Notion shipped its biggest AI update

Hey,

Notion shipped the biggest AI update of the year this week, and it's not a new model or a shinier chat window. It's skills, specifically the ability for admins to set one skill that runs the whole team's AI instead of hoping everyone configures their own.

Meanwhile the Notion community is having a real argument about which database properties are actually worth keeping, and the new model picker quietly shipped last Wednesday with zero fanfare. That's four days nobody noticed.

One quick thing before we get into this week's Notion stuff:

Let's get into it.

- Nick

In Today's Email 👀

• 5 Notion properties that survive 3 years of daily use

• Notion's model picker kills the guessing game

• Skills 2.0 is Notion's biggest AI update this year

3 Tips / Updates

1/ SKILLS 2.0: THE UPDATE THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS

Notion shipped the biggest AI update of the year this week, and it's not a new model or a slicker chat UI. It's skills.

Every skill now lives in a dedicated Skills tab. Mark any page as a skill, turn it on, and it becomes a slash command, or flip on "use automatically" and let Notion AI decide when to pull it in. Skills can even be downloaded into Claude Code, Codex, or whatever agent you run locally.

The real headline is default workspace skills. Admins can set one skill that auto applies to the entire team, no per user setup required, essentially the system prompt Notion never had. Worth knowing before you go wild with it: local downloads don't sync back, and the more skills you set to auto execute, the more context gets loaded into every conversation, so vague or overlapping descriptions will actively confuse the AI about which one to use. Keep them specific.

2/ THE PROPERTY LIST THAT STARTED A FIGHT

Years of daily Notion use apparently boils down to five properties that stick: Status, Date, Relation, Checkbox, and Person or tag. The abandon pile is just as telling, formula properties, multi level rollups, a standalone priority select, emoji heavy status labels, and files on databases that don't need them visually.

Formulas were the one thing nobody could agree on. Half say set them up once and forget them, useless day to day. The other half pointed to real cases, like a formula that builds a "dial status" out of three other properties, something no native view can do alone.

The point that settled it: match the tool to how much the logic needs to flex over time. A plain select never breaks when your schema changes. A formula can, quietly.

3/ MODEL PICKER DOES THE THINKING FOR YOU

Shipped Wednesday, August 14. Notion redesigned how you pick AI models. Instead of a wall of names, the picker leads with a shortlist built for your task, each with a scorecard for speed, intelligence, and cost. Pin favorites, or dial up "effort" for a more thorough answer.

It's table stakes UI that GPT, Claude, and Perplexity nailed back in 2023, so Notion's a couple years late, but the implementation is clean. Pick by constraint instead of hype.

Open any doc, press Cmd+J, and start typing. You'll see "Analyze this" tasks grouped together with effort controls right there. Pin one, and notice you never had to know a model name.

From The Community

Does anyone actually use Notion Calendar?

Turns out, yes. People running it as their only calendar. Google and Outlook synced in behind it.

Topic calendars, energy-level tags on tasks, a menu bar widget nobody opens the app without.

Quick Links & Tools

Build a CRM in Notion, step by step → The mechanics here are solid: two databases, one relation property, a Kanban view grouped by stage. Just know every "Related Reading" link in the post routes back to the same blog's PDF tool.

How power users track time in Notion → Best answer in the thread: one button, one text field, one formula that parses an array of start and stop timestamps. No extra database, no rollups, no subscription tracker.