- Well, hello there and welcome back to "Thomas Frank Explains". In this video, you're gonna learn how to create
your own personal dashboard inside of Notion. Now, a personal dashboard
is basically your home base inside of Notion, which can give you quick access to lots of other useful areas,
such as your task manager, your note taking system,
your project manager, or you could even embed
linked database views right inside of your dashboard so you can do things from
a single centralized page, like add tasks to your inbox,
add notes to your note inbox, et cetera. So in this video, you're going to learn exactly how to build this example dashboard right here. And if you saw my last
video on block basics, which was part of the "Notion
Fundamentals" course here on YouTube and over on my website as well, you'll know that this
new personal dashboard is the example that
we're using to illustrate a lot of the concepts
that we are talking about and teaching inside of
"Notion Fundamentals". So I wanted to make this
video because personally, my own learning style is such that if there's a project
that we're going through very slowly in a course to explain lots of different concepts, sometimes I wanna be able
to go and do the project right away even if I
don't fully understand everything that's going on, and actually, in education research
in cognitive science, there's a concept called a
backfilling where you go through a project where you kind of get outside of your comfort zone and you accomplish something where
you're kind of a little bit fuzzy or vague on some of the
concepts, but in doing so, you have reached outside
of your comfort zone, you've grabbed a handhold and
that's actually gonna help you to more quickly backfill
the required knowledge to become a true expert. So this video, this tutorial
is that concept in action. We are going to completely
build this personal dashboard, which you'll then be able to
build for yourself if you want, and then if you want to, you can watch the rest of the videos in "Notion Fundamentals" as they come out and you're gonna be able to
get deep into the details of how every single thing is working. So, the inspiration for this
personal dashboard here was actually my own personal dashboard, which we'll look at right here. And this is basically where I start whenever I come into Notion. I've got links to my tasks, all my views from ultimate tasks, my today, tomorrow, and next seven days, I've got links to my note
inbox, my habit tracker, and some specific notes that
I'm revisiting very often like the "Barbell Academy Principles" notes, it's a course I'm taking right now, ODCC was a course I just finished, I've got some content that I'm working on, projects and quick links. So I use a very link-heavy philosophy when I'm building my personal dashboard. I want to just kind of use
this as a jumping off point to get to certain places inside my workspace, but there is another personal
dashboard philosophy that a lot of people use and that
you might wanna use as well, and that is the use of embedded
and linked databases to be able to actually do some work
on your personal dashboard. So here on the example one
that we're gonna build, we actually have a toggle here
with an inbox where you can add new tasks to your task manager and we also have pretty
much the same thing here for your note taking inbox. If you wanna add some notes to your inbox, you can do it right from the dashboard. So you're going to learn in this tutorial how to build this from scratch,
exactly, and as a bonus, I'm gonna show you near
the end of the tutorial how to add this little weather widget, which is something that
comes from a third-party tool called Indify, which is free, so I'll show you that
near the end, but first, we have to actually get this page built, so I need myself a blank
page to start from. And I would actually like to
have that page inside of the content project here in
Notion for this very video. So, you are gonna get a quick sneak peek at Creators Companion, which is the system that we
use at my company to manage all of our content projects across all of our different channels, but which is also a template
that I currently have in beta. You can see the sales
page link down below. There are still a few spots open as of me recording this video and then we're gonna be
closing them and reopening at full price in early October. Anyway, I'm gonna go over to
my "Thomas Frank Explains" page right here and find this
in progress project, which is going to be how to create a personal dashboard in
Notion under ready to record. And then within here, I've got a little example area
with this personal dashboard blank page. So let's get this shindig on the road. And the first thing that I
wanna do is actually go up here and make this a full width page. Once that's done, I
need to add my headings. So I'm gonna do H2 for tasks, I'm gonna do another H2 for notes, I'm gonna do one for web links, one for reference, and that is gonna be about it. Now, one thing that I like
to do with my headings is give them backgrounds. So I'm gonna do slash gray
to get gray background and do the same thing for all these. And I also like to use emoji
