Clearing up your Notion sidebar: A Notion consultant’s guide to navigating with clarity

Clearing up your Notion sidebar: A Notion consultant’s guide to navigating with clarity

By
Roxana RodriguezRoxana Rodriguez
Category
Building in NotionBuilding in Notion
Publish
July 5, 2025

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Let’s talk about the most underrated real estate in your Notion workspace: the sidebar.

Over the last four years, I’ve been neck-deep in Notion builds, refactoring messy team setups, designing scalable knowledge systems, and yes, cleaning up countless sidebars that look like digital junk drawers.

Your Notion sidebar is like the hallway of your workspace. If it’s cluttered, confusing, or crammed with stuff that doesn’t belong there, no one wants to walk down it—let alone find what they need.

A clean sidebar doesn’t just look better. It reduces friction. It gives your team a mental exhale before diving into deep work. Think of it as the interface for how your team thinks.

Start with a philosophy: Less is more

There’s no universal right way to organize your sidebar, but there are definitely wrong ones. If your entire company’s knowledge architecture is visible at once, you’re doing too much.

Instead, structure your sidebar like a tree:

  • Clean trunk
  • Clear branches
  • Enough leaves

1. Define your sidebar zones

First, decide what belongs in your General Team Space vs. what needs to live in Team Spaces

General Team Space should only contain:

  • Companywide Resources (e.g., “Company Home,” “Benefits,” “Onboarding”)
  • Top-level Team or Org Pages (e.g., “Marketing Home,” “Engineering Home”)

What doesn’t belong:

  • Subteams (“Infrastructure Engineering”) → Nest these under their parent pages.
  • Temporary Projects
  • Personal Pages, Untitled Docs, or anything with your intern’s name in the title.
From my work with startups to scale-ups, I’ve found that every bloated sidebar is just a result of decisions no one wanted to make. So start making them.

2. Audit what’s there

Here’s your cleanup checklist:

  • Use Page Analytics to spot stale pages (anything untouched in a year? Probably toast.)
  • Search “Untitled” and either delete or rename
  • Create a Sidebar Inbox—a holding zone for stray pages while you clean house
For clients, I often run this cleanup with team leads or ops managers. If you’re not sure who owns a doc, toss it in the inbox and tag them. It's Notion’s version of “lost and found.”

3. Reorganize by type

High-level pages that stay in the sidebar:

  • Team or org homepages
  • Shared databases (Projects, Tasks, OKRs)
  • Frequently used dashboards

Pages to move:

  • Personal meeting notes → Make them private
  • Team-specific content → Move into Team Spaces
  • Old wikis or docs → Archive or sunset with a note
Rule of thumb: if the page is only useful to five people, it doesn’t need to be front and center.

4. Structure within team spaces

In team-specific sidebars, include:

  • Sub-teams (nested where appropriate)
  • Project spaces
  • Databases for tasks, roadmaps, resources

This allows for deep focus within teams, without polluting the global sidebar. It’s a balance between transparency and cognitive load.

Also: communicate. When you move or rename things, let teams know.

Links and bookmarks won’t break, but context can get fuzzy fast.

5. Visual polish (Optional)

You’d be surprised what a splash of color can do.

  • Color-code team spaces for easier visual scanning
  • Maintain naming consistency (e.g., “Team Home,” not “Team HQ” in one area and “Team Base” in another)
  • Avoid redundancy—no page should appear in multiple top-level positions

The final result should be a sidebar where users can locate key information quickly, with a clear sense of structure and categorization.

6. Sidebar Etiquette

Do:

  • Keep naming conventions consistent (“Home” vs “HQ” vs “Dashboard”)
  • Group similar pages
  • Review quarterly

Don’t:

  • Leave docs untitled
  • Let the sidebar become a parking lot for everything
  • Avoid difficult decisions because you don’t want to “offend” someone by moving their page

Cleaning up the sidebar is not a one-person job. Coordinate with workspace owners, team leads, and stakeholders. Review together, establish norms, and revisit periodically.

There’s no perfect structure. But there is a principle worth following: Less is more. A sidebar should invite users into a well-considered system—not overwhelm them with every piece of content the organization has ever created.

Order supports momentum. And a well-structured sidebar is the quiet enabler of productive teams.

Ready to clean up your sidebar?

At Notion Flows, we’ve been helping teams streamline their Notion workspaces for years, cleaning sidebars, building scalable systems, and making sure everyone knows exactly where to find what they need.

If your sidebar feels cluttered, inconsistent, or simply overwhelming, we can help. Whether you're looking for a light audit or a full structural overhaul,

Book a call with us, and let’s take a look together.

Sometimes all it takes is a fresh perspective 😉