Notion Masterclass: Build a Task Manager from Scratch

well hello there so the video you're about to watch will teach you how to build an advanced task and project manager inside of notion from scratch we are going to go from a blank page to building a system that you could use to replace apps like todoist or even asana in fact that is what i've done both for my personal tasks and for my entire business now one thing that i'll know before we get started is that the system we're going to build in this tutorial i've already built it and i've released it as a public template so if you just want to use it and you just want a task manager for notion i have a video that is much shorter than this one in the description down below along with the public template link so check those out if you're just looking to get tasks inside of notion but if you want to learn how to build this system and you want to gain a deeper understanding of notion well grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever it is you drink when you watch long tutorials and let's roll that intro [Music] well hello everybody and welcome to a longer notion tutorial today we are going to be building an advanced task management system from scratch hopefully in doing this you'll be able to learn some of the inner workings of notion and also in the inner workings of this template if you want to use it so we've got the ultimate tasks thing here i'm going to have it on my other monitor for reference while i build a blank version we'll go back here i like to keep my templates in a database so i can keep a change log here so what we're going to do is just create a blank page right here and we'll call ultimate tasks from so the first thing that i do when i know i'm making a big template like this is i go up here and i set full width and i'm probably not going to do all the jumping around and premiere to zoom in on things so you may want to watch this one in full screen just because this one's going to be so long i'm going to prioritize just getting it created instead of making it nice and high quality and everything like that let's go ahead and add our cover and i'm going to change it upload my custom image so you got to make it look pretty it's very very important to make your ti your templates look pretty otherwise what are you even doing so the task system that we're going to build here uses a master tasks database and this is very useful because once you have a master tasks database i guess i can throw myself here once you have a master tasks database you can create linked database views to show yourself what you want to see whether it be an inbox or a next seven days view or a priority view so the first thing we need to do is actually create that all tasks like master task database so we're going to create a page or we're going to create a table here and we'll make it a full page and let's just call this all tasks and i am going to put dash scratch after everything i create here and the only reason i'm doing this is i've already got here in my my existing ultimate tasks template i've already got a database called all tasks so when i'm searching for this database later on to create my linked views i need something unique so it's not confusing me and bringing up the other one otherwise you could just call it all tasks but because i already have that i'm going to call it something different here let's add an icon and we'll make it this little scroll seems something good for like an archive of every task and now we need to do is create all of our properties which is notions term for columns essentially so we've got our name which is the sort of key value of this database it is the the one thing you can't delete it is also the uh the page that will let you go into additional pages so we're going to call this task and then we have quite a few different rows to create here so the first one we'll do is just a checkbox called done and this is what will allow you to clear at least one time tasks if you've seen my recurring task video you know that we don't use this to clear recurring tasks do two notions current limitations we're also going to create one called state and this is going to be a formula block i'll show you how this works a little bit later and we're just going to paste the formula in but i will give you a quick look at how the formula works if you're curious i'll also do a more in-depth video or probably series of videos on formulas at some point in the future so we've got that we're coming along pretty quickly here uh and now we've got to have the do property which is going to be a date this is very important for a task manager can't really have a task manager without due dates unless you just you know want to wing it and uh right next to that we'll have one called next do so this one is going to be a formula and we will put a bunch of code in here later and this is what is going to run our recurring tasks function but we'll get to that in a bit next let's create and there's going to be a couple that we can't create yet because they're going to be relations to other databases that don't yet exist at least one so first we're going to create uh something called recur interval and days now the name doesn't necessarily matter for you if you're coding your own formulas i'm going to use the exact same names for my columns here that i do in ultimate tasks that way i can paste in my formulas without having to rename properties in those formulas so this recurrent of all if we put a number here is going to tell next to do when the next due date should be based on due date and this is what basically runs recurring tasks so i'll show you a bit more about this once we have the code in there and you can see a visual example but essentially you can put one in here to tell yourself this task recurs every every day and if you had two in there that would be a new every other day task next we're going to do one called type and this is also going to be a formula this will change based on whether or not recur interval has a number in it if it does this will say recurring and if it doesn't this is going to say one time so that's pretty important and we're going to create a created time which we'll just call created i'm not sure if you need this for any of the formulas or filters we're building now but i find that it's useful just to have created time in there and then we can also have created by so this one will be helpful if you're running a team you may want to see who created a task likewise we can also put assignee in here now we're not going to be using assignee in this tutorial here ultimate tasks is a template that is built for personal productivity but if you have an assignee column in here you could click anybody in your workspace and you could assign a test to them and then you could easily build a filter view based on assignee which is pretty