How to Add a Progress Bar to Notion

We do not build a progress bar widget, and for a lot of people the first workaround is better than a widget would have been anyway. Block characters in a text widget give you a bar that matches your palette, costs nothing and is edited by typing. A drawn bar in the image widget gives you more control if you want it.

Block characters

Type a row of filled and empty blocks, set the colour and the font, and that is a bar. Eight filled and four empty reads as two thirds at a glance. The characters are Unicode and our symbol table has them if you would rather not go hunting.

A drawn bar

Draw it at the stage it is at, upload, and swap the picture when it moves. Every page embedding it updates at once, so a bar living on ten pages is still one edit.

When Notion beats both

If the thing you are tracking lives in a Notion database, tasks done out of tasks total, a formula property can draw a bar that updates itself. No widget can do that, because no widget can see your data. For anything data driven that is the better tool and we would rather point at it.

Which leaves widgets owning the static case cleanly: a goal you set by hand, a fundraiser total, a launch that is sixty percent ready.

Progress bars and motivation

Worth a moment of honesty: a bar you update by hand is a record of progress rather than a driver of it. The version that changes behaviour is the one tied to real data, which means a Notion formula rather than any widget.

Where the manual bar earns its place is communication. A fundraiser total or a launch readiness bar exists for other people to read, and for that job a drawn bar you control beats a live one you cannot style.