- Hey, what is going on friends? Welcome back to "Thomas Frank Explains." In this video, I'll be giving
you an in depth look at my complete second brain
system inside of Notion. This is, at long last, an
all-in-one system that tracks all of my tasks, my
projects, my notes, my goals, and basically organizes my entire life. And this is what I have
wanted inside of Notion for the entire time I've
been using this app, ever since 2018 when I discovered it. And they had that promise
of an all-in-one tool right on the homepage. Finally, I have a complete system where I can capture all of
my notes, ideas, my tasks. I can track my projects
with both notes and tasks inside of those projects. I can organize my entire life using Tiago Forte's PARA
organization system. There's even a full GTD or
Getting Things Done workflow inside of the system. So in this video, I'm gonna
give you an in-depth look at every single part of this system from an action-oriented standpoint, which means we're gonna look
at it from the perspective of the actions we would want to take, including quickly capturing items. We're on the go organizing our lives and actually getting things done. For most of my life, I have had to juggle multiple
apps to achieve this balance, but now I can do it all inside of Notion. Now this will be a bit of a longer video, so you might wanna check
out the table of contents either right there or in
the description down below. So you can skip around
to what interests you or go back and review things as needed. And before we dive in,
I will also mention that I've turned this entire
system into a template, so if you want a complete
done-for-you second brain system that you can simply add
to your Notion workspace and start using right away, you can actually get it over
at thomasjfrank.com/brain. The template is called "Ultimate Brain" and I'll note right now, there
is a promo code you can use which I'll put on screen
right now, it is UBLAUNCH, to get a full 50% off the list price. I'll have more information about that at the end of the video, but for now, let's actually dive in because I'm gonna show you
every single part of this system so in case you wanna build it yourself, you can using what you
see here as inspiration. So let's get this show on the road and dig into this template. Once again, it is called "Ultimate Brain" and on the homepage, there are
several different areas here split into three different columns. So I've got some smart dashboards. One's just called dashboard, it is a very general purpose dashboard. There's also an area
for planning your day, a quick capture dashboard,
and a page called process, which is our GTD or Getting
Things Done style dashboard. And finally, one for planning your future. We also have some more
traditional productivity views, like a task manager,
project hub, a notes area, and areas and resources page,
which uses Tiago Forte's PARA, or projects, areas, resources, and archive organizational methodology for doing total life organization. And I'll actually have a
mini lesson on how that works within this video. One for goals, and archive,
and then some special views, a book tracker, a recipe
book, a quick links area. And we're gonna get through
all of these in this video. But like I said in the intro, I want to take an
action-oriented approach to how we go through this system. So I first want to start out
with actually capturing ideas. See, a second brain is an external either combination of tools or single tool that allows you to get
ideas or tasks or events, anything that you're
holding up in your brain, into that external system so you can go back to
thinking and being creative and actually getting your work done. And for that second brain to work well, we need to be able to quickly
capture tasks and ideas and everything else with as
little friction as possible. So inside of "Ultimate Brain," I created a page called quick capture, and this is a one stop
destination for capturing both tasks and notes into various inboxes. This is the kind of page that
you could add as a favorite to your Notion sidebar just like this. And you could also add it as a widget on your iOS or your Android home screen. So you could immediately open
it and then capture something when it comes into your life. So here we have two different views. There is a task inbox and a note inbox, and one of the design patterns that I use throughout the entire
template, but also here is these links to other dedicated pages. So here I see a linked
view of my task inbox and a linked view of my note inbox, but I can also go over
to the task inbox itself, and I can go over to the
note inbox itself as well. And an inbox is simply
a default destination for something that isn't yet organized. So in the case of a note,
it would be something that hasn't been yet given
a resource or an area, which is like a folder. Again, I'll have a whole PARA
tutorial later in this video. And in the case of tasks, it would be anything that
hasn't yet been given a project. So if I want to capture a task and I'll switch over to my table view, I could just call this "inbox task" and it's gonna remain in the
inbox until I assign a project, which is exactly how things
work in other task managers like Todoist or Asana or pretty much anything
you've used in the past. Now there is one additional
little feature here on the quick capture page. There is a filter that will ensure that anything I add here,
be it a task or a note, only stays here for 24 hours. And that ensures that
