Fix Notion’s subtasks inheritance

May 9, 2025

Notion has a nice subtask feature…

…But it lacks automatic inheritance. To set up subtasks in a tasks database, go to Database Options → Customize → Sub-tasks. If you want to do it like the cool kids, it’s just a relation column to the database itself, where one task is the parent and the other the subtask.

Where to find the sub-task option in Notion UI 😉

One would assume that…

…a subtask would automatically inherit the column values of its parent task. But it’s not the case. It’s especially problematic if you link your tasks to projects. If you add subtasks to those tasks, they are not linked to the project by default 😱.

Simple automations to the rescue

Fortunately, Notion is now equipped with simple yet really useful automations. And we can use that to fix subtasks inheritance 😉. Just add a new automation, and make sure the subtask gets the values you want from the parent task when the subtask is created or linked to it. You can apply multiple variables setup with the same automation and add more triggers if you want it to be refreshed more often.

Here’s an example if you want to apply the Assignee of the parent task to its subtasks by default

🎁

And that’s it! A simple fix to set up subtasks inheritance. In the end, I find it more interesting that way — even though it’s not built-in by default — because here, you have fine-grained control over what gets propagated to subtasks or not.