I recently spoke to a colleague of mine about how she managed her classes at uni. I asked her which tool she used to take notes, how she managed assignments, and what she used to study throughout the year. I couldn't believe it when her response to each of these questions was Microsoft Word! Creating a new document for lectures, assignments, research, exams, notes, and more; she must have been buried in a chaotic filing system. Nevertheless, she earned a first-class honors degree, so it's certainly achievable. However, why make it harder for yourself when there are FREE tools available to make achieving that first-class degree easier? Don't worry; I am going to introduce you to one of, if not the best, and provide you with a pre-made structured workspace for managing everything in your classes, helping you avoid the headache of dealing with an endless stream of files.

Introducing Notion

Notion combines the functionalities of note-taking apps, project management tools, databases, and more into a single, customisable workspace. It allows users to create and organise documents, databases, to-do lists, calendars, and much more, all within a cohesive and user-friendly interface. I use Notion for every aspect of my life now, personal finances, workout tracking, personal and work projects (I’m using it now to write this article), host my own website where your reading this, and why we are here of course university work.

I won’t sugar coat it, Notion if you are new to these types of applications comes with a learning curve. However, one of the best features of Notion is called templates! This allows you to create a template of an existing page that you can copy to reuse over and over again. The template I have created covers the major features and functionality of Notion in a hopefully simple way to ease that learning curve so you can get going straight away!

My Template

NOTE: It would be a good idea to skip to download the template at the bottom of this post and return to this point as I walk through each section and how to use it.

The template is called UNI Unit Management and is divided into four sections of units (Classes), tests, assignments, and notes. Each section is whats known as a relational database all you need to know here is that each section is linked. Although they all are connected in some way I treat units as the core section.

I use this template the whole year, everything goes in here and by doing this I have a centralised, dedicated workspace for all my work in a year of university. The next year I simply duplicate the empty template, rename my units to the classes I am taking that year and start again. Like I said there is a learning curve to Notion but its such an amazing and worthwhile tool once you master it! At the bottom of this post I will place some channels on YouTube with Notion tutorials and more free templates.

View of Notion template when first opened.
Units (Classes)

The units section you can treat as your core section, this is because units are the classes that you are taking and in that class you may have tests, assignments, and notes from lectures. All of these are extensions to your classes and thats how the template is designed as well.

When clicking into one of the units this will open its own page where you will see a similar layout to when you first open the template. However, whereas the below sections show all tests, assignments, and notes you have made across all units by clicking in you will see that the databases are filtered for only that unit. You will also see at the top of the page what we can call ‘related information’, here we have things such as instructor, due dates, unit grades. This is standard in Notion pages appears in all of the sections pages.

Tests

The test section shows your tests you have for the year, just like units each page has some related information but is different to the units. Here we have information such as due date, count of days to the test, and percentage of grade for the unit. When clicking into this page my intended use is revision for the test hence the title ‘Revision’ in the body of the page, however use this as you see fit. This introduces us to another feature of Notion called ‘page section’, this is where linked pages are shown just above the body and under the related information. Here you should see we have one assignment and one note linked. These are pages that have resources needed for the test for example the notes you link to a test have information you need to score well. This is really useful as you move through the year linking notes when they happen instead of going going back trying to find resources when you need to revise for the upcoming test.

Another new feature are ‘views’, you can see when looking at the test database you have All, Due, Due Dates, and Completed just above the title ‘Test’s’. I hope that the titles are easy enough to work out but click through them to see the different views of your tests. The one I like to use for tests is the Due Dates as it shows a calendar view and this lets me plan my weeks for revision. These views are ones I have built and find useful but you can create more or edit these. They are also used in the Assignment database which I’ll cover next.