I have recently written some guides that have covered pages within Notion recently, and it got me thinking about the Hierarchy of the pages within Notion. In this article, I’m going to share my thoughts with you in the hope that it clarifies my own thinking.
As you will soon discover, writing this article led me to discover Notion proved my initial thinking in this instance.
Let us start by explaining what I mean by Hierarchy.
What do I mean by Hierarchy?
A Hierarchy is also known as a parent and child relationship. If you were to draw a diagram of any Hierarchy, including your family, the resulting document would look like a family tree.
Hierarchy structures are used a lot in computing. One example of this is folders and subfolders within a file structure.
Hierarchy structures are used as it provides a system for storing data, making it easier to find the data again in the future.
Does Notion have a Hierarchy structure?
My initial reaction was when I asked myself if Notion had a Hierarchy structure? Was yes, it must have, as you can create pages within another page. Then I realised that my answer had to take Notion database tables into account.
Database tables are created inside a Notion page, and every record contained within that database table is really a Notion page.
As I thought this through, I realised that it is still a Hierarchy as the table containing the page is still within another page.
My initial layout for the articles is written in Notion. While carrying out the initial layout for this article, I realised that my weekly Journal displayed its location within the Notion Hierarchy structure.
The Hierarch structure for my Journal during the week I wrote this post was. “Weekly Dashboard / Weekly Journal /13/03/2022 – 19/03/2022” Weekly dashboard is the top-level page within Notion that contains the table Weekly journal, which is the second layer within the Hierarchy patch and the page title for that week Journal was 13/03/2022 – 19/03/2022.
Conclusion
Writing this article has helped me better understand how Notion works, and that should improve how I use Notion. I hope you are thinking the same.
You can find out more about Notion pages in my guide to Notion pages.
Last updated 27/05/2023
Hi and thanks for sharing this info on the hierarchy of notion pages. I found this page when searching for an answer to a conundrum – I wonder if you can help? The problem is one of navigation. When I am on a page in notion it helps me to know where I am in the ‘tree’. Our notion is quite large and my screen is small so the breadcrumb at the top is truncated. It would be really useful if there was a way I could automatically expand the tree structure on the left to show all the parent pages of the current page? Do you know if there is a way to do this??
Many thanks 🙂
Hi John
I’m not aware of any way you can expand the tree structure in that way.
Sorry that I couldn’t be more helpful
Sean