Notion Office Hours: Formulas 201 🧮

Notion formulas 201 zeroes in on the “conditions” side of formula building—turning checkbox/select inputs into different outputs—then uses that same logic to automate task prioritization and generate visual progress bars. The core takeaway is that Notion’s if function (often nested) is the practical switchboard for decision-making: it lets users encode rules like “if important and urgent, do it; if important but not urgent, schedule it; if urgent but not important, delegate it; otherwise eliminate it.” That matters because it converts static task fields into dynamic, actionable views inside a Notion database.

The session starts by revisiting the formula anatomy from formulas 101: formulas become useful when they answer three questions—what action to take, what inputs to use, and what conditions must be met. Today’s exercises focus on the third question. For the first project, task prioritization, the Eisenhower Matrix is implemented directly in a tasks database. Users add two checkbox properties—Important and Urgent—and then build a formula property that outputs one of four action labels based on the checkbox combination. The logic is expressed with a top-level if that checks Important, and nested if statements that check Urgent to select between “do,” “schedule,” “delegate,” and “eliminate.”

Next comes a second prioritization method, a “Murry matrix” variant that swaps urgency/importance for two select properties: Effort (Low/Medium/High) and Impact (Low/Medium/High). The session assigns numeric priority values by mapping each Effort and Impact option to a number using if logic. To keep formulas manageable, it breaks the work into intermediate formula properties—Effort Priority, Impact Priority, and Total Priority—then uses another nested if chain to convert Total Priority into emoji indicators (police lights, flames, stars, coffee cups, sleepy face) so tasks can be sorted and scanned visually. A key workflow tip appears here: for complex formulas, writing in a code block (with line breaks/indentation for readability) before pasting into Notion reduces mistakes.

The second major exercise builds progress bars using four functions: if, slice, round, and format. The approach is to compute a percentage property first (completed units divided by total units, optionally rounded), then render a bar by slicing a string of filled circle characters and concatenating it with the remaining unfilled circles. The filled length is derived from the percentage (scaled to a 1–10 range and rounded), and the final output appends the percentage as text using format so it can be concatenated. The session also notes practical constraints—like the need to handle edge cases such as 0%—and points viewers to Notion VIP for formula cheat sheets and exercise files.

By the end, the emphasis is less on memorizing one-off tricks and more on mastering conditional logic patterns: nested if statements for multi-branch decisions, intermediate properties to decompose complexity, and string/number functions to turn calculated values into readable UI elements inside Notion.