Notion Office Hours: Building from Scratch 🌱

good morning welcome to office hours can you guys hear me okay so let me know if you can hear me hello I am your host Marie Poulin and today we are going to talk about building from scratch I know if you guys have attended past office hours or maybe you've seen my webinar or watched any of my youtube videos you've probably seen a lot of the more advanced use cases and we often you know will bring on guests and you guys will probably see these like really already kind of built out workspaces and we get a lot of questions from people saying that's nice and all but how do I actually do that so I'm hoping today with your help and with your questions that we can actually build some things from scratch as though you are starting absolutely fresh I'm happy to use some of the examples in my workspace to show you the ways that I build it if that's helpful for you but I would like to kind of start without without templates just so that you guys get a feel for how the tool works I think most of you can hear yes sounds good okay cool we do have a couple questions that popped in already so yeah just a quick bit of housekeeping I will keep an eye on the chat as best I can but if you do have a really specific question or a specific use case make sure to use the ask a question area below and I will do my best to stay on top of the questions there's a few that came in that I can probably start to answer before diving in and building Amir asked what are some of the best automation processes that one can use to have a better notion workflow so I will say that notion doesn't have an API yet it is something that they are working on so there are some limitations I personally feel that the tool is still super powerful way more powerful than when I was actually using things like asana and Evernote with automations so that being said there are lots of shortcuts and things to get familiar with that will help speed up your workflow I do use text expander and Alfred very often so one of the things that I do really really often is pulling in unique icons and so I actually have some shortcuts there where I save all of those icons so I can quickly access them and I'm happy to share that with you so hopefully that helps hey Ernesto so good to see some familiar faces here somebody asked is it possible to somehow integrate notion with todoist either through third party apps or otherwise so I personally I don't use to do us but there was a great response in there someone says that they can embed their todoist on their dashboard page by choosing the embed module and wrote to do as calm as the URL then logged in and then each time you look at your dashboard todoist is there so that is one workaround yes text expander is is my best friend I use it like hundreds of times a day it'll definitely make your workflow really fast Jonathan been great to see you guys in here hopefully we'll have been on in a future episode Jonathan came on in our very first office hours and he showed us his workflow for helping people build curriculum which is amazing so there's just a ridiculous amount of stuff that you can do in notion somebody asked can you import calendar information into notion from Outlook Google Calendar as examples technically yes you can actually embed a Google Calendar as long as it is shared but my gosh it is hideous and I I just don't use it I'm holding out for the API and with regards to the Google integration so I just sort of found some workarounds within my own workspace so hopefully that that is helpful I will if there's any links that we reference throughout this session I will definitely as much as possible try to post them in the sidebar and we will also send out an email afterward that kind of rounds up all of the links and things that we reference so hopefully that will help you out there I did have somebody asked about the para method stuff and I do think it'll be good to go into that a little bit too and Jonathan to you if you notice anybody asking any questions and there's something that you have quick access to and you're willing to post that in the chat that would be awesome super appreciate it okay so I'm just I'm quickly going to go over the para method because I do think most of the way I think about and I build my workspaces that help Mike both their workspaces is based on an adapted version of the para method and I do have this this article open up which I will link to in the chat again I know that we've we've definitely linked to this a few times this is Thiago's article on the para method and we did have some people asking who are a bit confused about how do you define the difference between an area and a resource and so the way that I I think of it as areas are your areas of responsibility they are things that don't really go away they're things that you're always responsible for this might be business it might be product development health is an area of your life and I also think of areas as things that you personally are responsible for whereas resources are things that are a little bit more universal in general and you might access your resources in various areas of your areas if that makes sense so areas I think of as personal areas of responsibility things that are unique to you your hobbies your interest parts of your business and resources are kind of these global almost like research and notes that you're gonna pull in to be able to activate the projects that are active in your world projects have a set defined timeline so projects tend to be made up of more than a couple tasks and so we'll go into a little bit more detail about that I do use notion as my task manager as well some people use an external task management and that's fine I I just find it so valuable to be able to link my tasks to my goals to areas to resources to be able to perform that task and how about all live in one space I find that makes me a lot more productive so that's my personal opinion on para looks like some people want to see the weekly daily monthly quarterly planner all interlinked so we can definitely create some interconnected databases which will be awesome I think that's really notions power is connecting up the databases and we have a couple more specific questions about databases awesome so we can get into that I know people used to duyst as their managers notions more of a checklist manager that's awesome there's so many options for how you can use it so I'd love to hear from you quickly in the sidebar if there's a really specific use case you'd like me to start with I would love to create a task management area I'd love to set up the projects areas resources kind of the way that I would set it up for myself but if there's something really specific that you want to see in that process definitely let me know and I will keep an eye on that somebody asked what is praxis Thiago Forte who was actually coming on next week I'm really excited about he has this community called praxis he talks about building a second brain and productivity and how you think about and store your digital information so that's just a reference to the article that he wrote about the Parra method of organization again I will say that I think Parra is somewhat limited in that it was sort of based on the way Evernote works but the fact that notion can do task management and calendar and all sorts of other things I actually use a much more adapted version of Peres and I can go into that oh the Timeline view a lot of people have asked about that there is a timeline view coming up has not been released yet I cannot wait for that that's like a Gantt chart so you can sort of see multiple tasks on a on a timeline view which will be super handy really excited about that