How to set up visual progress bars to reflect yours tasks

Notion announced progress bars in their app today on their LinkedIn. This was actually something one of my clients asked about, and most of what I was able to help with was really complex solutions.

With this new view for number properties, this makes it easier for creative professionals to make their tasks more visual (or as visual as Notion can really support right now.) I’m going to show you how to set this up in your existing projects list to reflect your completed tasks.

Prerequisites

• “Projects” Database
• Related “Tasks” Database with Status Property

If you’re not sure how to create these, I help my clients to build this in Notion in my 1:1 coaching program, Creative Flow Academy.

Step 1: Create a Rollup property “Tasks Completed” in “Projects” Database.

Click the "..." at the top of the database to view the options for your database.

Click on "Properties"

Click on "+ New Property"

Name this, "Tasks Completed" and change the Type to "Rollup" and use the following settings

• Relation: “Tasks” (or whatever existing relation you want to use)
• Property: “Status”
• Calculate: "Percent per group"

As of creating this blog post, the progress bars are only available for number properties, so this helps make the number available for the next step.

Step 2: Create a new Formula property

Click the "..." at the top of the database to view the options for your database.

Click on "Properties"

Click on "+ New Property"

Name this "Progress" and change the Type to "Formula".

Click on Formula to edit and add this item in the bar

• prop(”Tasks Completed”)

Click on "Done". You can also change "Number format" to be one of the following:

• Number
• Bar or
• Ring

Something I noticed with these numbers is that the percentages do not round, so in some cases you’re left with a super long number that may not be desirable. I imagine that it might be where the tool is at currently, but if we look at the "Percent per group" formatting, this may happen as an update for Notion in the future.

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