How To Build A Clean Notion Reading List (Template)

today i'm going to share with you how to create a reading list template inside of notion so this template was actually something i was going to create for my blog and not for youtube but i didn't really have an idea for youtube this week so i'm going to marry the two and i'm going to share with you how i would go about creating something like this so we're going to make here is a notion reading list in one single database but i'm going to take that one database and turn it into what i like to call an l-shape dashboard an l-shaped dashboard looks something like this on the right-hand side we're going to have the main database view and on the left hand side a sidebar and inside this sidebar are going to be three different windows we're also going to create a nice little gallery view so you can see all of your books and their cover images all information that you'll need if you want to build along with me will be down in the description other than that let's just get right into it so what i did to prepare to create this template like i usually do i go ahead and i collect some data to put into the template so you can see how it works and this is the data i collected i have seven different classic books here and i have some other information too which i'll go over how i'm going to be using this i also have a link to an icon this is the icon that i want to use for my databases image i'll just show you what that looks like it is just a book icon the first thing i want to do is create that database so forward slash table make it an inline table and i'm going to name it reading list i could also name it bookshelf and i'm going to open as page and then i'm going to go to add icon to add that open faced book i'm going to go to link just paste that in and it should appear i think this looks really nice especially with this black and white theme the next thing i want to do is start creating all the properties for this database i like going in and just creating all the properties before even messing with formulas or anything or layout i want to get all the properties down the obvious ones which is author or authors and that's going to be in a multi-select property type the next one i want is start date so i want kind of like a tracking element here i want a start date and an end date whenever the user started reading the book and then ended or finished reading the book now i want a formula here that says time or days spent and this should calculate the days spent between the start and end date or the day spent reading the book which i think might be an interesting formula to have and the next property okay so i wanted to do a progress bar here this is also for tracking i want one column that says total chapters and then chapters red and then i want to create a progress bar from those two numerical values so i'm going to change this to number do another one chapters red make that a number and then i'm going to create that formula property that just says progress and make this a formula now the next property let's do a rating property this one's pretty obvious for a database like this let's do some star ratings make it a select property and below that what else do i want i want a cover image right so let's make another property called cover and change this to files and media what files and media does it allows you to actually see the image that you're linking to within the property field or within the cell which is really nice if you do use google sheets or excel you can pretty easily copy and paste cells inside of a spreadsheet into a notion database i'll show you how so i'm going to go back to my reading list page let me open this guy up as its own page actually and going back to my spreadsheet the way this is set up i have the name of the book and then the start date the end date total chapters chapters read the author and then the cover and that's exactly how i'm going to order it in my database so i have the name of the book and then right after that i do have the start date so i just want to drag this over to the end here then i have the end date perfect that's exactly how it's laid out in my spreadsheet so now what i want to do is actually delete some of these go to this first cell this first name cell click inside and then click out so that the cell is highlighted in blue and when i go over here to my spreadsheet and i copy all of this paste it right in and everything should show up exactly how it should i can adjust some of these columns you can see these covers actually they start popping up in the cell which is really cool you can actually click on this and when you click on each image you can have a full screen effect i'm going to go back to that reading list page and take a look at what we have so far it looks like authors actually did not paste over and that's because it is a multi-select property and this spreadsheet copy and paste doesn't really work with multi-select but i can change it to text and all of those people should appear and then i can change it back to multi-select let's actually maybe focus on the layout right now before the formulas i think that might be more beneficial i'm going to hide some of these so let's create two columns and that's just by pressing enter twice inside of the page dragging one block and just putting it next to another i'm going to drag this table into the column over here on the right and maybe adjust this a little bit then over here what i'm going to do is i'm going to link to the reading list that will be forward slash linked database and create a link database i'm going to search for the reading list and i'm going to change the view to list not table delete that table and adjust it so i can see that author name and i am zoomed in a little bit so i'm going to zoom out to see what it looks like i can adjust this to go over to about here okay so what i'm