Notion Office Hours: Contextual Dashboards 🧭

good morning Oh your first live office hours welcome can you hear me okay welcome welcome I know if you can hear me oh yeah a couple couple newbies yeah good morning cool so we've got a really interesting mix of beginner and intermediate today hopefully this is not too overwhelming for the beginners it might might be a little bit loud and clear perfect yeah let me know where you're coming in from and there is a poll below too so I'd love to hear from you what your experience level is with notion and also what context you're most interested in hearing about today I have a number of different context within MySpace I'm happy to show you but I want to make sure that this session is useful for you so definitely let me know below we have a lot of people interested in learning and studies planning is a big one I think not too many people on the team and work side but we can discuss that if there's enough people interested in that Boston Sweden Dallas very cool a lot of familiar faces or little emojis icons are very cool so if you've never been to an office hours before they're pretty interactive sessions they're pretty casual I basically either show you a tutorial sort of within MySpace or we bring on other people who are using notion and interesting ways today it's going to be a little bit more tour behind the scenes and a little bit of how-to I think building custom dashboards in notion is such a powerful a powerful way to become more productive if you're mindful about how you design your space so I want to show you what's been working for me and then maybe we can co-create a couple examples together a lot of Canadian people from everywhere amazing some of you must be pretty late at night for you yes how to help will help you Serena cool so a lot of people interested in the planning use case which is not really a surprise very cool and so if you do have a question use the ask a question area below so that it doesn't get lost I do my best to kind of keep an eye on the chat but when I'm doing a bit of a screen share sometimes it can be hard to catch those questions especially if there's a lot great 10:00 a.m. welcome everyone so this is this is fun okay so we're gonna dive in and I'm going to show you a couple spots around MySpace and sort of the things that I'm thinking through in the context that I'm designing with and again I really want to hear back from you so if you want to see something in more detail or you want to know kind of how I did something or how you might approach something feel free to put that in the chat and then we're gonna dive in it's gonna zoom in on my screen here so some of you might have seen my murray HQ basically it's my my dashboard before and i get asked a lot of questions from people they say where can I get this template how can i download this the tricky thing is you can't really download this because it basically embeds so many of my other dashboards which of course are tailored to my own needs I do provide variations of this template in smaller ways but really it's not exactly something that you can share but it's super easy to build if you have your core databases kind of ready to go so some of you have seen I use the param every the para method and that's the projects areas resources archives by Thiago Forte he talks a lot about that I can share a link to that after the session I take a lot of liberties with it and I think also para is great for organizing information and documents but notion I think is so much more than just information storage I think it's a place where we can do a lot of thinking take action to be more mindful intentional to pull up what we're learning and reading to reflect on it so there's a lot of opportunity with kind of how we're using the information that we're collecting I know I've talked a little bit about this before that I used to be a bit of an information hoarder and Evernote was basically the place where all of the information I could ever possibly consume would go to die and I was clipping everything into my Evernote clipper often it either didn't get resurfaced or I'd have to search for something specifically and so it just I was really activating that information and I find with notion you can choose to show the information that you want to see in whatever way you want to see it again you can embed multiple databases on a page and really filter them only to show what you want to see and that's what I think makes notion so much more powerful than a lot of other software out there just works with my brain I know we've got a couple questions that are popping up but I'll probably go through a little bit of a tour first and then I'm going to drop in and answer some of those questions there's been some good ones they can came in Nate you asked a really great one about busy work and I'm going to cut it off when you're playing in your notions space so great info hoarder yes I think a lot of people can probably relate to that ok cool so this is my memory HQ and I will say that Murray HQ is something that I've been using for probably the last eight months or so but only recently I started I mean really this is the power of notion is noticing your behavior and noticing where there's friction in your workspace and designing just enough for the use cases that you need so I know that there are times when I need to focus there's times where I'm in a learning mindset and I want to go through that content that I've been consuming and the courses that I'm consuming I also know that creating content is a context that I often have to do and I just had a big editorial calendar before and it was it was almost like looking at a blank page so here's a calendar showing me all the things I've produced in the past but in terms of creating new content or creating new videos I need a place where I can pull all of the emails that people send me with questions questions that come in from office hours I need to a place to kind of pull in that inspiration so that creating that content is a lot easier planning obviously is one that a lot of people can relate to alignment I really liked August Bradley's session his office hours a couple weeks back where he had like the alignment zone and so that's a place where you can go back and look at what are my bigger goals what are the things that matter to me what makes me happy Connect is one that I'm still experimenting with we'll go into that and grow of course it's a not personal development that's my gardening growth so I'm gonna dive into a couple of these to show you so Marie HKIA was the place I used to spend the most of my time but now I'm experimenting with getting a little bit more focused and creating contextual dashboards so this is sort of a catch-all dashboard that's got my goals here and again I can actually see you know if I open up any of these I can look at and see what are my next actions for that there's a target and current and a formula there and I'll definitely share any links and resources to things that relate to these templates as well there's a really great okrs template like Alex Sherwood that I'll share with you in the chat so great just created a focus dashboard but the other sound amazing awesome okay so I've got my goals here I can also scroll down and see what are my goals this quarter and so what I'm doing is just embedding my monthly database here and then I'm just filtering it just to show the goals and outcomes to so I can again I can see my my goals up here but I can also see that information in different ways that are going to be helpful to me I also sometimes like looking at things at a quarterly basis so what's my theme that quarter what are the goals what are the outcomes that support that what's the content that I'm creating that also supports that so again you can just ship you can choose to show the information that you want to see this might not be helpful for you if you don't necessarily do quarterly planning my journal which I do in my weekly agenda so I found that I just wasn't really using my journal here because I typically do that in my weekly agenda my project so these are sort of filtered by me personally otherwise if I just go into the projects area in my workspace that's like a catch-all of all of our team projects which is not necessarily helpful I want to see the ones that on I'm sort of focusing on right now notes and ideas and these are filter to show anything that hasn't been given a summary so that usually means something that hasn't been that has been added in the last week or so that I haven't really given any additional context to these questions are from tiago forte is building a second brain what are twelve questions that sort of I want to explore my life that can be prompts for creating content and that sort of thing and my knowledge hub so you can see there's a lot of different contexts happening here I've got my learning I've got like questions I've got a lot of different pieces that it's not actually necessarily super helpful to see all of this in one space and so what I realized was again especially after watching this session with algis Bradley I really saw how there were almost zones right or deep work or focus there's different context in which we work so instead of trying to put my planning and my knowledge capture and everything in one place I decided to break it down into these themes so let's jump into one and I'm just gonna take a quick peek at the chat to see what what's coming in there a workspace is so interconnected it doesn't really have areas yep focus dashboard is going to be I think pretty key for folks so Serena asked are all of these sections being pulled from master databases stored elsewhere yes so I'll give you like a very quick rundown of my space similar to again the the para method I've got projects that's a database areas and areas is basically a page with lots of pages and databases inside of it and I also contain all of our household and business areas in the same place yours might be very different if if you're working solo maybe you don't have a team you might not need to do this sort of thing but these are essentially all of my areas we're resources this one changes up how I store it changes up a fair bit but honestly these are some of the core databases I think that every space needs I love a master tag database knowledge hub is key that's a place to clip all of the things that you're consuming and learning some people like to separate this out by studies like courses that they're taking maybe in a separate place and things that they're reading I actually did that in the beginning and I found it was getting a little bit unwieldy so I actually have consolidated everything that I'm consuming and for information I'm consuming all those in the knowledge of notes and ideas that can basic dump passing thoughts things I'm thinking an idea that they want to pursue that hasn't really been activated yet it's necessarily a project but it's something that I'm thinking about that I want to eventually translate into a next step so that's a bit of a catch-all inspiration database pretty self self-explanatory and that might be different for you for me this is more business context so sales pages online courses other things that people are producing beautiful design examples that sort of thing swipe file is more text-based examples assets words and wisdom these are quotes that I collect that often helps support blog posts that I'm writing or you know posting on Instagram and that sort of thing so I can you know click on any one of these and I can see it's connected to the knowledge hub it's connected to the tags it's connected to the person so I don't have to jump around pretty much everything I need is kind of tucked away in these one little entries so those are those are the core databases that I think most spaces can benefit from especially some kind of notes and ideas and a knowledge hub for sure I think those are two of the key ones projects and then your master task database and so you'll notice a lot of the things in my knowledge hub are connected to every other item in my databases so let's say I open up one of these the houseplant master class so that's of course that I bought I can see it's in progress here's the person who created the course this is what it's tagged with the cost of it it's but I can relate that if I'm taking the course and I get some an idea or a quote that I want to remember I can type that in right here in this space without having to click around or leave anywhere so so that's that's kind of an overview of the core databases and those are the ones that I then begin to pull into other parts of my space and similarly like jump into murray HQ again so plan is where I keep a lot of those planning related databases so again I'm a big planner I like to plan and so I do have you know my goals my outcomes yearly weekly monthly all of that stuff you can reinvent these