Building a Personal Knowledgebase with Notion

so oh hey hey hey youtube what's going on tonight my name is brian morrison i'm a software engineer based out of chicago illinois and tonight i'm doing something a little bit different um did one of these streams uh before the holiday season where i detailed how i built the project management system in notion today we're going to be going over how i built my own uh personal knowledge base in notions so what we're going to do is we're going to start with just a basic intro to notion probably take five minutes or so and then um yeah we're just going to kind of dive right in creating necessary databases creating some views linking everything up together and overall just making a system to store information in a very structured way of notions so without that i don't have a whole lot more to say if you're interested in communicating with me directly when i'm off stream fullstack.chat is the url you want to go to it's a link to my discord server so go ahead and hop in there and come hang out with a bunch of other developers um there's a couple non-devs in there who uh yeah just kind of come in and hang out so um hope to see you and um yeah let's go ahead and i guess hop right into it what's up brad thanks for joining tonight i appreciate it come on there we go all right so um yeah let's go through it um i actually uh didn't get a chance to really throw an outline together until about 20 minutes ago so hopefully this goes smooth but it should it should be it's actually not that bad creating my my system's not not terrible um so yeah so quick overview of notion if you've never used ford notions kind of like a workspace management system uh you can just basically dump information in here you can create uh checklists you can create different pages you can create sub pages you can link pages together there's a whole lot of cool stuff you can do with that so if you're new to notion if you've never signed up this is actually the page you get to when you first sign up and um it's got a couple of different uh kind of examples in the left-hand side here uh the the general layout of notion is on the left-hand side you have your navigation which is where you would navigate and drill down into your various pages and databases and whatnot and then the right-hand pane is where all the content the main content is stored uh you can also minimize your sidebar like that and if you want to get a better view of your page if you drop down on the upper right hand corner there's a couple of options up here with how you can customize your page um so yeah that's just a couple different options to explore there if you scroll through some of these different uh quick templates you can see that they've made they may just i guess different examples on how you can you can utilize the system so you can see inside of the quick note here we've got some to-do lists we've got sub-pages that you can click in and navigate to if i drop down the left-hand side navigation you can even see your your sub-pages and everything is also going to be displayed in a nice tree hierarchical view there so that's pretty cool let's see here if we click through a couple other ones you can also create kanban boards within notions so if you're familiar with trello or a system similar to that um a lot of those concepts would come over here to and apply here but one of the very neat things about databases this is a database view as you can customize the different various fields that are on in the uh on the actual pages themselves the sub pages so like this take fig for a walk here this is considered a sub page and if i select this you can see there's a couple of properties up on top here that you can use to customize uh what fields you want your database so a lot of cool stuff you can do there and uh you have to forgive me if i sound a little nasally i actually had a seasoning attack before the before the stream so that always sets up for a nice interesting sounding voice um okay so but that's kind of like my general notion overview um let's before we even get started i'm actually gonna just delete all this stuff here so we'll we can delete these by selecting the three dots that are uh next to the page and then just selecting delete and we'll do these for each one of these because we're going to basically give us gives ourselves a clean slate to start off with now when i'm designing a system in notion you can see this it's actually everything you delete goes in the trash which is pretty nice if you need to recover things uh that's a quick way that you can do that um so when i'm designing systems in notion uh first off uh understanding my standpoint where i come from since i'm a software developer i kind of have the mindset of how i'm how to build applications and whatnot because i've been doing it for so long um but one of the things i highly encourage is to um is to think of your system in two separate parts uh one being the actual data um which in notions actually called the database is where you store all the data and another one being a view so you can you have two separate um i guess types of entities types of pages you're going to work with you have your database and then you have your view databases where the data is going to be stored view is how you want to kind of slice and dice and view your data in different cool ways uh brett says 40 minimum 40 sneeze is minimum yeah i that's probably sounds about right um i don't know it's one of those things it just it happens every once in a while and it just so happened to be bad timing but um you know dealing with the cards we got all right so um anyway when i in my main notion setup um i actually have one page i actually use called backend and what my backend page is used to do is to store uh databases only i don't do anything i don't store anything inside a backend uh the only exception that rule is if i'm creating dashboards i will have one page that holds a series of dashboards that i can favorite and kind of pop up to the top of my list on the left hand side and i'll kind of demonstrate how that works in a moment here okay so let's see with our backend page you can see there's a couple of options we have down below here um we're actually just going to start with an empty one