How to Build a Second Brain in Notion! (Full Guide) 🧠 ✨

if you're watching this video you know the power of a second brain is tremendous if you've watched videos by Thiago Forte and Ali Abdul you'll see that Behind These great minds there are great systems and software in place that help them stay focused throughout the day and help them access information that they can't access with their own mind that's where a second brain comes in in today's video I'm going to show you how to build a 100 free version of my second brain this is going to be a basic version of the second brain but if you want to check out my more advanced version which features habits snoozed tasks and more hierarchy to organize your tasks and resources then you can check out the link in the description in the top pin comment below but if you want to learn the building blocks and the basics of building a second brain in notion for yourself then stick around and enjoy this video okay so here we are this is our game plan I like to kind of create a checklist whenever I'm working on a new notion workspace because this keeps me organized and I know that I need to build a tasks database Base projects database notes database and after that I need to create some processing views add some quick capture buttons and then turn it all into a nice beautiful dashboard which we're going to call productive brain light also going to be able to utilize some nice views to see data in different ways with our tasks projects and notes and another nice thing is the Aesthetics are going to be on point with this I'm going to try to make it simple and minimalistic so that it fits everyone and you can tweak your Aesthetics as you see fit but the UI should be nice and fluid should be something that's nice to look at and then finally I'm going to reveal four mystery tools at the end that make this whole second brain work a lot better first let's go ahead and build the tasks database I'm just going to enter into some blank space and type page and we're going to call this tasks and then I'm just going to add an icon and let's just go with lightning bolt I'm going to go with this battery pack for this one and we're going to go table new database now let's go ahead and name this task I'm going to delete this property and we're going to create a new one for date and we're just going to call this action date we're also going to add a date for a due date because due date is important too so the difference between an action date and a due date is that a due date is when something is due so let's say something is due on July 1st and an action date is when I'm going to take action so I'm going to take action tomorrow and I'm going to complete it before July 1st so this is kind of my range of my timeline here and my task name can go here I'm also going to go ahead and add a status and this is going to allow me to basically just Mark what the status of my task is so not started in progress or done are the default ones and these work great so let's just go ahead and downsize this and now let's go ahead and add a priority using a select column let's call it priority and we're just going to go Priority One priority two and three maybe that would look better the other way around yeah I like that better Priority One looks more urgent being that it's like that red color all right this looks good this is all we need for a tasks table I'm just going to go ahead and rename this to tasks and we'll go ahead and change these icons to a little check mark all right I can delete my tasks out of here now and we have an empty task table with the following properties I'm going to go back to the second Brand Build along and we have tasks down here now let's check this off and now let's build projects I'm going to hit slash page enter and we're going to call this projects to add icon and for this we're going to go with this spreadsheet here and I'm going to select table new database we're going to call this project and I'm just going to go ahead and delete these tags we'll rename this to projects and we'll match with the top and now I'm just going to add a relation property and we're going to relate this project to our tasks so let's type in tasks to find it we're going to make sure that this is on no limit and we're going to hit show on tasks and it should just say tasks here and projects here add relation and now we're going to add our check and we're going to run over to tasks bye creating a new one quickly and where it says projects here I'm just going to hit rename and I'm going to change this to our spreadsheet so now we see our tasks on projects and this task that's popping up you see the project that's related with it as you can see it updates dynamically as I change the name next we're going to go ahead and add a progress tracker so to do this we're going to do roll up and I'm going to call this progress we're going to go ahead and select the relation tasks and where it says property we're going to change the property to status what we're doing here is we want to get a progress report on how the Project's going how many tasks in here are done well right now new is labeled as done so I'm going to hit calculate and percent per group complete this is going to tell me how many tasks in this project are complete so let's go ahead and open up this task of new right here and as you can see it's marked as done but watch what happens to progress when I hit not started here as you can see it drops to zero so progress is working well let's go ahead and come up with an icon for it you can also edit this property and you can change how it looks if you want to I kind of like this bar here because as you complete things it will just slowly but surely fill up if you have lots of tasks that is if you just have one it's pretty quick all right now we have projects built and it's time to build a notes database let's just change the name of this table to notes change it to the icon we selected which is that bookmark and we're going to change this column to note I'm going to go ahead and keep tags in this case