My Notion Second Brain Explained (In-Depth Walkthrough)

today's video I'm walking through my Flagship template the notion productive brain 3.0 this is by far the best second brain template that I've been able to devise from notion so far if you have been looking around YouTube for a good second brain something solid that's going to help you get more done something that's going to help you keep track of bookmarks notes this that whatever it is that you want to remember important dates this is the template for you 500 plus other people have purchased this let's dive in 3.0 basically it hasn't changed a whole lot in terms of where things are but I've simplified a lot of things so here we have the quick capture box and we used to be able to Quick capture three things and it was this big bulky database quick capture I made some videos talking about how to like basically create a button in notion called a quick capture button before buttons existed and finally notion released buttons so I was able to replace it with these seamless beautiful buttons and 3.0 so this one allows you to quick quickly add a new task or action however you want to say it and if I click on it it just opens up a new task and I just give it an immediate name so I can just say film notion video if that's my task and I can give it a new priority I have meeting quick priority one priority two and priority three these are ordered in the order that I want to see them and if they were on a list so probably one two three that's my list if I had a meeting or something that was a reminder or a quick which means something that can take one two three minutes and it's basically just a it's a reminder it's just something that I want to pin on top of my day in a sense so if I hit quick and I change the action date to today it's going to appear above all of my other actions so this is kind of what I think of as like a reminder and then if I hit complete it just disappears from my task list I'm going to mark it as incomplete and we'll refer back to this later I'm going to clear the action date and I'm also going to clear this priority so now this is empty and I hit add action and basically just filled out the name name let's say I didn't want to fill out any of this well I could just close this and now the task will be in my system and I can process this task later I don't have to worry about filling out a ton of properties right now a lot of these systems that people sell you on notion are just super cumbersome to keep up with and you have to constantly fill out properties and you have to know a lot about notion to make it work with this system you just quickly add a new task by giving it a name so name here and you don't even have to fill anything out you just close this and you can process it later using the process routine which we will talk about in a moment you can also add resources and I've Consolidated everything down to resources because anything that's not an action is a resource I've found so anything like a link or a file you can add a file here just by choosing a file from your computer or embedding a link to a PDF or a web page whatever it is that you may want to embed a link to or you can give it a title here so just give it a title of let's say YouTube video and like you could basically link a YouTube video right here so that's kind of how you would use this you can also just use it as a note just by typing into here type anything you want you can do bullet points you can do body you can do entirely new databases in here if you wanted to you can really do whatever you want within this canvas of this bookmark so it also has the status of needs review if you've already reviewed it and you don't want to come back to it later then you can hit reviewed but this is something that I will talk about again once we get to the process view if you want to take a note the point of the quick capture is just to be able to quickly hit add resource and then take a quick title down what's your title note one okay what's my note note here okay boom I'm out of here I took my note I had my shower thought I had my Epiphany and if you're a thinker if you're a creative person you're always having ideas I know you are are so you can write them down here and the ones that are good enough 24 hours later when you come back and you process them you can actually take action on those but the ones that are like not worthy of going after you were like I was crazy when I was thinking about that those are the ones that you don't need to worry about so that is ADD action and add resource and that's how you do it with the quick capture box the next thing over is today's to do this is just a component within notion that has a list of today's to-do list so right now it has how to build a second brain in notion I did make a video on how to build a second brain in notion and it basically just shows you how to build a simpler version of what you're watching today if you want to you can check that video out using the card in the corner I also have film productive brain 3.0 demo in priority two here so another video to film and film uh students second brain so if I open up each of these I also have some notes in here so you can add notes to a task if you want and you can even you want to to add subtasks so you just type anything and you can check these off so there's a lot of hierarchy within this you know you can basically add as many subtasks or notes as you want within a to do or an action or a task whatever you want to call it this has lots of useful information like the action date the due date this is in the past right now which is which means it's past due so I'll again we'll look back at that in the process mode the process mode is really the core of all of this template and how it runs all right I'm going to close this that's my to-do list when I complete something I can mark it off if I want to shelf something I can come back to it later it just hides it so there's ways to just completely eliminate these things I like to also move things because there's lots of ways to complete a task because I believe that completing tasks is one of the most important things in this system so I want to have very limited ways to keep a task in progress or to do and I want to have lots of options for completing tasks archive just means get rid of it right it means just remove it get it out of my face I it was an idea at one time but I never I never got around