In early November this year, *Notion finally shipped “Recurring Templates”, the first hint at truly internal automation in Notion. And there was much rejoicing! But, is it everything we hoped for? Does this mean we can stop paying Zapier or Make to create our recurring tasks?
Check out this dive into the feature I did on my YouTube channel and give me a follow over there if it was helpful!
Some Caveats
If you’ve been using it actively this month, you may have noticed it’s not quite recurring tasks yet, because tasks (and meetings) generally need a Date property. At this time it’s not possible to assign a Date property when a template is recurringly (is that a word? it should be!) created. I give a simple workaround for that in the video. This is a really important part of making this useful, so I’m confident Notion will address this in short order.
Actual Use Cases
One savvy Notion Ambassador, Thomas Hammoudi, mentioned to me that a current use-case for the feature as-is is for groceries:
By the way, I’ve found a pretty good use case : automatic grocery list of stuff I forgot. My cat won’t be hungry anymore 😂
A grocery list doesn’t necessarily need to be date specific. With recurring templates, you could set a “Cat Food” template up once a month and any time you go shopping, it would be in your “To Buy” list ready to be checked off! Great idea, Thomas!
[*For full disclosure, I’m a Notion Partner, so when you sign up with my link, you also help support me and my content!]
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