great for team task management my upcoming course on notion for creators and teams will get heavily into team task management so if you want to learn more about that i'll put a link in the description down below otherwise it'll be thomasjfrank.com notion course um let's see here what else can we do we're going to put a few kanban things in here so if you want to use like trello style kanban boards this will be helpful for you and i use a couple first one is called kanban state and we're going to use a select property not a multi-select we're going to use a select so only one of the options in here can be chosen at any one time and what we're going to put in here is to do doing and done so these are our classic kanban states and let's go ahead and give them some more fitting colors so we'll call this green and then we'll put done as blue and then why don't we just go ahead and duplicate this one we're going to create one for tags so one thing that i like to do and i can show you real quick if we bring up ultimate tasks over here in my project views like this website redesign project i like to organize my projects by task type so for a web design project we've got design tasks we've got copy that we need to write for different pages we've got speed we've got security i like to keep tasks in columns based on what they kind of are and what categories they fit into this is what we did in trello to build basically every version on my website since 2013. so the kanban tag column or a property is what lets you do that so what we want to do here is actually get rid of these options and we're going to leave it blank for now so i'm a little bit laisse fair about kanban tag like i said for a web design project we may have tags like design copy speed security for moving to a new house we may have packing basement living room kitchen whatever you want eventually you might end up with a bunch of different tag ideas or different tags here but this will let you build out projects as you want so right now we'll keep them blank and when we create new projects we can just create those tags on the fly but we do want to have this property at least there as an option for us so let me go back to my reference here to see what we need to make next i do wish i could memorize everything but it's pretty complicated so it's kind of hard the next is going to be task priority so let's call that priority and this will be yet another select and then we are going to give it options of medium low and high and i'm going to do it in this order so just like with our kanban stages i do want to give these some more fitting colors we'll just go with orange here and for high we'll go with uh red i suppose or maybe we'll make we'll make orange or we'll make the low blue yeah it's kind of like a cool task so i'm using medium first here and the reason will become clear later when i talk about filters as forcing functions which essentially is my fancy term for using filters to make new rows take on a specific property by default instead of being empty and making you fill in that priority i want all my tasks to be medium priority by default so i need medium to be the first option here because of how notion works we'll get into that a little bit later next thing we're going to do is something a little bit fancy we're going to create a relation but we're going to create a relation to this database so typically when you create a relation it says here create a relation to another database you're relating this database the all tasks database to another database and just as an example we'll come back to the completed ultimate tasks here we have a project property here this is a relation to the go back not that far back the projects database which allows you to create project rows that exist in a project's database and then relate them to specific tasks so this task is related to web design project all these ones are and vice versa if i click into this row this row in the projects database is related to all of these tasks relations go two ways but you can also relate a database to itself so when we select a database we're going to search for all tasks dash scratch doing a self relation it gives you a choice here of whether you want to use the same property or you want to create two properties syncing both ways so what we're creating here is subtasks and parent tests which means that we need to create a new property because the one we're creating that right now is subtasks but for every subtask there needs to be a parent task and then the parent tasks will have a one-to-many relation in some cases where the parent task will relate to many subtasks but we need to we need two categories here so we'll go ahead and create this relation and let's just call go ahead and call this one subtasks and rename this one that is auto-generated to parent tasks or parent task i suppose because there won't be multiple parent tasks i suppose you you could actually let one subtask be related to multiple parent tasks and i guess if you wanted to get into some like recurring maintenance tasks for many parent tasks you could do that but we're not going to do that in this example so we've got that and what else do we need to create now uh oh one last column and it's just going to be a checkbox that we call inbox this will be a simple checkbox property and when we create our inbox view we will create a filter to only show tasks that have the inbox box checked and then we'll also force new rows created in that view to be checked this can be very useful so this is pretty much it let's go ahead and give our tasks some names just just so they you know have names we don't want these blank tasks here for no reason right task three so this is the structure of our all tasks database and to finish this up we just need to get our formulas in our three formula columns here state next do and type and what i'm going to do is just paste the formulas in from ultimate tasks instead of trying to code them from scratch and if we go into ultimate tasks you're going to see that these formulas are compressed and they're pretty difficult to read so one thing that i've added is if you come down to the bottom of the template there's a toggle called change log you can open this up and click into this sort of metadata page that contains both the template along with demo versions but also a formula reference and in here we've got code blocks that show the compressed version but also an expanded version using an online excel beautifier tool which basically works perfectly on notion formulas to show you the expanded version so if you want to study how these formulas work you can do that here this one is using a very complicated or i guess not super complicated but very long nested if statement chain this one is well this one took days to write so there's a lot going on here and there's some math going on to do