- People love to say that there is no wrong way to use Notion. It's the all-in-one productivity app, you can do whatever you want. You can customize it to
your heart's content. But to that, I say, "Ha! And no", there actually are wrong
ways to use Notion. And in today's video, we're gonna be covering my top 10 mistakes that beginners make when
they start using this app. Now, this list is gonna be
split between actual mistakes, things that you really should
not do in your workspace, especially if you're
working with other people and some little known tips, tricks, and more efficient features
that you just might not have heard of already. And because you haven't heard of those, maybe you're doing
things in your workspace, a bit more inconveniently
and inefficiently than you otherwise could. I'm Thomas Frank, this is
"Thomas Frank Explains", hit that subscribe button
if you're interested becoming a Notion expert,
getting new build guides, tutorials, and free
templates in the future. And beyond that, let's get into the video. So item number one on our list is not using your favorites bar here on the sidebar of Notion. Talked about the sidebar
in other videos before, but the favorites is well, pun intended, my favorite part of the sidebar. This is where I like
to basically pin pages that I wanna have really quick access to. And that includes things
that I'm working on at the moment like this
very video right now, but also some more integral parts of my entire Notion system. So over here, you will see
that I have, for instance, my Creator's Companion, this
is my gigantic dashboard, where I run all the content
planning for all of my channels. In fact, you can use this if you go over to ThomasJFrank.com/cc, it is a template you can download and use if you are a content creator. I've also got things
like this dashboard here that I'm working on, and
this will have access to inboxes for tasks, and
notes, and all kinds of stuff. So, by pinning these more
central parts of my workspace, I have very quick access to
them from my favorites bar, but there's another more advanced trick that I like to use with my favorite bar. And that is to use what I like
to call a Quick Links Page. So here, I've got this
page called, Quick Links, which exists inside of my dashboard. And the only purpose of this page is to add link blocks to other
pages inside my workspace. And that is because, when you use a linked page
block inside of Notion, it actually shows up inside your sidebar. So if I come over here and I toggle over my Quick Links page, I'm going to see everything
that I've linked to inside the page itself. So for instance, if I add
something by typing "/link" for that Link To Page block, and let's just say, "The Top 10 Notion Mistakes
Beginners Make" goes on there, you're going to see that it also pops up in the sidebar underneath quick links. So, I use this to essentially keep my favorites bar
really nice and clean. I can toggle this close
when I don't really need it, which keeps my favorites
bar from being super long. But then when I need access to maybe, a slightly less frequently used
page, like these ones here, I can just toggle open quick links and I have instant access
to all those pages. Mistake number two is not
using database templates. So you've probably seen
databases in Notion before, but did you know that
you can create templates that will auto-populate new pages with pretty much whatever
content you want? Let me show you an example of that. I'm creating this little
dashboard here called, "My Day", which is essentially a
whiteboard in digital form for planning out your entire day. This is gonna be part of a
sort of ultimate productivity system that marries notes and tasks, and all kinds of things like that. Stay tuned. That is coming
out very, very soon. But over here, I've got this little section
called, Daily Journal. Maybe I wanna have a page
where I just do, you know, some morning writing,
but also plan out my day. I can add a new page to this
database by clicking New, and I'm gonna have a blank page, but you'll notice that I already have some database templates here, and these will automatically populate this blank page with content. So let's click Daily Note and now we have some automatically
populated content. Now I'm still gonna give this a title. You could set a specific title, but I wanna always give this a new title. I'm gonna call this "February 8th" and thanks to my template
this is all ready to go. I've got a toggle here
with my daily habits that I can check off. I've got another toggle
with a synced block that links to this
little Today block here. And then I've got a couple of headings where I can write my morning pages and I can do a daily review. Couple more examples just to show you what else you could do with this. Let's go over to this book review here, called "The Deadline
Effect", book I just read, I'm making a video on my
main channel about it, and I've got this whole summary with a couple of different blocks in here. And what I can actually do
inside of my book tracker is turn that into a database template. And now lemme show you how you can actually create a database template. All you need to do is in
