How to EASILY Use Notion with Your Team

and we are live let me see if I can uh get my little countdown timer working hey hey hey hey what's going on everybody Welcome to the live stream we're GNA get started here in about three minutes and I think think today instead of noodling on my guitar which is very out of tune right now I'm guessing y'all don't want me to tune my guitar on stream uh I'm going to do a little Q&A while we wait for people to sort of trickle in so hey welcome to the stream let me know where you're from let me know what you're work on in the chat I'll be there for the first uh few minutes of this stream and then I'll be kicking things off with a whole bunch of great content that I have planned for you today I wrote out an outline I feel like a a proper teacher I wrote out an actual outline for this stream so hey we got somebody from Minneapolis awesome somebody from uh UK is it Lewis or L not sure how you pronounce that Poland I think um my director of support Alex will be in the Stream he's also in Poland Chris says he has his guitar already is gonna Jam along too maybe at some point we need to do a jam stream I don't know how you would do that with the latency maybe you can get the latency perfect right so like okay if you get the latency exactly one quarter note then the drummer could play one quarter note ahead of time and you would get and you would get an actual uh an actual song out of it so yeah sorry for everyone who comes for the guitar at some point let me show you I'll literally show you actually I I brought this gigantic switchboard because what I want to do what I want to do is is use the streams the three minute countdown at the beginning of the streams as like an excuse to do music performances so I'm gonna figure that eventually I haven't had time this week this has been an insane week uh we've had you know tons of work going on for prepping for this stream for videos we're working on there's a new notion feature coming out next week um it was supposed to come out yesterday and it didn't come out yesterday so we were scrambling to film a video we got it filmed uh I might be able to actually give you a sneak peek a little teaser at that new feature in this stream they did give me um permission to show it so to to a small degree I told him there would only be you know maybe a couple of hundred people in this stream and we'll see if we even get that this is maybe even more Niche than last week last week we did um notion formulas for beginners the first week we did building a not taking system uh but this week we're doing notion for teams so yeah check in the chat one more time we got 10 seconds left Josh says trying to break $2,000 revenue from music I'll get there eventually um I'd love to know Josh are you also at $2,000 revenue from music because that would be pretty sweet it takes a while to get there takes quite a while to get there I do have to say all right I'm me transition my little starting soon thing off of the screen um is it C mom ton I got more videos coming on the main Channel we are working on them uh you know between streaming here between making uh long form videos on TF explains product design and updates and meetings and CEO stuff it is uh quite a lot of work on my plate right now but we do have new main Channel videos in the works and at some point in the future I also want to do like a notion for Content creators stream where I'll probably show off a lot more of the behind the scenes of how we plan content and get it made um what we're going to do in this video in this stream is go over the absolute basics of how to start leveraging notion with a team ideally a small team if you're uh here and you're representing like a 1,000 person company and you're trying to get them all on notion um this stream might be a little bit basic but I'm trying to keep things basic because I want to I want to show people a way to start using notion with a team that is going to actually stick it's going to get buyin from the team that's going to be a net positive instead of being something confusing so uh we have ift in the chat that's pretty cool um have some other questions so yeah uh like always Marissa is going to be collecting the questions that I'll be answering during question answer breaks um if you're new here the way I run streams is more like a teacher than a regular live streamer I don't sit here and react to content I actually sort of plan out lesson content and then go through it so what you're going to see in this stream is an actual kind of lesson that I've planned out in fact let me just trans transition over to my little lesson plan here I actually planned it out so let me give you an overview of what we're going to be be doing in this stream um I also want to make sure I can see my slack here just in case I'm doing something stupid and my team wants to call it out because I sometimes do that okay so what we're gonna go through in this stream uh first we're GNA go through a bit of an intro and I've kind of outlined a sort of goal for this stream here I want to show you the first steps toward getting your team on notion in a way that is easy for everyone involved that involves little friction and uh that will also work long term because a lot of teams will get into notion maybe they have one person like me on the team who is extremely excited about notion they go super into the weeds they're very nerdy about it but then they're like building these really really Advanced workflows the rest of the team doesn't really understand and there's never a lot of buying so we're going to talk a lot about that um we're also going to show some best practices for maintaining a great workspace and then uh part of this stream is literally going to be me building what I'm going to show you on stream so I'm going to show you some stuff I've pre-built you can hang up for the first hour or so to sort of get the overview we're going to be mapping some stuff out talking about theory and practice and then after the first hour or so uh we'll actually be building that stuff and then as always this stream is going to be live on the channel as an archive I'll show you that really quickly actually over on the TF explains Channel there's a little live tab right here and all of my stream archives are here so my sort of content plan right now with the channel and we'll see how this works in the future uh is to do these streams which so far are going around 2 and 1 half to 3 hours um to make them like the most in-depth training possible along with Q&A and stuff like that and then over on the videos tab I'll take uh stuff from the streams that we cover condense them down into shorter more medy impactful videos and um they should be under an hour hopefully so basically I'm trying to get people as much of a choice as possible do you want to hang out in the Stream or or catch the archive and see the really really slow like no detail skipped version of something or do you want to see our highly produced um you know Slicker and a bit more summarized version that's what you'll see in the videoos tab so going back to our little lesson plan here we're going to start with the top three rules I think that you should follow for using notion successfully with a team uh and they're right here start small and get a Buy in keep everyone on the same page and set permissions intelligently we'll go over those a bit more in detail after I go through this outline we're going to go through a team workspace overview and you can kind of see these pages in the sidebar here we're going to go through level one which I think everyone should start with the team which is a basic Company Wiki then we'll go through level two a meeting notes database level three is a company Wiki that I'm going to call an advanced Company Wiki it will look fairly similar but it'll be a bit more functional um and take a little bit more setup to get right and then level four is going to be task and project management I'm putting that at level four because I don't think every team in the world should be doing task and project management in notion I know teams that do it really really well including my own um but then again you might have bigger teams or engineering teams with a lot of extra uh requirements and needs and maybe notion isn't the right fit for them so that's why that's level four we're going to start doing some mapping out of um company organization and communication not just in notion but we're going to talk about some helper apps companion apps that you can use to sort of build a whole sweet out um a lot of this is going to be inspired by my Ops director's work Marissa Goldberg uh she works with us and she has sort of helped to overhaul our own company Ops and comms so we'll be talking about slack strategy notion strategy and a few other helper apps that we use to get things done as a team we'll talk a little bit about permissions and team spaces this probably won't be the most most in-depth stream ever on permissions in team spaces um somebody on my team was telling me today that I could probably do an entire stream on those alone and maybe I will at some point and then we're going to go into a build with me section so I'm going to put that at the end we're literally going to build these three I think yeah probably three pages from scratch uh but I want to show you how they work first because I have a lot of additional content on the channel on building in notion and maybe you already know how to use the actual building blocks of databases and filters and and uh pages and stuff like that so let's just go ahead and get into it I'm going to switch back over here really quickly and I want to talk about the top three rules for using notion with your team and this comes from a lot of experience we've had with our own team and I think as part of this section of the presentation I'll talk about how my team actually got into notion and the first steps that we took uh the first things the first pages and dashboards we found especially useful so the main thing with notion is it's kind of like Legos right you have like a box of digital Legos and you can build whatever you want so when you're working with a team you don't have the luxury of understanding everything that you've done in the past and being able to Tinker and kind of know the history of it because you now have a team and you have to communicate with them so the most important thing is when you're working with a team say you're a notion nerd you're like me you've built stuff like ultimate tasks ultimate brain you're doing like recurring tasks and um all sorts of advanced workflows and notion that's not where you want to start with a team because you want to get buyin you want to get uh people on on board with switching to a new tool and having run a company for over 10 years a company with team members and employees for over five at this point we've gone through several different types of software that we've tried to adopt and this can be a major Pitfall if you just get super excited about a new tool doesn't have to be notion in the past it's been a sauna or clickup for us uh and I go like head first into it and then I tell the team hey I built this giant setup and click up we're going to use this I built this giant setup in AA we're going to use this if the team doesn't buy into it if the team feels overwhelmed then they're just going to go back to using whatever else is at hand which might be just putting tasks on their desktop and a sticky note or putting tasks in slack and that's what you don't want you want to build a system that people are bought into so they actually use it and you have an agreed upon centralized place for uh company information for meeting notes for tasks and projects whatever it is you want to make sure the team's on the same page so rule number one start small talk with your team communicate with them and get Buy in on it rule number number two keep everyone on the same page so this was one um my head of support Alex is also an ocean consultant and he's built out workspaces and done coaching for companies uh a big thing that he says you want to avoid is having sort of sub teams on your team build out these silos of information that only they know how to navigate and only they know how to work with so you might have a team of 10 people like we do and you might have like a support team and a Dev team and a marketing team now they could have their own spaces they could have their own team spaces but if you have them sort of doing their own thing over here and there's no procedures set out for how information is supposed to be structured then you're going to run into problems when it comes to time to onboard new people or maybe you have somebody from a different part of your team who's now going to go help that team they don't know how to do things there should be some sort of agreed upon structure of information even if things look a little bit different from place to place you want to have an agre apron structure again you want to be on the same page uh and then last but not least we're going to talk about this a lot more in the Stream you want to set permissions intelligently again notion is like digital Legos it kind of lets you do whatever you want and by default it might give people on your team too much permission when they don't need it and especially when they don't uh always know exactly how notion works so a great example would be you give full access permission to everything to everyone in the team and you have somebody who doesn't quite know how notion Works maybe they accidentally delete some properties in a database like maybe you have a database full of um videos that are going to go out on your channel and you have like a sponsorship Rate Property for uh for each video somebody on your team could accidentally delete that property while trying to hide it and then it could be gone so you want to intelligently set permissions and ideally have one or two people on the company whose job it is to maintain the notion they should have full permissions and then everyone else should just have the permissions they need to do the work that they need to do okay so we're going to keep those in mind and then we're going to go into now uh actually looking over over the different workspace pages that we're going to build here so basically what I've prepared for you today is a really simple workspace that can work really well for a small team maybe you know five to 10 to 15 people um and I think even for a bigger team some of these some of these different things could work really well as well so we're keeping things intentionally simple we're going to be talking about a company Wiki a meeting notes database and then task and project management um so when I say Company Wiki simple what I mean is something like this we just have a simple page and actually this is the wrong one this is the advanced one I want to look at the basic one we have a simple page it has a couple of different sections for different areas in the company like business administration customer service tech reference and all you do here is create Pages for documentation and what you're documenting is processes uh standard operating procedures uh reference information basically any kind of thing that somebody on your team needs to reference often if there's a process that people on your team need to go through you want to get your team sort of documenting those processes in a centralized knowledge base like this as your company grows or if you already have a large company you could also have Team specific knowledge bases like a development or engineering knowledge base and a marketing knowledge base but a great way to start especially if you're working with a smaller team is to make one knowledge based page and then just have sections for uh kind of organizing the articles based on their uh their purpose in the company and their Department as it were and uh we have 11 people on our team actually this is what we use we don't yet have separated out team spaces we have a single knowledge based page and then we have sections just like this and you can actually go into those sections now I'm going to switch over really quickly to my Advanced knowledge base this is level three but um but I want to show it to you because I've actually prepared some sample content in here so basically what you would want to do is start creating a a kind of template for process documents that you want to create so I've done that for this ref reference article right here because I already had it written and basically what I've done here is I've noted who created it if I want to have somebody as the maintainer of this document I can just set them as the maintainer I'm going to set myself really quickly and then you can see we have a section here technical reference uh and then within here basically if I was giving a job to somebody else on my team like hey we have all of these what is this article really quickly uh we have all these video files and I want you to you want I want you to convert them to audio so we can say transcribe them to text summarize them whatever it is uh if I wanted to give that job to somebody on my team I can't um I can't assume they know exactly how to do it so I want to write up a document that would teach them how to do it and answer any questions so I have a table of contents here I have a summary and I have action steps these are actually AI generated I'm going to show you uh kind of how that works a little bit later in the Stream but the main thing here is I just have a full article that I've written up and I kind of have the prerequisites I have an installation here uh for installing home brew I have the actual commands for navigating to to a directory and the actual command for converting a file uh and an explanation as well so I would say that this is an example of idealized documentation um don't feel bad if all of your documents don't look like this this is the ideal in my opinion you basically have a summary you have action steps so people can easily reference exactly what they need to do and see it very quickly and then you have a full explanation for everything that way if somebody is looking through the action steps and and gets confused or doesn't understand something there should be an explanation down here that they can reference um so the whole the whole idea here is you're taking a little bit of time upfront you're investing and you get these documents that then can be referenced again and again and again by people on your team and as your team grows especially as you onboard new people who might not know how to do things you don't have to repeat yourself or like search and dig through slack conversations to try to find stuff you already wrote up you know exactly where that process documentation is and crucially everyone else in your company knows exactly where it is as well um I might be able to show you that new notion feature that's coming out because it's actually quite relevant to this so we'll see um it might not work because it takes a little bit of time to index things but wow that was a loud motorcycle right there uh so to give you a little bit of a teaser because this is something that's coming out next week uh notion AI has a new feature called Q&A and I think I have it in this workspace right here yep it's basically a chatbot right inside of notion and uh it works a bit like chat GPT except for the fact that it only searches your notion content so you won't be able to ask it like hey what's the unladen air speed velocity of a swallow or something like that uh unless you had written that in there it's not going to go out and actually find information on the web or uh it's not going to like reference a public training set but it does reference all your documents so if I said something like uh how can I convert a audio file or video file to an audio file and forgive my typing speed today this office is quite cold uh we'll see if it's indexed it it might not of okay so it hasn't indexed it yet but basically I've tested this out over the past week or so once the article gets indexed and I just threw this in here like 20 minutes ago in prep for the stream so that's why it's not here it would actually create a very concise um summary of the process based on the question I asked and the coolest thing is it will actually link to its sources it sites its sources and links to the relev pages so again if you're running a team this I think is an incredibly useful feature um and I might be able to actually bring it up in a full window because I think my face is covering it right now uh yeah here it is I think this would be a super useful feature for teams because again as your team scales even if you have a super nicely organized whole workspace just like this they're not always going to know exactly where to find things so the better we have for um the better tools we have for searching and sort of conversationally asking questions the more efficient your team is going to be okay I'm going to quickly check my back Channel really quickly just to make sure cool there just questions that Marissa is collecting awesome awesome uh yeah so I showed you that converting audio files uh sort of documentation there another uh really really useful trick that I find is uh using a tool called Loom and I think I have I think I have something in here here it is Task and projects guide so Loom is one of the sort of helper apps we going to go through later on in the Stream uh I also find this incredibly helpful for building documentation uh and I actually find it even better than writing sometimes because I can talk out a process and show it on my computer way faster than I can write it so uh we actually pay for Loom as a team and what actually put me on to loom is when I got into notion I realized there was a loom embed block and you can literally take a video with loom you get the URL on your clipboard immediately after you stop filming and you can paste it and have it in oce in like 10 seconds so just like this I've created a useful piece of documentation that is video based uh and Loom has a really fast transcription algorithm so beneath my summary and my action steps I just