This video will show you everything you need to know about Notion and help you go from beginner to pro. You will understand the possibilities with Notion and how to use this amazing tool to organize and manage your life more effectively. Notion is a no-code tool that doesn't require any coding experience, and once you understand how it works, you will be able to design any system according to your own life and needs. This video is divided into three sections. Beginner, intermediate and advanced. I'd recommend watching the whole video to make sure you don't miss anything, but feel free to skip ahead if you think you already know everything about a specific topic. Let's get started with the beginner level. The beginners section is about Notion itself, icons and covers templates, basic blocks & keyboard shortcuts, the simple table and also the quick find option. Before we create anything, let's first go through the Notion settings on the left sidebar. At the top you have your account, which is all your basic account settings. Then the next tab is where you'll find the most important setting, the toggle between light and dark mode. Under the Connections tab, you'll find your third party integrations. Under language and region, you can choose what day of the week the calendar should start on. And then you also have the earn credits tab where you can perform certain actions to earn credit and get the paid versions of Notion for free. Under the workspace section you can add a domain for your Notion templates. You have a member's area for inviting and managing your team. You have the plans and billing tab for managing your Notion subscription. You have security and provisioning options for the business or enterprise plan. And lastly, you have a connection tab showing all the third party integrations connected to your workspace. Now let's take a look at the sidebar and the page menu. All your pages live on the left hand side of your Notion workspace, which you can lock or hide by using the toggle at the top or by pressing control and backslash. At the bottom of the sidebar or next to the private section, you can create a new page. On the new page you'll see different page types and databases you can choose from. But for now we'll just use the empty page and go ahead and give our page a name. If you click on the page menu in the top right, you'll be able to change the font. You can make the tag smaller and change the page with. You can also move, customize and lock the page. You can also favorite the page by clicking on the star or by using the shortcut CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + F Inside the menu you're also able to copy the page link, undo certain actions, view the page history where you can restore previous versions and you can show deleted pages or delete the page itself. Notion also allows you to import documents such as a word file or an Excel spreadsheet, and also to export Notion pages as a pdf, html. or marked down and CSV file. And then at the very bottom of the menu, you have your connections to third party apps. Before we add anything to the page, let's first add an icon and a cover. Go ahead and click on Add Icon where you'll be able to choose an emoji, choose from Notion’s custom icons, or upload your own either as a link or an image. I'll add links in the description to a couple of Notion icon websites where you simply click on an icon to copy the link and then paste it into the link section for this page. However, I'm going to use one of Notions own icons. In the top right, you'll notice you have the option to select the default color of the icon and whether or not you want to manually choose a color each time. So let's add an icon and then move on to the cover. Clicking on add cover or randomly generate the cover image. When you click on Change cover, you can select one of Notion’s covers in their gallery, you can upload your own, you can paste a link from a website, and you can also select a cover from the stock free photo website, Unsplash You can easily create custom Notion covers with Canva, or you can use a website such as Covercons or Notion Cover Generator to quickly create clean looking Notion covers. Alternatively, you can also use animated gifs as Notion covers, which you can find on Giphy.com and on Pinterest. Simply search for pixel city gif and you'll find plenty of animated covers you can use. In the description. I'll include a link to my pin board containing all of my animated pixel covers. Now that we've added the cover, we can move on to the template section. Sometimes starting from a blank canvas can seem daunting, so if you don't want to, you can check out some of the Notion templates at the bottom of the sidebar which are categorized according to their type. These Notion templates are a great way to understand everything that's possible with Notion and to give you ideas and inspiration for your own Notion templates. You can get access to even more Notion templates by just clicking on Browse more templates, which will take you to the Notion template gallery. There's also a bunch of Notion market places where you can find a ton of templates from different creators The links to all of these Notion marketplaces are in the description below. To duplicate the Notion template to your workspace, simply open the link in your browser, and click on duplicate in the top right. Another feature I want to share before we start creating is the quick find option. You can access the quick find option in the sidebar or by pressing CTRL + P. This allows you to quickly find the page you're looking for by typing in the page name or