- Hello, and welcome back
to Thomas Frank Explains. In this video, I'm gonna teach you how to build a complete
Habit Tracker in Notion. We're gonna go from a
completely blank page to what you're seeing on screen right now this nice multi column habit tracker with this template button that you can hit to get a
habit tracking worksheet for each and every week. Over time, as you track your
habits using these worksheets you're gonna get this page that is essentially a living record of your habit tracking progress. I've also made some mobile optimizations so you can easily track your progress either from the iOS or
Android app for Notion or do it from the desktop app. And there's also this nice little toggle you could open up to go
back through different weeks and see your history of habit tracking. And for each week, there's also a Weekly
Summarization toggle. So you can create a little summary and do some journaling
about how that week went. Now, before we get into the tutorial I do wanna mention that
I've made this a free and public template that you can duplicate into your own Notion workspace. So if you don't wanna go
through this entire tutorial which is admittedly a little lengthy, you can go over to
thomasjfrank.com/templates to simply get the template for free and start using it right away. But if you wanna learn
all the inner workings of this template, if you wanna
boost your Notion knowledge and learn some advanced
multi column layout tricks that we're gonna be employing here then buckle up and let's
get this tutorial started. (gentle music) Well, hello there. And welcome back to
another Notion masterclass. This is gonna be a longer tutorial. And today we are building
ourselves a Habit Tracker. What you see on the screen right here, we have a multi column layout,
and we have basically just a weekly worksheet that has check boxes, where we can check off
the habits that we did. Whenever a new week starts, you can simply click this
little template button here to get yourself a new week and then you would type
in the date for that week. So this one was gonna be May 16th, 2021 since we already had May 9th down here. And this is basically it. It's a very simple concept and I wanted to keep it that way because I remember using this little goal-tracking
notebook in college, it was called Pick Four, and I believe it was developed
by a Zig Ziglar, his team. And every week you'd flip
to a new weekly worksheet where you would track your
habits and track your goals. So this is kind of a Notionized version of that concept here. And over time, what you would get is just this long page where you could scroll through and in one view see your
habit tracking progress, which is pretty cool. But there's actually some
pretty interesting stuff going on under the hood of the system. And in this tutorial, we're
gonna build it from scratch. And you're gonna learn a
few tricks along the way. So a few other little features about this Habit Tracking
System that I wanna point out. Number one, we have, well a nice little motivational
picture and quote here. I just figured I'd throw that in there. Cause I kinda like, (indistinct)
is my favorite painting. So I wanna throw that in there. And then Bruce Lee quotes are just great. We also have a Week log. So you'll notice whenever
we create a new version or new instance of this template here we get a Heading for the
week starting May 16th. So you can scroll through this, but there's also a Table of Contents block that adds a new heading every
time we create a new week. So we can easily jump to
a past week if we want to. We also have a Calendar here. And literally the only
reason that this is here is so you can see what the date is for when you're starting a new week. So I can just go, oh, it's,
you know, 16th is next Sunday 23rd is the Sunday after that. That's the only reason that's here. And then up here, we have this little I'm just gonna call it a jump block. I don't know if that's the correct term. There's no real correct term for this. Basically, we just linked these blocks from here and I'll show
this with some B roll. This is so you can easily
jump to these areas which are gonna be at the bottom
of the screen on your phone instead of having to scroll
all the way down there. So this is very easy to use on a phone where everything is a single column, but it's kind of designed to be used in this multi column view. So let's start building
this and as we build it, we're gonna learn some interesting tricks with columns in Notion. So we're gonna go here. And this is my template page
here, the template database. So you're gonna have access to this. If you check out the template
link in the description below and what we're gonna do is create a page and we'll call it Habit
Tracker- From Scratch. This is another from Scratch Series Video. So first thing I like to do when we were creating
something from scratch, it's gonna be a big multi column template. Like this is to create a full-width page. There we go. If we look over at what we have we have a few different tasks here. We need to create this column, which has our picture and our quotes and our stuff over here. But the main thing we need
to create is this worksheet. And then we need to
create the template block that has a copy of the worksheet in here. So let's start by doing this right here. And if you're following along with me I'm gonna give you a
very useful pro tip here which is gonna be, don't create your multi column
Habit Tracking worksheet inside this page, create
it inside another page. And the reason for that is, Notion has some weird quibbles when it comes to multi column layouts and getting them exactly as you want. There are some limitations when it comes to simply
dragging and dropping blocks but you can get around those limitations. If you put things inside a page first and then transform that page into a block. So I guess into a different kind of block a page is a block in Notion. So transforming it into
like a heading or something. So let's go ahead and create a page and we'll just do /page and
we'll just call it a Worksheet. And let's do a Heading
too, so pound pound. And we're gonna go Week
Starting May 2, 2021. Doesn't really matter which week it is. And I wanna give this a green background so /green find green background. And there we go. Now let's do a Heading three, for the first day we're gonna do, I'm gonna enter Done and