to it so I'm not gonna do it delegate that one is if you want to hire somebody this is something to think about so this is something that I learned from one of my mentors early on is that if your work is like you know making three times what you can pay someone to do work for an hour then you should just hire the work out so that's why I have delegated in here right you should be doing High leverage tasks especially if you're like a peak performer or you're really trying to accomplish something crazy you know if you're just coasting along life that's one thing like I'm not trying to say like you need to over optimize the out of your life if you're just trying to move on with your day and get your work done that's one thing but if you are trying to do great things you've got to delegate stuff you can't do everything on your own so that's why I have delegated in here a lot of the people that use this template are operators they're people who can delegate things out to others and then I have unplanned so this is something that I like to look back on it's more for reflection purposes so if I have something that comes up in my day that takes a bunch of time I have to put out a fire let's say so this is just let's just call it fire of the day it just shows up and all of a sudden it's Priority One okay I added that task on a dime and I completed it and maybe I even can maybe it even happened and I completed it before I got to add it to my to-do list but I just want to track that it happened so I throw it in my to-do list really quick and I change the status to unplanned and that shows me that it was like something that just came up something that just popped up in the day so that's how I like to use that status column there so that's actions that's today's to do the next thing down is today's habits this is going to show you your daily habits for every single day and you can set this up custom when you hook up the productive brain you can set up whatever habits you want right here for me it's just drink one plus liter of water which I know one liter of water probably isn't really even enough but it's good for me to at least get one liter of water because if I can drink one of those pellegrinos just one of those one liter pellegrinos I'll feel good about myself if I can drink two of them then I'll feel really good except I'll just have to wake up and I'll have to pee all night so I try to aim for at least one liter a day and I try to Mark the days that I work out for 45 minutes so even if I take a day off I just leave it unchecked but this is always here to track if I worked out or not okay and next I track how many hours I slept and I can tag things like if I was driving if family time I had a puppy let's say um I well this I just got a puppy in new Australian Shepherd so he's keeping me up all night that's why I added that tag so that I could basically put that next to if I got like let's say three hours of sleep it's like oh I got a puppy that makes sense why I got three hours of sleep or maybe I have a tag in here that says sick you know that would make sense why I got three hours of sleep you know so that's that's tags and you can add as many as you want and it's pretty simple so that's how you can track metrics so quantitative things in notion and this is how you can track like yes or no true false statements within a second brain in notion so right here on my home page immediately I see my tasks for the day I see my habits I see my metrics and here I see resources and resources are viewed through a few different lenses if something is pinned it'll show up here if something I took is recent it will show up here so these are recent notes within the past 24 to 48 hours I believe I forget what I set up on the filtering uh past the day okay so the created time is past day so basically these are just recent notes that I've taken and if I add a new resource let's just call it note test and I write something here that would also show up in recent notes here but after it's been a little while that will disappear out of here you can also go to all public and this shows you all of your public notes from here you can private notes and that will move them to private right here and you can also if you want to remove them from private and the opposite of private you can pin them so if you want to pin something you can pin it up here on your old page and then you can just click the link and open it up to that specific link if you want to or you can open the page itself and read the notes inside now working our way back up to the left side of the page we have a few different menus we have routine views and these are going to be the views that we spend most of our time on the home page is kind of our home base so we'll spend some time here but most of the time you'll either be on Focus plan process reflect or calibrate and the reason that I chose to set up these different pages is because I wanted you UW in a specific mindset whenever you went to these specific pages so when you go to the focus page it's Focus time right there's nothing else it's just a blank page with the quote that you choose you can set up any quote here that you want and your action plan for the day it's simple so you complete these tasks as you go and once you're done it says no filter results that means you're done with today's tasks you can move on to plan so plan is a view where you can see all of the upcoming tasks and all the past tasks that haven't been completed so you can drag things around you can click into them and change their priority level if you want to you can really load balance your days this way because if you have a lot going on on one day you can just drag some things out and just kind of smooth out your working surface you can view this in a week format if you'd like to you can also view it in today if I don't have any tasks for today they aren't going to show up but this is like today's to-do list similar to your home page and the focus page if I go to week as you can see it's just the same as month by but I can drag things around and we can toggle between the weeks here you can also toggle between the months in the same way if you want to see tasks that are shelved you can click here and as you can see here we shelved a task and I don't know if you remember me shelfing that earlier but that's just a status that you can give a task okay so it's basically just get it out of my way for now I don't want