There is some big news in the Notion world today. Notion has just released a long-awaited feature that brings us one step closer to full recurring objects – Recurring Templates! Just like it sounds, Recurring Templates allows us to set a pre-built template to recur on a timetable. The recurring options are similar to what we have in Outlook or Google Calendar.
How it works:
- Click the down arrow next to the “New” button for a database to bring up a list of any pre-built templates.
- Click the ellipsis (three dots) next to the template to recur.
- Choose “Repeat” and select the recurrence cycle (Every Day, Every Week, Every Month, Every Year)
- Based on the recurrence option that you choose, customize the pattern
- Choose when to start recurring
- Set a time of day for the template to recur (the default is 12:00 AM in your home time zone)
When the day and time on a recurrence schedule is reached, a new copy of the template will release!
Advantages:
If you are manually creating a new database entry on a timetable (daily, weekly, monthly, etc), this could be a real time saver for you! Some examples for ways this could be used are:
- Generating a new entry for habit tracking
- Generating a weekly meeting minutes template
- Generating tasks on a timetable
Limitations:
There are some limitations with the current model for recurring templates.
- Recurring templates are generated on the timetable that you specify, so are not viewable in advance. If you need to look days, weeks or months ahead to view upcoming recurring tasks, meetings or events, this is not currently an option.
- Recurring templates do not have dynamic date capabilities (yet), so any date properties will have to be manually populated. You can, however use the new dynamic @today and @now in the template name, which may be an option for some folks until we have true dynamic date properties available for recurring templates.
Notion is getting this functionality out to us now so we can start to use it, however they will be continuing to improve it over time. We can expect to see even more enhancements for this rolling out in the near future! These are exciting times!
Read more about this on What’s New with Notion.
