Easily Build A Perfect Task Manager In Notion (2024)

looking to build a perfect task manager for notion you've come to the right place in this video I'll walk you step by step through the process of going from this to this all right we starting completely from scratch with an empty page so you can follow along every step of the way first up let's give this a name uh let's call this the perfect task manager and then let's assign it a corresponding icon I like to go for the notion one but of course feel free to adapt it as you like it and then we will select the empty page option now in this video and also in general when I build out systems in otion I want to First focus on the back end and back end in notion means mostly building out the database structure because in notion pretty much any system that is powerful and like a good best practice approach means that you're using Notions databases to build things out they are so much more powerful than if you were to just use you know like lazy check boxes like this in a page and if you don't know that yet you'll notice in a second once we have that ready but yeah for that video that means we first will build out these databases and then we will later in the second half focus on the front end where we then build the dashboards and the actual way of how we interact with all the information all right in order to do that let's just type SL database that gives us a new clean database in our page and at the same time let's turn on full width in the top right corner to make sure that we have a bit more screen screen real estate to work with I'm also going to zoom in One More Level just so everything's a bit bigger on your screen next up let's call this our tasks DB perfect and then I always like to delete this initial property even if we add TX back in just so we have a clean fresh start so next up it's time to think about what properties do we actually need to power our task manager and the first one that we certainly need is an indication of whether something is done or not now in the past what I would do is I would simply use a checkbox and there's nothing wrong with this approach right this is the easiest one you just add a checkbox and you say done question mark and then you can like make it even very tiny small and put it in the beginning of this and then you can just oops check it off whenever you've done a task so that's totally fine if you want to go down that route in this video however I will actually use instead a status property and that's simply because uh in notion we have a few things where it's actually beneficial uh now to have like the the full status property in these three stages even if we don't need them always in our uh for the for task right for task it's a bit Overkill typically to say have these three different levels but what we can just do is we can just show this as a checkbox and the back and it still has these different properties and uh checking something off just means it switches to done immediately and you will see later it allows us to do a few cool things in terms of um some automations so let's uh keep it like this and let's move this to the front and then let's Al add change the um the icon here so just we know this means whether it's checked or not so I like to get the check mark and then we have an immediate visual indication what this checkbox is for besides knowing whether something is done or not the second most important information at task manager is of course course whether we have a deadline or due date so let's add it in next click on plus again search for oops not VI but for date add that property in and then just let's just call this our due date awesome uh while we added we can also then add a quick um select field so here I will actually a multi select one for sever applying several tags and let's call this context now here I'm just going to pick like think the form and shapes uh icon I like quite a bit for this just to indicate you know we have different things in here and this is something that comes from the GTD philosophy right where you want to maybe tag certain task based on in what context you want to do them and things that I like to add here but again you can customize this to your own specific needs would be something like oops let's just move myself over here again um uh low energy right so um let's get like a battery that is empty to indicate okay this is something you know that we can do even if we don't don't have any energy left then of course also the corresponding version with um high energy high energy um something else that mean not nowadays not as relevant but maybe for you still uh an important part is you could uh track things that involve your phone right so for phone calls so let's get a phone next and say okay this has to happen you know with the phone and then last but least let's add like um a lightning bolt for um some quick wins right so this would like uh be applied to tasks that can be just like you know like uh Blaze through at the end of the day and these are just a few nice options that then later on we can use in our views to filter and say okay you know I I really don't have any energy right now show me everything in my task manager that I can do right now and of course we can just like quickly uh also change the color right so low energy might be uh our gray thing high energy maybe yeah that that red uh sounds about right phone uh let's take a blue and a quick win uh let's take yellow just to have some different colors here in the text awesome so now we have our due date the context and whether something is done or not now let's add in a first Advanced Property a formula property that tells us how many days are left until uh the deadline and don't worry even if you've never written a formula before I promise this one is very easy and you can get it done so let's stick on plus let's select oops click select our formula and let's call this um days uh remaining and now let's go into the formula and say okay give me the date between and then first let's pick the later date which is the due date and then now with two quotation mark H with two brackets and then another comma quotation marks and days now the way to read this means so notion please give me the date between the due date and now and return that number in days so let's click on done and first here nothing shows up because we don't have a date in here but if we now pick here okay give me the 14th we see okay two days are remaining in between this and if it were on today right we have it set to zero perfect now let's continue adding a few more useful properties first up we will add another date property and this one will be our finish date so in notion it's actually kind of hard to record the date when you are done with the task or at least that was the case now with a few recent feature updates it's much easier and it can be quite useful for a lot of other things right then later know okay when did I actually do that so if you don't need it you can skip that but I find it quite useful and I will go in here and just add a different um you know icon to visually distinguish it from the due date so that's our finished dat now let's just add like a generic multi Select Property in for Tex right in case you want to tag things by something and then um after that we just need um one last property I think for now and that would be our priority so here let's take a Select Property let's call this priority and then um you know get an exclamation mark and then have our usual levels of um low uh medium and high and then just of course with the corresponding colors right so high would probably be red medium maybe something like um yellow and yeah that's already the case and then blue for a low priority Awesome by the way we starting off by building this for single player mode but later in this video I will also show you how you can expand the setup if you need it to work in a team environment and if you don't want to build this yourself check out the link in the description for a readymade template now this is already a pretty solid task manager for notion but let's Crank It Up a few notches first up let's add subtasks here and for that actually let's just add some Dam data in here first so we just say task a task B and task C and then let's click on these three dots here and then on sub items and here turn on sub items and now what happens is you see here at the very front we get this toggle to open and close our items and we can now add sub items right so I can now say okay this is now um a child task and I can say also like another uh child task to and then you can just you know close the tole and then they're all collapsed and it's of course infinite levels right so you could open up your triy task and so on and so on and this is quite nice and the way this works actually in the back end is that notion has automatically in your properties created two