and I'm also going to add a relation property to project so let's find projects Here We Go and show on projects as notes very good no limit add relation and we're going to select the spreadsheet for the projects just to keep continuity across our system and now we can create quick easy notes so give it a title and fill out the page and you can go ahead and relate it to a specific project you can even give it tags so let's say this is like a meeting note or it's a video script it could be any number of these things or it could be multiple of these things so whatever you want to tag it with go ahead and add your own tags here I'm going to go ahead and delete these out of here and in the future if you want to you can filter by those tags and just get specifically what you're looking for uh in that moment let's say you have just a ton of files related to a project and you want to sort them by a certain tag that's what this is for notes is done now time to build processing okay processing isn't a database so far we've built a bunch of databases and now we're going to build a view that uses these databases in a unique way so let's go ahead and actually flip things around a bit here we're actually going to build the dashboard and add some buttons first and then we'll do processing so we'll just go ahead and build our Dash board down here I'm just going to hit slash and type in call out and this is going to be our databases section so we'll just select databases so we'll just call it databases like that and I'll drag these Pages within there and we're going to create a view for today's to-do list next so I'm just going to hit slash create linked view of database and we're going to hit tasks and I'm just going to hide that and we're going to rename this to today's tasks at this point you're going to want to go to full screen or full width it says here and what you're going to want to do is drag today's tasks to this side of databases here if it won't drag to the side of the callout and you're still having trouble then you can just type in column and select two columns and then drag databases there and today's tasks on this side then we're just going to swipe that over and let's go ahead and throw this in a call out too slash call out and we'll drag it in today's to do list is what we will name it and I'll actually rename this just to tasks just to simplify and we'll go ahead and go with our task icon now we are seeing a task that doesn't have an action date of today now it has an action date of today but it didn't before so what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're only seeing tasks for today that aren't done we don't want to see anything that's done here and we don't want to see anything that is not for today so let's go ahead and add those proper filters we're going to filter by action date first of all and we're just going to say that it has to be is and you can hit today so it has to be today that's basically what that means we're also going to add another filter where the status is not done anything but done now because that was done it disappeared if I want to add new tasks I can hit this new button and it will add a new task with the action date automatically set for today and the status automatically set to not started let's give this task a name and a due date and let's give it a priority level and we can hook it up to a project and now that is basically just a quick way to add a task for the day and then once you hit done it disappears I can hit Ctrl Z to bring it right back and change the status back to not started if I want to as well if I accidentally Mark something done and let's say I marked the wrong thing done next I want to add today's notes so let's go ahead and add that right below this call out by adding another call out and we will select our bookmark and we'll just call it notes and we'll call this one to do I actually have an idea to make this a little bit more versatile here we can rename the view to today's to do and then I'm going to go ahead and add our notes Here drag it into notes and select our data source of notes hide that and this is going to say recent essentially we have today's to do and then recent notes here and recent notes is going to be basically just notes that we've taken so somewhat recently I know that sounds pretty obvious but we're going to add a created time property here and I'm I'm just going to basically name this note taken so that we can see when the note was initially taken at okay so let's also add a last edited I'm going to go last edited time and last edited is what we'll name it so anything that was taken today or that was edited today or yesterday we want to show up here so within the past 48 Hours let's say we want it to show up in recent notes so since this one is on the 29th it will show up right now if I change this filter to last edited is relative to today past let's just go past two days so actually what this is going to do is just going to show us anything that was last edited in the past two days or maybe we make this last edited in the past day and we may make it note taken is relative to today past two days so if it was taken in the past two days or edited in the past day it's going to show up in this part of the database here so this is just going to give us a good idea of our recent notes so if we remember taking a note and we wanted to reference it quickly we could find it here alright so with that we've built the dashboard and now we're going to go ahead and add buttons these buttons are what I call Quick capture buttons they allow you to quickly add a new task or note so to do this we're just going to hit slash call out and I'm going to type in quick capture and we'll bold that for icons we'll go ahead and go with the little capture there and I'm going to hit slash and type in button and we'll create a new button I'm going to name this add task again I'm just going to change this to tasks sorry I'm changing things like on the fly so much but again I just want to make sure it's perfect and everything's clean so add task