to make my headings a little bit more visually distinctive, so I'm gonna go ahead and do that as well. So the next thing I'm gonna do is actually start creating my multi-column layout. So I know I want notes to
be to the right of tasks, I'm gonna go ahead and have
web links underneath tasks, and then reference underneath notes. And then if we look back
at our personal dashboard, we actually had this pretty
sweet picture of Bruce Lee, so I'm gonna go ahead and
do and view original here. So I can actually open
the original photo here in Amazon AWS, which is
where Notion stores things, just so I can copy it to my clipboard. And then we can go with our
control back bracket to the one we're building and go ahead and just paste that photo right there. I'm gonna drag that to the
right to get our final column. I'm gonna resize that slightly. And really, I just want his picture here so I can also add my
favorite quote of all time. "Adapt what is useful,
reject what is useless, and add what is specifically
your own," by Bruce Lee. This is something I think
about pretty much every day whenever I'm learning things, or when I'm getting
suggested to try new things, when people are telling
me to try new tools, or I'm reading self-improvement material, I'm always keeping this quote in mind. I'm gonna adapt the things that are good, the things that don't
necessarily fit my own life, fit my own needs, I'm going to reject, and I'm going to tweak
things, remix things, try things out and, you know, add what is specifically my own. And I would recommend keeping
that in mind when creating this dashboard or creating basically anything based off the tutorial because the thing that I'm creating here is what works for me and
there may be some tweaks that you could actually add to it to make it even better for you. So now what I wanna start doing
is building out the content underneath these headings And the first thing that I wanna do is actually add horizontal rules. So pro tip, instead of typing
slash and then typing divider, which does work, you can simply type three
dashes to get a horizontal rule and that just visually separates
the content underneath the heading from the heading
itself, which I like. And the next thing that I wanna do is actually build up the tasks section. So what I'm gonna do is
go over to ultimate tasks. Now, this is a completely
free task management template and system that I have over on my website. You could check this out if you want. I think it is the best task
management system for Notion, at least the best that I've seen. And what I actually wanna do
is take these views here and create links to them from our
little personal dashboard that we're creating. So I'm gonna go into the today link here, and this is the today page where we see tasks that are due today, and I'm just gonna hit Ctrl
+ L and then go back to our personal dashboard, which I
wanna actually favorite now so it's at the top here. We should give it an icon
while we're thinking about it. Maybe we're gonna give
it this cool nerd face. And if I just hit Ctrl + V to paste this, I can create either a mention to this page or a link to this page. Now, when we're creating
a personal dashboard, I would highly recommend hitting the link because if we hit link, what we are going to get is
an actual link to page block and the difference
between a page mentioned inside of Notion and a link to page block is that when you use
the link to page block, if you come over here
and look at the sidebar, we actually get a link to
that page in the sidebar. So one of the most important and most useful aspects of a personal dashboard I think is to favorite it and
have it at the top of your favorites bar here in Notion
so you can toggle it open and have really quick sidebar access to all of your most important pages within your Notion workspace. If you don't want something
to be in the sidebar, if you want it to be simply
on the dashboard itself, well, that's pretty easy. All you need to do is go
ahead and delete this here and then we can simply paste
our link and make it a mention. Now, if it's a mention, it's
going to be slightly smaller, the arrow here is gonna be
slightly smaller as well, and you'll notice that
if we toggle this open, no pages are listed inside. So there's a difference between
mentions and page links. And I would really like
it to be a page link so I do get that cool little sidebar link. So we're gonna do the same
with all the other pages that I want linked here. So I at least want tomorrow
and next seven days, so I'm gonna go into
tomorrow, grab that, go back, and then I can switch over
to my next seven days, grab that as well. And while we're building
out our tasks section, one other thing that I want there is going to be a habit tracker, and this is yet another
template that I've built. It's free. You can check it out. Link in the description down below. Go ahead and copy that and
head back to our personal dashboard and add that to the
bottom of our list of tasks. So now I have really
quick access to my today, tomorrow, and next seven days' tasks views along with my habit tracker, but I wanna make this dashboard a little bit more interactive. So I wanna have an actual
