The dashboard you actually open is the only one that works
Most Notion dashboards are too pretty to be useful. Here's the three-thing test I use before adding any view.
I've built a lot of Notion dashboards over the years, and the ones that survive are never the most elaborate. They're the ones with fewer than five views, because every extra view is a decision you have to make before you can start working.
My test is simple: a dashboard earns its place only if it answers one of three questions — what's due, what's blocked, and what did I finish? If a view doesn't answer one of those, it moves to a sub-page or gets deleted. This is why my current home page is a single column with three filtered views. It looks almost empty. It gets opened every day.
The trap is designing for the screenshot instead of the Tuesday morning. A gallery of your projects with cover images is lovely until you have eight of them and can't tell which is late. Status and date columns do the work. Aesthetics matter, but they should come from type, spacing, and restraint — not from decoration that slows down the scan.
When I sell a template, the first thing I tell buyers is to delete a view in the first week. If nothing breaks, you didn't need it. If something breaks, you learned what you actually rely on. Either way the system gets better.