going to do is duplicate this link database so i don't have to go through the process again i'm just going to duplicate and then i'm going to duplicate it again so these are going to be our three views on the side this is what i mean by an l shape so i'm just going to create a new block and drag it down to the top of this column here and this first window is going to be just make this an h2 heading this is going to be books for further reading and i could change maybe the color of this to a gray text going to click inside the block and go command d if you want to quickly duplicate i'm going to drag this down here and this window is going to be books currently reading do that again command d and down here is going to be books latest books read to make this a little bit more flush let's actually duplicate again and i want to drag this over to the side here and this title maybe we can make it main database before i go and i configure the sidebar to make it functional i'm going to go ahead and finish the main database so we're gonna create some of these formulas and fill out these rating options so the first thing is the days spent formula and this one's gonna be rather simple so in the case that the end date is filled out which means that the book is finished i want to return the days between the end date and the start date so to do that i'm going to say only if i'm going to zoom in a couple more times only if the end date is not empty so not empty i'm going to put end date right inside if this is the case i'm going to find the date between and this is another function the date between the end date and then you want to go comma start date so the date between these two dates comma i want to find the days between them and then i'm going to create a false condition so in the case that the end date is actually empty i just want to have an empty space so i'm going to say to a number and i'm going to wrap around two quotes this will give me an empty space other than that that's that's the formula zoom out a couple times and go back so i'm gonna go to properties go to day spent make sure i can see that and you'll see that only in the case of a book having an end date filled out does it give me the days spent reading the book which is exactly what i want now the benefits of having a number here is that i can go down to the calculate button down at the bottom of the database column and i can do something like find the average amount of days spent on these books which in this case is seven can find the sum i could create a filter that only shows me all of the books i read in january for instance and then i can come down here and see how many books i read in january you can see the average day spent okay so the progress bar what i'm going to do is actually go and look for here it is 17 progress bar designs that i created i think maybe a couple weeks ago and i'll of course leave a link to this page i have here um i don't i kind of like this one the block one i may actually use that you know what i'm going to do i want to use the cube so i'm going to click in here and copy it i also have all the formulas down in these toggles i'm going to go back to our database and just paste this into the progress you will notice when i paste this in there are some properties in here like property not found prop red because that property doesn't exist so we need to change some of these property names instead of total chapters inside of this formula i do have total pages so i'm going to temporarily rename this to total pages and then the other one i labeled as red i'm going to change them back once i get this formula in here there we go now it should work i'm just going to change these property names back total chapters all right it'll work the exact same let's go back to the database i'm just gonna go to properties view the progress bar so it looks like in every instance only when chapters read is filled out that the progress bar triggers so going back to this original page i do want to see that progress bar here so let's start cleaning this up i'm gonna hide day spent i'm also going to hide total chapters chapters read i do want to keep here because i'm imagining inside of this dashboard when you're going to add something new to the database or if you're currently reading something it's really nice to have this chapter's read property here so you can quickly input as you're reading chapters over time i'm going to get rid of start date don't think that's necessary and date maybe author might be useful but we're just going to keep it like this and i also want to see the ratings property we actually do need to add some options to this property first option i'm going to bring up my emoji list and find the star which is right at the beginning cool and i'm going to copy and paste i'm going to put 5 stars as my first option or yes create then three two and one now that i have this i kind of want to change all these colors to blue i don't like that they are different colors go back to that database and i'm gonna go to these hundred percent ones and put in some ratings go back to original page i'm going to sort so i'm going to sort this progress by clicking on the title and going to sort and i'm going to sort it ascending i want at the very top of this database to be all the books the user is currently reading below that all the books that the user has read and is finished reading and then below that all of the other books in the database that are yet to be read i feel like logically that makes the most sense we're going to actually separate these three types of books into the sidebar i'm gonna use some filters to do that going to the database menu which are those three dots next to the new button i'm gonna go to filter and simply say uh let's see currently reading would be start date is not empty right it's filled out and the end date is empty that should give us odyssey and a tale of