Notion’s New Sta­tus Prop­er­ty: The Auto­mat­ic Sta­tus (June 2022 release)

by | Notion

Wouldn’t you like to save some clicks in Notion and improve data qual­i­ty at the same time? With the new Sta­tus prop­er­ty you can — automatically!

Notion com­plet­ed a silent roll-out of this new fea­ture at the end of June 2022: the auto­mat­ic sta­tus property.

For a Notion nerd like me, this is a big step to pro­vide a pre-enter func­tion­al­i­ty. With this “small” improve­ment we see a pre­miere how the tools com­bines flex­i­bil­i­ty and the pos­si­bil­i­ty to set data entry defaults.

By set­ting default val­ues your data qual­i­ty will increase, you elim­i­nate data clean­ing activ­i­ties and reduce user inse­cu­ri­ty. The default shows what the ide­al behav­ior is.

Make your ide­al behav­ior the default.

With this, Notion is mov­ing ever clos­er to project man­age­ment func­tions and is prob­a­bly try­ing to steal users from its com­peti­tors. Respec­tive­ly, to keep their twen­ty mil­lion users hap­py and con­vince oth­ers who were on the fence.

If you were using sta­tus for your projects and tasks already, switch­ing to the new sta­tus prop­er­ty couldn’t be eas­i­er — it’s a mat­ter of a few sec­onds per property.

What can the new prop­er­ty do?

Note: Notion calls fields prop­er­ties. In Spread­sheets, they are called columns. We use the words fields and prop­er­ties inter­change­ably below.

The new sta­tus field auto­mat­i­cal­ly assigns sta­tus val­ues such as To-do, In Progress and Com­plete.

Ger­man-speak­ing users and those spoiled by Notion’s flex­i­bil­i­ty are about to groan … but don’t wor­ry, you can assign your own cus­tom val­ues with­in the three cat­e­gories. When I test­ed the func­tion in my role as Notion Ambas­sador and Cer­ti­fied Notion Con­sul­tant, the abil­i­ty to cre­ate val­ues in oth­er lan­guages was part of my feedback.

Cap­tur­ing cus­tom val­ues also allows for the cre­ation of addi­tion­al process steps. For exam­ple, a task may be com­plet­ed by one per­son but might require check­ing by anoth­er. Tech­ni­cal­ly, the task isn’t com­plet­ed, but is mov­ing forward.

By group­ing indi­vid­ual process val­ues under three cat­e­gories it becomes trans­par­ent if a task is real­ly com­plet­ed or is pro­gress­ing through dif­fer­ent stages to completion.

The three cat­e­gories are To-Do, in Progress and Com­plete and you’re free to cre­ate as many sub­cat­e­gories with­in the three as required. Think of the three like this:

To-Do = Inac­tive & Unprocessed

There are dif­fer­ent rea­sons why a task may not have been start­ed, is wait­ing, is blocked, et cetera.

Exam­ples:

  • a task hasn’t start­ed and needs doing — the default val­ue when cre­at­ing a new record in the task database
  • you have start­ed with a task, but you are blocked now because an impor­tant infor­ma­tion or deci­sion is pend­ing. Use blocked when the task is still your respon­si­bil­i­ty to exe­cute on.
In Progress = Active & Processed

There are dif­fer­ent stages that a task moves through until its completion.

Exam­ples:

  • a task for a client is com­plet­ed client-fac­ing, but still needs to be invoiced
  • you write a blog post and it needs to be proof­read after­wards, once done it needs to be approved by you, then needs to be pub­lished, then pro­mot­ed and final­ly the tasks ends with sta­tus com­plet­ed.
  • extend the above exam­ple to your read­ing mate­r­i­al, by cap­tur­ing con­tent you want to con­sume, have it set auto­mat­i­cal­ly to needs read­ing and have a fil­tered data­base view that shows you only these. Past are the days where inter­est­ing arti­cles would fall between the cracks because they wouldn’t sur­face due to an emp­ty read­ing sta­tus field.
Com­plete = Inac­tive & Processed

We love to set our tasks to com­plet­ed and then move on to the ones that aren’t. But what about those tasks that arise from death?

waking up

Exam­ples:

  • You once fell in love with a total­ly bril­liant project (or your boss) and cre­at­ed sev­er­al tasks. A few weeks or months in you can’t make sense of it anymore.In sober­ing moments like this it wouldn’t make sense to leave this project and its task with sta­tus To-Do nor is Com­plete.
    Maybe you’re still a bit attached to it and can’t bring your heart to delete these records. There’s res­cue for nos­tal­gic feel­ings like this (and a great way to archive): cre­ate a Dis­card­ed val­ue and place it under Com­plete.
  • You’ve cre­at­ed a blog post mas­ter piece, pub­lished it and pro­mot­ed — every­one knows about it. But time wasn’t so gen­er­ous with the piece and you came to real­ize it’s out­dat­ed. For sit­u­a­tions like these, cre­ate a Needs Updat­ing val­ue and place it under Com­plete. It’ll be clear that it’s not a total­ly fresh piece of con­tent that needs to go through the entire process again.
New Status Property in Notion_Example Lead Magnets & Products

How we man­age our lead magenets and prod­ucts at Asynch.Works.

