How To Use Notion As A Task Manager: Sub-tasks & Dependencies Tutorial!

hi it's Simon and welcome to another notion from scratch video in this notion tutorial I'll take you through how to add subtasks and dependent tasks to a notion task and project manager I'm also in the new studio what do you think we'll also create featured database views that ensure both parent and subtasks are visual on your dashboard and will even create a task waiting report view so that you can see if a task is actionable or dependent on another this is the fourth part of my larger task manager build in this series so you might just want to jump back to the start of the series via the link in the description to build the task and project set up first and add recurring tasks into your system or if you already have a task database just watch and start from here and it works as a standalone video if you are new to notion this is a great place to start if you're an old hand you'll love the advanced speeches and stages of these builds for more powerful formulas I think and how to get the most out of notion finally a lot of what you see in this build is also part of my life OS notion templates so you might like to check out the tour video of my notion live Os or simplified notion systems first by the description or you can just scrap all of this and go download them at bettercreating.com here's a quick recap of the task and project databases I have up until this build so far so there's a task database with a due date and deadline date columns and a couple of other properties that help you organize tasks such as sortable daily priority fields and a context hack and of course a status column that can be used to arrange task views and check them off with a filter then we've got this projects database that is related to the task database what's Fab about that is you can then create these filtered views I use a filter based on Project is empty to filter tasks from the inbox into the system and a weekly review reminder for projects and finally a project template page helps you to view tasks by project and the notion of button automations can be used to make adding tasks and reviewing projects easier that was all in the previous videos let's get over the build okay so the first thing that we need to do is set up our parent tasks and sub items or parent items as sub items in the database we're going to go to the tasks database this works in any database in notion so we're going to go in here and we're going to use the little dots at the top and turn on sub items so pretty simple this clip click on that now what you'll see that's done within my database you'll see at the end here we have parent item and sub item if we click into sub item just to show you what it's done it's created a relation to this database so it's related the database to itself we often call these self-referencing relations what it means is it's done it all automatically for us which is really helpful because it adds this kind of sub item element to it now you can see sub items link through tasks to parent and back to tasks and so on and so forth I'm just going to change this one to task so it's clear and in parent items I'm going to change that to parent tasks however the other thing I want to do is edit the parent tasks property and where it says limit I want to change the limit to one page the reason we're going to do that is because you want to make sure that you can only ever have one parent task for a subtask because they always want to sit under the same thing let me show you what I mean here so first of all let's create a new task we have this template we can click on and we're going to call this create notion tutorial great so that's the parent task let's call it parent so it's really obvious great it's a new main task all done now what we can see here is this arrow and we can now see sub items will turn up below it another way to do it is to click in here and the first thing I would like us to do with this subtask view is actually edit it so we're going to go into the three dots in the top Corner customize the page here and you'll see that where it says subtasks if we can change that to view as a page section click on that and now you'll see adding subtasks has sat within it that means I can now add a new task create a new one for example plan video for tutorial subtask one and we're going to create that and if we come back out you can see that it's listed below you can also see in our new view it's related if we create a second one another way to do it is here we're going to click new sub item you'll see it's using the main task template we're going to fix that in a moment and we'll call this one film video there's our example and what's happening is you can see that these have double lists now I want to make sure that if I want to link it to something else maybe chat to Peppa it won't add that as well and you see it doesn't it's moved it it's got rid of it because it's only allowed one it's moved it down to here whereas this sub item if we undo what we did will allow two different items and then more to be added to it and that's what we need a parent task that can only be a singular item now this was the next problem so we've edited all of this we're getting this issue with our template for tasks so new main tasks I'm going to go in and just edit this quickly and I'm actually just going to call this parent task so we don't get confused come back out I'm then going to stop it being the default by setting well it's up to you you could just say new task and be done with templates it's the same for everything it's up to you but if you did want to go further and have two templates you can set the empty view for all tasks as the template duplicate this and we're going to call this one new subtask and you could even change the icon so that you then have two options for it if you'd like to have a visual representation for example we could go in here and just set them as new subtasks so you might prefer that as a look so that you can see a visual representation if you don't mind don't worry about it great so there we go we now have our parent tasks and sub items now if we go back to the dashboard views which is where I manage things it's all got a little bit confusing and that is because this view is currently not set up for sub and parent items so in any view where you want to see that which I would suggest is all the task views you're going to want to go into the dots for that view go to sub items where it currently says hidden now and