embedded view of my inbox so I can quickly add inbox tasks directly from the dashboard. So, if I hit plus here, I can start typing linked
database, and if I click this, I can actually start searching
for database inside of my workspace to create a linked view of it. So if I search for PD all tasks, this is a sample all tasks database, and this would literally
embed that database here. And if I were to click here, I would actually see the
original database itself. So from there, I could go in here and I
could start adding filters and sorts to make this
a pseudo inbox view, but that is a duplication of
effort that I don't actually wanna go through because there is a much, much smarter way to do this, which is going to be
going over to our inbox and actually duplicate that
view that's already there with its existing filters and sorts and simply bring it over
to our personal dashboard. So I'm gonna click today
because I happen to know there is a quick link to inbox from the today view in ultimate tasks and all you need to do is
go ahead and, well first, I'm going to unchange this name 'cause I want it to be all tasks. I just need a unique name to get to it. I'm gonna go ahead and
duplicate this view right here and now I have a basically exact copy of this linked database, which has the complex filters and sorts that enable this to work
really well as an inbox and all I need to do is
basically get it, highlight, do a cut operation, come back to our personal
dashboard, and paste it. And there it is. Now, because this is a personal dashboard with many different columns,
I'm gonna want the list view, which is much better when
it comes to responsive or pretty narrow columns
to be our default, so I'm gonna go ahead and
drag that to the top and make sure we're always looking at it. And last but not least,
I'm gonna hit plus here, type a little arrow bracket
here to get a toggle, and I'm going to get
an inbox emoji like so, and then type inbox. So I'm gonna have this in
the toggle because this will often have quite a few tasks in it and I want it to be hidden by default. One last thing that I'm gonna do here is go to the little three dots and I'm going to check the properties to see how many tasks we are
loading on first page load. Right now, we're loading 50 and I actually would like it to load just 10 because really what I'm
gonna be doing with this is looking at anything due today, which is gonna be sorted to
the top, that's in the inbox, but also, I want it just as a
really quick way to add a new task if I'm on the dashboard. I don't wanna see 50 different tasks if there do happen to
be that many in there. If we really wanna see it, we can simply just go to the inbox itself. So that is our tasks area finished and now let's go ahead
and create our notes area, and guess what? I have yet another free template, which we are going to use to
add some links to our note taking system and an embedded
note taking database. So if you haven't seen
it before, I do have, if we go over to my Thomas
Frank's Notion templates and go to my note taking system, I've got a note taking
system template for Notion. Again, this is free. I'm gonna come to the demo version of it. And I wanna go ahead and grab number one, the link to the note taking system itself, so Ctrl + L, go back to
my personal dashboard, and we're gonna create
ourselves a page link. Badaboom. And the last thing that I
wanna do with the note taking system here is actually go into it and I want this inbox to be
on my personal dashboard. So just like with tasks, I can add a note to the inbox without having to go to the
note taking system itself. We wanna make this personal dashboard a multi-functional place
in our Notion workspace. Now, there's a difference
between this and the task inbox, which is that I can't simply
duplicate this because if you'll notice, there's
not a little arrow here, which means that this is not actually a linked database view. This is just a plain old
database inside of Notion, which means that if I copy it, I'm gonna be creating an
actual copy of the database and if I add pages to that copy, they're not gonna show up here. I want them to show up here, so I need to actually
create a linked database and you're gonna get to
see an example of that. So I'm gonna go ahead and
give this a unique name. First, again, I'm a template creator, I've got many copies of this
demo inbox that are just like, you know, backup copies, things I've been building in the past, so I'm gonna call it PD demo inbox for now for personal dashboard
and I'm gonna go ahead and go create a linked database. So we just need to go back,
hit plus, type linked database. And again, this is creating
basically a window to that exact database in a different page
of our Notion workspace. And the nice thing about
linked databases is not only do they let you see a database
from a different location, but they also let you create unique sorts, filters, and views
from that linked database. So let's go ahead and type PD demo inbox. There it is. And now that I've got that created, I can go ahead and get