pasted the entire transcript from Loom like this and then I hit these little summary buttons that I'll show you later and it just takes the transcript from Loom creates action steps creates a summary and within maybe five minutes I have a really useful piece of documentation in which three of those five minutes were spent filming the little uh loom video so this is actually one of my biggest tips here to start building out process documentation for your team seriously use Loom because as you luse loom you'll be able to sort of talk through what you're doing you get to show it and that creates that super useful context for your team where they get to see everything you're doing there's no ambiguity and then we can use tools like AI to create a summary almost instantly or if you want you could create your summary yourself but again it's all about creating that perfect context for your team so you're not going back and forth asking tons and tons of questions or answering tons and tons of questions for your team and then uh one other thing I'll show you here is you can put databases inside pages so another really useful thing we do with our company is we have a gear and tool section and we maintain databases for things like uh apps that we're using um since we're a media production company we will often save songs for videos from um like royaltyfree stock music sites that we really like uh we have a gear list as well so you can just open that up and we could see we have software licenses which are all fake here uh for the actual tools that we use so Alfred power pack screen Studio descript we all we use all these tools as a team so often somebody on the team gets a new computer they're like hey I need to license for um Mac whisper or whatever it is Boom it's in our notion again they don't have to ask the question they can just go to our knowledge base and they get that information almost instantly so that my friends is sort of level one and I guess level three uh because we kind of went into the level three vers version um going back to my little Team Stream here I want to check out the outline actually I think I'm going to keep this outline in this tab here so I'll switch over level two is a meeting notes database so I personally find notion to be an excellent note-taking Tool uh the experience of writing a notion is great and notion is very collaboration focused so while some people might not find notion to be the ideal personal note-taking tool there are things like obsidian out there for that uh for team note taking I really haven't found anything that is better because it's so easy to get your team on a single notion page you can share the link in slack um you can make sure that it's easily accessible on the sidebar here and then you could just create something like a notes database just like this you could add your attendees here uh and then everyone can be on this page taking notes uh and I've gone a little bit further than some teams would because I've also added AI generated summaries and in the bottom I've added a little tasks view where we can actually add tasks to our task and project management system directly from a note which is super useful because a lot of times the team is just very busy taking notes they're in a meeting and if a task comes up having this little tasks toggle is super useful to just add that task to your actual tasks database and then I guess that will bring us to level four because I've kind of already showed you the company Wiki in its advanced form uh task and project management so again not every team should be doing task and project management in notion but I do think it works surprisingly well for a lot of teams for example um at nebula which is my uh talent agency and streaming service and whatever the heck else nebula is I guess a Creator development company um we have a whole Creator liaison team who works with both of our creators and our both both of our creators both our creators and our sponsors to make sure that sponsorships are running smoothly make sure that onboarding is going well um that team is I believe three people and I built them a a custom uh a custom task and projects area inside an ocean it actually looks quite similar to for the one I'm going to show you today and they've been using that for probably almost a year at this point um and it works really really well for them so again the management of 180 creators um probably 100 plus sponsors all working through this team that all happens in notion and it works really well really well really really well okay so back to making sure I'm sharing my screen here uh tasks and projects for team it for teams is really really simple and this actually is an instance where I want to highlight that first rule that I talked about at the beginning of this stream um you want to keep things simple and you want to start small so if you are somebody who has my ultimate brain template or if you have Creator's companion which is my content creation template you might notice that the task management features there are very comprehensive and we have a lot of advanced things you can do I bu like a whole getting things done workflow into ultimate brain but again for teams what you really want is to start small take baby steps and get Buy in because if you just dump a ridiculously complex system on your team all at once they're not going to understand it the way you do because you've you know spent hours and hours setting it up and getting familiar with it they're going to get overwhelmed and again it's going to go back to okay well I'll just do my task management and slack for now until I get time to understand this so you want to make it as easy to understand as possible and that is what I've tried to do here with this little tasks and projects board so we have a project board we can see our tasks in Pro or our projects in progress not started and done we can actually go into this project which I'll show you in a second and then we have a very simple conon style task board so we have all of our tasks here based on their statuses so not started in progress done I'm showing their assignes I'm showing their due dates and I'm showing the projects that they are assigned to uh we also have a by project area so this is very similar to our normal board view except we also get some subgrouping by project so if I want to close that I could just see this project which is no project or I can see my sample project just like that I have a this week uh table view here and this will basically show any tasks that are due within the current week and then I also added an un an unassigned area so if there's like a task manager like somebody in your company who is literally the manager of tasks then uh they'll be able to come in here and see are there tasks that haven't been assigned to a certain person yet if if so cool I'll go ahead and assign that to somebody so this kind of uh comprises and I don't think I use that word correctly composes maybe we'll see this a whole Wikipedia article on people misusing comprises um this sort of makes up a a dashboard for a manager in a company somebody who is like kind of overseeing all task management and then on an individual level what I've created is an assigned to me page um this is also in the nebula task manager setup that I've created and they say it's incredibly useful for them so basically this is very similar to the dashboard but it's only going to show tasks that are assigned to you uh and actually I can show you really quickly there is a really handy filter inside an ocean called me and me doesn't refer to me Thomas Frank me refers to the person looking at this page right now so if Marissa was looking at this page right now then she would be seeing all the tasks assigned to her same for Alex same for Ben uh so I have the same exact thing all my tasks I can split them out by project I can look at tasks that are due this week so I could basically use this view right here if I'm on a team to plan out all my work-related tasks for the week works perfectly well and then we also added a Project Lead property to our projects so if I'm the Project Lead I also see any of the projects I lead right here I can open them up and I can see all the the tasks associated with that project as well uh going back here I did tell you I would show you what's inside of a project so I'm going to go ahead and do that I'll open up the sample project right here open that as its own main page I just realized I don't have my cool little mouse circle on so that'll improve things uh and in here I did kind of the same thing so we have a view of all the tasks in a project basically split out by their to-do and in progress and complete stages we have a board view combon view a lot of people like that and then again to make things incredibly clear for each individual person we have a my tasks tab so you can switch over there and you're going to see only the tasks that are assigned to you personally uh and that's kind of it we want to keep things again deliberately simple so we're not working with a ton of different properties here we're not doing priorities or GTD lists or anything like that instead we have the name of a task we have status we have ay we have when it's due and then what project is associated with and I think the only little bit of icing that I put on the cake here is I also added a property to to basically associate tasks with notes again so you could add tasks in a meeting note and not uh have to see every task inside that meeting note but we'll talk about that a little bit later because that is a bit more of an advanced thing so uh that's kind of the overview I'm going to take a quick break here and answer a few questions and then we're going to go on to our little Whimsical section where we're going to actually start mapping out the structure of uh kind of how our remote company works and how if you're working with a team whether it be remote or in person you can start building out a structure of tools to help with your team's organization and communication uh sort of with notion at the center but we're going to talk about a few other apps as well let me switch over really quickly to my main camera view and I'm going to look at the questions Marissa has uh sort of collected a few for me so thank you Marissa uh one question here how to address the security and privacy issues from notion to big companies this is since they do not have end to- end encryption so uh Ben brosi at notion Mastery wrote an incredible article all about this going super in detail about it so if Marissa can pull that and put it in the chat um we can share that if you want all the details but basically I can actually pull this up for you uh notion has pretty much enterprise Enterprise gr grade SAS security so let's do notion security see if we can find the page here here it is so they have an S so type 2 um certificate they have all this information here um they have they have hipa compliance all this kind of stuff so when people ask about end to-end encryption It generally means that they don't quite understand how cloud-based collaboration apps work because you're not going to get end to-end encryption on really any of these sort of collaboration focused apps you're not going to see it in slack you're not going to see it in Google you're not going to see it in uh anything else like I looked into this when people started complaining about the endtoend encryption issue um and it really is just a design pattern that doesn't work for realtime collaboration cloud-based apps because the data has to be unencrypted while you're working with it um so when they say data is encrypted in transit and at rest that's about the best we can get and I think that that is reasonable security to expect when it comes to the kind of data you would work with inside of notion now what that means is you probably shouldn't be storing your passwords inside of notion we use dash lane for password management there's also bit Warden and all kinds of stuff like that uh use a password manager for password management don't be putting passwords inside of notion or any cloud-based app that isn't a password manager uh and again even even if you're using an app where there is entend encryption you have the question of well who controls the keys right so a good example is Obsidian sync uh and I love obsidian I think obsidian rocks they have a product called sync which will basically sync notes across your vaults without you having to worry about using Google drive forward or whatever they have two different options there at least last I checked there was one where they manage the keys like almost every other tech company does and there's one where you manage the keys if you choose I manage the keys you uh you personally that means if you lose the key you're completely locked out of your Vault forever but they do not have the key they could not decrypt it that is like the ultimate in cloud-based security right there if they manage the keys well there might be endend encryption but there's still somebody who isn't you who manages that encryption key and so what I call it is secur security through policy not through math so there's this whole gradient of security we could talk about in probably a future stream at some point or course content um but the bottom line is I believe that notion is as secure as any of the other work-based collaboration apps that I use like slack or Zoom or whatever it is uh and it's adequate for my needs okay uh let's see here one person said I might have missed this part but if is team spaces option only available for businesses I was wondering if there would be an option to adapt that for communities or members of a group that you're coaching that uh is thing we can probably check out on their page here so let me just go to Google notion team spaces I am not sure what plan you need on team spaces uh maybe with something in pricing that we could look at actually maybe it's on pricing yeah I'm not I'm not entirely sure if team spaces is something that is reserved only for business plan it looks like right here it says private team spaces is reserved for business um and I believe that is a team space that people who are not in the team space can't even see um but beyond that I I do know it's available on plus and it might even be available on free but then you're going to be on that uh block trial so you're I think it's if you're on the free plan and you bring other people in as team members you have that 1,000 block trial um but I do believe you can still create team spaces that's something I actually haven't tried so I know we have some other notion experts in the chat maybe they can check that out and answer it for me uh okay so can you can you please talk about partial database sharing how can I hide or share one part of my database or do I need to have five task databases if I have five people that shouldn't see the other tasks yes um I want to cover this this is actually something I plan to cover in the Stream but I'll cover it now because it is a huge question so basically what this person asking is is asking is hey can I create say a tasks database and then can I share only a slice of that database with somebody and make sure they can't see the rest of it so for example if I had a task database and and I only wanted to share the tasks assigned to Marissa could I do that could I set up a thing where she couldn't see the rest of the database and she could only see the tasks assign to her the answer is no I want to state that unequivocally because a lot of people think that they come up with these clever workarounds to make it work the answer is actually no the only way you can get around this is if you use the API to on a schedule literally duplicate a slice of a database and copy it to another database and you give that person permission to that I've actually done that before at nebula we have like an internal upcoming Productions database and I have a script that will basically copy the upcoming uh productions for the next three months create another database out of that and leave out some sort of internal information that is the only way you can do it until notion eventually gives us um like filter-based permissions or role level policies or things like that like we don't have that yet so even if you think you've come up with a clever workaround I kind of want to show you how it's defeated here so yeah I can I I want to actually demonstrate this so we're going to do it really quickly here so if I just add a new page in My Demo here I'm gon add a blank page let's just call it tasks 2 I'm going to make a database called in line tasks 2 and we will add a property called person and um I'll just assign a couple of tasks to Alex so me being clever I'm going to add a filter here and I'm going to say person is Alex and then maybe I even go into the database itself and I set the permissions of the database so that only I have full access everyone else only has say can edit content which we're going to talk about a little bit later so I've said this to can edit content awesome that would mean that Alex can't mess with the structure of this database I could even go to the view of the database here and I could lock it just like that he shouldn't be able to mess with the filters okay I think I've actually created a a slice of a database that only he can see and he can't see the rest here's a problem if I'm Alex I can just do SLT table view tasks 2 and I'm going to do new empty View and look at that there is the row that is not assigned to Alex he can see it so even if you filter the original database even if you lock it down as much as possible they can just create a new view of the database that has no fil no filters whatsoever and then they see everything so basically again until notion gives us proper Rowl policy editing or view based permissions and filter-based permissions which we do not have this can be done and the only way to get around it is to use the API to literally duplicate a slice of a database and reconstruct it so that you have a new database that doesn't contain the information that that intended viewer should not see that's it okay uh are there any other important questions before we move on um is working with let's see here it's working with Team free versions I'm not sure tutorial Mentor what that question means there it's kind of weirdly worded um purple sky says the assign to me page looks great but will it work if two people click into it at the same time yeah so the assign to me page and I'll show it one more time uh it's got a filter that's just called uh it's just called me so if I go here filter one rule assigning contains me whoever is looking at the page is going to see all the tasks that are assigned to them so even if two people are looking at this at the page at the same time they're kind of going to see it different version of the page because the filters are targeting their user account so don't even think of it as like a static page thinking of think of it as a destination full of essentially database queries and one of those database queries is okay who's logged in right now let's show them the content that is relevant to them because of this filter so yeah if somebody if two people are looking at the same time if 100 people are looking at the same time they're going to see a different version of it okay one more time Demitri or more question Demitri says is there any point in making backups and what does it mean to make a backup of the workspace and PDF um honestly this is something that I don't do uh you know maybe I should it would maybe be smart but uh it's something where I know like notion has their own very robust backup procedures they have like sharding across many databases all kinds of stuff like that so what you can do and um there's documentation online for this so I won't demonstrate it but what you can do is export the page content of one page as PDF or you can use the workspace export option which will export everything uh do keep in mind though that what notion gives us is sort of a set of blocks and tools that are unlike anything else out there it's not like obsidian where we're literally just building on top of markdown files it's its own data format and that brings a lot of um benefits it brings a lot of really cool stuff you can do but we can't really expect that we can export that data and perfectly represent it in some other app because it is its own thing it's not like um you know a markdown editor like byword or something like that and even with obsidian uh they are working on top of files which I think is a really cool concept but they're building a whole lot of extra stuff that would not really transfer over to other apps that don't know how to represent it such as the graph views or the databases uh or the properties they're adding in that stuff is Obsidian specific so you might be able to uh kind of like export some data that would be able to represent that way in a different app if it was coded the same way but as far as I know we don't have like an obsidian alternative that has all those same features uh okay one more question then we're going to go into our next section uh Chris says if you have a task database and an employee database and you relate them the employee can only see the tasks that you relate to them right uh that is incorrect Chris so like I just said and like I demonstrated um if the employee just creates their own linked view of that tasks database with no filters they'll see everything so again the relation and the filtering there does not actually constitute a change in permissions it's just a change in what they're seeing in that individual view so again there's there's no way to create a true lock down slice of a database that uh the employee can see or that a client could see without them being able to see the rest there's only one exception that I didn't cover um and that comes down to if you're making a database totally public to people who are not logged into your notion workspace you can put filters on the database itself and because people are from the public they're not logged in they couldn't make another view of that database so that's worth noting