so some of you may not know this I've had a number of people say that they they weren't aware that if you click on the question question mark in the bottom right hand side you can see all the keyboard shortcuts you can get the support guide they really do have a lot of great documentation I do encourage you to check it out again you'll see there's quite a few links here I know it can be pretty overwhelming when you're you're just getting started at the very least I would say learning the keyboard shortcuts will really really help you speed up your workflow you don't need to know all of them of course but there are some pretty standard ones especially when it comes to the formatting I use the probably command option 9 all the time to type out text and quickly turn it into a page so I'll show you that that's just to get to know definitely get familiar with that because you've got some really quick formatting shortcuts and as you're moving data very quickly in notion you're going to want to be familiar with those how do you use a master TAS database to surface common tasks for various longer-term different projects okay great question and I would love to see a health journal so I could track symptoms and view them on a calendar awesome yes notion is definitely overwhelming when you first start so I hear that time and time again people open it up and I think notions greatest strength is also their greatest weakness is it's a blank canvas and you can do almost anything and if you who aren't necessarily a systems thinker or you haven't you're a designer you don't necessarily have some of those structures set up for yourself then it's going to be pretty overwhelming and I think that's another reason why the para method projects areas resources archives can give you a lot of structure to start and I think you can definitely build out and adapt but you got to start somewhere how do you use daily templates especially to create a daily journal so I personally create most of I mean I create my own templates again the templates that they provide are great there's some really great starting points so you can click here go to templates and you can see there's lots of different categories here design templates support templates the process Docs there's some really great stuff already ready to go so we can definitely pull in a couple of these if they're helpful and then I can show you how to actually adapt it for your own needs because sometimes you know pulling this in you might pull it in and parts of it are useful and parts of it or like the tags don't really make sense for my kind of business or whatever and so I can show you how to manipulate the data and move stuff around so you can always pull any of these in at any point if they're helpful for you there's like editorial calendar as content calendars things like that and then you can click here and view the full template gallery so again there's lots there's actually quite a few in here organized by category and again it can be a little overwhelming sometimes people will put them in their account and then they're like well now now what do I do and the data is not really connected and you don't necessarily have a system yet for how are you actually tracking your information or how do you actually set up your projects so I'm going to start from scratch with a couple use cases and then I will check in on the chat and just make sure that I'm keeping on top of what people are asking for global tags that's actually a great question and I am happy to jump into my workspace to give you an example I think I've got one open here okay so this is just a super quick overview of what my space looks like so I have a dashboard an inbox journal tasks calendar projects areas resources archives so you can see this is obviously a slightly adapted version of the para because I will reference these tasks inside of my other projects you can see projects here is a database calendar is a database master tasks is a database this is actually obviously got a ton of tasks in it and the tasks the master tasks database itself is not super useful on its own so I would never just come in here and look into my tasks but what I will do is I will pull that tasks database into a weekly planner and so I can actually see my two dews here in a filtered view so that's that's where you really start to see the power of the master tasks database is once you're pulling those databases into other more useful dashboards so I will go into that in a little bit more detail it's checking the sidebar here okay I'm just going to check the questions here that are coming in okay we covered the auto some of the automation stuff and I'll go into the shortcuts okay how do you quickly capture an idea note or anything of that sort into notion that's a great question I'll get into once we've got the space created so the most important thing for you to know when you're starting to create your notion space that actually it took me a little while to pick up on and it also is something that all of my clients end up asking me you go to create a page and let's say let's start with a projects database I prefer to do this as a database so your options are basically a page or a database if you choose a database you can only have one database if you choose page you can have multiple databases on that page so that distinction is super important to know I personally like doing a gallery for my projects I'd like to be able to add a cover image and properties maybe like status and let's make that a multi-select let's like make that a select so we can say active progress actually in progress is kind of the same so let's say hold maybe cancelled and completed and archived great so now we've got some basic statuses to choose from probably want a date field so let's say this fancy project is something that we're going to do we're going to start it today and we're going to include an end time and let's say that's like a couple weeks project and I want to set a reminder for myself one week before I can include a time if I want don't really need to do that so you can see that this is going to span here now what I will often do is I will embed a task master toss database below I haven't created that yet so I won't do that just yet you can add as many properties as you want here maybe I will add a person property to assign that to me great and then I like to turn on these properties here so you can choose page cover page content I can choose if I want these larger and I like to include some of these status items here and I like to always include an outcome so what will what will make this project a success do you that thing and the nice thing too is with the text field you can actually format that so sometimes I like to get that a yellow background make it stand out and then at a glance I can sort of see these different project properties so hopefully this is making sense and just keep an eye on the chat great I can even duplicate that too if that is easier than starting not but not so fancy project great okay so I've got a super basic two projects here and let's also make a task database I'm a huge fan of the master task database as you probably know set this up as a simple table and I can start adding a bunch of things to do things more things great okay and this is where I can add check box to say done I can drag that too and that you can drag the columns around no problem I like to add a date for the tasks due date or I know at egghead I owe they don't do dates due dates they do check-in dates so that's another way that you can use that so let's say that's today that one's Monday great I can tag these as personal I can tag these as you know productive you can choose whatever you want for your categories