databases in multiple places anywhere else in your space and so I encourage people to get creative and figure out what are the cons in which you want to operate and what do you want more of in your life do you want more creativity do you want to follow through on your reading more what is it that you want more of design a dashboard with that in mind I'm just gonna check in on the chat here right yes okay so that's a great question that came through about the area's being pages versus databases so I when I started maybe a year ago year and a half ago my areas was a database and all of these would have been database entries what I found is there's so many different context here and I'm tracking different things in those areas to me it wasn't actually helping me it wasn't useful to have that as a database it was basically becoming database inception where you know in home-and-garden I have a plant plant inventory I have like a seed garden inventory a journal all of those things are databases and so it was getting a bit complex to have databases inside of databases and it was too much so I actually find most of these could actually be a contextual dashboard so home-and-garden could actually be a dashboard of sorts that actually pulls in any related resources any related goals any related projects and next actions all in one place so it's a great distinction how did you get the layup to go wide like that okay so super simple tip in the top right hand side of every page you can go full width I use that quite a bit especially if you're going to be using columns full width is your friend cool how do you close or click out of a page or a screen I know silly question so if you click on an entry in the entry in your database you can just click outside of that entry and it closes automatically um that's another thing I like about having databases embedded inside a page like this so if I'm in a learning mode I can open this up and I'm not I'm not actually in a new page so I can still jump around I can I could click on Trina's name I could go down a rabbit hole right here and never leave this page and then clicking out and I'm right back where I meant to be I find with a lot of other tools or technology you're you're having to kind of click and then find your way back and then you're kind of out of the original context so I like that I never actually have to leave the original page or dashboard and I find personally that keeps me from getting a little too distracted so hopefully that helps cool ok so the difference between dashboards pages and databases so to me I just see - dashboard is a page it's always a page but a page allows you to have as many in-line databases as you want so here's an example of my learning dashboard this is like my learning context and what I've done here is I've embedded my knowledge hub so you saw that was a basically a master database lives in my resources area but I want to surface the information that's most important because if I if I just go to my knowledge hub I think you saw that that's like a pretty this is a huge database it's got articles courses resources you name it and it can take a while for all of this to load there's a lot happening in there that's not necessarily super helpful for me to look at this giant list and it's also not necessarily very inspiring but by going and creating a learn dashboard I can see what are the courses that are active right now because they align with projects that I'm working on or goals that I have right so I'm working on understanding YouTube and YouTube video strategies so I've got a course here that I'm taking I'm in a mastermind with Meghan mins I've got empowered CEO here so everything that I'm taking and studying right here goes into active courses and so this is filtered by online courses that are in progress and again this is personal preference like you might want to show this in a different way you might want to see different things maybe you want to see next actions underneath there so I think I have a property here I have to see if this is connected to my actions here right so so I know that's part of empowered CEO that my next actions are create the content workflow map and create roles in org chart so you can kind of choose to show what you want to show I could show this in a table format with actions and show whether those actions are done or not it's totally up to you what is going to be helpful in fact I don't actually have a my master task list in here but that might actually be a good idea I could embed my master tasks database and only show items that are connected to an item in the knowledge hub that would show me whether I have basically next actions that are related to my courses just double checking here in the chat and Carlene let me know if that clarifies with the difference between dashboards pages and databases to me a dashboard is is basically just a culmination it's I see this like a curated page that pulls in what's most important to you and yes Roxanne I'm saying that you can to set up your areas the way Thiago teaches you as dashboards totally I think any one of those those items in your areas could absolutely be a dashboard right for travel maybe you have an inspiration board that's places that you want to go and then maybe you also have your your packing lists embedded in there as well and then as maybe you've got your upcoming trip maybe you've got a quote like a really inspiring quote at the top of the page so these these can be more fun than just sort of a list or a database I think when you start to activate the information and combine again action with inspiration with notes and ideas all in one place you can do that for almost any context and it just I think for me personally it's been very creatively activating I'm a lot more inspired to do things it's not just information capture and again I'm not to hate on Evernote I think it's it is a great tool I use it for many years but it feels a bit more like an archive of information whereas for me an ocean is a place where I actually am taking action I'm doing things I'm getting inspired I'm moving around my space in different ways great ok yeah I almost always click the full width option that's just personal preference just because I like that it allows you to to have these columns okay we've got active courses review what I've done is I've just filtered this by status of review and this these are courses that I often go back to you like I referenced you know I've mentioned building a second brain often by Thiago so that's a place that I reference pretty often and then it's again one click I can go down a rabbit hole all of its right here active reading and so here's another idea pulling in your notes and ideas so maybe as you're reading a book this is a place where you can just add a quick note right in the same place that you're reading your book here similarly I can also add any notes right from here so notes and ideas so as I'm reading this book I'm taking notes about it I can take the notes right in here or I can add any quotes words and wisdom right in the same space I'm not having to jump around I can be very focused so this is I mean everything's still kind of in progress I'm always experimenting with it to see like is this working for me where what's kind of missing so learning is feeling pretty good for me I'm sure I'm going to want to improve this over time another example so let's say you're you're in a mastermind you're taking a course empowered CEO that's a mastermind that I'm in so one thing I've done is created this dashboard so under Murray HQ one of my areas is masterminds empowered CEO so I know that as part of this mastermind there's at least a meeting every week there's notes and ideas that come up there's next steps to take and then there's the actual course itself so everything related to this context is all available here for me so I can create a new meeting here I can say it's a new mastermind I can put that information in there I can take my notes directly about the meetings right in here and I can add any notes next steps right from this place go right do that thing all right I can add that right in here without having to leave the context of this and go to my you know go to my master task and kind of go down a bit of a rabbit hole I can stay in the same place without getting distracted probably see a bit of a a bit of a theme I know I personally I was just getting distracted by all of my own information because then suddenly when you're in the action database you're seeing that other action that you meant to take and and you're going down a bit of a rabbit hole there okay great what's better to start with creating master databases first or creating pages or themes first I definitely think those core databases should be created first so for sure I think a knowledge hub of some sort is is going to be a great next step some sort of notes and ideas or capture projects for sure actions I again I love having all of this information all interconnected I know many people prefer to do their task management elsewhere and that's that's totally fine but I think for certainly information collecting I know somebody had mentioned having tab itis right having like hundreds of tabs open all the time I know I have been guilty of that too but if I'm not going to read that article in the moment I immediately snippet clip it into the knowledge hub and give it a category of article and I set time aside to read those articles so you'll see like a lot of these haven't been given a type that's because those were like clipped into my my knowledge hub but I'm not I know I clipped them and I don't read them immediately I set time aside for that so that I can kind of batch go through and read those items and as part of that process I go through I categorize it I add any notes etc so I would say if you have a problem with having too many tabs open you might need some kind of knowledge hub and or inspiration so if I see a website that I like I will do a full page screen capture and I will send that into my inspiration database so it's like everything has a place and you need to for yourself figure out what are the places that you need in your space I know that I need that inspiration zone I need a place to see examples already in action I'm having a starting point never starting from scratch and it's really helpful and that may be different for you like again I I didn't create all of these databases from scratch when I first started but I think having the core ones are going to be a good starting point over time for example I added like a home home inspiration database because I want that to me that's such a different context then you know storing business-related inspiration so as part of my home now it's like garden inspiration and a seed journal right side oh I don't necessarily store my gardening thoughts and inspiration in the same place that I do my daily journal for you that might be different maybe you want to have an entry in the same place but you get to kind of decide what are the different things that you find yourself asking yourself oh this doesn't have a place where should this live so hopefully that helps clarify so I think start with your master databases because then you can form those connections then you can embed them into pages you can't really embed that information into a page if it doesn't exist so I say start with start with your databases I'd love to learn more about how you use master tags master tags are the best because it's the only way I think to connect you might notice as you use selects and multi selects in your database properties that there's no way to kind of unify tags across all the items of your workspace so my workaround was to create a relational database with tags so and I'm actually filtering these by a rollup so what I do is I have relation from the tag to all of my core databases so you can see I've got a people database notes and ideas knowledge hub inspiration words and wisdom content that's my content calendar tools 12 problems there's a lot here events reference assets swipe files entertainment all of those are connected you don't have a via see you don't have to have all of those databases those are the ones that I find I use the most and then I've done a couple roll-ups just so I can pay attention like where am i spending most of my time and attention and best self so self improvement personal development money productivity these are things I'm paying attention to so I've just sorted this by this is basically knowledge hub descending so I can scroll down and see what are the things I'm paying the most attention to and I open up any of these and see like systems books I'm reading you know what I'm what I'm following all of that kind of get stuck together and then again I can I can rabbit hole from here and be like okay well what are those oh yeah thinking in systems I forgot about that I can jump in so if