content from the page, and then navigating the results with the arrow, keys and page filters Now let's start creating by pressing forward slash. Everything inside of Notion is a block, whether it's a basic block, a database, media files, embedded content, or an empty block. We're first going to go through all the basic blocks, and I'm going to give you the keyboard shortcut for each of them. Heading one, two and three can be created with one, two or three hashtags. To do list is both the left and right square bracket. A toggle is the greater then symbol. A bullet list is the minus symbol. A numbered list is number one with a full stop. A quote block is a quotation mark. A divider is three minus symbols. And then you also have the callout box, which doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. These are all the basic blocks that you'll use most often, and I recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts as it will save you a ton of time. In the description, you can find a website containing all of the keyboard shortcuts for Notion. Next is editing the block. When you open up the block menu by clicking on the six dots, you'll be able to delete a block, duplicate it, turning it into a different block, turn it into a page inside of another page, copy the block link to mention it somewhere, move the block to a different page, comment on the block, and also change the text and background color. With text you can highlight and apply all the basic markdown formatting, such as making it bold, italic, etc. and you can also change the text and background color for individual words instead of for the whole block. Moving on to the last basic block, which is the simple table, you can add columns and rows to the table by clicking on the plus, or by dragging the bottom right corner and resizing the old table. You can click the button at the top to filter the table to your page, which will resize table according to your text and window size. When you click on the menu button on a column or row, you have the option to create a header, change the color, insert more columns and rows, duplicate it, clear the contents, or delete it. The table also accepts rich text editing, meaning you can make the text bold and italic, change the color, mention other pages, and add links. If you have a lot of table entries and want to organize your table but don't want to manually drag the blocks around, you can turn the table into a database and use the sort and filter properties to organize and then just in the database back into a simple table. Now we're moving into the intermediate section. This section will cover everything about databases, multi-column layouts, mentions and reminders, links and backlinks, public pages and the Notion Web Clipper. Let's now start creating databases. To create a new database use the forward slash to create an inline database or select one from the empty page. Note that if you select a full page database from the empty page, then that's the only content you can have in that page. However, any full page database can be turned into an inline database allowing you to have multiple databases inside the same page. Once you create a database, you want to give it a name and then hide it. And if you want to give the database a more minimalist look, I always add the ccallout box set to the default color with the database name underlined in bold and also in a different text color. And then I just add an icon and drop the database inside. This not only looks a lot better, but it's also way easier to drag around and create multicolored layout with. Each database property is its own column where you can add information to the database entr, and each database entry is its own Notion page, where you can add more content and even more databases, allowing you to have multiple layers of information inside of one page. At the bottom of the table database, you can calculate certain properties. In the table view, you can toggle the vertical lines on or off, If the text is longer than the columns, you can wrap the cells. And if you want to import an Excel spreadsheet, you can merge your table with a CS V file. Your databases can have multiple views allowing you to organize information according to your own needs. Currently, there are six different database views, which all have different uses and are pretty easy to understand once you start using them. You have the normal table view, a kanban boards, a timeline, a calendar, a list view, and the gallery view. Notion databases are highly customizable so they can be used for a variety of tasks. With each view, you can select which properties you want to show, how you want to filter and sort it, and if you want a group to a specific property. To filter a database, simply click on filter, the property you want to filter it by, and the condition. If you want to remove a filter, simply click on the menu next to the filter and remove it. If you're filtering with a date property at the top, you can select a condition and then choose a specific date, a date range or a type of date such as today, tomorrow or yesterday. You can also create nested filters when you click an advanced filter. You can add a nested filter that, for example, only show database entries that has a due date after today with a checked checkbox property. As for the sorting option, simply click on sort, the property you want to sorted by and whether it should be ascending or descending. One of my favorite features is the grouping feature. It allows you to group database entries according to any type of property and gives you a lot more customization options. Once