sometimes there might be a URL associated with something and I like to just kind of make that an easy quick easy access if I open this up you'll see all those properties are here so this is another easy way to add new properties as well so let's do a relation to our project database that we created so if I create that relation and I click in here you can see there's the fancy project and the not so fancy project that I created so that's that's where you start to see how connecting up these databases starts to get really powerful so if I connect that up I can see that's the project that it's connected to if I jump into fancy project you can actually see that now that task is already pre-populated so it's they kind of get mirrored let's see here right ok I know some people are keeping on top of it in the chat thank you and so I like to rename this too and I just say tasks great and so those are connected up and what I can do also on the project's page is I can show the tasks so you can see that at a glance if I just want to get a really high-level overview of what's happening with my projects I can see any of the tasks that are associated with it right here great let's set up an areas there's there's so many different ways you can do this but I actually like to have the areas be a page which allows me to do things like you know type a call-out is in progress and then what I like to do is create an inline database so this whole page isn't a database but I can create as many databases as I like within this I can import one I can create an inline one so let's do a table in line and this can be a link to all the different areas so let's say I've got health let's say I've got Girl Guides product development rate and it it'll seem really kind of boring and simple at first but the more that you get a feel for it and you start adding emojis and you start adding your tags and things like that it really starts to come together so you'll notice that there's out of you so you can view a database in these five different forms you can do it as a simple table a Kanban board a calendar a list or a gallery and depending on your use case there are some cases where like in a weekly view I like viewing a Kanban board as a weekly view and I can sort of look at things by status I can look at things by day of the week there's a few different ways that we can do that so often with areas I like to do those as a gallery and we'll set up a couple of different views just to show you what those look like let me know if there's any questions that health girl guide so again these are areas of my life these are areas that I'm responsible for some of these will be business-related some of these will be personal you know health for example is that's an area of my life and there might be health health routines you know workout schedules links to interesting classes that I want to take a yoga class things like that anything related to health can live under here and I might have projects in this area that are actually health-related so I might maybe I have a goal of being like get super buff or like loot you know I'm not interested in losing weight but maybe like build a workout routine something like that and maybe that's something that I want to spend the next two weeks I'm gonna get myself two weeks to like establish a consistent routine I think they say three weeks for for a habit right so let's do that okay build a workout routine and as part of that there's going to be tasks involved in that where it's like research effective routines and that's going to get added to the master task database automatically so let's go back to my areas ok so there's nothing much in these so what I like to do with these properties of the gallery is I will sometimes hide the cover image and so I've just got these fun little areas here and you can add icons let's see workout or like muscle there we go here's my there's my of emoji there okay and so what I'm what I often like to do is again use the relational databases so I'm gonna tie this to a project I'm gonna say let's well it's time at projects great and I know that that's my build a workout routine that's a project that those are tied together and let's make sure to rename that project great so you can see how like within certain areas of your life like there might be multiple projects as part of Health like one of them might be you know build meal prep program or template in notion which I've already done but whatever we'll just put that in there just to give you an example and then if I go back to projects you will see that build meal prep template a notion got automatically added here and so you can start to see how these areas are connected so hopefully that makes sense in terms of how those databases are connected and so we've got our master tasks database at the moment which is not going to be super exciting yet until we start to pull it into other areas we've got our projects here and the archives is not super exciting but let's make that and then I like to you can drag and drop you can reorganize these I can make new pages within these you can definitely move data around very easily and quickly I'll just check in the questions that are coming in does that make sense so far okay so I know that some people have asked how do you set up your planner so I'm gonna add to this para method and I'm gonna say let's do a journal cuz I think I think a journaling habit whether it's a daily weekly whether it's business or personal I think is really powerful and I do this as a actually have multiple different views of my journal but let's let's start by setting one up so let's start today with our new and journaling habit I'm gonna set up a date property great and so some people will actually use the date and here that will actually update dynamically I don't I don't like to do that because I like to call items by by typing them in with the relational databases so I just I like to just name it exactly what it is and let's say I often have a bunch of multi-select in there so like I like to track my feelings happy anxious sad confused whatever you can always add those and delete those later I also like to rate my effectiveness so if you do any kind of like 12-week year type things where you're sort of evaluating your productivity or things like that I like doing that personally and so I might say like sometimes it's fun to put an emoji in there let's see here super super effective and I actually put I'll put like stars in they're not effective somewhat effective and so all the things that you want to track is what goes in here right so maybe maybe you like to track did you do that you know work out daily work out did you take your vitamins how can we you check box and again you can always put little emojis in here too and make it more playful and fun I don't really use files in my journal if that's useful for you you can keep them sometimes I like to add tags for whether I ran errands or haircut things like that and order some other properties oh and I will often track my tasks and project focus so again I will pull that and from our master database tasks great and then I can pull so I can say research effective routines that's the task that I'm going to do today so you can start to see how that gets pretty powerful and I like to connect the projects as well and then that way each day I kind of know what my focus is for that day projects cool I like to add a little icon great and so because I'm going to be doing a lot of these different entries what I like to do is create a template so we definitely want to create a journal template and so I always like to pull in an image for the date and so again this is just our template so I'm not actually going to put that