Running multiple projects simultaneously — consulting, a facilitation company, creative work, and AI side projects — while working remotely from Southeast Asia means operational complexity is a constant.
I co-run Become Inspired (a facilitation company working across 120 UK schools), manage freelance design and consulting work, and am building several AI-related projects, all while based across Bangkok, Vietnam, and Cambodia. For the first few years I used spreadsheets and increasingly frantic mental notes. What I actually needed was a system that was both comprehensive and low-friction to maintain — because a system you do not update is worse than no system.
Notion AI, properly configured, has become that system. Here is the exact setup.
The Pipeline Structure
My consulting pipeline in Notion is built around three interconnected databases:
1. Contacts — every person I have ever had a relevant professional conversation with. Properties include: company, role, last contact date, relationship status (prospect/active client/past client/referral source), and notes.
2. Opportunities — every potential engagement, from initial conversation to signed contract. Properties include: contact, status (exploring/proposed/negotiating/won/lost), estimated value, probability, expected start date, and associated proposal document.
3. Projects — every active and completed engagement. Properties include: client, status, key deliverables, deadline, invoicing status, and lessons learned.
These databases are linked — a Contact can have multiple Opportunities, an Opportunity becomes a Project when won. This relational structure means I can see the full history of a client relationship from a single view.
How Notion AI Integrates Into This
Notion AI is not a separate tool I add on top of the pipeline — it is embedded into the workflow. Here is how I use it specifically:
Summarising Long Client Communications
When I return from a period of focused work or travel and need to catch up on a client project, I use Notion AI to summarise the associated page (which contains all my notes, meeting outputs, and email threads pasted in). A 20-minute catch-up that previously required reading pages of notes is now a two-minute summary plus targeted re-reading of specific sections.
Drafting Proposals
My proposal template is a Notion template. When I start a new proposal, I provide Notion AI with:
- The brief summary from my Opportunities database
- Key notes from the discovery conversation
- The client's sector and any specific context
I ask it to draft the "scope and approach" section first — the section that requires the most tailored thinking and is hardest to start from a blank page. I then refine from that draft, adding specific methodology detail and the personal insight that only I can provide.
This takes a proposal that previously took half a day to draft to about two hours of focused work.
Writing Meeting Agendas and Follow-Up Emails
Before client meetings, I use Notion AI to generate an agenda based on the current project status and outstanding questions. After meetings, I paste in my rough notes and ask it to produce a structured summary with action items and owner assignment.
The structured follow-up email comes from that summary. Clients consistently comment on how clear and comprehensive my follow-up communications are. The AI helps me maintain that standard even when I am moving quickly between multiple engagements.
Pipeline Review and Prompts
Once a week, I have a recurring task to review the pipeline. I use Notion AI to ask: "Based on the current opportunities and their last-contact dates, which relationships need attention this week?" It scans the database and surfaces the contacts and opportunities that have gone quiet or are approaching key decision points.
This alone has prevented several relationships from going cold simply because I was deep in delivery work and lost track of where other conversations were.
What Notion AI Does Not Replace
Relationship intuition. Notion AI can tell me that I last contacted a prospect 30 days ago. It cannot tell me whether that prospect is ready to buy, whether the timing has changed, or what the right approach is to re-engage. That judgement is mine.
Complex financial modelling. For detailed project financial models, I use spreadsheets rather than Notion. Notion AI can help me think through structure, but the actual modelling stays in purpose-built tools.
Legal and compliance review. Contracts and compliance documents require legal review. Notion AI can help me draft initial language for discussion with my solicitor, but it does not replace that review.
The Setup Cost and Return
Setting up the databases and getting them properly linked takes a weekend — probably 8 to 10 hours of dedicated configuration. The ongoing maintenance is about 20 to 30 minutes per day of updating and reviewing.
The return: I can reliably manage 8 to 10 concurrent client relationships without things falling through gaps. Before this system, 5 was about the limit of what I could track reliably without anxiety about what I was missing.
FAQ
Q: Is Notion AI worth the extra cost over basic Notion? A: For a consulting business where proposal writing, documentation, and pipeline management are core activities, yes — the time savings on documentation alone justify the cost within the first month.
Q: Can I use a simpler tool like Trello or Asana instead? A: For basic project tracking, yes. But the relational database structure in Notion (contacts → opportunities → projects) and the AI integration for documentation and drafting are harder to replicate in simpler tools. If you are managing a multi-client consulting business, Notion's complexity is a feature, not a bug.
Q: How do I ensure client data in Notion is handled appropriately? A: Review Notion's data processing terms and ensure they are consistent with your client confidentiality obligations. For highly sensitive client information, consider whether cloud-based tools are appropriate. I store only non-sensitive operational notes in Notion — detailed deliverables live in client-specific environments.
Q: Does this work for agency businesses, not just solo consultants? A: The structure scales. For agencies, you would add a team-level layer — assigning projects to team members, tracking individual capacity — but the core pipeline structure is the same.
Q: What is the most important Notion AI feature for consulting work? A: For me, the summarisation capability. Being able to quickly re-establish context on a client project after a break or during parallel engagements is the single most valuable function in a busy consulting practice.