because we don't want any data or content on this page yet if you're inside of notion and you want to access some of the more advanced features um use the slash command and then you can see there's these different kind of building blocks you can use to build out uh your page and there's a bunch of basic ones text you can create sub pages to-do lists various headings lists et cetera but if we keep scrolling down a little bit more we get to the database uh section of the blocks and this is where some of the more powerful things are located so let's see here if i scroll down the one i'm actually looking for is this table full page what this is going to do is it's going to create a page inside of notion on our backend page and the contents of that page it creates is only going to be data there's nothing else you can add to it so it's it's not as flexible as a page like this but we don't need it to be we really just want it to be storing data um excuse me one sec something kind of fell and i don't know what happened i'll be right back i realized i was probably muted somebody actually dropped a well someone put one of these bottles here a little too close to the edge of our staircase and it fell down the stairs and hit the floor pretty damn hard so kind of freaked me out sorry about that anyway okay back to our regularly scheduled program so we're gonna create a table that's a full page and when i select this you'll see what happens is it pops me into this new view it just drops me right into the page and the uh the name of the page here or that where it says untitled the name of the database that's kind of how we're gonna actually reference this data throughout notion um so what i usually do when i'm designing systems and doing this is i think about the different types of of data or tables that i'm going to need to to use and we're going to link a lot of these together to be able to view them and view the data in different ways so since this is a document uh kind of management system um the first obvious one we want to use as documents so we'll just go ahead and select that heard that loud and clear on stream yeah that would kind of freak me out because my kids are asleep and my wife is in the basement so when i hear a bang like that i have no idea i had no idea what happened um so anyway documents let's go ahead and delete some of these uh basic entries we have here because we don't need them uh quite yet and let's see what we got here so whenever you create a table for the first time it gives you two fields by default there's name and then tags so if i create a new object here name is just like the title of the page and then tags is actually a multi-select so what you can do with a multi-select field you can come in here and say this is a tag hit enter another tag hit enter and it kind of displays it in a way like this now instinctually what you might want to do is just kind of utilize these tags here what we're going to do instead is we're going to create another database and we're actually going to create a tags database and what this will let us do in the context of a document system is not super powerful but if you wanted to create different types of data through your notion system you can use kind one master tag list and you can link you can link these tags to pretty much any any type of data within notion which is pretty cool hey arpan how you doing tonight hopeful hope the day treated you well i think i'm not even sure where you're at you you're somewhere i know earlier we were talking it was night time so i'm guessing it's gotta be morning for you um anyway thanks for joining so anyway um again we're not gonna use this so what i'm gonna do is i'm actually gonna delete this and then we're gonna back up into the backend page and we're gonna create another whoops and we're going to create another table here so i'll use the slash command again i'm going to start typing in table and you can see it filters out our list here so we'll create another full page table let's name this one tags i can delete this tags field here and we're actually not going to add anything else to this table all we really need is a name um so this is where you would add like being a software developer i work a lot with javascript so one of my tags that i use a lot in my own system is javascript we'll hit enter there and then let's see what other ones can we add in here uh let's use node.js just to be a little more specific and then i'm going to create one called c sharp because that's another language that i work with on a pretty regular basis our pen says he just woke up yeah got that right all right so um now one of the other cool things that you can do with these is if we open one of these up we can add icons to the pages and this is this isn't doesn't help necessarily with the way the data's structured but if you add an icon it actually gives a nice visual pop to your your documents table which you'll see once we link that in so if i select add icon it gives you a default icon that there's there and these these are all going to be emojis that are are kind of standard but what you can also do if you click the icon you can select upload an image and i've got a couple of pre-selected icons that i've kind of uh built here all right i actually use these inside of my own so uh we'll come in here turns out i actually don't have a javascript icon uh we'll just pick this guy here this is a node icon but we'll use it as a placeholder for the time being since i don't have one uh it's a little fuzzy the quality is not that great but it doesn't really matter because it's going to be small where we're at too so back up we'll go into node we'll do the same thing here uh select an image we'll actually select the one that says node so it kind of differentiates it a little bit and then our last tag that we're gonna add an icon here for is c sharp so i'll select that guy there and one thing you might notice inside of the tags in the left-hand side that icon now shows next to the actual tag itself okay so let's back up here and answer a couple questions i got here uh brad's cursing on my stream yeah i really don't care versus the way man just woke up so you have i do have a table for just tags and i when we're done when i'm done building the document management