How to Use Notion Recurring Templates
Notion has recently released recurring templates, a feature that enables users to create multiple instances of a page within a database, recurringly at regular intervals. While recurring tasks have been widely asked by the broad Notion community for years, the new recurring templates feature is a first, pivotal step in that direction. You can also create recurring tasks using recurring templates in Notion. Albeit, the feature is not optimized for that yet. Rather, you may want to use recurring templates in Notion to automatically generate a new journal page every day, a new habit tracking page every day, recurring meetings, or simple recurring tasks such as doing the laundry or renewing your public transports ticket.
You can implement recurring templates in Notion by creating a database template, then clicking on the three dots to the right of it, and configuring the recurring options according to your needs. You can watch a full demonstration of how to implement recurring templates in Notion in my video below.
Recurring templates are a valuable addition to the Notion user experience, stacked on top of the recent “default templates” release, allowing you to also make a database template the default whenever you create a new page in a database. These features are opening up the possibilities to customize your Notion experience even more. By using default templates, full page view, as well as recurring templates, Notion is turning into a toolbox where you can build your own “custom app” as you see fit. This is also what the Optemization team and Josh Redd explain very well here and here.
One key limitation of Notion’s recurring templates is that you can’t use a date property to trigger the recurring template creation. This makes this feature limited in task management use cases. Rather, it is always the created time property that dictates when a recurring page gets created in a database. As of November 2022, a workaround you could use is to fill out the date property in your recurring template (e.g., “Due Date”) with a date in the past, so you can ensure you won’t miss your tasks if you use filtered views based on the “due date”.
So, recurring templates are not ready for you to use as recurring tasks when you have a collaborative project management system in Notion yet. That’s because you would need to create one recurring template for each task and each project you have, which is not sustainable or realistic. In practical terms, say you have an onboarding checklist you always follow. Ideally, you could create an “onboarding” project template, and when you open it, all the tasks would be populated in your related “Tasks” database inside the project page. That is still not possible natively in Notion. You would need to use one of these two workarounds to achieve this: (1) drag-and-drop tasks into your “Tasks” database within the project page; (2) use automation (e.g., via Make or Zapier) to create your list of tasks every time a new project is created in Notion.
In the end, Notion’s latest recurring templates are a great user experience improvement, unleashing powerful use cases for simple habit tracking or personal recurring tasks. It is one valuable step toward native automation in Notion, which has been lacking significantly so far (as of November 2022). This a valuable step toward making software ubiquitous, where you can craft your own applications as you like them.
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