5 Steps To Leverage Notion For Your Maker Business

2026 is the year to—finally—get serious about your Maker business, but you need solid systems in place.

A mind-boggling number of free and subscription services are out there to help with very specific things. Notion gives you everything you need in its free tier and it's structured sandbox that lets you build what you want. I resisted switching to Notion over other options for awhile, but am glad I made the leap in 2023.

So that you can focus on getting your specific business needs, let me save you some time and give you the 5 steps I recommend for setting up Notion for Maker businesses.

Step 1: Make Everything A Database Entry

Most people start by making different Notion pages (and subpages), but by creating databases—where every "entry" is also a page—you can start leveraging Notion's advanced database functionality too.

Databases let you easily create structured relations (links) between different databases, which lets you pull in other structured data between different entries. There are more advanced options this unlocks, but for now it will let you do things like "assign" tasks to projects in a later step, so embrace the database concept early.

Step 2: Begin With A PARA Structure

Tiago Forte's book, Building A Second Brain, was so helpful for me to understand the PARA concept which stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, & Archive.

In Notion, start by creating a database for each PARA section (pro tip: I also like to add an Archive checkbox to most databases). Then, you can add relations between Projects, Areas, and Resources so that each can link together and you can see all your projects and resources for a particular area in one place.

Thomas Frank has some amazing tutorials on YouTube for getting this set up, and I used his videos to get mine going.

Step 3: Enhance Your Structure With Tasks, Goals, and Notes

Tiago's PARA structure gave me most of what I wanted to get started, but I found I wanted to also have databases for Tasks, Goals, and Notes (which is a little meta since all of Notion is built for Notes).

Goals and Notes are great to relate to everything else we've already set up, but Tasks should only be related to Projects. Your tasks should always live in a specific project, but your projects can then be "pulled in", including a project's tasks, to anywhere else in your setup.

Step 4: List The Few Things That Don't Fit Your Structure (Yet)

Internalize the PARA+ setup before you make your list though.

I've found that 99% of things are going to be a Project, Area, Resource, Task, Goal, or Note (such as a content calendar is really a resource). With Notion, you can have Database views inside other database pages, which Thomas Frank also goes into detail about in his setups.

Thomas also recommends having a dedicated Databases page where all your databases "live", but then create those custom views in your other structures like Resources.

Step 5: Resist The Urge To Overcomplicate (For Now)

Whew, we've covered a ton about how to get Notion up and running.

If you're already intimidated, don't worry it can all be changed later. The key here is to give yourself a solid foundational structure to continue building on, but resist the urge to immediately overcomplicate it because it's much easier to add complexity as you really need (like recurring tasks) rather than unwind complexity you didn't need (like I am now with how I structured my overall goals separate from business goals and need to merge them).