system i will kind of i'll i'll demonstrate another way in which that could be useful like if you wanted to tag other things within your your notion system um okay so he also brad also says and can you use those tags to tag entries in our table yep exactly that's exactly why i like having a single table for tags i also create one for categories too um so actually let's go ahead and do that right now so let's go ahead and create another table we'll do a table full page and we'll say categories and let's see one category we could do software development so i'll just do development i love mint if i could spell uh create another one let's see how about business business is kind of a good thing and let's see what's the third one we can do uh finances why not we'll probably won't use some of these categories but uh we i know i'm not gonna use the finances one so i'm not gonna bother getting an icon to that uh but same thing we'll give our give these guys some icons here i've got one there for cody very cody looking icon and i should have a couple of business icons in here too so let's select another icon for that see how about a nice building building always kind of relates to business brad asks what's the benefit of a separate table for those instead of columns inside of your documents table ah here's the thing these will actually be columns inside of our documents table and that's what we're gonna get to next uh so if i could head over back into back end we're gonna open documents back up and now here's where kind of the real magic happens we're linking all this stuff together so if i come in here and i click plus anywhere inside of the table if you see this plus this gives you the option to create another column within your table so if i click on my column after it's been created and i go under property type you can see there's a bunch of different properties that you can you can add in here some of the basic ones are text number select multi-select so on and so forth and these are kind of these different fields are all kind of isolated within the table itself but if you scroll down to advanced there's this guy here named relation and this is where linking tables within notion becomes very powerful so if i select relation i'm presented with another dialog here and i can select a database here so um inside of this let's make this a be our tag so i'll hit tags and we'll select tags which is our backend or our tags table we just created and create that relationship i'm going to rename this to tags and now an example of something i actually have inside of my own um document management system let's see here json to csv here's one so what i like to do is i like to create code snippets and i store them inside of here just so i i have quick access to them because you can search through all this data too and it makes it a lot easier to find this stuff um so the let's see this is uh how to use json to csv is a library that i've used to do some of that stuff and then inside of this so you have your different fields up top here where you can actually link things together or add different properties to this but the other thing down below this is where kind of the body the main content of the actual page is so if i come in here you can use markdown inside of this if you're familiar with markdown there are two ways you can do you can actually select the code block if you select these little six dots here and go turn into there's an option here for code but if you are familiar with markdown which i am you can use the triple backtick and it automatically creates a block for you um so i'll come in here and i'll just kind of like just paste some code in here just as a demonstration uh paste in here you can see uh it automatically does syntax highlighting for uh javascript is kind of the default because everyone uses javascript uh but you can drop this down you can see there's tons of different highlight and i guess languages you can use tons of different languages you can use to highlight so like c sharp was one of mine if i put some c sharp code inside one of these documents i can select that and it would syntax highlight that code for c sharp instead of javascript because the syntax is a little bit different um okay so this this is pretty good so far uh we don't really need to add an icon here but now one of the things that i was kind of talking about earlier was linking tags back into the the table itself is if i click this you can see it actually lists out all of my uh individual entries inside of my tags database so i can select javascript right there okay so now java this is tagged with javascript um there's one more field i'm well we're gonna add a couple more fields so i'll just keep on rolling with this so now if i back up here you can see inside of my overall view i have a javascript icon here so if you can imagine um i can actually real quick because there's not any real hardcore information here this is an example of my actual documents database it's not it's not super polished um there's there's definitely work that can be done here but you can see there's i have document type i have tags categories um we're going to add this all the stuff as it goes so if i'm inside of here i can quickly scroll down and see like all my ears javascript one here's a javascript one here's a couple javascript uh articles or whatever that i've added inside of here so that's where that linking becomes really powerful so back inside here uh let's see what else we also want to add categories since this is a development related article we'll select this we'll say category and same thing coming here we'll add that relation here search for categories and we'll select that database and create the relation and then same thing inside of here you can actually update all the fields from the table view itself too so it's not like you have to actually open the page to edit the uh the document itself if i click on that i could select development and boom now i have development brad says that's what i was missing understanding a notion dude i know this was like when i finally understood how to do this it was like my mind opened up like we were chatting on on the the learn learn build teach i think that's james the server learn bill teach we were chatting