the recurrent evolve correctly and then this one's actually very simple it just changes the type from one time to recurring if the recur interval has a number in it like i said so if you want to study those that's where they're going to be for now we're just going to go back to ultimate tasks and grab our formulas and copy them so first we'll do state grab that copy it and then come into our little scratch database here and paste it should work just fine so because all of these tasks have no due date right now their state is white but if i go ahead and set this due date today we're going to get green if i go ahead and set this due date to yesterday we'll get red and if i set this one to tomorrow we will get blue and while i'm thinking about it why don't we sort this master task database real quickly we're probably not going to have to come in here too much because you'll be using other views that are more useful but if you need to come in here it's nice to have it sorted so first let's sort by done and we'll put done tasks at the bottom just so they are kind of out of the way and then we'll create a second sort which is going to be do and we'll sort do based on ascending so now we've got all things by due date but also all tasks going to the bottom if they are done that's pretty useful to have so we've got our sort and the next one that we would do is next do except next do's formula is dependent on there being something in type so we're gonna go ahead and do type first and we'll grab that code from there come back on over and paste it in so now you can see anything with a recurrent of all set is going to be given a type of recurring otherwise by default it is one time and now that this has some code and is outputting some information we can go back and we can grab our next do formula which is the most complicated one that we have so if we come into here paste this should work just fine and now we have next due dates so now we've got all of our formulas in here so the next thing we want to do is create a projects database so that we can create the relation between all tasks in projects so to do that let's go back to our ultimate tasks from scratch which is still looking pretty blank and we'll create a gallery inline table we'll call it projects again scratch just so i have a unique table uh name here and we'll delete these and the reason we're going to delete these we're going to delete all of them is because what we want to do is create a template that we can we can spawn for new projects so i don't want to do a whole bunch of work inside of a already existing row and then have to copy it over the template let's make the template first but before we do that let's create a relation now that this exists we can come back into all tasks we can go all the way over to the right and create another relation to projects we'll just call it project and one person did ask me when i did the ultimate tasks overview video can you relate a task to multiple projects and yes you can that is very easy you would just go in there and add multiple projects so projects scratch is what we're looking for create the relation and now we have a relation to project easy peasy so now let's go ahead and create our project template in the projects database to do that we can just go over to the little arrow button next to new and hit new template and let's just call this project template one thing that i'm going to do while i'm here we can add properties to this database from any page within the database one thing i'm going to do is add a property called archive and what this will let us do is archive old projects so they don't show up in this database we can create an archive for them later on otherwise if you get a lot of projects you're going to have all kinds of stuff all over the place so and i don't think we need tags here so i'm going to go ahead and delete that one just don't think it's necessary all right so the main thing that we want in our project page is a linked view to all tasks a linked database block so if you type the slash and you go for a linked database this will allow you to search for a database and we're going to search for all tasks scratch so now we get essentially it's not a copy of all tasks it is all tasks but it's showing it in a different area of notion and in addition to showing it in a different area of notion if i open this as a page and go ahead and let it be full width all of the sorts and all the filters that we create here and the orders of the columns the properties are going to be unique to this instance of this linked database so if i go ahead and move done and inbox and i go to all tasks they have not moved from the way that i've set them up here which is very useful so i'm going to hit command or control bracket to go back this is essentially a custom view of this database and this is really the power of a master tasks database in letting you build a multi-view system like this it's also will let you build any other kind of system note-taking system though in another video i'll get into why i don't use a master database for note-taking for a wiki for an archive of content you've created this is kind of the general idea so what we want to do here is start creating some useful filters and sorts so the main thing is well number one we want to filter tasks in this view by them being related to this project and something really cool about notion is if you create a filter here and the filter is where project contains and project template then this is what i call forcing function because if i create a new task here in this database we'll just call it project task 1. well if we look at the project it is associated to it is associated to the project template automatically you don't have to set this because we're creating new rows in a linked view that has a specific filter then by by definition these new rows have to meet this filter criteria so notion will force them to take on those properties you can use this to automatically set a project to automatically set a parent task when we get into building our parent tasks and subtask template to automatically set a priority a kanban stage all kinds of very useful stuff so if we come over to ultimate tasks and we look at the template that we have going on here we can see we've got some of these forcing functions in our filter criteria we've got project contains project template ultimate tasks we also have where kanban and priority is not empty and then we have some other ones that are not forcing functions but they will just let you clear done tasks when you're done so we'll go ahead and build those now in our template so again we've got our forcing function and let's go ahead and give this an icon just to make it visually distinctive purple umbrella is perfectly fine for now so the other two forcing functions we're going to create and we'll put these in a