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IndiePlan
Notion6 min read

The Notion setup every freelancer should have

The minimum viable Notion workspace for freelance work — five pages, four databases, and nothing you won't use.

Notion's flexibility is its best and worst feature. You can build anything, which means most people build far too much and then quietly stop using it.

This is the minimum setup that covers real freelance work. If you build only this and nothing else, you'll be ahead of most people.

The four databases

1. Clients

Name, contact details, rate, status (lead / active / dormant), and notes. The status field is what makes this useful — it tells you at a glance how much live work you have.

2. Projects

Linked to a client. Scope, deadline, agreed fee, status. The agreed fee living here rather than in an email thread is worth the setup time on its own.

3. Tasks

Linked to a project. Due date, done checkbox. Resist adding priority levels, effort estimates and energy tags — you'll use none of them.

4. Money

Every invoice raised and every expense. Linked to a project where relevant. Date, amount, paid checkbox. That checkbox is your entire accounts-receivable process.

The five pages

  1. 1.Dashboard — this week's tasks, unpaid invoices, active projects
  2. 2.Clients — the database, grouped by status
  3. 3.Projects — board view by status, so stalled work is visible
  4. 4.Money — this month's income and expenses, with a running total
  5. 5.Weekly review — a simple template you duplicate each Friday

What to leave out

No CRM pipeline stages beyond lead/active/dormant. No time tracking unless you bill hourly. No resource library. No meeting notes database. Add these later if you genuinely reach for them — most people don't.

Set it up in an hour, not a weekend

Create the four databases, add the relations between them, build the dashboard, and stop. Use it for a fortnight. Then, and only then, add the thing you found yourself missing.

The workspace you'll still be using in a year is the boring one that does four things reliably, not the elaborate one you built in a burst of enthusiasm in January.

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