however even that I don't know if there's a way around it I just I wouldn't I would not rely on uh on filters to create true like permissioning this just not a thing uh and one more thing uh if it comes to security what about Matias Frank's notion guarding I have never heard of that so unfortunately can't talk about it here if there's somebody in the chat that knows about it let me know but I have never heard about that before he does have my last name though which is pretty cool okay we're going to move on if I can get my stream back to yes it is uh we're going to move on to our next part of the Stream So I want to start mapping out in a tool called Whimsical which I love and use all the time uh a sort of organization for building out your company's communication structures organization structures all that kind of stuff so we're going to build this on the Fly and I don't know how well planned out this section of the stream is so if there's questions that can help build this out a little bit better um feel free to put them in the chat but I kind of want to just like start mapping out how our company works and this will hopefully inspire you to make some of these changes or take inspiration from them at least for your own company so I'm going to make a little shape here I'm just going to call this Thomas Frank company because we don't have actually let's call it the real name of the LLC business things and whatnot that is literally the name of my company I think it was like 10 years ago or something like that my friend Steve cam from nerd Fitness gave me the advice to uh name my LLC something generic so if I ever wanted to have a different blog it would fit the LLC and I was like let me take that advice to the ultimate extreme and I'm just going to call my company business things and whatnot okay so what we're going to do here is we're just going to like start mapping out the apps that we're using here and then we're going to kind of build little views or specific use cases for these apps and sort of talk about how they work so we have notion here um the other one that we use most often is slack and that's where we do all our team communication and then I'm going to make one more called helper apps I think so this will start to help you sort of model out a structure of tools and communication strategies for uh keeping everyone in your company on the same page so within notion we have all the things we've already talked about we have our uh Company Wiki and that's where we're going to have process documents reference documents and uh aom collections so collections of gear in your company or um those software licenses or stuff like that in slack we kind of have a strategy where we have specific channels for projects and then we have a few main channels here so I'm going to make one for main channels uh and the most important one this this was brought into my company by Marissa who's in the chat uh is a channel called my week so the my week channel is basically a channel where every single week every person in the company is supposed to come in on Monday they write out what they got done what they didn't get done from the previous week and then they write what they're going to do for the upcoming week and this combos really well with a task and projects management dashboard where you can kind of see at a glance and sort of at a project level what everyone's working on but it's all it's nice to have an actual Channel where everyone's checking in in saying here's what happened if I didn't get something done is there a reason why was I blocked for some reason uh and basically every Monday we just have a little period of time uh async but we have a period of time where we're going through and just checking on what people got done uh if they need any help if they're unblocked stuff like that so yeah and Marissa is saying in the chat it's uh it's a way to help us have less meetings or fewer meetings I guess so we I don't think ever have regular meetings actually at our company um I think we might have had like one or two for team Retreat and like one kickoff meeting one time but other than that we have a completely asynchronous structure for working um I'll switch over to main camera while I explain this so my company is entirely async first which means that we communicate asyncronously through slack and we have an actual policy for responsiveness and slack that policy is not like you must respond in 30 minutes or anything like that uh it's a bit more loose and bit more holistic what it boils down to is we communicate primarily in slack and the company key value is deep work so everyone in the company should be able to have the ability to sit down and focus on a task for a long period of time without feeling obligated to constantly check slack or have notifications enabled on their phone then they can they can check in at a regular basis and make sure that there's they're keeping up with the messages and crucially if there is actually something urgent that's the time when we can actually pick up the phone so I know this is uh probably something that makes me a little bit old school but if I need somebody's attention right away I'm just going to pick up my phone I'm going to call them and I'm going to get them on the phone and have a conversation with them otherwise if I need something I will just put it in slack and I will wait for them to get back to me that's it um another thing that Marissa had to teach me is in slack there's this little ability to schedule a message so my team is fully distributed we've got a guy in Poland we have a guy in London we have two people in the Philippines uh we have people covering almost every us time zone at this point so sometimes my brain will fast forward and I'll go well Alex is in Poland it's it's like 3:00 a.m. for him right now let me schedule this message for 9:00 a.m. his time and Marissa had to tell me like don't do that because you need to trust everyone on the team to have their own policy set up for device notifications do not disturb when they're going to check things and if they have those things set up and you should be trusting them to do it because that's our policy then you shouldn't have to be worrying about uh trying to predict when the best time to send them a messages just go ahead and send it and again if it's not urgent you're not calling them they're going to get to it on their own time so that's been really really helpful for me uh because I often would beat myself up about scheduling messages the wrong time or I literally wait and try to remind myself to to message people now I just do it and I trust they're going to have their settings all set up okay so we have my week Channel we have our general random all kinds of stuff like that and then we also have project channels so the way we call a project is like p dash and one we're working on right now is UB upgrade so we're doing a full upgrade for ultimate brain ultimate brain 2.0 creators companion 2.0 so we have a we have a channel for that and that gives us the place to have an actual conversation um about things that are going on so a lot of people often ask me like is notion a great app for having conversations on stuff right and it's it's it's good enough for it but I wouldn't call it great so within notion we have a comment area at the top of each page right here we can have a discussion there it does kind of work we also have the ability to put comments on any block or even a selection of text so I could go in here I could add a comment just like that uh I could also do it on a specific selection of texts I think it's command shift M yes it is so you could do that there and we often do that for say video scripts or video outlines or if we're outlining um a new product launch or something like that we are going to have comments in the notion space however maybe this is just me I get the feeling feeling it's not just me I don't think that notion is the place to have an actual conversation about something I think slack or uh maybe twist if you're a Dost fan or Discord maybe not Discord their privacy is not the best for business stuff but uh Microsoft teams whatever it is use that as a place to have discussions so at least for us it's like the uh is is there is there is there a two item word for Trifecta is there a Duo fecta it's the U the pair the ultimate pair of notion and slack that's what sort of yeah perfect couple there we go that's what sort of constitutes the majority of our task and project and communication and Process Management all that kind of stuff uh okay so going back to our um little diagram here we also have some helper apps and if people have questions about notion or slack feel free to put them in the chat and Marissa can grab them for me um we're going to talk about the helper apps as well this is pretty simple we have a few that we find really really useful Loom is the main one and Loom again lets me just really quickly make a screen recording to either go over a problem that we're having or to make a piece of documentation so that is something that we pay for as a team we find it incredibly useful um another one I would say this is less for team comms but sometimes it does come in handy is a text expander so I think text expander is more useful for customer service since we have um people who ask a lot of the same questions so what we do is we have a database of sort of text Snippets that quick answer these questions and how this comes into team communication is there is a team plan so we have a text expander account I think we have four people on it our whole support staff and what that allows us to do is if somebody writes up a text snippet to quickly answer a repeat question now everyone else in the team has access to that snippet and they can use it as well so if Alex and Ben are going into our Circle support space to answer technical questions if Alex writes up a snippet Ben can then use it same thing for Cass and Christine if they're going through email support and they're processing refunds or they're doing um they're doing like pre-sales uh questions things like that they're going to have access to the snippits that they've created for themselves uh another tool you can use if everyone on your team is on Mac is raycast I freaking love raycast that I personally pay for raycast even though the team is on text expander instead but they also have a really good snippet tool where you can create text Snippets and you can share them across your team I think that is a raycast pro you use and it'll even like sing across your devices the only problem with raycast is it's only on Mac so if you're not a completely Mac only shop then uh raycast is not really going to work for your entire team though I personally love the heck out of it um another one that I didn't think of when I was prepping this stream is front so front is not that you don't have to use front but uh we do basically recommend having a sort of centralized email inbox or customer service inbox we use front for that so the reason we like front is a basically lets us bring in all of our email addresses and then it creates like this unified box where you can set permissions for each inbox and most importantly you can assign conversations to specific people and you can have uh a threaded comment conversation within an email conversation so a really common thing that happens with us is we'll have somebody who's like hey I bought the template but I didn't get it yet and um we'll reach out to our payment processor and they're like well hey the payment didn't go through maybe it got stuck on Stripes end or stuck on PayPal's end or whatever so it often requires us to have communication between the person who's handling the customer service maybe me or Marissa and we can have those threaded discussions directly in front in the context of the email thread which is super duper helpful uh and that is why we pay a stupid amount per month for front there's another one I haven't tried I'm not going to force my uh my team to switch off of Front because it's fine but um Groove seems like a decent alternative that actually costs a lot less and does a lot of the the same stuff so that might be worth checking into it kind of frustrates me how much I pay for front but again we're kind of locked in at this point so take that as a uh we use this tool not maybe a glowing recommendation of the tool because it is quite expensive uh and I think that might do it for the helper apps there so I'm going to take a quick look at the questions we have collected really quickly and then we're going to go into the next section of the tutorial which I believe is permissions fun fun fun stuff okay so looking at the question here tutorial Mentor says having two different team spaces and you want con bond from Team space one to be shown in team Space 2 and team Space 2 can make changes which will also happen at Team space one uh okay so I think the question here is um can I have two different team spaces let me show this actually can I have two different team spaces in a workspace so say I have General here in demo here could I have a database in demo that people in the general team space can see uh and as far as I know yes and I'm saying as far as I know because my team actually has not adopted multiple team spaces yet in our main workspace which I do not show on stream uh we have just one team space called General and everything works in there so really we're going to get to we're going to get into this more in the in the permission section team spaces is just another layer of permissions that help you sort of segment your workspace up a little bit better um and it also kind of helps you to make the sidebar a bit cleaner but that's kind of it and if you have a database in one but somebody has access to it you could I think you could make a linked view in another team space in fact we can literally try that right now so let's make a blank page really quickly and we'll just say uh task test right there and let's do slash uh table view tasks 3 there it is yep so I'm in these two team spaces this tasks 3 database exists in the demo team space I can verify that by viewing the database and checking the breadcrumbs right there I can see it's in demo and yet I can still see it inside of the general team space so really it comes down to the permissions model on a personto person basis and team spaces just gives you extra extra capabilities of managing that person to page permission relationship so I'm going to delete that because it's going to make my workspace all messy don't want that and I'm going to check the questions one more time here uh Mark says what about turning one of the databases into a group chat what's the point to ever even leave notion yeah you could do that um I think that's an example of like trying to mold a tool into something that it's not really good at doing you definitely could do it but again I think about like what what are the tools that are going to keep people coming back right so uh I think about this a lot actually with building fly liigh like how do we make the tool so joyous to use that people have no resistance to using whatsoever and I think for writing uh especially and for building like company wiks and stuff notion does does really really well in that area um in my opinion writing a notion is a joy which is why every single time I try to test out a new not taking app I'm just like I wish I was writing a notion right now it's so much more fun to write a otion especially when it comes to like embedding screenshots and stuff like that it's just so seamless so think about that uh on your own part but more importantly for the sake of your teammates again it's about all being on the same page and building a system that encourages people to use the system and not go uh I can't be bothered I can't be arst I'm going to go just like put my tasks on a sticky note right now that is what you want to avoid so if you're trying to like you know shove group chat into a weird notion database because you think it's cool to have everything in notion um you're probably not going to get that buy in from your team and that's going to cause communication breakdowns and I actually have a good example of that uh when when our CEO at nebula Dave finally got into notion because I was telling him about it for for years and he kept making fun of me like oh Tom's the notion guy stupid stupid and he finally got into it there was like a week or two where he got into it to the point where he almost was trying to get people on the team to stop using Excel for certain things uh and we eventually realize like you can't do that like we can't do our financial modeling inside of notion because yeah you can kind of sort of make it work but kind of sort of make it work is not good enough for team use you have to use a tool that feels good to use and ideally you're creating a suite of those tools that talk to each other and that form this great foundation for your team to actually do their work so financially remodeling should be done in uh what's what's the Mac equivalent to Excel it's not Pages it's it's uh whatever it is whatever that one is or Excel or Google Sheets because a spreadsheet application is what should be used for financial modeling it's what's going to feel good um documentation process uh project management I think can be done in notion in a way that feels seamless feels really good to use communication should probably be done in a communication Centric app with a bit of crossover when it comes to commenting on specific things in notion that is just my opinion okay uh Noah says is is there a text expander app for slack for those of us who use slack for external something with clients external CS I don't know what CS means um I think text expander just works in slack so uh if you want to if you want to clarify that question in the chat uh Noah you can but uh the thing that is kind of coming to mind for me right now is text expander or text Snippets and raycast those are sort of app agnostic so you don't really need to have text Snippets in slack because you can just do it in text expander um I will say front actually does have its own sort of text snippet or canned responses feature I think even Gmail has that as well so if you're looking for something that is like directly in an app I know front has that maybe there are slack Bots or slack apps that integrate with slack that actually kind of add that to a slash command or something um um I can sort of architect in my head how you'd build that already so it probably exists but again text expander is just a keyboard shortcut away you can paste it right into the slack uh bar when you're in slack I don't see a reason not to use it okay uh Mark says if it comes to helping apps let's not forget about fly liigh thank you for helping me to promote my own app uh Mark so yeah if anyone hasn't heard about it we are building our own app called flyer which is all about instant knowledge capture so it's going to be the best notion Web Clipper you've ever seen along with a mob mile app for capturing web content for capturing ideas we're going to have a whole like voice notes to text function in there so if you do want to get on our wait list flyer.com is what you can do for that and then one more question from Dimitri before I go into our next section uh lately sometimes default database templates take a very long time to load in a new page for that database yeah I encountered that yesterday um and that did get reported in the notion Ambassador slack so I know that they are aware of the issue beyond that I don't have any other information okay so we're going to go to to our next portion of this little stream and I keep going away from my stream planning in this tab I want to go back over to this tab try to remember it Tom okay so the next thing I want to go over and we're gonna try to make this brief this needs to be a video on my Channel at some point we're going to talk about permissions and team spaces so the way that permissions in notion work uh number one is we have different levels right so we have workspace we have groups we have Team spaces we have page level pres permissions and then we have What's called the permissions Cascade which I will talk about in a second just a concept so basically everything we're seeing here on the screen is the notion workspace and that includes all of our team spaces I have my private areas here I've got my shared pages so if I go to my settings and members and I go to uh right here I think we've got members we can see there are actual access levels everyone here is a workspace owner right now so Alex Ben and myself are in this template Demo's workspace um I didn't want to put the rest of the team in the workspace because this is a demo workspace I use just for streaming and I'm paying uh $8 times three people just for this demo workspace so my whole team's not in here but uh you can see they're all workspace owner so they can change the workspace settings and as owners they're going to have ACC they're going to have the ability to access any team space even if I don't put myself in a specific team space I could add myself later because I'm an owner of the workspace now I could set Alex to member and that would basically make him not an admin so if I did that then I would have better and more granular management over his permission to say specific team spaces and he wouldn't be able to add himself so if you are the administrator of your notion workspace what I would recommend is set yourself as workspace owner and everyone else as member that's like the foundation here um you can also I think have an invite link and I think you can also set this link to be domain specific if you're on the inter Enterprise plan maybe business plan not sure um so you can let people actually join and then they would join as members they won't join as workspace owners I just set these two guys as workspace owners because um they do a lot of notion template help with me so they deserve to have full access to this workspace we can also add guests to our workspace these people do not count towards our our billing here uh but you have to give them specific access to Pages you can't say