group and and notice that we're going to use and and then we're going to use and in here so the group is not necessarily a necessity it's just good for visual organization so we're going to go with kanban stage is and you can do is and you can select all three of these so technically what you could do is you could do is to do and is doing and is done but there's a much smarter way to do it where kanban stage is not empty so when i talked about the order of our kanban stage being important earlier this is where it really comes in now where compound stage is not empty i'll show you if i create a new task it's going to get to do immediately if i had doing here on top now if i create a new one it's going to get doing the top select criteria you have is the one the forcing function is going to set for any new row so whichever one you want to be the default make that the top and note that if i create a view here which is a board view and we'll use this temporarily and if i go to sort by or group by kanban stage i can move these around i could put doing first look at it to do all the way over here and even so to do is still on top so your board views do not need to match this make sure whatever is your intended default um setting for a property is the top one if you're going to use a forcing function so because i don't want to duplicate work we're going to delete this view until i finished with my filters and this view and also notice that when we create more forcing functions like say priority these would disappear if they didn't have a priority so while i'm setting up my filters why don't we just get rid of these tasks so we don't have to go find them later on so we have our con bonus not empty we're also going to do and where priority is not empty and the nice thing is it will automatically keep some of these things when you create a new row which is pretty nice so our forcing functions are done all new tasks in this project will be related to the project we'll have a kanban state of to do because it's the top one and we'll have a priority of medium because it is the top one our forcing functions are all here now let's create some filters for getting done tasks out of our hair when they are done so if we look back at ultimate tasks this is a little bit complicated and the reason is that we need to build in some logic for using recurring tasks but also one-time tasks and also letting you use kanban tables if you want so the first one is going to be number one turning this into a group so it is easy and then we're going to turn this into a subgroup because we're doing an either or at this point so this is where groups and notion are very very useful when you need to mix and and then or criteria so notice here we're doing and and and we could technically not have this in a group we could have where project contains project template and kanban is not empty and priority is not empty those could all be on one level it doesn't matter the moment you need to mix and and then or is where the levels the sub levels matter so for this third sub level here we're going to create where done is not checked and where type contains and we need to actually type this in exactly as is so i'm going to go ahead and copy it from my existing template so i can get that emoji and kanban stage is not done so if any of these are true we won't see the task here in this view and basically this is saying if one time tasks through the checked off is done or they've been moved into a done column let's get rid of them or type contains recurring so this will make sure that any recurring task does not fit into this criteria and will stay there because recurring tasks get filtered by date and that's basically it i think that's all we've got for a filter in the table view so really we're ready to go here and the only thing you may want to do to finish off this template is to add some more views to your template here so one thing that i wish notion could do at the moment which you cannot do is duplicate a view right off the bat even if there isn't a secondary view which as far as i know you can't do that so what we need to do is add a view and we'll just call it null because we don't we don't actually want it just so we can now select views so no again we don't want it what we want is to take table view and duplicate it and then rename it and give it a new type so let's call this board view state and we're gonna give that a type of board hit enter and now this has the same filter criteria as our table view but it's a board view and if we go here to group by we can choose where we want to group by i'm going to go with kanban stage so now to do doing done you got your classic kanban and because we built a forcing function nothing is ever going to be given no stage unless you create it here so why don't we just go ahead and hide this now you've got a perfectly good kanban board if you look at ultimate tasks there is also a nearly identical view for tag where it's just sorted by tag there's a calendar view there's completed tasks i will let you look at these yourself and create them because we are already at half an hour so this is left as an exercise to the viewer to create the rest but one thing that we did forget to do well number one let's delete our null view now that we don't need it because we now can choose which view we want we may want some sort criteria as well so filters essentially tell us what we will or won't see in any view and then sort is what's going to tell that view how to order those rows so the way that i have them sorted in ultimate tasks is simply by do an ascending order that's it and that is your linked database so now if i create a new task we'll call that project task scratch it's got a kanban stage by default it's got a priority by default it's got a project template by default it's associated with this project template because it was created here due to this filter and then i guess the last thing you may want to do is come into properties and choose what properties we want to show for this project so we don't need inbox because this isn't the inbox we may not need assignee if we're doing this for personal productivity we may not need created or created by we do want do we may want these we don't need we may want prayer tasks we may not i'll leave that up to you we can leave them open we may want priority we may want all this kind of stuff so let's leave it and then of course we can move them and change their size as needed as well so i like to have state here i like to have done right next to it i like to have task right there do is good and then i like to have type which we can go find let's put type right here and then we'll put next do right next to type so if there is a recurring task we'll see that date you can go ahead and order these and hide these at your will one thing is you may also want to hide this relation