Unlocking the Power of Notion Buttons: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this newsletter, I’ll teach you how to use Notion buttons to automate workflows and generate 30+ inter-related pages in < 1 second.

You’re Not Capturing The Potential of Buttons

Most people don’t understand how to use Notion buttons to their full capacity.

But now that Notion has updated the button functionality to allow us to apply page templates to the pages we’re creating, the opportunities to use buttons to completely automate work are endless.

For instance, instead of just using buttons to create templates or open pages, you could be using them to create:

Project pages with parent/sub-tasks
Content pages with specific templates for different post types
Creating client onboarding tasks each time you need to onboard a new client

This might not sound huge, but it’s a big deal.

Because now you can use my Cascading Button method to create pages that are automatically set up for your workflows.

Let me show you how to take full advantage of this update.

STEP #1 - Using Cascading Buttons to Bulk-Create Pages

First off, it's important to understand the concept of Cascading Buttons.

These are multi-step buttons that are interrelated, allowing you to create pages across databases that are related to each other in one click.

For example, if you have a project management database with tasks and subtasks, you can create a Cascading Button that automatically creates a new task page with all the subtasks already set up.

This saves you time and ensures consistency across your project management database.

Here's how to set it up:

Create a new button on the database view where you want to create the related pages.
Select "Create a new page" as the action.
Choose the database where you want to create the related page.
Select a page template to use under the second dropdown button after the word ‘as’ and choose the template you want to use for the page.
Repeat these steps until you have all the pages entered that you want to create
Update their properties (i.e. status, tags, etc.) accordingly

STEP #2 - Using Cascading Buttons to Auto-Relate Pages

Now, let’s say you want those pages to be interrelated to each other.

For instance, you’re creating a project and you want all of the sub-tasks to relate to the parent task or “project”.

Great! Cascading buttons makes this easy.

Here's how to set it up:

1 → After you’ve followed the steps from Step #1, go to the first sub-task page and select your relation property. Then select the dynamic option, “New page created from Step 1”.

2 → Do this for all the subsequent subtask pages you want to relate to that main page

A couple of notes on this process:

You always want to select that dynamic option so each time you run this button it will select the *NEW pages you’re creating.

*Unless you actually want to relate it to some specific page in your database.

Also, if you have sub-sub-tasks (for instance, you have a sub-project within this project that has specific tasks) you’ll want those to only relate up to their parent task.

This will avoid a mess inside your project database.

PHEW! I threw a lot at you there.

But now let’s take a look at my favorite use-case for this new hack.

Using Cascading Buttons to Create Content

My favorite way to use Cascading Buttons is to create content pages within my content database.

As you may know if you’ve been following me for a while, I use the Justin Welsh method of content creation.

Meaning I create ONE long-form piece of content (like this here newsletter 😉) and then I turn that into several smaller pieces of content.

I have a database that helps me do that.

But now with Cascading Buttons AND auto-applied templates…

The game is completely changed!

Here’s how I set up my database to help me be even more efficient with this method.

Here's how to set it up for you:

Create your specific page templates for various types of content (i.e. newsletter, thread, tweet, etc.)
Create your “Generate Posts” button
Select "Add a new page" as the action
Choose the content database as the database where you want to create the new page
Select the template you want to use under the “as” dropdown at the top (for example, as “Newsletter” template)
Fill in your other properties accordingly
Create additional steps for the other types of content you want to create that go with your first piece of content
Select "Use a template" and choose the template you want to use for each post type

This has already helped me save SO much time in my content workflow.

Now, instead of having to use multiple buttons to achieve the same effect (and having to manually apply the proper page templates) I can do all of this in one click.

But there’s more…