How I Manage My Medium Content With Notion and Why You Should Too (Free Templates Included)

Story archive, content database, content calendar, top writer tags, and more — all in one place

Screenshot from notion.so by author

If you want to take your writing to the next level, it helps to manage and plan your posts.

I keep and maintain a sufficiently complex, yet simple to understand database of my Medium posts and other relevant information. I use the best all-in-one productivity tool for that, Notion.

Let me show you how! And stay till the end for your freebie Notion template.

Also, get the Substack app to read newsletter and discover new ones on the go. It’s a fantastic reading experience.

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Working with Notion

If you’ve never seen Notion, you might be surprised by its capabilities.

It’s an all-in-workplace that combines the functionality of note-taking and reminder apps, a writing tool, a project management platform, and a robust database architecture with powerful features like formulas, relations, and roll-ups.

Notion is a productivity beast. That makes it both super capable and highly complex. Luckily, you can decide how far you want to take it.

Oh, and Notion is free!

I have used Notion on and off for the past two years for managing my personal notes, but also for running my YouTube channels. A little later, I started managing my Medium content in it as well, and now, I write and plan my stories in Notion.

I created a simple database that houses my Medium posts with various important details. I also keep a top writer tag list in Notion.

Let’s have a look!

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The content database

My Medium content lives in a database. That database is simply called Writing. You start one by opening a Notion page and clicking on the + sign next to the cursor, or by typing /tabledatabase.

My Writing database is not Medium-exclusive, I list posts from various outlets here. But it is Medium-centric, because I tend to focus on Medium. Therefore, many categories I add to the database stem from a Medium context.

This is what the content database looks like.

Screenshot by author

It begins with the Name of the post. Each of these name entries serves as a Notion page. I can click on it and the respective page will open up with the text body and all relevant information in it.

Next to the name, I created multiple columns with relevant data points like Status, Publishing Date, Tags, Platform, Link, and more.

Let’s break this done a little further!

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Medium-relevant columns

Since this database serves as a general hub for all my writing, the first column I created in addition to the name was the Platform column.

Platform is a tag selection property, meaning I can choose from a set of created tags (or create a new one on the fly). Only one can be selected at the time if you pick the Select option in Notion.

If you need more, there’s also the Multi-select property. I went with Multi-select, because I might post the same story on two (or more) platforms, like Medium and Simily, or Medium and NewsBreak.

Next, I have a Status column. This is another Multiselect property which houses options like Published, Submitted, Draft, or Idea. I think these categories are self-explanatory and go well with Medium’s structure.

Other columns include Publication (where the story is published on Medium), a list of Tags as another Multiselect property, the Published column with the date of publishing, the Link to the post, and a section for Medium Lists where I could add all lists the post is a part of. I’m still adding this one to my database right now.

Important insights

Lastly, I want to emphasize two other columns I have created. These contain simple checkboxes, but you can utilize them in powerful ways.

It’s these two, Curated and Viral.

Screenshot by author

I just check off these two if a post gets curated and/or goes viral. This is useful for multiple reasons. Here are my main ones:

1. By filtering for Curated or Viral, you will see patterns in topic selection, chosen publication, added tags, and more.

2. You see the relation of Viral and Curated

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How I use the database

The pictures above show one way I use my Medium database. It’s the main view with all available information about each post-entry. There’s more.

The planner view

I created multiple views, though. Another significant view is the Content Calendar.

Screenshot by author

As the name suggests, this views shows a calendar with my published posts. Seeing the month full of stories gives you a great feel for your accomplishments, in my opinion. It’s also a fantastic way to plan future posts.

The pretty view

A third view I have set up is the Content Gallery. This is a secondary view (a more pleasant one if you ask me) of all my posts. It sports a card layout with the featured image of every post front and center.

The task view

Lastly, there is a Content To-Do view. This shows all my drafts and ideas for new Medium stories in a Kanban board style. It’s perfect for dragging and dropping posts from one status to another, i.e., from idea to draft.

I won’t show you my view here. But you’ll find it in the free template.

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Bonus

I have another database which is highly useful.

A complete list of Top Writer Tags with competition rates based on stories written for each tag, as well as the number of Medium writers for any given tag.

This Top Writer Tag list is useful for a few reasons:

1. You can easily check off the ones you’ve achieved on Medium

2. You can sort tags by competition rates from very low to very high to understand which ones are easier to get

3. For every new story you write, you can take a glance at this list to quickly find appropriate tags

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The bottom line

Once you transition from a casual writer who publishes here and there to a (semi-)professional blogger who writes and schedules multiple stories per day, it becomes essential to manage, structure, and organize your content.

Notion is a perfect and free tool to do that. Its powerful integration of multiple tools and workflows gives you seemingly endless options to write, plan, and archive your work.

Moreover, the powerful search functionality makes it easy to find specific details about one or multiple posts. It’s way quicker than searching or going through your stats and story pages on Medium. Most importantly, filtering certain aspects gives you deep insights into your progress.

Get the freebie

If you’d like to try Notion, I’m glad to share my free Medium Content template. You can view this template and copy (duplicate) it to your Notion workspace to make changes. Likewise, try the Top Writer Tag List template.

You’ll find both templates for free in my Gumroad store here. If you want, you can pay a small amount of your choice. Thank you a million times if you do so!

Leave a rating if you like the templates. Comment down below if you have questions! Click on the following image to get to my Gumroad store.

Medium Content Planner on Gumroad