the quick capture page is always nice and clean. To give you a very quick look at how this works in the filters, I have a special filter called
"quick capture" is checked, and there's a formula in
there that basically just says if this is older than 24 hours,
it's not gonna be checked. So it's gonna go away from
this quick capture page and keep the page nice and clean. However, it's always
gonna stay in the inbox until I physically process it and put it somewhere
else or actually do it. And one of the really nice
things about using inboxes is that there are extensions we can use like Notion's official web clipper, and the Saved to Notion extension that will let us actually clip
web highlights and web clips into our Notion template here. So I wanna show you an
example of how that would work using the Saved to Notion extension. The official Notion web
clipper is really nice as well, but I love the Saved to
Notion extension because it'll actually allow us to choose
some specific property settings when we're clipping a webpage. And we can also clip specific
highlights from that webpage. So I have the Save to Notion extension installed in my browser already. If you don't, you would just add it to Chrome or Microsoft edge. And here I'm on this article
about front squat variations. So I can open up the Save to Notion button in my little bar here. I have some pre-setup forms. This one will add a note
directly to my inbox and this one will actually
make the note bypass the inbox and go directly to my
fitness resource, which is essentially a folder of
fitness-related articles and notes. So I'll show you how
both of those work here. First, I'm gonna add it
directly to the inbox. I'll just click that and hit add new page and then when I go back
to Notion, I will see "Front Squat Variations for
Lifts at Every Experience Level" right in my note inbox. From there, I could come
in here and I could give it an area or resource, again,
that's kind of like a folder, but I'm actually gonna
show you how it would work if I added it directly
to that area or resource. So I'll go ahead and delete it right now and I'll re-add it using the fitness form. And if I go into this
form, you can see that I'm simply adding this
area resource of fitness to my web clip. So if I hit add new page,
I can go back to Notion and it's not going to be
in my inbox because, again, the inbox is a default destination. If I add it to a resource,
it's not gonna be in the inbox, it will disappear. So I'll go over to my notes dashboard. This gives you a bit of a preview of how the notes dashboard works, and I can see it in my recents. So if you're coming from
a tool like Evernote or anything that has a recents folder, you can see it like that. But I can also go over
to my fitness resource and I've got a special web
clips section where I can see boom, my "Front Squat
Variations for Lifters at Every Experience Level." I've also created a special
view of the web clips section called "by site" and this will actually group
my web clips by their base URL so I can see everything from Barbend here, I can see everything from
Body Recomposition right here, very great resource if
you wanna learn about biomechanics and things
like that, by the way. And if I open this up by
default, I'm gonna see nothing, but this actually will allow me to start creating some highlights. And I've got a whole video
planned on how this works and how to leverage it. But just to give you a
bit of a example here, if I highlight this
and hit "add highlight" it is highlighted on the webpage for now, but I can also go back and
see that highlight instantly in my second brain system. So this extension is
actually a very good way to do highlighting and note
capture within webpages that you're doing research on, and then have them sync
over to your second brain. So that covers quick capture for now. We've got a lot more cool
things coming down the pipeline for quick capture, including an automatic speech to
text to Notion workflow that I'm very excited to
share in the very near future, but for now we're gonna move on to the next portion of the template, which is going to be planning your day. I think this is really, really important. You want to have a way of capturing tasks, giving them due dates,
giving them projects, capturing notes, but it's also very important to sit down either at the end of each day
or the beginning of a new day and plan out what you think
you're going to accomplish on that day. So I wanted to have a dedicated
page for that purpose. And this page essentially acts as a virtual whiteboard of sorts where I can just write
down my plan for the day and just get a view only of
what I'm planning to accomplish instead of seeing everything
else in my system. And the point of the my day
page that I've built here is to facilitate that planning process and then give me this
little virtual whiteboard. So the first thing I have here is a couple of little callouts, very simple, not database driven, but they
are inside of a synced block so they can follow me around
my second brain as well, so I'll see them on the my day page, but if I also went over to
the general purpose dashboard, I have this toggle where I
see the exact same content. And if I were on, say, the task manager, or maybe even one of the time-based views, like my today view, I've got the same toggle. So if I'm looking at
tasks that are due today and I wanna plan to do one, I can just open up my