new properties parent item and sub item so if you want you can rename them right to parent task and subtask or you can leave it as is but it's very useful to know how this works and actually you can also go into your sub items and always you know change the settings for one you could say okay actually uh you know show the nesting toggle on the title or not uh or you could do something like turning them off in this view so that they don't even appear but yeah just again useful to know where that feature sits moving on let's add some simple time tracking to our task manager and for that we first need one additional helper property so we already have the time when we finish it right but you don't have currently like a property to record when we start something so let's quickly add that another date property and let's call this a start time and here this is one that we usually don't even need to see so it's again just a backend property and behind it we will add now a database button this is a fairly new feature in notion that we can have database buttons that trigger certain effects just for that row and this one we will call you know start tracking and you see once I do that it automatically also uh updates the the button here I actually just want to rename this to start and maybe give this like a a green um dot so let's pick the the Green Dot and you know let's call this start and now set up and what what we want to do is when this button is clicked please uh take my um the start time that I have and fill in the current time stamp that's the first thing that I want to do and then the second thing that I might want to do is like just make sure that this is actually now you know in progress so we can also say okay the status make sure that we set this to uh in progress if it's not you know already there and this you know one of the situations where it now comes in handy that we have more than just a checkbox uh in order to do that and that means now whenever I click this button you will see uh I click here it fills out the start time here and I get this like weird uh in between thingy in the checkbox right it's not not undone it's not done it's like in between it's in progress all right now the second thing that we of course need is we need to stop the tracker again so again we let's add another button and let's call this stop tracking and here then again let's add like red dot oops red red circle and stop and here when this button is clicked then please um let's update the Finish date with the current time and let's set our our status To None all right that's pretty much it now all that's left is another formula property to just calculate how long you know a task is taking us so let's add formula and let's call this um task uh duration or task uh task time and here it's a similar formula to the dates remaining we take date between and this time we will take the um fin finish date and then we will take the start uh time and now this time we want to return this probably in minutes right for like a smaller interval than this and another a second we click here on stop it will fill out the finish time and then calculate the total minutes that we spend on this all right we spend well 1 minute right from 46 to 47 on this task now one important caveat with this method you basically can only stop uh the timer once and end it once right this is a very very simple time train so you can't like pause the timer and then you know come back to it later if you need a more elaborate more robust time tracking system let me know down in the comments then I'll record a separate video uh on how you can uh do that but again for just like this very simple one where you can say okay like how long does this roughly take this is great to have now as you probably noticed this doubles also uh to allow us to you know check off the task that is done with just a click of one button and at the same time set the Finish date so for example if you say you don't want to use the time tracking but you still care about you know knowing your finishe date then you could just rename this button to uh instead of saying stop track you know like done and then it just sets the task to done and fills out the Finish date so you know that later now one other way to set the Finish dat in notion would be to use database automation right here you can pretty much uh do the same thing you can say okay when uh something was said to done in terms of the status then please fill out the Finish date so these are the two approaches of how you can record it and then later you know come back and actually see okay you know how many tasks did I finish on any given day before we continue quick shout out to the sponsor of this video Morgan Morgan is an amazing tool that allows you to combine your calendar task management and scheduling in one place and they just release their native notion integration which makes it the perfect companion for this task manager in notion most importantly they not just integrate with Google Calendar but also with Outlook apple and others so if you first got all excited by Notions recent calendar release and then all sad because you couldn't really use it well then this one is for you so so just to quickly show you the integration here's the Morgan app and as you can see next to my calendar I have here on the left side my different tasks integrated and I have by default the Morgan task right so you can just use Morgan also as a task manager and then I have next to it my notion uh integrated and in here you see it automatically pulls in the task from the task database and then it CHS them either by the dates right so overdue today and upcoming and then I can also select another grouping so here I currently have it set up to group by priority right so I have high medium low but I could also say okay please group it by projects and then you see okay now I get my projects here and then inside each of the grouping you can then pick a secondary thing in my case please show it by status so let's go back to by priority and then by status so I see okay under mine no priority items I have currently three things work an integration video play around with two integration and something important I nearly forgot I can then just take these tasks and direct them into my calendar to time block as usual right so I can say okay play around with Tod do this integration that will take quite a while and work on the integration video that will be uh after that and that will take this much time as you can see get oops I get an indicator that this task comes from no so if I have actually like something else integrated as well in this case my todoist I could say well okay let's actually do some todoist work oops afterwards uh and then um I get theu indication that this is from that other app now one important thing that tripped me up initially uh is that it all doesn't appear automatically in your cam right so even if you said a a due date it will show here right so it shows you that you have a certain due dat so fep three this is by when I should have done this but it still waits for you to schedule it so it's a different approach to it rather it won't automatically show you when you have your things to do but it just shows you your calendar and then allows you to add the tasks there once they added they also get sync to your Google calendar right so if I go back to my Google Calendar I will see here again I have play around with d this integration and work on integration video this is just a Google Calendar view right so this is really cool because that means you have sort of a two-way sync between your notion tasks and the calendar active last but not least while it is not possible to currently change um any of the properties from here right so you can't rename a task or you can't change the priority you can just tick it off as done right so either here or in the sidebar and that will sync back to notion right so basically the workflow is you create the entries in notion you tag them and you see them everything in here and then you can uh after you schedule them you can say okay this is done this is done and then if you head back over to notion after a moment uh these will flip back to done there you have it work on integration video is now finished so check out morg yourself with the link in the description and now back to building the perfect task manager in notion time to now add projects into the mix so that we can then group our tasks by well the respective projects and for that we want to create a separate database basically notion whenever we have a different type of data right that requires different meta information right so different properties we want to create separate databases for it so in this case let's now again create it here and let's call this our projects DB and then here as well we will delete the default one and the first thing that we need to do is we need to