A project manager came to me with a clear goal: he builds Notion templates for the PM market, and he needed a resource management template as his next product. He already had two Google Sheets that worked — a planned-vs-actual hours tracker and a resource assignment matrix. He wanted both rebuilt in Notion as one connected system he could sell.
The brief sounded simple. The work wasn’t.
The Mess
The utilization sheet was a single wide grid. Four weeks of dates across the top, a P and an A column under each date, every team member down the left, and hours typed into every cell. Below the grid: planned work totals, unplanned work totals, project utilization %, team utilization %. All hand-calculated per day.
The assignment matrix was a different flavour of pain. Checkboxes in a 5-day grid showing which days each person was assigned to each project. Want to see next week? Copy the whole block, change the dates, start again. Want to know who’s free Thursday? Scan every row.
Both sheets worked for the PM who built them. Neither one scaled.
The Build
I made four design calls early that shaped the whole system.
One: Keep the manual input. The client told me directly that a PM entering hours is fine, that’s what they’re used to. I didn’t try to automate what didn’t need automating. The system asks for the same input the spreadsheet does, but makes that input faster and more organized. Respect the workflow the user already knows.
Two: Split one spreadsheet into two databases. The utilization tracker and the assignment matrix do different jobs. Utilization is about hours. Assignment is about who’s on what. In the spreadsheets they were forced together by the limits of a grid. In Notion they’re two connected databases, and each one gets the views it actually needs.
Three: Build a person-level dashboard. This was the unlock. In the spreadsheets, there was no easy way to answer “what is John doing right now.” You had to scan multiple sheets. I built a reusable dashboard template — one page per team member — that auto-pulls every utilization entry and every assignment tied to that person. The PM adds a new hire once, duplicates the template, and gets a full view of that person’s workload with zero extra setup.
Four: Make the home page the morning glance. Most Notion workspaces drop you into a database on open. A PM opening their resource tracker doesn’t want a database, they want an answer: is today okay? So the central dashboard carries two things — navigation to every core area on the left, and a live today card on the right showing planned vs actual, unplanned hours, team utilization, and project utilization. The first second of the PM’s morning already tells them if the day is on track.
The main utilization database is grouped by work type — Project Utilization and Other Tasks — so billable work and internal overhead stay visually separate. Five views handle every input and review scenario: Today, Today-All, Day-All, Day, and Input. The Input view auto-filters to today’s date so the PM isn’t scrolling to find the right row. Every entry has a Notes field for the project name or work context.
The Metrics hub rolls the same numbers into Today, This Week, and This Month cards — same data, three time windows. A day above 100% utilization flags overallocation without a single formula. The PM sees the week at a glance and catches overloaded Tuesdays before they turn into missed deadlines.
The assignment matrix was the trickiest call. The client wanted the 5-day checkbox layout preserved — that was non-negotiable, because it matches how PMs visually read assignment. But the spreadsheet version forced a new copy-paste block for every week. So I kept the checkbox matrix and placed it on a live calendar timeline. Each assignment is one person on one project for a date range, with day-level checkboxes sitting on the actual calendar. Five views handle every slicing angle: All, By Resource Person, By Project, This Week, This Month. Scroll horizontally to move through months. No copy-paste.
The Result
The client got a template that does everything his spreadsheets did, and more. Hours input is still manual — by design. But the data is sliceable now. A PM running a 20-person team can see individual workloads, project-level assignments, weekly utilization %, and monthly trends without rebuilding a single grid. The template is duplicatable, which is the point — he’s selling it.
The handoff ended where every good template project ends: with the client ready to package it, price it, and ship it to his own audience.
What I Learned
Resource management is where spreadsheets hit their hard ceiling fastest. A grid can hold the numbers but it can’t answer the second question — the one the PM actually asks after looking at the week. Notion’s job isn’t to replace the spreadsheet’s input method. It’s to give the same data multiple angles without touching the input. The moment you split one sheet into connected databases, every filter becomes a new view, and every new view becomes a new answer the PM couldn’t get before.