toggle and I can add it to this exact same synced block. But on the my day page specifically I have this little virtual whiteboard but I also have some useful
sections that I can refer to when I'm actually planning my day. The first one is upcoming tasks. So I have a calendar of tasks
that actually have due dates. And there's also a view called do next. So within the Getting
Things Done methodology that David Allen created a long time ago, he has this idea of tasks that don't have a specific due
date, but that are priorities. The ones that you are planning
on doing as soon as possible, those go on your next actions list, or as I call it here, a do next list. So these are tasks which are
grouped by their context, like high energy or errand or home, that haven't been assigned
a specific due date, but I do want to do them soon. So when I'm planning my day, I can refer to these do next
tasks in their contexts. I can refer to my actual calendar with tasks that have to be
done on a specific date. And I can plan out my day just like that. I also wanted to add a
specific self-care area and this was more for me
than for the template, but I think other people
will find it useful as well. I find that as an entrepreneur who has a lot of goals and a lot of tasks, it's very easy to deprioritize workouts and drinking enough water and eating well when I have so much work to do because the work is very
visible, it's very tangible. It's on my task manager. So it's very easy to be like, "I'm too busy, I can't work out today." And that is why I actually
wanna put self-care items on this virtual whiteboard
right next to my tasks so I can mentally prioritize them just as highly as my work tasks. Finally, there is a daily journal area and a priority projects area. There is a priority
check box for projects, and I wanted that because over the years of using
different task management apps like Asana and Todoist, I eventually would have a ton
of different projects in lists and it would be hard to prioritize which ones I wanted to actually work on, which one's really important. So here I can only see projects in my project management system that have been marked as a priority. If I open up this Build
New Set project here, which I've actually been
working on for quite a while, hopefully you like the set, I can see that priority is checked here and that is going to enable
me to see that project here on the my day page, along
with set up mini garage gym, and this song that I'm working on. Now, let's go back to
the journal for a second because a lot of people love to journal and I wanted to add this as
a feature to the template. If I add a page right here, this is actually just a page
within the notes database, but it has a special template
that I can generate from called Daily Note. So if I generate from the Daily Note, I might give it just a date name. So I'm just gonna go with 5 9
2022, which is today's date. And this template actually gives me a useful little dashboard that
I can use as a daily journal and as a place to plan
my day, if I want to. So if you're really into journaling, you might want to use this
instead of a static my day page. I've got the my day
synced block right there, I've got my next seven
days, I've got do next, all that good stuff. But I also have dedicated areas to do like morning page writing if I want to get into a writing habit, I have a daily review area, and over time, if you're using this journal template, you're gonna have a whole journal
that you can look back on. In fact, if we go to the notes page, there is a daily journal
heading right here, and this will actually show you all of your past journals over time. So it could be pretty useful
if you do like journaling. So that's gonna cover
it for daily planning in this overview video. Now I wanna go into life organization and the life organization
methodology that I've chosen to build into my system is actually the PARA method
that Tiago forte came up with in his "Building a Second Brain" course. He has this great article, it's public on his website and free, on the PARA method. So I will link to that in
description down below. And he basically explains the
entire thing, but I'm also going to briefly explain
how it works in this video and also show how, using Notion, we can improve on it, in my opinion, because PARA was actually
developed to be tool agnostic, which means it has certain limitations based on older school tools that Tiago has been using for a long time. So to properly do this
section of the video, I'm gonna have to break
out the whiteboard. So like I said before, Tiago's
methodology is called PARA, which stands for projects,
areas, resources, and archive, and this forms a top level framework for organizing the entirety of your life. Now, I think Tiago would
agree with me when I say that PARA isn't a rigid system that you have to stick to for everything, but it's more like a
top level starting point so you can create projects, you
can create areas, resources, you can have an archive for dumping things that
are no longer relevant. And then within maybe a
certain area or resource, you can start customizing things. And this is where Notion gets
really, really useful because it's a tool that allows
us to build our own tools. But to explain PARA from a non-Notion, more
app agnostic standpoint, each of these letters in the PARA acronym are specific and separate lists. There is a list of
projects, a list of areas, a list of resources, and then an archive which contains lots of stuff