show sub items in view you can also go to Advanced and show nesting toggle on title I think that's really useful to be able to see where there are more you're then going to have a clear view of tasks within that your probably not going to need to worry about it in add new tasks in the system we've already made the other one to do at the moment on here I would go to the to-do list View and I would make sure here for table views the sub items are shown it's only table views you can set this up for and it will just mean that if you want to then add items you can do that really simply great now currently sub and parent tasks are going to still be a little bit confusing Within These filtered views and we'll move on to that later on in terms of how we filter the dashboard views but the next thing I want to do is go in and set up dependencies because this gets really exciting really quickly now dependent tasks essentially mean dependencies mean you can't do a task until another is complete so it's either being blocked by something or it's blocking another task this means if you have a workflow you want to structure you can do it in notion with this new system so let's go into the task database and just see it within that view for ease here so we've got creating a notion tutorial here and then we've got our different subtasks and I'm going to set some dates for these say that this one needs to be here there you go and you can see here that I've added due dates for when they're going to be done so I'm going to plan the video on the fourth and the fifth I'm going to film the video on the 7th and the 8th and edit it from the 11th to the 13th for example and my aim for the thing to happen is on the 14th now it's possible you might just want to like lay this out over the time that you're doing it all but I would say using the new dependencies feature avoid that always make the parent task when you want to tick this off essentially now this is how it works it's very similar to the parent and subtask relation field that's created we're going to click into here and turn dependencies on before we do that this is why I've been waiting so long to release this video I knew that subtask independencies were coming out when I started this series but also very recently they've added this automatic shifting of dates now this is really powerful and so helpful if you turn this on and you move the first task in list back everything else will be shuffled with it now I would say you can have a couple of options do not automatically shift so you just do it yourself you can have shift only when dates overlap so if you push something back and it overlaps with another then it will get moved or you can keep the distances between them I would say if you want to use this stick to shift only when days overlap I would separate start and end dates I think that's very very helpful for clarity just so you can kind of see where they are and we're going to turn on dependencies now by turning those on it's actually created similar to parent tasks and subtasks blocked by and blocking I want to leave those as they are so this means a task is blocked by another and this means it's blocking another now why don't we just move these back because you might actually want to use these further up in your system if you want to set what is blocking or blocked by what now I'll give you an example I would say that the main task is going to be blocked by the final thing in the list of its subtasks so we want to say that this is blocked by subtask 3 of that group and there you can see this is currently blocking the final job now another way to do this is to say that subtask one is blocking subtask2 and we want to say that finally subtask2 is blocking subtask 3. now we have a chain of actions which go one two three and up to the top great not very easy to see like this though is it and that is why we want to make a timeline view which is really where dependencies come into their own so we're going to add within our main database view a new view we're going to set it as a timeline I want to make sure it's by due date I'm going to separate the start and end dates and actually why not let's show the table of the tasks as well and now in this view this is probably going to make a little bit more sense to you let all those recurring tasks that our systems created in the previous one but there you go so it goes one goes to two two goes to three three goes to the end and for example this is is how you can move things around and do things like remove that and drag it from here to link tasks really really powerful now if you want to understand that better you can click into here and understand if you go into advanced settings you can see that it's set to blocking you could set it to a property of block buy which would give you a red arrow going back I think this is much more intuitive because you go that's blocking that it's up to you there you go so that is our timeline view and we're going to call this and it's his timeline and why don't we do a timeline great so now we've created that we can add it to our system so we're going to go back into the main page so within our action view I would open this up add a new view want to find the tasks database here and we're going to use the dependencies timeline and in action view we want to go to today so we can just see if this is working you want to now filter and sort this so I would say you want to filter this by done and we're done Advanced filter is not save that for everyone and usually with this we would also say as we have with the rest of my system add another filter Advanced filter and where related projects is not empty let's just uh go back up to here and add a project for our main task side hustle now what you'll see here is that first of all that's grayed out because these haven't been given a parent task which is fine you can still see them and they haven't been allocated but also if we go down to here we can't see any of the subtasks even though they need to be done and this is where filtering has to come in so that this makes more sense but that's how you're going to add your dependencies timeline so you can manage it you could put that wherever you want it to be I would also suggest if you go into your project views that we created previously you might like to add one here I think that's a very very good idea so let me just show you that first and then we will solve this issue of how we make sure that all the tasks turn up by filtering these databases so make sure you've added your