to look at it I don't want to see it but when I want to do it again I can drag it back into my calendar and it's like nothing happened right it's pulled off the shelf it's back on my calendar it's back into go mode so now we can interact with this and we can complete it so that's the action shelf and you can drag things into it and you can drag things out of it I recommend using the planning view every night when you go to bed or right before you go to bed making sure that you plan tomorrow today or at least when you get done with work for the day or your tasks are done that should be one of the last things you do is just basically plan whatever it is that you have coming up so if I've completed everything for today or if I'm exhausted and I need to drag something out or replan or recalibrate I can do that but at the end of the day everything should be clear your past should be clear and you should have a plan for the days ahead so that is what I suggest not to say that it's a formula that works for everyone but I think that like trying to spread these outworks best and really just trying to focus on a few things at once is better so this can visualize that for you are you overextending yourself or are you able to actually function and get things done on a regular basis get two to three good size tasks out of the way per day that's the goal with this I know my brother was using this over on AI foundation so probably you might be mad at me for sharing his secret sauce but I saw his planning View and it was just chock full of course modules he created a course on uh AI on how to use chat gbt so um check out his channel he used this Workhorse to get the job done just search up AI foundations and tell him productive dude sent you anyways so that is the planning view now let's move on to the process view process is very simple if there's something that needs processing in the system if there are cobwebs that need cleaned out if there are things that need to be purged this is where it happens this is where you'll find any violations of due dates or action dates you can think of the process view as a filter for everything that is not right in your system all the bugs all the Kinks all the knots in the system and you have to go in on a regular basis and organize this to some degree it's fairly automated but this is something that is just necessary and it's actually something that David Allen talks about in his book getting things done is this sort of notion of processing your tasks later on since right now we're capturing them or completing them we want to be processing them and designating a time for like processing and planning later on just like I said with planning you want to designate some time to process usually you can do this at the same time so if you just got done with your plan you know everything is good your day is empty now before I dive into process it's important that we understand how all of these databases interact with each other so let's start out by going down to our settings menu and going to databases and then we'll jump back to process I'm going to go to databases and as you can see we have a hierarchy diagram of all of these databases and how they work the database symbol is the cylinder here so any of these cylinders are databases in notion you can create a database by hitting slash and typing in database you can create an inline or a full page database all of the databases in this system are full page databases and they're listed right here areas sub areas actions resources and days these circles represent properties within the databases so I don't list out all of the properties in each of these databases because this would be a crazy graph if so but I just wanted to integrate metrics and habits so that you understand the architecture of the overall system metrics and how habits or properties not databases the database that they are related to are days so we're working along like a day's timeline essentially with the metrics and habits so this system is a bit of a separate system from the areas sub-areas actions resources now areas are basically the most important thing in our world so if I go to the calibrate routine I'm jumping around a lot here I apologize but the calibrate routine is where you can see the big picture what what areas in your life are you focused on these are all of the areas in my life I have personal health real estate productive dude humways and Three Six Lakes so 36 Lakes some ways and productive dude those are all companies that I own real estate is just something else that I do on the side health is something that everyone should focus on and personal is anything that isn't related to these things basically or anything that's family related for that matter the next section down is sub areas and sub areas are the next level of higher hierarchy that we have within our areas so my personal life has a sub area of clean and tidy living slash working space so this is just about having a clean office essentially so this is an action that I take just to clean my office at the end of the day and I wanted to put it within a sub area a goal of keeping a clean and tidy living slash working space this is the motivation you can think of for the goal behind the action you can see that we have an all tab but we also have it sorted into goals we have ending and ongoing goals if I hit new here it's going to give me this checklist it loads in below and if it's ending as it says here like I was saying earlier you have to give it a timeline a start and an end date so it gives you that instruction right that's the only difference that you can basically influence on these different types of sub areas so goals can have a starting or ending date entities don't have a starting or ending date so we don't need to group by starting and ending here and these sub areas just don't have an ending so it's ongoing so we don't need to fill in a timeline and as it says here for entity I can just replace the entity with entity's name let's just do that place entity with entity's name choose one area that the goals fits into most accurately and it says goal but it should say the person and here you can add that and then basically check that off and once it's checked off you can close this boom and now I can add actions or resources related to that person down here I can set my focus statement so let me show you a few quick ways that you can set up your focus statement so