connect these two databases so that we can start grouping tasks to projects and for that what we want to do is we want to create a relation property so let's add a relation and let's pick the database that we want to relate it to so the task database we just created previously and say that we want to see it on both ends right so let's move myself over here show on task database and then we can just rename it right so here on projects it should say tasks and on task database it should probably say project right because we only have one project per task all right uh one other tip that I would recommend doing in order just like you know keep things a bit cleaner is to swap out the icon in here right to correspond with the task so for tasks right we have this check mark so here let's uh quickly change this also into the check mark and then here for projects if we scroll to the very end uh actually doesn't appear automatically we need to go to properties and then here we see we have now this project relation as well and we can also here just change it for what I like to do there and I think for project are typically like this target icon all right another nice thing is we have now okay let's see we have our project one we have project two and we have project oops number three we can now H connect it to the task right by simply clicking in here and it shows us all our tasks and we can say Okay task a and task B belongs to the first project and project number two has task C all right and you see the corresponding ones up here uh pop up uh and fill that out as well so now we have this connection established all right time to add some helpful properties first let's add a status here as well and then let's add um a date property to indicate the duration of our project awesome now next up we can activate one specific feature that we so far haven't talked about on tasks but on projects it might be quite helpful and that is dependencies dependencies allows you in notion to indicate that a certain item will block another item and that it should be done beforehand and whether you need it or not really depends on the complexity of stuff that you manage right if it's mostly your personal uh life then you probably don't need it if you're however in a work environment or particular team environment then might be helpful to see for others you know okay so first we need to have these three steps finished before we can tackle step four the way this will work is that notion will create two new properties so similar to the subtask feature where we have you know par parent and subtask it will add two properties here that are called blocking and block by to indicate you know this relation and the cool thing is that once we turn this on let's actually just do this we can tell notion to please automatically shift the due date so the duration that we've set for something when there's a collision right so you have different options you can say Okay always maintain the time between items that can be a bit much uh but I like particular this option of Shifting when the dates overlap right so the second I move like a a blocking item to a point where you know like the end date is later than the start date of something that's blocked by it will automatically move the later one out you can also say whether you want to avoid vegans or not I work vegan so I don't want that to happen and you can turn it on now you see you get now these two new properties and again here I would just recommend to like uh replace them with like some properties that um make a bit more sense uh to you visually so let's get a hand here and then let's take a um stop um uh sign here for the blocking uh block by and blocking and now I could say for example okay my uh project um project uh one is actually blocking project to right so I click in the blocking uh column and select project to and then will pop up here as block by now this alone right is not not the nicest way to look at it and we'll talk about use a bit later but I just want to show you where this becomes relevant if you have for example now a timeline view right on which you want to show these and for that actually we should set a duration here so let's say project one that goes from first of FB until end of FAP and then the next project will go from um the 2nd uh of March until the end of March now if I go into my timeline I see my items in here right so I have my my current project and then I have the next one let's actually look at this maybe by the quarter and we see uh we have this yellow line that indicates okay project one is currently blocking project 2 and you see now if I move project 2 in a way that you know like overlaps with project two it automatically pushes out project 2 now be very careful right like if I'm do it in the other way it doesn't automatically adjust it uh but at least this one level is quite nice to have so that's the blocked by and uh blocking property for the task manager next let's create an easy progress bar to indicate how far an individual project has come right and in order to do so we need to create a formula property so let's click on plus say formula and let's call this progress oops progress and again swap out the icon for like uh nice um progress bar and here in the formula we want to like now look at the tasks that we've connected to it and figure out how many of these tasks have been done and the way to do so is that first we take task so the name of our connection and then we will type dot filter open the bracket and then take current dot um and then status equals and now type in in quotation marks the name of whatever status you have right so that that indicates it's done so in this my case that's done if you renamed it you would need to type something else in here that's the first step and what this basically tells notion is to please go into this connection the task connection and then filter items and only show me the ones that have a status equal to done so if I click on okay you just see that in progress a it will only show me task a because that's the one that I have set to done but if I were to check task B now task B would pop up here as well and again if you uncheck it it disappears so that's the first step right just showing the remaining open tasks but now we want to take it one step further and say okay well how many uh are that and for that just type Dot and then length and now it counts the length of this array so we see now okay now we have one and otherwise we would have uh two if I check both all right so that's the total number of tasks and now now of course we want to percent progress so in order to do that we need to divide this by the um total number of task that we have and we can either type the the slash one or we can just continue with like dot divide and actually like this because then it's a bit more readable and we say okay please divide this by and then just take tasks do length right so the number of all tasks that we have now we get the relative number right 0.5 and you can just stop there right and just say okay now please edit property and say okay number form please show this as a percent value and then give me um the progress bar next to it to indicate right if you want you can even remove the the the progress part to just show that now if you want to show the percent for the progress then one thing that I would recommend is to actually um round this yourself because uh sometimes notion has a weird bu so let's actually just create another task in here uh we have and you see it has like this uh yeah it doesn't round the the percent value uh very well so now it just like keeps showing 66 this is not very nice so in order to like fix that issue what you want to do is type um dot here again and then first do multiply um multiply uh open records and we want to multiply the whole value by 100 then we want to round it and then we want to divide it um divide it again by 100 and now you will get a rounded value right you see now 67% if you actually want it with like a comma value you could like just add one or two zeros here for the multiply and divide then you get the corres in thing the reason we have to do it like that is that the round command in the formula will always round to the nearest full number so if you were to round the comma value just would round to either zero or one so that's why we first you know multiplied by a th000 and divided by a th000 to get into this nice um you know rounded uh percent value so bit of a workaround but uh you know just one time setup and then you have this nice uh little progress part that automatically updates with the corresponding percent value whenever you check off a task on off right now 100% And now back to 33% present we can add even more formula magic and figure out what is the next task that we should do for any given project for that let's click on plus and say okay formula again let's call this next task