there's no need for you to see that this task is associated with this project because you're in this project's view so this is kind of just an unnecessary thing to see so go ahead and get rid of that the other really nice thing and this is what's great about doing project management in notion is this page can be whatever you want so why don't we create a call out block and in bold text we will just type project overview so now when you spawn an instance of this template you could write down a quick little few lines about what the project is about and then why not create a toggle and we can just use the greater than sign space to create a toggle very quickly and just call it project details and i want to bold that just because i can so we put that there open it up we could create really anything we want if we wanted to link to stuff we could if we wanted to create a page we could if we wanted to just add some details you know we could but if you're doing a big project and you maybe want to dump a bunch of research or you want to take a bunch of notes you want to hash out a bunch of stuff you can do it here and then you'll be able to see all your tasks alongside your details so that is our template now one thing we're going to want to do is clear this task because if we don't clear it it's going to be in every copy of the template we generate and it's already associated with with the template itself so we'll empty that out and have it completely blank for the project and i guess we must have created this one earlier so let's go ahead and delete that one as well we want no tasks associated with this project we want to completely blank now that we've done that we can go back to our little ultimate tasks from scratch homepage and either we can go to new the arrow here and click project template or just create a new row and then generate from the template let's do that real quick let's just call this example project scratch if i click this you'll see one of notions coolest features and actions so remember if we go ahead and bring this property of project back in remember that in the template we associated the project to the template itself but now we have an instance so what's very useful here is that if we create a task we call it project i guess example project task one it is going to be associated not with the template but with the instance that we just created which is very very useful so now anything you created here is associated with that project perfect so we've got that done and with it the project section of our ultimate tasks from scratch template is done which is great so now we can come back here and start building out our useful views so one thing that we have in ultimate tasks if we go back to the dashboard is in addition to our projects view in our little views here we have a daily tasks database and this is essentially like a little scratch pad which you can create every day if you want again i like to use a whiteboard sometimes to write out my tasks this is like a virtual whiteboard where i can just jot down things that don't need to be in the actual database with all their details or where i can take things from my today view maybe or my next seven days view and plan out my day just in a very very simple check box so to create that we're just going to create another gallery inline database and again these are all databases gallery table list board calendar they're all just different ways to view a database block and if we hit add view we can add different types of views to the same database so we're just going to call this one daily tasks again scratch so i have that unique little term that i can search for and we'll just delete the little default rows we got here now i want this to be to the side of this unfortunately right now it doesn't really work in notion with inline databases they just will not let you put things to the side so what i'll often do is create a header block and doesn't matter what's in it could be 21 and then i can duplicate that and what i find is these blocks are very easy to nest next to each other and from there you can grab your inline databases and nest them underneath these blocks and then you can delete these blocks and your columns still hold fast now these are a little big for me especially if i'm gonna have a lot of projects going on so if i go into properties i'm gonna set the card size to small and i'm gonna set the card preview to page cover we don't have a page cover right now but we can easily create one if we want and i'm going to go ahead and just let that stay as default and there we go looks cool with daily tasks i'm going to leave the preview to be the boxes but i do want it to be small as well and then we can change the columns sizing here so i've got daily tasks scratch right there and if we look over at ultimate tasks we have got a little bit of filtering going on and we've got a daily tasks archive so why don't we create those real quick first and foremost number one we're going to have to bring this back out so we have access to these little areas let's filter at first we need some properties i guess so tags we don't need well let's get rid of them unless you want to keep them you can i want one called archive so i can archive old notes i no longer need to see and i want one called date and we're good to go there so that is good let's check what we've got going on here date designer before today and once again we're going to create a forcing function so if we go into the filter criteria for this view we want archive to not be checked and we want date to be on or before today this is a forcing function that will automatically give new rows a date of today and let's just call this 10 30 20 20. not 2021 and i don't really think we need a template for this here we're just going to create things like to do's so if you use left bracket right bracket you get it to do and do the thing do the win do the thing win the points do a sports you can check all these off also look at this if i do at maybe i want to do 11 am now i have a little time reminder which is pretty cool so we'll see this here because it is not archived if i archive it it's going to go away perfect but maybe we want to be able to see all of our daily tasks in one area so let's create a page and let's call it daily tasks archive and again my little scratch just in case i need to reference it and just as we did with our project template we're going to create a linked database and we're going to search for daily tasks scratch and from here we can create different filter criteria in fact i'm going to create no filter criteria i'm only going to create a sort and i'm going to go by date descending so i get a history an archive and you know an archive probably needs some sort of archive cover photo here so why don't we look at the unsplash thing and type in library perfect we got some books we