you start to play around with different database views, filters and sorts, and the grouping feature, you will quickly understand how Notion databases work and be able to create any database tailored to your own needs. As we previously covered, everything inside of Notion is blocks and you can drag these blocks around and build any type of layout you want. For a multi column layout, you simply want to drag a block next to another one until you see the vertical line, which means they'll clip next to each other. If you want content underneath a specific column, simply press Enter inside a column to create an empty block or drag and drop the blocks you want into the column. You're also able to resize multi column layouts to extend beyond the margins of the single width pages. And if you want a three column layout, then you need to change your page to full width. If you're not using colored boxes for your databases, then you're unable to drag inline databases into a multi column layout unless you use empty blocks and drag and drop your databases inside. When you copy and paste multi column content, it will retain the layout when you paste it. And if you paste a multi column layout into a toggle, add the toggle underneath a column, then turn the toggle into text, and delete the toggle with backspace, then you're able to have multi column layouts inside a multi column layout. Next is mentions and reminders. You can use the @ symbol to mention a page, a team member, or a specific date and time. When you mention a date, you can add a reminder, which will then send out the push notification on your phone and show up in the updates tab in the sidebar. The more you begin to use Notion, the more tasks, databases and pages you'll have to navigate between and links can help make connections between related pages. Simply copy a page link and paste it as a link to page inside the page you want. And if you want to have a link to page in line with text, then paste it as a mention. Every link creates backlinks automatically and they are dynamic, so they update themselves. If you want to share your Notion pages with others, you can invite users to specific Notion pages to collaborate on or you can toggle to share the web option. Everyone with this link will be able to view your Notion page just like any other website, and you can select if you want the link to expire in case of sharing sensitive information. If you allow editing, then any Notion user can edit the page If you allow comments, then people can comment on the page. You can allow people to duplicate your template to their own workspace and you can also allow search engine indexing, which will make your Notion page rank on Google search. The last part for the intermediate section is the Notion Web Clipper. This Chrome extension allows you to save any website or link directly to the Notion. In your Notion workspace, you want to create a gallery view database with a URL and a tag property which you'll use to collect, process and categorize your bookmarks. When you want to save a website, you simply click on the web clipper at the top and save it to your database. The content of the link, whether it's an article or a YouTube video, will automatically be embedded inside the Notion bookmark. As for the phone, the Notion wave clipper already comes built in with the Notion app, so all you have to do is just share a link to Notion. Now for the advanced sectio. We're going to cover synced blocks, link databases, relations and toll ups, progress bars, template buttons, recurring templates and API integrations. Let's start with synced blocks. You can sync Notion blocks from one page to another by either turning a block into a synced block, or creating a new synced block and dropping the content inside. Simply click copy and sync and paste it inside any Notion page you want. If you make edits inside the synced block, it will also change any instance of that sync block. If you want to make changes to a specific sync block without making changes to the others, then simply click on unsync. And just note that if you click unsync on the original synced block, then it will erase all the other synced blocks. A useful way to use this feature is to have a Notion page on your phone with a template button where you can quickly add new notes and have it sync to your main Notion dashboard, where you can organize the notes into tasks or projects when you're at your computer again. Next is linked databases. Either create a link database block and select your database, or copy the link of a database and paste it as a linked database. Any changes to the database entries or properties will be reflected in the original database, and any filters or sorts added to the linked database will only apply to that linked database. Now for relations and Rollups, one of the most important Notion features. Relations allow you to connect different databases with each other and Rollups allow you to pull specific information from one database to another. Here we have a project and task database, and each task needs to be connected to each corresponding project. So let's go ahead and add a relation property to the project's database and connect it to the task database. In the relation menu, you can choose if you want the property to be displayed on both databases and also what name it should have. Once the project database is connected, you can click inside of the relation property and choose the corresponding project. In the relation property, you can choose to show the relation property as its own section at the bottom, you can choose which properties you want to