Why your Notion dashboard is too big, and how to cut it in half
Most dashboards fail because they try to show everything at once. Here's the pruning method I use on every template I build.
Every Notion dashboard I inherit looks the same. Twelve linked databases, four callout banners, a widget for the weather. Someone built it in a weekend of enthusiasm and hasn't opened it since.
The problem isn't Notion. It's that a dashboard is a lens, not an archive. If a piece of information doesn't change what you do in the next hour, it doesn't belong on the top level. I apply one rule: can I act on this in under ten seconds? If not, it gets pushed one level down.
Here's how that plays out. My content calendar shows today and the next two days. Nothing else. The full database is one click away for planning sessions, but the dashboard never shows me thirty scheduled posts. A wall of future work just makes me avoid the page.
I did the same thing with my product roadmap. Instead of a kanban of everything, the top of the page shows one thing: the next task for the current product. Everything else lives in a collapsed toggle. It looks almost empty. That's the point.
Try it this week. Take your busiest dashboard and delete every block that doesn't pass the ten-second test. You'll probably cut it in half. If you miss something, you'll know within two days, and adding it back takes thirty seconds.