Notion Calendar: a new app to keep your schedule organized

Notion users have been asking for an integrated calendar system for years. Now, Notion is delivering: it’s launching Notion Calendar, a standalone app that integrates with all of your databases and notes in Notion. It’s yet another way Notion is attempting to be the only app your company needs to do pretty much everything.

If you’ve ever used Cron, the calendar app Notion acquired in 2022 and has been operating ever since, you basically already know the deal with Notion Calendar. It’s just a redesigned, Notion-ified version of the app. Cron was always a fast, simple, nice-looking calendar with some clever features like Calendly-style booking tools and a command bar you can use for quickly setting up recurring meetings and the like. One feature I particularly like: if you use multiple calendars, it’ll automatically block your work meetings on your personal calendar, and vice versa, so others can’t double-book you. It’s a total power user tool, but it’s a good calendar app.

The big new feature coming with the rebranding is Notion integration. If you or your company uses Notion, you’ll be able to create or link Notion documents inside a calendar invite. If you have a database filled with due dates, you can add that as a calendar to Notion Calendar. It sounds like a much better way to handle agendas and notes than sending them around before and after a meeting or hunting for them in your Slack. Putting everything in the calendar event is a good move.

The downside of Cron, and of Notion Calendar at launch, is that it doesn’t support all of the tools people actually use. The app is coming to Mac, Windows, and iOS at first, and Notion says Android is coming later. It also doesn’t support Outlook, which immediately means a huge percentage of Office-using businesses simply can’t use Notion Calendar. Like so many modern productivity tools, Cron was built for Mac- and iPhone-toting tech professionals, but that’s just not most businesspeople.

Notion in general is a pretty cross-platform app, though, so I’d expect it to start to support other platforms fairly soon. The company is on a mission to be effectively the only app your company needs to do business — it’s launching AI features, messaging and commenting tools, automated workflows, integrations with other apps, and much more. Calendar is a natural next step. Maybe next, Notion will try to kill email. Or presentation tools. Or maybe it’ll take on Excel to try to down the long-reigning productivity champion once and for all.