--- title: "Managing your team in Notion" slug: managing-your-team-in-notion description: "A simple Notion setup for keeping notes on the people you manage, the two things it does well, and the point where a flat notes tool stops keeping up." topic: managing-people-over-time project: continuum updated: 2026-09-15T06:53:21.638Z canonical: https://roland.leth.ro/guides/managing-your-team-in-notion --- When a new manager decides to stop keeping everything in their head, the first stop is usually Notion, Apple Notes, or a single long doc. That's a sound instinct, and you can get a real distance on it. This is a setup that works, followed by an honest account of where a plain notes tool starts to strain. ## A Notion setup you can build in ten minutes Two databases, related to each other. If you'd rather not build them by hand, [the finished version is published here][notion-template]: open it, press Duplicate, and both databases, the three views and 2 sample people land in your own workspace. The rest of this section is what each piece does. **People**, one row per report. Properties: - **Name** (title). - **Current read** (text): 2 or 3 plain sentences on how they work and what you're watching, with a sureness word in each. - **Read updated** (date): set by hand whenever you change the read. Notion's own "Last edited time" moves whenever you touch the page at all, which is a different thing, and you want both. **Log**, one row per thing you noticed. Properties: - **Note** (title): one line of behaviour, what you saw or heard, not what you made of it. - **Person** (relation to People). - **Date** (date). - **Theme** (select): ownership, clarity, pressure, momentum, whatever words match how you already think. - **Direction** (select): up, steady, down. Each person's page holds the earlier reads, struck through with the date and the reason that moved them, and a view of the Log filtered to that person, so opening someone shows the current read, how it got there, and the trail underneath. Then 3 views: - **People by silence**: People, sorted by Last edited time, oldest first. The person at the top is whoever you've gone quiet on. - **Reads to revisit**: People, filtered to Read updated before a date about a quarter back; nudge the date forward each quarter. A read that old is a question for the next 1:1, not a fact. - **Log by theme**: Log, grouped by Theme, filtered to one person when you're prepping a conversation with them. That's genuinely useful. It captures well, it searches, it bends to however you think, and, in a personal workspace, it's yours. For a small team and a manager who keeps up with it, it can carry you a long way. ## Where a flat notes tool starts to strain Three things get harder as the read matters more. **A read is just text, so its history is lost or buried.** Your view of someone changes; that's the whole point of paying attention. In a notes tool, when it changes you either overwrite the "Current read" (and the earlier version is gone) or you append a new one (and the current read sinks under older entries). Either way you lose the one thing worth having later: how the read formed, and when it moved. A flat document can't hold that history. **Nothing connects a note to the read it changed.** You log "shaky in the incident review" as an observation and, separately, you carry a belief that this person is a calm operator. The notes tool keeps both as unrelated text. It never tells you the second should update the first, so the connecting has to happen in your head, which is the place you were trying to offload. **Everything weighs the same, forever.** A rough note from March and a good one from last week sit at equal weight in the log. There's no sense of recency, so old observations keep pulling on your read long after they've stopped being true, and "what's current" is something you reconstruct by rereading. That's the exact memory problem the setup was meant to solve, moved into a document. None of this makes Notion the wrong choice to start; it makes it a starting point you'll feel the edges of, usually right when [a review or a promotion case][recency] asks you to show how someone has changed over months. ## Keeping notes on people, responsibly Whatever tool you use, notes about the people you manage carry a duty: keep them to the work, say how sure you are, prune what you'd no longer stand behind, keep the workspace personal rather than shared, with a passcode and disk encryption on the machine, and write as if the person will read them, because in some places, including the EU and UK, they can. [The full version, with who can legally read the notes and where they should live, is its own page][notes]. Do that, in Notion or anywhere else, and you've turned a private habit into a fair one. What the tool changes is how much of the discipline you have to supply yourself. More guides in [Managing people over time][topic]. --- Full disclosure: I make [Continuum][continuum], a Mac app built for the three places above where a notes tool strains. A read is a first-class thing you revise, with every earlier version kept beside the current one; the notes you tag flow into the reads they touch and leave a record of what changed; and older notes fade unless you see the same thing again, so what surfaces is what's live. It opens on the people and reads that have gone quiet, so you're not relying on memory to know where to look. It never scores anyone, everything stays on your Mac, it's free for up to three people, and Pro is a one-time purchase if you'd rather not subscribe. If Notion is working for you, keep using it; this is for when you've felt the ceiling. [notion-template]: https://rolandleth.notion.site/Team-notes-3dcd09a76480813b98cbdff9104d3344 "Team notes — Notion template" [recency]: /guides/recency-bias-in-performance-reviews "Recency bias in performance reviews" [notes]: /guides/keeping-notes-on-employees "Keeping notes on the people you manage" [topic]: /guides/managing-people-over-time "Managing people over time" [continuum]: /projects/continuum "Continuum: Manage Thoughtfully"