we're going to go ahead and add an icon here with our yellow task check mark and I'm going to add a step and we want to add a page to we're going to select our tasks database and the task name should be new task status should be by default not started and then I want to add one more step and we want to open page and this is where you want to select side Peak and you also want to select new page added this is going to select the page that you're just now adding when you're clicking this button so let's hit done and now when I hit add task it's going to pop open a side panel where I can quickly capture a new task so in this case I can just quickly add it to my to-do list for today for instance if I wanted to and I can set the due date for sometime in the future and then I can select my priority levels so that they fall into the proper hierarchy here speaking of the proper hierarchy let's go ahead and sort this tasks database here click on priority and priority should be ascending it should set everything up right let's just test it out boom now the way way that this works is it's not alphabetical it's based on the order that these are Dragged In so if you have Priority One in the middle it's not going to alphabetically work or anything like that you have to have them one two three and that is how it's going to know how to sort those so we've added that sort there now add task is done we're going to go ahead and duplicate and we're going to rename it to add note and we'll go ahead and go with the bookmark we'll call this new note and we're going to change this actually to notes and edit another property if you want to you can add a tag let's just go ahead with the new page added side Peak make sure it's on notes new note and that looks pretty good let's hit done and click add new note and as you can see it's going to allow me to change the name and it's also going to allow me to enter some things here all right the buttons are complete and now let's go ahead and build processing into this I'm going to go ahead and just add a view for each of these that helps you process your notes and tasks so let's go ahead and hit plus and we're going to go with tasks and we'll go ahead and do a new empty view I'm going to rename this view to needs review and we'll go with the check mark still and for this particular use case we're going to go with the table and side Peak is fine all of this is fine we're just not going to show the database title let's hit done and now I want to see basically just things that need review in here which would be things that don't have priority levels things that are past due on the due date or things that are past due on the action date if something doesn't have a project I also want it to show up here because I want everything to fall under a project even if it's just called general or something like that I want everything to be categorized where it should be if that makes sense so so if you want to you can tweak this so that it doesn't have to have a project but for me I'm going to make it so that you need a project you need a priority you need a due date you need an action date you need all of these things you need a title as well the next thing that we have to do here is we have to add some filters to see what needs review out of our tasks anything that doesn't have a project a priority or a due date action date task name anything that doesn't have these things I want to make sure that it doesn't slip under the rug so let's go ahead and hit add filter and we're going to add an advanced filter where the task contains new tasks it's going to show up in here so that means if I hit add task it's going to show up because that's the name by default and that means that I haven't given it a name yet so once I give it a name it disappears out of there okay so that's just one quick example of how you can process things right the next thing that we want to make sure is that the action date isn't in the past if the action day is in the past that means that we've forgotten about this task let's go ahead and add a filter rule for that just hit add a filter Rule and it should say or and we're going to select action date is before today so anything with an action date that's before today is going to show up here and then as soon as the action date is today or later it shouldn't show up here but the reason is still showing up is because we have our task name here without a name if you remember we added that so as you can see when I give it a name it disappeared so now action date is before today is working and we're also going to add action date is before and we're also going to add that for due date so let's just change this to due date is before today so that means it's basically past due it's either past due or it's past planned the status should be not started or in progress so we do have to add that and I'm just going to go or we're going to also add where status is not complete but I'm not going to add that yet first we're just going to add that it needs a priority in a project this is a simple one so we're just going to go ahead and do or priority is empty and then or projects is empty you don't need to do this last one if you don't want projects to be mandatory but for me I want projects to be mandatory on all my tasks even if I just name it like General project or something like that but now that's all set I'm going to go ahead and add another filter just press this button separately where the status is not complete so I don't want to see anything that's complete okay now everything in here needs processing everything that I'm seeing right now needs processing any tasks that aren't in here that means that they've already been processed properly so walk the dog let's go ahead and change that to today and let's go ahead and change the due date to today as well and give it a priority and give it a project of animal care and oh boom it's gone it's just like magic as I add all the details for these tasks and all the up-to-date content for these tasks they're going to slowly start disappearing as