question mark and add like just this Arrow to indicate as a symbol then in the formula uh we need to write something that is slightly more complicated but don't worry just follow the step by step or copy paste it from the U block post Link in the description so we need to First Take tasks and tasks we then need to say okay please find me the one entry in tasks where the current values uh due date equals the next due date in line well how do we find the next D in line well we need to take the whole task um uh array the whole task connection here first filter out everything where the status is uh is not done right so like only things where it's not done should remain that's why we use uh the exclamation equal that means not equal to so wherever the status is not done we want to keep keep that and then we want to take from these items the due date so that's what we do with map right with map we can build a new array and say okay please only keep the due dates and from these due dates we can then say please sort them and then take the uh very first um entry in that list now after all of that right we can click on done and again if this is a bit complicated also have a tutorial in the link below in the description that teaches you a bit more about formulas and understanding like how exactly this works but for now we can just click on done now we see okay the next task in line here is Task a which if you check it yep task a third February that's the one we need to do next if I check that off now it should jump to next task perfect because that one is February 11th and if I check that one off it will show task B so now you have this one property that will show you whenever you have you know like the the next open tasks based on dead du date uh at a glance on your project database we're making some great progress with this build and the back end is nearly done but before we we can move on to the front end we need to add two things first we want to create some standard views on our databases and then we want to set up some database templates first views the cool thing in notion right is that you can store all your information in this database and then you can create targeted views to only show you the information that you need because let's be honest this here is not the most you know intuitive view to work with your tasks every single day and the reason why we will create these views now here on these main databases and not later only on the dashboard is that in notion the view the views that are created on your main database instance can just be copied elsewhere very easily let me just show you what I mean right so if I have now a sample view here and if I later and say okay in the sample view I just don't want to see any properties and if later let's assume down here right this is my dashboard that I build later I say okay please create a link view of a database and I take my task database you see I can now select the two views that I've created earlier so it just makes it later much easier and simpler and F faster to build out your dashboard that's why we create these views now all right so which are some of the most important views for a task manager well the very first one is probably a today view so let's take the sample View and just rename it and let's call this today and here uh let's say go we go in our icons and we want to pick from the calendar um this you know individual Day icon and for our today view the first thing that we want to see is okay which properties do we need to see here and what I would recommend is that whenever you build these views and pick what properties you select only uh show the ones that you actually you know need to interact with in that moment so what we definitely want to see is the status right because that's just super helpful and we want to always have that as this checkbox at a very front oops sorry for that at the very front of our database next up let's go back here three dots properties we want to see the due date yep because we might have to change it right even if the due date is by default today we might have to modify it so let's show it here and we might want to um b c the priority all right and then depending on whether or not we use the time track or not we could also choose to show uh the time tracking buttons but actually let's leave them out of here and the last thing I want to see on this view is just then the um project all right so now this is like basically a very simple core view if I just you know need to glance at this and see okay what are the things that I need uh to do today but of course we're not done yet because it shows all the database entries so we need to go to filter and set up a filter now what I would recommend is that if if you have uh you have basically two types of filters right you have the normal filters and you have something notion calls Advanced filters nine out of 10 times I would recommend you to set Advanced filters the normal filters I only would uh I would only choose them if you need to modify the filter often let me show you what I mean let's say we have in our priority right let's say we have you know this is one these two ones are high the next one is medium or like low and this one is medium if I now go into filter and say okay please um let's filter By Priority you you see that I get this like little uh gray icon here at the top of my database um that shows me okay priority and then I can just click in here and quickly you know flip through them and say okay show me only medium show me only high and so on and so on so in these situations having this type of filter the simple filter is okay if you want to like often change what to filter for but in our case where we say okay on the Today view I only want to see today's State that's something that has to be always there in that case I would always set it as an advanced filter because it's just well more intuitive for me to set them up so let's click on ad Advan filter and then say okay where and you see you have now three things first you can choose the property to filter by then you can choose the operator and then the value so in terms of the uh operator we need to get the due date and then we want to make sure that the uh start date um is today right in this case it now shows me only the tasks for today and nothing else now that view uh is like not bad but you probably also need to see the tasks that are overdue right so the the task that had a prior due date so you actually need to modify this Rule and say you know it's either on or before today and now you will see everything that is due today or was due in the past on your today view moving on let's also create actually a view that only shows overdue tasks so for that we can simply like right click our today View and duplicate it then we don't have to not have to set up everything individually again and let's rename this to uh overdue and here you know uh we should probably show like some sort of an alert to indicate well this is this is not good and now in terms of our filter we just want to make sure well that it's not on or before uh today it's just before today and this now shows everything that is in the past so basically overdue and then just one more thing let's also show everything that will be coming up this week so let's again duplicate our today View and let's call this um this week and again change the um the icon to maybe we I have another what what other calendar do we have this one the Week calendar and here just again modify our filter ever so slightly to show us tasks that um where the start date um is uh relative to today this week right so this will show you everything in the upcoming week this is already a solid mix of views right we can now then see today overdue and this week and now just let let's add a few more to the mix uh one other thing that might be useful to have is just my tasks by project so again let's duplicate our today View and let's call this um tasks by projects and here we will use the project icon that we're using and now in this case what we want to do is we want to add a group grouping allows you to display things well grouped by what they belong to so we click on here and then we say what do we want to group by by project and what this what this does is you see now you have this project one toggle up here uh first up here you have a few more options to set up right you can by what you want to sort it alphabetically blah blah blah that's good hide empty groups also make sense so you don't see the things that are not shown so that uh is all good and now we can just collapse this uh or like show it to show me everything from Project one now we still have this filter on for today so let's actually remove this because on this view we want to see everything um that is uh you know relevant for us uh and now we see okay project one these are my tasks here and project two these are my tasks there now