rid of our unique name and make it demo inbox once again. Just needed it to have a unique name so I could search for it very easily. And all I need to do is replicate
the filters and sorts that I had over here in the demo inbox itself. So if we look at it,
they're pretty simple. We have where status is not
empty or URL is not empty, so we'll add those, and then we have a sort
where updated is descending, so let's go ahead and add
those to our little embedded version here, our linked version,
by going first to filters, we're gonna add a filter for
status, and is not empty, and this just ensures a default
status is always applied to every new note that is created. And then we're gonna also
add or where URL is not empty and the reason that we do this
is that Notion's web clipper, if you use it to clip
something into a database here, it will not respect forcing functions, which is what this is here, where I think we have
where status is not empty, that would force a status
tag in that select property. The Notion web clipper
doesn't respect that, it's kind of a bug, so we have an or property
because we know that the Notion web clipper is going to add a URL, which is gonna be the URL of
whatever page you clipped. So we've got those two there and then we are going to go
here once again, click sort, and we are going to sort
by updated and descending. You could also do created if you want to, but I prefer to see the
note that has been changed most recently at the top, even if it has been
created a long time ago so I know what I've been working on. And I just realized that
this is a table view, but what I really actually
want this to be is a list view, just like this inbox view here. So here, I'm gonna show
you a weird Notion trick that doctor's don't want you to know. Maybe they want you to know. I don't know. A weird Notion trick that helps
us get around a little bit of a limitation in the
Notion product itself and that is the fact that I
can not duplicate this view if I have not added another view. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna click add a view
and we're gonna call it dummy. And literally the only reason
we have created this view is to get access to this
little dropdown list, which gives us access to all of our views, and gets us access to
this three dot button on the original table view, which I can then click
and hit duplicate on. So this now gets me a duplicate
version of the view that we've already used to
create filters and sorts and I can go ahead and change that to, sorry, not a board view, a list view. So there it is. What we could also do is simply
change table to a list view. And we still have our filters
and we still have our sorts. So that is a trick for
creating duplicates of views that you've already, you know, done a lot of hard work to
create filters and sorts on. You just need to create a dummy view and then once it's created,
we can go ahead and delete it. And in this case, because we just changed the
original view to a list view, I'm gonna go ahead and get
rid of this copy as well. I just wanted to let you see that trick for both of its intended uses. So we'll go ahead and remove that and now we have our demo
inbox linked database along with our link to the
note taking system itself. Now let's fill out this
little web links area and this is going to be a very
simple part of the tutorial. All I'm going to do is
simply click plus here and I'm going to paste a URL, which gives us a couple
of different options. We can either dismiss it, which will just leave
the URL onscreen here, we can create an embed, which will actually embed the page itself, or we can create a bookmark, which is exactly what I want to do here. So, this is just an area which would have very quick access to websites
that I'm often using, so I kind of want that one as well, and I also would love to
have my community page. So I'm gonna go ahead and type
community.thomasjfrank.com, which is the circle community
that we are using for the Creators Companion tutorial
where people can get support and things like that. So I'm gonna go ahead and have
that on my dashboard as well. So moving on to the
reference area, for me, this is just an area of my dashboard where I put links to pages
that I'm visiting quite often. They might be pages for projects, they might be places
where I'm brain dumping, like trying to, you know,
make a gigantic video that's gonna take months, I wanna have really quick access
to all that kind of stuff, so I'm gonna put it in my reference area, or maybe I'm gonna favorite it and put it on my favorites bar,
but the nice thing, again, is that if we use the reference area and we use link to page
blocks, we are going to have, and you can actually see right here, all of these links to pages. So for example, I've got
my "Notion Fundamentals" public supplemental database here where everyone can come in
and get their supplemental materials for "Notion Fundamentals". Boom, it's right there
linked right underneath my personal dashboard. That is why this is so powerful. So, let's go ahead and create
ourselves a personal dashboard by getting some pages
underneath reference. And actually, the first one