under the other day about like one system to kind of rule them all right it's like kind of a lord of the rings reference like i've been looking for that for so long and this notion is like 99 there the last one percent is that api which i'm hoping they come out with very soon because that's gonna let me do all sorts of cool crazy stuff with it and i can't wait for that um and i don't want to try and use a hack together api library i just it's it's not that big of a deal like my system that i built works well enough to where i don't really need it but i'm looking forward to that um so the other thing as you notice inside of my uh my actual uh notion setup is i also have a document type in here and so we're going to act that's actually a select field um i don't need to relate that to anything else so i'll come in here and say document type and we'll leave that like that and i didn't actually add any options in here but you can add that right in line so if i select this under document type will say like how to would be like the type of article or document that i'm creating here so i'll select that and this gives another way for me to be able to view that and then the other thing which i haven't added to mine but i want to is a bookmarked and we're going to use bookmarked later on when we create a filtered view of this table when we favorite it because that's going to give us like quick access to all of our bookmark documents like things we use on a fairly regular basis so we'll leave that there and another quick demonstration you can check and uncheck this just like you uh can with the other fields inside of here so everything that you can do inside of the document itself with all these properties you can do from right here um okay so that's cool that we have something like this but what if you wanted to do something a little more advanced uh that's kind of where templates really come into play so a template inside of notion um is a way for you to define not only the different not only pre-populated fields like these the tags and categories and document type but you can also pre-populate the body of the document so in in one of the document types i guess i can have is like kind of like a business process or a standard operating procedure sop as they call it um that is one of the document types that i have but i don't want to go in and like populate all the fields every single time that or like you know manually fill the document out every single time i want to create a new process because i kind of have an idea of what i want to put in there and we're going to go a little we're going to go pretty professional with this i don't quite use all of these fields or i guess structure but it's it's good to see it kind of gets the point across so instead you can click down here under new or you can actually drop down this guy here and if you click if you click new it just creates a page but if you click this little arrow down here it shows you the templates that are available for this specific database and templates are built per database so you can create i don't know if there's a limit i actually don't know if there's a limit on the number of i'm not going to bother looking at that not yet at least i will at some point i don't know if there's a limit but you probably don't need too many so what we're actually going to do now is we're going to build a template for that business process or standard operating procedure so i'll click on new template and you'll see inside of the or on the top here it says you're editing a template inside of documents just so this way it kind of gives you a good visual representation that you are not actually editing a document this is a template okay so in here we'll do like uh business process is the name of the template it's not the appeal sometimes i can't spell and talk at the same time this is the name of the template specifically this isn't the name of the document itself or the entry into the database but we do know the document type is going to be business process so that is one field that we are going to pre-populate and the other thing which i like to do is pre-populate the icon because that also gives you a nice visual um on your art or on your your documents themselves so i'm going to select add icon and we're going to upload another image here it's back up here and i've got like this this red looking document here is pretty cool so let's select that guy and the other thing i'm actually going to do is because this is red i like these colors to semi match so i'm going to change the color of my document type to red as well just so those you know i don't know call me anal or i don't know adhd i don't i don't even know what the right term is for it but anyway um and now down here in the body of the document you can start creating your your outline of what you want to uh populate or yeah i guess the sections of your document um so we'll do here same thing you can um you can type in something like executive summary let's see what else do we want here i think it's built summary right yeah we also want prerequisites uh and then in order to switch uh these types you can again you can click on this little three dots click turn into and then it gives you the different options so we'll select that be heading one but the other thing since if you're familiar with markdown you can do the uh the hashtag and then space and that'll also convert it into a heading as well so i'm gonna keep doing that uh we've got procedure which is the actual meat of the document um we're gonna have definitions which could be terms so like if you've ever worked with a real high-tech environment um like i have a background i do a lot i've been doing software development for pretty much i don't know as far back as i can remember however it's always been part of a dual kind of responsibility so i also have a background in i.t operations and systems engineering um and working i've worked a lot with these types of documents and i've had to create templates and do things myself with them so uh definitions and so that's where you'd be like if you have a technical definition about a specific system that's where that would go and then we're also going to revision history and this one's going to be pretty cool all right but we'll