while setting this up I'm realizing one thing that we forgot to set up for all these views so we need to go back and actually do that and you ideally do it while building it out the first time and that is we need to make sure that we hide things that are done right this is actually sort of a preference thing some people like to also see the things that they have done but I would rather have things disappear once I checked them off so let's actually like uncheck them quickly and then here add another Rule and say okay and the uh status of the task is not and then now select uh the complete part and this means that once I check something off now let's say task a is done it just disappears from this Su so it just gives you this feeling of having an actual app so uh you would do the same for overdue and this week I'll do that in a second off screen and then for task and projects of course you want to have the same so add an advanced filter and say status um all right uh is not oops status is not complete and now you get this running list of all the tasks broken down by the specific projects so you get a quick overview over everything you have to do one quick remark about subtask that sometimes confuses people you see that even though task a is done it still shows up here but it's grade out and that's because it has child items that are not done yet right so if this was collapsed you would see just like slightly grade out to indicate well okay this is done but actually there are things still inside so if I check off all the sub items then the whole thing disappears so sometimes a bit confusing if you have it active interface now let's add a few more useful views so first up we probably want to have a calendar so for that let's click on plus and here pick the calendar option let's just call this uh calendar and again like can just keep this icon here probably and say okay uh we want to have this calendar shown by due date that's perfect and you can pick whether you want a monthly calendar or Weekly right or you could also set up both for now let's stick with month and open pages I always like to pick the side Peak because that's just a lot more usable for me personally now once you've done that you see that you have now these cards in your Calender and we don't have a filter set up right because this time we uh created it from scratch we did duplicate something but I actually don't mind it here I don't mind seeing also the tasks that I have already uh done but what I definitely want to have is more context as to what these tasks are about so I click on the three dots and then properties and say okay please for every uh you know item show me the context show me the the priority show me the project and most importantly the status and now we see a lot more information on our cards we can just quickly reorder it so we can say okay I always want to see the status at the very top then the project uh then context and then priority if there and now we can do a lot more with that information here perfect so much about calar view let's add also a b view so now let's pick the B and just call this kban and here one thing that we want to do is we want to make sure that uh under the um grouping uh options first we have status selected that's correct we want to group it by the status but we want to make sure that we this time not hide empty groups and that's because I want to have this full Con on board and be able to drag and drop things between these columns even if there are no other items in this column already uh one other quick little layout thing I personally like to turn the color on for the columns just to get a bit more visual separation perfect and then just like before what we want to do is we want to make sure we see some properties here so we want to say okay show me the context show me the uh project uh show me actually here I also want to see the the due date and then uh the status I don't need to see right but the priority so again why we just pick and select the corresponding information that we want to see on every single item based on you know how relevant is and actually the due date let's show that at a very bottom perfect now one uh little thing here is again I don't mind seeing done tasks in General on this view on the con board but if you use this now for a year and you have hundreds and hundreds of done tasks it would mean you know they all fill up this area so we want to set a filter that avoids that so you want to make sure to say okay filter let's say set an advanced filter and first say okay show me everything where oops not done but where the status is not done or alternatively where uh we you know the Finish date is within the last month so uh instead of and we will choose here an all filter it means either on needs to be true so either it is not done or the Finish date um is Rel is like on or um after um one month ago and this will now show everything where the Finish date is you know like in the past month or you could also like adopt it to the past week and after that it will disappear from our view leaving us you know with all needed information that we need to see all right let's do one last View and then move on to the projects and that uh for that let's take a combination of two things uh just just so you see how it works let's say we want now uh table VI which means actually I'm going to delete this and I'm going to pick uh you know duplicate one of our existing ones I'm going duplicating the today View and I want this to be you know like a uh time tracking for deep work so I will call this time tracking and let's just uh you know get the the stopwatch um and here what I want to do is in the properties I also want to show the start tracking and the stop tracking buttons and I want to make sure that uh on this page I don't show all tasks but I show only the tasks that have the Deep work requirement so let's go in here and say okay we want to make sure that our the um uh our uh context uh contains the high energy tasks right now we currently don't have any high energy task but once we have them again let's just go quickly here and say okay this actually task a um the next task that's the high energy task we have now this one view where we can then you know quickly see okay these are most important things let's let you know start timer on them and then once we're done with them let's stop the timer for project views we don't need to do as much we already have our timeline active here so all I want to do now is create a conbine board uh to uh track our status our projects across the different status so let's pick again the board view let's make sure that we have it Group by status and that we don't hide anything and that we again color our columns and then just set uh the same filter that we set above where we say okay please in the um uh make sure that we only show projects where the you know the duration uh is within the last um is on or uh after you know um one month ago and actually the the end date right so that like we have the the latest at latest we have something with like one month ago and nothing after that shows up uh in our quick hban here ah and of course we also want to see the ones that don't have a due date so again let's go back into the filter and make sure okay we say either that or alternatively uh we want to show everything where the duration uh is simply uh empty right so that one those ones should also pop up here perfect and now just like before with the task we can then uh choose other properties to show here so we could say okay please give me the progress of that project and show me the next task so with just a click you know can jump into the next thing that I have to do for any uh of these uh jobs now for one of my absolute favorite features in Ocean and that's a self- referential template we are going to set up something so that we can click into every prodject and then see all the tasks that are relevant to that project just by you know like looking into it and then having it here in the body of the page and in order to do so we will create a database template and for that we click here on the drop down menu and say okay please add a new template let's call this new project let's also set an icon that we want to use for every project by default so the project icon and then I think that's pretty much it uh none of these need to be filled out by default while we're here though I will quickly reorder them right so I want to see the the status at the top I want to see them duration the next task uh actually also up here and the progress and then um you know the other ones they can be done there even the task relation I don't want to see it all right because this might be fairly cluttered so I just say okay please uh hide this always and like blocked by and um blocking um I want to yeah that that actually can be there all right so let's open this full screen now and now let's create