How to Self Reference Notion pages
This is a quick tutorial showing you how to make self-referencing pages in Notion.
It is a technique that I use throughout my entire Notion system and it allows me to edit my page properties anywhere on the page. You no longer are confined to editing page properties on the top.
This is extremely useful if you had a specific page workflow in mind because you can have your own workflow whilst still using Notion’s page properties feature. I use this extensively in my Life Journal Notion System.
Pre-requisites
You have to be familiar with the basics of Notion and its features.
If you’re not, don’t worry, it is pretty straightforward. These two links will help you with that.
- Notion for Beginners (Gets you started with the basics of Notion)
- Notion Page Properties (Gets you familiar with page properties, which is what this technique is mostly based on)
Once you are familiar with Notion, let’s look at the specifics of this method.
This method mainly relies on two Notion features, view filters, and linked databases.
How It Works
I find it best to just look at an example of how I do this, instead of explaining the method. So I am going to show you, how I do this in my journal system.
For starters, my page properties for my journal looks like this :
It’s pretty terrible to have to enter all the information at once and it doesn’t help that they are all nested at the top of the page. So, I would hide all of them.
Let’s say I would like to check Habits 1,2,3,4, and 5 later in the page without scrolling back up to the top. We can do that using the self-referencing page method.
To get started, create a linked database anywhere on the page. For simplicity, I am going to choose the middle of the page.
Then, I select my daily journal database page which in my case, is called “Daily Journal”.
Then the default table view should show up.
At this point, I can scroll through the columns of the table and tick the habits off but leaving it this way is still messy. Not to mention, if I had more journal entries, this entire table would be filled with all those entries.
To clean it, I apply a view filter and set it to Today , to filter out all the other pages.
I can then even take a step further and hide all the properties that are not Habit 1,2,3,4 and 5.
I am now able to edit my habits anywhere in the page. This method is very useful in preserving my custom workflow.
To me, it feels more natural to be able to check off my habits at the bottom of the page instead of having to scroll all the way to the top.
However, the one caveat is that Notion’s Today filter does not lock in the date. That means when you check this page tomorrow, the self-referencing sections would be broken.
Which makes this method ideal for daily journaling or any page that you only need for the day.
I hope that helps.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. You might be interested in my other Notion related articles on medium
Originally published at https://bradenkoh.com.