any view of your database, go over to this little blue arrow here and you see your templates. So I could create a new template or I could go in and
hit the three-dot menu and edit this existing template. And you'll see at the top, you are editing a template in Books. So that's how you know you're
editing a database template, which you can then apply to new pages. And I call that an
instance of the template. So I can come down here
and I can basically create a skeleton for my book summary. I might have an overall thoughts call out. I might have a main takeaways call out, and then I'm just gonna
give myself a little bit of a head start by creating
a heading two for Book Notes and a heading for Chapter One. Now, this is a very simple example. I've got maybe, five
or six blocks in here, but you can take database
templates much further if you want to. And for my final example, let's go over to Creator's Companion. I'm gonna go over to my
little demo area of it, and I will show you the
database template we use for YouTube video projects when we are planning out our videos. And I'm just gonna open up, uh, let's see here, this one I think is
pretty well filled out, "How to Stop Feeling So
Tired When You Wake Up" in the morning and this is generated from a database template. So we have a project
tasks area that brings in a link to database
from our task database. We have an entire B-Roll list. We have description, meta
stuff. We have checklists. We have internal pages for scripts, research and notes, related
content, topic validation. I can come in here and I
can get all this cool stuff for validating my topic, for
putting thumbnail drafts. You can create basically anything you want inside of Notion, inside
of database template. And that's gonna give you
essentially a head start whenever you start a new project. Going back to my channel page here, I can go down to this In
Progress ideas tracker, and let's click on this How to Build Self-Discipline Idea here. Currently, this is empty. So, I can give you a perfect
example of how this works. If I hit this Thomas Frank
YouTube template button, and then all of this good stuff just automatically pops in, and the video project is
completely ready to go. By the way, this is what is built
into Creator's Companion. So, if you are YouTuber and
you wanna use the same system that I use, you can and once again, ThomasJFrank.com/cc. Mistake number three is trying to shove literally everything and the kitchen sink into
a single dashboard page. Now you have probably seen
on like the Notion subreddit or on YouTube, or on Twitter, people love to post these
aesthetic dashboards that have literally every thing pertaining to their life on a single page. And honestly, it makes me think of msn.com or yahoo.com way back in the early 2000s. They were these splash pages, these homepages for the internet that had all these widgets
all over the place. And the idea was you
have this single homepage where you can get all the information you could want about pretty
much anything from one spot. And you can do that in Notion. So I've got this In-Progress Dashboard that I'm working on here, but I would caution you
against always doing this, against always trying to shove a ton of information on a single page, because I think there is
merit to splitting things out onto their own pages. For example, I've got this inbox here, which literally just shows me
my task inbox, nothing else. It's simple. It's clean. It's to the point. I can go back and I can
do the same thing for say, tasks that are due in the next seven days. I can go back and I can do the
same thing for recent notes. And this is especially useful
when you're using Notion on your mobile device, because all the columns in
your gigantic dashboards are gonna stack up and
it's gonna be really hard to navigate through them. You're at least gonna have
to do a lot of scrolling. It's a lot better if you just
have a simple link to a page that has exactly what you
need and nothing else. Now, let me show you a trick, which will give you
the best of both worlds that I have been utilizing
inside of this dashboard design. You will notice that these toggle blocks have underlined links here. So what I've actually done is create pages for things like say, the inbox. This is its own page, tasks, inbox. And then what I've done is hit Control L to grab the URL for this page, put it on my clipboard and go back to the dashboard that I'm building. I'm gonna recreate this just
to show you what I'm doing. So I create a toggle. You can actually get that by putting this little right arrow
bracket and hitting Space. And then I paste the URL, and I have the option
to choose Mention Page. Now, if I choose Link Page, it's gonna go outside the toggle. But with Mention Page, I get this page link
inside of my toggle title. And then I also still
have the toggle usable. So now I can click over here
and boom, I'm at my inbox page. Now you will notice that I
have put this database here inside what's called a sync block. Anything inside these red outlines here, and it's called a sync block.