I'm writing a blog post related to systems I can go down a bit of a bit of a rabbit hole I can jump into a project that was related to that jump into related tags and again like I don't use roam but I think there's like a similar functionality where like you can really string together your ideas and your thoughts in different ways and make it very quick for you to do writing that you need to do studies that you need to do etc so that is the master tag database hopefully that helps clarify so gray we're gonna go into roll ups in a future session with William nut but essentially a roll up is is allows you to pull data from a separate database so as long as two databases have a relation a rollup can actually pull a property from a database that lives elsewhere you will definitely be going into way more detail about that cool okay a bunch of questions have popped in I'm gonna I'm gonna take a peek I know we haven't touched the learn or sorry the planning dashboard yet okay okay Nate had a really great question he said I find myself invariably getting into busy work when trying to get my notion organized how do I know what is necessary and what is just geeking out with no real benefit and as they have such a great question because I do think there is an element of that with notion where there is a learning curve there is set-up time right that it takes it takes a lot more time to set up your notion space than say something like asana or a project manager but part of that is a few pieces to this this question for me designing systems is like what I do for a living thinking and ecosystems thinking about productivity workflow design that stuff is magic to me like I I sort of play with notion sort of the same as like watching Netflix for me personally so when when you say geeking out to me like geeking out gives me excitement I love I actually love looking at other people's notion setups because I get to see how their brain works and I think everyone thinks differently they show up differently they need different things and they need to see that information in different ways so to me that gets me excited and I could nerd out about it for hours like be careful if you if you're my friend and you asked me about notion but if this is not moving you forward in any way then maybe putting some personal limits around how much time do I spend a day or a week tweaking my notion set up I think you if you don't feel like you have that self control around it it might be something that you kind of have to cut off you know that give yourself a time limit for that and I'm open to if anyone else has has thoughts on that to me the more that I use my space and I just kind of tweak as I go I'm not trying to build the perfect set up it's something that evolves slowly week by week like these contextual dashboards are something that only came about in the last three weeks or so and they they bring so much joy now to my space and the way that I work so to me I see that benefit to me I always want to look for what are some ways to improve the way that I work and be more creative what can i it's sort of like I think it's is it jeans jeans clears butt atomic habits where it's like putting the shoes by the door so that you do the workout to me it's the same thing if I want to create more if I want to learn more I need to create those spaces that make it easy for me to do that so that gets me excited and I don't mind spending time in there because I know the long-term benefit is is great for me but if you're if you're kind of taking it too far you might want to give yourself some some limits maybe on how often you're spending doing that I don't know if anyone else has has thoughts to to add on that like Danny I live in ocean yes to me it's a place of creative inspiration activation etc hopefully that that helps answer your question okay Alou Allu I don't know if I'm pronouncing your name correctly I'd love to know how you can use the contextual dashboard to start and end your day week month I have a journal database similar to yours that has a morning and evening checklist that referenced my OKR as weekly template there's a lot of jumping around on those pages and I'd love to have it all in one page I love that you asked this because this is actually a very recent use case for me as well so I'm gonna jump in here originally I have this mind sweep page and I'm actually I'm happy to share this link with you I think it's a it's a template here so folks can I'm just going to double check that yes okay so this is the this is the sample template I'm just going to post that in the chat if anybody wants that so I started off with this mind sweep and before I used to to click in to it was like update your goals and projects update this and I found myself jumping into the projects and then I was out of this page and I would always have to click that and it became a little messy so one thing that I've done is baked the mind sweep into my weekly agenda so if I go to my weekly agenda template this is what it looks like and so what I've done is I've got this reflect here at the bottom so it's all tucked into a toggle and that I've got these these triggers here from David Allen's getting things done projects not completed you know things are like things that are lingering and taking up mental RAM this is these are just some triggers to kind of get your your brain going and then the idea is to go through and do this mine sweep as part of your weekly agenda process so like plant the seeds you the things whatever and just do a big brain dump of all the stuff here so before I would I would click on these things empty your mind that would take me to the mind sweep project will take me to projects and so I was jumping around to all these different places but now what I've done is I've actually baked those pieces projects someday maybe ideas are all here so I don't have to leave what I'm doing this review process I can do oh right planting the seeds that's actually like a some day maybe maybe project and I can do this by status or by type so for example thoughts a household's garden cleanup thing I can be like Oh plant the seeds and just drag that in there oh yeah I need to do that garden cleanup drag and that allows me to do that filtering process of the end of week mine sweep right here so hopefully hopefully that makes sense for I'm not sure if you're here today Allu but that is one thing that has really helped with that weekly review cleanup process my my database is here too so I can again just drag anything into deep work small win if if some of these things are a grind to be like do this annoying thing like you know pay that bill that's really annoying it also got properties here I'm going to turn on I've got a property called do it and if I drag anything into daily grind it's automatically gonna say delegate that task so I can I can turn that back into text okay so anyway that's one example of I mean this weekly agenda is sort of a contextual dashboard it's like I can do the planning at the top and then as they go through I'm doing my actions my journal and then toward the end of the week I'm doing this mine sweet okay what's left lingering what didn't get done what are my next actions what were some of those ideas that popped up and I filter this by the past month because this database is also pretty big and so maybe there's just like a thing that it's not complete and maybe it's not to-do item yet but it's a thing I need to think about and so I can just very quickly add my notes here without going to like resources notes and ideas etc studies are here as well so that's that's one example of starting to pull the context in which you work those review processes into the place that you need to do the work to prevent all that clicking around hopefully that helps answer that question it's going to check in on the chat okay cool okay daily do I do this on a daily basis too so sort of yes let me see how my journal okay so this is something that I've been really enjoying that works for me so at the beginning of the week when I create this new week I have this week and this basically becomes my plan for the week I put in all of my meetings Monday through Friday in here and then I go through and I put through my entries so let's let's open up this one okay actually that's this one this is the template so actually this is last week so let's just update this and then you you can see what the process looks like to update this okay so today Friday here what I do at the beginning of the day I review this I open this up usually I do this on Sunday so I create all of my entries for the week and then I just make sure to put in the win the day tasks that is like the most important thing that needs to get done that day if I do it I mark off my win the day I track if I hit a flow state so a lot of this is mostly reflective the most important pieces that I put in what is the win the day task and any meetings meetings that that are happening the week that it's associated with the month that's associated with and then toward the end of the day I go through and fill all of this out but what I can do is switch this from this week I can actually switch this to a review as well and that will show the photo of the day as well as whatever what I'm feeling like I open this up my energy effectiveness happiness what I was consuming notes and ideas all of that gets put in here so that is that is how I've built in the sort of review and the planning just with different views so it's just sort of surfacing different information if that makes sense so I do my you know end of day review and that's mostly going through those items at the top I do then also have a journal at the bottom of the entry that's just more form what went well today make sure tomorrow's task will win the day task is there go and let's let's update this again so the only thing is you will have to you know update these update these views on your different reflections so hopefully that makes sense they're kind words ok cool and I mean honestly I can I can say personally that doing this daily journal process I've struggled to do it my entire life but since doing this it has it's been an eye-opener and it's made me way more mindful planful intentional it's not like I don't still have days where I don't do the thing that I said I was going to do but I'm a lot more in touch I think with what's really happening so +1 for for journaling okay how can I align a linked database within a toggle and Marvin can you clarify when you say aligning a links database within a toggle like how do you actually get it in there is that what you were wondering just drag it in yep so exactly if like let's say I wanted to say journal um I could literally just drag my journal right inside that toggle and tuck it away there we go cool oh the left the left alignment okay so let's say we want to format I sort of like on the learn page Marvin is that what you're referring to like having a column on the left and something on the right oh you know Marvin you might actually need to refresh your notion I know that there was a funny thing where the there was like an extra this space of alignment so you might need to refresh notion Owen so interesting great your gray was saying that with the journaling habit I've trouble doing the evening wrap-up logbook or whatever so something that has helped me with that the trickiest part about this is like how much information am i showing if I click on this thing here okay so here's the thing this is the magic of roll-ups as I fill out all of these days here all of this all of these properties here are roll-ups from my journal so if I don't fill up my journal the weekly agenda doesn't get filled out so this becomes again like bringing it back to like what our roll-ups what can they do I am pulling the effectiveness from my journal entries Here I am pulling the words that I used from my journal here so I basically incentivize myself to fill that out so that throughout the week I can actually see like energized I use twice anxious I use twice right so then at the end of the week when I go to give when I go to give my week I like to give it three words that represent the week anxious right I'm basically able to then pull from what were the most commonly used words that showed up in my agenda this week because it can be easy to forget in the 7 days I think you're like oh I think like what happened but if two of my you know days here were rated as like super high effective and when the day task was done you know I can I can roll up that information and interesting ways to to pay attention like what was what was produced procrastination was was put on there twice and then at the end of the week I can also just do like a general journal dump of stuff here and be like wow like I struggle with procrastination this was happening but at the very least the report like the the simplified report is available at the top so I know