Tips to keep your team’s Notion pages up to date

As your team grows, Notion grows with you. Your processes, your team, your company — scaling often means creating more content to support that growth, whether it's an onboarding deck or outlining new processes.

That documentation is the foundation on which you'll scale. But keeping it up to date and organized is just as important.

Using features in Notion, you can streamline your ability to keep track of what pages need revisions, ensure information stays fresh, and communicate updates to the rest of your team.

Seeing the progression of a page from its creation to the latest version gives your team transparency — and helps you understand what needs an update.

Here are a few ways you can keep informed when you have engineering sprints, marketing projects in progress, and other pages that constantly change.

On the top right of your Notion page, you'll see a tab for Updates. Here's where you can see all the changes made to that page.

If it's a page where you need to be updated of any edits made to it, toggle on Follow this page. A checkmark will appear next to Updates, which means you'll receive notifications in your sidebar (under All Updates) and via email.

Let's say you're checking a page's updates and notice something was incorrectly changed — like your engineering team's QA process. Instead of going through each of the individual line changes in the Updates tab, you can just restore an old version of that page.

Tap ••• at the top right of any page and select Page history. A menu will appear where you can see what that page looked like on a certain date. If those updates to the QA process were incorrect, select the right version and click Restore Version.

You can view and restore past versions of any Notion page up to 30 days back if you're on a Personal Pro or Team Plan (and indefinitely on an Enterprise Plan).

If your team keeps documents, tasks, or meeting notes in a database, certain properties in your database can help you see when pages were created, by who, and when they were last edited. This gives you a quick look into recent changes. Click + Add a property to see your options.

Under Advanced, you’ll see these database properties:

• Created time — this automatically timestamps the page's creation. If the page is foundational, it might not need action. But if it’s something like a project spec or meeting notes from months ago, it could be a candidate for a cleanup.

• Created by — automatically record the original author of any database page. If you’re going through and organizing any docs or meeting notes, you can mention creators of pages to confirm if those pages are needed any longer.

• Last updated by — see who made the latest changes on any given page automatically. This can show you who’s frequently adjusting pages. Like the Created by property, Last updated by helps when it comes time to clean up the pages in a database because you can see who’s updating pages most.

• Last edited time — another way to see which pages in your database are freshest, the Last edited time timestamps the page's last edit.

You can get a high-level look at any of these properties while viewing your database. After you add any property, click Properties above your database and toggle them on.

Have a large database and want to quickly see which pages haven’t been updated recently? Select a table view of your database. Click Sort above the table. Select +Add a sort and choose your Last edited time property from the dropdown menu and select Descending. This brings the most frequently edited pages right to the top of your database so you can quickly assess which pages your team might need most.

You may want to clean up some out-dated pages in your workspace, but might not want to delete them into the digital ether. That's why we suggest creating an archive for every top-level page in your workspace.

This allows you to keep a tidy page but also have some of those old pages for reference — like a product charter that your team might want to reference when building something similar.

Simply create the archive as a sub-page, and drag out-dated sup-pages into it.

Whether it's a team wiki or your company's benefits, you probably have pages in your workspace that are frequently used but only need updating every few months. Here's how to keep those pages fresh so your team is getting the right information.

Save yourself the time of restoring old page versions after accidental changes. Let’s say you change your team’s stock option policy. You wouldn’t want a new employee accidentally editing it as they’re reviewing that page.

Click ••• and select Lock page. When you lock a page, nothing can be edited or changed by anyone (including you!) until the lock is turned off.

For full-page databases, you can use the Database lock. Anyone will be able to edit the pages in the database. But they can't change views, properties, or values of Select and Multi-select properties.

You can remove the lock on a page or database anytime by hitting ••• and clicking Unlock page.

You can also restrict who can edit specific pages by creating permission groups and updating the share settings.

Instead of doing this in the page's comments, we find it better to make a Callout at the top of the page — so it's clear who owns that page.

Type /callout at the top of your page and type @ and their name to mention them in the callout. That way, they know they're responsible for that page. But maybe even more importantly, anyone who has questions about the page's content knows who to ask.

You can also set expectations of how often page owners need to revise pages by adding reminders. Add a deadline for completing updates with @ followed by the date. For example, typing in @6/30 creates a timestamp that displays Jun 30, 2021.

Maybe you want someone to go in and check the team wiki again three months from now for updates to benefits policies or the company mission statement. First @ mention them in a page comment on the page you want them to revisit. Then add @remind and enter the deadline for the next round of updates. Click into that @ tag with the date and a calendar window opens up. Here you can set it so that they receive a reminder two days before the due date.

After setting a reminder, whoever you tag will receive a notification under All Updates at the top of their left sidebar. They can also update their notification settings to receive these reminders via email or push notifications.

Sometimes page updates aren’t as obvious as they need to be. You may want to call out your team’s updated Roadmap when a feature release gets pushed to later in the quarter or a subtle change in positioning happens. Notion makes it easy to share the news.

Give your team a heads up by pushing updates to Slack. Click Updates, located top right for any page or database. Switch on Connect Slack channel. You'll see a prompt to sign into Slack or if you're already logged in, you'll need to give permission to Slack to integrate with Notion.

Then choose the Slack channel where you want to push Notion update notifications from the dropdown menu. Automatic alerts will now happen whenever an edit or comment occurs for that page or database (or any sub-pages within it).

You can integrate Slack on any Notion pages and select the most relevant channel so updates reach the right people on your team. For example, your team may have a Slack channel dedicated to Notion updates around your Roadmap features. This helps keep everyone in the loop on what’s underway and when feature release dates change.