How to Manage Your Email and Calendar in Notion - Notion AI Agents Connections
As Brian starts the day, he checks the calendar and the inbox to define the most important work to be done. During the night, his “team of agents” scheduled focused work sessions for the day and processed incoming emails, drafting replies and creating tasks when appropriate. Brian reviews the agents' output and makes adjustments to match his judgments, and then begins the work day.
The inbox and calendar are two of the foundational pieces of knowledge work, standing the test of time and remaining prominent in the ever-changing technological environment. The email inbox enables direct interactions one-to-one or one-to-many. The calendar allows coordinating and scheduling time with other people without the need to rely on memory alone.
Over time, ideas around their use have developed, emerging and fading away depending on historical and cultural contexts. A relatively modern concept concerning emails and calendar management revolves around the importance of protecting your time and energy to ensure you don’t spend all day reactively monitoring the inbox, but safeguard it to allow space for focused work on important projects that lead to desired progress in some areas of your business and life.
Depending on the stage of your life and your current beliefs, you may find the concepts of time blocking, inbox 0, and other tactical approaches attractive, impractical, or somewhere in between. Regardless, the concept of time/energy management applies to everyone.
Strategy is not tactics. There are many tactics (short-term approaches/methods) to inbox and calendar management, but what determines which tactics you try or discard is your strategy (the underlying philosophy behind how you behave in the domain of inbox and calendar management).
For example, believing that your energy and time are to be protected from random external requests in favor of working deeply on important projects is a strategy. Because of this strategy/belief, you may implement the tactic of checking the inbox only twice per day, blocking focused work sessions on the calendar, and not working for more than 6 hours each day.
Importantly, if there are no underlying beliefs/strategy, tactics won’t matter and your energy and time investments will be primarily dictated by other people’s requests. In the absence of a cohesive belief system, we default to activities that appear to produce the most instant gratification, which rarely coincide with those that are most impactful.
What Notion AI Can Do
Notion AI Agents can directlyinteract with your Notion Mail and Notion Calendar accounts (or Gmail and Google Calendar). This means retrieving, creating, organizing, updating, and deleting calendar events and emails on your behalf. This can be automated via Custom Agents or coordinated manually by chatting with custom agents or Notion AI Agent.
Notion Calendar and Notion Mail are distinct products in the Notion suite. The advantage of using Notion Calendar and Mail, if you use Notion, is that they integrate effectively in the ecosystem. You can also use AI Agent(s) to directly interact with those Notion products without leaving your Notion workspace, which has the potential to consolidate and clarify your entire workflows.
This consolidation can reduce context switching across tools, which frees up cognitive real estate, allowing for more space to innovate and reflect. Context switching is the practice of switching across different tools (and contexts) multiple times per day/hour, which drains energy because each context switch requires “loading” all the relevant resources, which differ across contexts.
That’s one step in the direction of implementing the concept of deep work. You can choose to engage in “deep” work instead of hyperactively reacting to other people’s requests all day. And the current tech tools can make implementation much easier to start and iterate on.
To use calendar and email connections with Notion AI Agent (the ever-present chat), you must connect your accounts via Settings > Notion AI > AI connectors. This allows you to select the connected accounts in the available sources when chatting with AI Agent.
To use calendar and email connections with custom agents, you must connect your calendar and email accounts on each agent that uses them, in the agent trigger/actions. If you already connected your accounts at the workspace level (as explained in the previous paragraph), you can just select those accounts (no need to re-connect).