some people like to say that you should do this manually like you should do a separate weekly you know reflection process and I do but this at least gives me like a starting point to be like oh yeah freak I think that's what happened this week so that I have found to be really really helpful cool to match Glen's question curious how the interplay of your notion window and you're busy Cal work you'd manage and you are a busy Cal user in a previous video I use it heavily myself and I'm curious how you can toggle but in both worlds yeah I mean I I'm always like referencing my my busy Cal to just kind of reference time based meetings and I also as part of my busy Cal I have recurring it's almost like a recurring event ideal calendar so deep work blocks are recurring events that are set for two hours every Tuesday Thursday so I have these set items in my calendar and I look what needs to get done and I will I will update my busy Cal to say oh I'm doing I'm focused on this client and doing this particular task so I am often kind of flipping back and forth between the two but most of the time in terms of taking action I'm just working out of notion cool and also I'll check in on the I guess I have a bunch of questions have come in here okay Hannah asked do you have a way to organize too much mixed information in a practical way for example I'm a tab hoarder so I know we did cover a little bit about the tabs Hannah let me know if you're here if that answered your question about having a page that you save those tabs to so I don't know if it's like reading lists or things that you're consuming or whatever I you can also do things like one tab right where it kind of collapses everything but I know that I have time set aside every Saturday morning and every Sunday morning to to read and go through all the things that I've been saving and so I only clip things into notion if I'm like yes I'm going to read this I'm committing to reading this otherwise add it to your bookmarks and close that stuff down yeah I mean Hannah you could do something in a contextual dashboard where you're then embedding all the things that you clipped and to say show me everything that's been unread this week or that hasn't been given a tag yet or hasn't been given a status something like that might be a way to kind of help you get over your tab itis I hope that helps I'd love to know more about how you organize your tasks how those are set up the problem with my current tool is that I can set tasks ahead but there's nothing that pulls them together or allows me to reflect and revise what I've done so I'm very much working day to day instead of having everything linked to my big picture of vision and plan how do you link your plan and goals with daily tasks and notion such a great question Rachel so a few different ways for me again I know that this stuff is so personal and the way people manage their tasks and want to see their tasks is so personal and different this is what has worked for me I love the Kanban view but not by in progress next done whatever I like to do this today next later someday this has been helpful for me personally so this is going to happen you know maybe it happens next month or whatever it's always there top of mind I can always see it I can also see these recurring tasks I think you guys can't see it because my eye might be a little zoomed you still see my screen if i zoom don't like that play that's okay I can see all of my recurring tasks here and I know what the someday someday maybe stuff is and I know what the later stuff is so that's one way like at a glance that stuff is always there but for today I've got my items that are due today so this is filtered by date is on or before today and if it's past the due date then it gets this little icon we got to do this and also to tie back to the question about busy Cal and calendar so I know that these are like deep work blocks these are going to take at least an hour or maybe two hours of really deep focused work and so I can look when I'm assigning myself stuff energetically speaking okay how many of these blocks have I given myself is that realistic and I look at my recurring recurring events in busy Cal deep work blog deeper block so I would go into deep work block and say publish this page and I would put that right on the calendar but it's a way it's a good way to see if you look at organizing by kind of energy level and urgency importance you can start to see oh well no wonder things aren't getting done I'm giving myself way too many deep work tasks on a day where I have lots of meetings that doesn't makes sense so it helps you start to notice some of those patterns at least for me again seeing being able to see the same information in different ways has really helped highlight where I was over booking myself and and that sort of thing so for me organizing everything through the Kanban board based on today next later or some day and then also by energy level or also just show me the things that are marked as essential those are like the win the day most important tasks right I can I can choose which of those things I want to see show me the overdue stuff just show me what's on deck for this week like you get to really choose and so being on the focus board here there might be a few different views that I might want to say like today urgent today important like you get to decide what that looks like for you and what's going to be a helpful view for you you know even my husband what he likes to see that all the tasks in a table and with checkboxes and that's you know we like to view the information very differently but this my energy level has really helped me personally and then I also have client tasks in here so all of the client databases tasks databases are also embedded in here if I open that up which I I won't do because that's got some personal stuff in there so that's that's one thing Rachel and then another part of that is also having the the plan dashboard where I've broken things up by what are my goals what are the supportive projects that are going to do that and so doing quarterly planning 90-day planning do like a planning session once a year do one every three months weekly review monthly review I'm just kind of checking to see where you are with things and just making sure that every goal has a project associated with it at least one project and then at least a couple next actions so those are going to pop up in my in my next actions database and also I have a lot of templates to four tasks so if a task is related to like if it's an outcome driver it actually has a little lightning icon so just so visually I can see like alright this is like a key this is a really important task and then key results are related to that too and again I can I can post that link to Outlook Sherwood's okay ours template that I use that as a starting point and then I need some adjustments but I think part of it is having a plan where you're you're actually breaking down those things into projects that are going to support that follow-through and again having a space where if you want to do more weekly planning maybe you actually embed your projects in here I've got I've got it here like this but maybe you want to see more detail maybe you actually want to turn it into a bit of a planner so maybe I could say make this a table right and I could say let's like hide some of these properties I could give it dates I could give it I could break this down to only see what's going to be most important when I'm in the planning process maybe I even need it like a notes and ideas database here as well so that I can you know relate it to my planning so that might be that might be one way to do it but really again having the the place of the that the actions are planned out in the same place that the goal is happening I would probably just do it right from here like what are the next actions that are going to support this I can also jump right into my like key results database as well I'm not sure if that helps if that helps clarify but it sounds like you do need it like a dashboard that's all a plan planning and reflection big picture visioning I think also my alignment one could be a good example of that again I'm still experimenting with some of these so you'll see like this one doesn't look nearly as as fancy or nice as the other ones but I've done things like embed like the myers-briggs the Gallup strengths finder in here so I can always quickly kind of jump in and review that oh yeah there's my strengths finder thing ok cool some things are highlighted in there so it can be a thing to do like remember what you're good at remember what those questions are that kind of lead your life and that inspire you having a vision and a manifesto here some of you maybe seen this right like something to go back to it's always kind of clearly and easily visible rules to live by a list of things that make you happy right and maybe go back to August Bradley session where he talked about the alignment zone I think he had some specific ways that he did that I really liked I really liked that session very inspiring yeah I desired outcomes all this stuff so having a place where you do this and then maybe also the goals database should be embedded in here so that way it's like alright my goals are really in line with this stuff that I said was really important okay so a question that came in not getting this with next action there's an arrow showing it's a relational database do you have one database for this and another for action ok so just to clarify next action is my master actions task database they're the same thing I just call it something different depending on what database I'm in let me know if that makes sense cool Jennifer I'm actually an ENFP I'm always like straddling that line of introvert/extrovert anyway yeah Robin that you make brought up a good point about collecting so many templates and other people's ways of doing notion I actually do have an archive for those templates for sure I definitely put those in in the archives but that's where I also think that having those core databases most like in many people setups have just a couple you know core databases whether it's a goals database your projects database actions some sort of knowledge hub once you have those you can totally aligned with almost anybody's setup in different ways and reorganize in a way that makes sense for you you know like these could be like all areas I think I actually still actually I don't really call them areas I just kind of have them floating at the top here because they basically summarize the different areas of my life ok let's check on the cool questions a bunch of questions popped in yeah creating a dashboard for school career family and tying things together that overlap that's a that's a great one and I think especially if you if you have like a team context as well as home studies having your own private dashboard too so your team stuff might be up here but in in private you're able to pull in your master tasks database in here and also how like your own studies can be right here like you can decide what's what's going to be most helpful to you because I mean in my in my focused database I'm including house stuff in here as well as business stuff everything is in here I don't I don't really see them as separate but for other people those areas of their life are very separate like that's my nine-to-five and that's my evening but then you get to decide you can say only show me house stuff only show me work stuff stuff that's filtered by business or you might decide again if you're sharing a database with people you may decide you actually need like a personal private database and I would do that in your own like personal private page here I would have like Marie's tasks that nobody else can see so anything that lives in here natively is stuff that even my husband you can't see any of these databases if he wanted to I would let him see it but he did I don't think he needs to see that anyway okay how to structure the dashboard to pull it all in instead of searching everywhere you're right okay so Coby was asking how you would do that so I mean really from scratch if we're just gonna build like a new my fancy dashboard and then if you needed uh if you needed a table that was your own tasks like you might want to do some kind of you know for personal life before you start giving it columns and then you might say like studies maybe this is your your school studies or whatever and this would be the place that I would drag in or break the links database and I would pull in my knowledge alright I might filter this by active courses similar to the way I did and learn and then you could also have like maybe the household stuff you could have any quick links here that you wanted to you can link to page you can link to any other page that lives elsewhere maybe I want to link to the planning page