in gratitude maybe there's like recap of the day what happened today that was awesome sometimes people like to put their morning routine here and then you might have like Drinkwater five minute meditation whatever you want can go in there and you can probably see I'm using a lot of keyboard shortcuts with the formatting so command option two three one to change up the sizing awesome and so that's a really really simple one mine is a little bit more complex but that way if I want to add a new journal template let's say I had one for yesterday I can say woohoo happy yesterday I took my vitamins and I did that thing and then I add my image I often just drag my images right in it's super easy hopefully that's loading in you guys probably can't see what I'm doing on my screen here but strike a picture of mochi in there there we go and then oh and also simple thing on the template I can adjust the icon here so that it will always have the same icon so if I open up on the tenth I think I made this before I added the icon okay great and so what I like to do is create a couple different views so a visual visual diary and I like the gallery view of that and then there you can see there's beautiful mochi and sometimes I like to you know show my feelings show my tasks did I do the vitamins workout that sort of thing and then if you you know like to track your habits and routines on a daily basis then I will often do like a progress tracker of sorts and that will be more of a table view and then you might don't need to show the date twice so I would probably drag this up and then that way you could like start to see your effectiveness over time and maybe I'll just jump in very quickly to my journal to show you what that looks like so I've got my visual diary here I can show my effectiveness my feelings and then I've also got like progress so oh no October 7th I didn't put my words and love to retro actively do that but you can see it over time as I'm tracking my priority I am even tracking my reading then I can start to do a reading list and so if I click on reading you can see over time and this is filtered by any anything that has reading of not empty will do this and so if I open up this maybe to show you what this looks like you can see I'm linking to a reading database I'm linking to my tasks database week database etc so that's just to kind of give you a sense of how you can start tying that information together I'm just going to check to see if there's any questions I've come in as part of that is that is that pretty helpful to see how that database cool okay so that's an example of the journal is now connected to the projects it's now connected to the tasks let's also create a maybe a fun dashboard so for example you may not want to just click it like you know the projects view on its own it's not necessarily helpful the journal view on its own is not necessarily helpful so what I do is I've got this weekly database so let me click on that to show you what that looks like so I create a dashboard and then I've got this weekly database if you will and that way I can track all the most important things I can track my outcomes my project focus and you can see that it's connected to a lot of different pieces so I track my you know quarterly outcomes tasks reading all of that good stuff so let's also make sure we create a resources archive because we had a few questions about how do you actually quickly save things into notion so again I like to choose there's so many ways you can you can do this but I like to choose a page as my resources because I do find I have a couple of different databases so I just hit enter and I would say reading I have a reading and listening database and I hit command option 9 to turn that into a page and then maybe you have a swipe file I like to save examples of cool things I see on the internet and beautiful sales pages and things like that so I save that into a swipe file and so I jump in to the reading and listening and let's create if you if you watch the you know building a second brain you'll know that the reading and listening or the notes database is really one of the more powerful uses for an ocean so we've got nametags files yeah okay I like to add a URL great and this will be this will be super basic to start but what we'll do is let's go let's say I want to save this awesome article about the Parra method I'm gonna have to see how this works because I have a couple of different workspaces so you've got the notion clipper make sure to download that I use that on my phone all the time even if I'm if I'm on Instagram and there's a really beautiful image or a note or something that I want to save I will say that right from my phone to notion and that's pretty straightforward okay so let's use the clipper and you can see it saves the title and I don't want to save that to my clients workspace I want to save that to my workspace and I don't want to say about to Journal I want to save that to my reading sometimes you may have to type the the database if it doesn't pull up automatically once you've saved to the database in the browser it tends to remember and it becomes a lot easier to do that so save the page open that in ocean so you can see it save the URL automatically save the title and then you can see it's actually populating there you go so it pulls in all those images and all those things and so what I like to do is also add a summary old past Marie would have just been hoarding digital resources and saving them for just in case one day I might need these which is not super helpful and so these days I actually try to summarize it and say you know para projects areas whatever and I would actually create a little summary in there for myself which makes it a lot easier to remember your stuff great so there's my summary of this awesome article so that's really high level how to save things into your database so you can see the icon changes up when when you're actually using that database so is that helpful a digital resource hoarder yeah I think a lot of us tend to do a lot of that resource hoarding okay rod said we can't see how the Clipper worked when you were selecting oh okay um mm so when you when you click on the Evernote on the Evernote on the notion clipper it just automatically pulls the name into the field and you just have to choose you have to choose where you want to send it and you have to make sure that you're sending it to the right place obviously so don't when you're clipping something I would not send that into resources because that would just put it as a file right here which I don't want I actually wanted that to go right into the database so I just had to make sure that I was selecting the reading and learning database so that it would go right there so you can see there's some empty fields there that we don't need now I often also will create some templates for this let me just jump into myspace as well so I can show you so for example I have this notes database master notes and there's a lot of properties in here and I think I have okay so I have a couple of different templates here so what works is a community that I'm active in and so sometimes I like to save if there's a really great post in there I will save that in there and that kind of automatically saves that with that selected with the icon that goes with that and so any time you're saving something from somewhere kind of over and over again sometimes I find it more helpful to actually save in this fashion so I might click new YouTube and you can see the icon is already ready to go sources YouTube and it's like it's a little bit of a shortcut but it just kind of makes it easier to to save things in a format that you might use over and over again so