add a guest to an entire team space and you can't add a guest to entire workspace you have to just give them permissions to access a specific page um now the way you start architecting your space can give a guest a lot of access but you do have to keep in mind that in terms of top level pages right here that is what guests get access to and you would have to manually add them to new pages if you wanted them to have access to new pages so uh let's talk about teams spaces really quickly you can see here we have a couple of Team spaces demo general sales and for each of these I can go into the team space settings and this is how I can start to sort of segment access to a notion workspace that is meant for a bigger team right so here we have uh first and foremost the open permission if I open this up here I can see I have a few different choices the default one means everyone in this workspace must be a member so default would be great for a team space like General if you had like a Wiki with um you know uh time off policies and Company mission statements and whatever else you want to have for literally everyone of the company to see you would set that team space as default and uh then anybody who comes into your team gets added to the notion work space they're going to be instantly there open means anyone can see it they can join it but they will not join it by default so maybe you have um a team space for I don't know company events or something like that and you don't want to force people into it you could set that to open closed would be anyone can seen this but they will not be able to join on their own they have to be added by the person who is managing the team space so say you have an engineering team and you don't want the intern from marketing to have access to the engineering team space you would set that team space is closed they would be able to see it but they wouldn't be able to join it and then if you upgrade to the business plan there is one called private where only members can even see that it exists so if you want to have a team space called secret cabal where we wear robes and chant you would probably want to upgrade to the business plan maybe even using my affiliate link for notion uh and you would want to set that as a private te uh Team space so you know for for the five people out there who want to start a cult in notion uh and then we have actual um permissions here so team space members can have full access or we can set uh their permissions a little bit differently here and then everyone else in template demos again because I'm open here I could set these permissions so if there was somebody who wasn't a member of the team space I could let them actually view the content in the team Space by setting can view like that they'd be able to come in and view it but because they're not members of the team space then they would not be able to actually change it so yeah someone say uh notion is already a cult eh it kind of is I mean people are pretty pretty darn into it and I think again that comes down to the fact that it's like easy to use it makes you want to use it and then that combines with What's called the Ikea effect where the act of building something yourself makes you feel more ownership over it so notion kind of like nailed that balance and I think that's why they're so popular even though there are other tools out there that can do other things notion has that popularity I think because of that combination so if you're maybe a startup founder like me those are two things I would keep heavily in mind when building your prodct products uh ease of use to the point where it becomes like a joy almost an addiction to use and then um just enough customizability that people get that Ikea effect and they feel ownership over what they've built in the tool cool so I can add members here again if I were to set this to closed just like that now if somebody comes into my workspace maybe they join a general team space but I don't want them to be able to join this demo workspace now that it's closed they can see it you can see that everyone else in template demos has no access I could set this to can view they could come in and view stuff but I would have to as the team space owner come in and add them manually if they were going to get ask uh access here okay so talked about team spaces uh there's also a groups and let me see if I can do that here so if I go to my members here I can create groups and this is useful for basically like creating teams so maybe I have like a um admin team or management team or I have an engineering team I can create a group let me just create one I'll call it engineering like that actually let's call it imagining and inside of imagining we'll put uh well Walt Disney is not in this place so I'm gonna put myself I'll put Alex sorry Ben doesn't get to be an imagineering for now so now I have a group and what I can do now that I have a group is I can set permissions based on the group which makes it way less tedious because I don't have to do it for specific people so if I come into say this notion for Team Stream document that I'm on right now I can click share now everyone at demo currently has full access let's change that let's say everyone at demo has no access nobody gets access except for teamspace owners so right now it's actually me everyone at template demos can view let's set that to no access now I'm the only person who can see this page but I could add a group so you can see here I have my actual people here some of them are guests some of them are full members but I also now have this imagineering group if I add this I can set full access I can set edit comment view let's do edit invite cool so now I have access to this page fully and then the imaginan group which is you can see me and Alex uh has edit in edit access and I have full access I think I might have actually gotten rid of my full access I'm not sure here it doesn't say it uh via demo there it is okay uh but yeah so now everyone at demo it's me full access everyone else no one else but now the imagineering group has edit access so that is a way you can start to cut down on the work in involved in setting permissions specifically on pages uh because you can do a group instead of actually like picking every single person and inviting them individually okay so I now want to talk about let me see if I got to it yet uh page permissions and the permissions Cascade I love the term Cascade because I play a lot of Magic the Gathering and Cascade is one of my favorite effects they ever brought into the game um but the permissions Cascade and notion is a little bit different so I think the best way to illustrate this is to show and point out the breadcrumbs at the top of the page here so the permissions Cascade basically means the permissions for a page are either something you set manually or if not they will inherit the manually set permissions of the nearest parent page so what I mean by that is uh let's see if I go to meeting notes I have a page called meeting notes inside that page I have a database also called meeting notes and then I have specific pages in here and I think think I actually want to um demonstrate this a little better so let me create like a Cascade of pages here so we're going to call this page one and then in here I'm going to do SL page I'm going to call this page two page three inside of page two and finally page four inside of Page Three so now you can see we've kind of created like this full Cascade page one page two page three page four I go into share I have full access to this page via demo so that is what I meant we Traverse up the tree to the nearest parent page that has specific permissions set and if none of the pages in the tree all the way up to the top have specific permissions set then it's going to inherit the permissions of the team space we're in um otherwise if I had set permissions it would inherit those so let's let's actually demonstrate that I'm going to go to page two now and let's actually set some specific permissions let's say teams space members can only comment on this everyone at template demos can view cool so now if I go to page three page four we should see I have full access based on demo but if somebody else was in this ah here he is this access is based on page two changing this access will restrict permissions of the page so you can see my personal access is based on demo because I didn't restrict my own access on page two but here we can see this rule is being set by what I set on page two so that is the permissions Cascade basically uh and that might be all I had to say on permissions again this is probably something that deserves its own video or stream or article um but I probably want to get questions from people uh so let's also talk about Let's see we also talk about filter VI of database already let's talk about database locking database permissions really quickly here because this is actually quite important for teams so here I have a meeting notes database and let me actually make sure I'm on it yeah I'm fully on it let's see here yeah I am cool so when you're building databases in otion uh one thing that you might want to make sure to do is to go up into the share menu for a specific database um and let's see here am I on the database because I should see yeah I can okay for a specific database uh and anyone who is not the notion architect in your company anybody who's not like the admin of the notion space should have in my opinion can edit content permission and nothing higher so let me explain that difference here if I set everyone of the template demos to can edit content what that means is they can make new pages in this database just like that they can edit the values of uh permissions or of properties on a specific row so I could add a person here as an attendee let's add Ben cool I could change the date there but because let's say I only have can edit permission I can't delete one of these properties I can't go into one of these properties and change its settings um if I had a select or multi- Select Property I wouldn't be able to change any of the options there add new ones all I can do is essentially what I would be able to do in a traditional app like say todoist or jira or something like that I could um I could add new rows I could edit their content but I can't change the structure of the database so in my opinion when you're working with a team setting everyone except for say you or the admin in your company to can edit content is very useful the other thing I often recommend doing is just locking databases so you can go to the three do menu right up here you can lock a database and that is going to prevent any changes being made to the property settings properties can't be deleted again I can still add new pages I can set the date I can add attendees just like that we're all good to go but I can't actually change this database until I unlock it like that that I think is a really good practice to adopt because again notion is like digital Legos and once you have a setup then you're working with your team you don't want people messing with the Legos so this is like gluing the Legos shut which in The Lego Movie is shown to be a very bad thing and will farell is kind of a villain for it but I'm goingon to say here Justice for Lord Business Justice for will frell in this context we want to use the kaggle on the notion Legos once we have the system working because we don't want people accidentally deleting properties deleting information stuff like that in many cases you can restore properties it's not the end of the world things happen but some cases that might not be the case and you just want to make sure you don't have to deal with that headache so lock your databases um and you're going to be a lot happier okay going back to meeting notes let's go back to my little stream plan here open that up as uh one person saying that lock needs a password feature uh I'm wondering if people who don't have access to the database can unlock it that's a good question we should check into that so we talked about permissions we talked about locking we already talked about filtered views of the database uh if you didn't catch that there'll be a stream archive later on on the live tab of my channel so check that out as a recap again you cannot make a filtered view of a database where the person only can see that view unless you literally use the API to create like a duplicate database you just can't do it so don't think that I can have like a client's database and a task database and make sure one client can only see the tasks assigned to them it doesn't work they could just make a new view of the task database and take all the filters off of it and see everything um eventually we're gonna get eventually we're going to get those abilities but it's not happening yet I did see the CEO of notion replied to Ben brosi on Twitter recently saying they were working on it but again I think it's a pretty hard problem so hopefully we get it soon um but who knows when we're going to get it okay so we've gone through all the lecture material thank you for listening class the next part of this stream is going to be the build with me so this will take maybe a little bit longer I guess we've already been going for an hour and 15 minutes I almost called it I said the first hour would be lecture material so my f ratio on this should be 25% right if you were here for the formula stream last week you would probably know what I'm talking about so I'm going to do a quick question and answer break a quick take a drink and stop talking so much for a full hour break and then we're going to go into the build with me and I'm going to show you how to actually build all of these cool things that I've demonstrated in this stream so we're going to build the knowledge base we're going to build tasks and projects area and we're going to build a meeting notes area and this will be sort of functioning as like uh an archived I don't know lesson on how to literally build this uh and then hopefully this will help us to sort of formulate our notion for teams course that we're going to be working on ideally releasing in 2024 um I think Alex is working on like an interest form for that somewhere we might have that in this stream otherwise uh I guess what I will say before I go into the question and answer break is yeah we're working on a full course for notion for teams and then in 2024 we're also going to be ramping up our ability to to offer consulting services and coaching services for teams that need it so uh I wasn't able to get a actual signup form for this made before the stream prepping all this material Took a ton of time so sorry for that uh but if you are interested in either that course or consulting services in the future over on thomasj frank.com we have learn notion there's a newsletter link right there that will get you on our notion tips newsletter and then at a point in the future um oh and it looks like we already did it so Isa uh is correcting me already looks like we already have the finished tally form I think I just didn't see a little uh preview box so never mind you don't have to sign up for our general newsletter you can if you want but it looks like we also have a notion for teams sign up link here it is cool so yeah we have a we have a T.O form in the description and uh if you are interested in our course or in Consulting Services you can fill this out otherwise again if you want the easiest possible way to get updated about that in the future we have the newsletter link there which I will send to Marissa really quickly in slack so she can actually see it and I just realized I can put it in the chat myself I have my own chat check it out I'm interacting with the chat just like that okay uh I'm G to go through some questions really quickly here let me take a quick little drink okay um so one person's asking would it be possible to adapt the par method to the business level so I mean using per tools and procedures to manage a team uh and share the most common objectives and missions yeah I think that would actually be possible um that is something we're going to have to think through so for those who are unfamiliar perah stands for projects areas resources and archives it is I think a primarily personal productivity focused method created by my friend Thiago Forte it's in his book building a second brain along with his course and uh if you didn't know ultimate brain my full template for personal productivity is built on top of the PA method I would want to actually talk to Thiago about how to adapt that for business in fact that gives me an idea for a video that I could do probably on my main Channel How can a team adapt Pera so great question um I think we could do it don't have a specific implementation yet but in the future I think we will uh let's see here okay uh Ashley says any info on inability to Cascade content only like with Pages um I think content only is just a database level permission so like can edit content um if that's not what you're asking let me know but yeah I think the can edit content permission is specifically just for um databases not for individual Pages Aaron says when does it make sense to pay for a member instead of having them as a guest is there a limit to guest Pages or any relevant differences uh you'd be saving a lot of money right yes so like I said before we have the page Cascade and if you're thinking through things here um within knowledge base I could I could literally just call this page home and then I could put everything inside of that page and I could I could set guest access right there so notion is actually incredibly generous with what you're able to do with guests and uh you could add a lot of guests and you can get a lot done in your company um just adding guests to specific pages and I actually make quite a lot of use of that in the settings of members here you can see we have three full members and I want to make sure all those people have full access to the workspace but then there are three guests and these people don't need access to every single page so I've opted not to pay the eight bucks a month for each of them that saves me 24 bucks a month because they only need access to these specific pages that they're on so what it really comes down to when you're adding people as full members is do they need access to an entire team space right there do you um I'm trying to think if there's anything else that's like super compelling I think there is but I haven't thought about this in a little while so uh that again is something that we should probably address in future content but yeah uh what mainly comes down to is do you want to give people access on a full team Space level or do you want to give them access on a page level uh and I think there are some other details that are kind of detail on Notions pricing page and then I think there is actually a guest limit on each workspace it might be on the pricing page here yeah so free you can have 10 guests plus you can have 100 guests 250 on business and maybe they even have a page on this maybe we can look on it Google uh notion guests so let's see if it even says if there's a difference here members guests guest versus members here it is cool all right uh they can't be given workspace wide access that's kind of what I already talked about they have to be invited to individual pages to view them and their subpages let me zoom in a little bit for you that makes it a little better uh they can't create new pages outside the ones they have access to cool they can't be added to groups of members this actually is significant so again if you have a larger team and you have a more complex workspace where you're often setting permissions this can get kind of tedious if you have tons and tons of of group or of guests you might want to add some of them as members put them in a group that way you can give group access uh personally I find that worth it again I'm trying to reduce as much friction as possible my business so yeah can I just workspace settings are building information to me that's a plus can't add new members can't add new Integrations so I think what it really comes down to is trust and access um and if you're working with a team enough this is is going to become very obvious to you in a way that I don't think gets obvious at a purely theoretical level like if you're sitting there as an individual or maybe you work with a few contractors who have very limited responsibilities right now you're probably not thinking in terms of I want to give my team as much access as they need to do things autonomously without my permission needed but as somebody who runs an 11p person team with many of those people on the team as full-time employees we've gotten to that point we've gotten to the point where I realize like I'm a bottleneck in many situations and because we're acing first it it's actually very important for me to not be a bottleneck because I am not expected like everyone else I'm not expected to be instantly reactive I'm spending a lot of my time again doing like a three-hour stream like this if there's somebody on slack trying to get my attention and it's not about this stream they're GNA have to wait for three hours so if say Alex does not have access to do a specific thing with our notion like say add an integration or something like that he might be blocked for the next 3 hours or because he's in Poland he might be blocked for the entire workday go to bed I can't get to his request until the end of the stream and he wastes an entire day working on something so it really comes down to yeah trust access bottlenecks that kind of thing weigh that against the $8 a month per person and uh make your decision uh okay cool so let's look at any more questions that are on here I was just answering errands I think surgical says if I create a client portal link a database on that page from A Different Page let's say a tickets database and give that client client guest access they can't see the linked database so that would be true yes surgical is asking if I have a page and I link a database on that page that lives somewhere else and they don't have