or what have you so you can you can pull in stuff that lives elsewhere but ideally you want to be embedding these databases here so I would embed the actions database here so you still got your personal tasks but then you can still also see stuff that lives elsewhere or that is shared I guess I'd like to know at what point we should be confident enough with notion to leave other tools behind I feel like I'm not really getting the most out of notion because I'm trying to bolt it into my current tool set and I don't know if you're here I'd love to know what those other tools are now obviously everybody uses notion for different things there's lots of people that just use notion to do their standard operating procedures and documentation and things like that and they just kind of use it to replace Google Docs I would just encourage you to think about what are you wanting notion to do for you and I know some people have mentioned they don't like notions sort of quick capture functionality right other tools can be a lot faster to just add a quick task but for me personally having built so many templates into my tasks I'm able to add this stuff very quickly and one-click I'm able to actually add a lot more properties to a task which is helpful for me but I totally get that for other people that might be it might be annoying it might be frustrating it really depends on your workflow so I'd want to know what do you want notion to do what are the other tools that you're using that can complement notion doesn't have to replace everything necessarily I I feel like I left Evernote behind pretty quickly once I moved over to notion of an asana - I basically asked myself what are those tools doing for me asana was my task management Evernote was basically resource storing and I'm able to do both of those things in notion and so I haven't really had a need to use those tools anymore but if you're trying to force it maybe there's something that's not built super optimally maybe you need to create some more templates for yourself or I probably need a bit more detail about what you're what you're trying to do but I don't think notion necessarily has to replace all your tools for me I find it has I can find pretty much anything I want and need I've got spaces for everything it did take a while to find that groove to make sure that everything did kind of have a place and whenever I noticed there's friction like recently with the tracking my seeds and tracking what I was planting and where I planted it and I haven't been really organized about that so that's something that now with my grow dashboard I'm hoping to spend a little bit more time kind of fleshing out what that looks like and I don't know yet what that looks like it's don't like this still pretty messy I've got my garden journal here a garden inventory that I've started so let's I could say seed started as today so that's another way that like what I'm doing my my seed planting and I have my laptop out there on the on the table I could be sowing the seeds and planting stuff and then just be making notes right here and I can say okra open that up and it's connected to my garden journal too so I started that on whatever date so that's that's one thing I'm experimenting with houseplants I also have a houseplant master class here so I can kind of quickly jump into that this isn't even close to the full inventory of my plants but I'm getting there so whether I own it right so I can add ones that I want that I don't own yet fertilizer soil different light and water features the care and that sort of thing so I'm experimenting with what this looks like and what information what assets and resources I want to pull into here like my home and garden inspiration inventory that's in my areas I want to pull that into here too I haven't yet so I'm still in the process of crafting what that looks like but just wanted to show me what it looks like to be in process and I'm very comfortable being in process I don't never feel like that this has to be like a fully final finished product I know that the more that I use it it's going to become more useful and and that doesn't bother me personally so cool still struggling with when to use a database when to use a database and when to go for a separate page what's your criteria of choosing one or the other so a database I would use for anything where I'm storing similar properties across different items so with something like a garden journal I know that there's always going to be a date property there's going to be a type of seed that was planted like there are properties that are going to make sense for most of those things to me I think of pages as usually containers I think again pages can contain a multitude of databases but if you create a database it can only be a database you can't add other information in there so that would be that would be one way that I think of it pages are content pages as containers for data and databases are for things where you're going to need to store multiple properties and also templates right there's so many amazing ways you can use templates once you've got your your database is created do you have a routine to go over your tasks projects in different areas of your life yeah I mean well part of what I'm trying to do with the align dashboard now too is having a place that I can always go to either at the beginning of the day beginning of the week beginning of the month that there's always a place that can kind of go back to you and reflect and I might also again pull some of those items into my weekly agenda into my monthly agenda so that whenever I'm doing my wrap-up for the week or for the month that I'm always like checking back with this is what you said was important and so are the tasks and projects that you're giving yourself are they aligned with where you said you want your life to go so yeah my routine is basically the daily journal my weekly review and routine and weekly plan a monthly how did how did the month go which I'll probably do that this weekend and yeah 90-day planning has been huge for me personally setting up projects that support some 90-day goals hopefully that helps clarify what do you keep in the notes and ideas and the swipe in the databases in the resources page I'm mostly his notion to take notes in book Mart's please explain your setup by the way your formula 101 and 201 helped me a lot thanks very much cool so the notes and ideas and the swipe I can show you what that looks like for me and again this is different for everyone and it's definitely gone through some iterations but I mean there's all sorts of stuff in here it's like like somebody said oh can you how what I do is that'll Caston method for an ocean right someone gave me some advice on SEO for my course I was like oh you might want to check this out you know someone who's also doing productized services with notion so there are things that are related to projects that I'm working on or things that I'm thinking about or conversations I want to be having and so they're almost like they're like sparks of an idea and so by going through here whenever I'm thinking of content creation no I'll show you what am i if you if you guys think I'm organized I'll show you what am I like messier pages so if I want if I want to be in content creation mode I want to be pulling those notes and ideas like those are things I've pulled and they're meant to spark content creation so this is the place where I'm experimenting with what would it look like if I had certain themes associated with the month and content types so I can pull in I've got this database of content types so best-of manifestos or rants seminars or webinars cheat sheets infographics you name it so I can go through and say like oh maybe I want to do like a humorous or sarcastic post or whatever so these are meant to sort of inspire and spark ideas so that's that's kind of how I personally use my notes and ideas database it's usually a project related or just you know things I want to explore or inspiration things that I just kind of activating for me and I want to do something with them and not forget them and then I've got my content hub here for example but if before I just had this content hub and it was like okay where you create your content this week and like what do I do I do it's kind of overwhelming and so to have the notes and ideas my manifesto right you saw that in my align dashboard I'm actually pulling it in here alright so I can see that right away the questions all of this is here to spark creation content hub content themes all right these are like themes I put forward is like things I'm interested in and wanting to create content around content formats content types and so this is just meant to like spur ideas quotes right I can and then for quotes I've just pulled in my words of wisdom database right because I've been storing and saving a bunch so if they're related in terms of their topic to what I'm working on and I can pull one of these quickly and put that into the calendar content formulas ex ways to get X so these are just a sort of spark ideas for me so this one's still kind of a messy messy database but it's at least now pulled in information that might have lived elsewhere and was kind of messy so that I'm not just starting from scratch when I'm thinking about creating content now I've got these ideas that can all kind of support that action hopefully that that makes sense okay cool yes I think there Serena there are some law practice templates I hear actually from a lot of law practices so yeah I should check in with you about that and the other one you asked about was the notes and ideas and a swipe file so for me the swipe file is it's usually like email related so examples of like great welcome emails let me open this up some of it like legal contract stuff autoresponders like I really liked Michele's autoresponder here hey thanks for getting in touch reaching out I just really like that autoresponder so it's they're really just wasted like spark ideas I really liked Mariah's accelerator intake form terms and conditions refund policies so they're just meant to be examples of things so you're not starting from scratch or again I really liked like Thera welcome onboarding so maybe that becomes like an inspiration when I'm trying to put mine together hopefully that helps clarify Donald you should chat yes Sarah here has there's actually quite a few real estate development folks that I think might have a template for you I'll have to have to check back in about that I do know someone who has one Daniela said I've been working this week on a master dashboard for weekly and daily tasks my problem is when creating a flow I get very confused so I have meetings content and projects to work on so should I have databases for these projects separately by areas projects meetings and contents and then use different views I'm working with a master tag database and I think it makes a huge difference okay so I'm not sure I mean the the this one might kind of make be a good format for you who me meetings content and projects to work on yeah so similar I think it sounds like you need like you need a project database that's connected to your actions database and inside of that project database - you'd probably have a relation to your meetings and that way you could tie in any of the meetings connected with that project specifically I feel like that might Daniella your question might be a whole other office hours that you may want to check the one with Jason on managing clients that might be a helpful one I don't know if we have time to go totally into how we would do that in this particular session I know we're already kind of at the hour okay the starter pack Luka said love your starter pack are you planning to make videos about using it from staff from start to beginning to how you use it that would be amazing to watch over your shoulder your process to manage the whole process I would even pay for such a course Lucas you know I have a course right I do have a course called notion mastery so I do actually kind of cover that if you want to go way deeper down that rabbit hole some of those students are probably here to date as well but yeah I do one thing I do as well Lucas is I'm doing some build with me videos as well so I've done one of those on YouTube it was actually two and a half hours is very long hoping to make them a little faster in the future but where people can submit their use cases or even like a partially done set up and we workshop it to show how to how to improve a set up basically so that's something I have been doing lately and it's always fun when you have something to start with and then you're kind of taking it from a basic to much more functional cool is there a way to make full with the default not unless you make a page template that is full page is default okay so let me show you what that looks like template button