- Well, hello there! And welcome back to Thomas Frank Explains. So Notion has quietly
released a brand new feature called Synced Blocks, which
many of us have been asking for for quite a long time. What are synced blocks? Well, they're essentially
a way to embed content from one page in your Notion workspace into another page or several pages. As many as you want, in fact. And once you've pasted a synced block, you're gonna be able to see
and even edit the content within it from every location
where that synced block is. It's a really cool feature. And in this video, we're gonna
go over five different ideas for how you can start using synced blocks in your own workspace. From embedding insights and
quotes from your book notes into articles you're writing,
like in Roam Research, to creating checklists in a company Wiki and then porting them
over to project templates, to even creating a global
quick link navigation bar that you can put basically anywhere. A lot of these ideas I'm already
using in my own workspace. And I hope that you find them helpful for your next build as well. (upbeat music) All right, once again, I am trapped within a
circle on your screen and we're going to start
exploring the first idea, which is gonna be embedding
blocks of research from book notes or other research sources that you already have in
Notion, within a, maybe, video research page or something
else that you're writing. Maybe an article. If you've ever used Roam Research, you're gonna be very
familiar with this technique. If you've got pages of research
already in Roam Research, you can use their block
embed feature to bring it into something that you're writing. So for example, I've got this "Three Steps to Decluttering
Your Phone" article that I'm writing here in Roam Research. Or was writing many, many months ago when I was using Roam full-time. What I also have is my book
notes on the book "Hyperfocus". So if we load these up, we'll
see I have all these notes. I've got probably 10, 20,000
words of notes on this book. And there's a lot of great insights that I would love to bring in to the article that I'm writing. Instead of copying and pasting these and then bringing them over, I can actually embed certain
blocks from that research right in this article I'm writing. So if I just hit Enter here, type slash and go to the block embed feature, I can then start typing to search. And I'm gonna go for multitasking. And I know there's a block
I can bring in right here. Multitasking relies more on basal ganglia. And when I hit Enter,
that's gonna be brought in. I can also come and click
this little one here and I can actually see the
location of that block, which is pretty sweet. So now with synced blocks in Notion, we're able to do something
relatively similar to this. So for an example, I'm
writing this article or making a video on How To Beat Analysis Paralysis right now. So in my Research and Notes area, I'm taking some notes and you know, I come to remember that there's
a quote from "Antifragile" about how failure actually
gives us information. It'd be great to bring into this video on analysis paralysis. And I have a whole page of notes, actually highlights from
Readwise about "Antifragile". So if we come in here and we find a quote
that we wanna use, like, say this one right here, we can go ahead and turn
it into a synced block. I'm just gonna type /turn
and start to hit sync to turn this into a synced block. And just to go on a bit of a tangent here, turning things into a synced
block in Notion is different than turning things
into other block types. With synced blocks, you're simply wrapping the existing block in a new synced block. You're not turning it into
a synced block, actually. So now we have this
quote in a synced block and we can click Copy and
Sync, and then we can go back to our research and simply paste it in. So now I have a little
exclamation mark here because there are privacy differences between those two pages. But beyond that, this is now very usable. If I want to make an edit to this, I can or I can make an edit to it on
the actual Antifragile page. So this is a great way
to take notes on books, to take copious detailed
notes on research sources, and then easily bring them in to research that you're doing for specific articles. It's pretty cool. Idea number two is gonna be
syncing process documentation, standard operating procedures,
and centralized checklists into actual project
templates when you're working on something in Notion. So to give you an example
of that, here is a look, actually, exclusive first
look at a premium template that I'm creating called
Creator's Companion. This is based on the
actual content planning and management system that
we use for my main channel, for this channel, for
all the kind of content that we create. And if you're running a
content creation business especially if you have a
team, it's a great idea to have a centralized company Wiki where you can have documentation, you can have contact lists, sponsor lists, that kind of stuff, and
you can have checklists and standard operating procedures. If you're hiring someone new, it's great to have a centralized
database where they can go and get instructions and
see how to do things. So for example, we have this YouTube video
publishing guide here and this has a checklist which
is inside a synced block. And this basically shows you
exactly how to upload a video to my main channel. We need to do things
like creating a thumbnail and testing it with thumbsup.tv. We test title variations. We do all these different things. And if we weren't able to
look at this checklist, it's very likely that my team or even me would forget to do one
or more of these things. There's just so many little things here and a lot of them are detailed so it's great to have a checklist But I would love to have
this checklist inside of every video project that I create. So here's another great
use of synced blocks. If I put this into a