access to that link database then in that case they would not be able to see the entire database so again um permissions and notion are set at the page level and we can consider a database to be a page so if I don't give somebody access to a database and then I link that database I create a linked view on a page they do have access to they're just going to see a blank space baby uh YC why commentators in the chat just kidding YC would says would you in general recommend using notion for a team of 50 people with mixed age and mixed digital experience yes so the more people you're working with and the less techsavvy experience you're working with the more you want to follow rule number one which I will go back to right here and highlight start small and get buying that's really what it's all about so if you have a 50 person team and a lot of them don't have a whole lot of tech experience going to a knowledge based page like this requires almost no Tech experience whatsoever like if I'm working on a team um like I I'll use my mom as an example my mom has learned how to use Excel has learned how to use word but she doesn't have a ton of tech experience she still calls me quite often for computer help um she works at a fairly midsize company at this point like maybe 30 people or something like that um if she was like told go to the knowledge pace and go to a page like this and look at the process she could easily handle that like she'd have no problem with this whatsoever if she was told like Hey we're running a huge getting things done process and we do all of our team Communication in this one database page and stuff like that she would not understand any of it and she would probably just go back to writing on sticky notes and sticking them to our desk so again it's all about can you start small can you get buying from everyone your team if you can use that tool if you can't don't use that Tool uh and you know because you're working on a team it may involve creating some trainings so I actually made this as an example in the knowledge base right here uh we have a tasks and projects guide and as prep for this stream I shot a little three minute overview of how our tasks and projects page work uh works and then I used the loom transcript pasted it here and I Ed notion AI to create a summary of it just in case that's useful um and so if somebody like my mom was coming into my team and needed to know how to use tasks and projects boom there it is I could easily link it to her in slack she could watch this video and she'd know how to use it so that is an example of uh I wouldn't say like pure onboarding it's more like reference guide but as part of an onboarding process they might have a access to a guide like this and I think somebody's actually asking about new team onboarding um in there I didn't have time to write up like a sample new team member onboarding here but basically you would want to create a step-by-step article for how to onboard a new team team member so what's that going to involve it's going to involve probably a training session on how to work things depending on the role that they are bringing in it's going to involve uh adding them to specific tools so in our specific case if I'm adding somebody to my company they need a Google Apps account for our domain they need a slack account they need an ocean account they need a text expander account most likely they need access to our Circle workspace um and they need access to our front account at least so those I think five or six I just mentioned there would be a section for each of them literally just showing it maybe there would be individual Loom videos for each one them and I would create a well structured onboarding article and again it's all about investing a little bit of extra time up front to create something that becomes a resource so now you are not spending time again and again uh answering questions and acting as a bottleneck because you probably have your own work to do Beyond onboarding other employees so keep that in mind and uh I keep thinking of Lincoln Park lyrics every time I say a word uh couple more questions here when person says hi Thomas do you know if notion AI can use the comments in a page and extract information from those comments like the name of a person that commented um I'm not 100% sure about this but I think right now notion AI cannot get comment uh content I think right now it just gets the the uh page content specifically and then I think um some pieces of notion AI can reference database property values but in general that's been a little bit buggy in my testing so i' would say it's rock solid for page content database properties maybe not so much comments I don't think it can access at all right now uh Demetri says how to conduct team onboarding oh that was the question I saw in the chat so already kind of covered that and then uh Mark says when is it beneficial to use a team space and when is it uh beneficial to just share with somebody as a guest I think I've already covered that so again it's all just about like does somebody need more access so you're not being a bottleneck maybe add them as a member if they need only a really limited set of access save yourself some money and set them as a guest uh cool so let me take a quick drink here see if there's anything else and we do have some linked Park lyrics in the chat so that's great to see okay so that is the lecture portion of this stream we're now going to go into the build with me portion of this stream we're literally going to build this out um maybe if I were smart I would save this as paid course content but we'll probably still have it in our course and sell it and then you guys are the stream you get it for free anyway so we're going to literally build this out and I'm going to show you exactly how to do it uh we're going to start at level one with our company Wiki simple so this is like the most dead simple way to start using notion with your team uh and this is the most dead simple way to build it so I think what I'm going to do is actually make a new team space so you can see me build this literally from scratch so we'll create one right here a little plus icon just like that uh let's just call this a stream demo and we can even describe it I'm going to build stuff like Bob the Builder check me out we can set it to open we can set it to closed we already went through those permissions I'll just keep it open for now create this team space and there it is I can invite people if I want to maybe I want to invite Alex maybe I want to invite I can even invite well I think if I actually what happens if I yeah she's a guest Martin's a guest too I think Ben is the only other member here so there he is and it's a little bit weird that when I start typing here this kind of just gets cut off I wonder if that's because of how zoomed in I am right now not sure but we'll have been there I'll invite them they can be my team space so again team spaces are just a way to segment out a specific workspace I think they were a response to a lot of teams actually having multiple notion accounts or not accounts but multiple notion workspaces in one account um this just creates faster access and better permissions management versus that old method so we can also give this an icon I think I have to go to the team space settings to do that yep so uh I don't know let's give it oh they actually moved icons over here it used to be in the middle let's give it a nice little space invader Emoji or icon and then I'm going to delete this this teamspace home we don't need it and I'm going to add our first page so we're going to call this knowledge base you could also call it Company Wiki I think I use the term knowledgebase because I had a IT job in college and we called this the knowledge base um and I like to make this a full width page because I like to have a couple of different sections here so basically thinking about your own company you would want to think about um the sort of different sections of your company and one person in the chat is asking what do you think about the turn into Wiki feature versus using a regular database so if you don't know there's actually up in the three dot menu here this Wiki right here I don't really like it personally uh I tried out the wiki feature again I tried my best to to make it work really well um as part of stream prep here but there's a couple of problems with the turn into Wiki feature I can cover those maybe in some future content but what what it kind of comes down to is the more advanced version of the knowledge base and this is literally what we use in our company uses linked database views underneath these sections and what that would allow us to do is like sort so if I open this up I can make sort criteria let's just do by name and ascending right now to alphabetize it now I can literally sort those articles within that specific section and I think that's pretty useful I also have this announcement section right here so this would be like a nice section for uh if somebody on your team is like writing weekly newsletters for your team or there's like information about a team Retreat something like that I would probably want to sort that by the due date or the uh the date of the announcement specific to this view so if I were to create a Wiki which I can literally do just like that I have to go through this little onboarding before I can even do it it kind of like turns the entire page into a database and so if I have Pages like I'll just call this page one for now now uh we do get like an owner verification and tags property by default and I can switch over to this all pages here but what I'm not going to be able to do is create that nice linked database view without also seeing the same Pages duplicated beneath it so you can you can play with that if you want to but again I'm just not the biggest fan of this Wiki feature so we are not going to use it in this stream I'm going to go ahead and uh undo the wiki and just use a regular empty page so let me check full width we're still there cool cool what I'm going to do is create two columns so 2 C just like that we're gonna do a slash one and I want to get actually my other knowledge base up for reference so I'm just going to go ahead and put that in a different Tab and let's look through the different sections we're going to build business admin announcements customer service technical service cool so call that business admin call this one announcements slash one sometimes I think like it would be fun to do competitive notion like how fast could I do stuff here but here all I'm doing is typing slash 2C again and then slash one to make a heading that's all I'm doing so this is literally I mean one of the easiest ways to start building up a little company Wiki and notion beneath here you could just start creating pages so here I might have um new member on boarding just like that and you just create create Pages just like that uh here's a cool trick you could do if you knew a lot of pages that you needed to create so for customer service maybe you had one for processing refunds another one for um handling uh disputes another one for uh adding customers manually to Circle which is our community platform so you could have a bullet list just like that so say you like you know what articles you need make a bullet list you could highlight them just like this go to the six stop menu and turn into pages and check that out you just created Pages another cool thing I think if I hold alt or option I can uh open up pages that are not in the database inside Peak now which is super useful so that is literally how you would build a basic knowledge base and uh I'm not going to bore you by literally creating all those pages but this is sort of like the end result it's just a page with two columns and you have Pages underneath headings and this is a great place to start for teams seriously like if you have nothing else but this it will be a value ad for your company um this is actually how we started out with notion we were looking for company Wiki software we went through a bunch of different options I wanted something that was like super easy to create a new page we at one point tried like I think we literally tried like Wikia or Wikimedia or something like that um we tried WordPress and it just takes too long to create something uh and it's it's actually kind of astounding to me now to think back at just how annoying it was to create stuff like this before an oce now like every app in the world has it slack has canvases there's slight there's Koda there's uh there's Confluence all that kind of stuff but like the ability to just I just made these Pages instantly and I can go in here and I can just easily type stuff and make stuff so that is how you would make a very very basic knowledge base uh cool so again I'll just have this on screen one more time as a reference for people watching through the uh replay the next thing we're going to build here after I give this a cool little icon cuz come on we have to give it a cool icon let's do it a book um and we could also give it a cover if we really wanted to but after that we're going to build a meting notes database so I'm going to go to change cover let's do unsplash and uh is there like old library maybe something that's like knowy yeah these look pretty good these look pretty good what's this one here this one looks uh pretty cool I think if it wants to load yeah so we I don't know spiral staircase with some old leather bound books and a lot of mahogany in my apartment got to have that and boom there you have a very basic knowledge base and if you were diligent about building process documents then you would have something incredibly useful for your company okay step two level two in this build guide is going to be a meeting notes database so once again I'm going to make a blank page I like having blank pages that contain databases you can just do a database but I like having blank pages so once again I want to make this full width I'm going to call this meeting notes and this will be a great place for if your team does have an frequent meetings you could send everyone the link to the meeting notes document and it would be super easy for everyone to take notes on that document you can even give any everyone their own section if you wanted to um and it literally keeps everyone on the same page pun intended so meeting notes let's give this like a pen icon I think that looks good and on here I can create a database so I'm going to do SL database we'll call it an inline database I will call this meeting notes so it's a meeting notes database inside a page called meeting notes and the reason I like to have it in a page instead of as a full width database is if I wanted to do something down here or maybe up here like a call out I could do that if I was a full width or full page database I couldn't put additional blocks on here so that's why I like to do that I like to make my call outs a default background and maybe give them like a I don't know space evader icon and then I could literally like write instructions for my team here you know that's very obvious but there might be some specific instructions that you might want to put in here like instructions on how to use it you could even here's a cool trick enter down tab in Dash D Dash and then instructions if you wanted to put like a loom video or something in a toggle like here now there is no confusion if somebody lands on this page and they're not sure how to work it which for media notes database is probably not going to be the case but for a task manager or something like that might be the case you could easily put instructions inside a toggle and that will help anybody who needs instructions on it to use it you can even link to with a double bracket the knowledge base or a specific page in the knowledge base and that would uh give them a quick link to a specific piece of documentation on how this works so in our meting notes database I think it might be useful to have a couple of different properties so I'm going to get rid of tags but what I do want to have here is a date one so we'll call that the date of the meeting and then I also want to have a person property and uh this could be for attendees and you'll see why I'm going to add this in a second I want to hide this database title here and then what I think I want to do is create a meeting notes template so if I go back over to my actual uh demo here and I go into meeting notes I can actually show you why we have this so if I go into team retreat planning here actually I want to show you the Black Friday sale plan first you'll see that we have a summary we have a list of action items and we have our actual notes along with a tasks table that we can open up we can even add tasks to our task manager We'll add that a little bit later but uh the reason why I want to create a template is because we can actually add these in here so if you have the notion AI add-on which is a paid add-on you can even add it onto a free plan if you want to um I think it's like eight bucks per month annually per user so I think really only makes sense for teams that are going to heavily leverage documentation with summarization if that does uh involve you or that does that does include you then inside of a uh a notes page here you can add what are called AI blocks so I can add these as a template and they're going to automatically be here and after we take notes I could just do this summarize page of the eye we're going to get a summary I could do find action items in this page generate that it's going to create a nice little checklist of things we need to do so uh this is like a really really basic note here but for a big long meeting planning out tons and tons of details for a team Retreat you might have tons of stuff here and the ability to just instantly create a checklist of action items could be very useful for certain teams so we're going to go ahead and build that little uh template there and the way we can do that is inside of our meeting notes database we can go new template just like that cool and I'm going to open that as a full with page I'm going to call this meeting template let me check the date thing I want to see if they added this oh my goodness they did okay this is actually cool I need to remember and maybe Marissa can take a note for me here I need to remember to add this to my new notion feature Roundup video that I'm working on I think I'm going to call it like 30 notion features I forgot to tell you about or something like that uh inside of a database template we now have the ability to set a date property as now or today date when duplicated that is so so nice I didn't know we we had that yet I'm so happy about that oh my goodness I'm like irrationally excited about it okay so I'm going to set this as today date when duplicated and then attendees will be empty and we can start building out our little template here so first thing I want to do SL to that's a table of contents as we add headings here we'll be able to jump to those headings from the top of the page I think it's pretty cool I'm going to do a uh summary heading just like that and then in here if you do have the notion AI add-on you can type Ai and then after all of these different AI options there's a few AI blocks there is summary action items and custom AI block custom AI block just lets you write your own uh prompt if you want but I'll go with summary just like that and then uh I can do another one and I will find the action items so basically the reason I'm doing this is I'm creating a database template which is going to be applied to our new meeting notes going forward so automatically I'm going to have the summary and the find action AI blocks on the page I can also add a notes section this is just where I'll take my notes and then later on in the build guide I'm going to come back in here and I'm going to add a tasks dropdown but for now we don't have a tasks uh database yet so we're not going to do that quite yet so this will be our meeting notes template we can now go back to our meeting notes page and a cool thing we can do is go to this little blue arrow here go to meeting template and we can set this as a default for either this view or all views for this database I'm going to go with all views for this database because I intend this to be the only meeting notes template for now and then say I delete all these and I create a new meeting note let's just call this um notion for Team Stream where I would be able to add all of you lovely folks as attendees if you were in my notion workspace sorry you're not I'll just put myself and I don't know I'll put Alex for now as well maybe Marissa now if I come in here because I said it as the default look at that it's already here I can take all my notes as needed uh we talked about we talked about databases and Pokemon cool so there you have your notion or your meeting notes uh database template another thing that I think I want to do here is the same trick that I demoed in the tasks and projects area where I want to create a view of this table that only shows me notes where I was an attendee so I'm going to rename this to all notes and then I'm going to go ahead and duplicate it I'm going to call this uh uh let's see here I attended sure in the filters for this I'm going to create an advanced filter and you can do this with simple filters I just like Advanced filters better and I'm going to set a filter where attendee contains me not Thomas Frank but the keyword me so again if a different person in my workspace is looking at this view the me filter is going to apply to them but in this case it applies to me personally so now I'm only going to see notes where I was an attendee let's say there was another one called uh super secret meeting that Tom isn't invited to and I want to uh a tongue out this one doesn't look mean-spirited enough but there it is Marissa's in there Eli's in there Ben's in there now if I go to I attended it's not there because my filter is only showing me the stuff where I was an attendee and I think in general this is a useful design pattern for team focused workspaces because what can happen as you