add a new page new page and you can also drag pages into here as well so it's what was that full width great okay so anytime anytime I make a new page now using that template button it's going to make a full width page so it's you'd have to have that template button somewhere central that you could kind of access it very very quickly so hopefully that helps clarify can you speak to when you use views versus filters versus formulas to shape a dashboard view yes I use I don't use formulas a ton really just a couple for like progress track but I use views and filters a lot let's take a look at one maybe that has like the learning dashboard yeah so I basically use each view has its own set of filters and just wait for this to load so for example I've named this course is active and I'm filtering this by type and by status now obviously your properties are you know gonna be a little bit different than mine maybe like if I open up one of these you can see the different properties that I track and so you can filter by any of the properties that you store in your database I could say show me only active courses by Trina or show me only active courses that are tagged with YouTube or or only show me articles instead of courses or podcasts you get to choose kind of what the filtering properties looks like and then again you can duplicate that same thing and just adjust the the filters so that that is a tip as well like if you copy a link to any of your databases like if I copy a link to my projects and paste it here by default it's going to include every single entry in the projects which is kind of annoying but if you have a filter that's close to what you like I can just duplicate that by hitting command E or clicking duplicate there and then I can adjust the filters here and rename that and change up the filter and that prevents it from like having to go through click add a bunch of filters so that's that's a quick tip for making that adjustment here hopefully that helps clarify gray so basically you can either copy and paste any database you can say copy link and if I paste that that is going to literally embed everything but I often have filtered views that exist elsewhere so I can like move them around where I want them to go so if I want if I wanted to drag this knowledge hub in to say my create database I can I can do that ocean is like slowing down now I can't handle him so like yeah let's say I just want to drag that into the create dashboard you can totally you can like duplicate your views move them where you want them to go and that can save you a lot of time then creating those those filters from scratch oh great question Anna about how do you track the more mundane tasks of course it's slowing down I can't handle this awesomeness so Anna at the top of my both my weekly agenda and in my focus o notions like we're done here today you are cut off sad I might have to have maybe I'll share my share my window instead of the app this video but Anna just to answer your question about mundane tasks at the top of the focus page I actually have a quick ad and that's just a toggle with like straight-up checkboxes because not everything needs all of those properties and sometimes you just have those like quick notes brained um kind of thing so that's how that's how I handle it which I I think definitely saves that having to have reminders app Danny says he tracks all all my apps and only put reminders on my events as my journal shows all my active tasks call my the only one that has a crush on Marie's brain why thank you yeah it's I mean I will all be honest with you Ram I'll say like a creative person I've tended to be very like very scattered very fragmented using so many different tool and feeling just really stretched across so many different things and I think that's why for me notion was so exciting was that that integration and like like bringing it together and giving it structure is something I've really you had to like again I study this stuff I obsess over it like I think Tiago said something like it seems like systems is your art or your creativity and that I think that is true like I think I I crave it because I think I've been missing it in my life and so it gives me like peace to to give structure to chaos so it's something that I I don't know part part talent part learned I guess I don't know I need notion to stop living my life in putting out fires mode yes Serena so that's definitely something that is something that I noticed when I was doing my weekly reviews and every week I was saying overbooked overbooked feeling tired whatever procrastinating and just paying more attention to what I was spending my time on what I was committing to and realizing I'm not a victim to my my schedule like why am I saying yes to these things so but it workflow but of boundaries it takes some time to do that but I can I can relate and I personally I feel like notions helped me make that transition and because information isn't buried for me in the same way that it felt like it was and tools like asana or you've got sub tasks and subtasks and so when you're in a task I'm not really able to see the full picture of what's happening so when everything that you're responsible for is like facing you on a dashboard it's like oh okay that's what I've committed to okay Sabrina you are my best friend especially if you love notion okay cool yeah it's like everything that's missing in your space you need you need to design for and that can be I think the mix of the exciting thing and the frustrating thing about notion is yeah you could do it but you got to build it and so if you need a quick add if you need you know a place for brain jumping if you need what like an inbox whatever that looks like you just have to build it first and once I find like once you've built it there's a lot of upfront cost in terms of learning it putting it in place once it's in place the maintenance is a lot easier especially once you start diving into templates and I think we're gonna have a whole office hours just on templates because again I do think it's probably one of the most underutilized parts of notion I think people maybe aren't aware of what's possible what you can do with them and even like nesting templates inside of templates and also putting global blocks inside of templates so I think we're gonna have whole office hours on that roll-ups are definitely coming William not is going to be covering that we also next week Dan shipper is talking about writing a novel which I'm really excited about I'm not writing a book but I you know maybe yeah maybe someday that'll be a goal of mine is to write a book I'm really curious about seeing what that process looks like Haley was asking if there's a way to automate notion is there an API not yet there is no API yet however I will say from personal experience like this is so Haley this is something that I used to do for my clients was like integrating and automating and setting up zapier to air table and you name it like this was stuff that I was doing all the time for my clients so I'm like you know zapier is a tool that I love I do however find I'm not missing that in notion and it actually forces me to be a lot more intentional with my data so yes I think there's so much that's gonna open up as a result of getting the API but I also feel like now that I'm way more in touch with the data and I have some processes around it I actually don't find it that big of a limitation and I've just become a lot more aware of kind of what's on my plate and how much sales are coming in and all sorts of stuff so cool Haley you were saying that's the one thing holding you back from dosha and other tools of api's and I hear you I was a little bit nervous about that at first but I will say it has not it has not impacted my workflow and I can also say most of the clients for whom I'd set up their api's with air table it was so automated and there was like so much magic happening the scenes that my clients didn't really understand what was happening and so they were still doing things manually anyway like I had clients that were still sending out emails because they just like didn't trust that the automation was working and I thought it was so interesting that it was almost too much tech and now that I've moved a bunch of those clients into notion and they're not really using air table like air tables great and ap eyes are amazing and zapier is amazing but I for the clients that I've worked with they've actually had an easier time managing and staying on top of things in notion which is it's kind of interesting so maybe I'll have to do a little bit of behind-the-scenes about that Oh Corey there is actually someone who has like Alfred notion integration thing you should totally check that out I don't have the link top of mind but someone has done that and they did a whole like how-to situation that's pretty amazing cool more templates more temple yes okay we'll definitely cover more templates we'll do a whole session on templates this is Rita said okay stupid question I feel like I just connected with so many of you already during this hour is there a way to connect follow each other on notion Oh interesting yeah social media is probably the probably the best place I'm pretty active on Twitter in terms of my notion Khan conversing but we do these office hours every Friday so you're welcome to join us for these we try to stick to an hour but sometimes there are lots of questions and I just I stay on a little bit longer which I don't mind you can always come back and watch these replays any time if you watch the replay in crowdcast there are timestamps on the answers so you can actually kind of jump to if there was a specific question that you wanted to jump to you can always it'll take you right to that spot in the video where we answer the question okay Edgar was asking and let me know if you guys are if you guys still want me to keep going I think there's like 135 of you still here an hour and a half in which is cool I can keep going to answer some of these questions that didn't get answered if you like I'll just have to reshare am i are you sharing my screen obviously if you've got to take off you can totally do that otherwise let's keep going okay guys are troopers you're fun you guys are my friends okay I'll stay forever awesome okay so Edgar was asking what is your process to recirculate items that did not get done and are beyond the current week filter how do you bring them back into the queue this is a great question because I don't have a week filter you'll see here I'm just filtering this by things that aren't done that are assigned to me so if it doesn't get done it continues to stay on this list every week that's super simple so if you follow the getting things done methodology I think he says you're not really supposed to give something a date unless there's a consequence to it not being done so you'll see like here are consequences these are things that were marked with a date that have not been done yet yet but otherwise here most of these actually don't have due dates so I assign them to myself in terms of I'll put them next row up with them today and each day and each week I'm kind of filtering these and planning my day putting it in my calendar so if it doesn't get done it is gonna stay here for these things like weekly follow-ups or writing my email newsletter what I do it's a day of recurring and I just I'll just add a note here that's like you know April whatever April 30th whatever day that I that I did it or April 29th whatever it is and I can also add the URL to the most recent convertkit email newsletter that I sent out so those recurring things are things that like never get checked off is done I could also hide this if I wanted to and re embed this to say like today this week and recurring or have it at the top if I really wanted like recurring tasks to be here and to the person that asked about the notes I can open this up and see you like any just add any do this thing really rapid notes that just so I can kind of quickly add them and then if I want to activate it okay that's actually needs to get done today that's an essential task I can drag these and they become those important things so hopefully this is what again this is just what works for me if you look at anyone's to-do list in notion and the way they treat it it looks very different and I think that's great I think you kinda have to know yourself and know how you work but this for me having an on deck view where I can pretty much see everything that's assigned to me is is helpful hopefully that helps clarify does a master list master tag let's cross over between public and private pages recommitting to my list and wondering what to add a great question Britany so anything the master tag list for me is in our shared space but it's connected also with some items that are in my private space my husband can't see he'll be able