Transcription
Notion AI is incredibly powerful, but like with most AI, you really need to know how exactly to use it to get the most out of it. We've spent the last few months battle testing Notion AI and agents in our day-to-day job as Notion consultants. And in this video, I want to share with you my favorite tips and tricks to make the most out of it.
First up, make sure you use the good Notion AI. Did you know that not all of Notion AI is created equal? At least as of the time of this video, the only AI that you want to use is the one that you can access by clicking the bottom right corner on this icon. This is not the same uh that you get when you, for example, press space anywhere in your workspace. This is a much weaker version of AI and there's really no point to using it at all. I'll update this video with a comment uh once Notion, you know, ties it all together, but until then, please only use this one for the best results.
Second, speed up your prompting using the add command. Like all AI, Notion AI performs much better the more thorough and complete your instructions are. But writing long instructions can be a drag. So make sure that you make the most of the fact that Notion AI is deeply integrated into the workspace where all your information is. Anyway, one of the most helpful tips here is to use the add command liberally. As you might know, right, whenever you are in any Notion page, you can always press add in order to either mention a person or link to a page so people can quickly jump to it. And just like you can let people quickly jump to this, you can have AI review this as part of the information. So in this case, right, we want AI to format this uh block of text according to our guidelines. And instead of explaining it every single time what these guidelines are, I'm just going to type please format this according to and then how to format weekly content roundups. And it will now automatically look at this by then take it into account for what's prompt. This is very similar to the way that um ChatGPT works when you create a project, right, and have knowledge inside that project or the way Claude does it when you set up your Claude project and upload things that they should always reference, but with the additional benefit that here you have full flexibility, right? You don't need to swap between projects. You just need to mention the page that you wanted to use.
Small bonus tip, not directly related to Notion, but all of your AI usage will get better if you start dictating instead of writing. There are amazing AI dictation tools out there that make it super easy to just press any key on your computer and you can just speak into it and will record it all perfectly. The reason this is so powerful is because it's so much easier to give AI context quickly spoken than typing it out every single time. So, I promise you using a dictation tool will make all of your AI and particularly Notion AI that much better. My two favorites are Whisper Flow and Monologue. Linking them both below.
Number three, turn your work into templates. In the beginning, you often will do work for the first time with Notion. So there is no document like this how to format the content on yet. But it's very, very important that whenever you do any of these bigger pieces of work, you should always finish your chat with the system by asking it to, "Hey, can you please based on our conversation and task so far, take all of this and create an SOP in," and then you mention your documents database in Notion. And that way, every session that you do with AI turns into a blueprint for the next one. That's how this one got created, right? Our content guidelines is not a document that I wrote, right? The AI wrote this based on me sharing and walking it through what it should do once and then asking it to create an SOP. And when you do this, right, you get two things for the price of one. A, you get instructions for the AI to do this the next time. And you start building your company knowledge and your company SOPs and the clarity for your team on how certain things actually should work, right? Absolutely amazing. Make sure everything that you do right, you don't have to repeat yourself next time.
Number four, set a master prompt to save time. We already talked about the importance of writing good prompts and giving AI the right context. So now let's take it to the next level. For all these small things of your day-to-day work, it's not really realistic, right, to create individual SOPs and always at-mention them when you talk to Notion AI. Instead, what you want to do is you want to go in and create a system master prompt. You can do so by clicking on AI and then on the face and then here, if you haven't set this, it will say "Set instructions" or in my case, "Edit" because I have them already. What you then see is the option to select something pre-selected, browse a template, or what I would recommend at this point, create your own. And I'm going to share with you in the description a link to the master prompt template that we recommend as your starting point. You can download it for free and adjust it however way you want it. And now I just want to quickly touch on a little bit the role and the core components. The purpose of this prompt is to a) explain to Notion AI how your workspace is built and structured and b) how you like to work in it. Because that means it knows every time when you ask it to do something exactly how to execute and you no longer need to add all the prompt scaffolding of, you know, when you add a task, please make it due for tomorrow, when you, you know, add a note, please add it to this database. All these things are rolled up into this master prompt. So you can then get away with much shorter, quicker prompts for your everyday work. The core components will vary based on how complex your workspace is. Right? The bigger your organization, the more complex this prompt will be. And of course, the more diverse your workflows, the more different approaches you need to have in here. But basically, what we always recommend is that you kind of start with your database architecture. So the tool knows where to find which property and where to add what kind of information. Then if you do project and knowledge management, right, explain like how is it built. For example, one of our clients, right, has a very strict system with initiatives, goals, epics, tickets. You might just have projects and tasks. But whatever it is, right, explain to the system as if you're onboarding a new employee how it works. And of course, you don't have to write all of this yourself. The easiest way to do this is to take our prompt template with a link in the description, add it to your workspace, and then ask your Notion AI to help you go through this and fill it out interview style. So you can simply answer the questions that Notion AI is asking you to complete it. Just as a sort of last part to it, right, at the very bottom you will have then the general identity and interactions which influences how it, you know, responds to you plus memories, right? So as the system goes, whenever you ask it to remember something, it will auto-update it here so that next time it doesn't have to ask again.