got our archive we're trucking right along so this is starting to look a little bit more like ultimate tasks which i clicked away from all we need now is our views for inbox today next seven days priority view we're gonna be good to go so let's go ahead and create those and that will round out this tutorial so we've got our all tasks database and just as we did within our project template we're going to create a view that contains a linked database so to do that we need to do is hit the plus icon here to get ourselves a new block and we're going to create a page in this page we'll call inbox and let's give it an inboxy icon give it a full width and once again we're going to do a linked database you're going to see a theme here linked databases all the way down and it's going to be all tasks scratch once again and now we see everything so what we need to do is create again one set of filters that will be forcing functions to make new tasks placed in the inbox have the properties that we want and then another set of filters to allow us to clear tasks out of the inbox when we want them to so if we're trying to recreate something that is essentially and i can i guess move myself here to present to you a bit better if we're trying to create something that is essentially like a stand-in for todoist but within notion then when we think about the inbox what do we want well we want tasks to be there until either we've done them or until we've sorted them into a better place like a project or we've at least gotten them into a date-based view so the way that we do that in ultimate tasks if we bring it back over here is with this little inbox checkbox that we created before and if you look at the filter criteria we've got some forcing functions and this actually down here is a forcing function it says where inbox is checked so anything new created here will have the inbox box checked and then once you uncheck it it will disappear so the idea is you create a new task and you add some details about it and once you have maybe a due date or you've associated with a project you could uncheck on inbox if you don't intend to do that task right away so let's go ahead and create that now again i'm going to want some certain properties to be hidden here i don't need assignee created created by i don't necessarily care about kanban states in here again forcing functions will apply to hidden properties this is just not showing things so if i go ahead and say like it needs to have a kanban stage it can't be empty even if i hide this it's still going to happen which is perfect i can do that with priority as well maybe i don't care about that i only care about these things so inbox will be the first thing in this view so i can easily check it off we'll have done we'll have state and i like having state right next to inbox and why don't we put done right next to state we'll have task here we'll have due here we'll have type in between next due and do so i can easily see visually that some tasks are occurring and some are one time and then we could have projects parent tasks recurring of all maybe should be next to next to do and yeah this is a pretty decent looking inbox view here so let's go ahead and create our sorts and filters first and foremost our forcing functions and we can great and why don't we just make it more efficient and put them all in one group so we're going to say where inbox is checked and not or we want it to be and kanban stage is not empty so it could be any stage but we want to make sure it's not empty and again we're using that forcing function to force it to the first one listed and priority is not empty so we're getting all that these are our forcing functions and beyond that we want some filters that allow us to clear things out of the inbox very easily so what that's going to be is again our same double nested group of filters so we'll create a double nest here the first one being for our one time tasks so where type contains and i need to go ahead and copy that from another monitor and done is not checked and kanban stage is not done so if you've got a kanban view somewhere else and you move it you move a card to done the way i've got ultimate task set up is actually i'll show you here if you go over to board view state if i move something to done it'll stay here but even though it's got the inbox thing checked because of our filter that we're done is not checked is or sorry because of our filter of where kanban done is not present on the table view it's not going to show there anymore but it will show here because some people when using kanban want to see the cards they have done so we're not going to make it disappear unless you actually check done then it will actually disappear from here so let's keep that there where i had it so we've created those and lastly we need the filter for our recurring tasks so or type contains and i'll go copy that so i don't define the emoji recurring so now inbox task is here it's been automatically if we click into it given a kanban stage to do given a priority of medium and do is empty because we're not forcing any due dates here but inbox is checked so i can go ahead and create a due date let's say today now our state changes to green because it's due today if it was yesterday it'd be red overdue and if it's after today it is blue for something planned in the future but that does have a due date let's let it be today and let's say i want to clear it out of the inbox so i can just click inbox and now it's gone we will see it very soon when we create the today view but we have one last thing to do here which is to create one more linked database and that is going to be for our daily tasks scratch database so once again we need to create our filters here and this is going to get easier after we've done it once so it's going to be where archive is not checked and where the not created where date is on or before today just as we had it on the dashboard for ultimate tasks and this is a table why don't we go ahead and we're going to have to create a null view this is very annoying but this is how it works right now so no and then we can duplicate that one actually we don't even duplicate it now that i think about it once we've created an old view we've got options to change this let's go ahead and change table view to a gallery view which i like a little bit better delete our null and we can change our size settings again i want this to be small and we have to use our little header trick so we'll just call udd for i don't know doing deeds i don't know anymore i'm not an improv performer you're not here to hear jokes you're here to learn notion so we'll do our little column trick i don't know why that grabbed there and then we can delete u delete u and resize so now we have an empty version of our inbox view here and again you can use our little duplicating trick to