that no longer matters. So to define these, a project
is an ongoing series of tasks that has an end goal. You probably know what a project is. An area he calls, "A sphere of activity with a standard to be
maintained over time." So I see that as what I
love to call "life buckets" or the sort of slices of your identity, maybe health, your business, if you're a musician like I am,
the music part of your life, these are large pieces of your life that might have tasks to be
done on a maintenance basis. But might also have resources and things that you're collecting, information, notes, that kind of thing. A resource is a bit less
actionable than an area. It doesn't have a
standard to be maintained. It's more a topic of ongoing interest. Something that you're
simply interested in, like biomechanics or
guitar, something like that. And then the archive
is just a holding area for anything that is no
longer relevant to you but that you don't wanna fully delete. An archive is a great way to make sure you can access things in
the future if you need to but that those things are out of your way on a day to day basis. So within PARA, these
really are separate lists. And the reason for that
is this is a methodology that can be applied to basically any tool, so if you're using a separate note taker like Evernote or Bear, you can have a projects
folder, an areas folder, a resources folder, and an archive. If you're using your
computer's file system for file management, you can have a projects
folder, an areas folder, so on, and you can do the same
thing with task management. So in projects you might have
garage gym, things like that. And in areas, you might
have a health area. In resources, you might have biomechanics. And in the archive, you
might just have stuff that you have gotten rid of that
no longer matters to you. The cool thing though is that in Notion we can get a bit more flexible than what we're looking at right here, because with Notion we're
actually using databases instead of rigid directories
in a hierarchical structure. So let me show you a bit of a diagram that I've created for this. This is "Ultimate Brain"'s PARA structure, and you can see here that we have a bit more flexibility going on. Areas can actually contain goals, they can contain projects, and
they can contain resources. So when Tiago says an area
is a sphere of activity with a standard to be
maintained over time. To me, that means it's
a big part of your life, which may contain specific projects. And it also may contain more
specific and topical resources. So why wouldn't you have
them within an area? In a tool like Evernote,
Tiago doesn't like doing that because you have to scroll
through all of your areas before getting to a resource. But in Notion, we can
get a lot more flexible. Same can be said for things like goals. I think a lot of times goals don't have actionable tasks associated with them. So we may actually wanna have
them as their own data type, which can, again, contain projects, and then projects of course contain tasks, but that can also contain notes,
which can be really useful, and then resources contain notes as well. But the big thing, which I put on this little
sticky note right here, is that pretty much any of these pieces of your organizational system do not have to be contained by other ones. Projects can exist outside of
an area, same for resources. Tasks can stay in your inbox
and not be assigned a project. You have a lot of flexibility
when you use databases in a tool like Notion, because Notion is simply allowing
you to relate information from one database to
information in another database and you get to choose
whether or not you do that. So let me show you what
that actually looks like inside of my second brain system. So here we have an areas
and resources main page, and this collects all of
the areas in our life. And you can see how these are
the big pieces of my life, college info geek, health, music, but also the resources,
the more topical interests, things like interior design, productivity, business, finance, all this kind of stuff. And if I go into one of these pages, like the health page right here, I can see that there's
basically this dashboard for this entire part of my life. I might have projects like
setting up this mini garage gym, and I've got a progress bar and I can see if there
are any overdue tasks, how many tasks I have, I have resources like fitness
or nutrition, I've got goals, and I can also favorite notes. So this Barbell Academy notes page where I was taking notes on a course, I have it favorited
inside of my health area. I have all of the notes
across any of these resources or not in the resource, just in the area right here in area notes,
by updated, alphabetically, or I can even look at
them in a matrix view where I can give them types. So this Barbell Academy notes, which you can see exists
in the fitness resource, has actually been given a lecture type. And with these types, I can
create even more organization if I'm say taking a very complex class with lecture notes and book notes and all kinds of other things going on. So this gives me a bird's eye view of everything in my life
related to my health. I can also go into one of these resources. So if I go into fitness
and I open that up, I have my Barbell Academy notes. I can open that up, I can
take all the notes I need to, and this is a pretty darn long note because I had the entire
