Notion hid a better way to think

Hey,

This week is the practical side: a Notion AI advisor built from any book you trust, why your due today view is lying to you, and 12 updates that shipped this month including one that finally makes custom agent costs trackable.

Let's get into it.

In Today's Email 👀

• Build a Notion AI advisor from any book or framework you trust

• Your due today view is useless and how to fix it with one checkbox

• 12 Notion updates from this month including the one that matters for your wallet

• Quick links worth bookmarking this week

3 Tips / Updates

1/ BUILD A NOTION AI ADVISOR FROM ANY BOOK

The idea: take a book you trust, extract the key frameworks chapter by chapter, and load them into a Notion knowledge base. Attach that knowledge base to a Notion personal agent with custom instructions. Now you have a specialist that only reasons from that material, not from generic training data.

The demo in this video uses Seth Godin's This Is Marketing. Each chapter gets atomised into entries: key principle, when to apply it, confidence level, source. The agent reads those entries before answering anything. When the knowledge base is empty it says so rather than making something up. That's the whole point.

The setup has three parts.

1. Instructions: one page that acts as the job description. Who the agent is, what it does, what it must read before answering.

2. Skills: reusable playbooks for specific processes like a positioning audit or a book ingestion helper.

3. Knowledge base: a Notion database of frameworks, principles and case studies seeded from sources you chose.

What makes this different from just chatting with Claude or ChatGPT is the grounding. Generic AI gives you generic advice. An agent with a curated knowledge base gives you advice shaped by the specific frameworks you've decided to trust. The video shows a live test where the agent correctly says it can't help because nothing's been ingested yet. That's proof the system is working.

Pick one domain where you keep getting generic AI advice. Find one book or framework you actually trust in that domain. Spend an afternoon pasting chapters into a Notion knowledge base using an ingestion skill that atomises the content for you. Point your personal agent at it. That's your first specialist.

2/ YOUR DUE TODAY VIEW IS USELESS AND YOU KNOW IT

Thomas Frank published a video on his daily planning system. The core argument: your task manager trained you to put a due date on everything, so you did, and now your due today view has 40 tasks in it and half of them have been overdue for weeks. You can't tell a real deadline from a task you just wanted to get to eventually. So you stop trusting the view and work off vibes.

His fix is three things. Due dates only go on tasks with a real external deadline. Everything else gets no date. Every morning you manually pick a small list of tasks and move them into a separate execute view. That list is all you look at while working. At end of day you clear it completely no matter what and start fresh tomorrow.

In Notion this is a single extra checkbox on your task database called My Day. Check it, the task drops into your execute view. Uncheck everything at night. One property, one filtered view, no duplicate entries, no second app.

Open your overdue list right now. Count how many had a real deadline vs. tasks you just wanted to get to. If most are the second kind you've been using due dates as a priority system. They're not built for that.

Watch the full walkthrough

3/ 12 NOTION UPDATES FROM THIS MONTH

Matthias Frank's June roundup is worth watching in full but here's all 12 in one place.

Merge cells in simple tables. Select cells, open cell menu, hit merge. Spanning headers now work. Should have shipped years ago.

Conditional color by property. Previously highlighted the whole row. Now you can target a single property. Useful for flagging missing fields without making the whole row scream at you.

Notion Easter egg. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, then type PA on any page. Rainbow kitty flies across the screen. Not new but Notion reposted it. Still works.

Notion moves to .com. app.notion.so is now app.notion.com. Small for most people, matters if you're in an org where .so was getting blocked by firewalls. Update your password manager.

Relation filters. You can now filter what shows up when you click into a relation field. By default it hides archived entries. You can also filter to show only verified pages. Basic but long overdue.

Rollup number formatting. Rollups now support currency and decimal formatting. If you've been running formula workarounds to get dollar signs on rollup totals, delete them.

Version history diffs. Changes are now highlighted inline, track-changes style. Makes it actually useful to go back and see what someone edited and when.

New AI connectors. Mercury, Miro, Mixpanel, Sentry added for custom agents. Plus you can build your own via Workers and custom MCPs.

Outlook and Teams on Business plans. Previously Enterprise only. Now available on Business. Read-only for now but two-way alpha is open for sign-ups.

Custom agents in private Slack channels. Was public channels only. Now works in private ones too. You need to invite Notion AI to the channel manually.

Meeting notes speaker recognition. Now identifies who said what. Matthias says it's best on 1-on-1s and gets shakier in larger groups. Still a meaningful step up.

Custom agent cost insights. This is the useful one. You can now see per-run credit consumption, which model was used, which tools were called, and what triggered it. Run the same agent on two different models and compare cost vs quality side by side. Makes it much easier to stop burning credits on tasks that don't need a frontier model.

Poll / From The Community

Notion is great at storing thoughts. Less great at showing you how those thoughts changed.

The thread this week was about voice journaling daily for months, then realizing a decision made last week had been quietly building for six months in those notes. The only way to catch that kind of shift is to re-read everything. Nobody does that.

The workaround people have landed on: quarterly Python scripts, tagged entries, local AI summaries. All of it manual. All of it outside Notion. The native AI Q&A can gesture at it, but hallucinates timelines once the database gets large.

The real question isn't whether you journal. It's whether your system shows you who you were, or just what you wrote.

Quick Links & Tools

Notion as a business brain for Claude: Store your SOPs, cost history, contract positions, and subcontractor directory in Notion and connect it to Claude so every project has business context on tap. Worth it for the token efficiency tip alone: pull from Notion once at project setup, convert to markdown, run everything from that.

3 unhinged ways to customize Notion: Custom CSS, HTML widgets via Netlify Drop, JavaScript for decorative elements. None of it requires you to code. Describe what you want to Claude, paste the output into a browser extension. Good rabbit hole.

Workers free beta ends August 11: $0.0023 per run, ~4,348 runs per $10 after that. If Custom Agents are burning your credits, rebuilding them as Workers before August is worth the afternoon.