you can just use basic text you can mark it as code you can underline it while it's marked as code you can bold it this is a look that I've been experimenting with that I think looks pretty cool when it's underlined it just does that bottom border and I think that looks neat you can strike through it I don't know if that you would do that you can italicize or bold you can change the color of it which I think is also very neat I love this look with this little underlined text here like I said that's something that I haven't seen a lot of people use in their workspaces but you can really just change this to whatever style you want you could even go ahead and add a quote in here just hit slash and type quote and it would put in the special quote font which is just a little bit bigger so do it however you want and another thing that you could do here is you could just embed anything so if you just want to embed like a Pomodoro Timer or something like that just hit in bed and you can embed using some kind of notion embed if you want to and that is a really neat way to use this as well I've seen some people do that or even just putting like a gif in there just put whatever you want here so I've kind of skipped around a bit here we went from Focus plan and then we went to process and I had to kind of backtrack a bit and talk about the hierarchy then we went over to the calibrate page and explained areas and sub areas a bit more and we added this Focus statement now I'm going to head back over to process because everything is going to make more sense now this is where base basically everything that doesn't have information gets processed so areas if there's a new area that needs some kind of information it will show up here if you don't see anything then you're in luck everything's organized properly sub areas same thing we've created two new sub areas here so the reason that these are in here is because they have no area so we have to set up an area for these and they will disappear now if this was ending it would also need a timeline so if John Smith was ending then it would need like a end date and as soon as I give it an end date it disappears out of there so again if it's ongoing it just needs the following information it just needs area duration type and sub area but if it's ending it needs a timeline as well so I'm going to sort this one out and now we're at inbox zero as you can see now let's move on to actions this one is broke down very nicely it breaks it down into needs info past due and reschedule action so this is some very crazy book long formula that I had to write to get here but I was able to create some filtering and create a formula that basically tells you what these need so these just need info basically what that means is it needs a priority it looks like here so we need to set some priorities for these different tasks many of these have action dates but not all of them do so we're going to set action dates I'm just going to set arbitrary ones that one as you can see when I clicked on it it says reschedule action now and that's because I put it for an action date in the past it's a very smart system if I put it for today brings it back here it needs info now okay so let's go to due date and the reason that these are still here is because they don't have a due date or a sub area so we need to add a due date for all of these and we need to go ahead and add a sub area that makes sense if you don't have a sub area for it create one called General but what I highly recommend is doing a bit of introspective work and thinking about why you're doing all the things that you do throughout the day and quickly just jotting down a new sub area here for what it is that you do right film productive brain 3.0 why do I do it right whether I want to be altruistic and I want to share the the part of it of I want to help people which I do or I want to share the part where I want to say hey I want to make a hundred thousand dollars a month with this with this product someday I wanna I wanna gener I want to turn it into a software a SAS product I can I can really write whatever I want here whatever my intentions are so that I can map out like what I'm doing to reach those goals reach those intentions or to enhance that notebook that I created or fill out more information on a CRM for a person that I added right whatever it might be this sub area is here to give you context as to like where that is going what part of your life it's funneling to and how much time you're spending in that part of your life that are inherited because remember sub areas and the tasks underneath them and the resources underneath them all live under an area and that area is really going to give you some insights into like how you're spending your time and what bucket of your life is getting filled the most so let's finish processing these as you can see as I fill out the sub area for these they disappear and they go up to where they're supposed to be but you'll notice that we still have some tasks that are past due that's because the due date is in the past so I have to reschedule these things and they will slowly but surely disappear then we'll go down to our final section I can close needs info on actions and we can go to needs review on notes in this section it's filtered by three rules okay if there's nothing here for the name it's going to show up in here another reason that it might be showing up is if the resource is not reviewed so here it's not reviewed on all of these none of these have been marked as reviewed that means that I took the note but I never went back and looked at it so Factor 75 here I can hit review because I know what that is I know what that is I've seen that oh what is this one I open it up oh it needed a name it had let's say it had a YouTube video on it what is this YouTube video about well it's a notion second brain video okay and I can take some notes on it here productive dude if I want to tag it with my name or whatever and then I can add in notes about quick capture and areas and whatever I want to write about right so that is the point of this processing here right is you've reviewed that now I can mark it as reviewed and it's gone let's say these ones were already good I just wanted to check in with it again make sure that I have cemented it in my mind right and then I can hit review so at this point everything has been processed but I added a new sub area if you remember