our dashboard here so let's type slh1 and let's call this uh tasks right and if you have other steps in your project plan you could of course added above or below in this case I'm just quickly going to add the task uh thing and now I type slash create linked view of database and now I pick my task database so I'm now embedding my task database and you see all these views that we previously created now pop up here so I want to uh see here maybe just like a Conan Board of all the tasks for this project and by default now it means you know it shows everything so the first thing I want to do is I want to hide this just for like you know slightly cleaner view you could go even one step further and also and instead of having here a Conan you know you could swap that just to the task icon uh and then one nice little trick is you can just remove this and put a space in here for this very minimal and clean look and now we have all our tasks here of course we don't want to see all tasks we only want to see tasks relevant for that specific project and for that we now go into filter and add one more rule actually we are running into an issue now because currently we have this all rule here right where say status is not done or uh the Finish date is 1 month after goal but we need to now add another and rule on top of that and that doesn't work so we actually need to modify this filter quickly sorry for that I forgot that while setting it up so I will remove this filter here and I will instead say okay turn this into a group and then say okay when status is not done or uh or the um finish date uh no uh the yes the Finish date um is on or um what was it on or after um one month ago and now with this group here I can now set up a second and filter and say and and where the connected project contains this new project all right so this I will also like modify on the menu in a second but for now let's just look at it here now we see this is empty uh which means first like look you're like okayy nothing shows up now but a true magic happens now when you apply this template to any of your projects so let's go here to project number two the second I click here and like pull this template in it will automatically update the filter that we set to show now the task linked to this right so if I inspect this filter we will see that it now says well the project contains project two and the same if I go for any of the others right if I pull this in here for project one it will automatically update to only show the task for project one which is absolutely amazing right so you never have to set up these little dashboards um from scratch you can just create them once and then you know resurface them whenever you have a new project and of course you could now pull in a lot more views right I will just leave it at this one view but if you want to see today tasks for this specific project you could just you know keep expanding that one last thing we want to do here and we want to make sure that this project template is applied by default so let's go in here and say okay please set this as a default for All Views in the projects database and that means if I now create a new project right so um project 4 this will automatically have my template uh applied here one cool little trick in case you didn't know if you now create actually a task through this view it will automatically be taged with that project right so if I say okay I have a new task that is in progress uh you know like uh task uh I think D or E we have you see now it automatically is connected here to this project so it makes it much easier to enter information and later than having to go into tasks enter it assign it to a specific project now let's also create some task templates and in order do that we again click on this drop down menu and say okay new template and we say okay new task and we can just take um the the task icon and um just leave it as that right we don't have any any standard content in here but if we want to two we could also now create specific templates for specific metadata right remember we had like in this context with this high energy thing so we could say okay uh okay also like let's create another template for like you know high energy task and let's add here you know what what battery thingy icons do we have here okay like a full one with a flash maybe and say okay here the context should always be automatically high energy or of course we could do the same for the others right for low energy and so on so on and that just makes it easier when we create new task to automatically apply icon that indicates what this task is about now we're finally done with building our back end so it's time to turn this into a nice and visual dashboard and the first step here is now that we are done with our databases we can turn them into pages when building it out I like to keep it on the same page because I sometimes need to jump between it right when building out projects you might remember a new property here in tasks and it makes it just much easier like this but when it's you know goes to maintenance mode and you know using mode you can click on the six dots here and then turn this into a page do the same for projects turn into page quickly assign the corresponding icons right for tasks we had this check mark for the projects we had the um the Target and then actually move that into something that I would call backend if you have a very simple setup that could just be a toggle right that you call uh backend if you have you know something more complex I would recommend that you create a separate page that contains all your key databases and now with that out of the way we can freely design our page if you also have a fairly large monitor like I do then I'd like to work with two column layout if you have a very small one then you might need to see whether two columns you know take up too much space uh and maybe like organize it differently but let's actually start with that so let's type slash call for two columns and then in the left action in the left one I would like to have some quick actions so let's type slash um H2 and let's just call this quick actions and then on the other side I will call this again add here my uh an H2 and I will call this inbox we're building that out in a second now below that I will uh add a divider left and right just for some um you know visual separation and because we don't need so much space for the quick actions I can actually now resize my columns to you know uh take up a lot more space uh on the right than on the left and below the quick actions I can add some buttons to quickly trigger uh things so how does that work well let's just go in here and make sure that this is actually below um the the column right sometimes you might actually grab one of the full ones so you can just grab this line and pull it until this blue indicator is small below the quick actions and then here say Okay slash button and now we can set up a button to quickly H capture task instead of you know having to go to the database so the first one let's just call this you know new task and here we can then say okay as the icon I want the check mark and say when this button is Click add an action please add a page to and now I set my task database task database and then you see here as empty so here I can now pick a specific template that I want to use so I want to say please add this as a standard new task and when doing so we can could then also addit properties right so we could say okay set the name um by default to you know new new uh one also but we actually don't need to do that but instead what we want to do in case we want to you know modify it immediately we want to say okay and then please open this page as side Peak all right and then for the select page we want to say the page we just created let's click on done and see how it works now when I click this button uh the sidew pops up with a new task and I can just label it okay you know um something important I nearly forgot oh and while we're here we want to also tidy up this section of course same as we did with the projects so let's say uh what are the things that we actually need to see here well we definitely want to see the status at the very top we want to see the context we want to see the um the due date we actually here we don't need to have any days remaining we don't need to see the Finish date here so let's hide these uh for subtask we don't need to see that here as well um the project we want to see start time again right because this is more occasional situational that we want to see these buttons so let's uh well let's keep them for now um but hide the other stuff right just so to tidy things up and make this a lot less overwhel right looks already much better perfect so our first button is ready and now we can do the same for like some other type of task right so let's actually just duplicate this