The Setting in Notion That Keeps Breaking Daily Planning

1. Daily planning setups keep breaking with recurring templates

The first time I noticed it, I thought I forgot to hit the button. You know the one — that friendly little “+ New” in a Notion database calendar that should spin up today’s to-do list like clockwork. But a few days in, I realized: my supposedly recurring planning template was silently failing. Multiple entries missing across the week. Just… not there. Every morning I had to re-click and re-load it manually.

The culprit? Notion does not auto-generate recurring pages natively like some people assume. Recurring templates in Notion aren’t natively automated — they only show up when you manually create a new page, and even then, only if you select the right view or template. And they cling to whatever context you last used. So if yesterday you clicked a different template or changed the default one per database — congrats, that preference sticks until changed manually.

On a team dashboard I built last month, someone flipped the default template to one with weekly structure at the end of the day. Next morning, I clicked “+ New” expecting a simple checklist, and got a novel-length weekly review format… twice.

Aha moment: I finally spotted in the database settings that Notion only switches active templates when you manually select them again. So automations built on the assumption of “repeat the last setup” often pull the wrong structure. If you’re like me and build with Zapier or Make, this gets messy fast.

2. Autofill date filters break when using multiple time zones

We had three people planning “today’s priorities” on one shared calendar — until one day, half the team couldn’t see entries on mobile. They’d open Notion in the morning and it was blank. The calendar was visible, the database looked fine, but events for the day just didn’t show. This didn’t happen in the browser.

The problem? Notion’s date filter logic is based on the local device time, not the user time zone set in account. And that causes chaos when pairing filters like Date is today.

Try this:

• Set up a daily planner database with a date field
• Create a calendar view filtered for Date is today
• Have a team member in Europe and one in the US access it from different devices

You’ll see one person’s view start “today” earlier or later depending on local device settings, even if both are on Notion’s web app.

Undocumented quirk: This gets worse if a mobile device sets its time zone via GPS — entries from the evening before or early morning may vanish from view or randomly hop between days across devices.

After wasting an hour in team Slack trying to figure out “why are today’s check-ins empty,” we manually added an unfiltered view just to counteract this.

3. Checkbox fields reset after duplicating templates with synced blocks

This is where things get dicey if you’re trying to reuse actual planning blockers or routines with synced references. In my sprint planner, I had a synced block to a company-wide reading list. Every template I used for daily planning would include a task like “Spend 15–20 min reading from synced block.” Checkbox next to it. Straightforward, right?

Hit duplicate on that planner template? Notion leaves the checkbox state from whatever it was last clicked as — but only some of the time.

I ended up with multiple days marked completed before I’d even checked anything. The team assumed I’d done the work. I hadn’t. It wasn’t even Tuesday yet.

Behavioral bug: This isn’t true for all checkbox fields — only ones inside synced blocks used within templates that get reused across days. If the block was checked before for any user, then duplicated via template by someone else, the state sticks.

There’s no visible warning for this. You only notice when daily logs look wrongly finished.

4. Notion reminders do not re-trigger on recurring tasks

One Monday morning, I hit the weekly reset. Notion template for the week? Check. Planning time blocked on calendar? Check. Recurring task entries with built-in reminders? Double check. Except I never got most of the reminders. Silent fails. Only a few fired.

Turns out, Notion’s built-in reminders (the “remind” function tied to dates) only fire the first time that entry exists. Duplicate the task to next week? Reminder doesn’t fire again unless you edit and re-save the date field manually.

Here’s the behavior I tested:

• Create a To Do item with a “Today 10:00am” date + reminder
• Duplicate it next week using a template
• Set the date to “Next Monday 10am”
• Leave the reminder untouched — visually, it still says “At time of event”

Nada. No ping. Not on desktop, not on mobile. Once I actually clicked into the date — even without changing anything — it reattached the reminder properly. But I had to do that for every single duplicated task.

Dead giveaway: The reminder logic detects interaction at edit time, not copy. It doesn’t matter that the date is technically in the future and visible. It expects you to “touch” it.

5. Daily rollup tables silently include unrelated records without filtering

I built a master dashboard to sync and summarize priorities across days. Rollup tables — great power, zero guardrails. Here’s what happened:

Each day had a list of tasks tied to a unique Day ID. My rollup said, “Show total completed tasks where related Day ID is this day.” Worked fine Monday through Wednesday. Thursday started ballooning. The count said 14, even though only 3 items showed in the linked table view.

Looking closer, some older completed tasks — from totally unrelated days — were being included in the rollup result… but weren’t appearing anywhere else.

Hidden edge case: If you’re using a relation property where multiple filters are active depending on the view context, the rollup might pull data beyond what’s filtered unless the relation itself is pre-filtered inside the source database. I had to explicitly lock the relation property in-place using a filtered linked DB, not just rely on filtered views.

The Notion UI never warns you. Even worse, the rendered rollup value seems right until the math starts to not add up — that’s what flagged it. Could easily go unnoticed for weeks.

6. Viewing templates on mobile resets your default desktop template

This one broke me mid-commute. I opened Notion on mobile to look at a planning template I’d used the day before. Didn’t make changes. Just skimmed the checklists. About an hour later, on desktop, I went to create the next day’s planner via “+ New” and… it loaded the wrong template. I hadn’t touched the template list. Just viewed it.

Confirmed behavior: If you open a record created from a secondary template on mobile, Notion silently makes that your new default template for that database — even if you didn’t select it while creating a new entry. No confirmation, no flag.

I later tested this on a shared planner with three templates:

• Daily Standup
• Sprint Planning
• Offsite Agenda

Simply tapping a Sprint Planning page (without even hitting Edit) made it stick as default for new entries.

Avoid this chaos: On databases you rely on for repeat behavior, set only one template. Or manually reselect the right one after every mobile interaction unless you want it to shift.

7. Synced database views multiply API zap triggers unnecessarily

Last one was confusing because it wasn’t even a Notion problem — just a weird combo of platform features. I set up a Notion planning page that included embedded views of the same Tasks database across different sections: today, this week, blocked, done. Each view filtered differently.

Then I wired a simple Zap: “When a new item is created in this database, send to Slack.” The same entry got sent twice. Then three times. Then once. No pattern.

Key problem: Notion’s API doesn’t recognize filtered views, only core database-level changes. Zapier, however, re-triggers for every embedded view the database is part of — especially if those views update and re-render per filter refreshes triggered by Notion UI activity (like changing sorting or filter state).

Side effect? An entry created in a synced block on a dashboard with multiple views of the same database might trigger multiple API events via Zapier, depending on timing.

Only fix I found: centralize all creation triggers from a single unfiltered view in a private backend DB. Then do relation syncing to expose those records elsewhere.