to see the field but he won't be able to see any of those connections so you can share a shared database with have a relation to a private database and anyone who sees the shared one won't be able to see the entries inside the private one if that makes sense let me know if that helps clarify so I guess you'd have to decide if you want the tags to live in your personal private space or in the in the shared area cool awesome another marine okay love to see a create dashboard and how it's more than just an editorial calendar cool I'm not sure if you're here Steve but I know we did kind of go through that so I'm not sure if I answered your question but yeah I'm basically trying to make this a content planner of sorts and I'm trying to figure out my own process and system around how do I plan the content that I create because obviously I do these these weekly office hours and I do YouTube and stuff but I don't I haven't been doing it on its schedule and I haven't been blog posting I don't necessarily send an email newsletter super consistently but that's something that I want to improve and so by having these prompts here formats like what's that epic content what's the flagship content what are the tutorials that I've created and that way I can also look at if I'm only creating one type of content like only tutorials or only interviews what are some of these other types that maybe could spark an idea well what kind of let's let's review a calendar let's review you know like behind the scenes of notion of whatever there's lots I could do there so this create dashboard is intended to kind of help spark that awesome how do you ensure you're not constantly recreating these table views I guess I'd have to know more about where you're recreating them wherever possible I always try to duplicate one that already exists as opposed to creating one from scratch like again I know that starting with a filter is going to be is going to be better some I know some people have said they did all of their filters on their original databases and then when they tried to paste it somewhere they're like oh all those views are gone yeah it's an unfortunate limitation you can only retain views on an instance of the database not on the parent database itself so I'm not sure if that helps clarify cool let me know if that helps clarify that okay imagine a knowledge hub database can get pretty big is there some sort of limit to the number of entries hope that moved and not sure if that got deleted yeah it will I mean it will get probably pretty big over time if I go to the bottom of this area here I actually have okay finished and backburner so I imagine over time like all of the podcasts that I've listened to and that sort of thing I could be moving all of these into the archive so there's no reason necessarily like as part of a media quarterly or even probably even a yearly process I could clear out any of that old stuff like chances are I'm not going to go back to that podcast thing that I clipped but the as long as the notes and ideas are there and the notes ideas get moved into content or they get moved into projects so that kind of gets cleared out fairly often so you could definitely have a cleaning process for your knowledge hub as part of your your process hopefully that helps George says I'm wondering if you have a system for organizing master tags I'm trying to avoid the possibility that items will get buried as the database grows I would be curious to know why would it matter if tags get buried the more that you use your tag database the more you use your tag database you're going to notice certain tags are going to be used a lot more often than others and so if I scroll down to the bottom you know there's gonna be a bunch that just like I don't often come to the tag database necessarily I would usually come to the tag database through a piece of content that I'm storing notes about I'm going down the rabbit hole but I don't necessarily come here and search for a tag of course you can but yeah I'll notice that there's some of these that only have like maybe two entries or something or some have more inspiration entries but not as much or like lots of words and wisdom but maybe not a lot of content in the knowledge hub so to me the tag database is just meant to facilitate those connections and if some of those connections are not very strong then so what I can kind of delete them over time or merge them if that makes sense Sarina said mental health is a big area of my life but you can imagine it's super personal heart it's been hard to research it hmm cool yeah I hope I hope that I hope that helps clarify I know it's very personal but I don't really I don't really worry about the master tag database I don't even often do anything in here often as I'm reading I'm just like like let's say I'm reading a book in my knowledge table and I want to add add a new tag like you're like feminism tag that I actually just added yesterday or like kittens Aaron does that and adding a new wonders for your fun I just add it in here that's pretty much the extent of it and then over time if I tag something else with kittens once I go to kittens that's gonna start to have other entries in it but I don't really do much organizing of the knowledge hub I don't even really search for for tags in that way I haven't had that be a limitation to me it's just a way to like connect and unify that information okay cool yeah Brittany I do zoom cause every week it's part of my course it's fun uh-huh thanks Brittany I could imagine a knowledge hub gets pretty big yeah okay so we talked about that a little bit of clearing out the clearing out the knowledge hub over time and that's something that you could do yearly like so any any courses that you haven't touched in a while you could move to the archive or move to the backburner also one thing that I that I do I guess I didn't really cover that today let's go back to the learn dashboard I don't usually have all of these favorited by the way those are favorited just to kind of show you a couple different examples but so one thing I've started doing is once I noticed that I've clipped a bunch of databases pages properties websites whatever all related to a certain topic actually will unify those topics into what I call a guide so because I was like going down the livestream rabbit hole and I was you know clipping a bunch of things and people and things related to it I bring that all together and then I just say like guide to same with video so anything where I noticed there's been a like a bunch of especially tutorials how to you whatever I will consolidate those and create a guide and that also kind of helps clear up some of those items in the knowledge hub hopefully that helps clarify cool Lindsay says working with Peres right now but I'm struggling with the resources database I was trying to keep everything in a master resources database but I find I want to save different properties for different things exactly so Lindsay that's exactly why I have a knowledge hub I've got my tasks database like I can't personally I can't imagine having one resources database because there are so many contexts even within resources like what kind of resources are we talking about I have gardening specific resources and those are in such a different place in my brain than like my business resources so I've got my like my grow hub right where I've got this is a combination of area resources right and I don't necessary don't maintain such strict like area or resource it's more at a conceptual level so grow could be considered an area but in here I'm going to pull any resources that are related to that but to me it's not going to make sense to have like gardening related resources in the same place that I have like business resources so you know for me these are the resources that I keep and that's that's what works for me so it sounds like maybe you might want to break up your resources into a couple of different databases what are your thoughts on how to approach is storing resources yeah I think I might even do a bit of a mind map and ask yourself like what are the kinds of resources that you are storing and what are the different areas maybe they do need a little bit more separation I know learning for me is like I'm always reading and taking courses and doing something so I know like that's like a big pillar of my my resources notes and ideas again those are the big ones do you have a workflow or step-by-step list of questions like the mind suite list that you do to determine your goals or resolutions not really megan mins is amazing at this stuff she has so many amazing workshops resources 90-day planning stuff megan mins comm I highly recommend she's got some workshops around that that might be more helpful for that Taylor Pearson also has a really great I think it's called the effective entrepreneur that's of course that that he teaches where he gets you to do like a 25-year visioning exercise which is intense you know like 25 years well where do I want to be what do I want my life to look like so I often kind of dabble and go back and um like 12 week year I think is another good one too for figuring out like what's what's the long-term vision that you want how do you want to feel okay well what are the what are the things that I would want to do that would support that feeling okay what are the projects that I'm gonna do that would that would help me get there that's that's sort of what works for me like just start with like the as far out as you can imagine the vision and just starting to do a little bit of a work back well what's going to get me there well what's going to get me there what do I want to do in three years what I want to do in then I keep the big picture of vague and then as I go lower and lower what I'm doing my 90-day planning I can make sure that it's aligned and not just like busy work or distracted work that it's aligned with where I want to go so long answer long I don't necessarily have like a specific checklist necessarily but I do have some questions in my quarterly my quarterly database that kind of helps prompt those things a little bit let's see okay cool yeah Oh Michelle Michelle who did was it last week or the week before creating an intentional life she had some really great stuff in her notions base about that as well cool gray said Marie in the future I'd love to see how you use notion to replace asana particularly for a team as that's something I have to do for my workspace yeah honestly replacing asana was like my first goal with notion because I wanted to get my husband's buy-in and we had been using notion for a long long time and it was it was good for a while but to me asana is it was like a task manager it's not a place where I can be doing the strategic planning and I da ting and just it was it felt very one-dimensional in terms of like this's where your tasks live it wasn't a great place to store standard operating procedures I've tried it and I've seen other people do it to me it feels like a mess like it's not the right tool for that so we could probably do a whole session on asana 2 notion actually probably a good idea for my content maybe I'll just add that to my notes and ideas right now I think that would be a good use case and gray I think it would be good also to identify what are the what are the gaps for your team it with asana like where do you feel like things are missing or falling through the cracks and and that way you can kind of design your notion space with that in mind so for us building our task manager was a kind of first first step to see like could we give it the same property use custom peels what does that look like can this work so it took a bit of time to to get that in place but I think doing like a specific all right from scratch we're moving from from asana into notion is probably helpful thanks for coming Serena it's awesome cool hopefully that helps gray cool asana versus and again I always I don't want to like crap on other tool because I again I think you know specialist tools are great and ocean or asana was great for years we used it for years but it was again only a task management it wasn't quite allowing me to do some of the other things that I wanted to do if it still works for people I think that's great how do you choose what columns show up in the can man I tried setting up one based on my coworkers but I couldn't get each person their own column oh well let's why don't we why don't we try that out right now uh let's go let's do this in my focus database okay so you can you can sort by any Kanban board so if I want to group this by I can group it by owner so as long as you have an owner property you can have each person have their own columns is that it does that answer your question gray so you end with with Kanban board you'll notice you can't do the columns by relational databases you can only do it by selects multi selects or