Make with Notion 2025: Building the Future of Workflows (Sara Loretta, Sean a.k.a. Mr. Wildenfree®)

Custom agents and automation are being used to turn Notion into a “boringly effective” operating system—one that reduces admin, prevents status chaos, and keeps work moving with minimal manual effort. Sara Loretta, a solo Notion solutions partner, describes building a single, tightly structured workspace that tracks finances, sales pipeline, knowledge, content, goals, and projects. Her core principle is to avoid aesthetic clutter and dashboard sprawl until the foundation is solid, then layer in AI only where it saves real time. She also argues that the biggest productivity drain is context switching—constantly bouncing between inboxes, notifications, and fragmented project statuses—so she replaces multiple status-heavy databases with a simpler “areas” model and deep-dive pages that hold everything needed for offers and products.

Loretta’s workflow centers on capacity planning and due-date clarity without relying on dozens of statuses. In her projects area, she uses toggles and aggregation to maintain a bird’s-eye view, limiting each toggle to no more than 10 items to keep throughput predictable. Instead of tracking “not started / in progress” across separate systems, she organizes work into areas like backlog, extended projects, quick projects, and research-heavy one pages. For timing, she uses formulas inside toggles to surface the next subtask due date, letting her quickly determine availability during sales calls without guessing or digging through notes.

The “bells and whistles” arrive with Notion AI and custom agents. Loretta describes a real-time project manager standup built from a Notion AI text property that summarizes what’s incomplete, when the next due date is, and suggests an action item—auto-updating inside the database so she doesn’t have to read meeting notes. A second custom agent, “Arthur,” is triggered when a sales call status changes to “done.” Arthur cross-references sales call notes against the deep-dive one-page offer details, then recommends whether to onboard the client or route them to another Notion consultant. The agent updates database statuses and produces an onboarding-ready outcome.

Onboarding itself is streamlined through a button that sends an email prefilled with context pulled from the sales pipeline. Loretta adds that this automation extends beyond Notion: Zapier acts as an external trigger that creates invoices in Stripe, updates calendars, and generates Slack channels. She estimates the system saves roughly five hours per client—small per task, but meaningful because repetitive admin tends to expand as volume grows. The payoff isn’t just efficiency; it’s protecting attention for relationship-building and creative work.

Sean “Mr. Wildenfree®” Wild shifts the focus from business operations to creative production. He uses Notion to manage a “music OS” that evolves from a simple set of databases into a more complex system as industry needs grow. His custom agents handle tasks like expanding music-industry acronyms into standardized term pages, generating ID3 credit structures from song mentions, formatting lyrics for distribution across platforms (including variants like spaced, punctuated, labeled, and emoji versions), and analyzing lyrics for sentiment, readability, literary devices, word counts, unique words, rhyme patterns, and more. He also describes a Web3 agent that classifies wallet vs. smart contract addresses by scanning blockchain explorers and populating a web3 database. Finally, he uses an external browser (Comet) connected via MCP-style integration to reduce redundant data entry by pulling Notion metadata into forms. Across both workflows, the message is consistent: build a simple, standardized workspace first, then use agents and automation to keep work moving—without sacrificing quality or creative control.