Notion Dashboard Creation - Command Center (Beginner Level)

hi everyone in the last video we did an overview of my notion system all the key elements of how I run my life in business in notion now we're going to start going through each section one by one and flesh out how it all works in more detail so today I'm going to start with looking at how to build a command center dashboard which was the first screen and notion that I shared in my overview I wasn't actually planning to start here but some great questions came up in the Facebook group so I decided let's start right here it's a pretty simple page so it's also a good opportunity to introduce some of the basic concepts of how to use notion so this will probably be the most beginner entry level video of the whole series so it's a good place to start if you're new to notion and I'll go a little bit more slowly explaining the basic functionality of notion in this one that I will and most of the others because the others will be covering more advanced topics and more or I would should say more intermediate topics and will move faster assuming you have a basic understanding but this one will fill in a lot of that basic understanding so this is a good place to start then after this we'll go through piece by piece throughout the rest of the notion system introducing in between some interesting ideas or thoughts they have along the way so it'll be fun and we'll cover a lot in a very short amount of time ok so this is the command center we looked at in the overview it's the main dashboard sort of the front page through which I access the rest of the site or at least the key elements of the site and the objective here is to keep it as simple as possible while giving you access to the most important areas quick access but also to organize it so it sort of gives you a framework in your mind of how the whole system is laid out so as I explained it's got focused growth business and home slash life areas I'm not going to go into the area that's what the following detailed videos in the previous overview video covered I'm going to talk about how to actually create this dashboard so again more of a beginner introductory video this time it will get more intermediate in the next ones to come so I'm going to shrink myself and then enlarge this so it's easier for you to view on the video I think the last one is a little small so I never work at it at this resolution but I'm enlarging the text so that can see it more clearly all right so everything in here is either text headings or links with one embed down here we'll get to that so I'm going to duplicate this page here create a new page and I will toggle back and forth between the command center and the new page and will recreate some of this all right so some of this is just literally just typing in text so to create these we are gonna go to the new page here first let's just title it whatever you want command center Home Dashboard whatever title you'd like to give it so I guess I shouldn't assume anything we'll add the cover by hitting add cover gives you some samples you can choose from within their collection or you can find your own and upload them or you can use the free unsplash stock photo gallery so just choose whatever photo is relevant to your life okay then add an icon of course you click Add icon and choose the icon you want you can also upload I like to upload a lot of custom icons now flipping back to the command center we've got focus growth business and home life let's create each of those categories back to the blank page just type here no it'll get rid of those other options and you'll just have a page you just want to create a page a dashboard is a page not a database so enter focus hit return now that's just normal text size but what you want is a heading so you go up here you click on the 6 dots next to it go to turn into and turn it to heading 1 that makes it big and you can make it whatever color you want by highlighting it double click on it choose the letter here and then pick your color so for the second one growth now we can do it a little bit faster if you just instead of typing the word you'd hit slash each one lets you pick the heading format up front and then you can type growth and it will already be at heading size again double click choose your color now they're on top of each other but we want them side-by-side so again you click on those six dots hold and drag all the way to the right till you that vertical indicator let go and now they're side-by-side the next one slash each one business of course you'll choose your own titles whatever is relevant for you but this is how you do it then you drag this to the right of growth see it's you could go under one of them or get the vertical line you to the right let go you got three now lastly slash again other the original way so that you can see how to do at home slash life case you have it already typed out you just click the six dots go to turn in to change it heading one change the color to whatever color you want grab the six dots drag it to get the vertical arrow say okay so by default the page is not full width so you have to go up here to the three dots and the upper right and change it to full width to get the full width which you I think you definitely want for a command center dashboard okay so actually we had these color bars let's do it that way just so you can see how to do that instead of or in addition to this color you can click here and the six dots on the side go to color and instead of picking a color you can select a background so say you want an orange background then you can highlight in here and choose the text color within it I find if you have a background often white is the best yeah that's what we got there so you can do that again to each of them go color pick a background if you're also I should note that I'm in the dark mode P it can man shift L you can switch between dark and light the other way to do it is go to settings turn dark mode on and off here I prefer dark mode because I mean looking at a backlit monitor is essentially looking at a flashlight and if I'm gonna stare at a flashlight I'll dead prefer to stare at a dim flashlight rather than a bright flashlight so I think it's a little bit easier on the eyes but of course it's up to you white background sights can look very elegant I think dark ones look a little more dramatic and I tend to go in the more dramatic direction you want to use color to guide and to mean something in most cases