people so if I say by owner there's like me there's my assistant all right and everyone can have their own their own column let me know if that answers your question if you need any clarification there let me know I had each person tagged and couldn't sort by them I think I'd have to see your space when you say I had each person tagged so are you using names as tags and let's do a little let's do a little experiment here let's just duplicate one of these okay so you were doing that as a tag I would I would probably do that as a as a person instead of a tag but if you still want to want to do it by tags you totally can do that but this way when you assign someone something they're going to receive it they're updates as well so that's something to be aware of yes but otherwise you would just go group by and choose if it was like person or whatever it is you would just choose that so I can go by status I can group by by type I Studies employment courses right so that way if you just want to see show me all my online course tasks I can do that because I have a studies property right hopefully that that helps cool awesome yep so the group buy is pretty it's pretty handy okay cool you are yeah you are able to join the course if you want to I just um post that in the in the church or a pool and comm slash notion - mastery there is I mean there is a waitlist because but you can totally purchase it if you want it's still in beta the contents not finished but I do weekly office hours with folks so that I can learn from your questions and make the content even better and hopefully shrink that learning curve so yeah it's not a perfectly complete course and I'm adding to it every week it's hard not to add to it because there is just so much and over time what I'll probably do is break it up into a simpler like a a 101 smaller level course and then the more advanced use cases too but right now it's everything's in there team-based stuff solo you name it it's all in there cool okay can you show your connect dashboard so Mariona I did I don't think I I don't think I can only because there's like client stuff in there but that would be a great place to have your like a customer relationship management thing in there so any like follow-ups with people that you want to do meetings and also my people database I think I if some of you have come to a past office hours you've probably seen my people database which is I love it so much highly recommend I did actually mentioned that it's one of the core databases but the people database is really great it's another one that's connected to so many other of my databases so I have you know of course that I purchased from him sphere of influence it's in there and right any any money that I paid them any money that they've paid me meetings love notes inspiration words of wisdom all of that is connected to their profile so maybe there's people that I want to follow up with so this would be a great I basically embed my people database in the connect dashboard I also embed my meetings database the meetings people and students and clients as well so I actually have a separate clients database from people so people is more like influencers peers mentors people that I'm just kind of in their sphere and I'm loving what they're up to and I'm saving resources from them and the clients are obviously people that have more like direct ongoing relationships with so I don't think it's like clean enough to show you right now without sharing so that personal information but you could definitely do even some formulas to help you figure out when did I last contact this person and when like how often do I want to contact them I know some folks have shared this in the Facebook group there's like a couple that have an automated formula so that if you know 14 days out if more than 14 days then show them in this view kind of thing so you've got to keep in touch with folks so yeah anything obviously is gonna be very personal in terms of how your business works or how you connect with people maybe there's a your friends are in there too and it's it's just keeping them top of mind people that you want to connect with we have so prakash asked about the subtle Caston built into notion to avoid notion becoming a data storage and I think I've had enough questions about this I feel like I might need to do either like a video or a session directly on that so I'll have to answer that in another session a broader question might you know anything about notion as a company specifically any road maps or longer term plans for opening up the software sharing the api's can only imagine the horsepower behind a system where an ocean can play with Alfred so quarry there is some connection with Alfred someone has shared a whole like behind-the-scenes of how they do that so you can google that but I do have it like a great relationship with notion I'm in touch with their team pretty regularly they do keep the notion prose kind of in the loop of what they're doing but we don't necessarily have specifics I'm like I mean gosh I would love for that thing about Timeline view that I'm really excited to hopefully get my hands on so I don't necessarily know some of the specifics or when the API is coming but I do know oh thank you for sharing that Ram Kevin yell Bert integrating notion with Alfred definitely check that out that might be helpful for you yeah so unfortunately I don't know the specifics of that I do know they've got a lot of funding and they've been hiring like mad and trying to get some more engineering power so yeah unfortunately don't have any specific answers for that but they do they do try and keep us in the loop as much as they can Tsun Tsun mark was saying I spent the last two weeks trying to organize information using Thiago's para method I want the moments of reflection daily weekly monthly quarterly annually to be focused on the areas I've settled on areas having two aspects what I'm responsible for doing and how I'm responsible for being like that if that doesn't fit in the session I'm always interested in your gardening dashboard so and so mark I don't know if there was a question in there was there something you're wondering like how to actually set that up how to do that and yeah it might be it might be for another session and I think you saw the gardening dashboard which is very basic at this point I'm still an aspiring gardener so that's why I want to create that grow dashboard and I want to pull an inspiration and pull in tips and things like that oh my gosh you guys there's still so many questions hopefully I've covered the most important ones might have to wrap it up soon how do you prevent applying the toggle format to the sub block beneath the toggle I know you had shown a cool trick some time but I can't seem to recall I think Rafael clarified that one we did the how to make layouts go wide we covered that oh okay I have two databases how can I combine them so the there's a few nuances to this but essentially you can highlight and select all of the items in a database so as long as your cursor is on the left hand side there I can select all of these and I can right click and say move to and I can choose the database that I want to move those people to now you will have to make sure that the database that you are moving to has the same properties or at least most of the ones that you want to retain will have to be in the database that you're moving to and you may need to make sure that you're at least one of the entries that you're moving has some of those properties filled out and that will make sure that they get transferred in the move if that makes sense if you don't care about the properties you can totally just select all and move those items into the database that you want to move to okay make a way to tag people oh I don't know if you can tag people in the chat that's a great that's a great question I saw Alessandra I'd have to I actually have a note in my in my notes to go a little bit deeper in the in to settle cast and system in notion to make sure that I'm answering that question properly because I use Thiago's like progressive summarization so when I'm doing my my book notes and things like that I take the notes I highlight I bold and then I create these executive summaries so I go through here and then I'm highlighting it whatever and then I'm adding the tags and so like I had my own system for how I I process stuff but enough people have asked about the subtle Caston that I think it's it's time to do a little how-to on that so hopefully we can we can do that how do you get the pictures onto this page for the Carlene your sentence got cut off so I'm not sure if you're able to clarify which pictures you're referring to if it's the if you're talking about cover images then we can say properties here you can choose page cover or page content or none and then you've also got your page covers up here you've got emojis here I just use command control spacebar on a Mac to pull up emojis and then you can also of course just put in every goods here just upload upload images or from unsplash icons you could just drag them right into your page as well into the P oh into the people database so it's it's the same it's the same idea basically the people have I my assistant uploads their their profile photo just upload an image or paste the link and then just paste just paste there in the bump okay I should wrap it up see if you guys can like get on with your life you guys have been troopers yeah okay so any other questions if we didn't get to answer them you know I always like I export these after and store them and save them because I know there's obviously a lot of connected themes across a bunch of these and I want to make sure that these questions get answered so even though we didn't get to a number of these I'm gonna summarize some of these and hopefully we can do whether it's a follow-up session or just in future office hours we can hopefully cover some of these yeah thanks for coming everyone I know so so very long I was didn't know it was gonna go this long but there's so many questions that came in I wanted to get them answered so thank you for coming I'm gonna do my best to go through how did you get the stars on the tags where on the tags might have to I do have a I mean I've got a YouTube channel too where I cover some of the stuff in more detail I do talk about the master tag database on my channel as well see and also something I'm experimenting with in the future if you're interested is doing almost like live consulting sessions so build with me sessions where if you've got a space that you've like got it like part of the way there but you need to take at that little extra level I've got a forum where you can put in that information and hopefully I can kind of help you through that build with me process doing it as a live stream or as a recorded video and yeah that's something that I'm gonna experiment a little bit with because sometimes it's hard to answer the question without a little bit of that back and forth dialogue a little bit more context so hopefully I'll have time to catch up on my deep work today well and that's why draggin my fridays are a bit of like a buffer day because I know that it like deep work is probably not going to happen after a Friday when I'm all like jazz and excited about notion and I'm very distracted now and so today we'll probably just be learning and some calls and anyway cool thank you so much everyone for coming great questions there's so much I'm sorry if I didn't get to cover your question but I will definitely definitely do a way bigger sort of behind the scenes how to blog post of showing some of these in their full you know full screen capture how I do it and including a couple templates for those as well I think I included the mind sweep template with you all but I'll come up with one template that you could at least use as a starting point with some sort of recommended next steps and hopefully that is it's helpful yay that's awesome thanks for coming Ram that was and it was a very long session but I think it was good for people to just kind of see the effort and thinking that goes through and how you how you structure databases and all that good stuff so okay for real I'm gonna let you go now thanks everyone for coming I will follow up with a more in-depth blog post and template and as always you'll reach out on Twitter let us know what sessions you want to see more of and if this was helpful for you I definitely say hello on Twitter and next week we have Dan schipper from super organizers talking about writing a novel in notion which I'm really excited about so thank you thank you everyone have a wonderful weekend and see you on the Internet bye everybody

Channel: Notion

Views: 38,304

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Id: YX2AJD4kx80

Length: 115min 36sec (6936 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020