Your Notion is a junk drawer

Hey,

This week is the practical side: what Workers actually means for your wallet, how to stop your workspace from rotting, and why your AI keeps doing the wrong thing in Notion.

Also: cell merging finally shipped. It took years.

Let's get into it.

In Today's Email 👀

• Merge cells shipped

• The 2 pages that make any AI useful inside your workspace

• Your Notion is a junk drawer and here's how to fix it

• Plus 3 tools worth trying this wee

3 Tips / Updates

1/ MERGE CELLS IN SIMPLE TABLES

Notion shipped cell merging on May 26. Select multiple cells in a simple table, open the cell menu, choose "Merge cells." You get column-spanning headers or grouped rows.

This sounds minor. It is not if you've been hacking around Notion's rigid simple tables since they launched. You couldn't do a basic "this header covers 3 columns" without breaking out a full database. That workaround era is over.

This is table stakes. Confluence and Google Docs have had this forever. It took Notion years to ship it. Still, it is here now. If you build internal docs, onboarding wikis, or status pages inside Notion, use it today.

Find any existing simple table → select 2 cells in the top row → right-click → hit "Merge cells" → type a bold section header. Your table now looks like an actual document instead of a grid with opinions.

2/ THE TWO NOTION PAGES EVERY AI USER NEEDS

Most people connect an AI to Notion and immediately ask it to do things. That's the wrong order.

Before you use any AI in your workspace, whether that's Notion AI, Claude, or anything else, build an instructions page.

One page, at the top of your most important section. Write down how your databases are structured, how you like things formatted, what goes where. Title it something like "If you are an AI agent, read this first."

Every time an AI lands in your workspace, it reads that page. It stops guessing. It stops putting things in the wrong database or formatting docs in ways you'd never do yourself.

The second thing worth doing: a high quality examples section. A page with your best outputs. Best docs, best summaries, best whatever you actually produce in Notion. When you ask an AI to write something, point it there. It will match your style instead of inventing one.

Two pages. Thirty minutes to set up. You stop re-explaining yourself every single session.

3/ YOUR NOTION WORKSPACE IS A JUNK DRAWER

Everything needs a home. Not a folder, not a loose page, a database. One tasks database. One notes database. One projects database. All views pull from those. The moment you start creating one-off pages for random thoughts, the rot begins.

Start with an Inbox page. Settings → New page → call it Inbox. Every messy capture, half-thought, and saved link goes there first. Once a week, spend 10 minutes moving anything that earned it into the right database. Delete the rest. Most things won't survive that filter and that's the point.

The 6-month archive is the move nobody talks about. Every 6 months, do a hard sweep. Anything untouched gets moved to a page called "Archive 2026 H1". Not deleted. Just out of sight. Takes 20 minutes if you're ruthless. Your search results stop being a graveyard.

The broken database relations are the real tell. Open your sidebar right now. Find any database where the filters stopped working, the rollups show empty when they shouldn't, or relations point to pages that no longer exist. You know the ones. You've been ignoring them for months. Fix one or delete it. Once you stop maintaining the system you stop trusting it, and once you stop trusting it you stop using it. That's how Notion graveyards happen.

5 Notion habits that actually fix this

Poll / From The Community

The MCP thread this week split the room. Half the comments were "this is game changing." The other half were "it's overpriced, token hungry, and slow."

One person switched to Cloudflare Workers to run 20 Notion agents for free. Another said the official MCP burned a session's worth of tokens in 2 queries.

So genuinely curious where you're at:

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Quick Links & Tools

SubNotion: Monitors Reddit for keywords you care about and saves relevant conversations directly into a Notion database. Useful for research, competitor monitoring, or tracking what people say about any topic.

Recipe Clipper: Paste any recipe URL and it saves just the ingredients and steps to Notion, no clutter. Browser extension coming soon.

Notis.ai - Notion agent alternative: If the credit pricing is giving you pause, Notis is one of the more credible third party alternatives getting real traction in the community right now.

SF Electronic Music Calendar built with Notion Workers: Someone synced SF electronic music events from 19hz.info into Notion using a Worker. Dates, venues, genres, prices, auto-updating. The pattern works for anything you've been copying and pasting manually.