Notion, the popular productivity platform, is adding a calendar app the company says will eliminate much of the tedious clicking users of competing software are accustomed to.
“Even though digital calendars are kind of the main way we end up running our days, if we’re honest, there hasn’t really been a lot of innovation in it,” says Raphael Schaad, head of product for Notion Calendar. “Nothing really has happened there in the last decade or so.”
And while Notion Calendar—available as of Wednesday for Windows, Mac, and iOS, as well as on the web—offers many familiar features like event scheduling, RSVP management, and support for reserving resources like conference rooms, the software is designed to make all of these tasks quicker and more user-friendly than in competing apps. Keyboard shortcuts are also an option for those who find them faster than a mouse.
Events are easy to reschedule by dragging and dropping, a day’s schedule can be seen at a glance from a computer’s menu bar, and it’s possible to invite someone to select from one of several possible times for a meeting with just a few clicks and no need for external software, Schaad says.
Notion Calendar inherits many of its ideas from Cron, a Y Combinator-funded calendar software startup founded by Schaad and acquired by Notion in 2022. But the new app also naturally integrates with existing Notion features, making it easy to, say, create a Notion document to share with a meeting invite or block out time for important tasks on a Notion project management timeline before a deadline day is bogged down with meetings.
“Otherwise, the day happens and all the actual tasks that I have to get done that aren’t meetings aren’t done at the end of the day,” says Schaad.
Other kinds of files, and links to meeting rooms on videoconferencing software like Zoom, are easy to share too, and the software integrates directly with Google Calendar. Users can link multiple calendars, like a work calendar and a personal one, in order to see all their events at a glance and quickly block out time for scheduled personal events on a work calendar without necessarily sharing the details with coworkers.
