Emojis Make Notion Easy To Use

The Emoji & Color System in Our Notion Space

When I first started using Notion, I felt lost. Every time I opened the app, I struggled to find what I needed, and honestly, it almost made me quit. That frustration led me to develop a simple system that has made our templates intuitive and easy to navigate.

If you learn one template, you learn them all.

This system is based on a set of icons and colors that uniquely identity the tool you’re using. Now, with one look, you know where you are and how to to get where you want to go.

By using a few key rules together, a consistent template design, and scalable structure, any template is easier than ever to get started.

With just a few minutes and the Core 4 organization concept, you can easily organize and find anything in seconds. Let’s walk through how this works.

The Core 4 Organization Concept

The Core 4 concept is what makes everything run so smoothly. Anywhere you go, the organization falls into one of these four classifications:

1. Item: Any single object or piece of information (e.g., a book).
2. Hub: Anything that holds items of a similar grouping (e.g., a bookcase).
3. Display: How you view and arrange your items (e.g., a bookshelf).
4. Tracker: A category used to display similar items (e.g., sorting books by genre).

When using the Core 4 approach, everything has a place, and every place has a purpose.

If you have a hub for books, you don’t put your milk in the same place—you put the milk in the hub for cold things (fridge) and leave the books alone.

If you see something that doesn’t belong, it’s a sign that you can organize it differently and be more effective with it.

The Icon & Color Guide Across All Hubs

Consistency is key. Each content type has a unique emoji that follows the color guide below.

Using this color scheme + specific emoji combo will save you an incredible amount of time navigating around your workspace.

It doesn’t have to be strict by any means. If you want to change a page to purple when it’s green, go for it. This just provides a reliable starting point for any tool.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Color Guide

• Yellow: Notes or stored information
• Green: Tasks or to-do items
• Red: Projects or extended efforts
• Orange: Goals or forward-looking objectives
• Brown: Organizers
• Grey: Functional sections
• Blue: Broad or general views

Hub Icons

1. 📒 Notes Hub – Central storage for all note-related content.
2. ✅ Tasks Hub – A focused area for action items.
3. 🔨 Projects Hub – A dedicated section for long-term efforts.
4. 🏆 Goals Hub – A vision space for future-oriented objectives.
5. 📦 Areas & Resources Hub – Resources that support all hubs.

Additional Icons for Specific Functions

• ⭐ Favorite – Mark items as important or frequently accessed.
• 🚨 Priority – Flag time-sensitive or critical tasks.
• 🗂️ Categories – Group items based on function or content.
• 📊 Status Tracker – Track progress within databases.
• ⏩ Upcoming – Show future items or events.
• 📶 In Progress – Items currently being worked on.

Rules for Consistent Structure

One more time: consistency is key.

Any tool we build in Notion follows four fundamental rules to maximize ease of use. By strictly adhering to these rules, it’s impossible to get lost, even in a complex workspace.

You will also have a very useable sidebar.

Here are the rules:

1. All Hubs are built around a database.
2. A Hub’s icon will match the database it’s built around.
3. All Hubs sub-pages will have an icon related to the purpose of that view (i.e. the 📒 Notes Hub’s ⭐ Favorite Notes sub-page will have the star icon).
4. All Hubs sub-pages will use the main hub icon in the header subtitle (e.g. 📒 Favorite Notes).
5. All Hubs sub-pages will carry the color from the main hub (e.g.  Yellow for Notes).
6. All Hubs sub-pages showing a relation to another database will use the icon of the other database (e.g. 🔨 Project Notes).
7. Infrequently used information will be kept behind a toggle to reduce load times using Notion’s lazy-loading feature.

Page Views & Quick Access Features

For efficient navigation, each hub offers multiple database views that act as quick returns to key areas.

For example, the Life Hub includes these five quick-return views:

1. All Notes (Last Edited): Full table view of all 📒 Notes.
2. All Tasks (Last Edited): Full table view of all ✅ Tasks.
3. All Projects (Last Edited): Full table view of all 🔨 Projects.
4. All Goals (Last Edited): Full table view of all 🏆 Goals.
5. Areas (Last Edited): Full table view of all 🗄️ Areas.
6. Resources (Last Edited): Full table view of all 📁 Resources.

Each view is set to a load limit of 10 pages to further take advantage of Notion’s lazy loading and reduce load times.

Quick Navigation Sections

Each hub’s subpages are organized into four distinct sections:

1. Favorite/Important
2. Processing
3. Time-Based
4. Category-Based

This navigation instantly shows you where to go when looking for a specific type of page.

1. Important: There is only one priority/important page in each hub. This is a focus page for your most viewed content. Keep this clean so that important information receives proper attention.
2. Processing & Status: These sections are for organizing pages in the correct location, or viewing pages by their status.
3. Time-Based: Most things have a time property included, such as date or last edited. This section is to view your activities based on when they happened or will happen.
4. Category-Based: All pages are grouped based on where you process them. This section is to view anything based on where it’s located or how it’s organized.

This also has the added benefit of being able to customize the layout of the sub-page to show more than you could on a top level page.

In short, this quick navigation is a very convenient way to find anything you’re looking for.

All Emojis

In this section, you’ll find the entire list of 240+ emojis and color codes that guide the organization in our workspace.

This quick reference allows you to integrate the system into any Notion page effortlessly.

 

Final Thoughts

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With a consistent color and icon system in Notion, finding your way around becomes second nature.

Each template is built on the same structure, so you only need to learn it once to feel comfortable across the board. It’s an approach that keeps things accessible and organized.

Once you start using a consistent theme, you’ll likely want to find pages across your workspace quicker.

Here’s a guide on using a reliable naming structure for your databases and pages.

Whether you’re diving into notes or managing projects, you now have a system that makes sense from the first glance.