you can see so it's kind of like trying to reach inbox zero when you are in your email and you're going through at the end of the day and you're just kind of checking things off so that's how the needs review works now we're going to go ahead and build the needs review for notes let's just hit plus and I'm going to go ahead and click notes I'm going to rename this to needs review and here I'm just going to go ahead and filter by some different filters we're going to go ahead and delete these ones on the needs review Tab and I'm going to add a filter for the name first like we did for today's tasks so when I hit add note it's going to say new note so let's go ahead and copy that so add filter note so if the note contains we need this to be an advanced filter if the note contains new note or it's empty it's going to show up here okay so none of these have that as the case but if I hit new then we're gonna have an empty one and it'll show up or if I hit add note we're gonna have an empty one and it will show up tags if you want to have them be mandatory you can I'm not going to so I'm not going to add a filter for tags projects I am going to have mandatory just as part of my review process for the note so I'm going to go to filter and we're going to add another or projects is empty and that's going to bring all these notes into here so if I add a project to them or multiple projects even if you want to then they'll start disappearing if I add a project to them or multiple projects even if you want to then they'll start disappearing cleaning and processing so boom as you can see that was just a quick example of how to process your Tasks and notes using the needs review Tab and with that bill building is complete for process now I'm just going to show you some examples of how you can utilize some different views for tasks let's go ahead and utilize the calendar view I'm going to go to tasks and we'll create a new empty view I'm going to call it calendar and here we're just going to select our task icon and I'm going to go to the settings here layout calendar we're going to base it on the action date and I want to see this month and if I open something I'll open it inside Peak then I'm going to go back and we're going to edit the properties that we see here so let's take a look at the priority and you can also introduce the status or projects due date whatever you want I'm just going to stick with priority and just keep it very simple actually we need status as well and let's go ahead and filter out anything that's done let's also go ahead and sort the priority levels properly so as you can see now our tasks are in here I can click on them and I can change the status of them and when they get completed like so they disappear from our checklist you can also drag them between days if you want to like so and as you can see this works dynamically with the needs review so if something happens to be in the past it's going to Boom it's going to go over to needs review so this calendar is in tune with the rest of this system let's go ahead and hide this tasks title there's one more view that I want to create for tasks and that is all tasks so let's go ahead and select tasks this is just going to be everything so where it says New View we'll go ahead and do new empty view I'm going to name it all tasks and we will change the icon to this check mark and we'll hit done now what I'm going to do is I'm going to enable some grouping so I'm going to group by status and we're going to see all of our tasks not started in progress and done I'm going to hide the title there so yeah this is just a quick easy way to see everything and if I want to I can hide anything that's done but if I want to I can also see everything in my system that's not started even things that aren't processed yet so if this is here it might not show up necessarily on my calendar because it doesn't have an action date but it will show up here in all tasks so maybe lose something and you can't find it and you're not looking in needs review and fixing it well all tasks is a place to go where you can take care of that if you want to Let's also create all notes from here if you want to you can enable any sort of sorting that you want so I'm just going to sort by last edited descending this way as I add tasks it's going to put the new tasks on the top so that's utilizing views now when it comes to nice Aesthetics we've kind of been working those in as we've gone along with these call outs some other tips that you can kind of take and use if you want to are first of all you can create equation on any single piece of text like this and hit done and as you can see it makes it look a little bit fancier if you wanted to that is one way to go about personalizing the system making it look a little bit more aesthetic and another thing that you can do is Mark as code after you mark as an equation or you can just get rid of the equation let's see if I can get rid of that and just name it notes and you can just go with the Marcus code if you wanted to then you can bold it and change the color I quite like the look of that at because it looks a little bit more Compact and it stands out a little bit nicer so that is one way that you can change the look and feel just by marking something as code and changing the color Bolding it you can even italicize it or underline it if you want to the underline looks quite nice because it just underlines the entire code block so I don't know I think that this is something that's underutilized in terms of Aesthetics so definitely give this a shot I'm going to go ahead and keep that for everything actually because I really like the look of that perfect another thing that you can do is just match all the colors like I've done here with the yellows and let's go ahead and get rid of our game plan for the most part here we don't really need that anymore I'm just going to drag the third party tools to the bottom because we're going to add that in a moment but overall this is the second brain for the most part I'm going to add projects next though