Three Notion Academy badges, and what they actually mean

We use Notion at Blue Horizon Labs the way most companies wish they used a workspace. Not as a junk drawer. As an operating system. The promise of it, when it is set up well, is that the company can hand a new client an instance and the work just runs. The reality, when it is set up poorly, is the same junk drawer they were already in.

I picked up three Notion Academy badges this spring. Essentials. Workflows. Advanced. There are more in the queue. The reason I am writing about them is not the badges themselves. It is what the curriculum forces you to think about.

Essentials taught me how to think about a database as a single source of truth, not as a place to put a list. Workflows taught me how to design templates and automations that compress repetitive work into one click. Advanced taught me how to use formulas, relations, and rollups to build a lightweight internal app instead of buying another piece of software.

What this means for clients is concrete. When BHL deploys Notion as part of an engagement, the result is not a pretty homepage with a few subpages. It is a set of databases that talk to each other. A CRM that rolls up to a pipeline view. A project tracker that surfaces what is actually blocked instead of what is loudly visible. An employee handbook that updates in one place and propagates to ten.

Most mid market businesses do not need an ERP. They need a workspace that respects how they actually work. Notion, configured well, is that workspace. The badges are the tradesperson signal that we know how to configure it well.

I am going to keep stacking them because the curriculum keeps teaching me things, and because it is one of the cheapest forms of compounding I know. Two hours of focused learning, a real test of the material, a piece of paper that says we did the work. The clients benefit from every one of them.

Tools matter. The hands holding them matter more.