Who is Ev Chapman?
Systems teacher and template maker. Known for the Focus Hub and a run of Notion workspaces she built for part-time creators, including a free Notion library for writers doing the Ship 30 for 30 challenge.
This page recognises Ev Chapman for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I want to know whether Ev Chapman is someone to learn Notion from, or whether her templates are still worth buying.”
This page covers what she built in Notion between 2021 and 2022, what each template actually did, and the point at which she moved her daily work to Roam and then Tana. It does not review her current AI and Tana courses, and it will not tell you that her old Notion workspaces are still maintained, because her attention has been elsewhere for some years.
The sales page for the Focus Hub, a $29 Notion task template, opens with a confession. Ev Chapman had been "a student of productivity for the past 20 years", starting with GTD, and had "used ALL the apps" without finding one that fit. Every one of them arrived with its own opinion about what a project was, and she had to bend herself around it. Notion was the first that let her build the thing she actually wanted, and the Focus Hub is what came out.
She got there sideways. During Sydney's 2020 lockdown she decided to start writing online, and in 2021 she began posting what she called "little yellow essays" on Twitter, after a decade she describes as leaving "a graveyard of forgotten creative projects spread over the internet". The writing needed somewhere to live. Her blog was a Notion workspace published to the web through Super, so when she wanted a library to hold the daily essays, that was a Notion page as well, and she gave it away for whatever people wanted to pay.
By June 2022 her Gumroad store carried seventeen products and her own bio there claimed more than a thousand template downloads. Three months later a friend messaged her on Twitter about a new app called Tana, and she left. She works from Sydney now, teaching what she calls a personal agent operating system, and the Focus Hub survives as a Tana template.
Notion was the first tool that did not make her fit into it
Chapman came to Notion as someone already tired of productivity software. In her own account she had spent twenty years on the problem and cycled through every app, and each one imposed a model of tasks and projects she had to accommodate. Notion was different in a way she stated plainly on the Focus Hub page: "So when I found Notion I knew I had found something special, that I could build to fit my needs and have it evolve over time as my system grew and evolved." What she built was a task system organised around eight week cycles, with automatic progress bars, hill charts for reading where a project actually stood, and a deliberate warning when she had loaded too much into a week. She said she used it to finish well over 100 projects in a year. It sold for $29, and an archived copy of the product page from December 2022 records 134 sales.
The blog was already a Notion page, so the templates came out of it
Her website through this period was itself a Notion workspace, published with Super, which is visible in the archived 2022 HTML down to the Notion block markup and her Super referral link. That is the direct origin of her best known giveaway. The Ship30for30 Library Notion Template was built for writers taking Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole's daily writing challenge, who were posting atomic essays to Twitter and had nowhere to keep them. Her description is specific about the lineage: "I created this notion template as an extension of my blog which is already in Notion." Each day you add the essay image and the tweet link, the gallery fills up so you can see the run of work behind you, and Notion's share button turns the whole library into a public link. She priced it pay what you want. In May 2021 Red Gregory picked her out in a list of notable Notion creators, singling out how the templates on her site were "displayed beautifully".
She sold the workspace and the reasoning behind it in the same file
Chapman's Notion products tended to arrive with an argument attached. The 30 Day Experiments Field Guide + Notion HQ Tracker went out at $9 and paired a twenty chapter guide about running short experiments instead of committing to habits with a custom Notion tracker and a video walkthrough, and had taken 53 sales by November 2021. The Ultimate Creator Studio launched on 19 September 2022 at $57 in pre-launch before rising to $97, and she described it as "part Notion template, part crash course in creator systems": an idea generation hub, over 100 hook and headline templates, content production, projects and tasks, growth tracking, and a starter kit for shipping a first digital product. Alongside these she ran an on-demand workshop called How To Build A Digital Product In Notion For Creators, which taught the thing she was in the middle of doing. Her store tags from that period count nine Notion templates.
September 2022: one message on Twitter, and she moved out
The break was about capture speed. In a Glasp Talk interview she set out where Notion stopped working for her: "It's great for building databases. It's great for organizing things, but it's actually terrible as a, as a daily driver." Her example was being inside a project and having an idea for content, which meant navigating over to the content database before she could write anything down. She switched to Roam, which took a few attempts coming from something as structured as Notion, and then in September 2022 a friend messaged her on Twitter about Tana. "The moment I saw the video on Twitter, I was like, that is my app." She has not moved again. She is a Tana ambassador, writes the weekly Knowledge Work Rebooted newsletter to around 2,900 subscribers, and now sells courses on building an AI agent with a knowledge base behind it for solo operators. The Focus Hub was rebuilt for Tana and sells at $49. Her about page currently describes her as "the common sense person in a noisy AI world".
Why Ev Chapman is on this list
For about two years Chapman published her entire working setup as Notion workspaces other people could duplicate, and she kept the entry price low or absent. The Ship 30 for 30 library existed for writers who had just started publishing every day and had nowhere to put the work, and it cost whatever you chose to pay. Her Notion workshop pushed creators to build and sell products inside the tool instead of only keeping private systems in it. She has worked in other software since 2022, and the templates and the write ups she left in the Notion community are still what people find when they go looking.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Ev Chapman and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
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