Bonus point. If you work in a company setting, right, with other team members, what I highly recommend is that you write this once for your whole organization. You save it in your knowledge base. Then you ask every person in the company to take this as a starting template and implement it. As of today, it's not possible for system administrators to set a workspace-level prompt. Every user needs to do it themselves. But you can of course give them the right starting point. This is what we did the day after the update. We stopped everything else, right? We just spent the whole day writing these master prompts for all our clients so they would have the perfect starting point for the AI uh revolution kind of that Notion is starting here with the agents.
Number five, have it work longer and better with this collection of tips. These are tips from our actual own internal documentation, right? So, how we try to get it to give us the best possible results?
Number one, make sure you select Claude 4.5. When you click on your AI icon, right, you can swap from auto to Claude. And it's much, much better at following complex instructions and not going off topic, right? Or randomly stopping. This is the single biggest, you know, bang for your buck that you can get with these tips. Claude over ChatGPT.
Next, ask AI to write itself a checklist before it starts with the work and ask it to, before it hands over back to you, verify its work progress against the checklist to make sure it's actually done everything. Particularly with long and complex tasks, there's always the risk that at some point AI goes off the the beaten path, goes down the wrong rabbit hole and kind of forgets what it's supposed to do. Similar to humans and just the way same way that we, you know, write down what we wanted to do and before we go to our supervisor that we check once, well, did we actually do what we were asked to do? We need to help AI do the same. Very simple element, always add this to your prompts, whether you paste it in right or whether you dictate it in, it will greatly improve the accuracy of the result.
Next, for even longer prompts and tasks, ask it to actually track its work outside of the chat, right? So, if you have a long prompt in here and you ask it to do the checklist, you'll see the checklist pop up there, it will work and so on and so on. And most of the time, that's fine. But occasionally, particularly when you want it to process large amounts of data, it will at some point bug out. It's kind of inevitable, right? The chat gets too long, there's an error, and you need to start again. If you ask AI to keep its, you know, uh, plan, its checklist, and the progress that it's making not inside the chat, but in a separate Notion document, then it's super easy to have it pick off again, right? All you need to do is reference this page with an at-mention and be like, "Hey, you started work on this. You got interrupted. Please pick off where you left." Much better, rather than having to explain again what exactly already happened and where it should pick off now.
And last but not least, a small and meaningful improvement is to ask it to work autonomously until it has completed everything. And with the added thing that when it thinks it's done, to please double-check first whether it's actually done and if it's not done to continue working. Seems a bit redundant, but spelling out these key behaviors really helps to keep the system on track and helps it to keep working through something for up to 20 minutes at a time rather than pausing, you know, every 30 seconds to tell you like, "I've done this so far. Should I continue?" Right? That's just redundant. If you have good instructions, there's no point for you to check it along the way. And this will make sure that it actually processes everything.
And to wrap it up, here's my favorite way to help you figure out what to actually use Notion AI for. This tip comes directly from Akotari, the co-founder of Notion. It's very simple. For the next 48 hours, you're not allowed to use Notion. The only way you can navigate the UI is through the agent. So, basically, ignore the whole left side of your screen, right? Only work in the side pane for a while, no matter how big or small the task is. Need to add something to to your to-do list? Well, ask Notion AI to do it. Need to find a page and change something? Ask the agent, right? Basically turn into a vibe Notioner. The same way that VIP coders don't really write code and just ask AI to do something. Try the same with Notion because this will give you very quick a feeling for where AI is super good, where it still needs some help, and you will naturally start thinking about all the other processes where you can start using it for. It's a really cool trick and everyone that has tried it so far absolutely loved it.
Follow these tips, you'll be using Notion more effectively than most other users and the challenge hopefully helps you figure out just how useful Notion agent can be. But if you're looking for a bit more specific inspiration, well, I've got you covered. Here's a video with my favorite seven use cases for Notion AI from our day-to-day experience working with clients and AI. Just click here and I will see you in a few seconds.