create different views so here in ultimate tasks we have the table view and if we look at our filters they are like so if we go over to list view this is a copy of table view just changed and you can always change the type of view here to a list view lists are great for mobile because if you're on mobile and you're looking at table it's going to get real squished down you're going to have to scroll side to side that's not very easy but the list view squishes everything down by default which is perfect for your phone so what i would do is duplicate the table view change the duplicate over to list view and then come in here and select the properties that are really important to you when you're on the go additionally you can move properties around so if i take state and i move it like that you're going to see it changed so i want certain things in certain orders namely i want my inbox checkbox over here because it's not labeled i need to make sure i know where it is and then i'll have it done right next to state perfect so if you're going to build this from yourself just go and duplicate those views and you'll be good to go and now that we have this with our filter criteria all set what we can do to save ourselves some time is to simply duplicate inbox and use that to create our other views so instead of copy of inbox we're going to call this one today not but today let's find ourselves a calendar emoji why not this one works pretty well it's not mark 21 but you know what i guess that's what they stick on the emoji and all we need to do here is change our filter so these forcing functions kanban priority that's exactly what we want type exactly we want all this is exactly what all we want to change here is instead of inboxes checked we want where do is on or before today and what that's going to do is show us any task that is due either today or that is overdue so if i make it overdue i'm going to see it if i make it due tomorrow it's gone today view is perfect so now you have a perfect place where you can come and look at what you have to do today and because it is a page and it's not a database row you're going to have it accessible from your sidebar very easily so one more date based view duplicate today and we're going to call this one next seven days and you could do this as much as you want next 14 days next month well actually let me let me potentially take that back let's let's look real quick so let's call this next seven days so you may run into a limitation of notions filters at the moment because you can do do is on or before and your options are today one week from now one month from now or you get to an exact date where it starts getting less useful as days go on so i guess you could do a one month upcoming and then you could do you could sort just to make sure you can see things it looks like you're not going to be able to do two weeks unless there was some um some sort of filter that you could create with a formula which we could maybe do but it's going to be beyond the scope of this tutorial so we're going to go ahead and get that as one week from now and hey there is our task one week from now and i guess one thing we forgot to do which was a little bit of a boneheaded move on my part which would be to create a sort before duplicating all these pages i should have done that so let's go with uh do ascending and we can just add that to each one yep duplication of effort don't like it but it takes about i don't know 20 seconds to do this so not too bad if we create that do ascending now we've got a sending due dates so here we go next seven days we can see the task that it's due today we see the task that is due the 31st if we create a new one the forcing function will force the due date to be november 6th which is seven days from now that is just how it works so we'll just call this task two and we can just go ahead and change the due date let's just say this one is due i don't know the third of november remember remember the third of november i guess uh and from any of these views you can go ahead and associate a new task with a project so we had our example project why don't we just associate this task with that and if we go over to that project we're going to see task 2 is now in that project view which is pretty sweet so what else do we have to do well we have a couple of little cleanup tasks before we're done with this recreation we've got our priority view and then we've got subtasks so let's do those and we'll be wrapping up this tutorial uh looks like it went a little over an hour as i record this there may be some cuts so we'll see uh we're gonna go ahead and duplicate once more our next seven days view and we're gonna call this one priority view and why don't we give this a priority-esque emoji like a siren okay and because priorities are i think best shown as boards like a kanban style what we need to do is number one create ourselves a null and we'll just call it null don't want it don't care about it but our table view has us our filters and our sorts that we want to keep possibly tweak a little bit but let's go ahead and change that table view over to a board view so now we've got ourselves a board view and we're going to want to sort because we're creating priority view by priority and because of our forcing function right we've got our priority is not empty on basically all of our views in fact even on our all tasks view i went and did this kind of off camera but i added our forcing functions again here just to make sure that no matter where you create a task it's going to get a kanban stage and a priority because of that over here in priority view we're never going to see anything here in no priority so we're just going to go ahead and hide that and because of how boardview works if you create a new task under high or low or whatever you don't even need this forcing function to make sure it gets that priority if i create one at high normally again medium is the first one listed but if i create a high priority task like this then if i come in here we're going to see that it is given the priority of high just because of where i created it but it also has that to do and again just to reiterate this because i created in high it doesn't matter that high is the bottom here and it doesn't even matter again if i if i want to move these around i can do that i would probably want you know medium in the middle and maybe high here that doesn't matter to the order here medium is still going to be our default when we're using our forcing functions in table views so that's our priority view maybe you want to have a sort by date and maybe you want to get rid of do is honor before a week from now because this is not a due date based view so we'll go ahead and maybe just remove this so now we see all tasks you could add maybe a month out from now or a year out from now but we're just going to