How to automate project setups in Notion (auto-tasks/project delivery)
When you sign a new client, you may have default projects and tasks to create. This process is crucial for delivering the best service to your clients, but it can be time-consuming and involve a significant amount of administrative work. Fortunately, it can be automated.
By using templates and automations, you can save time and resources during the initial client setup. These can be built in Notion, Coda, Airtable, or other customizable project management tools. In this essay, I'll explain how to build this automation in Notion.
In a previous post, I covered some applied automation principles for creating a new client in your CRM upon a Stripe payment. In this video, you will understand how to automate the initial project setup for the new client.
For example, you own and manage a real estate development company with a team of 8 people and some project-specific subcontractors. Chances are, the project setup process can be automated, so you can start from a solid foundation that's proven to work in the past, while keeping space for innovation and project-specific adjustments.
You open the new client page, select the service/type, and an automation generates all the tasks and associated dates. You then adjust manually as needed and start managing projects in one place, where you can collaborate with everyone in your team.
Requirements
For this automation to work, you need the following databases:
- Clients: Each client can have one or multiple projects.
- Projects: Each project can have one or multiple tasks, as well as a start and end date.
- Tasks: Each task has a start and end date, an owner, and a status.
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How it Works
When you sign a new client, you may change their status in Notion, click a button, or select the specific service(s) you will deliver. This action triggers an automation that creates all the necessary projects and tasks.
In this demo, I am explaining how to create projects and tasks via a button on the Client page. I like this approach because it ensures a level of control and choice that wouldn't be present with other triggers (e.g., page creation, property value change).
In addition, technically it corresponds to a manual creation of the project(s), which allows triggering a Projects database automation (otherwise, database automations can't trigger other database automations).
How to Set it Up
Watch the video for a visual demo
For this demo, we have one type of project automation corresponding to one button. Your use case will likely differ. Understand the concepts and apply them on your own, or work with me for advanced customizations.
Step 1 - Create a Button on the Clients database
The button has two steps:
- Add a Project to the Projects database. Here, we prefill the client relation (this page), and optionally the project dates/team members, and anything else that can be usefully automated in the project creation stage.
- Open the Project added in step 1
Step 2 - Create Automation(s) on the Projects database
Learn more about native Notion Automations, which require a paid plan.
Chances are, different kind of projects require different tasks. If that's the case, we can create multiple automations depending on the project type (which could be a select property within the Projects database). If not, we can create an automation triggered by a project creation (no "type" involved).
Following the demo example for a real estate construction company, there may be multiple project types whose tasks vary (e.g., construction projects, development projects, design projects, or all combined). So we may have a multi-select property defining the project type(s). We can use this property as the automation trigger.
Continuing with the demo, say we are creating the automation for construction projects.
So, the automation would have one trigger: when "project type" contains "construction". And multiple steps (as many steps as there are tasks, which I understand can get messy to manage in the small database automations interface currently provided by Notion).
We can also include sub-tasks (see this video for a deeper explanation). Once we create the first step (task), we can duplicate it to add the subsequent ones.
Each Task is dynamically related to "this project" (the one that triggered the automation) and can have dynamic start & end dates depending on the duration of each task.
We can include dynamic dates on each task by using a Formula to populate the Date properties in each Task creation step.
We can also auto-assign an owner to each task and any other properties we wish to automatically populate.