course's notes inside of this. And I can also, like I showed you before, collect web clips that are
related to this resource. So this gives me, again,
a top level base framework for organizing every part of my life. I have my health dashboard,
I have the fitness resource, which is very good for organizing everything related to fitness in terms of information that I'm saving
or notes that I'm taking. And I also have projects. So going back to my health area, I have a setup mini garage gym project. And what I've always wanted
in basically any tool is a robust note taking system and a robust task management system. And from what I've experimented with, there wasn't really a tool out there that offered both to me until Notion. So inside my project template,
I now have an area for tasks, but I also have an area for notes. I can take any notes I
need to on this project. And another cool thing,
if I wanna pull notes from somewhere else in my
second brain into this project, so I have like a
reference for the project, I can actually do that. I created a little property, if I open up the more
properties area here, called "pulled resources"
and "pulled notes." So using this one, it's a
simple relation property, I can pull an entire
resource into this project, if that would be helpful. And with this one, I can
get a bit more specific and I can pull specific notes
into this project as well. They are not notes that are
directly related to the project, but I'm pulling them in as if I'm gathering all the
resources I already have relevant to this project
into one useful dashboard. So let me show you how I
do that in pulled notes. I'm simply going to search for my front squat variations article. And now if I come over to my notes area, you'll see that it's still
blank because the default view only shows me notes that I've
added directly to the project. I would want to see those, but I can also go over to
this pulls view and see now my front squat variations are showing inside of this project. So again, it's about creating a dashboard that is perfect for the given context. And there's gonna be
times in my life where I am in project planning
mode for a specific project, in this case for the set up
a mini garage gym project, and I wanna see all my
tasks, but I also wanna see any information within my second brain, whether I take it directly
from here or I pull it in, that's gonna help me with this project. If I pulled an entire resource, so let's just say pulled resources, let's add in fitness entirely, that will bring in everything
from that resource. So now I'm gonna have the entire
resource showing down here and I can easily access it. And I'm gonna see every single web clip and all of my notes from that resource in the pulls area as well. Again, I have this one stop
shop dashboard for this project, but like I said earlier, we are not restricted
to the rigid PARA model. And if I want to have something that doesn't exist inside of an area, or if I wanna have a
resource that's on its own, I can do that. Because again, we're using databases where our relations are optional. So if I go back to the areas
and resources main page here, you can see that some of these
resources, which are again basically just little topical buckets for things I'm interested in, some of them are contained within areas. I've got guitar, music
production, and singing inside of music. So if I open up my music dashboard, I'm gonna see all of those there. And I can also see all of my notes related to all these resources inside the area notes. Pretty useful. But there are certain
resources in my life, certain little topical interests
that aren't really related to any overarching identity that I have, like as a musician or as an athlete. For example, interior design
doesn't really go in an area. Or maybe if I had a house
area, it could go there, but if I don't have a house area, or if I just want to have a resource, I need to create one quick and dirty. I can just do it in no root area and now I have this perfect
little interior design resource where I can clip "21 Mid-Century
Modern Chair Designs," that kind of thing. So we have a lot of flexibility here, and this allows us to use
Tiago's PARA methodology as a starting point, and then to create really useful customizations
from that starting point. To give you an example of
that, I have this Notion area in my actual copy of this template, which I'm keeping private, I'm using a demo for most of this video, but I've got this little
Notion Tools note, which normally would
just be filled with text, that's normally what you
do with notes in Notion, but this is actually far better served by a custom database with
some custom properties. So within this note,
I've created a database and that allows me to use this
in a far more useful context than if it were just a bullet
list full of just random text. So we've talked about PARA
organization, life organization. We've talked a lot about
project management, actually. I will show you the
project hub really quick. This just shows us our
projects by their status, which is very useful, and then
groups them by their areas so I can see anything that
is currently going on, I can see projects that have been planned, which I don't have any yet. I have ongoing projects and this is actually really
good for recurring tasks, which I will cover a little
bit later in the video. Tasks that have to be done again and again on an ongoing basis I collect in these ongoing
