Who is Vic Montano?
Notion template creator and automation builder. Known for Getting things done bundle, Learning Box, and the productivity snippets newsletter.
This page recognises Vic Montano 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 landed on a Vic Montano template or one of his newsletter posts, and I want to know who is behind it and whether the rest of his work is worth my time.”
He is a Notion Marketplace creator with three published templates, and the reasoning behind two of them is written out at length in a Substack archive you can read before you duplicate anything. Read the note-taking post or the horizons post first. If the method is useful to you on paper, the template is the same method with the databases already wired. If the method is not for you, the template will not change that, and he says as much in the posts.
Three templates sit under @thevicmontano on the Notion Marketplace: a Getting things done bundle, Learning Box, and Business OS. The profile bio is a single line, "Notion and automation for agencies and startups," and it covers the shape of the rest of the work fairly well.
The templates came out alongside a newsletter. productivity snippets ran on Substack from late 2022 into September 2023, and most issues picked one named productivity method and worked out how to actually run it. The CODE methodology from Tiago Forte, the Cornell and Feynman note-taking approaches, the Bento Method, Kaizen, the 80/20 principle, inbox zero. The posts read like someone testing a system on himself and reporting back, and two of them end at a Notion page he had built while thinking it through.
The work since then has moved further into automation. His X bio describes him as an AI and process automation expert helping companies save time and cut costs, and the posting there is about tooling and client operations more than template design. The Notion Marketplace profile stayed up, and the templates are still listed on it.
The first template asked what your work looks like from higher up
The Getting things done bundle is the one that started the Notion work. It asks you to look at your commitments from different altitudes, covering the range from high level values down to the tasks in front of you today, and to define each of those levels for yourself so that daily actions line up with the long term ones. The marketplace slug for it is horizon-focus, which points straight at the horizons of focus idea in David Allen's original method. It went up on Product Hunt as Notion Getting Things Done, hunted by Pascio, under the tagline "A tool to gain clarity in work and life." The listing that Notion Everything carries puts it more plainly: a framework for gaining clarity and direction in work and life, aimed at students, freelancers and anyone assembling a personal productivity system from scratch.
productivity snippets explained the method before it pointed at anything
The newsletter is the best record of how he thinks. In December 2022 he wrote up the 3MIQ framework, which sorts a life into Experiences, Growth and Contribution and asks you to answer three questions against those buckets. That post ends by noting the Notion template he had built with a section for answering them. In March 2023 he took on the CODE methodology and spent the whole issue on the Capture step alone, quoting the line the whole idea rests on: "Our brain is for having ideas, not storing them." Through 2023 the subject matter drifted from personal systems toward business ones, with issues on SMART goals, the customer journey, running a SWOT analysis with AI, and viral loops, which is roughly the same drift his consulting work took.
Learning Box collected the note-taking methods he had been testing
On 10 March 2023 he published a comparison of note-taking systems: Cornell, the Feynman technique, Tiago Forte's progressive summarization, the outline method, the boxing method, and synthetic notes. Partway through he mentions the reason the post exists. "To my delight, there are many note-taking templates in the Official Notion Template Gallery. In fact, I recently submitted one myself, and it was accepted!" That template is Learning Box, a lecture notes setup he described as designed to help you use those methods effectively. It is a small thing to have made, and it is the clearest example of his pattern: survey the approaches in public, then ship the Notion page that makes one of them cheap to try.
The consulting work eventually took over from the template work
The newsletter archive stops in September 2023, and the centre of gravity moved to automation for clients. His X account carries the current positioning, an AI and process automation expert helping companies save time and cut costs, and the recent posts work through tooling questions: what the Airtable acquisition means for people who built on it, using MCP based workflows to prepare client material, trimming an agent configuration file down to something maintainable. He has also said out loud that he retargeted the content at founders and operations leads, because those are the people actually buying. Notion still turns up in that work, sitting inside a wider automation stack next to Airtable and the AI tooling, and the marketplace profile still calls the whole thing Notion and automation for agencies and startups.
Why Vic Montano is on this list
He gave the Notion community three templates and, less commonly, published the reasoning before the product. Anyone who read productivity snippets got a working comparison of note-taking systems and a plain explanation of horizons of focus whether or not they ever duplicated a page. Learning Box and the Getting things done bundle are still on the Notion Marketplace, which means someone meeting GTD or the Cornell method for the first time can go from reading about it to running it in one afternoon.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Vic Montano 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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