we'll leave that like that and then what i like to do if i'm populating these guys out is i will also add another line down on down below here and i had kind of just instructions on executive summary is pretty straightforward so i don't really need to do that but we'll also say like uh what needs to be done before you can do you can do this process execute this process very professional and then i'll also like control i to make sure that that goes italics um we can also see let's change the color and choose kind of a light gray so it kind of fades into the background just a little bit see brad says no she needs better colors yeah i kind of agree that the pastel colors i i wish there's a plug-in out there uh for it's not really a plug-in it's kind of a it's really more or less a hack into the electrode system for the desktop app called notion enhancer which lets you tweak the colors and stuff but um i didn't have any good luck with it so i wouldn't i don't know that i recommend it but there are ways around it it's all just css uh he also says man you structure this so professionally yeah i again i came from this world uh lucky boy sunday what's going on man uh off topic do you know jira as well as notion um to some degree we use jira at work but i don't use it in a large capacity i used to know jira the old version of jira before they went to the cloud and made the the new templates and i'm not i'm not a huge fan of the new system i liked being able to get into all the nitty-gritty um excuse me one sec let me get a sip of water there um uh lucky boy why do you ask out of curiosity if you can go ahead and drop that in there i'll answer it when i see it all right so procedure uh let's do uh the um the process i guess is a good one i don't know those step-by-step instructions and then you can also like uh what same thing we'll do highlight and let's change this color to something like do that light gray again and let's see i'm not even i won't bother you kind of get the gist of what i'm trying to do here um but for the process you can also do you can pre-populate some of these guys out so we'll do like one two three so people get kind of an idea what needs to be done there definitions you can use the the hyphen and then a space will turn it into a bulleted list you got to put a couple spaces there so it doesn't actually get rid of your your bullets when you drop down but revision history is the fun part uh so what i've got for revision history is actually you can create databases within databases which is kind of cool and especially if you create if you create a database within a template and you pre-populate that database with stuff it shows up on every single template every single uh entry in your your master database i guess if you will with all that information as well so if i use a slash and i create um let's create another table and what we're going to do instead of a full page we're going to do inline if you select inline what it'll do is it will drop it right into the um i guess the main bulk of it and we can actually probably get rid of this header and just say for our the name of our table revision history so this isn't actually a table that you would um yeah you could i mean it's not like you can't but i don't know that i would really reference this from anywhere outside of the system um but this is kind of like isolated into itself if that makes sense if that doesn't let me know i can try and explain it better but we can also add different types of fields here so like if revision history for the document what are some things that you normally would would have um we would have like the author the date uh the description like what was doing the name i don't know that you can change i guess you can so yeah we'll rename that to the description we're going to get rid of this tags uh table or the tags field because we don't really need that anymore um and then let's go ahead and add author now i'm going to actually select from our basic types i'm going to say person because you can actually tag people within your notion system and then it it kind of if you have like a profile picture it'll show up next to it so you'll see what i'm talking about so we'll select author or we'll select person for that that field type we're actually going to drag this over to the left so it looks a little nicer we'll click on this again and we'll add dates and we're going to change the property type to date and then we're going to add reviewer and normally i would choose person for this but because i am the only person inside of my notion it's going to look a little funky if i'm the only one you know since i can't really tag myself twice i guess i can but anyway we'll just leave this as text so let's see here i'm going to um open this up more and let's see that probably is pretty good so let's back up actually uh let's go back again so we're back to our main page but if i press this arrow again you can see here's my business process template that we just created now if i select this watch what happens it didn't happen that time i don't know why it didn't happen let's try that again let's get rid of this drop down notion's been having some some funkiness lately i don't know what's going on doesn't seem to want to do that but now another way oh here we go it finally kicked in uh while we're waiting for this to kind of generate uh lucky boy says just promote it to team lead and i would be much more involved in creating backlogs epics stories etc i tend to use notion to organize my own work and like to keep things clean um funny you mentioned that because i i'm not i haven't been promoted but again we use notion at work or we use uh jira at work and i use notion here so um i use notion to manage all my personal tasks i follow the gtd methodology i have for a long time and i'm kind of starting to move away from that but like my individual deliverable tasks i will keep track of within my notion system whereas like the higher level milestones and projects and stuff that's that's where my my company is really interested in seeing so i don't necessarily have to get into um doing all the fine grained detail with inside of jira or yeah inside of jira uh lucky boy also says but after spending some time in algeria it's a mess okay um i don't know