right General here what you can do is you can go in and delete things if you don't want them in your system so that's what I'm going to do with this I'm just going to delete it and everything updates dynamically here so if I deleted that General it's going to open up this action that now needs a new sub area because General was deleted but everything works together and nothing slips through the cracks so now everything should be processed and it's a simple checklist that automatically puts it in front of you every single day when you go through and you process and plan this theoretically should only take you like five to ten minutes at the end of your day you sit down you process and plan so you're ready for the next day and you can switch into your focus mode and you can actually get to work and of course you can have your quote your Pomodoro Timer your puppy whatever it is that you want right here the last page that we haven't talked about in routine views is reflect so if I go to reflect it's going to show me a few very interesting items and this is something that I really like about this system is not only does it help you plan for the future focus in the present but it also helps you look at the past and get some insights so you can see today what have I done yesterday what did I do past seven days what did I do and you get this really good picture of some of the things that you're completing right and then in habits here I see today I can go see yesterday and I can edit yesterday if I had something that was different I can go to the past seven days and see my Trends if I want to I can see what percentage of days I've actually completed and I can see averages for my sleep score I can see all of my tags and I can just check out the individual day in fact if I wanted to open it I could even write a journal entry right here on individual days if I wanted to and that can be interfaced with on the home page right if you remember it we have today's habits you just click into here and you can write your journal entry so it's somewhat of like a bullet journal and a task tracker and a note tracker that like brings everything back into context in the reflect view here so it's pretty great you also can see an archive of all of the completed sub areas and areas which I find to be quite useful as well if you want to look back on your accomplishments a bit of a trophy case if you will I'm going to go back to home here and as you can see we now have one more section one more menu you to look at and that is the settings menu if I click on components you'll notice that each component in this system is broken down into a category for actions we have different ways to view your to-do list if you open it up here this is just a simple to-do list here we have to do with areas so this shows you the sub area and the area so if you want more context around your to-do's you can use this as you can see there's all sorts of different tabs that you can switch between and uh components that you can look at so if you're somebody that likes to Tinker if you're somebody that likes to understand how things work then you can come in here and you can look at all the different components they are all synced blocks so you can paste them anywhere in your system you can even create new routine views if you wanted to so like link for instance the go to home link right here it's featured in so many places right if I want to paste it somewhere else I can just click copy and sync and I can see that it's on eight other Pages I'm just going to copy and sync it and let's say I want to put it on I want to put another one here on the widgets page right so I would just hit Ctrl V it already has two but I can drag it wherever I want and then it will work as I go back to home button so that is kind of how components work and I've just stored everything in here so that it's organized and you know how the whole system works again databases is just this hierarchy to help you visualize the system and then all the individual databases if you want to view the data independently of these routine views the routine view is pretty much just add context to your data and so does the home page so if you're on the home page in the routine views you might not even need to go into settings components databases and widgets are more for like people that are hacking this thing but most people will just use like quick capture routine views and their home page but like I said if you want to go into the details get into the Nitty Gritty you can click onto each of these and you can view them through a few different lenses like active archive and master view which shows you everything that has to do with these even the back end properties oh yeah and I would also like to note that I try to put an x on any property that isn't applicable to you so I try to hide these anywhere but there's always a master view that shows you all of the properties so if you are someone that likes to work with notion databases you can get in here and see how the whole thing works together it's important to note that when you're on a full page database like this you can't hit go to home because it's a full page database there's nothing here but a database so I have to use the breadcrumbs up here to get back to where I was and then once I'm back in the template I can go home if I want to or I can navigate with the routine views or the settings views finally we have widgets you can use them as shortcuts on your phone you can basically set up a widget with the notion app on your iPhone or Android and you can link it to any of these that you want so we have quick capture today's to do and action shelf so you can view these things very quickly through a widget on your smartphone this has been the productive brain 3.0 tour if you want to purchase the productive brand you can use the link below this video and if you want to learn how to build a simple version of this productive brain productive brain light then you can go ahead and check out this other video right here where I show you how to build a productive brain and I give you the base basic fundamentals for how you can get started

Channel: Productive Dude

Views: 26,714

Keywords: notion second brain, notion second brain template, Second Brain Template, Second Brain Notion, Notion, Second Brain, Notion Tutorial, productive brain, Productive dude

Id: Z9EzPMjKbCE

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023