sync block like I have and then I go ahead and copy and sync it, then I can go over to
the projects template that I use for my YouTube videos. So to do that, I'm gonna go
over to this channel page here and inside the channel page, I have a link to my master content tracker. Actually, just click that to
show you what it looks like. This is a master database for tracking any content
project that we create. It could be YouTube videos
for the Thomas Frank channel. It could be College Info Geek articles. It could be stuff for
the Thomas J. Frank blog, all kinds of cool stuff. But within here, we have templates for each type of content we create. So I'm gonna open up this Thomas
Frank YouTube template here by going to Edit and you'll see something that should be quite familiar. If you've seen my videos before, this is my project template. So we've got things like our, you know, related content area, our
research and notes or script and an area for checklists. So I would love to have a
publishing checklist inside of every new video I create. And to do that, I'm going
to add that synced block to a page here in this template. First I'll click plus here,
and I'm gonna click a page. I'm gonna call this publishing checklist. And then all I have to do
is paste my synced block containing my global checklist. Now, anytime I create an instance of this YouTube project template, I'm gonna get this
publishing checklist in here. And I already had this
on my old templates. I'm gonna go and show
you an existing video just to show you that that exists. Let's go back to How To
Beat Analysis Paralysis. So I open this up and you
can see this is generated from that template. So if I go into my publishing checklist, I'm going to see that checklist. Now here's one thing to keep
in mind when you're doing this. If I make changes to this checklist, say I check off a few items
because I'm actually doing them, because this is synced, when
we go back to the original, we're going to see that it's
actually been carried out across every instance
of that same checklist. We don't actually want that to happen. We want this global checklist within our Wiki to
always remain unchecked. And obviously, we also don't
want things being checked off on projects that aren't
yet ready to be published. That's gonna be very confusing. So let me uncheck these real quick and we'll go back to
that publishing checklist within our How to Beat Analysis
Paralysis video project. And what we need to do before
checking things off here or making any changes that
we don't want to propagate across every instance of our sync block is go to the three-dot
menu here and click unsync. I'm gonna be given this option, do you really want to unsync this? Yes, I do. And now these blocks are just blocks. They're sitting here. You can see they're all selected. There's many, many, many of them. They are no longer synced
to that synced block. So if I go off and you
know, upload my video and I'm checking things off as I go, now when I go back to my Wiki right here, we're gonna see that none
of these are checked off because I unsynced that
instance of this synced block and the checklist within it. Idea number three is going
to be creating a global inbox that you can place in multiple locations around your workspace
to shuttle data around. They give you basically a scratch pad that you can work off of wherever you are. So to show you an example of that, here is a beta version of
my ultimate tasks template where I can play around with
things and make changes. And what I've created here
is a little toggle block, that's within a sync block. And I can open that up and
basically add anything I want. It could be video ideas,
it could be tasks. In fact, let me add another task here, test responsive design on sales page. And I can just add that wherever I want. Now, if I sync this global
inbox across my whole workspace, I'll be able to drag things as needed into their correct spaces, maybe in task lists and databases. So if I go to my web
design project right here, you're gonna see that I've
also added this global inbox to the side of this task
list within the project. And if you've watched
my other videos before, you know that Notion has something that I like to call Forcing Functions, where you use the filter
criteria of a database or a linked database to
essentially force new rows that are created within that view to take on certain
properties like due dates or an association with a project. So if we look at the filters here, specifically the top one here, everything in this
database view has to have its project related to
the web design project, the demo project that we're currently in. So if I drag anything
from this global inbox into this database view, like test responsive design on sales page, it's going to be associated
with this project. I don't want to remove my sorting so I'm gonna cancel that. But now I have a new task
associated with my project. And if I open it up and
look at the properties, we can now see that it's
associated with website redesign. So imagine if you were
to put this global inbox inside a meeting notes template,
then if you have a meeting with your team every week, I
can actually show you this, I've made an example for it. You could drag things
from your meeting notes into this global inbox and
then organize them as needed. So for example, I wanna
do a performance analysis on this video that over-performed. So I'm gonna go ahead and drag this block into
my global inbox here. It doesn't even matter if it's indented. And now if I go over to say,
my today tasks, I'm gonna see, do performance analysis
on watch time drop offs from my meeting notes
and I can just go ahead and drag it into my today list. Cancel that. And we're going to see
it is now due today. Again, because we are
using forcing functions and the filter on this
view specifically says it must be due today or before today. So that's the global inbox idea. I think this is a very versatile idea. There's probably a lot