that this the stream is probably not the best way to do this but if you want to uh either ping me inside of discord or i'm assuming i guess if you came from discord you can always dm me or tag me if not if you're not in discord uh fullstack.chat is the url um that will it's kind of a landing page to my discord join up there we're a full we've got a couple developers bunch of us chat on a daily basis so uh it's definitely um you know if you need help or anything i'd be more than happy to help um okay so we've got our template has been populated here and you'll see if i scroll down uh here's everything that we put inside of our template has now been added inside of this page so for the business process let's do one of the things that i try and do on a regular basis a weekly review so we'll say weekly review and let's bookmark that so we'll see that inside of the view categories let's change that to business and tags we need to tag this with anything probably not we'll leave that be um so we can come in here and say like you know there's an executive review here's you know these couple things need to be done ahead of time you can think process you can add in pictures and stuff too so like if i come in here and uh like i had a page open earlier uh do i have a picture that i can do somewhere let's just do like a business process how about workflow diagram since we're going like straight up business in here let's just go let's go right for it everybody likes their workflow diagrams and charts and all sorts of stuff so we'll right click this copy image let's head back in here and let's go ahead and just paste that guy in there so there there's there's images this is one of the things i really like about notion is you can structure your data really well or you can get real freeform with it um it's very flexible both ways um so just by pasting an image in here now that image belongs is inside of notion which is pretty cool definitions we don't really need to populate it but we're going to look at this revision history here real quick so um if i select new you can see it's a description so let's say like uh initial document would be that one the author i can drop this i can select this and you can see anyone who's a member of your notion workspace will be populated here so since i'm the only person i can select that i'm the author the date can be today and then the reviewer would be like i don't know bob bob is a reviewer why can't bob be the reviewer okay so then this this lets you actually see a quick like hey what did i do on that specific day um this is kind of more this is really just kind of here to how normal sops are designed but you can actually also if you have depending on the um i guess tier of your notion workspace if you have at least the first paid tier you can scroll down here and you can actually see the different revisions to your pages as well which is really cool i can't really demonstrate that because i don't have oh here we go page history um it's not available f i don't know that this workspace is going to work yeah i see it doesn't work usually you can come in here you can actually step through the history of your notion pages and i've actually caught myself like i've accidentally deleted stuff off of pages and i'm able to restore it by coming in here and looking through the history of the page itself which is pretty neat um okay so the last thing i really kind of want to demonstrate um i guess there are two more things i want to demonstrate the first one is search so i'm not going to bother doing it inside of here because there's not enough there's not enough articles here i guess but we'll bring my notion back up this is my actual setup there are a couple different ways you can search uh there's a search icon right on the database itself so if i select this and i say weekly review you can see maybe not weekly review there we go so it shows now it filters it down to my weekly review um and then the other way you can do it which i can do with inside of here is anywhere inside of notion if you hold ctrl or command on the mac and hit p it brings up this nice search and this will this will search your entire notion workspace um so i can also type in like how to and it'll bring that guy up uh depending on how large your notion workspace is this sometimes takes a couple of seconds to kind of find it but i've noticed it's it's it's pretty good about like if you know you're working on a product like me me personally i'm tracking i'm actively tracking i think like 20 projects right now that i'm working on um so instead of having to like navigate through my system and find the actual project uh page that i want to open up to work on i can just control p and find it pretty quickly that way so that's a very very useful tip um and then i also wanted to like i said earlier i use back end for all of my databases and where i store stuff and then the one page that i usually will come in here and add as well is my dashboards so we're going to create a page now so i use slash and typed in page we'll select that and then i'm going to type in dashboards here and this is not going to be a table this is going to be an empty icon or uh no one empty with icon let's remove the icon see brad says show us why linking those tags and categories is better than select oh yeah well i forgot about that thank you for reminding me and i will get there um so inside of dashboards we'll create a new uh let's see favorite let's let's create a new page inside of here and favorites uh i guess bookmark let's say bookmarks um bookmark documents uh let's come in here so we this is just gonna be an empty page but what we're gonna do is we're actually going to be we're actually going to um do what's called create what's called a linked database and when linked databases is it's a it's a completely separate view of your data that you can add your own sorting and filtering to without affecting your your original database um so slash create link database is the command you want to enter after that and if i select this you'll see it's going to give me the option to search for my database so we'll select documents and then you can see it's just showing us the default view of everything but if i select this guy i can come in here and i can filter it and