dependencies timeline and you've added the basic rules of done is not done and related project is not empty into the view we can now go and just edit the projects so let's go into the projects dashboard there they are I'm going to click into here edit the new project template we made in the previous video and we're going to edit that we have our task view here this should be as simple as adding a tasks View dependencies timeline filter that timeline by related project contains this template save that for everyone sort by due date sending save for everyone hide the filters and sorts and while you're here don't forget within the projects template that we made we're going to need to make sure that sub items are in there and with dependencies we want to make sure that they're on great so now we're going to go into side hustle I'm going to delete everything in this because I want to reinstate the template new project template there's a little bit of a problem at the moment that we can't see subtasks within the dashboard views but we'll do the filtering for that in a little bit the first thing I want to do though is create a report view for whether a task is actionable or not so here in my life OS here is an example of subtasks that are due and you can see what's actionable and what's waiting now that is essentially a formula that is based on a roll up that I'm calling blocked by status and you can see that essentially it says if the blocked by status Roll Up is less than one it's waiting otherwise it's actionable so if it's not 100 it's waiting so this is what we're going to do to make that let's go back to our system I'm going to clip back through actually to my tasks database and in here we're going to create a new property and create a roll up we're going to call this blocked by status so this won't be seen in the system it will just work in the background but that's why again we have the database view now we're going to configure that by clicking on the little writing sign the relation I want it to be blocked by and then I want to pick the status so is it done or not and I want to show the percentage group that's complete so that will be zero or less than 100 until all of the subtasks are complete right because or anything that's blocking it is done so as soon as block by status hits 100 done you will know that everything is complete so that's going to be really useful so let's now create the formula we're going to go in here we're going to create a new formula I'm going to call this actionable and here you might want to change the icon to I think something for example now this formula we want it to be if blocked by status go and find that there it is less than one right waiting otherwise right actionable close the brackets what we should find is this isn't blocked by anything so it's actionable these are waiting if I set this as done now it's actionable so that's all working although it looks a bit boring right so the other thing I do is within the written section here you can often do this with using the function button but I'm just going to do edit symbols and emojis and I'm going to find a color here so I'm going to do red find a little dot there it is add that in space and then in actionable I'm going to put green find the Little Dot put it in space done and now we have a really nice report view which we can check works by making that in progress it should mean that the top one is not actionable it's waiting there you go everything else is doable and then if we make all of these not started not started you should find that the top two are waiting and the first one that's doable is actionable so that is how you create that report view now for this you would want to go back and in your view here you might want to do things like show the properties so show that in each view in your to-do list you might want to show the property there it is show it and work out where you want it so I might move mine up I think it's better near the beginning maybe you have to do any priority there you go shows it there look at that so that's dependent tasks done now we just need to make sure that our tasks appear in our dashboard views so let's get on with filtering the dashboard views we've got a couple of things going on here with our dashboards in my action dashboard if we go down to the tasks that will have all our subtasks and open up the subtask they're not showing up because they're not being filtered for our current filters say that just has to be that it's related to a project and done is not checked so that's not going to work at the moment because as you can see in this view in the inbox the place where everything goes it's processed by being related to a project so a quick example here if I relate this to a project it disappears and turns up in the main view or if I set it as done it disappears so that's our issue currently subtasks aren't being filtered by that system so we need a way to understand that tasks are related to projects now of course I could just relate it to the project and it disappears but I don't think that's the right approach because I only want to really relate the parents out of the project and everything else should just automatically go related to the project right so there's two things we can do we need to create a reference to those related projects of the parent tasks and then we need to filter these dashboard views by that reference so let's do that let's move across let's add a new property we'll do it here and we're going to add a roll up call it project of kind of a task because that's what it is I want the relation to be a parent task So currently it's just showing the original so now we're going to configure that role up here I want the property it shows of course to be the related project and show the original and there you go you've now got side hustle from the original task is shown in its subtasks really good I'm going to leave that there so you can see what we're talking about for a moment we can see that they're all linked now we have to filter by them so this is where it gets a little more complicated we're going to first of all need to filter the task inbox then I want to be able to filter the to-do list for you and then we'll do something about the board and calendar views later so the first thing to do is filter this task inbox it either needs to be that it has a related project and no parent task so it disappears so basically those two need to be empty or related project can be empty or it needs to be that it has a parent task and a