How to improve project collaboration with Notion AI

Team collaboration brings together different skills and perspectives to drive results. But once a project team is deep into a demanding build, keeping everyone aligned takes real coordination. Leaders know this, which is why many successful project teams rely on connected workspaces to stay on track. 

According to Notion internal survey data, 86 percent of Notion users manage projects at work. Among those teams, 60 percent document team-wide tasks or to-do lists, 58 percent share status updates, and 21 percent schedule using shared calendars.* Those habits show what modern project collaboration actually involves—and it’s more than just good intentions. 

To keep projects moving, you also need clear workflows and shared context where deliverables, decisions, and timelines stay visible as priorities shift.

Project management and project collaboration solve different problems. One creates structure, while the other keeps work moving inside it.

Here’s how they differ in practice:

• Project management focuses on project planning and control. It’s where you define project goals, create timelines, allocate resources, and set milestones. It also answers big-picture questions like, “What needs to happen?” “Who owns it?” and “When do we need to finish it?”

• Project collaboration concentrates on execution and coordination. It’s how team members share updates, give feedback, and solve problems as the work evolves. It also answers on-the-ground questions like, “What’s changing?” “What’s blocked?” and “What needs attention right now?”

Imagine a marketing team that’s running a multi-channel campaign. Project management sets the framework by mapping the project timeline, assigning owners, and tracking milestones across email, social, and paid channels. Project collaboration, on the other hand, happens as the work unfolds, such as when writers and designers review drafts, stakeholders comment on messaging, and the team adjusts as dependencies shift.

By bringing these two together, you can avoid the common trap: structure without collaboration slows you down and collaboration without structure creates noise. When both work in tandem, your plans stay clear and your execution speeds up.

Strong project collaboration changes how work flows. For instance, teams can spot blockers sooner, make decisions faster, and keep project progress visible without constant check-ins. This results in better project outcomes across the entire project lifecycle. Here are some examples:

Planning and tracking work together to help project teams move faster and produce better results—and data backs this up. According to Atlassian’s 2025 State of Teams, teams that work this way are 5.3 times more likely to produce high-quality work. Axios HQ’s 2024 State of Internal Communication report also highlights this kind of alignment as a major performance driver—85 percent of leaders believe a team’s understanding of their project goals directly impacts overall business performance.

Keeping goals, progress, and priorities visible is what makes that alignment possible. This visibility also helps your teams spot delays early, adjust quickly, and keep the overall project moving without waiting on missing context.

When information is scattered across tools and conversations, you’ll have to hunt for context before you can move forward. This slows down decision-making and leaves your team reacting to problems rather than solving them.

The scale of this digital hide-and-seek is massive—Atlassian’s 2025 report shows that Fortune 500 companies lose 2.4 billion hours every year to simply trying to find information. What’s worse is that 56 percent of workers feel that scheduling a meeting or asking a colleague is the only way to get the information they need. 

When team members share updates, feedback, and documentation in a connected workspace, they instead spend less time chasing answers and more time acting on them.

Communication gaps don’t just cause confusion—they also drain time and resources. According to recent communication statistics from Project.co, 55 percent of people have wasted time due to miscommunications, 46 percent have missed messages, and 26 percent have lost files. 

When you have effective communication, customizable, collaborative workspaces, and visible updates, you can reduce those breakdowns.

Good collaboration aids project visibility. In fact, Project.co’s research also found that while 69 percent of people generally understand what others on their team are doing, that number rises to 100 percent when teams use project collaboration tools with shared communication channels. 

This transparency helps teams coordinate deliverables, prioritize effectively, and maintain momentum throughout the project. After all, when everyone can see the plan, they can take better ownership of their part in it.

Projects generate decisions and lessons that matter long after a deadline passes. But if you don’t capture that context, you’ll lose the “why” behind the work.

When you instead document work as you go by capturing notes, feedback, and outcomes, knowledge sharing becomes a natural part of your process. This shared record helps new stakeholders onboard faster, reduces repeat work, and improves project outcomes for the next endeavour so you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

In day-to-day work, a connected project workspace allows team members to plan, build, review, and ship projects while sharing the same context. It’s the digital home for teamwork where tasks, decisions, and feedback stay visible so everyone can align on a common goal.

A product launch is a great example—design creates assets, engineering builds features, and marketing prepares campaigns. Each group has its own tasks, but they all rely on the same shared project context to stay in sync.

When coordination lives in one place, it’s easier to track project progress, link tasks to briefs or specs, and share real-time updates. When everyone can see dependencies clearly, changes won’t go missing and the overall project will keep moving without anyone having to chase down the latest version of the truth.