area task projects. I have done projects here, and then I can also set projects
as on hold if I need to. So that's a pretty useful hub. But now I actually wanna move on to task management inside of Notion and specifically inside
of "Ultimate Brain." So I have this whole little
task manager dashboard here, and this will show me,
number one, a calendar. So anything that has actually
been given a due date, I can see at a glance right here. But then I have lots of very useful views so I can see projects and
tasks in their proper context. First, I've got my inbox
where I can simply dump tasks that haven't been processed yet. I've got time based views,
so this view would show me any task that is due tomorrow or before. I've got three right here. I could go to my month and I could see anything that
is due within the next month. Today will show me anything
due just today or before. Those are really useful. And then there are these process views, which I will talk about in just a bit, because they are related to
the Getting Things Done method. I do have a special
views little header here, which will show completed tasks, cold tasks, which are
pretty useful actually. Cold tasks are essentially tasks that are more than two weeks overdue
and not high priority. And the reason I added this is because using Todoist and Wonderlist before that, "remember the milk" back in the day when I was a high schooler, I would often have tasks,
I was very busy in my life, I would often have tasks
that were very far overdue and they would just gunk
up my due today list. And I would either have to go through and process them automatically, or just have a mess of a task manager. And despite my best efforts, sometimes in my life, this happens. So when I started using
Notion for task management, I thought, "Couldn't
I just create a filter that would get these really overdue tasks out of my hair and into a special place?" And that is what cold tasks is. It basically just checks off
a cold check box property. If the task is more than two weeks overdue and it is not marked as high priority, it's gonna get itself
out of my today view, my next seven days, and
go to this cold area. And the whole philosophy here
is if you have a task that is more than two weeks overdue and you didn't physically
mark it as high priority and you didn't come and
update its due date or do it, it wasn't really that important
anyway, it probably wasn't. So again, we're not getting rid of it. We're not deleting it. We are getting it out of your
more important views where you should only be seeing tasks
that are actually important and actually a priority. Going back to our task
manager, we have once again a high priority project list, and then we have these process views. So the process page, which is, again, it's own page inside of this template, is a complete Getting
Things Done or GTD style processing dashboard. So this would be for anybody
who actually uses David Allen's GTD method. And it basically lets you
use that entire method in one page, there are also specific pages
for each of the GTD lists, but you can also just use it
on the process page itself. Now I'm gonna explain GTD
a little bit in this video, but I also have a full video
plan that will go in depth on what GTD is, how to actually use it, and whether or not it's gonna be useful, but to just show you the
workflow of how to process items that come into your life. I'll come over to this little
whimsical board right here, and we'll take a look at this flow chart. So essentially Getting
Things Done is a methodology for processing anything
that comes into your life and figuring out where to put it. And in fact, Tiago has
mentioned that PARA is almost an add on to GTD. It sort of tells you
where to put those things, if they're projects or areas or resources, but the GTD processing methodology is really what we can use to
go through the actions of processing things that
come into our lives. So this starts with an inbox. Everything comes into an inbox, which in my case is either a
note inbox or a task inbox. And then we start asking questions. First and foremost, is it actionable? If not, we either delete it
if it's totally irrelevant, we'll add it to our reference
materials in this case, it would be a resource or maybe an area. We'll add it to a someday list or we can add it to a snooze list, which has also been called a tickler file. Essentially it's like snoozing
an email in your email inbox. It'll come back into the
inbox a little bit later on, or at least get a reminder about it. So if it's not actionable, you
do one of those four things. But if it is actionable,
you keep moving on. The next question is, is the
next action clear and obvious? So if you have something
very big in your inbox, like write an entire
paper, if you're a student, or make an entire video, if you're me, then next physical action is
not very obvious in that case. Make a video is not obvious because I have a lot of different
subtasks in that process. I need to script the video or outline it. I need to turn all lights on in the set. There's a whole lot to do. So if your next action is not obvious, you're actually looking at a project, you would create a project out of that. You'd break that project down into smaller tasks that are obvious. And from there you can
go onto the next step. The next question is, can you do it now in under two minutes? If yes, then simply do it. Don't worry about getting
it into your system or processing it because it would take