more you could do with it but we are gonna move
on to our next idea now. Idea number four is going
to be global headers and footers in page
templates that you create. So say you're trying to
create a unified workspace that has maybe a header or footer that is pretty much on every single page. You can easily create a block
and just copy and paste it across lots of different pages. But then if you wanted to
make a change to that footer you would have to go and
make a change in tons of different places, synced
blocks solve that problem. So for an example, here,
I've got yet another instance of the creator's companion
template that I am creating. And by the way, if you
wanna get on the wait list for this template, if you're
a YouTuber or a blogger who wants to manage
multiple channels in Notion, you can go over to thomasjfrank.com/cc. There's a waitlist there
you can sign up for but I've got this synced
global footer in the template. And if we go over to, say
this channel page here, we're gonna find that exact
same synced global footer here. So if I wanna make a change to this, say I want to just, I
don't know, add copyright. Yeah, 2021 right there. Then when I go back to the
original template page, we're gonna see that that
change has synced across. So this is a great way to
create easily changeable, easily updatable footers and headers. And this can be especially useful if you're using Notion to
create your own website using tools like Super and Potion. And our fifth idea, one that
I am pretty excited about in particular is using synced
blocks to create a synced and global quick links
bar that you could put basically anywhere in your workspace. Like the one I've created right here. I've got this inbox view
part of ultimate tasks and I've got this little
toggle bar that I can open up. And I see all of these
links that I have set up to frequently used pages in my workspace. So this is a bit of an upgrade or at least an augmentation
on the sidebar here in Notion. The sidebar is very powerful but there are some limitations. One of the biggest ones is that with database views like this
one here, if I twirl into it, I can't actually look at the
rows inside the database. Instead, I just look at the
different views I've created. So if I wanna link to
specific pages in a database, I actually need to create
links on a page to those pages. And that is exactly what I've done inside this quick links bar. But because it's synced, I can now put it anywhere in my workspace. I could even make it a global header. So it's basically part of every
single page if I want it to. So how do you create this links bar? Well, first and foremost,
you probably noticed that I have a toggle here
with multiple columns inside that if you've ever tried
to drag things around to create multiple columns
inside of a toggle, you will know that it's
actually not possible. So we actually have to
do is use a little trick that I'm gonna be teaching
you in more detail in an upcoming video about
nested columns here in Notion. But I'm gonna show you
real quick how to do it. First, you wanna create a page
with your multiple columns. So I've got my links here. I've created columns and it's
a page called quick links. I'm gonna go one level up so I can see that page block here. And I'm gonna turn that
page into a toggle list. So that's a useful trick. If you put things in a page
and then you turn that page into a toggle or a heading or whatever, you're gonna preserve that
nested column structure from the page you had created. From there, all you're gonna
do is turn this quick links bar into a synced block, which
is gonna make it synced. And I still have a toggle here so I can collapse that if I want and then I can copy and sync
it throughout my workspace. So there you have it,
five ideas for how to use the brand new synced blocks
feature inside of Notion. One thing to note is that as of today, as I'm recording this, synced
blocks are still in beta so we're probably gonna see some changes coming to sync blocks. I've already sent off some
ideas to the Notion team myself for some changes that I would like to see but everyone has access to synced blocks and you can start using them
in your workspace right now. So hopefully these ideas get you started with some cool things. You can start adding using
these within your own workspace. I have a full article on synced blocks that includes these five ideas
along with a full tutorial on how to use them. So check that out. If you wanna learn more
about how to use sync blocks, we'll learn more details. And if you wanna learn more
Notion stuff in general, I've got a whole course
called Notion Fundamentals which is free and public
and you can find it over at thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals. There are all kinds of articles teaching basically every single part of Notion as I'm recording this right
now, it's still coming out. But if you're watching
this far in the future, then the entire thing is
probably gonna be published. And you're gonna wanna check it out. Last but not least, you can sign up for my Notion tips email newsletter right on that fundamentals page, where you can get notifications whenever I publish new
tutorials or make new templates. And speaking of templates,
I've got a ton of templates including a brand new
habit tracker template over at thomasjfrank.com/templates. So check that stuff out if you're looking for some cool templates
to add to your workspace or don't cause as
always, I'm not your dad. But I am curious to know, what are you gonna do with synced blocks? What are your ideas with this? And what are your questions? If you've got questions, leave them down in the comment section down below, or follow me on Twitter @tomfrankly and send me your question there. I do my best to answer
every question that I can as long as I'm able to answer it. So as always, thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video. (upbeat music)