add more and more stuff to a workspace over time if you have these big dashboards specific people on your team are going to go there's so much stuff here that isn't relevant to me I'm overwhelmed well if you create a nice little view like this they're not going to be overwhelmed because all they're going to see is stuff that is relevant to them so that is our meeting notes database pretty simple not too hard the next thing we're going to do is take the database concept that we used here and we're going to use it to upgrade our knowledge base because as you can see right now this is just a bunch of pages uh just like an it you have like jbod just a bunch of drives this is just a bunch of pages so what we want to do is make this just a bunch of pages work a little bit better again this is our finished knowledge base we have linked database views for each section and that allows us to sort those articles by date by name uh we can even filter them it just becomes a lot more useful in my opinion so we're going to do we're going to do that next um I think this is like technically the halfway point of our build guide TimeWise it's probably not because this and the task manager are a little bit more complex than the first two things but I am going to take a quick break to answer a few questions because Marissa does have a few I think that I have not um covered yet so let me again take a quick drink break and we'll see what Marissa has collected for me okay um Mitchell H says Hey Thomas have you gone over notifications I'd love to use notion to notify my team the notifications don't seem reliable yeah to be completely honest uh I don't rely on notifications at all in fact I'll go back to here we can see I have 99 plus notifications across my entire notion account um I really just don't use them that much and that might come that might be due to the fact that I'm really not a notification heavy person I I do have notifications in slack and like messages but beyond that like I don't get I don't have a badge for my email I don't get notifications on my phone for email I just go in and check um so I've never really been incentivized personally to try to make use of notifications in notion that being said we do have uh plans to make content on how to best use them and as I'm thinking about it I think this would be a very very useful thing to add in the Notions for for team's course so maybe Marissa can note that down or maybe I can note it down um in fact I can just add it as a little note section here wow like it sounds like the fire engine almost like stopped right outside of my studio St just went gone hopefully it's not for me all right uh notes for me notion for teams I want to make sure to add that as a note section on notifications so yeah I will uh make sure that we cover that in the notion for teams course um but right now yeah I don't have a whole lot of great information on it because it's just not a feature I use very often uh s says Thomas I've been building my notion for years now but I keep failing to continue using it how to fix that did you come with this issue before so how do you fix that issue um I think it really comes down to the same exact thing that we talked about for teams start with minimum viable product and get buyin in this case not from your team but from yourself so I think about this a lot right you can be in two different modes of thinking you can be in Builder mode and then you could be in execution mode where you have to actually use the systems you've built to do things and this is not unique to notion I've gone through this problem with the simplest of apps like todoist remember the milk when I was in high school stuff like little to-do managers where I just had a list of tasks and maybe some projects and then I wouldn't use it the problem becomes if you let your systems become overwhelming if you let your systems get crufty as I like to say then you're you're going to stop relying on them and you're going to start using your head again so a big thing you need is number one Simplicity in your systems make it as simple as you need it to be or as advanced as you need to be but you also need a process for reviewing the system and making sure that it is up toate and it is cleared out of stuff that is no longer relevant to you this is a huge reason why in Ultimate brain our template for personal productivity we have an archive concept comes straight from Thiago Forte par methodology archive is a safe place for stuff to go that is no longer relevant to you it's not deleted you can find it if you need to but it's not showing anywhere else other than in the archive so what that does is it keeps your system clean it keeps you feeling like everything you're looking at is relevant and you're more likely to stick with the system you've built again I will stress this is not unique to notion this happens with all kinds of systems be they digital be they paper based I've been using productivity systems you know basically every tool Under the Sun since I was probably 13 or 14 uh I think that's when I found remember the milk maybe and uh you know even if it's a paper notebook if it gets messy if you don't understand the context if it feels irrelevant to your life then you're going to stop using it so um a really tactical tip I can give you is maybe make Sunday a review day where for like half an hour you sit down you review your systems you archive stuff that's no longer relevant you check off tasks that you forget to check off and then that's going to keep your system working nice and smoothly cool uh Austin says is there a way to take a full page database and turn it easily into an inline database instead or do you have to recreate that entire database Austin that is the easiest question that I will be asked in this entire stream so let me just show it to you really quickly uh here I have my meeting notes database this is in line if I click the little six stop menu here here's a here's a button called turn into a page so now that's a full page database if I go back I can do the exact same thing click the six. menu and turn into endline that's all it is so if you think about the data model of notion every single thing in notion is a block including pages and including databases so I can often change anything into anything else in fact I don't know if this will let me I can turn this into a page uh because this is a database I probably can't like turn it into like a header or something like that but um I can turn it into inline and then I think I could even turn it into maybe not uh some sometimes you can turn databases into simple tables yeah like another example if I have a a bullet list right here and I want to turn this into a heading turn into heading that's because on the back end it's just a block of information it says all right what's the content of this block it's the word bullet what is the type of the block right now it's uh the of type bullet list and you could just change it into header and that just changes on the back end now it's of type header one that's it all right um Marissa says how do you allow a user to enter info in the properties Fields but not add or delete new rows in the database I actually don't know if that's possible H if Marissa knows the answer to that question maybe she can put it in the chat but I don't know if that's actually possible because I think if you have can edit permission on a database or can edit content they're going to be able to change the contents um yeah I think the only way you could do that now that I'm thinking about it is you would you would go into the database itself so here I'm on a full page database and I would go to my permissions here um let's find Eli I'm going to set Eli to can view for this database cool I don't want to add him to the workspace I'll skip for now keep him as a guest so Eli can view this database now he could go into any of these pages but he has view only access he couldn't change anything now let's say I want him to be able to change the content of the super secret meeting that Tom isn't invited to I can open that and because this is a page that exist inside the database it's its own page it has its own set of permissions and again we talked about the permissions Cascade since I set uh permissions in the database then Eli has access based on those database permissions you can see right there if I try to Mouse over to go away but this access is based on meeting notes so I can change his access on this IND individual page to can edit so now Eli would be able to edit these properties edit the page con down content down here but again if I go back to meeting notes and I check out share he still has can view access so that is the way you would do it um I don't think there's a way where you could say like a person has edit access to all pages in this database that already exist but then can't edit or can't create new ones or delete new ones or delete them and I think because he has can't edit he could even delete this page so I think what you're asking for is not quite possible but that is about the closest we can get to it uh okay so I think that might have been the last question here I think uh Lucia is still asking some stuff um oh and Austin saying right but if it started as a full page can you turn it into an inline database view oh okay Austin I think what you're asking here is if I have a full page database at top level can I do that so here in the Stream demo let's do that let's um creative link page at the top level stream demo we'll call it a table so it's an actual new database new database so you're asking me if I could turn this full page top level database into a page and or into an inline database so basically what I would need to do is move this into a page so it could be viewed as inline because basically if you think about it if this is top level then there's nothing above it for it to be displayed in line so again we're thinking about like Notions block model right pages are blocks databases are blocks so if a block is going to be displayed somewhere then it needs to be within another block where we can display it and if it's top level then the block isn't contained by any other block again pages are blocks right now this new database is not contained by anything it's just top level so if I want to make that inline let me just create myself a page here call this new page now I'll pop database into new page and now I can go ahead and turn to endline so again you wouldn't have to recreate the database just make sure to drop it into a page so it is being contained by something that creates a canvas on which it can be displayed and then you will be able to turn it into an inline database okay couple more questions I have a page with subpages in the left margin how do I convert the parent page to a database with all subpages as records that's actually an interesting idea um I think what I would actually recommend doing so I can literally demonstrate this as well so they're saying I have a page here let's get rid of this database and I have some other Pages here so let's call this page one page two page three and they're asking if these are Pages which I will turn into pages right now contained by a parent page could I convert this parent page into a database where these are the records um and I don't think you can let see turn into nope I can turn it into a team space I can turn it into a Wiki can't turn it into a database because it's top level but again if I make it not top level then I might be able to do it or I probably can do a trick that will enable me to not do it so let me create one more new page we'll call this container page now I can drag new page into it and now new page is right there now let's see if we can turn it into a database I don't know if we'll be able to but I'll look we can't so instead what we want to do is get access to those pages here's a cool trick if I turn this new page into a heading there's all those pages and then I'll just create a database I call new database and now the way I can make these records of the database is by highlighting them dragging them make sure that I'm not dropping them into one of these existing rows but instead getting this thinner line so I'm actually dragging them in as new new rows and there they are now they records in this database and I can just get rid of this new page so I guess the short answer is you can't really convert a page to a database but you could easily just create a database and drop the pages into it all right um Lucia says what's the best way to create a navigation menu for people who aren't members only guest access so they don't get the full team space view in the sidebar um that might be a bigger question than I have time to go over in the Stream right now uh let see here yeah I mean I think like people who have guest access they're going to see what they have access to in their sidebar and I I think it's going to be in a shared area right down here so if they have guest access to setu they're just going to see that and then again if you were to upgrade to the business plan and notion you could set your team space settings right there to um private so they wouldn't see it but you would have to upgrade to the business plan and then your your guests would see the pages they have shared with them in the shared section right here so really no way to um change that I think I can click to hide it I can open to share it that's about it uh Sim says I want to suggest a video since you are planning to be the go-to channel in notion the idea is drag and drop pages that already have properties but you made a button that creates the pages okay um I'll I'll take a look at that a little bit later and I think for now we're going to go back to our build guide here so we already built our very simple knowledge base one little thing I want to do here is actually go up to my page customization settings and turn off those backlinks I don't like them and that's a trick I use all the time for um bigger bigger Pages like database Pages or um or dashboard pages I turn the back links off because they're sort of just supposed to be destinations for lots of things and I don't want to see all those backlinks there so what we're going to do in this section of the build guide is we're going to take this knowledge base from being just a bunch of pages and we're going to turn it into this nicer more organized knowledge base where we have a full database of all of our pages and then we're kind of creating linked views where we can actually sort and filter to make it much more useful so to do that I'm going to come down here I'm going to make a toggle so little uh shift period to create that little bracket space that creates a toggle I'm going to call this databases and I want to call put my databases in there I'm also going to I think create a new Full width block and dash Das Dash to create a divider this looks a little nicer so in here I'm going to create a database make it inline for now and I'm going to call this um KB articles for knowledge based articles I'm going to get rid of my tag section and I'm going to add a Select Property which I will call section so in here I can create sections like business admin I could create one like Tech reference um what else do we have in terms of sections we have announcements and customer service so we'll do those two and announcements could maybe even be its own database in fact maybe I will make it its own database because it's going to be kind of different so I'm going to go ahead and delete that one we'll just have those three for now I'm also going to add a created by so I know who created the property or the page and then I'm going to add a person property and I'm going to call that maintainer and this I think is useful because you might have uh instances where somebody in your company makes a page maybe then they leave the company and you hire somebody else and then they become the person who's supposed to maintain the documentation you could say like okay well for this Alex is the maintainer for this one um is a maintainer cool so we have our sections we have created by we have maintainer let's take a look at what else we have if anything uh last edited that's about it so we could add that if we wanted to cool and now we have the structure we need to start creating linked database views so so instead of these which I will keep for now we could enter down from say business admin maybe I'll make a divider and then we could do slash list so if we do last view a list view we can make a linked database view of our KB articles database I'll do a new empty view just like that and that creates a nice little compact list view I'm going to hide my database title and then the most important thing here is that I filter by the section and I want the section to be business admin that's it maybe I'll also sort by uh name in ascending order so now what I can do is drag this page that I had just sitting here into my linked view I won't remove my sorting and now it's a page in that database if I come down here I see new me new team new team member onboarding as a page in the database check that out I'll delete these blank ones and I've kind of created this list already so let me go ahead and rename it to business admin and if you watched my previous stream you'll know that I am a fan of reducing effort so instead of just remaking this now that I have this all set up and maybe I want to set my load limit as well to 10 pages just so if we have a lot of pages in here they aren't all showing at once I can now click this little six dot button right here click away so the entire database is selected I'm gonna actually I don't have to do that I can hold option or alt and literally just click and drag that six to create a copy of it so let me enter down and then the only thing we have to do here is change the name of this view to announce actually wait announcements will have its own database so never mind we won't put it there we'll put it down here in customer service and we'll make a customer service view so again hopefully you can see where this is going we're just making filtered views of a single database where we're filtering by the section so this one would be customer service let's change the filter to section is customer service not business admin we'll save for everyone we're in a workspace with with multiple members so we do have to save the filters for everyone because you can change filters for yourself um that won't apply to other people until you click that button and then we do the same thing we can just drag these articles in here just like that don't remove our sorting and we do the same thing for Tech reference dash dash dash rename this bad boy Tech reference or whatever you wanted to name it you can name it dinosaur chicken nuggets for all I care but what's important is that you change your filter to Tech reference and now maybe we have an article like um or actually we just add pages directly now uh you know converting MP4 to MP3 and we create that kind of thing another database we might create and maybe we'll actually turn this KB articles into a full page database now is an announcements database so one more time database inline me call it announcements and this would be good for you know little announcements for your team so like say Marissa was planning a team Retreat for us uh earlier this year which we did in Seattle in uh August went amazingly well so she would have had announcements like um you know vote on the uh accommodations or uh vote on the different things we're going to do like that announcement blog post almost for that and she could even have like a survey in there with Tally or something like that so we'll have an announcements blog post uh database I'm going to give it a single property of date so we can set a manual date for it let's go ahead and delete these default rows we don't need them turn that into a page and we can do the same thing that we did before up announcements I'm going to create a list view find announcements make a new empty view hit done and then I think what I'll do is hide the database title sort by date in descending order so the most recent announcement is there up front we can make a new one just as an example team Retreat details and we could even give it a date which we actually need to show that property so view options I'll go to properties show a date now if I edit it I could add a date and let's say it was the 8th of August cool so we're getting a lot more useful here we're basically done with the actual knowledge base the last thing I want to show you here on the knowledge base buildout is how we can actually uh start to create database templates that will help in creating better documentation and I kind of already showed this in the section on the uh mating notes database but I'll show it to you here too so we can actually go into our database and sort of show what it looks like I have a technical reference database template right here if I edit it we can see what it looks like we've got document verification status uh this is actually something that's built into the wiki feature but again as I told you I don't love the wiki feature so I sort of just built my own and then we have table of contents summary action items and a full article pretty easy so the way way we would create that is any of these views will do we can go into the little blue arrow make a new template just like that I'm going to call this our Tech reference template and then beneath here we've got created by we got last set of time we're all good to go for that because it's Tech reference I'm going to give it a default section of tech reference and then in here we could start to create our template content so I'm going to start with a Toc table of contents let's go a and hide that sidebar to give you some more view uh room to see this um and then down here maybe I'll make a heading for summaries or summary and I'll create an AI block again this requires the notion AI add-on so if you don't have it then you could ignore this part but I'm going to just do it because I do have notion AI action items I do think that this is particularly useful for technical documentation uh and I'll show