we'll say i want to add a filter to this and i want to see everything where bookmarked is checked so these are all of our bookmarked bookmark documents here but say i don't like all these fields scrolling off the side of the page right like i don't need to see all that stuff so we can hide some of these fields in here as well there are two ways you can hide fields inside of databases a link database is just a database itself so it works largely the same any changes to the fields you make in the link database will also affect the original one now there are the two different ways you can hide this is like i can click on this and it either gives you the option to hide here or if you select these three dots uh here and select properties it shows you all the properties that are available inside of your your um all the different fields that are available inside of your database and you can just uncheck them now this still looks kind of funky like we don't maybe we don't need to view it in like a tabular way but we can actually experiment with different kinds of views as well so if i select add a view there's a bunch of different view types that you can add to like kind of view your data in different ways and list kind of is the one that pops up to me is the way that i'd like to see this so if i select list and click create you'll see it's it looks a little bit cleaner right we have to re-add our filtering back in here so same thing i'm going to come back in filter we're going to add another filter change bookmarked and we'll set that to that um maybe we do want to see some of this information here um so if i wanted to see like the tags that are associated with this or the categories i say i guess we'll say are associated with the specific article i can select the the three dots there click properties and select categories and now my categories are viewed there if you want to reorder these you can go into properties and you can just drag these guys around so say i'll drag category above document type and now my fields on the right hand side are reordered now brad says ah in superpower i didn't know diamond's making fun of my light what's up diamond thanks for joining man uh couldn't you create another bookmarks uh view for that uh if you could explain a little more i'm not sure i quite understand the question um i'll move on to your the previous statement that you mentioned though about uh viewing the actual why viewing the um am i trying to say uh why creating the link tags is better uh there are two i guess ways that i would approach this um the first one i would do is come in here uh i'm gonna hide this because every time you create a relation it creates another field here for you to like see everything that's linked together if you have a lot of js or javascript articles it's gonna get crazy so we're going to hide this right off the bat but what i can also do is if we create a template inside of here and say like a default tag template and let's add a table inside of here so if i add a create link database this is why i like doing the tags in separate tables so if i create a link database here and we'll say we want to show all documents and then i will say we can leave this as a table view but i want to filter and this this gets pretty cool so if i filter it where the tags contains um the default tag template now this is kind of a kind of one of those hidden you call them superpowers brad um this is one of those hidden superpowers so if you create a if you're creating a template and you create a link database inside of that template if you set wherever your whatever relation field you're using so in this case we're using tags and if we say it contains the default tag template notion is actually smart enough to where when you create this template or apply it to an existing page it's going to filter that view based on that based on whatever that relation is so it even though i select the default tag template here what you'll see is if i go let's see let's just go ahead back up and we'll leave that as is if i go inside of javascript which is where we created one of ours and i select the default tag template when it generates the body of the page what you'll see is it automatically filters it down to the javascript page or tag instead of the default tag template and if i go to filter you can actually see it's already it's already populated that data so it's smart enough to do that which is one cool cool way to do it um but brad you also mentioned um why you know another i'm kind of all over myself today so let's say we want to come in here and we want to create um let's think of another another data type that we can add let me look through my own setup and i want to see what else we can add here and i'll kind of demonstrate why i like tags in different spots bear with me for one second okay so there we go i got one so um okay so i'm content creator obviously i'm streaming right now so one of the things that i manage my entire content creation process the first 95 percent of it all within notion right so i have the concept inside of notion of a constant or i guess an artifact i guess um concept what do i have him name hold on a second i'll find out what the actual name is and i'm going to go through my i will go through my content management system at one point so i have content item is what i'm called so we're going to create another data database here so content item let me get through creating this actual table here and then i'll answer more questions uh create a table and we'll create a full page and we'll say content item there we go and now what i can do is i can come in here i can delete this and say how like one of my articles could be like how to uh link javascript in html right like that could be an article that i would write for my website um if i wanted to be able to uh i could since i created tags in its own separate system without being tied into the table itself what i can do is i can create a relation to this guy too so if i wanted to see all my articles that were related to javascript i can see those inside of the tags page as well so i'll create that relation let's name that tags and then let's come inside here and select javascript now back inside tags let's just open javascript and create another another