By cre­at­ing cus­tom sta­tus­es that reflect your work­flows and using the defaults, the new Sta­tus prop­er­ty will increase your data qual­i­ty and smoothen your work­flows even further.

This fea­ture is very use­ful if you use automa­tion to auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate data records in Notion (new appoint­ments, tasks, incom­ing leads, and more). In par­tic­u­lar, it is ter­rif­ic if you want to trig­ger automations.

With the intro­duc­tion of these three par­ent cat­e­gories for sta­tus, Notion cre­at­ed the base­line for auto­mat­ed trig­gers and Notion then becomes the place to fire actions off.

Get the template
Project Man­age­ment System

Start with a basic project man­age­ment sys­tem, incl. the new sta­tus prop­er­ty, and cus­tomize it to your needs.

New field type: Notion Sta­tus property

If you cre­ate a new prop­er­ty (field) in Notion, you will find a new field type “Sta­tus”, which can be recog­nised by the radi­ant icon and is list­ed right after the mul­ti-select prop­er­ty on the prop­er­ty type list.

New Status Property in Notion

As soon as this field type has been select­ed, val­ues are auto­mat­i­cal­ly assigned to the prop­er­ty. Adjust the default val­ue and add your own sta­tus (steps fol­low below).

Choose dif­fer­ent dis­play formats

Anoth­er advan­tage of the new Sta­tus prop­er­ty is that you are not lim­it­ed by how it looks like you know it from select and mul­ti­s­e­lect prop­er­ties. You can choose between a select or check­box look.

New Status Property in Notion_Change Display

You can also switch back and forth between the two dis­play for­mats with­out los­ing its con­tent! Do note that, when switch­ing from mul­ti-select to check­box dis­play, all sta­tus­es that are in progress do get a ver­ti­cal line with­in the checkbox.

New Status Property in Notion_in progress status with checkboxes

I have not yet found out whether it is pos­si­ble to set the sta­tus of a check­box to “Edit” with a mouse click. I have already asked Notion about this.

Under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ence between old and new

If you already used sta­tus prop­er­ties (sin­gle or mul­ti-select) the visu­al dis­tinc­tion may not be imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous to the new sta­tus property.

Notice how the new Sta­tus prop­er­ty val­ues have more round­ed cor­ners and a cir­cle icon in front of each value.

Select and Sta­tus prop­er­ties work differently

With select prop­er­ties, users are used to being able to quick­ly add, change or delete val­ues. This is not pos­si­ble with the new sta­tus field.

Adjust­ments can only be made via the three-point menu or Edit prop­er­ty option in the drop­down menu. This has the advan­tage that not every user can change the val­ues at the drop of a hat. If muta­tion rights are lim­it­ed to pure­ly con­tent-relat­ed changes, this leads to more data stability.

Advan­tages & rea­sons for a change

  • You want to stan­dard­ize sta­tus values
  • You no longer want to decide between select fields and checkboxes
  • You’ve burned your fin­gers and want to lim­it access to who can change the word­ing of your data­base statuses
  • You use third par­ty appli­ca­tions, e.g. Save to Notion, Tal­ly Forms, to cre­ate data sets in Notion and want to have con­sis­tent data qual­i­ty (and exclude man­u­al post-processing)
  • Want to have clear trig­gers to fire an automa­tion from Notion
  • Reduce man­u­al labor: you won’t have emp­ty sta­tus prop­er­ties anymore!

How to switch: trans­fer of exist­ing values

Assum­ing you already have a project man­age­ment sys­tem with task and project data­base and both have sta­tus fields, how do you trans­fer the val­ues to the new field function?

You sim­ply change the field type of the exist­ing sta­tus field (Select or Mul­ti-Select) to the field type Sta­tus. The field val­ues are trans­ferred auto­mat­i­cal­ly. You may have to sort the val­ues into the three cat­e­gories once.

New Status Property in Notion_change property type

New sort­ing of the Sta­tus field

In con­trast to the select prop­er­ty, the Sta­tus field can now also be sort­ed alpha­bet­i­cal­ly. In the case of select prop­er­ties, you have to deter­mine the order your­self and then Notion sorts up or down.

Clos­ing words

The new Sta­tus prop­er­ty stan­dard­izes one aspect of project man­age­ment. It elim­i­nates emp­ty prop­er­ties and merges pref­er­ences between select and check­box properties.

Don’t have the new Sta­tus prop­er­ty yet in Notion? Just restart your Notion or reset the app (menu: Notion/Reset App & Clear Local Data). If it still isn’t there, wait a day or two and have a cup of tea, since Notion rolls out new fea­tures in a cas­cad­ed fashion.

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