What Notion Calendar Teaches Us About UX, Trade-offs and Product Strategy

by Vera Tay • 9 October 2025

Back in 2024, we recommended Notion as a note-taking and productivity app. As a Notion enthusiast, I think Notion deserves more time in the spotlight. And what better way to do that than dedicate an entire article to it?

A confession: despite being a self-proclaimed Notion nerd, I am a little late to the Notion party. When Notion Calendar released over a year ago, I did not immediately jump on it. I was perfectly content with managing my personal schedule using the Calendar View in flagship Notion.

It was only in Week 0 that I faced the reality that homework, assignments and tests were going to be a thing again. I figured that I should probably get myself organised for school, and reflexively conjured up a new Notion database to track everything.

My school database tracks everything—lectures, homework, finals dates and more! P.S. if you’re wondering why this database is so colourful, it’s the conditional colours feature, which went live in July 2025.

When I had set everything up, I realised I wanted a way to combine the records from both my personal and school databases in a single view, so that I could see my complete schedule at a glance. To my dismay, this was not possible in Notion despite my persistent tinkering. Then a flash of memory: could Notion Calendar do this?

As it turns out, Notion Calendar was built to do exactly that.

One month in, Notion Calendar has earned a permanent place on my desktop taskbar. Here’s what I think of it so far, through the lens of Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics:

What I Like

[Aesthetic and Minimalist Design] Clean and Streamlined Layout

Let’s start with the obvious: Notion Calendar is just as pretty as the original product. A similar pastel colour palette is used to denote the different databases, and fonts used are consistent with flagship Notion. Although the two apps display information differently, the overall design language is maintained across the products. I love that I now have a calendar app that is still distinctly Notion-esque in terms of visuals.

Here’s a peek at what Notion Calendar looks like when I first open it: purple for personal to-dos, and blue for school-related events.

[Flexibility and Efficiency of Use] Highly Customisable Views

One unexpected but very useful feature is the sheer flexibility in how I view my calendar events. I can quickly toggle between daily, weekly and monthly views with a quick key press:

On top of that, I can also specify any number of days (fewer than 31) to be displayed as columns:

This comes in handy when I want to compare two dates that are not within a week of each other, or compare two weeks side-by-side—the possibilities are endless.

Shortcomings

[Error Prevention/User Control and Freedom] Lack of Undo/Redo Support

Interestingly, Notion Calendar does not seem to have robust support for undo and redo. Upon “accidentally” changing the timing of an existing event by dragging the bottom of its block, pressing Ctrl + Z did not revert the change. There are also no persistent undo/redo buttons to be found on the user interface. This felt unintuitive because I already have a habit of pressing Ctrl + Z to undo any unintended actions in flagship Notion.

For more critical mistakes such as deleting an event, pressing Ctrl + Z still does not do anything, but a snackbar pops up, informing me of the deletion as well as providing an Undo button.

Conversely, if an event was unintentionally created, the user can quickly abort the action by clicking anywhere else on the calendar.

Upon further investigation of the available keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl + Z is indeed supported, but it only works when editing text fields.

[Consistency and Standards] Lack of ability to duplicate events

This has been a concern of mine ever since I started using Notion itself. Now that Notion has a specialised calendar product, I think the ability to mass duplicate events has become a critically missing feature: think weekly meetings, lectures, quiz due dates. Implementing bulk duplication would be a big leap for Notion Calendar in getting up to par with its competitors.

Trade-offs and Assumptions

The above strengths and shortcomings beg the question: what exactly did the Notion team choose to prioritise when building the Notion Calendar MVP?

It seems odd that for all its strengths in data and scheduling visualisation, basic features like event duplication are missing in a calendar app. These are clues that point to what the product roadmap for Notion Calendar might look like: Notion Calendar might never have been intended to be the most powerful calendar app out there. Instead, it looks like a sidekick for flagship Notion, filling in the gaps for Notion without overcrowding the original product with new features.

This also aligns with the original premise for the app: calendar events are pulled from databases in flagship Notion. As a user, to maximise your use of the calendar app, you would need to be familiar with the concept of databases within Notion.

We can further conclude that the Notion team might be assuming Notion Calendar users are, in fact, existing users of Notion. In other words, Notion Calendar is targeted at enhancing the product experience for Notion users, rather than introducing a new calendar solution for the wider market. This is clear from the fact that the Notion Calendar MVP has a strong focus on expanding the capabilities of existing databases from flagship Notion.

Therefore, it’s not that Notion Calendar isn’t meeting the basic needs of new users looking for a calendar app: instead, the Notion team is trying to produce a solution to existing users’ pain points.

Bottom line

Despite its UX pitfalls, I am still a happy Notion Calendar user because it addressed a real need that I had, that is, to see my personal and professional schedules in one place without leaving the Notion ecosystem. Notion Calendar did exactly that by augmenting how I view my databases. Because this requirement was so fundamental to my use of Notion Calendar, I am able to look past its imperfections and hope that future iterations of the product will resolve my other concerns one by one.

Good UI/UX is what oils the gears of a usable product, but great products answer to users’ core needs. As a PM, the choice of whose needs you want to address is up to you. That’s certainly not an easy decision: given limited time and manpower, addressing one group’s needs means potentially compromising another’s. However, these trade-offs shouldn’t be viewed as losses; instead, each choice you make helps to shape the eventual identity and long-term vision of your product.

About the Author

#93: Vera Tay

As a freshman studying Business Analytics, Vera joins NUS Product Club as a Publicity Executive, specialising in writing blog articles on product management. Prior to the commencement of her undergraduate studies, Vera previously completed a product internship at Lexagle - a rising legal-tech startup that specialises in contract management. She was also previously the captain of her school’s touch rugby team in Raffles Institution.

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