hopefully that's helpful okay let me I'm going to check in on the questions so we covered how to quickly capture ideas notion to do is we covered okay I will go into a little bit more detail about how I do this weekly planning situation because honestly the weekly planner is pretty much where I spend almost all of my time I find that to be the most useful so we'll go into that yes this is being recorded you can always check out any of the past office hours anytime okay some had a pair a question okay using para when should something be a project versus an area I would say areas do not have a defined timeline projects always have a fixed start and end date there's an intention for them to be finished at some point whereas areas are kind of things that you're always almost always responsible for like I volunteer for Girl Guides that's a that's an area of my life there's probably lots of projects and things to do and tasks within that area but that's not like a thing that has an end date so that's kind of an easier way I think to think about it is just area is like a personal area of responsibility projects are defined in scope they have tasks associated with them there's kind of like a nice clean deadline there will be an end to them there is an outcome at some point and hopefully hopefully that makes sense if I want to have a daily Duns list but have certain entries feed into a larger table yes okay is there an easy way to do that a daily Duns list okay yes so really that the task management is kind of where where a lot of the magic happens okay let me close this close some of mine okay so yeah let's make a custom dashboard because on its own these will aren't necessarily super exciting to look at or super useful but let's say we make a dashboard and you want to see what your daily tasks are so what I like to do is embed if I start by hitting slash and type in CR it starts to pull up your options create links database I want to pull in our tasks great so you can see there's that tasks database you'll see this scrolling bar here anytime I am embedding databases in a page I like to go to the top and say full width and that kind of opens things up a little bit and a lot easier to to work with the data so I tend to like things in a certain order here done checkbox on the Left Files I don't often use files I don't necessarily need to see the journal relations right there even tags are not necessarily always helpful but one thing I do like to do daily to do things I'm just going to mimic this daily done thing that that you were asking about so one thing you may want to consider doing is having a day and so Monday Tuesday setting up one of these for every day of the week you can also add emojis to those if you are so inclined and sometimes I'll actually add a some day to this okay so let's say I'm gonna out of you here canva and view can sometimes be helpful so soive tasks by day and what I can do is say I know that I want to do that on Tuesday this is definitely gonna happen on Wednesday Monday okay and so you'll notice that if I drag this into Monday and I open this up that now has the property of Monday automatically so it automatically will update that grouping and I can also hide this if I want and I can choose how much space these take up so maybe I just want the card size to be small and maybe I don't want to show the done that isn't really helpful in fact what I what I like to do is add a filter here so I only want to see things that are not done so done is either not checked and that way if I do one of these things a market is done that disappears and I can stir to see what's what's coming up this week if that's helpful okay so daily Duns lists I know somebody mentioned also if they could actually see the same list in a list view and a Kanban board view so one thing you can do here you can actually copy the link to that database paste it and create links database again so then that's copied and ready to go and in this case so let's leave this one as a list view and we can filter this one differently so let's say I only want to see the personal things in this list or let's say we don't want to you could actually say done is checked and date is today or something like that if you just wanted to be like my punch list of things that I did today or you could say you know day is Monday and this could just be like Monday list and so these are the exact same databases but they're just filtered views right so you can see the same thing in a couple different ways and even hi different categories so like let's say I want to hide that hide this you can also hide that by opening up the properties here and just hiding all of it there you there's just a super simple list so there's a number of ways you can actually work with the same database in the same place and then on the dashboard too I like to pull up my projects so I like to see like what's active you know just kind of at a glance there we go and I I like to do the projects as a gallery you can also do that as a list view that might be helpful and so that kind of you know shrinks and simplifies things and then you could sort that I like to sort it so that the active stuff the status so those are sorted by status hopefully that's helpful awesome fancy I'll be watching this one over and over okay cool I know some times two I can be kind of going quickly and doing a lot of shortcuts so if there's anything that comes up you're like wait a second what's happening there but you can see that you can embed as many databases as you want and you can make the views work the way that you want so if this isn't helpful to you like maybe maybe this is my work week dashboard and I actually don't want to see the stuff that's on Saturday and Sunday let's hide that and I can also hot you know hide the some day and then I could actually have a some day area at the bottom too that maybe just shows me some day projects just shows me some day tasks you can really embed whatever you want I could even embed the reading list you know just show me all my reading and learning from the last week show me a top-level view of my journal and I like that gallery view because I like to see pretty pictures of my dog there you go and so then you can sort of see your you know visual diary if you will and I make those small and again you can choose to show information or not you can I think you can even hide the name so you can just you know show a picture that represents the day or the week which i think is kind of fun to make your space a little bit more visual someone said no they've tried following up in notion parallel on a screen yeah I mean you can always go back and look at this video and see what we did stuck with the read-only view yeah like the calendar integration is is not great and so I have my own way of dealing with you know time-sensitive items people did ask about recurring tasks as well I mean anything that's time-sensitive meetings things like that I rely on my calendar for that of course I have dates and things associated with my tasks here but yeah the Google Calendar integration is not quite there yet okay I'm going to say so these are these are my tasks ok so again this dashboard can look however you want it can have you know cover images and it got this unsplash diary team so you're more than welcome to switch that up and have some fun with it and so the other thing I like to do on my dashboard is create quarterly quarterly goals so a weekly a weekly planner oh I need to create a inline database weekly and what I like to do is we make sure that there's a unteach property in here either week and so let's say that's from the 14th to the 20th great and this is where you know I like to add those effectiveness the words all about good