- Recurring tasks, inbox views, sub tasks, Kanban views, project views. I'm so, so tired. (bright music) Hey, welcome to another
Thomas Frank Explains video. So today we are tackling
what is for many people, the white whale, when it comes to Notion. That is task management. It's been right on the homepage ever since Notion
launched, replaces Asana, and replaces Trello. But for a lot of people, they have found it kind of
difficult to set Notion up in a way that actually lets
them manage their tasks, and ditch these other apps. So today I'm going to show
you exactly how to do that, using a brand new template that I just launched
called Ultimate Tasks. And you can find that over
at thomasjfrank.com/templates or the link to the exact template is going to be down in
the description below. You can just click it and duplicate it, and even follow along with it
while you watch this video. But I'm going to use this template to essentially teach you how
you can manage your tasks, both singular tasks,
recurring tasks, sub tasks, big projects. All kinds of different tasks
work inside of this template. So let's just dive right into it and show you what I got going on. So this is the sort of main dashboard here for ultimate tasks. And right away, you're going to see links to many of the views
that you would often see in another task management app, such as your inbox, your today view, your next seven days view. I've also got a priority view here, which allows you to see things in a Kanban view and
sort them by priority. And there's all tasks link right here, which is the master database
that runs the entire system. And essentially the brain here. Every single task ends up here, but this is probably not the view you're going to want to use because it's sort of, it's a
dumping ground for everything. So let's go back to the dashboard. In addition to those links, we've also got an area for projects, and this was really important to me. I wanted a place where I
could manage my daily tasks my personal tasks, but
also manage big projects, in sort of a Kanban view
where I can have all kinds of things going on at once. In fact, I just recently
redesigned my personal website which was a pretty big project. And I use this template to
organize the entire thing. And lastly, on the dashboard, we have something called daily tasks. If you watched any of my old videos about my productivity systems, you know that I like to plan out my day on a piece of scrap
paper or on a whiteboard. And essentially this replicates that right inside of Notion. And this daily tasks board is actually within pretty much every view that you're going to see,
except for the project view. So if I go to inbox here this is sort of, you know, the inbox view that you expect in Todoist or Microsoft To Do, or anything else where
you can just dump tasks before they're sorted. And to the side, just as with the today view
in the next seven days view, we have this daily tasks area. So if you want, you could create a scratch
pad where you essentially plan out your day, or just dump a few tasks that you know are going
to get done really soon. And that don't need to be put into the actual overall system. That's probably the
simplest part of the system. So let's get into some
of the actual views. So here we have the inbox. And you're gonna see a few different interesting columns on this table here. First, we have a check box called inbox. Any task here in the inbox
that has this box checked is going to remain in the
inbox until you uncheck it. So if I go ahead and
uncheck a task right here it's going to go away. As long as it also has a due date. Essentially the logic here is
to allow you to add new tasks to your inbox, then add their due date, to add their project, add their priority, whatever it is you want to do, but keep them in the inbox
while you're doing that, until you want to get
them out of the inbox. So let's just create a
sample task right here, called a shoot ultimate tasks video which I'm doing right now. So I'm gonna give that due date of today. And then if I wanted to, I
could give it a recur interval. And there's some new logic in here that actually improves on
the recurring tasks template I made in a previous video. If I give it a recurrent interval, it is automatically going to be given the type of recurring, and
we'll see that next due date. Now, the way that I handle recurring tasks in Notion, is to set their due dates
to the next due date. So essentially this next due
column is a guide of sorts. So if we go ahead and
set that to November 2nd, then the next due date is
going to update accordingly. Whereas for one-time tasks, we actually just hit the done
button and they disappear. This is a bit of a workaround to deal with some of Notion's limitations. And if you're curious about
how it actually works, I have a whole video about
recurring tasks in Notion I'll have that link in
description down below. Next we have the state column here, which gives you some
quick-at-a-glance information about a task. If it's red, it's overdue. If it's green, it is due today. And if it is blue, it is
planned for the future. You're also going to see these
little arrow markers here. Sometimes these indicate that this task is indeed a
sub task of another task. So if I go into this task
right here by clicking open, the first property we
see here is parent task. And I can click onto this
and go into it to reveal that within this task, we have our own little sub tasks table. So one quick thing I forgot to mention when I was filming earlier, is that you can create sub tasks within any task using a template. So if we go to this shoot
ultimate video right here we can spawn from a template