I've got a whole video on it. I'll link to that in a
description down below, but essentially, I can
paste this sync block to other places in my workspace. And I essentially have
a window to that content from another location. So I'm going to do just that. I'm gonna click on the
edge of the sync block. I'm gonna copy and
sync. I'm gonna go back. Again, Control bracket to go back and I'm going to paste my sync
block inside of this toggle. So if I'm on desktop, if I have a ton of window
space to work with, I can go ahead and toggle
this open to show my inbox. I can toggle this open
to show my recent notes. I can get this great, complex, useful dashboard to work with. But if I'm on my phone, I might not choose to
untoggle those things. I might choose to just click into my inbox or maybe even favorite my inbox. That way, I have an instant path to a much simpler view
that is much more usable on that small constraint screen. Mistake number four is not learning the markdown syntax and keyboard shortcuts that are built into Notion. Notion has a ton of these. If you want to navigate your workspace, if you wanna create new pages, if you want to create text
and format it much faster. Notion actually gives you a bunch of different ways to do this. It gives you markdown formatting, which is a way to essentially,
add syntax to your text, such as couple of asterisks
here for bold text or one asterisk for italic text, or you can use regular keyboard shortcuts like Command or Control B
to bold things, like so. Or you can use little
context menu that pops up to format your text as well. There a ton of different options, but if you take just a bit of time to learn some markdown syntax and the most useful keyboard shortcuts, you're gonna be able to
both navigate your workspace and create content a lot faster. So, for just a couple
examples here, number one, if you wanna create headings in say an article you're writing or some notes, just create a little hashtag
symbol and hit Space, you're gonna get a heading one. Double hashtag is gonna
get you a heading two, and triple will get you a heading three. I've already showed you
bolding and italicizing, if you create a single
asterisk and hit Space, you're gonna get a bolded list. One will get you a numbered list. And I did show this earlier,
but I'll show it again, this little HTML bracket
is gonna get you a toggle. And then for keyboard shortcuts, the ones that I find
myself using most often are Control P to bring
up the search bar here, Control L to grab the
URL of a specific page. So I can do things like
mentioning of that page. And finally, one of my
favorite keyboard shortcuts is using the Control or
Command if you're on a Mac, bracket buttons to go back and forth between pages in my workspace. I have an entire guide on my website and a whole video about the
editing and text formatting, and keyboard shortcuts in Notion, so check that out. I'll have a link below
and Notion themselves have a very detailed documentation guide about all their keyboard shortcuts and all their markdown formatting. So if you really wanna get into it, I will have that linked too. Mistake number five, and this is a doozy, is allowing people to have too much access to your workspace. Now, Notion is a wonderful
app for collaboration. If you've got a team, if
you have collaborators, if you have people you're
working on a project with, you might have to give them
access to pages or databases, or maybe even your entire workspace, so you can get your work done. Notion's great for that, but a lot of people I
know have been burned by allowing people to have complete, full access to their workspace. And then those people
accidentally change properties and databases, or delete properties, or delete pages altogether. So, learn the access
and permissions controls that you have available to you
on any page inside of Notion. You can go up here, you
can click this Share button and you're gonna see
what the permissions are. Number one, you're gonna see if this page is shared to the web. And if so, you can open
up these toggles here and see what people can do
if they are not logged in, if they're part of the public, but more importantly, and
pertinent to your team, here, you see which groups
or people specifically in your workspace, have
access to this page and what level of access they have. So this page here, everyone
at College Info Geek, which is my company. So pretty much everyone in the workspace has full access to this page, which may not be the best thing. So I could come down here and
I could change it to Can Edit, but they couldn't share with other people. I could change it to Can
Comment, or Can View, or take their access away altogether. And actually, as of last night, as I'm recording this video, Notion dropped a brand new feature, which I personally have been asking for. A lot of people have as well. And that pertains to how permissions work inside of databases. So I'm going to go down
here to a little toggle called the brain in Creator's Companion, and I'm gonna go to the
Master Content Tracker. This is an actual database. And here, we see one more
option for permission control. I go up to the Share menu. Right now, everyone at College Info Geek has full access to this page, but I'm the only person who should be making actual changes to the database. I'm the only person who
should be changing properties, deleting properties, adding new ones. No one else should be. So there is now an option
where if I toggle this open, I can let everyone else edit the content, but not the databases,
views, or structure. So if I choose this and restrict access, I now have full access, but
everyone else on my team, they can add new rows. They can work on 'em, but they
can't change the database. I highly recommend if you have people on your team who are non-Notion experts, who are not supposed to be
administering your workspace, set this permission level
for them and have you or other administrators be the only people who can actually change
the databases themselves. Speaking of changes, mistake number six is making
big changes to your workspace without telling your team
or anyone else who relies on the pages in the
