Running your show prep in Notion: how to do it well, and where it stops

I ran my show prep in Notion for a couple of years. I built the database, I made the templates, I had views for everything. Some of it was genuinely better than what most stations hand their hosts, and I still think a jock with Notion and a bit of discipline is ahead of a jock with a folder of bookmarks and a Word document.

So this isn’t a piece about Notion being bad at this. It’s a piece about building it properly, and then about the specific place it stops — which took me two years to be honest with myself about, and has nothing to do with Notion being a bad tool.

Why radio people reach for it

The instinct is right. Show prep is a pile of small things that need to be sorted, kept, found again and reused, and that’s precisely what a database with views is for. Notion gives you:

One place instead of an inbox, a Word document, three tabs and a notebook.
Structure you choose. A prep item has a length, a section, a source and a date, and you can say so.
It’s yours. Nobody can take it away or reprice it.
It’s free for one person, which matters when your station’s software budget is a number somebody says out loud with a wince.

If you’re going to do it, do it like this.

The setup that actually works

One database, not seven

The commonest mistake is a database per section — Weird News, Sports, Phone Topics — and it feels organized for about a month. Then you can’t see the whole morning in one list, you can’t move an item between sections without retyping it, and half your views only exist to reassemble what you split up.

One database, called something like Prep Items. Everything is a row.

The properties that earn their place

Six, and I would fight for all of them:

Property	Type	Why
Item	Title	The line as you’d say it, not a headline you’d have to rewrite on air.
Section	Select	Rundown, Off the Rails, Phone Topic, Setup, Sports — your own clock, your own names.
Read time	Number	Seconds. The single most useful field and the one everybody leaves out.
Status	Select	Idea → Ready → Used. Three values. Not five.
Air date	Date	When it ran, or when it’s meant to.
Sources	URL / Text	Two of them, or it doesn’t run.

Two more worth having if you’ll keep them up: Market (local / national), and Evergreen as a checkbox — the stuff that doesn’t rot is the stuff that saves you on the bad Thursday.

The four views, and only four

Today — filter Air date is Today, group by Section. This is your sheet.
The bank — Status is Ready, Air date is empty. This is what you raid when the day falls apart, and it’s the whole reason to do any of this.
Evergreen — checkbox is checked, sorted by least recently used. Games, questions, calendar bits.
Aired — Status is Used, sorted newest. Your archive, and your defense when somebody rings about something you said.

Anything past four views is a view you built once and never opened again.

The daily template

Make a template on the database that stamps out a day: one page per air date, with a linked view of Today, a heading per break, and empty toggles for the things you always do — weather line, contest mention, the tease into the next quarter hour. Duplicating a good template at 4:50am is a different experience from opening an empty page at 4:50am.

The one habit that makes it work

Write the read time in. Not “short”. Seconds.

At 150 words a minute — ordinary broadcast delivery — that’s about 25 words in ten seconds, 75 in thirty, 225 in a ninety-second break. If you’d rather not count words, paste the copy into this and it’ll tell you, free and without an account.

Do that for a fortnight and you’ll stop guessing what fits. It’s the single highest-return habit in prep, in any system, and it’s the one thing a general tool will never do for you.

Where it stops

Here’s the honest part, and none of it’s a criticism of Notion. It’s a document tool being asked to be a radio tool.

1. It doesn’t know how long anything takes

You can add a Read time property. You can’t make Notion fill it in, and you can’t make it total a break for you as you assemble it. So either you type a number into every row for the rest of your career, or the field quietly goes empty and you’re back to guessing — which is how a ninety-second break becomes two minutes ten and the log eats the tease.

This is the failure I never solved in two years, and I tried.

2. It isn’t reading copy

A Notion page at 5:55am is 16-point text in a narrow column with a sidebar down the left, on a screen at arm’s length in a dim studio. You can zoom the browser. You can hide the sidebar. It’s still a document you’re decoding rather than copy you’re reading, and you can hear the difference — the little stumble where somebody’s eye lost the line.

The fix inside Notion is real but partial: make a full-width page, use Heading 2 for anything you actually read aloud, and put a blank line between every sentence. It gets you most of the way. It doesn’t get you to broadcast-sized type that scrolls.

3. Your sourcing rots quietly

You paste two links into a row on Tuesday. By the time you use the item three weeks later, one has moved and neither has a date on it, and you won’t check — nobody checks a link they pasted themselves. That’s fine right up until the morning the story turned out to have been corrected, and it’s your name on it, not the tool’s.

The partial fix: paste the outlet name and the publication date as text next to the URL, always. A dead link with “AP, 14 Aug” beside it’s still evidence. A bare URL isn’t.

4. The blank page is still blank

This is the big one, and it isn’t a feature gap — it’s the whole job.

Notion is a container. It holds what you put in it beautifully and it’ll never put anything in it. So the forty minutes of finding, reading, checking and rewriting still happens, every single day, before your actual shift starts. On a good week that’s a routine. On the week with a sales meeting, a remote and a sick kid, it’s the thing that gets skipped — and a skipped prep day isn’t a worse show, it’s a show where something goes on the air that nobody checked.

So should you leave it?

If prep already takes you fifteen minutes because your bank is deep and your system is good — no. Genuinely. You’ve built the thing this article is about and you should keep it.

If you’re spending forty minutes a day filling a container, the question isn’t Notion versus anything. It’s whether that forty minutes is the part of your job you want back.

What we did about it

ShowPrepPro is the same shape of idea — sections, read times, a bank, an archive — with the two things a general tool structurally can’t have. It fills itself: 21 sections built overnight, every factual item with its sources linked and dated on the item, two independent ones wherever they exist. And it’s built to be read on the air: broadcast-sized reading copy that holds still while you read it, and a break builder that counts your clock as you pick.

It also does the thing I never managed to bolt onto Notion — it records what you actually said, off your own stream, and files the clip beside the script.

$19 a month, 14 days free, no card. And if you’ve a Notion setup you love, the read-time habit is the part worth stealing whether or not you ever look at ours.