you in a second the action items specifically and how useful it is and then here I'll do full process so that will be my template again I can set this as a default and then if I need to make a technical reference article I'm just going to see it automatically come in like this if I go back to my knowledge base let's go ahead and go to the tech reference section and we will set this Tech reference uh template as a default but only for the tech referenced view I realiz I didn't get the d off there apparently me change that quickly there we go so now when I make a new article like that Tech reference let's just call it um I'm G to I'm going to get a good article to actually bring in here and show you uh uh here we go converting audio files with fmeg now when I come in I've got all my stuff so let me show you why these are so useful let's say I've written up this really long technical article about converting audio files with FFM Pig which is a command line tool for converting um audio or video files to different formats if you want to like convert video to audio you can do it that way it's super duper useful so now that I have this you can tell that this is a lot of information it might be overwhelming and it might be too much for someone on your team who's just like oh I forgot the command in the command line what is that command well if I go to summary I can just generate a summary just like that if I go to action items I can generate action items just like that and I want to show you a trick here these action items are fairly useful check if home brew is installed install home brew if not check if F me install if not navigate to the video file but what might be really useful is to be able to say the command right at a glance so this gets generated using a default prompt on the back end but if I want to change it I can do that just by clicking right here I can ask it to write anything and let's just say um generate a and my typing is terrible so sorry about that generate a list uh I put a checklist checklist of action items from this page including any relevant command line commands so if we do this now we're specifically asking for those commands let's see if it gives us something a bit more helpful there we go this is much better so again if I'm on the Thomas Frank team and I've been assigned to go through and actually convert some audio files or video files I can see in action items oh there it is there's the command I needed FFM Peg D High blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and if I really need to know how to do this then I can go look at the entire process so that is our knowledge base basically done we have a template in there you could make multiple templates if you want another thing that I will note you can do I've already shown database Construction in the Stream enough but another thing I'll note you can do is you can literally put databases inside of other pages so for example in our knowledge base we have a section called gear in tools where we have like a gear list for all of our camera gear lighting all that kind of stuff uh we have a songs for videos list and we have a software in SAS apps so inside that page I've just created a custom database specifically for software licenses so if we buy a piece of software like we bought screen Studio really recently U we got a license key for that we put the license key in this database because if I have a team member who gets a new computer this just happened to Marissa recently um she's going to need to go and install some software and she might need license keys so it's good to have that kind of database in there again a database can go inside of a page and you can go as many layers deep as you want until you meet the turtles on which the Earth stands upon its Turtles all the way down my friends okay so the last part of this stream we're going to go through is building our tasks and projects template here this will be um the more involved one of the four and again uh like I said earlier at the beginning of the stream I don't think every single team in the world should be doing tasks ask and project management inside of notion especially if say you're like running a big engineering team and you need like linear or something like that um but if it's a simple team I think notion can work really well for task and project management and it does have the big benefit of you being able to very easily say go into a tasks details and link to a note or link to a process document or anything like that and they could just instantly go to it so we do our task and project management inside a notion and I'm going to assume that you want to as well if you're going to hang out with this stream uh let's see here if there's anything in terms of questions that we can answer until or before we go into the last part of this build guide uh Shelty cousins says can I how can I convert the action item list generated by AI into my task list that appears on my task list page I will show you that uh a little bit later in the Stream because we're actually going to go as part of this build process we're going to add a task database view to our meeting notes template and then you'll be able to see how we can actually drag items from our AI list into our task database cool so if there are any other questions pop them in the chat while I take a quick speaking break one person says uh you are so freaking fast I don't know if that's a compliment or or a non- compliment but I try to go a good clip um this is the third stream we've done so far and I think we're on Pace to be right around the same 2 and a half to three hour Mark so I don't know if that's just me and how much I talk or if that's just how much people tend to stream but yeah I guess what we're getting is a three hour streams basically okay so taking a drink I think we're ready to go into this last build project as a reminder what we're building here is a task and project management section so we have a project manager here where we can see in progress not started and done projects we have a task area where we can see all of our tasks in a nice little board view we can see them split out by project as well we can see any tasks due this week as well as unassigned tasks we can go into a sample uh project and we can see all the tasks that are related to that project and then we last and definitely not least have a assigned to me page where I'm only going to see the tasks that are assigned to me kind of in the same views but this gives me as a member of a team a kind of centralized dashboard to see all the tasks related to me and everyone in the team can actually share this because the filter shows them only what's relevant to them cool so let's start building my friends back open with the command backs slash with style we're going to go into our stream demo team space make one more page here call it a blank page and this is going to be called tasks and projects check that out uh one thing I will also note is notion has actually built some built-in templates so if you don't want to build this yourself um you can go to plus right here and you can see they have suggested templates so if I did projects and tasks that just adds that almost instantly it's not quite the same thing that we're going to be building here we don't have that assigned to me thing but we do have a project dashboard and a task dashboard so you could generate that and if if you're the kind of person who just likes to be given something then that might be an even faster way to do this I'm going to assume anybody who is showing up for a notion stream is also the kind of person who wants to fully understand what they're building um and wants to like build it themselves so we're going to be building it ourselves but I just wanted to note that as a little aside so task and projects I'm going to make that once again full width and then let's enter down a couple we're going to make a couple of databases so let's create that toggle and why did I call it toggle I have I'm two hour and 15 minute into stream brain that's why I called it the toggle toggle let's call it databases and this is going to be two databases that we're going to work with here so first and foremost we're going to create a tasks database I'll do database inline call this tasks and then what should a task database have well it should have a few properties like status it should have AE it should have um maybe a due date but it should also have a relation to a Project's database so we're first going to create a projects database as well database in line one more time projects and now I'm going to get rid of these tags properties I kind of wish that they didn't come in by default I just want the name property let's start building out our set of properties first and foremost let's make that relation and I have a whole uh I'll point out on Thomas Frank explains I have a whole video notion databases full course for beginners if you want to understand relations in that video there are full timestamps and there is even a relations section in here SAR it 24 minutes in so if you really want to understand relations check that out um or check out the companion article in the description there's a full article as well we are just going to build that relation it's going to relate our task database to our projects database so if I if I pick project right there I'm going to call it project I only want one I do want to show on projects I'll call tasks and you can see here that we have a diagram of what this is doing it is creating a property on my tasks database called project which points to my Project's database and then vice versa that's going to have a property called tasks pointing to tasks and that allows us to relate different rows together so for instance if I a project row I might want to have some tasks that are related to that project so I'll add the relation and now if I create a project like um rebuild the studio again maybe I have uh Mount the lights kick out Deadpool he keeps sleeping on the couch um get new rug also Deadpool's fault now I can relate these to the rebuild the studio project and you can see they're coming in just like that now this is currently not very useful but what it's going to allow us to do is go into our project page and see all those tasks down here in a nice little view in just a second so let's go ahead and create our other relevant properties so for a tasks database we probably want a status property and I think the default options have not started in progress and done are totally fine for our simple purposes again we're trying to keep things simple we might want a person property for a sign so maybe kick out Deadpool that's going to be uh that's my job I don't know if I'm going be able to do it but that's my job Mount the lights I'm giving that to Ben get the new rug Marissa can do that and then uh let's see here due date how about I do date so date call it due cool let's check our reference to see if there's anything else we need project status s do note will add a little bit later so that's it as for projects we might want to have another person property which we'll call lead so who's the Project Lead who's the person that I need a ping on slack if I have a question about this project and then we'll also have status and I think that's all we need for our projects as well so now maybe I turn these into Pages like I've been doing we can start to actually build up the dashboard so first I'll create a heading one for projects and here I'm going to create I think a gallery view I think I used Gallery so if I do uh projects database I'm going to make a linked view of the projects database just like that new empty view we'll bring a gallery in there and then I can go ahead and make some tweaks here card preview maybe if we added a page cover we could add that so I'll go ahead and do that just to make it look nice I'm going to set my size to small wrap properties and I like to open my projects in side Peak they default to uh Center for gy views but I don't really like that so I'm going to go with that there's our project view but if you look at our original one we want to see our progress and we want to see only in progress projects here then switch over to not started switch over to them so it does uh it does seem that I forgot to bring in uh that progress property so I'll go ahead and make that here you can go ahead and make that in a page if you add a property this will add it to the entire database and for that it's going to be a rollup I'm going to call progress and basically a rollup reaches through a relation to access a property of those related rows in this case I want to be status and if I choose a status type property I can actually do percent per group and I going to do percent per group complete so right now it's zero um another thing I can do because I am outputting a number here I can edit this property and I can actually show it as a bar graph which is pretty cool and then if I say mark off some of these tasks as part of this project so let's just set Mount the lights to done now if I come back here and I go to view properties and show my progress check that out 33% and maybe let's give it a cover image as well so it shows up there maybe a little bit better one like a TV studio that looks pretty good yeah I like images of it I think that looks pretty cool and then uh to finish up this little projects area let's go ahead and create a filter I'm going to add an advanced filter just like that I'm going to say uh status is in progress and I'm choosing the group here not just the option the full group that comes in as default and then I want to actually give this a name as well so we'll call it in progress and again once we have everything sort of set here we can just duplicate our views to cut down and work so I'll set this one to not started call it not started adjust the filter just like that now that one is only filtering for not started projects which apparently is this one we can set this one to in progress if we want to and now we see that it's back here and maybe rebuild studio is led by me and we can duplicate one more time call this one done and adjust our filter as needed so now we have our project view the next thing we can do is create a task view or we could uh finish up projects by making the project template so maybe I'll do that first within our project view I can create a new template I'm just going to call this project template nothing here needs a default status or view or anything so I'm going to leave that blank I'll make this full width and then in here what I want to do is basically create a filtered view of my tasks database that only shows shows me tasks related to this project so we covered this in my notetaking system stream if you caught it already um but I'll show it here let's do a uh table view actually if I if I pick my tasks table as or my task database as my source here I'll create a new empty view just like that um let's call it table I guess and then what we can actually do is go into our filters this is the most important part we'll set uh where project contains project template so because we're adding this to a template when I create a new project like Studio redesign and I apply this template this filter is going to get updated to rebuild the studio again and I'll show you that in a second demonstrate it uh what I think I'll also do is set grouping here and I'm going to group by status you can see here this actually groups Now by these statuses uh and I can easily collapse them if I want to which is pretty nice and I think the last thing I'll do is sort by due date in and uh descending no ascending or descending I think ascending is what I want to do cool so now I'm going to see tasks by their status in uh ascending due date order I don't think I need to show the project because we're literally on a project page um but everything else I might want to see here and then I'm going to go ahead and I think duplicate this but I'm going to call from board I'm just going to duplicate this so I keep my uh filter there I'll change my layout to board just like that and then we can actually change different settings of our board here I do want to color the columns I think it looks a little bit nicer opening Pages ins side beak that sounds perfectly fine and uh properties are there any we want to show here aign I think yes do yes and the rest we don't have to do status we're kind of showing with the combon columns project is obvious we're on the project Pro page and then uh one other view I want to add here is one that is specifically for me the person looking at the page so I think I'll make that a table as well let's duplicate this let's call it my tasks and the only thing we have to do here is add one more filter and that filter is going to be where AE contains me and again we're using the me keyword so if Marissa comes in and is looking at this page she will see the ones time to her Ben comes in he'll see his tasks I see my tasks save for everyone and I think that will do it for this project template so now if I go back to our little tasks and projects dashboard which needs an icon what am I doing what am I doing let's do a checkbox here just like that not the $8 a month checkbox just a regular checkbox uh now if I come in here I can apply the project template and we will see here are all the tasks for this project I can zoom zoom in a bit more to show you all of them and if I go to my tasks I only see the one assigned to me board shows me all of them which is pretty nice another thing I might want to do is because I can already see all my tasks down here in a more useful context maybe seeing them here isn't super useful so let's go ahead and uh property visibility set to always hide that's a little bit nicer cool let's truck right along by creating our tasks section so I'm going to do slash one more time call this tasks and we're going to create a board View so slash board view choose tasks as our source database a new empty View and then uh I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this database title right here and then let's go ahead and come into properties and show the properties that are useful here so assign is good due date is good project is good here because we have a full tasks View and then status we don't need because we're showing that via the conon views uh columns here in grouping I want to color my columns I think that's a nice little aesthetic touch and then I'm going to go ahead and sort by do in ascending order I don't think any of these have due dates right now so let's add a due date say that one's due today um get the new rug is due it's overdue actually it was due on the 7th and mount the lights is already done but let's just say it was supposed to be due next week and Ben was really on it okay so that gives us our tasks board view um and what did I call did I call it all tasks I think I did yeah so we'll just call it all tasks instead of board now again to save myself from effort I can just duplicate like that and I'm going to create a by project View and the only difference here that I'm adding is in subgrouping I'm going to add project as a subgroup and what you can see this creates what are called Swim Lanes so I have my typical con Bon board that are going uh in in the descending order here I guess in the whatever this called was called uh not started in progress done but I also have these horizontal rows that are representing each of the projects in my system so I can close them I can open them up and this is just like another nice way if you're the project manager in your company you can easily see everything going on by project I also had this week an unassigned so let's create that really quickly too so I'm going to go ahead and make another table view again tasks is my dat is my data source call this this week just like that uh I'm going to go ahead and not wrap all columns but I am going to wrap the name column just like that um and a cool little trick you can also freeze up to this column so say I had a lot of columns here in this table view now if I hold shift and scroll that's frozen to the side which is a pretty cool little feature pretty sweet and uh because we're creating a this week view it's going to be powered by a fil filter so if I create a filter again I love Advanced filters you don't have to use them uh we're going to say the filter is due and this actually sets It Up by default for us the start date relative today is this week so anything due this week is going to be showing in this view you will notice that Ben's project or Mount the lights Ben's task Mount the lights is not there because that is actually scheduled for next week if we wanted to we could create a next week view if we really wanted to so how about next week if you wanted to look ahead just change your filter next and now I can see Benz for whatever reason I can see this one as well even though it's for Friday so I'm not sure if it's counting seven days relative to today in either direction because it doesn't seem to be going to next week but it does now let me look ahead which is pretty cool and maybe I will sort by due date in ascending order just like that same thing over here the last one I want to create here is an unassigned tasks View so this would be for somebody who's like a project manager in the company uh in our company this would probably like Marissa's View and this would just show us any tasks that don't have an assign so changing my filters here instead of the do filter which I will remove I'm going to add a filter where assign is empty so let's say we have another project task here this one is um I don't know dust the microphones they're so dusty I keep breathing in microp phone dust uh this is unassigned so it would be here in this unassigned view so that my friends is tasks and then to finish up this build we're just going to create the assigned to me page so I'll do SL page assign to me just like that uh let's get a little icon like a person I think that's pretty good full width and then here I think I'll create a call out and I'm just going to copy the text from the assigned to me call out over here this I think would be useful to have again if you're building