stuff anything that you need to track on a weekly basis again habits did you do that thing that week did I post that YouTube video did I do an office hour is any of that you can track in whatever way is gonna make the most sense for you you'll see everyone's workspace looks so different because our brains are so different but yeah let's be like vitamins whatever or like workout meditation any of that stuff you can track in there and then of course I like to connect the databases so I like to know what was my focus for the week of October 14th to 20th so let's look at my projects awesome and let's say my fancy project and my meal prep template that's my project focus this week and and what I like to do of course is create a template and some of you might have seen my weekly template before it was part of my weekly before it was part of a database so I'm going to show you how I recreate my weekly agenda so at the top I like to have let's make sure that this is correct tasks I'm gonna relate that to my tasks database again great and I like to have a date that is separate from my tasks so I'm gonna just very quickly show you how I do this and so to move things around you click and drag and you just have to drag it to the right hand side to create columns you will not believe how long it took me to figure that out Bera Singh amount of time and there so then you've got your columns and I also like to format these you know make them bigger whatever and I usually will create templates for this so you can you'll notice there's a template button here and so add a new work event and I like to color code things so that work events have a pink background and then that way it matches up with my Google Calendar and then I'll say like 9:00 a.m. with okay and when I close that so this becomes a template let's say I need to add a new work event I drag that in I can say Wednesday I've got that other meeting and of course I go in so I'll do this every Friday afternoon or Sunday evening and I'll just say like go through edit those up and and then similarly I'll make a template button for personal and now obviously and this is the template so I I shouldn't actually add those yet but that's just to give you a sense of those little automations where when you doing something over and over again I also do this for projects so if there's certain project types that you do over and over again and then you want to nest specific tasks tasks underneath that people who run podcasts and they have like multiple tasks things that you always know that you're going to need to do every time I always make a project template for that so I like to have this at a glance weekly view and then sometimes I'll have like quick notes you know take up garbage things like that and these are kind of set I kind of keep these separate from my tasks which tend to be a little bit more business-related and again I sometimes might do this as a Kanban view and then you can see it's already grouped by day so the can bend view does it needs a property like a drop-down selector or a selector to be able to do that that auto sorting and let's shrink it so that it's small I'm on my my laptop so I on my big screen I kind of have it so that they're medium and they're they're sort of matched up here but I like to hide I like to hide the weekend because I like to I again kind of use this as my business business thing I hide the some day I just want this to be super focused let's make that medium maybe so that they sort of closely aligned and then these are like my project tasks and these might just be quick notes or send that email I could do these as tasks here and I can actually drag these over here as well but I I kind of like to separate out my my meetings up here and so meetings and obligations tend to go up here and then I've got my you know meaty tasks that I need to do are below hopefully that makes sense so how do you get to you can get to almost any function by hitting the slash command and you'll see you've got all these different options here if you start typing anything like if I start hitting Tem you can see template button appears so it once you get kind of comfortable and familiar with that any time you hit the slash you're going to start to notice you've got all these different options and just by quickly typing you can get those options yes blog publishing calendar it's great for podcast planning for editorial calendars you name it there's so many options there wow we have a lot of questions coming in that I haven't gotten to let's do it let's take a look okay I haven't fully finished this daily weekly monthly quarterly thing yet okay so let me let me quickly wrap this up okay so one thing that I I do like to do is I link this to my quarterly goals those aren't ready yet so that that database isn't quite ready yet but let me show you by going back to the dashboard okay so as you'll see here I'm gonna hide some of these properties but if I want to make a new week I've got that template which I didn't name and that opens up here and you can see that all that's kind of ready to go I open that as a page and I'll have to make sure one thing you have to make sure is that whatever view you want to be your default it has to be at the top and then that will show up in the Kanban view so there we go I have another week ready to go that let's make that for the there we go and so similarly to how I have this weekly view I will actually make a quarterly view it's not a database I like to make that gallery quarterly and let's say this is q1 great and so what I want to do is link that up to I want that to be a relation and I'm gonna link that to the weekly database so you notice I can pull the weekly database even though it's an inline database and so let's say I'm gonna pull in weeks and this just allows me to very quickly when I'm in this week you can see it's related to q1 and these days I don't do this kind of the same linking I like to link to the actual objective itself so that every time I'm in my weekly view let me go back to my my notion space so when I'm in my weekly view I can again see what are the outcomes for that so if I if I jump to that you can actually see this as my a part of my big initiatives and so again there's a lot of interrelated databases and things like that so in the past I used to link to q4 but that doesn't really tell me a lot so now I can very quickly at a glance see what my focus is for the week right I can see all those outcomes that are the most important thing for that week well my project focus is and that really helps me keep focused and I know what my bigger goals are not just getting caught in the weeds of the day-to-day so that's kind of what we're doing with this linking up the journal you know there'll be seven entries every week so I can see all of the the journal entries and I can jump to them very quickly I can jump to the month so I do that you know weekly monthly quarterly journaling and all of those are kind of interconnected and then similarly the resources and reading and listening is connected to a lot of those different databases as well so if I open that up I can see those are the days that I was reading that book I can see related notes I can see which week that was my focus and it's all connected and I can again jump right back into that week and I can see what was going on that week and I find that really helpful things aren't as buried it does take some time to kind of get your dashboard assembled and things organized but I hope that helps give you a sense of kind of how to work with databases how to work with pages how to interconnect that data a little bit better yeah okay Omar I will say it it took me a while it definitely took me a number of times reading Pera for