configuration they were in before you made the change. I have made this mistake so many times. I get excited, it's I
don't know an evening, I got a glass of whiskey. I'm making a few changes,
making some upgrades, you know, making Notion a lot better. But then I forget to tell my team, "Oh, Hey, I completely changed how our knowledge base works". Or "I made a brand new notes database, and now everything's moved over there", and they don't know what's going on. And in my head, everything's
makes perfect sense. I've made this beautiful elegant system, but I didn't teach my team how to use it. So if you are working with other people and you are gonna make a
change to your workspace, document that change and let 'em know. In fact, I would recommend even making maybe a loom video or a screen recording, showing them the changes you made and how to use the workspace, now that you have changed it. Mistake number seven is trying to reinvent every wheel with your workspace. Notion's greatest strength is
also its greatest weakness. And that strength is you can pretty much do whatever you want. They give you these
granular building blocks and you can use them to create
your own complex systems. The problem comes when
you're trying to make your own tools and also invent your own productivity methodology at the exact same time. Things get messy, and that's
why people often quit Notion. That's why people often go back to tools that have a more rigid
structure like Todoist or Evernote because they get overwhelmed with what they've created. They've created this
Frankenstein's monster of a productivity tool for themselves. So, I would urge you when
you're creating a system, like say this dashboard here, if you're gonna build
new tools from scratch, maybe follow an existing methodology or philosophy and let it guide you, while you craft these tools. So for example, this dashboard
here integrates tasks, notes, projects is a pretty much all-in-one productivity system and nobody has created
this specific configuration of blocks inside of Notion before. And if I had tried to also
invent my own methodology, I don't think I would ever get it done. So instead, I am essentially taking Tiago Forte's P.A.R.A methodology, the Projects, Areas,
Resources, Archive philosophy to essentially guide me
as I'm building this tool, which means that I have tasks and notes and they can live inside of projects, and then projects are
inside themselves of areas. And so for example, I've got this music area and
this will show me projects inside of the music area, but also notes inside
of that area as well. The methodology, the
P.A.R.A. system is helping me to design this tool. And once over the tool is solidified, I might actually tweak the methodology. I might make my own changes to it, but I do think it's a good idea not to try to reinvent multiple
wheels at the same time. Focus in on one area,
make your tweaks there, and use tried and true
systems everywhere else until you can then shift that focus. Mistake number eight is
importing thousands of notes from Evernotes or another note-taking tool that Notion allows imports from, and then trying to
organize them all at once. I do think this is a
mistake and it's something that I consciously decided not to do, even though I was using
Evernote for more than a decade before I started using Notion. And Notion does give you this tool, right? We can go down here to this import area and we have the option to,
I even get $5 in credit if we import from Evernote. We can import from Trello,
Asana, all these tools. And it's very tempting to do it, right? We kinda wanna have all
that stuff we've created imported into the new system
that we are now using, but I don't think it's a good idea. And I purposely decided not to do it when I switched over to Notion, because I realized I
have thousands of notes. And the harsh truth, and this
is a harsh truth for a lot of you digital hoarders out there, the harsh truth is the vast
majority of that material, you're never going to need again. I am never going to need
to go into my MIS 101 notes from November 30th, 2010, to learn about "Star and Ring
Networks" from that class. If I wanna learn about those, I'm gonna go on Wikipedia and
I'm gonna learn about them. I don't need those notes. So I'm going to leave them to Evernote. And I'm going to just create a brand new notes database in Notion. I'm gonna start using it. I'm gonna tweak it. And I'm gonna have a
manageable amount of material in there that is pertinent
to my life right now. And then if I do need
something from Evernote, I'm going to use the Just-In-Time method to go over to Evernote and get it. And I've done this several times. Sometimes they have recipe from
Evernote or something else, I will go in. I will copy
the content of that note. And I'll create a brand new note in Notion inside of my organized clean
system, because I now need it. By the way, my friend Tiago
Forte agrees with me here. He is a heavy Evernote user, but he told me in a
recent colab that I filmed in LA with him, that he would
do the exact same thing. Use the Just-In-Time methodology. Don't try to import
years and years and years of stuff into a brand new system. By the way, that is
going live on my channel, my main channel later this month. So get subscribed to that
channel if you are not already. Mistake number nine is
not using linked databases in your workspace. So you have probably used databases before and maybe like me, you even have made multiple
views of those databases. For example, I've got this
B-Roll database down here with a Chrono view,
which sorts by timestamp. I've also got this Gather view, which sorts by tag and
all these different views. When I first started using
Notion, this is all I used. I used databases and I
would create different views and I would switch
between them all the time. But then I learned about
possibly Notion's best feature, which is the linked database. And what a linked
database allows you to do is essentially create a brand new view of an existing database
in a different spot in your workspace. And that view can have
its own Filter criteria, its own Sort criteria, and you can hide and show
properties differently in that view than you would
in the original database. So let me show you how to create one. Type your slash command