show, and you can also have the relation displayed as minimal, which works similar to how backlinks are displayed. Now that our databases are related, we can make use of the rollups property. In the task database we use checkboxes to see whether a task is completed or not. We can add a rollup to the project database showing the percentage of tasks completed for the specific project. So let's add a rollup property and give it a name, select the relation, select the checkbox property, and then choose to show the percentage of checked checkboxes and have it show as a progress bar. Now that we have the percentage of tasks completed, let's take this project and task management system one step further and add a progress bar. The first step is to identify what creative characters you want to use. You want both a solid and an empty version of the symbol. I'm going to be using the circles, but feel free to use any creative character from the progress bar cheat sheet in the description below. The progress bar consists of three pillars: Our solid characters, our empty characters, and the percentage. For the solid and empty characters, we will be using the slice function, which returns a segment of provided text depending on the start and end points. So first we have the actual text, in this case ten solid circles. Then you have the start point, which will be zero, and as for the ending point, we're going to use our percentage property multiplied by ten. So let’s go ahead and run our formula and make sure everything is working before we move on to the empty characters. For the empty characters, it's pretty much the same as the solids. So we're going to copy the formula, add a plus, and then paste the formula. Let's go ahead and replace the ten solids with the ten empties, and then for the empties, we want to use the percentage of tasks not completed. So let's subtract the whole percentage property by ten. And then let's also add a floor function in the beginning of the percentage property. Now just make sure to add another closing bracket and let's go ahead and run the formula before we move on to the last part. The last pillar of our formula is to display the actual percentage. First, we want to add a plus with a space inside of quotation marks, and then another plus. Then add a round function to the percentage property to get rid of any decimals, and multiply it by 100. Now we have to turn the number into text format. So add a format function in the beginning and close it off with a bracket. And then lastly, add a plus and then the percentage symbol inside of quotation marks. If you've entered in everything correctly, you now should have a working progress bar. Next, I want to cover template buttons. In the top right of a database next to New, you have a drop down arrow where you can create new template buttons. Let's create a template button for each time we have a YouTube related project. Let's give our template button an icon, and let's copy the link to the task database and paste it as a linked database inside of the template button. Now, under filters, we want to filter this database to this current template button. This will make it so that every time we click on this template button, it will add an icon and a self referencing task database showing all the tasks related to this specific project. We can also set the template button as default. So for example, in the task database, if we want to use a specific icon for a new task, then simply create the template button with that icon and set it to default. Now each time you add a new task, the icon will automatically be applied. Another amazing feature is recurring template buttons. So let's say, for example, you have a daily journal and a habit tracker which you use every day, on a calendar that is grouped according to the created time property. You can go into the template button and select the recurring template feature. You can repeat template buttons daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. For the Daily Journal you want to have this template button create a new database entry every day at the specific time. So when you open up Notion in the morning, your new daily journal entries are already generated and waiting to be filled out. You can also take it a step further and add a line graph to visualize the progress of your habits throughout the month. I will be sure to leave a link to a video I've already made about this in the description below. Next, we have the Notion API. This allows us to create automated workflows between Notion and external apps. For example, you can sync a Notion calendar to your Google calendar. Or maybe if someone buys a product from your store, their information automatically gets added into a Notion database. The possibilities are endless and you can pretty much automate anything. The best thing about this is you don't need to know the code, you just need to use an Integration software such as Zapier or make. Firstly, what you want to do is connect the apps you want to use to the integration software, then set up an app trigger which starts the automation and then an action in another app which is caused by the trigger. I already have a full Zapier tutorial showing you how to connect Notion to Google calendar if this is something you'd like to explore further. Now that you know how to use Notion, you can play around and build your own custom system or you can grab my Life OS Dashboard, which is the dashboard I personally use. And if you haven't already, check out the video about my 9 free Notion templates after giving this video a like and subscribing for more Notion content.