keep it like that so the last thing we have to do is figure out subtasks so if you go into all tasks here we have got this relation already built subtask parent task and if i want to say let's just drag these way over to the front so they're a little bit easier to work with if i want to say that inbox tasks let's let's just create a new one let's just create subtask subtask 1. so if i want to say subtask 1 is a subtask of pair of task one then all we need to do is go to either task one go to subtasks and find subtask one click that or we could have gone to parent task and done the opposite thing good if i almost clear it so i'll show you how it works go to subtask one parent tasks and i search for task one which is conveniently right here for me then we're gonna see this is related to task one it is it's parent task and subtask one is task one's subtask but there's a better way we can do this so let's go ahead and create a template inside of our master database and we're gonna make this look basically like our project template except for it is a self-relation so let's call this task with subtasks and i like to give it another little emoji just so it's easily recognizable visual rep or visual recognizability is very important um i don't even know what the emoji is that i had so we're just gonna use this one that'll probably work once again all we need to do if we open this as a page again we'll make it full width for now is create a linked database cradling database to all tasks scratch and we just need to filter where parent task contains what is this called task with subtasks there you are and if i go ahead and create subtask two it is going to be related to task with subtasks now again we want this to be empty because it's a template again you can use the same filtering mechanisms that we learned in other areas in fact let's go reference what our template may have in here at the moment in the actual template so if we edit that we can see we've got our forcing functions as we had them before we have our done functions to clear things from areas automatically which is very nice and it also allows you to come into this task and then check off subtasks just as you would in any other view but the most important thing is this forcing function to make sure that it is related to the parent task so all parent or all subtasks of said parent tasks will show here so you can create those we've done it a zillion times and one thing that i would love to have notion do in the future but it currently isn't a thing is you currently cannot copy filters this is something you need to recreate in each linked test thing now if you can copy a linked task or a linked database in fact let me show you how to do that so let's delete this and i'm gonna i'm gonna make sure that this is uniquely named just so i can do this very easily why don't we go to one of our other views like today so today has the filters that we want in our subtask template that has our forcing functions all this kind of stuff so what if i just go ahead and duplicate this as long as you need the duplicate linked database to link to the same database you can go ahead and do this and then we can go ahead and do a move to and we'll call it task with subtasks scratch this may take a little bit and i wonder if it is case sensitive yep there it is so that has gone away let's go back and actually from any view we can go find that template there it is so we can edit it from there now we've got this in here basically as we had set it up but we do want to change this we don't want the date filter here and we do want and parent task contains task with subtasks there it is so there's our template and if we're in all tasks or if we're anywhere else let's maybe do it in the inbox as an example we can go ahead and create task with subtasks example and because you can create template instances off of any new row just by clicking down here we'll go ahead and create that boom so we don't have inbox filtering here so this is in the inbox but if i create an example subtask in here then it's not going to be here it's only going to be in here though do note that if i click this it'll show up and we have a little visual indication that this is a subtask because of the little arrow so with that we have essentially created or recreated ultimate tasks really the only thing you would want to do in addition to what we've done here is maybe add some colors add some toggles so we can do that really really quick let's just create a toggle call it views and bold it if we want move it up here move that down here uh go ahead and select all or can we select all these there we go select them all throw them in there now they're hidden if they want and we can give them colors so i don't know yellow for all tasks priority view is going to be blue so it looks nice on that thing right there make you green it'll make today be not yellow that's one we already used orange and the inbox will be i don't know blue there you go i already used blue once i don't know i can't remember colors it's brown that's a little less attractive than the one that i had set up uh but that's it yeah so now you have created ultimate tasks for yourself and hopefully you know a few more things about using notion hopefully you can apply what you've learned here to other concepts and other challenges once again if you want to simply duplicate ultimate tasks it's on my website thomasjfrank.com templates where you can uh and i guess i'll just show you real quick if i go over to oh i've got it on tab over on this page we have our ultimate tasks and projects template for notion you can download that or you can grab my new among us template my note-taking template my video project tracker template and lots of new ones that are coming in the future if you have ideas for templates let me know in the comments below or tweet me over at tomfrankly and yeah let me know what you want to see let me know what questions you still have and let me know if this was helpful this is obviously like an hour-long video so we'll see how well it does on youtube but um i had again i had a few people who wanted to see how this was actually done so i wanted to put something out there for that um that's about it so until the next one i will see you later

Channel: Thomas Frank Explains

Views: 283,193

Rating: 4.9696684 out of 5

Keywords: notion, notionhq, notion app, notion tips, how to use notion, notion productivity, notion templates, notion tutorial, notion vs todoist, ultimate tasks, thomas frank, notion tasks, notion calendar, notion recurring tasks, notion task manager, notion projects, project manager, project management app, task management software, task management app, to do list app, best to do app, best task manager app, best productivity apps

Id: 32dLXdB4ozs

Length: 58min 29sec (3509 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020