so stick around for a moment while I add a little bit more of an area for projects so I could add projects over on this side for instance just by hitting create link to view you could go to projects and then we could hide this database title and you can add as many views as you want for projects but in this case I'm just going to go ahead and go with the gallery layout and then we're going to go with small and I'm going to show page cover and we'll select side Peak I think this is going to look really nice because we're going to have all of our projects just kind of running down the side here and you can sort by how many tasks you have or the product progress if you wanted to sort by whatever you want or add different properties even if you do want to and let's go ahead and also add the progress properties so that we can see the progress of our projects and then I recommend adding some nice cover photos if you're going to go with an aesthetic of like this yellow colorway then I would just go to unsplash and type in yellow and then enter whatever it is that you want so I'm just going to go with these balloons or balls or whatever these are and as you can see if we went with like all yellow in here it would look really nice after a while and it would just look really aesthetically pleasing I could even go ahead and change all my priority levels to like colors that just look a little bit better in this particular style then I can also add a cover photo and let's just go with the yellow for the cover photo and I think for this let's go with white so that it looks good on the yellow there we go or at least a little bit better maybe we go see the gray looks like however you want to do it with this just some ideas that I'm throwing out there but that is pretty much it I think I'm gonna go ahead and delete these other projects that don't matter and as you can see this is pretty much the second brain let's go ahead and add a call out here just do a few a few little clean up things before I go projects should go there and we'll keep the styling consistent of course and we'll drag it in here give that a little bit of breathing room and if you get too many projects and you don't like this over here you can always drag it under these and that can be helpful as well so now let's go ahead and talk about the tools that are going to enhance the second brain for you tool number one is notionautomations.com notion automations allows you to sync notion with a ton of different platforms mainly Google Calendar and todoist if I go down to the pricing here you'll see that you can select how many automations you want to have and your refresh frequency so this is a very useful tool for two-way syncing Google Calendar and notion or todoist and notion back and forth this saves a lot of time and it saves on capturing as well it can be super helpful to not have to context switch and go back and forth between Google Calendar and notion it's nice to be able to just change something on one end and then see that change reflected on the other I'm excited to see the other automations that these guys release all right the next tool that we're going to take a look at is chart brick chart brick allows you to add embeddable Charts from notion or airtable to your workspaces so here's a quick example of how they use this for expenses in their expense database and I think it's just pretty neat so that's why I had to include this I have another full video on it if you want to check that video out it's basically just another way to look at your data inside of notion tool number three is save to notion this is another quick capture tool that's just going to save you a lot of time when it comes to capturing different items when you're just browsing the internet as you can see here on their home page it just says save the web to notion and you can download the Chrome extension or Firefox extension it's pretty easy to use and get started with you just have to choose a database that you want to pull articles into and it will literally turn an article like this into a notion page and it'll pull everything over there for you where this becomes really powerful is when you are using notion Ai and you're automatically summarizing those articles or trying to gain key insights from those articles inside of notion so if you have the notion AI version which I've talked about in previous videos I think that this could be beneficial as well and finally we're going to move on to Tool number 4 which is zapier or make.com both of these tools are really good for automating things that notion automations can't automate so Google Calendar is something that I've tried to do in zapier and make and I just had a lot better luck in notion automations even though it was a paid feature so if you want to you can pay for zapier or make or use one of their free plans to try to automate some things in notion as well one of the things that I did is I hired a JavaScript developer to create a poll that every day pulls from the aura ring API and captures my sleep data using this sleep tracking ring so basically this has these little sensors on it every day it sends my sleep data to the cloud and my activity data to the cloud and then that gets automatically ported over to my notion workspace through an API using some basic JavaScript he's able to kind of format that information and put it into my workspace every day automatically so you can do some pretty crazy things with zap happier and make and it can really make your productive brain all that stronger

Channel: Productive Dude

Views: 50,243

Keywords: notion, notion second brain, second brain, how to build a second brain, how to build a second brain in notion, how to build a notion second brain, basb, second brain notion, notion second brain template, tiago forte, notion second brain guide, building a second brain, notion second brain tutorial, building a notion second brain, second brain build tutorial, how to make a second brain, what is a second brain

Id: moxFOyc1RMk

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023