button uh command D is a shortcut for that or clicking on the six dots and then clicking on duplicate and now click on the gear icon to modify it and say okay you know new uh high energy task and here select our different icon right and then say again when this one is added add it not as a new task but add it as a high energy task and then again open it as inside view and then one last thing uh let's also um add another one for new task uh for today also super useful so here let's use um the calendar icon and say okay here it should be a new task but this time we want to edit a property we want to edit the due date and we want to set set the due date to the current day so let's click on okay and now we see again if we just try this out new task for the day we would see okay it automatically filled in the due date for today and of course like in all the other views right it will pop up in the right context there just one last button for good measure we need of course also want to create a new project so type slash button and you can of course adjust this to whatever it is you need right if you have like different types of projects you could do that as well so let's uh add our project typ icon let's say okay new project and here when the button is clicked this time we want to add a page to our projects um database you see it also already selected the new project one because we set it as default so that's great we can say okay the name will be new project um we can't unfortunately you know can't open like a command prompt to to ask us okay what should the name be we always need to then say as another step that we want to you know open the page that we just created um in a side Peak to then like actually modify it properly all right now these are our quick actions so so now let's look at the rest of the page and structure that part we're going to actually ignore the inbox part for now and we just will continue somewhere else on this page uh in this uh other column on the side oh and while I'm doing this I'm realizing this new project button I accidentally didn't add it to the column but below on the page so just going to quickly drag it here and also going to drag a space in between those you know just to se visually separate that a little bit just realize it now when pressing enter here a few times so here what I will do is now I create another mh2 and I will call this tasks and then below the H2 um we will add a link view for our task database or actually let's instead of using an H2 let's turn this into an H2 uh toggle because that way we can then you know hide the task if we don't want to see that and again just creates more minimal less cluttered view perfect so now inside our Opening Our toggle and then clicking here inside we can now create a link view to our task database so let's have slash create link VI of database pick the task database and because we've done all the work already right by setting up these views we can just click on any The View that we want and then have it here it's already set up the only thing we need to do always is then to hide the database title for you know a more minimal and cleaner view so we have our today view here let's go in here again and say okay from the task database I also want to pull in the overdue view again hide the database title and then on third click U brings in the um this week view again hiding the unnecessary information you see how quick that was and because you set it up once like whenever you have no different dashboards it's so much faster to build than than having to rebuild these views every single time and even if you know there's a specific view that doesn't quite fit the ones that you've created it's much easier like that right because you can just pull in something that is the closest to what you want and then update it accordingly so let's just actually add the kban as the very last thing for good measure where is it we can also just like search for it perfect here's our conbine view and again hide this and here you now also see where it can be helpful to be able to you know like un toggle this because if you have a lot of information there it just makes for much cleaner uh look on the page so those were our tasks now let's again type SL H2 pick the toggle heading to and here uh take our projects and for projects uh let's again just pull the information in create link view from database so projects database and here the Canan view now one view that I forgot to set up which I usually also quite like uh to set up for projects so we'll just do it here now is to create um a gallery view to just quickly jump into individual information so let's just duplicate this one and say okay uh you know um let's call this maybe a active projects uh and use um you know like a box or container do we have something yeah the active ones this is a nice one now that looks like an archive maybe let's just take an an arrow um active projects uh and here we want to change the layout from board to gallery and we want to oops let's move this here we don't want to have this page preview right so we're going to turn the page preview off the card size can be small now we have these nice little icons here uh the pages should be opened in a side Peak and then we want to show some information again right so under properties let's show here the um the progress and the uh next task the uh status doesn't need to be shown because we will filter this now and say okay here show me only the projects where let's remove this the um status uh is oops uh in progress right to just show me my active projects now I have the one here and this just allows me to really quickly use this as a navigation bar right to then jump into the project and in the project see then all the tasks relevant to that project or any other information right that you choose to uh pull in here this is already coming together nicely so now let's focus on the Inbox and for me the inbox is an area that captures every information that I put into the notion system and make sure that nothing uh falls through the cracks so I want to pull all the entries that I created in here and just you know have a second go at them to check okay is there something I need to add to them so let's click on the six dots and actually also turn this into a tole to keep in line with the rest of the design and then let's pull in here first our tasks database and here we can just take the table usually again I would set up this inbox view on the main database I can just pull in but for now let's just create it here and now make sure that first we remove all properties and then only show the ones that I want to look at here so I want to definitely see the status right I want to be able to take something off if it has already been done and I want to be able to um see the uh due date the context and the project but this is the core information that I want to see about every uh entry that I have here in my database all right so now I want to set up a filter so that I don't see everything but only the entries where I still need to fill something out so in order to do that let's add an advanced filter and say first the status uh of the task should not be done because it's done then I don't need to you know if it's done uh is not oops sorry is not uh done because if it's done then I don't need to you know worry about adding any information to it and then I want to add a group and I want to make sure okay show it uh when it's not done and when either due date or project is empty so let's go to um due date and say due date um is not empty uh or the uh project um is uh oh wait sorry is empty so either the due date is empty or the project is empty and now I get this view of all basically incomplete tasks in my system right so I hear task C I forgot ah here haven't set a du date so I can just set a due date for it and it will disappear from this view new task hasn't been assigned to a project so okay let's assign this to a project disappears from The View and so on and so on right for like for example for task e i just check this off because I say well it's actually done again disappears and now you just have this Dynamic View at the top of your database that you can now check once a day to make sure all these things that you've added with the buttons or somewhere else are just properly you know filed in the system so let's do the same thing for um project so let's just rename this view quickly to tasks so we know okay what this is about this is about our check mark tasks and then let's pull in here the projects next to it and again just quickly set up that view right so let's call this projects uh let's add the target to it hide all property so what do we want to see for every project for a project we definitely want to know maybe just like the duration maybe that's everything I actually care for in this case for the duration when do I actually plan um to do it and then again