some useful automations yourself. So right here at the top of our databases feature, we now have this little lightning icon and I can click that to open this little automations menu. If I open a new automation, I've got a few different options here. I can name my automation.

I can say that it's four pages inside this entire database or I can limit the automation to just one view of the database. But the real magic happens in the trigger and the action sections. So first and foremost, I have a couple of different triggers that I can set up for each automation. The first one is page added.

So basically anytime a new page is added to this database, it's going to trigger the automation or I can use the property edited trigger. And there are all kinds of different properties that can work with this. A lot of them are just going to trigger anytime any edit happens. So if I typed one letter in the name property, that would be a trigger.

Some of them have some additional options that we can set like multi-selects and select properties and status properties. For those, we can get a bit more granular and trigger only when a specific choice is edited or selected. So those are triggers. And then we have a few different action steps that we can do here.

We can add new pages to this database or to any other database where we have edit access. We can edit pages in an existing database. Later on in the video, I'm going to show you why at least right now, I don't think you should be playing with this particular feature of database automations, at least with important databases. It's easy to mess things up.

So check the timestamps if you are curious about that. We can send a helpful Slack notifications to our connected Slack workspace, or we can edit additional properties of the same page that triggered the automation. So I want to jump right into examples and we're going to start building some useful automations that you might actually want to use yourself today. So you can see exactly how this works.