This post was originally published as part of the Association of Professional Futurists Compass Magazine June 2025 “How-To” issue.
Supercharge Signal Scanning with Notion
Across futures research and foresight, signal scanning is the primary method used to identify and track trends, technologies, social patterns, or any other sources of change that could potentially indicate future changes or developments in a domain. Regular signal scanning helps foresight practitioners stay on top of emerging changes and extract the underlying patterns or trends that might drive different futures.
While most practitioners can broadly agree on the definition of signal scanning, there are probably as many methods of doing signal scanning as there are foresight practitioners. And although practitioners have no trouble waxing poetic about the why of scanning for signals of change, few have written about the messy business of how to scan for signals day to day.
The purpose of this article is to provide a brief glimpse of at the nitty-gritty of doing signal scanning, as well as share how a web-based productivity software tool called Notion can help supercharge the signal scanning process.
What does Signal Scanning Look Like?
If there is one word to describe signal scanning it would have to be “tabs,” as in browser tabs (figure 1). Searching for signals of change typically starts with a search of the internet for the given topic or domain. Many practitioners will use a “snowball” method when scanning: reading main-stream media and credible journalistic sources and clicking hyperlink after hyperlink to venture down rabbit holes of academic and technical papers, professional and trade journals, substacks and subreddits, or other forums on the fringe. Regardless of the topic, a signal scanning session can quickly result in tab clutter that slows a computer to crawl.
At this point in scanning, some kind of tool is typically leveraged for collecting and cataloging signals of change. There are stories from the foresight practitioners of the pre-digital era who kept physical file folders full of highlighted newspaper clippings, magazines and journals, while relatively more modern tools include using online spreadsheets or a bookmark manager. Beyond building a repository of hyperlinks, most modern scanning usually includes some tagging, commenting, and highlighting to aide in analysis of collected signals. A signal scan library is the final output of scanning, and having a properly organized and analyzed library is crucial to subsequent synthesis of trends and drivers and report creation.
Scanning for a Scanning Tool
Most foresight practitioners are typically utilizing off-the-shelf tools to collect, catalogue, and sort signals and while it can be tempting to stick with what’s familiar (e.g. a crusty old Microsoft Office license and Excel) there are far more efficient software tools suitable for signal scanning. Since early 2016 when I first gained exposure to organized signal scanning at the University of Houston using Diigo, I have been on the hunt for a tool to streamline project-based signal scanning. Across several years of regular scanning and evaluating several bookmark managers, academic research tools such as Hypothes.is, and commercial products such as Factr, Notion emerged as an exceptional tool for signal scanning due to its unique blend of features designed to enable organization, collaboration, and data integration.
What exactly is Notion?
While a fully populated signal scan library in Notion might resemble a typical database or spreadsheet at first glance (figure 2), there’s a plethora of features in Notion that make it indispensable for signal scanning.
Notion advertises itself as “a single space where you can think, write, and plan.” Productivity poetics aside, Notion allows databases to be highly customized while supporting multiple types of content such as text, tables, images, videos, and embedded web content and media. Information can easily be structured as pages, databases, or kanban boards making Notion useful for notetaking, planning, project management or ultimately any kind of pursuit which requires information and knowledge management.
This makes Notion, and Notion databases in particular, incredibly powerful for signal scanning. In addition to basic needs of scanning such as hyperlink collecting, organizing, tagging, and commenting or collecting highlights, Notion also affords:
- Bookmarking and embedding of other web-based content and media (e.g., videos, social media posts, embedding audio from podcasts, etc.),
- Fully customizable database fields can be created to label, tag, rate, or rank scan hits based on whatever scanning criteria or format is utilized,
- Multiple users can input collaboratively into a single database,
- Custom sorted views of the library allow scan hits to be viewed/parsed differently based on tags, ratings, etc.,
- Databases and pages can be quickly published as a web page and shared,
- Databases can be exported to CSV or PDF files, especially useful for archiving,
- Third-party tools such as the browser plugin “Save to Notion” further streamline scanning by allowing content to added without even needing to open Notion
Collect, Tag, Analyze, Repeat.
Individual signals are added as entries in a database, but unlike a simple spreadsheet, each signal can be expanded as a page to view detailed information (figure 3). This expanded view can also be customized, for example, to include properties such as an image and source, a description of the change being observed, various tags used to categorize the signal, and a brief explanation of potential impacts as a result of the change. The embedded content feature of Notion also means signals that originate from academic or scientific research can also include a PDF of the full paper.
Two of the more remarkable features of Notion useful for scanning and working with signals is the combination of sharing the database as a web page and the saved views of Notion databases, which allows the signal scan library shared in a way that allows signals to be sorted and viewed based on different tagging or criteria (see figures 4-6). This brings a level of tangibility to the signal scan as a deliverable in project work and encourages interested readers to browse the research and dive into rabbit holes.
The database format also means the signal library can be delivered to in a format that also affords continuation of the work, using the same library to collect and monitor ongoing signals of change.
Using Notion to build a signal scan library enables a more streamlined signal scanning process while also creating a futures research artifact which is more tangible and interactive.
Although there are no shortage of modern software tools aimed at making foresight more productive, Notion stands out as particularly suitable and adaptable to any practitioners signal scanning.
A sample signal scan library created in Notion can be viewed here.
This library can also be duplicated and used as a template to get started with your own scanning library in Notion.