called task with sub tasks. Or we can go over to here to new, and click task with sub tasks, to get ourselves a task
that has a little database inside of it. Any tasks created in this sub database is going to be a sub
task of this parent task. So this is essentially the
best way that I could think of to achieve sub tasks inside of Notion. And then from any view, the little arrow icon in the state column will let you see at a glance
that it is indeed a sub task. And I mean, any view. You've got the inbox view here. And we've got several different views that you can switch to. So list view is actually perfect for mobile phones, because the list view
actually is responsive, unlike the table view. And here you can see
that state information. You can see the inbox check box, the due date, and the done
check box, for when you're done. We've also got a board view that goes with your typical Kanban
states: to do, doing, done, which means that not only do you have typical table-based task management you also have Trello style,
Kanban management here, which is going to be very
useful for projects later on. And also if you grab a task in the Kanban view and
you drag it over to done, you are going to see it
here in the Kanban view, because some people want to
see which cards are done. But in any other view,
such as the table view, that is now going to be gone, because due to our filter criteria here, which essentially runs the entire system, the Kanban state of done is treated exactly like the done checkbox, in terms of what tasks are
hidden from what views. So that is a brief look
at the inbox view here. If we go over to the sidebar, this was really important to me. I wanted to design a system that allowed me to get to my inbox. Mike today view, my next
week view, my priority view, all from the sidebar, essentially replicates
the same functionality from Todoist, which I used to use, and I've now switched over from. So if we go over to another
view, such as today, we get something that looks
basically like the inbox. And if you switch over to the table view, you're going to see it
looks pretty much like it, except the filter is changed. So now we only see tasks that
are due today or before today, which means you're only going to see the red or the green circles. And if you add a task here, which we'll just call it tasks due today. It's automatically going to
have a due date of today. Of course, we can also go through and add other information, such as a project, a recurrent of all if we
want to, a parent task, anything you want. And like I said earlier, from any view today, next seven days, whatever it is, you have
your daily tasks blocks. So if you wanted to create
a new one for 10 26 20 which would be a good
scratch pad for today, then we could look at
what we've got going on in today view, and plan out our day, along with anything
else that might come up. So today I know I had
a call with the movers. I had to film this video. I've got some tweaks on my website. I can easily plan that out here in the today view. Now to make sure these daily tasks notes don't gunk up your entire system, there is an archive check
box, which if clicked, will hide the note from
basically every view. So I'm not going to hide this
one because this is today. But I do want to go and hide yesterday's, which I'm done with. So we'll just click that. And then from any view here, it is going to be completely gone. So from there, let's look
at the next seven days view. This is identical to the today view except the filter criteria
is a little bit different. Instead of filtering for
tasks on or before today, they are now due on or
before a week from now, which means you're now
going to see everything that was in the today view, but also, in these blue rows, you're going to see
anything due after today, up to and including seven days from now. So from there, let's go into
some more interesting views. First, we have this priority view, which looks a little bit different from all the other ones. I wanted to build Kanban that Trello style card system into this, so people who like to
use that can use that, and people who like to use the table view can use table view. So here in priority view, every task when created
is going to automatically get the medium priority level. And this is done through filter trick that I use all the time
in my Notion workspace. Essentially, if you come
in here to your filters, and you choose a property
like Kanban view, state or priority, and you
filter the view by is not empty, then whenever you create a new card, and let's go ahead and
do it somewhere else, because here we're doing
it inside this board, so that would automatically
get medium anyway. Let's do it over in the today view. So if we create another task, just call it another task due today, and then if we go into that task, we're going to see that it automatically has
the medium priority set. And it's because due
to the filter criteria, Notion is going to force this row to take on one of those priorities. And the one that's going to be
chosen is the top listed one. So if you wanted every new task
to be listed as low instead, you would just drag low to the top. I want every task to come
as medium instead of low. So that's the order I want here. And if we go back to our priority view, notice that the order of the Kanban boards
does not have to match the order of the items
in the select property. I can drag this around all I want. It's not going to affect things. Everything is still going to come in as a medium priority task, which means we can easily order
it by high, medium, and low. So if you're a priority person, this is going to be the view for you. So from there, let's move into probably