so red is draws attention so I make that focus I differentiate them just so I can have a visual quick reference and I can almost choose them by color more than anything else over here I use color more deliberately so organizing by color create meaning through use of color all right so now if you're just doing this at the beginning you don't have a system that you're adding this on top of then this is a great way to start to lay out what kind of system you want so I would start just with this like this out and then type out all the sections under each you would like to ultimately have we're gonna build them one by one and it's gonna take days or weeks or even months but to lay out what you'd like to have is going to give you a road map so we're gonna start by just typing in a word then I'm going to turn it into a page so let's say daily action zone is what you want to have first and of course you'll have your own sections you can use mine as ideas but you'll customize endlessly a lot of the stuff is just being deliberate about every important aspect of your life not just letting things go ad-hoc but to very deliberately plan what matters identify what matters and then plan habits routines projects activities around what's most important to you so that you're guiding your life your life isn't just dragging you blindly behind it we basically laid it out now these are just type text so how do we make them more usable how do we make them link to something because essentially all this is is a page of headings and links each of these links to another page very few of them link to databases though there are a few exceptions the daily tracking links to a database habits routines Fitness these link to databases so you're linking to either a page or database in most cases you're linking here to page because dashboards are pages dashboards are collections of various types of content with some embedded databases and other widgets and nodes and various things so a page lets you design your whole layout but you can put databases into pages so that's why we create dashboards so what we are basically linking to here is dashboards for each subsection in most cases okay so now we have this text it's not a page or anything so we want to turn it into a page so click on the 6 dots select turn into and choose page now it's linking to a page click on that you've got a whole new page do whatever you want on that page what we're doing on this first page the main command center dashboard you can now do on this sub page just lay it out and build it the way you want it all right so workspaces turn into page daily tracking turn into now let's say you wanted to turn it into a database you don't have the option for database here so you'll turn it into a page you'll click into it and then choose database and now it's a database so we go back to command center on the very top you click on any of these pages or databases you have a breadcrumb a directory you can click back that way of course you've got the forward and back arrows up there too so now we've got database page page now what's happening here is you're actually sticking these databases and pages you're their home is embedded inside this command center page this dashboard that may or may not be how you want it what I do is I don't actually create original pages for dashboards or original databases inside of the command center page on my dashboard you see these little arrows next to almost everything means that these are links these are not where those dashboards and pages and databases are our house these are basically shortcuts to them what I do is on the side over here on the left side we've got my organizational system of pillars pipelines and vaults again I'm going get into this in more detail I gave a quick summary in the previous video I'm going to do a whole video going into that in much more depth but we have the four folders dashboards which is where the command center is I will organize the original databases in dashboards and pages inside the pillars pipelines and vaults organizational systems so I would if I were going to create a daily tracking database like this one I would not put it here daily tracking to me is something directly supporting my pillars it's measuring the effectiveness of how while I'm moving toward my pillars so I'm gonna keep my daily tracking folder over there drag this into here now it's kept over here now it's the home of that database is over here we could do the same thing with pages drag these over here now they're parked over here I just find that a little bit more organized then over here what I do in the command center created by typing slash link it's gonna give me the option to link to a page or a link to a database or create a link database so in this case link to a page we're gonna look for the page you want to link to just daily action zone scroll down to do the action zone boom there it is put it back where we want it and you drag it you want to get that narrow arrow that's the same width as the header if it goes to a bigger width that means it's not under the column it's creating a whole page wide you know column of its own but if you dragged it up so it's got this the blue indicator is the width of the column you're putting it in then you know it's in the column and now we've got a link it's gonna take you to the page just like the original did the thing to remember here is there's only one place that databases and pages or house but you can create a link to them from anywhere same thing with the database the database if you organize it wherever you want on the side it's not linked there just type slash link it'll give you create link database it will give you the option of which database to choose if you're starting out you might as well just create them all in the command center it's a little bit simpler and then you can always drag them over here and recreate the links in the command center so that's all we're really doing is going through laying it out putting our headers give me a the color and background we want typing out the categories that we're going to ultimately want and then turning them into pages or databases deciding whether we want to have the home the stored home of that be in the page or in a separate structure on the side in the beginning it doesn't really matter it only matters as you get more and more and you can always change it you can drag it over create links so no big deal whichever direction you decide to start at the outset and you lay them