that I wanna create is a brand new page, which I am going to call quotes. I personally like having a page
in my workspace where I can just record quotes that I think are cool. So I'm gonna go ahead and
paste some quotes in here and if I have new quotes
that I come across when I'm reading or doing online research, I can easily come into my
personal dashboard from my favorites bar here and add a
quote, which is pretty sweet. I also wanna have a couple of links here, so let's go back to ultimate
tasks and let's just say I wanna have a really quick
link to this website redesign project that I'm working on. So I'm gonna go ahead and
grab that with Ctrl + L, go back to our personal
dashboard, and once again, you know the drill, paste
that and create a link to page so it is in my sidebar. So at this point, our little personal dashboard is coming together quite nicely and it's looking very
similar to what we had in the intro to the video, but we
are missing a few things. We are missing this little
weather widget, which is coming, but we are also missing these little areas at the top of the dashboard, which I think you are going to
want to include specifically, and especially this little
quick links bar here. So let's get these things
added and then we're gonna go work on the weather widget. So, first and foremost,
I want a quick links bar. So what is a quick links bar? Well, it is simply a toggle
that has a table of contents widget in it. And the reason you would
want this is that if you are looking at your personal
dashboard on your phone, all of this is gonna collapse
down to a single column and that means if you have a
lot of content underneath each of these headings, you're
gonna have to scroll a lot, looking for the thing
you're trying to find, but if you've got a quick
links bar like this, you can easily click this little thing and you'll note that here, it just highlights it in blue because it's already on the screen, but if you were using your phone, it would also zoom you
straight down to this section, which is very handy for using
Notion on your mobile device, whether it's an iPhone
or an Android phone. To give you another quick sneak
peek at Creators Companion, this is something we have
built onto every single view. If you're on ideas, you
open on-page navigation, you have all this kind of stuff. If you're on validation,
open on-page navigation, you have access to every
single one of these subheadings because I wanted to design
this around mobile usage. And that is also the case
for our personal dashboard. So just add a table of
contents, link to a toggle, and then I'm gonna go
ahead and give it an emoji, let's type in nav to get this
little compass, type this, and then I'm gonna go with on, or I'm gonna go with quick links. Type this. I'm gonna go with quick
links and I'll go slash, let's do a green background. There it is. So keep that toggle most of the time, but when you want quick
access to a heading, boom, open it up and you can get to it. Next up, I want a call-out block, which is simply a fancy
bordered background color block where I can add something that's gonna stick out a little bit. And I just want this little
reminder at the top of my personal dashboard. Remember the regrets of the 100-year olds. There's this great video on YouTube. It's got hundreds of millions of views or something like that
where these people who are over a 100 years old are
talking about their regrets in life and for the most part, a lot of them regret working too much, skipping family functions,
not seeing friends enough, not exercising, not getting outside, so I want this at the top of my dashboard. Work hard, stay focused, but
quit at a reasonable time. Spend time with your friends
and your family today, go outside, don't skip your workouts, don't optimize your life by
sitting in front of a computer all day for more sitting in
front of a computer all day, you know? You gotta work hard, but you also have to have a balanced life. So I want that there. And you know what I also want, just to show you something cool, I also want a synced block
because if I drag this into a synced block like so, and then get rid of this little line here, I can actually copy this synced block and whatever's inside of it and I can go say over to
how about my quotes page and I can simply paste it and now I have a synced version of
this block in this location. I'm gonna actually click
here to show you the multiple locations and in this location. And if I make a change here and go back to the original location, we are going to see that change reflected. So that is a pretty cool thing you can use throughout your workspace. I'm just going to use
that as the demonstration. And the last thing we wanna create here is a daily tasks list. This is basically like a pad
of sticky notes on your desk where you can just like
make some check boxes for what you got to do today and I personally find this
useful because I don't always wanna go into my inbox or my
actual task management system to write things like go to the store, or workout, things like that. I like to plan my day
and checklists sometimes. So inside this toggle, I'm gonna type slash and I'm going to actually create a gallery, which is simply a different
