Setting up Notion as a personal CRM (and when it stops working)
Notion can work as a personal CRM if you set it up right. Here's the structure that actually holds up, and the point where maintaining it turns into a chore.
Using Notion as a personal CRM for contacts is one of the most common Notion templates out there, for good reason: you already have the databases, you pay nothing extra, and you can build every field exactly the way you want it. Before we get to where it struggles, here is a setup that survives past the first two weeks. If you are trying a personal CRM for the first time, this is a reasonable place to start before paying for a finished product.
The setup that actually holds up
Most Notion CRM templates do not fail because a field is missing. They fail because nobody planned for how to track relationships between people or how to keep the whole thing maintained over time. These six steps build both in from the start.
- 1
Create a "People" database
The core table. Fields: name, photo, email, phone, birthday (date), relationship type as a select (friend, family, colleague, mentor, acquaintance), how you met as text, and tags as a multi-select for anything that cuts across the other fields, hobby, city, shared employer.
- 2
Add an "Interactions" database for the contact log
A second database with a relation back to People. Fields: date, a note on what happened or what you talked about, and channel as a select (call, meetup, message, email). Each entry here is a row, not a replacement for the person itself, which keeps the People database from getting cluttered.
- 3
Build "last contacted" with a rollup and a formula
On the People database, add a rollup field over the Interactions relation that pulls the latest date using the "latest date" aggregation. Next to it, add a formula field that calculates the days since today (
dateBetween(now(), prop("Last Contact"), "days")). Without this field you never actually know who is going cold, only who was entered most recently. - 4
Set up views for daily use
At least three: a board view grouped by relationship type, a table view sorted by days since last contact, so the coldest connections sit at the top, and a filtered view showing only birthdays in the next 30 days. That last one needs another formula, because Notion date fields cannot be filtered by month and day directly.
- 5
Model relationships between people
For "who knows whom" you need a third database with two relations to People (Person A, Person B) and a relationship type field (knows, works with, related to, introduced by). This works, but it is pure manual labor: every connection needs its own row, and Notion does not render any of it as a graph, just another table you have to click through.
- 6
Set up follow-ups and reminders
Notion will not remind you of anything on its own. The usual workaround: a "next contact planned" date field plus a filtered view showing overdue entries, paired with the per-row reminder notifications built into Notion. That holds up for a while, as long as you stay disciplined and actually open the view on a regular basis.
Where the template tips over
To be honest, this setup works well for twenty or thirty close contacts you would remember anyway. It starts to crack once three things happen at once. First, there is no contact sync: if someone changes their phone number, you will not know, you have to notice and update it by hand. Second, nothing surfaces itself. The filtered view from step six only shows who is overdue when you open it, it does not call you.
Third, the relationship structure between people gets unwieldy fast. With fifty contacts and a few dozen connections between them, the two-relation table from step five stops being a structure and becomes a list nobody reads anymore. And fourth, there is no way to let an AI query that structure directly, the AI features built into Notion search text, but they do not understand the relationship model you spent hours building.
A Notion CRM works exactly as long as someone keeps maintaining it. And eventually, nobody does.
Notion setup or Umfeld
| Umfeld | Notion (self-built) | |
|---|---|---|
| Google Contacts sync | ||
| Actively flags cooling contacts | ||
| Relationship graph between people | table with workarounds only | |
| AI access via MCP | ||
| Upkeep | runs in the background | fully manual |
If your Notion setup ends up costing you more work than it gives back, Umfeld is the obvious next step: the same core idea, people, relationships, a contact log, but with Google sync instead of manual entry, a real relationship graph instead of a second table, and an MCP server that lets Claude or ChatGPT read your network directly. No rebuild needed, just a move.
FAQ
Is there a ready-made Notion personal CRM template to duplicate?
Can I move my Notion contacts to Umfeld?
Do I still have to maintain everything by hand with Umfeld?
Is Notion or a dedicated app like Umfeld the better choice?
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