out so that is pretty much it that's all there really is to my command center it's just a series of links organized in a way that means something to me and lets me quickly access the different subcategories of the different action zones and that's all we're doing is creating a series of bookmarks really now a few other fun things on the bottom the next video I'll do a quick video on how to embed a weather forecast let's do a separate tiny video on that it'll come out immediately after this one at least within one day over here I've got the keyboard shortcuts now learning keyboard shortcuts it's fantastic it really speeds things up and I would highly recommend you do that we're gonna set the toggle here you pick the ones you want notions help center has all these navigational shortcuts laid out in this format that you see here you just copy and paste the ones you like and you embed them here so how do you create a toggle to create a toggle in your new row if you're under any row that doesn't have one underneath it that one has one underneath it but you want it but there's nothing if there's nothing underneath it all you do is go to the plus sign next to the six dots yet plus you get a new row so say you want to add a toggle hit slash it's our typing T or GG toggle list there's a toggle give it a title keyboard short cuts I like to make a heading bold so I'll highlight it open the toggle and now you can paste anything you want into the toggle so if you want to put all these in there highlight all of these hey copy from the notion shortcut page all right so now this is a good point these are all under this column but we don't want them under the column so we're gonna close the toggle we're gonna take the six dots and drag them underneath so here you see the indicator is only the width of the column down here it's the whole width of the page we want the whole width of the page or at least half the width we can do a half and they'll fit either way now they fit toggle them in and out so in the shownotes under this video I'm gonna put a link to notions page that lists all of the keyboard shortcuts so you can copy and paste those here I'm also going to link to notions help page their support and help page is fantastic it's obviously laid out in an ocean format it's a really great demonstration on how elaborate an ocean wiki can be is like a the ultimate notion wiki used for notions support and instruction and help so I'm going to link to that any of these things that are too confusing they have a dedicated page for every function for toggles for linking to databases for every little thing has its own page with extremely clear instructions it's one of the best software certainly one of the best SAS software instruction platforms I've ever seen so I'm gonna link to that in the show notes if you get stuck on anything here just go look it up there and that'll solve any question you have on any specific functionality again I'm gonna do another video on this imbed over here how to embed a weather widget or any widget for that matter and that's pretty much it I can't think of anything else on this page that I haven't explained other than the widget embed for the weather that's going to be in the next video everything else is a link to a page or in a few cases a link to a database it's that simple the hard work is then building out each of these pages and databases but start with this get a layout of what you would like to have as your control center as your command center and as your life operating system like what would be helpful to have organized structured in this way and then lay them out by category so may growth business home aren't your three things maybe you're only using it for business then instead of growth business home I think everyone should have a focus section but instead of having growth business home if you're only using it for business you might have sales and marketing as the main column and in different subsets of sales and marketing you might have client operations and there may be a list of each client you might have media production and several at a higher level for those for me I'm pushing more functionality to deeper levels because I want to cover everything in my life perhaps you're just using it for home you may have a category for family category for like home admin and then a category for social life outside of home and family you know you need to think about what you want to use this system for and then design it around those objectives but this is a very simple but very effective way to lay it out and get started and design your intention of what you want your notion system to ultimately be so that'll do it for this video next short video will be on how to embed that weather widget then I'm going to do a more detailed video on how to build a task database to manage and prioritize every item in your life day to day the things you have to get done to move the ball forward and how to organize and sort all that in your life that'll be the video after the weather widgets so lots more coming and from there we're just going to build out throughout the entire system it's going to be fun so I hope that's helpful let me know if there's other stuff you would like to see if this is of interest be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to get updates on future videos leave thoughts or questions below and hit like if you found this valuable it boosts the video and the algorithm helping others to find it and I write a newsletter called mindin machine on increasing human capability I give away several of my best notion templates to anyone who subscribes to the newsletter you can of course unsubscribe at any time but I hope you'll give it a chance I work hard to pack it with a lot of valuable insight the newsletter link is also below in the show notes that comes out about every three weeks thanks for watching lots more to come

Channel: August Bradley

Views: 116,779

Rating: 4.9722943 out of 5

Keywords: notion, notion app, notion productivity, notion productivity app, dashboard, notion dashboard, page, notion page, pages, notion pages, database, notion databases, how to, notion how to, productivity, notion solutions, personal enhancement, efficiency, business efficiency, small business systems, systems, august bradley, personal operating system, business operations system, performance, personal performance, business performance, Evernote, asana, trello

Id: 2sQup0BfdPs

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020