project of parent task So currently our filter is done is not done or recurring today that was for the recurring tasks and where related project is empty I'm going to delete this and start again so we're then going to add a new filter group and we're going to do first of all where related project is empty as we had and then I'm actually going to turn the device into a group within it and where the project parent task any is empty and that disappears everything so that's for subtasks gone but it's also got rid of all of the normal tasks that aren't related so we're going to add another one here add another filter group or where related projects is empty and another one and where parent task is empty great so I think that's done the job right the subtasks have disappeared Let's test it let's go and remove the project from our Master task that everything turns back up at the top yeah it does fantastic so now if we relate a subtask to a project it will disappear so that does work if you want to but if I relate this entire group to a project all of them disappear fantastic that is our task inbox filter working save that for everyone and if you need a moment take a screenshot and you can work with it because it's a little bit complicated right next up we actually need to make the subtasks appear in our to-do list in action and then for the board views we're going to create a report to show how many subtasks are within parent tasks so to do this in the to-do list we're going to do this I'm going to show you what I've done there's quite a lot here but essentially it's the same kind of logic now if you want to pause the video and just take a screenshot of this and you'll see that we're essentially doing the usual so for standard tasks projects not empty due date is not empty and status is not done that's a group then we're going to do all a different Group which is where any parent task is not empty due date is not empty and status is not done so this is for anything where it's a subtask essentially and finally we'll do one for subtasks which don't have a date so this will both show them with dates and without dates but you have the option to add those in if you would rather just see subtasks with dates you would just emit this section and then finally at the bottom we have all where status is recurring today which is a standalone thing and it will just mean that this section will then always show the recurring tasks which we set up in the last video so let's get started with projects is not empty due date is not empty and status is not done so if we go in we're going to go to our rules it's a related project is not empty and due date is not done what I would like to do is turn that into a group and this one we can do all and we can do we're done is recurring today because we're going to need that a bit later on and it's a clean way to clean that up great so we've got where related project is not empty we're going to add another and where due date is not empty and add another filter we're done is not complete there you go I'm going to do wrapping group so that becomes wrapped in another group and then in there we're going to add another group make that an all where project of parent task any is not empty add another within that and where due date is not empty and then one more is going to add in here and we're done is not done again we've got two there just gonna delete that great so we have two versions one for standard tasks and one for subtasks now for the final section if we look back at what we did we also want to do where parent task is not empty and status is not done so we're going to jump back to this and you might find you could do it like this duplicate the one below change that to parent task is not empty and we can remove that and done is not done great and then outside of it we have all done is recurring today that's our filter so let's just save that and take a little look at it now what you can see is wonderfully we have all of our tasks turning up within our example if I take one off a subtask it disappears let's undo that and if I take this off it disappears it but until we delete all of them you won't see anything great so everything is then complete so we now have a filter that works for all of the different types of items now the one thing that will happen here is you will still be looking at tasks by date Group which we set up in a previous video so whenever you set your date for the main task the other task will sit under that of course that becomes a little bit of an issue if you don't want to group things like this now if you don't want to show them like this you might want to consider adapting this so that you can change it so that there's a start date and an end date for items but this gives you a load of tools to be able to filter and view this as you wish that's how mine works I think it's really good if you would rather be listing this as a kind of from date to date I would suggest that you go back into dependencies and if you set it to do not automatically shift you'll find that you'll be able to set this as this as a start date and an end date for doing the whole thing and these can then Nest under it so you would see all this further up and it would move down with you so that's kind of worth considering the only thing that is left to do now is adapt our this week by the date so this is our weekly board view currently we only see Master tasks parent tasks in here let's give you a little example in our current week I'm just going to add a subtask which is find Pepper yeah you have to find it before I chat to her great that's my example and there it is so if we go into here we can't see find Pepper so the first thing you're going to want to do in this board view is Click into here go to properties and I want to show subtasks now now we can see the subtasks that are listed within it and I can click through into subtasks actually let's just make it look like one so you can really see what I'm talking about so I think that's a really useful way to view subtasks if we want this to make a little more sense that this is a sub task I'm finally going to show you how to create this report view this is in my action board on my life OS template and you'll see I have a subtask report there's one subtask and then you see it below I think that's really helpful I've actually got a percentage completion but that's maybe for another video because it gets way too complicated to create in the time we've got so let's now add that I'm going to go into our task database in