the most complex part of the system, but also I think the most powerful. If we go back to the
ultimate tasks dashboard, we have a separate
database called projects. So this is its own database. And if you create it, we've actually got a template here called a project template. You're going to get something
that looks kind of like this. This is sort of a demo
project I've got in here. So you can sort of look at
how things are going on. But this has a linked database in it. And of course we are
linking to, you guessed it, our all tasks database,
where everything lives. And while we're here, if you look at this project column, you're going to see some of these tasks have certain projects
associated with them. In this project column, we achieved that by
what's called a relation. We relate to one database
to another database. In this case, all tasks is related to, I go back with command
bracket, our projects database. And so we're relating
to this specific row, which is a project, our website redesign, which means that any new tasks created in this board like debug home page, is going to automatically be
associated with this project. I can go ahead and give it
a due date if I want to. And if you really wanted
to, you could go ahead and give the filters
here due date criteria. so it would force different due dates. Personally, that doesn't
really work for my needs. But of course, you can always
add things or subtract things. That's the beauty of Notion. And within this project view here, we have our standard table
view, which is pretty useful. But when I manage big projects, I love to use Trello style Kanban views. So we can switch to two
different combine views, one of which is our classic state view, which is our to do, doing, and done lists. But for really big projects I kind of like to use
Kanban in a different way. I've got another view
called board view tag. And here I've got different tags for different categories of work. So for a website redesign,
I've got design tasks, I've got copy that needs to be
written for different pages, I've got speed tasks,
I've got security tasks. So for this project, I would just create new
tasks under these tags. So I can sort of see the entire project at a glance. But of course, every single one here that has a due date, is also going to show up in my day view. So I've got one place to plan my project, and see it all from bird's eye view, and other places to see what
needs to happen in a given day in that task, but also
across my entire system. So let me just demonstrate really quickly how you would create a new project. If we come back to the
ultimate tasks dashboard here and look at the projects database if we click new, we're going to add a new blank row. And if we click right here, we can generate a new template based on the templates we have set up. So if I click this,
it's going to auto fill with all the different stuff
we set up in the template. So I will call this house move. Go whole project, move into
a new house very, very soon. I'm going to want to have everything related to that in one project. So now if I create a task
here, like pack books, and I make that due today, why not? Then it's gonna be here. But it's also going to be in
my today view, pack books. And we can see it's associated
with the house move. Now, personally, I don't
want to have a frog icon in all my projects. So one thing I'm probably gonna do to customize this project, is change its icon. Let's just go with a house. Boom. And if we come back to today, it is visually distinct from
our website redesign project. So I know there's a lot
going on with this template. If you have questions about it, feel free to ask them in
the comments down below. And like I said earlier, you're gonna find this
template, number one, linked in the description where you can get to
the landing page boards, or you can find all my Notion templates over at thomasJfrank.com/templates. And on the template landing page, there is a little email sign up. If you want to get on my
Notion tips, email list where you're going to get notified about new templates I create, and new content that I
create teaching Notion. You can sign up right there
on any of those pages. Or you can just click
the no thanks button, and go right to the template without signing up for your email. Either one is cool with me. Again, ask questions both about this, but really anything else. This channel right now is
kind of focused on Notion. So I want to hear your questions. I want to hear what you want to know about and let me know what
you think of this template. Let me know if there's anything
you would do to improve it. And if you're curious, last but not least, I am building a course for
people who want to use Notion as they're all-in-one
productivity systems, specifically for creating content, running businesses and running teams. This will be useful for both solopreneurs
who have a lot going on, but also people who have teams
of people working under them. And in that course, you're going to see an
even more advanced version of this template. That's also hooked into a company Wiki with standard operating procedures that you can use to generate checklists, and a whole content library
and lots of other cool stuff. So I'll have a link to sign
up for the interest list for that course. It's not ready yet, but I
am building it as we speak. And it's going to be ready at least in a beta form pretty soon. So if you're interested, you can sign up for notifications on that. And that's all I got for you today. So I'll have a couple of other videos on the screen that you can check out. Make sure you're
subscribed to this channel if you aren't already. And as always, thanks for watching. See you in the next video. (upbeat music)