it to really sink in and I tried it I resist it I don't know if this makes sense it did take me a while and once it clicked everything started to make a lot more sense and again I think you got to take what works and leave the rest so to me it didn't make sense to put everything only in projects areas resources archive because a journal like sure I could put that in areas I could put that as it's not a project it could be a resource to me that didn't really make sense with the way that my brain works so I just adapted it and I've got my own calendar I've got my own journal and tasks and again because notion can manage tasks it's really powerful I'm just going to use that as a top-level item and that makes sense in my brain so don't you know don't hesitate to take what works and adapt it for your own projects and needs there's so much more we can do with this I know that in some ways we're only just scratching the surface I'm going to take a look at yes been made a really great point I think notion is actually way better for implementing para than Evernote and I actually think the Paris structure is a little bit limited because Evernote doesn't manage tasks and I think in some ways you're trying to force information into a structure but with notion there's almost no limitations on the way that you're able to connect this data so it actually opens up a lot more options and you can be referencing a single resource in a task in a in a project in a database like you can reference one piece of information in so many different places without it having to live in a notebook where you're like ah is this under this category or this category and it like your brain has to work too hard to categorize things so in notion you don't even necessarily need to categorize a resource but you can pull that resource as needed when you need it and that's the magic of it are there any other questions feel free to type them in the sidebar I know there's a lot in the question/answer area that I didn't get to so if there's any kind of quick questions or if anybody even wants to come up and workshop something in their space I'd be happy to chat about that yes Kevin I do have I do have a few you two videos on that I have one specifically on relational databases I have a couple different ones let's see master tasks database relational databases I will post I will post that in the sidebar yes relational databases kind of blew my mind when I first discovered them and I feel like they are kind of the key to that top level like I've said this before but I really think the biggest benefit for me of notion is being able to surface the information that you need when you need it so in a weekly view I can see what my big goals are you know when I'm in a project I know what pieces of that project need to get done things aren't living in different places it does take time to build the system in the way that your workflow and your brain works but once you've built it it's really easy to maintain so hopefully hopefully that helps Ben has an amazing setup too so I'm hoping that Ben at some point in the future you'll be willing to come on and we can talk a little bit more about even like your review cycles and things like that I do consulting on this too and I help teams also integrate this into their workspaces so that is something that I'm happy to chat about if that's of interest can people share their custom templates with another person yes they can I have tons of templates - if you go to notion Murray Poole ENCOM I'll put that in the sidebar yes if you want some more templates I'm always working on these so if that's that's helpful for you please check those out and so yeah you can always share your templates with other people sometimes it can be I find it a little tricky to share the ones that have interconnected databases because it means I have to clear I have to duplicate and clear out personal data and things like that but still make sure all the connections are maintained so but absolutely you can share if you like something that your friend is done and they're willing to share it with you there's a little option in the top right share and so I can say public access is enabled and I can in fact why don't I copy I'll copy this page link now if these other databases aren't shared i think you'll only just see a blank database so i'll share that in there just for just for fun if that's useful someone asked a really great question about a tags database i will say that i think this goes into a little bit more of an advanced to use case but i will elaborate on something that i do now have a master tags database that i'm experimenting with this a little bit i want to see if this is the best way to do it so you'll notice I've got these tags here so instead of let's say let me I'll go to one of my resources here and open up one of these okay so so you'll see I've actually got tags here positioning and then I've got tags here and so what I'm experimenting with is is a master tasks database the best way to handle this and then that way I can actually see all of the interconnections for a single entry so if I'm looking at copywriting then I can see all of the notes that are related to copywriting and if you just did that as a drop down tag you wouldn't have that functionality and this allows me to save any swipe reading calendar entries anything that's related to copywriting I can see that all in one go so that is something that I'm experimenting with I want to see if that's you can see there's only a couple entries in some of these so I'm still experimenting with that I think I am I think I'm gonna like that some of my pages you'll notice like do you have a lot of entries but I just I find the benefit is that I can just quickly jump into any of those super quickly and I can see you know mindfulness technology some things have more notes than other things but I try to always give it a summary and I'm at the very least give it a tag here so hopefully that helps miss our website for Ikon I mean you can you can do any icons with notion you can upload any URL any JPEG the noun project is a good one yep so there's definitely lots of options sue asked was areas just a page you set up miss this yes absolutely areas is just a page I just clicked new workspace called it areas there you go and again I can say maybe I want to drag this into here if I click on areas you'll see there's that page so again you can have pages within pages databases within pages you can do all sorts of stuff okay is it possible to have multiple tasks from master database linked to a single page yeah I think you think that was already answered how do you move items from swipe file into resources category okay great question one of my favorite things about notion is the ability to move data around to different databases so at any point I can open up this thing and I can say actually this isn't a task this is more like a resource I can hit command shift P or click here move to so command I use command shift P all the time all the time if I want to move something to a page if I want to move a page to a database you can literally move any piece of data into any other area by hitting command shift P so let's let's say move this thing so I'm in the tasks database but I really want this to be moved into the resources area I hit command shift P and I will move that to my reading reading and listening and you can see the properties change right because those are the properties that we have in not database and so if I open this as page I can see that that is now in there so very very easy and like let's say I changed my mind I'm like I know I want to move that back to the tasks database I can do that too and you will see you will see that those properties