A deep dive into API Automations

API integrations are pre-coded behaviours that will automatically occur at set intervals. By doing so, they save a lot of needless clicking in multiple areas of workspaces. Let's look at the topic more closely.

What are the greatest capabilities of Automations otherwise unimaginable?

Making Notion go outside of Notion

While Notion by itself can already satisfy a majority of your workflow needs, it is no secret that it’s not the only app that you are using - and will be using.

Things like Google Calendar or Cron are what I consider the most obvious examples of this. Even if you’re planning your events in Notion, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have them also appear in your personal calendar, would it now? That’s where automations enter the scene. A few cleverly set up API calls can effortlessly extract data from your event / task / meeting freshly created in a Notion Database - and throw it right into your calendar of choice without you moving a finger.

Or maybe you need it the other way around? How about each time your company email receives an inquiry, it goes right into a comfortable spot in your Notion workspace, straight away assigned to the proper employee?

Automatically summarizing, managing and moderating your content as you see fit with AI powers

One of the newfound strengths of Notion - and of productivity as a whole - is AI. Using AI with Notion is fairly comfortable, but you still have to type your prompt in manually. What if even just typing out the prompt was also done automatically for you? By using the GPT API, you can schedule an AI to summarize, moderate or manage your content in all the ways you could like.

Go make yourself a coffee, while an integration automatically summarizes the meeting notes for you and creates a beautiful overview of things that actually have to be done - and this is only a singular example. The huge den of things that became possible with AI in the last few months is definitely nothing that an open-minded businessman should overlook.

Fixing Notion’s annoying Workspace Guest system’s caveats with clever workarounds - by making Notion relate back to Notion (where it cannot do that by itself)

You may or may not know this - but Notion allows you to have others enter your workspace not just and only as Workspace Members ($10 per month per user). They can, for free, become a so-called Workspace Guest.

Workspace Guests don’t have full access to your Workspace - they can only see what you explicitly decide to show them. That sounds great right?

Well, problems arise when you store a lot of data in a singular database. Once again jumping straight onto an example, it is a great practice to, instead of creating a new Tasks database for each new Project you have, store all Tasks in a singular database and have each Task be related to an item in the Projects database. This way you have 2 databases - Projects and Tasks - and can filter, view, display etc items from all projects, only a singular project, or however you’d like.

Now, coming back on topic, the problem is you can only share singular Tasks, or an entire database with a Workspace Guest. In many cases you would like to only show your Guests Tasks related a singular Project - but all they have to do to “breach” your security and display all of your database records is… disable a filter on a database view.

“Just share that singular database view and don’t share the database itself then!”

…We’d love it to be so simple, but sadly it isn’t. If you only share a database view, a Workspace Guest will not see any tasks in there - they don't have access to them.

“So just share only the Tasks you want them to actually see!”

Uh, good luck clicking through all your Tasks, one by one, to share them to that guest. Also good luck remembering that each time you create a new task, you again have to manually share it.

“Aw shucks. So what’s your solution?”

An API integration! A great example is once again, a workspace with Tasks related to Projects that is connected to an integration that: for each Task a) being created in Tasks database b) being edited in Tasks database, will:

• Check if there already exists a “client-visible” database, and:
• if it does, it will create a clone Task and parse in its client-synced fields to the already-existing clone database (along with said task’s body)
• if it doesn’t, it will;
• Create the clone database
• create a clone Task and parse in its client-synced fields to the already-existing clone database (along with said task’s body).

That way, you can both have the flexibility of Tasks related to Projects, and a peace of mind when sharing individual Projects to workspace guests - by only sharing a “client-visible” Project clone that only contains Tasks of that very Project and nothing more. This way, you save some money on unnecessary Workspace Members in a long run while also making sure your Workspace Guests only see what they need to see - nothing more, nothing less.

I don’t want to make this any longer - but this article should have successfully visualized to you how robust and easy to use can automation-powered Notion workspaces be.

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