the system and we're going to add these final elements so we're going to need a couple of things in order to do this first of all I want a roll up of the number of subtasks really simply so that we're able to count them so I'm going to go in create a roll up I'm going to call this number of sub tasks and well let's move over to here and we can make sure it works we're going to click in here we're going to make the relation subtasks we're going to make the property subtasks and we're going to count all we can see that works there are three subtasks and it lists three so that is our counting of subtasks next we need to create a report so I'm going to create a formula and we're going to call this sub task this is going to say concat I want to put in Brackets I'm going to open the parentheses and I'm going to go to my symbols and I want to find an arrow down let's use that we're going to put a space close it and then we're going to do format and then I want to put in number of subtasks so it's formatting that close the commas on that comma and then we're going to open the parentheses again and we're going to put a space and we're going to write subtasks close the brackets and we can now see it reports three subtasks that's great so we could just list that and it could say no subtasks but I'm actually going to do one more so that if there are no subtasks it doesn't show anything because in that board view I don't really want to have to see that so we're going to create one more formula and we're going to call this sub task report let's maybe give this a tick sign so we can see it's the one we want to show and this is going to be an if formula so it's going to go if and then we're going to find subtasks is greater than zero I want to propose the concat report otherwise I want it to say nothing at all and we close the brackets so that's just parentheses with nothing in it done now you can see where there is a subtask it's listed and where there isn't nothing is written so all we now need to do is go back to our board views and you can find all of these where you want to add them for example your dependencies timeline you might actually want to show it in here so we can go first of all into properties and show subtask report now that's really exciting so now it shows that there are three subtasks and when I click on the Arrow I can see them opened up so that's going to be really powerful for our dependencies timeline however if we also go now back to the main dashboard we made this for our board view which is here that's fine pepper so now all we need to do is go in find the property subtest report and show it and you want to place that above the subtasks that are listed and it tells you that they're there fantastic you also May in this view want to add whether something is actionable or not and I would I would send that up to much nearer the top so you can essentially now manage what it is that shows up in these views but this edition of showing subtasks I think is really powerful in the board view if you're wondering what this is this is our analog view we can just add tasks by using the project view from much earlier in the sequence where you can just add things without dates to a day so I can say I want to do that on Thursday and it will turn up in Thursday section So within this you may well want to also do the same update go into properties make sure that you can show your subtask report and show your sub tasks and of course from here you're going to want to just rearrange things so it's all making sense and actually that's the wrong subtask report we want the actual subtasks there they are look at that it's working really beautifully now in the previous video If we go to our project dashboard we also created within this a project template so I'm just going to go in and edit that because you may well within here want to also add within this the filters that you're going to need in order to view the subtasks so what we currently have in here is where related project contains new project template I would add a role in here and an or where project parent task contains your project template and that is going to then ensure that you do see all of your project tasks that are subtasks within that view as well so that is going to do it for our full tour of how to add subtasks and dependencies into the system I did say this one would be Advanced you can use it as much as you like some people just don't want to use subtask and dependencies or you might just want to use the subtask element of this and not the dependent tasks but if you're wanting to build structured groups of tasks it's really powerful and in fact in my system I've actually added to it a new parent and subtask button where you can create automations which will essentially build entire groups of parent and subtasks within the system but that one is probably one to check out in future or maybe go check out my notion buttons video that's currently already on the channel well that just about does it for this project and task manager build in the notion from scratch series four videos within the series to build this entire thing so make sure you check out the others if you just use this video to learn about subtasks and dependencies hit the like button if you found this valuable it really makes a difference to me and the channel to reach other people with this stuff and subscribe if you're not already but most importantly I'd really like you guys to comment below and let me know what should be next in this series it really helps to hear from you so I can tailor the content I'm thinking something like maybe a notebook build or a Knowledge Management build let me know and of course get over to bettercreating.com sign up to the notion from scratch mailing list for other useful content around this and updates on these videos as well as checking out all of my other useful resources on there and uh I'd better get back to creating

Channel: Better Creating

Views: 20,659

Keywords: how to use notion, how to use notion for beginners, notion, notion tutorial, notion app, notion tasks, notion subtasks, notion for beginners, notion sub items, notion setup, notion task management, better creating, notion how to, notion task manager, notion 2023, notion tutorial for beginners 2023, notion app for beginners, notion dependencies, better creating notion, notion task manager template, notion task manager free, notion projects, notion todo list

Id: RTvCfoIJdgo

Length: 35min 53sec (2153 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023