do ---four horizontal rule and then let's just give it one Habit. So now we have one day here and I'll go ahead and make
this full width as well. I'm gonna copy these. And if I go here, this
is a cool trick I learned I don't go to the next
line and then paste. 'Cause you always get
this blank line here. I just go to the block that
has content and then Paste. So we could call that Monday. Now there's something we could do here where I could literally, we could copy this and I
could take one of these, bring it over here, Drag and Drop. And then just take these
elements, put them here take this one, put it
here under this column, take this one put it
here under this column. And if we look at our original one here. We have Sunday, Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I built it this way because when we look at multi
column layouts like this, typically, you know at
least in Western cultures we read left to right? And this just makes sense. And if you look at this on a phone, if you actually look at the demo or the template version of the phone it's gonna stack up correct. You're gonna have Sunday. Then you're gonna have
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I'll show that on screen with some B roll. Now you're not gonna get that result. If you just do it the way we just did it where we have created two columns here because what we have now and you can actually
see a self dividing line that sometimes pops up, is we have one column and
then we have another column. So if I were to make
this Tuesday down here and Wednesday down here, what I'm actually gonna end up with is Sunday, Tuesday, Monday, Wednesday I don't want that. So we can't make a column in the column. We have to make two columns and then a separator and then
two columns, then a separator. So let's go ahead and
delete all this content. We;ll have Sunday and Monday. And now let's just create
another horizontal row. We can see that this horizontal row is only going from here to here. So I'm gonna drag it down until we get it to be full width thing. There we go. Now we can delete our blocks in here. So this is basically what we want to copy this whole structure here. And if I click on the
rule itself and I Paste, I can get it down here. Now notice something, when you Copy multi
column things in Notion, and then you Paste them, they don't really cooperate. They stay on a single column layout. It's kind of a, it's
a bug, it's a quibble. I don't know what it is,
but it's kind of annoying. So we sort of have to go through here, Drag and Drop a couple of times and just create our layout from scratch. So once again, we'll Copy that, Paste it. Drag. Okay, now I'm gonna go
through and rename these and finally, to get the
layout we had earlier we'll add this little
toggle for a Weekly Summary and this will be a nice little block where you could just add a written summary of how your week went, and you could tell yourself, like, here's why I didn't
get certain things done or here's why it was a great week, but now we have the layout we want. So here's something cool. If you go through here and delete this full width double column, spanning horizontal rows like that, this structure still holds up. So now when you look at it on a phone, it's gonna be Sunday,
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday Saturday, stacked up in one column correctly. So a little bit of a pain
when you're building it but now you have it. So the next thing we wanna do, is go back to our actual
from scratch thing. And let's go ahead and
Drag in our picture. I just have a copy to my clipboard. So what we can do is drag
this to the left of worksheet. Now we have two columns, and let's just go ahead and resize these. So this isn't as big. And why don't I go bring in my quote? Obviously you can use whatever
kind of quote you want but I like Bruce Lee quotes,
for Habit Trackers at least put that there, and then we
might wanna create our week log and our calendar. Well, let's create these a little later. I'm just gonna keep these toggles here and we'll make them in a bit. For now, we wanna figure out
how to get this, right here. Like we had it earlier. So all we have to do, is turn
this page into something else. What should you turn it into? Well, you can pretty much
turn it into anything you want and you're going to get all
the content from that page sitting on the page. And interestingly, if there
is a multi column layout sitting in this page, it's
gonna be replicated in here. And that's very, very useful. Let me show you why this is useful. If I created Heading one and
you know, we have it here. So this is one column, two column. And then I create two toggles and this is, you know for anything, if I want this to be nested next to this. So two columns underneath
this column, I can't do it. It won't let me do it. I can only create three columns
and that is not what I want But, just going to delete this. If I turn this, into a
text block, I get that. I get that multi column
layout nested under a column, which is itself part of
a multi column layout. It's column inception here. One interesting thing about turning it into a text block specifically, this does not work for
other kinds of blocks, but if you turn a page into a text block, you're going to get the text here and then you're gonna get all the content nested inside the text block. And that is useful because
you can then drag this anywhere you want and retain
that multi column layout. You can also duplicate it. And remember how earlier when I duplicated my multi column layout and it all went to single column because it's all in
this nested text block. I don't have that problem. It actually works. So that can be pretty cool but actually I'm gonna
keep it as text for now but let's go ahead and duplicate it. What I really want in the
end, is for this to be turned into a heading and I'll use Heading 2. So that way I can actually
delete the word Worksheet and just be working with this right here. This looks exactly like it
did in our demo version. And now has the benefit
if we come into Week Log and we create a Table of Contents block, as the benefit of adding this heading here we could do it with that test block but it's just gonna look a little messy. The reason we wanna do a