just hide the database title and make sure okay here again set up the filter to say all right we want to make sure that the um status of the project is not done right that won't happen so often and we have actually a project that is done before we have filed it but just in case let's set up and um then here we could like for good measure right because we might have to adapt it later say okay have add a group and say the duration um is not um is empty and now I see okay these are empty so I could now fill it out and say okay this actually from here to you know end there and now it disappears from The View and I have my inbox also properly set up now I just want to show you one neat little trick for your dashboard let's actually just remove the space here to you know have this u space a little bit more evenly and that is freeze columns in your uh you know some of your views you might have a ton of properties a lot more than I have here so let's actually just you know for for example pull in the Full Table View and that can get quite unruly because you need to now scroll to the side and you might lose context here in the beginning so what you want to do in these situations is you want to rightclick the uh name property or whatever you know main properties you care about and freeze it freezing means that if you now scroll to the side you will keep these two stuck here in the beginning right and you can now always see okay the start tracking is actually relevant for task a and so on and so on this task manager is now already in a great position but if you want to use it as a team you need to add a few elements to it first up we need to go to our task database again and add an assig person right that's the most important property that's currently missing we don't know who's supposed to do something so let's add a person property and call this um responsible whoops so now we can easily assign the different tasks to um a specific person we're going be also able to do the same on the team one so we go into projects and here again say uh create two new properties one for the at least well at least one property at least one for the you know the responsible so like the the lead and then typically if you have a bigger team I like to also create um another people property that indicates you know the the team and then just changing the icons here so from the person from two we go here to three and here from the lead we go from two to uh the one person all right that's the first modification that need to happen now the next thing you need to do is allow people to filter only for their specific product projects and again it's best to create them right now as the default views on your main database so let's go in here and let's call create actually a k that only shows me the projects that I assigned to me so I will duplicate this and I will call this you know my projects and here I can now go into the filter and say here in my you know my off filter that is still you know falling me on my feet so I need to to change it and say here again let's create this as a as a group so remove this turn into a group uh that's actually best practice whenever you have set an all filter just forgot it earlier uh and say okay the duration U is empty and then the second option that we want to have here then that's thing we actually came for is to make sure that this is assigned to me so we going to say and the um you know the lead is uh contains me now you don't want to pick your name you want to pick me because me will update dynamically to the person who's currently logged in and only show that person the thing so you don't need to create you know separate views for all your different team members you can just create this once and whoever is logged in and looks at this will see their projects we can of course expand this then right and say turn this into a group and say where either the lead uh is me or the uh you know the team contains me so I now I see everything that is relevant for me and I might also want to you know in the general Canan turn on to see okay in the properties uh the lead uh as a uh you know thing that I can quickly see I see okay who actually has to do something perfect so that's it for the task and of course for the projects and on the task you want to do them the same right in terms of the me filter you want to go in and say okay you know my tasks today for example so let's go in here and let's duplicate this um you know my tasks today and again um add uh to the oops to the filter that you've already set up another and Status where you say and um responsible contains me now this can be quite a bit of work right in the beginning if you set up all these views here if you say Okay I want all these views in general for the whole team and I want them also for the individual people but but you know you just need to go through the months and you can pull them in quickly now one thing that I would say is definitely also worth doing on the task database is just like we have you know task by project create another one where we say task by assigning so again we will duplicate this and say uh quickly tasks by you know asse or responsible and pick here the person thing and just change our group from Project to um the responsible person and here uh again say hide empty groups and now we see okay we only have these task when no one is responsible so all of these need to be quickly assigned so someone actually can do them now if you have a particularly large organization then you might want to expand your setup also by a teams database right so on top of tasks and projects we also want to have uh teams so let's just create here a new page whoops this disappeared uh let's just type page uh you know teams and turn this into a table right so here we create our database right away new database uh teams can assign it the corresponding icon and here we can then have a you know the people who are in the team so we could add person properties but let's leave that out for now the main thing we care about is the relation uh to our uh task database right so uh tasks sh task database uh team and same for um then the projects relation uh for projects database Sean both ends you know projects and here as well team add a relation you know switch quickly the icons out for projects and for tasks and now what you can do is on the tasks and projects database you can connect every single entry to a team and then on the teams you can just like you did before with the projects create these dashboards that show you all the projects and all tasks of that team at one glance and that means you don't need to create like individual dashboard for teams right you could of course also do it manually but here whenever you add a new team you just add it here and it has automatically a dashboard generated so let's call this new team and here uh let's go in here just to show you and call this first you know the uh H1 um you know projects and then below that we have another H1 for tasks and we pull in here with the same little uh trick for related entries first all the related projects from the uh let's take the conun and set up here the filter to say okay this and this again the same issue right that's why you should like do it in the menu so you don't have to redo it every single time so we say okay and add filter rule where we say and and the um Team relation uh forgot like we have the same name here so we would need to change it the team contains the new Team all right and that means now that whenever we have something here we will see all team related projects there and the same for the task if we want to say okay task database um let's show me also here the conun and also here make sure that our filter is expanded by the uh now you see right why we should always create end filters not all like NE all filters otherwise this can be quite cumbersome so we say and the uh Team contains the new team perfect hide it here as well and now we just created this very quick and easy thing where we have our different teams in here we set this of course as a default and we will pull in uh edit oops no sorry set as default for our teams know our first team and we have automatically a dashboard for that team created where they can see all the and all the projects that belong to them and if they create new ones they will automatically be tacked with that corresponding team now you have an awesome task manager in notion but how cool would it be if this could now turn into your personal assistant something that shows you quick insights and an action breakdown of your day well you can get that with just a few adjustments and I have a complete tutorial for you just click here and I will see you in a few seconds

Channel: Matthias Frank

Views: 3,767

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Id: 9rwhI2x5jls

Length: 64min 49sec (3889 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024