linked table i guess you know what here's here's a better way let's delete this guy and we're going to edit the template and let's say i have documents there and let's also create another link database up under here and let's uh go content items and we'll see all our content items but i want to filter this same thing we did with the documents themselves we'll add a filter we'll say where the tags contains a default tag template which is the name of our template here and let's back up here now inside of javascript again let's reapply that same you can't apply a template or if you can i don't know how to you can't reapply a template after you've already applied one but if you wipe out all the contents of the page like we didn't really have anything we wanted to save inside the page any changes so we just delete everything we could start over if i click on default tag template to apply this template back into my page you'll see not only am i seeing the documents that are related but i can also see the actual content items like articles videos things like that that are related to javascript um so that's another that's the reason why i like having my tags and categories in in their own separate tables as opposed to being consolidated inside of a table because it gives you different ways to create relations within your notion workspace uh let's see uh phoning you i think that's the name hey brian thanks for the live streams video i needed hey perfect glad hope you learned something if you have any questions feel free to ping me on discord um again i'll repeat this stack.chat is the url to get to my discord uh if you're not already in the notion the unofficial notion discord i'm there too brad says okay now you can go either way relay doc yep there you go you got that so that's why i like doing that um but we're back to dashboards we were creating here the last thing i completely forgot to do is if i if i know that um bookmark documents is kind of a view that i want to see and have quick access to on a regular basis uh usually if it's a dashboard that i'm creating i'll also give it an icon i like using icons within notion because um they they make pages pop and give you like any anything i can do to work my system faster if i can quickly see what i'm trying to get at i'll take the extra effort to to add whatever information or images in there i need to so like let's come in here do i have an image for a dashboard somewhere business there you go some charts charts are kind of dashboardy right to do let's see here i don't have like an actual dashboard icon that's okay yeah we'll just use like let's just use this guy here this looks very kind of dashboardy i suppose uh so what then i can do here is if you click this favorite in the upper right hand corner notice what happens on the left in the navigation so i i don't have any kind of like headers up on top of my pages but as soon as i click on this i have a favorites up top and then i have a private space down below and there's actually if you if you share pages out with someone else who uses notion there'll be a third section here that um there'll be a third section here that will uh show what pages and uh within your notion that you have shared webcack you made it what's going on man hope you're having a good night um so yeah that uh that's kind of the stream um i hope you learned something tonight um this is i mean i breezed through this pretty quickly um obviously i mean the main kind of takeaway from here is how to create databases how to structure your data and how to like link things together and get different cool views again repeating something i said earlier in the stream just in case someone didn't get it whenever i'm trying to work within notion i always start i try and decouple my views from my data think of them as two separate things you have your data where you actually want to store the information and this can be kind of inside of these tables here like i don't really care what some of this stuff looks like um documents is probably the one exception to that rule because i do like the table view inside of documents so what i usually do is i'll like let's just come in here let's add this guy give this guy an icon whatever that icon and i'll favorite that so that's pinged up to the top now and then i can minimize this back end and i don't have to worry about whatever's in here um yeah brad says link databases are key they really are i mean that's kind of like when i figured out how to link databases and do this all this stuff this was like this was a total game changer for me i don't like using that game changer term because i feel like it's overused in the business world but the game the game has changed a little tron reference there if anybody didn't catch that um anyway so again that is the stream um i would like to thank you for joining me tonight i appreciate your time out of your evening um if you're interested in more content like this uh more notion stuff is coming soon i'm actually getting ready to start building a notion course that i plan to release um i do a lot of live coding streams where i'm demonstrating different various topics uh i usually stream every wednesdays at 8 30 pm central that's the best place to find me um if you liked this uh video do me a favor give it a like give me a sub all that normal youtube oh wait hold on a second is it is it's a i have to by law request you to smash the like button i think that's the right term smash is the right term do whatever you want with the like button just press it for me please um but uh yeah um subscribe hit the bell for notifications um i'm brian mmdev on twitter any updates to the stream are all going to happen there um yeah but thanks again for joining me and have a have a great night um bye-bye you

Channel: Brian Morrison

Views: 329

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: notion, templates, knowledgebase, document management, documents, productivity, database, notion app, notion api, notion templates, notion templates for students, notion templates 2020, notion templates 2021, notion tutorial, notion for beginners, notion tutorial for students, notion tutorial for beginners

Id: Nu_p0g7DH14

Length: 49min 45sec (2985 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021