and start typing, "Linked" to get "Create Linked Database". And then it will ask you
to Search for database. I'm going to bring up the notes
database that I'm working on on my ultimate productivity system beta, and I'm going to get a
database that looks pretty much like the original one. Once it pops in, it's
gonna have all the content, but this view is unique. I can tweak it to my heart's content and it's not going to change
the actual databases view. So all this stuff is here. I've got title, I've got tags. If I've got favorite, if I go back and I go and I
turn all those properties off, I go into Properties here and hide all, nothing is going to change
about the original database. So this is a great way to have
persistent database views. So you don't have to constantly
switching views all the time and to have those views in other places inside of your workspace. You've probably already seen
this in this video before, but I'll show you again, this little dashboard here
has all these different views for today, for tasks
that are due tomorrow. And you'll notice these
are all the same database, "caAll Tasks", but they are on this page and they have their own
Filter and Sort criteria. So we can go ahead and do
that with this as well. Maybe, I wanna create an inbox of sorts for this All Notes database. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna create some filter criteria. And I'm gonna say the inbox
is essentially anything where the note doesn't have an area. So area is empty actually, where it doesn't have a project, that's also gonna be empty and
where it doesn't have a tag. So if it doesn't belong
in any of those areas, it's gonna be essentially
my inbox or my default Catch-All-Place for brand new notes. Now, I've got unique Filter
criteria in this linked database that doesn't exist anywhere else. And that brings us to our
10th and final mistake, which is deleting database properties when you could just hide them. I got an email about
this just the other day. Somebody had bought Creator's Companion, which has like 58 different properties inside of the project template. And they're used in many different places. And they were like, "Hey,
can I delete some of these? They're kind of in my way." Well, you could, but something might break or you could just hide them. So, take a look at this
Set Design Ideas note here, and I can show that I've
already actually hidden some of these properties. We have, you know, probably 15, 16 different properties in here, which when I click into this note, I have to scroll past to get
to all of this cool stuff that I put here, all this
cool set design inspiration that I've been collecting. What I can actually
do, is hide properties, so I don't have to see
them until I toggle open this 10 more properties button here. And there are a couple of
different ways I can do that. I can right-click on any property. And then I can go to
Hide Property and choose, Always Hide, Always Show. Sometimes, you're also
gonna have the option of only showing it when it's not empty. So I'm gonna choose Always
Hide for this updated one, or I can go over to the three-dot menu in the corner and I can
choose Customize Page. And I actually have a
lot more control here. I can choose my Show and Hide criteria for every property in the database. So let's just say, I want to also hide the created property. And then you also see here Hide When Empty for properties that can have
text or content inside of them. But I also have some
options for Back Links, Top-Level Discussions, and Page Comments. So right now we notice there
is a back link to this page. And maybe I don't wanna see
that there is a back link. Maybe I just wanna have
it be really clean. I can go over here to back links and I can choose instead
of Show and Popover, I can choose Off, and now I don't see it. So utilize that Customize Page area or just Hide Properties individually, and you're gonna have a much
cleaner database property area, and you don't have to delete properties that could be useful in other places. So that's it. Those are my 10 big mistakes that I see beginners making in
their Notion workspace. Hopefully, you found something
new and useful in this video. And if you haven't already, hit that subscribe button, so you get access to new build guides, tutorials, beginner's guides, and free templates
coming down the pipeline as I release them. If you are a beginner with Notion, you're just trying to get
your head around the software, I've got a completely
free, completely open, beginner series called
"Notion Fundamentals", and you can find the over at
ThomasJFrank.com/fundamentals. There is a full YouTube video
for each part of the software, just like this one. And there's also a full written guide, which acts as more of a reference. There's shortcuts, tables, all
kinds of cool stuff in there, so check that out. And there's also a signup
for a Notion Tips Newsletter. You can get on that. It's completely free, easy to
unsubscribe if you want to, but I think you are going to enjoy it if you are trying to unlock
the secrets of this tool. Lastly, if you are a content creator, if you make YouTube videos like I do, if you make blog posts,
if you do podcasting, Creators Companion is a tool that's going to upgrade your workflow immensely. It is exactly what me and my team use to manage multiple
channels, YouTube channels, blogs, all kinds of stuff. And it turns Notion into a one-stop shop for collecting content ideas, for green lighting projects, for managing it throughout the entire content production pipeline, from research, to scripting, to editing. The whole thing is done inside of Notion. You can find that over
at ThomasJFrank.com/cc, it's called Creator's Companion. And it's a great way to
support this channel as well if you have been enjoying the content that I've been throwing up here. So that's it. Thanks as always for watching. Seriously, appreciate you. Thank you for subscribing
if you've done that as well. And if there are a Notion mistakes that you have noticed that I
did not include in this list, I would love to hear about 'em in the comment section down below. Thanks again. And I'll see you in the next one. (energetic hip-hop music)