have been restored so that is definitely an awesome feature that I use all the time yeah so more people are asking about the Parra method adaptation I did do an office hours on that you can definitely watch older episodes we talked a little bit about that with the building a second brain I can go into more detail in a future YouTube video if that is helpful but I think we did cover a good chunk of the para stuff today so I want to go too far into that definitely read that article and we will definitely send out any of the links resources and things that we send people or that we mentioned during this episode happy to stay a little later if it's helpful for people I know there's still 83 people on which is awesome can you show all your workspace tree is how you select scopes and instances that might be a question for another day that is something that I'm working on to show as a map so people can see where all those interconnection touch points are Kenosha open application from its native app when you say a word document it asks you to when you save a Word document asks you to download you can't open it on the page yeah I think I think that makes sense you know I don't think notion is going to be able to open a different app inside of it but but yes I think if you if you're in notion then you open if you click you know open a word file that should actually open the word file and it's in whatever the native application is I believe yeah don't quote me on that but I'm pretty sure when you're working with the notion desktop app if you click on a specific file type it open in that application great question Brian asked notion seems ideal for personal knowledge management but there are parts where it's still more challenging to use as a task manager that's a great great question we actually do have an office hours coming up on October 25th and a friend of mine Jason Resnick is going to come on because we actually have very very similar setups and we both use it to manage all of our client projects so we are going to go into more detail about how to do that from a project management standpoint and task management standpoint on the business side of things so if that is interesting to you definitely stick around for that because honestly I feel like I'm much more on top of things with this new system that I ever was with asana and again I think part of that is just being able to make yourself the dashboards that you need and surfacing the information that you need to see so it doesn't get lost so there is definitely a bit of a learning curve for sure getting that ready for managing clients how you share spaces which spaces to share the biggest piece being managing your own internal master tasks database while also having a test database for clients and so there's a few different ways to do that it's pretty yeah yeah Jason Resnick he's got I really like the way he has his set up to you and we again have very very similar set up so I think it will be helpful not necessarily for people who are in you know web development web designed that sort of thing but it should be helpful I think for people who do any kind of consulting and need to manage multiple projects in the same space hopefully that's helpful are there consultants I can hire to work with me to get going on this yes I know Jonathan does consulting I think Ben does consulting I do consulting there's lots of us Maria as well who is also on office hours there are a number of us who do this with people if that's something that you need help with can you create a template that automates another template um you yeah it would be good to get a better sense of what you're trying to do but you can do some pretty amazing template inception and so you could have templates that have template buttons and things like that inside of them there's kind of a unique use case that we're doing with egghead where they create a new project but that project actually has maybe three projects within it and that's something that they do every time so we have a template that actually has an embedded database it's like the parent database has an embedded version of itself inside of it and then that's filtered it's it's kind of hard to explain without probably showing you but we'll definitely do future office hours on this because you know today we're kind of covering from scratch and building things and getting familiar with it but there's so much you can do to kind of take it to the next level and do some of those templating and automations and things like that so hopefully we can cover that in future office hours yeah okay somebody already linked to the Parra article how to edit Mochis inside of a text field awesome Jonathan thank you so much for staying on top of answering some of those questions so yeah you can add an emoji plug-in with your browser you can there's keyboard shortcuts to do that as well yeah so hopefully hopefully that covers the majority of questions that people had I think I've covered some of these are kind of bigger deeper questions it might require a whole other office hours but you know I do have a few YouTube videos I go over different ways that I'm using it personally there's lots of great templates here again you can always click on that question mark in the top right corner there's a Facebook community there's lots of people making YouTube videos and fancy you did ask about the really building out that quarterly weekly planner I do have a sample template of that that I could send you it's it's kind of a stripped-down version of what I use I would be happy to send that to you if you I think I've already got your email so I can send that to you yeah otherwise I think we can probably wrap it up for today I hope that's helpful in getting you started I know this is it's a bit more of a beginner office hours we do have some pretty advanced ones coming up we have yeah shoot me an email or sign up notion Marie Poole ENCOM sign up for the list and I know fancy she replied to my email and I can definitely send you again it's like a work in progress it's not perfect it doesn't have all the fields that I have but at least it'll kind of get you started and so yeah upcoming we have Thiago 14 next week he's going to be talking about his blogging workflow and ocean we've got Jason Resnick coming up October 25th and we're going to go into client and project management I think that one's going to be pretty exciting because we get a lot of questions about how to how to manage it for business and we also have a couple other ones coming up I know Tara McMullen is she's gonna be coming covering her editorial workflow and how they do set up their editorial calendar it's it's a thing of beauty I'm really excited to chat with them about that so hopefully this at least gets you started there's plenty of content for you to binge watch and we will follow up and send you guys some more links anything that was mentioned here any of the links references reading and a couple templates that might be helpful this is this is recorded so if you visit the same URL again the crowd Castillo slash notion from scratch you'll be able to rewatch the video at any point so hopefully that was helpful thanks for joining me on this Friday morning and Jonathan Ben thank you so much for answering the questions as we went along that was super helpful definitely shoot me an email hello at Murray pool ENCOM I'll send you the planners that I have available thank you everyone and we will see you next week thanks everyone [Music]

Channel: Notion

Views: 111,074

Rating: 4.9169717 out of 5

Keywords: notion, project management, daily journal, task management, wiki

Id: x1I3Hic0urY

Length: 75min 17sec (4517 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019