view type for a database than a list or table
like you've seen before. I'm gonna go ahead and
call this daily tasks. I am going to delete these
sample cards, and then this one, we're just going to name the date. 9/3/21. And I'm gonna create a
little checklist for myself. Oh, I already did that one. Sweet! I also wanna add a property
here called archive. I'm gonna make that a checklist property and I'm gonna go ahead and
give this a filter to ensure that archived daily task
lists are not showing. I'm gonna come here into the three dot, I'm gonna go to properties, and I'm gonna change
this to also only show 10 on first load and I wanna make sure the card size is small. So I'm gonna go ahead and
give this a name, daily tasks. How about an emoji because
I simply like emojis and I think we can go with maybe
a blue check box this time. Make you bold. And if we look at our
original personal dashboard that I introed the video with, we now have pretty much
the exact same thing, except for our cool little weather widget. So let me now show you exactly how to get that on your dashboard, and in fact, any page in Notion if you want. So if we go over to this
site called indify.co, I'll have Tony put that onscreen as text, we can actually create little widgets for our Notion workspace, and there are quite a
few different choices. There's a life progress bar, quote bar, all kinds of stuff that you can explore, but we're going to
create a weather widget. So if you come in here and create widget, we're gonna have a few different options and I'm gonna go ahead and
just set my location to Denver and I'm gonna go for two days. I wanna see what the weather
is today and tomorrow and that's probably all
I really care about. There are some other things you can do, but I actually like
these default settings. I'm gonna go ahead and
make this a little bit, yeah, we're gonna try for, well my screen is actually very
zoomed in for this tutorial, so I'm gonna keep it at two columns. And all I'm gonna do is
copy this URL down here once we have changed all of our settings, come back to our personal dashboard, click plus to get a little thing here, and all I'm gonna do is paste this, but this time, instead
of creating a bookmark, I'm going to hit create embed. So what we are doing is
essentially embedding a webpage, but this is a very tiny webpage
that only shows our little weather information here. I can change the width
to make it a little bit better looking in this column, I can change the height too if I want. And that is our completed
personal dashboard. As always, with everything
that I create in tutorials, there is going to be a downloadable
template version of this personal dashboard that you
can go ahead and duplicate into your own workspace and, you know, use to your heart's content, though it's going to have links to some public template pages, so you're gonna wanna delete those links and replace them with your own pages from your own copy of whatever
templates that you are using. So use it as a starting point, but it's probably not
gonna be completely useful right off the bat since, again, we're linking to public pages. Hopefully you found this useful. Again, this is going to be
the example project that we're using for the entirety
of "Notion Fundamentals", which if you don't know, is my complete free and
comprehensive beginner's course for people who wanna learn Notion. If you wanna become familiar
with all the basics, everything that the app has to offer and you wanna become proficient with basically every feature, "Notion Fundamentals" is
going to teach you all of that and has written versions for every lesson along with the video version and tons of supplemental materials, not just things like
this personal dashboard, but there's also like an entire
listing of every block that Notion has in less than three and all kinds of cool stuff like that. So if you wanna find that, you can go over to
thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals. I will also have a link in the description down below to my template page where you can get access, free access, to the ultimate tasks
template that I talked about, the note taking template,
the habit tracking template. The only paid template that
I sell is the creator's companion template at this point in time. So if you are a creator, you
may wanna check that out, but everything else is completely
free and is quite advanced and pretty comprehensive. So check that out. If you have questions, leave them down in the
comments section down below, or go ahead and follow me on Twitter. I'm pretty active over there. I'm gonna do my best to answer every tweet that I get with questions. So let me know what is on your mind, what you got stuck on, what you would like to add,
and what you need to, you know, get some tips on and
I'll see you over there. Thanks as always for watching. Hopefully you learned something here. Hit that like button for
the algorithm if you did and subscribe if you want more
tutorials on this channel. That's about it, so I will
see you in the next one. Stay cute. (upbeat electronic music)