two cities which is indeed two books we're currently reading um i could actually go into the properties here i could have the cover image let's do that now next on the list i want to filter out all the books i've read to do this i'm going to add another filter and kind of do the opposite of what we just did i'm gonna make sure that the end date is not empty or the progress bar so progress contains the number 100. now as for what i want to see here i do want to see the rating because it is finished and maybe the cover as well let's do the cover for all three maybe take away the author for this window there we go now really depends on your screen size how much is going to fit in each column and do a filter here so this is books for further reading so what determines if a book is not being read or is not finished start date is empty do i want to see maybe the cover image you know what let's put the cover just for the sake of making it look nice i could also probably squeeze in another property here depends on how long your titles are but let's assume you are digitizing your real-life bookshelf and putting them all inside of this database this window up here books for further reading is then going to become massive so we want to minimize this over here on the side window by going in to the database menu going to properties and where it says show on first load i don't want it to be 50 pages i only want it to be 10. i can do this for all the other windows on the sidebar as well so if you are using this sidebar effect for really any sort of page this is a good idea so i'm just going to do 10 pages and the latest books read this list will also become very large over time so we really want to make sure we minimize this 10 pages i want to create a sort and i want to make sure this sort tells me that the end date the time i stopped reading the book is descending so this will give me the date that is closest to right now so the latest books read to the ones furthest away i want a place to create a wish list so this is books not already in the bookshelf or the database here but books the user wants to buy so i'm going to create a database view inside of the main one here with add a view and i'm going to create a wish list and i'm going to make sure this is a list view and the properties i want here i actually want to create a new property one is a price because this is a wish list there's probably a price to the book that you would like to know about so i'm going to create a new property simply call it price make sure it's a number and let's just put in a random number go to this one two three button right next to the number uh property and i can change it to whatever currency i want in this case let's do a dollar i want to show that property here next to the author and how do we determine if a book is inside of a wish list i'm just going to create a simple check box that says wishlist make sure it's a check box and let's say this one here wuthering heights is on the wish list and inside this view i also want to see that check box we just made great now we just need a filter that simply says wish list is checked it looks like inside of our books for further reading it says weathering height so we want to alter that filter to make sure it excludes items on the wish list so this is just books inside of the bookshelf so i'm going to add a filter that says start date is empty and the wish list is unchecked we can also create a board view for the ratings so whenever you have a select or a multi-select property you can create sort of like a pivot database to a different view called board and let's name this ratings and that will give us all the ratings at the top and then all the books underneath that associate with that reading i can hide this no rating here to make it look nicer let's mess with the properties a little bit maybe i want to see the author and also the end date that looks nice the last view i just thought of we need to utilize those cover images so let's create a gallery view and call it gallery going to the database menu going to properties i can change the card preview so right now it's just the page content inside of the page which i don't want to see i want to see the cover so our files and media property does show up as an image we can see through this window which is really cool there's also an option to fit the entire image inside which i do like how this looks a little bit better and i'm going to change the card size to small awesome before ending the video i want to create some filters for example in gallery i want to make sure i'm taking away wishlist items i don't want to see them inside of this view so i'm just going to create a filter and simply say wishlist is unchecked i'm gonna do the same thing inside of that default view and actually we can rename this to bookshelf filter wish list is unchecked great that wuthering heights book is now removed also when you go to wishlist every time you create a new item that wishlist checkbox will automatically be checked so you don't have to do that manually that's basically how i make my notion templates so let's go right into the outro as always there is a template down below to copy which is exactly what we made here today also all the other relevant links that i talked about including those progress bar designs i will be linking down below if you want to maybe implement a different progress bar design or you want to use that reference for other projects in notion feel free to do that i'll see you guys the rest of the week on twitter and next week with a new video i'll see you then [Music] you

Channel: Red Gregory

Views: 64,940

Keywords: Notion, Notion template, Notion reading list, Notion dashboard, Notion tutorial, Notion databse, Notion progress bar, Notion bookshelf, Notion library, Notion gallery, Notion aesthetic

Id: fmtR1EM5Wsg

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021