Why starting feels harder than it should
Every time I sit down to write something in Notion, I get caught in the same loop: open a new page, type a hesitant title, stare blankly at the blinking cursor, question my existence, then bail to check email. Or YouTube. Or attempt to sort my already-too-many dashboards into… more dashboards. Starting a blog post shouldn’t be this hard, right? You’ve got the ideas, the tools, the good intentions, all floating around your workspace somewhere. But when it comes time to commit words to screen, everything just… stalls.
This is where the two-minute rule (which I seriously underestimated until recently) actually kicked my butt into gear. The rule says: if something will take less than two minutes, just do it right now. It sounds kind of suspiciously simple, but if you weaponize it properly inside Notion, it can turn a blank page into an actual blog post scaffold without the mental friction.
I started testing this by changing one thing: instead of opening Notion and going into “writer mode” (which, let’s be honest, is when I reorganize my tags for 45 minutes), I would open a page, set a two-minute timer, and type whatever came to mind about the blog’s topic. That’s it. No structure, no sections, no formatting. My only rule: fingers keep moving until the timer ends. The first few tries were garbage. Like rambling-about-coffee-level garbage. But by the third or fourth attempt, I always found some weird sentence or phrasing that actually had a spark. And that spark became the meat of what I was really trying to say 🙂
Setting up a two minute page in Notion
Okay, here’s how I set mine up (and I redid this like four times because the first version kept breaking my sidebar filter, yay).
First, in Notion, create a simple database where each entry is a potential blog post. Just call it something like “Blog Drafts”. Add a few basic properties:
– Title (duh)
– Tags (optional but nice when searching later)
– Status (Idea, Draft, Edited, Ready, etc.)
– Word Count (I use a formula property to auto-estimate this — bonus tip later)
Now inside each database entry/page, insert a template button. (Yes, that thing buried halfway down the block options menu that most people ignore.) Title it “Two Minute Start” and have it create a text block that just says:
> ⏱ Two-minute sprint active: Write whatever you’re thinking about. No edits. No stopping. Go.
That’s it. Every time I click that button, I trigger a two-minute Pomodoro timer on my phone and just dump words. No bullet lists, no bolding, no switching blocks. Just stick with the default text and type.
If your Notion is on dark mode or you have page icons everywhere (like I do because I’m apparently a raccoon for visual clutter), this makes it pretty easy to visually catch which drafts have been started, and which are empty craters of ambition.
Transforming messy blurts into actual blogs
Let’s say you’ve done the two-minute thing. You now have a few mini rants, straighforward outlines, or half-dead metaphors sitting in your blog database. The fun part — and I say “fun” with full understanding that editing your own writing is more emotionally cruel than watching video of yourself talking — is turning this raw mess into real structure.
What I personally do is create another template inside that same Notion database called “Blog Skeleton.” It automatically inserts this structure:
– Intro (What’s the actual problem I’m solving?)
– Section Blocks (I usually start with three or four H2s; titles don’t matter yet)
– Closing moment (sometimes this is just a random line that sounds good, sometimes it’s a joke or callback)
Now I go back to the blurt from the two-minute sprint and do quick highlighting. Anything that sounds remotely like an idea, an opinion, or actual knowledge gets cut and pasted into one of the section placeholders. If I had a thought like “I hate how Airtable forms load slowly on mobile,” I’ll drop that into a section about form tools.
One trick I use often is searching my blurt with the command palette (Cmd+P on Mac or Ctrl+P on PC) for any cursing. Oddly enough, my strongest opinions are often flagged by finding the first sentence that contains a swear word. Not proud of it, but hey — intensity = passion sometimes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What to do when nothing comes out
Some days the sprint timer ends and I’ve written literally “I don’t want to do this today” six times in a row. That’s fine. The point is to create a habit of writing *through* the block, not outsmarting it. If you’re starting totally empty, here are four prompts I keep in an inline toggle list at the top of my “Blog Drafts” database:
1. What did I Google at 2am this week?
2. What’s one tool I used today?
3. What annoyed me that shouldn’t have been hard?
4. What question has someone asked me in DMs more than once?
If I still can’t get going, I do what I self-deprecatingly call a “text dump roll-over.” Basically, I open an existing blog post — even one I finished a while ago — duplicate the page, delete all the content, then give myself two minutes to see if anything about that same topic comes out differently now. New angle, new story, new let’s-try-this-again energy.
Sometimes that leads to reworking the original post entirely. Sometimes it dies. Either way, it neutralizes the fear of starting anew. Like, who cares if it stinks — it’s just a duplicate. Like an artist sketching over the same outline again with a new pencil.
Hooking this up to reminders or calendar
I initially tried connecting this whole Notion blog-factory loosely with Google Calendar using Zapier. Then I broke it. Then I fixed it. And then it broke again two weeks later after an update changed event data formats 🙃
Anyway, here’s what worked before it died:
I had a recurring calendar event called “Blog Sprint” every other day at 9:30am. In Zapier, I used that event starting trigger to run a simple workflow:
– **Check if there’s an empty blog draft**
– **If none, create one titled with today’s date**
– **Send me an email with the Notion link + 2-minute rule prompt**
It worked great for reminding me to write, especially since I always check email (even when I shouldn’t). The issue I ran into was Notion recently changed how they handle linked databases in API outputs, and suddenly Zapier was sending me the parent database instead of the specific draft link. So now it just drops me on the wrong page unless I manually add the page ID parsing back in.
I’m not bitter. Just… tired 😛
Some optional tweaks if you wanna go deeper
I also tried layering in a few extras with varying success — not necessary, but if you’re the type that likes upgrades:
**Daily Rolling Task View:**
Create a database view inside a dashboard page that filters blog drafts by “Created Today” or status = “Idea.” You can even color-code them so fresh drafts stand out. If you use this as your home dashboard, it nudges you to do a sprint the moment you open Notion.
**Characters or Word Count Warning:**
I hated that Notion doesn’t have a native word counter per block section, so I jerry-rigged a formula using the “Length” function that kinda estimates it off the character count of the title and first text block. It’s goofy, but it gave me a red flag when a post draft started ballooning way past what I had energy to edit.
**Publically Shared Writing Area:**
I use a separate “Public WIP” (work-in-progress) database where I can drag finished drafts and have them auto-publish via Super or Potion sites. Publishing straight out of Notion is risky and prone to weird rendering bugs, but for MVP writing or early feedback, it’s fast.
Keeping yourself from overengineering this
The giant temptation here is trying to automate the thing until it’s no longer writing. I’ve done it. I tried adding AI prompts to auto-summarize my two-minute thoughts. I tried scoring my drafts automatically based on how many H2s they had. I even had a version that tracked how many days passed between sprints. That killed it.
If writing is the goal, automating should only get you to the keyboard faster — not do the writing for you.
Every extra rule I added made it slightly harder for me to click in and just start. So the version I’m using now is dumb-simple: template button, two-minute timer, daily database. That’s it.