text block first though is because we are gonna
be able to duplicate this into our template block. So that's what we're gonna do next. We're going to hit slash and create a template
block or a template button. Let's call this, Add New Weekly Worksheet. And then if we just take
this, and drag it here you get your multi column layout
inside the template block. This is something that a lot
of people who get into Notion find to be a frustrating
limitation with the template block. You can't create multi column layouts inside this template block. Except you can, if you use this trick. So to summarize, Create your content in a sub page. Turn that sub page into a text block, Drag it in to your template block area. From there, we can go ahead and turn this into a heading and get
rid of the heading itself. And now we have exactly
the content we want retained in a multi column layout. So we're gonna hit Close. And I do notice that this template block is actually sitting as a single column. So I'm gonna drag it here, to
make sure it's in this column. And now when we hit the
button, we get a new worksheet. So I'm gonna change this to May 9, 2021. And actually one thing I might wanna do is come in here and configure
this to just be date. So, you know, to change
it when you create it. So this functions pretty much like those paper gold tracking notebooks, where if you want to change
up your weekly routine, then you would come in
here to the template block and actually change it. So let me go ahead and do that now. And now we have the Weekly schedule that we're committing to
for the foreseeable future. This seems like a lot of manual work but if you're tracking habits
over a long period of time you really shouldn't have to
tweak this all that often. But if you have to, you can just come into this template block and you can do it. So now if I click it, boom I've got a worksheet and
I can change the date. Let's say, this is for
next week, May 16th, 2021. Now I've got a worksheet
that I can go through and I can just check things
off every single day. Last couple of things we've got to do here is we'll add our calendar,
very easy, just type calendar and we'll do an inline
calendar, call it calendar. And this just basically gives us a tool where we can reference. All right, what is the date of next Sunday when we're creating our new worksheet? Keep that tucked in there,
close that up if we want to. And the last thing we'll do
is create our jump block. So let's go here, and
literally just type Week Log. I like to do three spaces and one of these vertical
lines and calendar there's nothing special about
what I'm typing right now. It's just easy links for me
to use when I'm on my phone. Let's do a purple background. And I'm gonna go ahead and hold this. And then all we're gonna
do is come down here Click the block handle, Copy the link to the block Highlight that, link to it. There it is. And then do the exact
same thing for Calendar. Copy the link, go to calendar, link, and there. And why don't we give it an icon as well? Let's give it that beefy arm for habits. And we have essentially
recreated this Habit Tracker from scratch. So now, if you can commit
to using this over time you're going to get, like I said before this page that you can scroll through and see at a glance all of
your progress on your habits. The other nice thing
about using this strategy instead of using a database strategy where you're going into a
special page for every week, is this gives you a single
page that you can Favorite, have right at the top of your
Favorites bar if you want and easily click into. Put it on the front of
your iOS home screen put it on, you know, your Android widget, wherever you get to your Habit Tracker you can just come into it with one click. And because we're using
this template button your current week is always
going to be at the top. So it makes checking off your habits, a very very quick
process every single day. But you have this ability
to jump to your Week Log, come in here and review
past weeks if you want. You can come in here and you
can write up a weekly summary. So it's just this nice one
page that gives you a record of your habit tracking activities. That is gonna be it for
this video tutorial. Like I said, in the intro you can go over to
thomasjfrank.com/templates to get the template version
that I've made public of this Habit Tracker for free. So if you've watched this
far, I'm guessing you did because you wanted to build this yourself and you know, more power to you, but hey, if you watched it just because you were
wanting to be entertained and this is what you
watch for entertainment but you don't want to build yourself. The public template is available for you. You can get it for free and I'll have that link in
a description down below. If you like clicking links instead of typing things
into your browser. If you have questions let me know in the comments down below. And I also have Twitter, @TomFrankly you can ask me questions over there. I try my best to answer Notion questions as long as I'm able to answer them. And honestly, a lot of times
people's Notion questions are the thing that pushes me
to learn more about Notion, pushing things, learning how to do these
multicolored tricks, things like that. So feel, you know, no shyness
about asking me questions. I will do my best to
answer them when I can. Beyond that, I've got
a whole Basics Course. If you wanna learn all
the Fundamentals of Notion I have a course called
Notion Fundamentals. You can find that over at
thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals going through all of
Notion's main features basically in the most logical
order that I can think of. So if you wanna really
master this software then you can go through that and pair that with tutorials like these, I've got an advanced course coming up. And if you want to learn more about that and also get updates when
I create new Notion content I have a Notion tips email list and you'll find that link,
that description down below. Other than that, I've got
no more things to pitch you or talk about or self-promote or whatever. So ask me questions if you have them otherwise have yourself a lovely day and start tracking some habits. (upbeat music)
