How I Use Notion: The Best Productivity Tool (not sponsored)

hey happy 2020 I hope you guys had a great holiday season whether you were at home binging on food or Netflix shows in movies or if you were on a tropical vacation okay waiting for your parents to pose for pictures but more importantly it's a new decade it's time for a fresh start full of productive vibes and accomplishing your goals maybe even sticking to your resolutions and for me to make that happen I'm gonna be taking even more advantage of my software tool of life notion and I received quite a few comments asking what this emoji feel minimalist app is so in this video I'll be sharing my love affair of motion and hopefully you guys will jump on the bandwagon too I'll be going through a quick tour of all the features what I tried before and why all the other options didn't work for me how notion solves all these problems and how I set it up for myself and know this video is not sponsored by notion but if you guys are watching you know what to do notion is a pretty young startup founded in the heart of San Francisco and this picture pretty much sums up exactly what notion is fixing it's taking all of these productivity tools and simplifying their features into one easy-to-use app the cool thing one notion is that it does everything it's a text editor it uses the essence of markdown so your notes can be both consistent and beautiful you can format code quotes and equations and snippets from nearly every external platform like Google Drive Google Maps github Sigma can all be accessed on one page and finally each page can be formatted in two different rows and columns as your design needs so it's super flexible it can also be transformed into a Kanban board like this each card can be personalized with as many properties and nested elements as you want and each card can be dragged into various columns to get that satisfaction of marking something is done and this view can be transformed into a database view as well so this is essentially a smart spreadsheet that can be sorted or filtered into sub views as you like and the cool things of the data from this view can be transformed into other views like a calendar or a list so the possibilities are really endless for nearly every Productivity app I've tried there was always something missing and one of them was my bullet journal this is something I used throughout college after I was inspired by his very aesthetic YouTube videos and Instagram posts I get my own and for the most part it worked throughout college and was kind of fun to maintain but to me the problem was that after a few months I wasn't as hyped about drawing out something from scratch especially what I just want to get stuff done a slightly less analogue option is using an iPad specifically notability and I do it uses day-to-day for things like drawing out schedules are sketching designs but as an all-in-one planner and tool it has lots of the same limitations as a bullet journal so what other solutions are available for a lot of last year I used Evernote and this is a great productivity tool that relies on a notebook structure it has a very intelligent search tool it can detect even handwriting and it has a Mac app but my biggest gripe would ever know it was how limited it's free plan was you can only use it on two devices and they limit you to 60 megabytes of memory and I didn't like how they always push the premium option on you so it made me less enthusiastic about using it I also use something called Trello for a few months before I found ocean and Trello uses a Kanban design which features a to-do list app in a structure so this is great for keeping track of tasks and errands that have needed collaborating with others on boards and the simplicity of this product does make it really easy to get started with however the product was almost too simple and its designer gone Kanban that I felt like the functionality was a bit limited and to top things off I didn't love the design and laughed some of those clean lines and I was after and they didn't have a Mac app so I couldn't use it offline so as much as I wanted to love cello I couldn't stick with it for long Oh after nearly ten years of looking for the solution I feel like I found it with notion and I Primus checks all the boxes first it's really pretty for something I'm gonna be spending a lot of my day looking at I want to be beautiful and with notions all wipe design and customer options with the emojis and the background colors I'm able to finally achieve an aesthetic that I was after also it's really easy to navigate I'm able to see everything at a glance with a sidebar and favorites menu that toggles to show all the nested occupants and the search tool I also love how flexible and accommodating their free plan is I want to have time to test something out before committing and I hate being pushed towards buying a premium product before I'm ready and with notion I was able to use their free plan to its fullest for months before I ran out of storage and by then I was sold and the great thing is that their pricing model offers a lot of discounts and is free for both students and educators so I really love how their culture is focused on making their products super accessible to everybody last but not least they have a Mac iOS and Android app so that I can have my data across all of my devices synced and ready for offline use which I love ok so by now you should be sold not yet not yet ok let me show you how I set up my notion and you'll see how powerful it really is a few months ago I saw this video by Thomas Frank on how he manages everything YouTube on notion I adapted this content calendar to make sense for what I do which is a combination of writing and making videos as a one-person team at first glance this is a bit overwhelming but it essentially is a smart spreadsheet each row represents a piece of content that I have an idea for I'm working on or published here I set up properties to make it easier to read like a platform and publication date and just like any old spreadsheet I can sort it by values in a particular column and even add multiple sorts but what makes this more than just Google sheets is how I can nest pages within each row so if I click on a row say for this video and open the page I get this left column generally has the different components I need to take care of for a video thinking about titles editing checklist research notes the script and content that I can easily copy and paste like descriptions and the right side is kind of like my playground where I can quickly add notes as I need while making a video and a lot of times I like to task switch so I usually favorite the project I'm more hang on so I can quickly hop between pages just from the sidebar and because this layout is quite complicated I can actually make a template to include all these reusable elements for a video page so no more copying and pasting and everything is super consistent and since I do a bit of writing I have another template for writing which is a lot simpler and back to the content calendar because it's a calendar it's nice that I can take this table and quickly switch to a calendar of you to see the cadence of my uploading schedule so this is on the complete other side of things a hashtag basic setup for my to-do list but this board really helps me see everything I need to do at a glance and I usually keep it open on one monitor throughout the day what I love about this is that I can add new categories or elements as they arise so I can easily customize it depending on the day and how busy I am I also have a few boards that I use to help me run my business such as keeping track of potential new students to do this website content etc here is a board I use when brainstorming design ideas for haikus branding which utilizes the gallery of you to see everything as almost an inspiration board I also have some other fun boards I made including one to keep track of my exercises at the gym I have another one for maintaining a list of all the recipes I follow or want to try and another one to keep track of how to take care of my plants and what their names are so this is super powerful and I'm always kind of rearranging and customizing my notion to add more functionality as I need and that is notion I usually don't sing many praises for things like this but for an app as powerful and productive as motion I just had to and if you want to see more videos related to productivity just leave a comment down below and if you like this video please give it a like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: harshibar

Views: 398,010

Rating: 4.9283023 out of 5

Keywords: notion, notion hq, productivity, evernote, trello, harshibar, how i use notion, how to use notion, what is notion, notion app, keep productive notion, note taking app, notion setup, my notion setup, note-taking, notion app review, note-taking apps, notion vs evernote, notion vs trello, notion vs roam, notion tutorial, notion for students, notion for beginners, notion for business, not sponsored, notion 2020, productivity apps, notion setup 2020, notion harshibar, 2020 notion

Id: 536Q_kIImWk

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/d_ern26]

Wondering if I can type in 2 columns in notion. That's my number one problem