Even if your team struggles with project collaboration, you likely don’t need to redesign your entire process to fix it. Usually, a few practical changes are all it takes to see a difference.

Here are a few ways that you can improve your team’s workflow:

If your team isn’t sharing updates regularly, people will start filling in the gaps themselves. For example, one person might assume that a task is finished while another thinks it’s still in progress—or worse, someone may start work that’s already underway elsewhere. That’s how duplicate work happens, and it requires a steady stream of check-ins just to find out what’s going on.

But consistent communication rhythms prevent these issues. To begin, you should capture meeting notes, decisions, and action items in one place. Using a shared format like Notion’s meeting notes template here provides a clear record to check back on so you don’t miss anything.

Notion AI takes the friction out of this habit by instantly summarizing the key points of a meeting and drafting short status updates. Sending these updates on a regular cadence—weekly or at key milestones—then guarantees that everyone will see the same information without adding another manual task to your plate.

If your team starts work without seeing the full picture, they’ll end up interpreting requirements differently, missing dependencies, or working toward outdated priorities. This causes projects to drift off course even though everyone is staying busy.

To fix this problem, you’ll want to give your team a centralized place to see what matters right now. A shared home for goals, key docs, and roadmaps helps everyone understand the direction of the project before they start.

Notion’s team hub template works well for this—it keeps project goals, links to briefs, and ownership details in one place so no one has to guess where to look. 

Notion AI makes it even easier to stay up-to-date by summarizing updates and answering questions across that workspace. This makes asynchronous work much smoother for team members and stakeholders and allows everyone to stay in sync and focused on problem-solving without hunting for context.

As projects grow, the number of tasks, deadlines, and stakeholders grows with them. But if you don’t have clear workflows, it’s hard to scale. 

With a structured system, your team can track work in one place as it moves. Shared boards and timelines also make task management simple by providing a foundation for collaborative project management where everyone can see what’s planned, what’s in progress, and what’s hit a roadblock. 

When you link everything in this way, your team members will be able to orient themselves quickly each day. For instance, they can open a project page and ask Notion AI to summarize changes, review key updates, and see what needs attention next. 

Even strong teams run into collaboration problems. Luckily, most of these issues come down to visibility and shared context rather than effort, which makes them easily solvable. Here are a few examples:

When updates live across instant messaging conversations, Slack threads, and scattered spreadsheets, people will miss critical information. 

To keep that from happening, you should keep status updates, notes, and decisions in one unified space. This ensures that everyone sees the latest information. You can also use Notion AI to summarize key details so team members can understand changes quickly.

When intermediate steps stay private, teammates can’t give early feedback or spot dependencies in time. This often leads to rework and delays that ripple across the project timeline.

That’s why you should make work visible earlier. Shared kanban boards, task databases, and Gantt charts provide this visibility so your team members can see progress as it happens, not just at the finish line.

Scope creep usually happens when decisions, feedback, and requirements live in different places. For instance, a team member might start a task using an outdated brief, a stakeholder may share feedback in a message instead of updating the project page, or someone could change priorities without letting the rest of the team know. Work keeps moving, but not in the same direction.

To combat this, you should link briefs, requirements, and project goals directly to the tasks they refer to. This creates a single source of truth that your team can reference before starting work.

Duplicate work usually happens when teams can’t see what others are doing. That’s why you should use shared task boards, project timelines, and calendars to make assignments and deadlines clear. This allows teams to track progress and avoid overlapping effort.

Poor team communication doesn’t just slow work down—it wears people out, too. According to Project.co’s Communication Statistics report, 40 percent of people say communication issues at work have led to burnout, stress, or fatigue.

Visibility reduces this friction. After all, when tasks, priorities, and deliverables sit together and link to relevant context, everyone can understand their next steps.

Strong project collaboration comes down to a few fundamentals: clear communication, shared context, visible progress, and project workflows. These make it easier for teams to move work forward together. When goals, tasks, and updates connect, everyone spends less time chasing information and more time delivering results.

An AI-powered, connected workspace like Notion supports this kind of real-time collaboration by bringing planning, execution, and documentation together in one place. And with Notion AI, teams can summarize the latest updates, orient themselves with changes, and prioritize work quickly to keep work moving as projects evolve.

Ready to optimize your collaborative workflows? Explore how Notion AI can streamline collaboration and connect teams for more innovative, productive projects.

 *Source: Notion Internal Survey (n=624). Respondents were Notion users in collaborative work environments across the US, UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Australia, India, and Canada.