a workspace for a whole team this is going to be a page meant for each team member to use as sort of their dashboard to show them their tasks so having a little bit of explanation here is useful context for making sure again your team is on the same page down here I'm going to do slash 2C for a couple of columns and in this section I'm going to say my tasks and then over here slash one I'm GNA do projects I lead so what we can actually do is save ourselves some effort One More Time by copying one of these views so I'm going to go ahead and click that click away command C control c i Windows now I've copied this entire link to database block I can go into assign to me and I can paste it and I don't want to paste in sync because I want to make changes to it so I'm going to hit dismiss right here I think I'll move this over just a little bit for now and all I need to do is add a filter to each of these views where AE contains me that's it s e contains me this week s e contains me oops and maybe I don't need the next week view I'll get rid of that and I definitely don't need the unassigned view because again anything on this page should have an assigning already so we're good there uh and the only other thing we need to do is add this projects I lead section I'm super zoomed in because of the Stream So the fact that it's a two column layout here doesn't look amazing uh but on a normal computer I think it looks pretty good as two columns and to make it look better here I could go to my layout and change my card size to small now it actually all fits so again projects we can do the same thing here we can go grab our uh project projects link database here command C to copy it I'll paste it here and I'm going to dismiss there I think I'm going to go ahead and open this as a full page and sort of do some work on here so instead of being a gallery view I think here on this page I will show it as a list view just like that and then again I can filter where uh the lead contains me just like that and if I wanted to have all those tabs I can do the exact same thing right there however if this is a page where I'm just trying to see what's actually in progress right now maybe I only need in progress that's kind of up to you so I got that built now here it looks really nice I can open it up I can see all the tasks if I'm leading the project maybe I want to go in and actually see what each other person is supposed to be doing or if I wanted to see only my tasks per that project I could do that very easily as well so so that is a task management system again it's plain it's simple it doesn't have GTD it doesn't have recurring tasks it doesn't have subtasks and in my opinion if you're working with a team you do not need those things and they probably are going to work to your detriment as you're trying to onboard your team get that buy in and make notion a destination that people actually enjoy using again that is the key build systems that are simple useful and a joy to use so that way people start to get used to using them they don't resist it and they don't start branching off to their own systems that they like better that keep things scattered because that's what kills team communication organization is when information gets scattered into silos where only one person can find it um and no one else knows what's going on so that was our build I think we finished it up hopefully you found it helpful I'm gonna answer questions uh and then we will end the stream and I will go eat food so I think Marissa has um grabbed a few more questions for me here I'm going to go through them really quickly after I take a drink one more time again I've been talking for two hours I've been falling for 30 minutes uh legendary promo TV says if you use the new formula feature instead of a rollup on a page for your team to see but you didn't share the main database to that user can they still see the rolled up data I'm trying to find a way to hide certain dat from other users without having to create a separate page and database with basically duplicated data but disregarding sensitive data so yes um a person needs to have in access to a database to see roll up data from that database but there are still some uh there's still some like problems that can happen with that so yeah you can work with that um but I think it really comes down to database access one thing I would really like to see from notion in the future is the ability ability to not only uh set like Rowl permissions for database Pages like only show Marissa the pages she is assigned to but I also want to set permissions for properties for example in nebula uh we have like a whole Productions database and there might be a property for like the budget for the production some people shouldn't see the budget for the production but they should see the release date for the production or something like that right so what I would love is the ability to set permissions based on properties as well so somebody could see like here's information about this but you don't get to see the budget you don't get to see like other sensitive information like that uh Shayla says just jumped in but is there a way to set up a formula in a database that can highlight a certain item if a checkbox is checked or a word urgent is found in a summary by changing color or notifying um I think shayla's asking if we can like use a formula that is dependent on page content um and I don't think we can so basically you can use a formula that brings in other other properties of that database but you can't really have a formula get context about the content of a page so if you really wanted to get content about a page and um contextualize that you would want to use the API for that I'm going to be doing a stream probably next week on working with the notion API with pipe dream which is my favorite automation Builder tool will go from no code to code um so you could look into that I think it might be a little bit complex for this use case but it is possible so I do want to note it and yeah for with formulas I don't think it's possible yet Tom says hey I'm my name's Tom too hi Tom uh when creating a template for a project what's the best way to add a bunch of tasks that is needed for every project without the task having a link to the template project I will show you that that's actually a pretty cool thing to show let's hop back over to the screen here so what Tom is asking is if I create a new project and say it's um like a video I have to make there's going to be default tasks for that project and we just want to generate them by default right so edit the video video write the script publish the video to YouTube those are those are tasks that are going to be related to every single project how would we make those uh come in by default there's a couple of different ways to do it um I think I can show both of them in this workspace because I am using a paid workspace so let's actually do that so the first one is status automations so if I go into automations here in the view options menu I can create an automation menu and let me just call this um video default tasks for pages and projects when a new page is added and it looks like right now we don't have the ability to filter by like a new page being added with a specific template so right now with the status automations or database automations it's just like any page is going to be added we're going to do something but when any page is added here we can add an action and one of those actions could be add page two tasks so let's just say um film video is the name of the task we would edit a property and that would be the project and we want to say this page which is the page that is being created and then we could do that again if we want to as many times as we need it to so let's do another one add pages to tasks we'll call this one uh edit video same difference there project is this page and I'll create now so whenever I create a new project let's call this um I don't know my fun video and I generate from my template I should see my tasks in there by default there they are edit video film video and if I open up edit video you can see the project is my fun video so that's how to do it with database automations one thing I will note uh database automations are a paid feature so you have to be on a paid notion plan to actually use that feature if you duplicate a template that has automations you can use them but you can't edit them and you can't create new ones and I have a whole video on those automations on my channel so check that out if you're curious the other way to do it is with a button so if we say go into our project template which I do want want to set as default actually uh I can go into this project template and if I created a button I could actually basically make those default tasks with a button so slash button like that let's just call it create default tasks or create video tasks how about that give it a fun little icon and then when the button is clicked again add page to our tasks database just like that maybe this one's called edit video we would edit another property and make sure the project is this page and then we can do the exact same thing can we duplicate yet we can duplicate below look at that film video now one thing we can't really do is dynamically set a date property based on the date of the project you could use a formula for that but it wouldn't be like an actual date property what we can just create this uh list of tasks here well this one published to YouTube just like that and we'll headit done so now if I come into a project uh rebuild the studio again and G to go ahead and actually delete this I'm going to delete this um linked database view so I can get a blank page and regenerate from my project template now if I hit create video tasks look at that as many times as I want they all come in so those are currently the two main ways that you would do this the other way could be with the API but again that is um a lot more Technical and involved but those two ways do work pretty well um Lucia says I figured out a way to set the date as an offsite based uh offset best in the project date so what I would ask Luc is are you using a formula for that because we can definitely use a formula for it the only problem is it doesn't become an actual du like a date property that we can change if we need to so as far as I know we would have to use use the um the API for it but if you know a different way let me know let's see if there's any other I think that was the last question that was Tom's question I don't see anym from Marissa so yeah that might be it we're at two hours and 40 minutes I mean I didn't know if this stream would go as long as the previous ones but it did indeed so um I'm gonna start wrapping things up and if there are more questions that come in please add more questions I will ask I will answer them before we uh actually end the stream but I'm going start wrapping things up um we number one have an interest form for the notion for teams course that we are going to be building that will probably launch in 2024 I'm going to post that in the chat one more time so if you are working with a team and you have interest in uh that course pop in the chat right now notion for teams course and Consulting form yeah so if you're interested in that we've got a little tally form where you can uh fill out a survey we're going to be launching a course in 2024 for uh teams that want to use notion will be basically like a beefed up more in-depth version of this with support and then we also will have uh expanded Consulting and coaching opportunities in 20124 Alex on my team is working on expanding our abilities there so if you are working with a company or you're running a company you want help with notion we'll be able to provide that more capably in 2024 we're scaling that up uh that part of my team out uh otherwise if you just want to be on my notion tips newsletter and make sure you get um notification when I'm doing new streams which I'm trying to do roughly on a weekly basis can't commit to fully weekly because I travel sometimes but uh roughly weekly up in the learn notion tab here on Thomas J Frank we have this newsletter eventually I'm going to get a newsletter up in the up in the top men menu as well but that'll just take you right there that'll get you on my notion tips email newsletter and there's a whole bunch of extra goodies like a whole list of a bunch of the SAS tools I use you'll get a list of all my free notion templates as well all kinds of cool stuff so make sure you're on the newsletter so you don't miss out on future streams future free templates other cool content stuff like that lots of cool stuff there um and again I wouldn't be a good SAS marketer if I didn't also give a plug for fly lighter so if you like me are somebody who's constantly capturing Web Clips uh highlights from the web all kinds of cool stuff you also want a way to easily capture ideas on the go on your phone fly lighter is the app that we are building for you it is literally my dream app it is the best notion Web Clipper you've ever seen it lets you basically fill uh create these like custom flows which will not only capture web pages and highlights or even full articles to notion but you can basically set up defaults for the properties in your notion database so you could set up a flow that would say like set a specific tag in your notetaking system maybe even set a select property and you could even set it up to grab specific information like the entire property or the entire content of a page or maybe nothing so you can go in and highlight those pages again there's a whole demo video on the website so you can see some of our initial features and we have a huge like a major new version coming out very very soon so you can get on the wait list we're going to be opening up a second beta hopefully next week and then doing a full launch uh probably January I think unless we can get it out even further than that cool so I think that's like my call to action SPI for the most part let me see if there's anything else in the chat in terms of questions uh Shayla says do you have any recommendations for getting with getting a team to use notion more with other applications we use on a regular basis um so I'm not quite sure the context there but earlier in the Stream which you'll be able to access uh in the replay at any time you want we did talk about this whole little mapped out diagram of kind of how we use notion in the context of other tools that uh that help with our communication organization so as a recap what we do in our company is we have notion where we have a company Wiki for process stocks reference stocks collections we also have project and task management in there note taking in there and then slack is our team communication area where we have channels like the my week Channel where we kind of like recap our week and commit to what we're doing in the in the next week um we have Project Specific channels where we can easily have uh real-time conversations about the projects we're working on and then we have other apps that help with our team organization like loom for quickly recording screencasts like text expander for sharing text Snippets for like customer service and things like that and then front which is our email management platform which allows me to assign emails to other people on my team for them to take care of and also allows us to have conversations in the context of email threads in case we need to um talk about like a customer issue or something like that so hopefully that answers the question well enough if it doesn't um feel free to tweet me or send me an email and we can cover that in future content anything else in the uh chat here so yeah I want to go through Lucia's cool little method for getting an offset date um oh so yeah this is actually really clever luciao is saying that the manual date takes priority otherwise it shows the date minus an offset result so yeah so basically like you're creating a formula property and you're saying like if the date property has a manual date we'll show that if it doesn't we create an offset that's actually quite clever um the only thing that the only downside to it is it doesn't involve showing two due date properties so it might even be fun to show that right now we can create a formula call it offset date uh I think we would need a do property for the project so let's go ahead and create that date do and actually for a project we need a cooler word than do so how about deadline so let's just say the deadline is next Friday so the offset date for um get a new rug we could just say is something like um if and what do we have do if empty do. empty then we would show the uh project. map current. deadline otherwise we'd show do and uh if we want to do deadline we could do that we could do like dot date subtract maybe there will it even let us yeah there we go date subtract uh how about like four days does that work so we have November 7th cool so if I get rid of do what happens November 10th which is how many days four days that doesn't seem right November 10th November 17th isn't that seven days so for some reason I'm getting uh seven days instead of four but this is generally what you would do and I can't tell if I'm just messing up here or if this is a bug I'm getting the deadline right the deadline should be let's just check one more time let call this formula uh project. first. deadline November 17th yeah okay November 17th now why can we not do date subtract date subtract one days we should get November 16th we do okay so that should be working but for some reason we're get project map what if we do instead of project map we can do project first just just to see November 10 date subtract 4 days I don't know why it's doing that uh yeah maybe somebody in the chat can see what I'm not seeing here but I don't quite understand why subtracting four days from our November 17th deadline is giving us November 10th that doesn't seem to make sense or maybe or am I just like not saying that I have this filled oh that's why yep I'm silly I just was looking at the wrong row still had a due date okay four days November 13th from 17th that makes sense cool uh I'm gonna blame that on being three hours into a stream brain fart all right uh wow there's there's still 57 people watching this stream if you have any more questions I will I'll hang out for maybe a couple more minutes other than that we're going to end the stream as a reminder one more time over on the Thomas FR explains Channel there is the live Tab and as long as it doesn't destroy my algorithm which I don't think it should I'm going to keep all of my streams live as uh replays there because I think that this is useful context for people who need um the most in-depth kind of training that I can offer right now which is streaming because I get to actually answer questions on stream and then um what I'm trying to do is take the lessons that I prepare here for stream and the cont text I get from the chat to uh create shorter more compact long form videos on the videos tab there so uh very soon we have basically a super compact version of this live notes dashboard tutorial that is only an hour long instead of three hours that'll be going live very soon along with a brand new template called ultimate notes so yeah and I can only I can see now now that I decided to look Marissa is telling me my do wasn't cleared yep I was silly with my formula cool all right I think that's about it for this stream so I don't see any more questions in the chat thank you as always for hanging out next week I'm planning on doing a pipe dream Stream So to tease that a little bit piped dream.com is my favorite automation platform for notion you can use uh you can use zappy or you can use make.com but pip dream is the coolest one the cheapest one the most powerful one it's kind of the best in every way it also allows me to literally like build automations I can share with people that they can just duplicate almost like notion templates which is super cool so next week I'm planning on doing a lesson sort of going through uh beginner workflows in pipe dream with no code and then maybe we'll dip our toes into a little bit of JavaScript code as well at some point I should have a whole course of materials worth for pip dream as well wow that's a very interesting way of selecting it just selects over the top I should maybe tell them about that uh but yeah it's just a super cool platform it's what used to build all my notion Integrations and automations uh and I think I did see maybe one question pop in here Shayla says do you trust any certain apis more than others um that's a good question I think uh you know when it comes to trusting an API I would be looking at the security policies of the company behind the API so in terms of notion um they have well publicized information about s so type two compliance the way they do in encryption at Transit and at rest so um I don't know if they have like specific document mentation on how their API Works securely but I mean I guess they have they have authentication information as well um but everything else is going to be like okay well if you're submitting a request ideally it's two notion database content that they have on their servers so that's going to be governed by their security policies so yeah in short um I trust the companies and then I trust the apis as an extension of the company rather than trying to evaluate an API since an API usually is just like a set of tools for working with resources the company already manages cool alrighty well that's going to be it I'm going to go get some uh lunch thanks as always for watching make sure you jump on the newsletter right there if you want to get notified for that new stream coming next week and uh beyond that have yourselves a lovely lovely weekend cheers

Channel: Thomas Frank Explains

Views: 13,802

Keywords: notion, notionhq, notion app, notion tips, how to use notion, notion productivity, notion templates, notion for teams, notion teamspaces, notion permissions

Id: ROQ8Z3cnGKo

Length: 171min 38sec (10298 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023