less time to just do it. If you can't, or you need to
put it off for some reason, can you delegate it? If yes, add to a delegated list and maybe add yourself a reminder to check in with the person
that you delegated it to. Finally, if you cannot delegate it, you ask, "Does it have a
hard, specific deadline?" If it does, you add it to your calendar, and if it doesn't, you add
it to your do next list or your next actions list. And these colored boxes here indicate the different lists we
actually have inside of GTD or the actions we'll take. So for anything actionable in your system, if it's not done within GTD, it is going to be on one
of six specific lists: your inbox, your do next list,
or your next actions list, your delegated list, your
snooze list, your someday list, or the calendar itself. And inside of my little
second brain process page here in Notion, we have a view across this little tab bar here of each of those lists. So we have our task intake,
which I just called intake to differentiate it from
the classic task inbox, which does not use GTD rules, and it's gonna stay here until I move it to one of the other lists. I could either move it to do next, so here I'll give it a do
next smart list option, and that'll actually
move it over to do next. And I could give it a context as well. So if it's a high energy
or a low energy task, I could give it an energy context. If it is a errand, I could
give it that context. And these contexts would allow me to look at my do next list at
specific times of the day and see which tasks
are gonna be useful for the context that I'm actually in. So I can identify what's
truly actionable right now. I can also look at my next month list, and this is exactly
like the next month list in the task manager. This shows only tasks that
have a specific due date. We also have a delegated list
where I can add a wait date and this will just be the date
that I actually delegated it so I can see how long
things have been delegated and if they're done or not. I can add a note like
"delegated to Anna" right here. And then we have a snoozed list. So this is again like snoozing
an item in your email. I could basically just say, "I wanna snooze this until
May 1st or April 15th." These were snoozed quite a while ago. And I will go and look
at them maybe each week when I'm processing my system. So it comes back into my life when it's actually relevant again. And finally there is
a list called someday, and this is just for things
that you don't wanna forget that you might wanna do someday, but you're not actually
sure if you're gonna do it. So put it on the someday list. So this gives me an entire GTD workflow for all tasks and for
all notes and web clips. Here I've got a clip from the Technium, "103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known," really good article actually. And from this processing dashboard, I could go ahead and give
that an area or a resource. I'll probably just add that
to college info geek for now, and it gets out of my inbox. So that's the GTD style
processing workflow and using this or simply
using the regular old inbox you could process your
tasks, give them projects, give them context, if you
want, give them due dates. And then every single day,
when you're planning your day, you can look at what's due today, or you can go ahead maybe
a day or next seven days or a month and view what's coming up and plan your day accordingly. Here I'll also mention that this template completely supports recurring tasks, and I won't get too much
into how those work, but I will call out that
we have an entire video on how to create automated
recurring tasks inside of Notion. This template has all of
the Notion-specific stuff you need to run recurring tasks. So it does pretty much like
75 or 80% of the work for you. And there's also a full
blog post that shows exactly how to set this
up in a written form. So if that's more your speed,
you can check that out. I'll have those links in
the description down below, along with everything
else that I mentioned. So let's now talk about note taking inside of your second brain and Notion. And this is actually what
I've been doing inside Notion for quite a few years now. I think I moved over from
Evernote to Notion for note taking about two years ago fully, and partially about three years ago, but there were some things from Evernote that I really, really missed and wanted to recreate inside of Notion. So the notes dashboard that I created inside of this template
essentially does that. And you can see here, we have basically all of the main lists that
I had back on Evernote, or that you'd have in a more
traditional note taking app like Bear on Mac or Ulysses, and that consists of,
number one, an inbox. So again, this is a default
place to just drop a note so you can process it later, but maybe more importantly, we have a favorites
area and a recent area. So in many cases, I am lazy, which means I don't wanna go navigating
through areas and resources to find a specific note, especially if I used it really recently. So this recent area basically just sorts all of the notes in my
system by their updated date. And it gets rid of anything
that has been archived, which means I can just
come right to recents on the notes dashboard, or I can come to the
specific recents page. I might favorite that on my
sidebar and I can quickly get to any note that I've worked
on really recently. But if I wanna make sure that a note is always gonna be
available on that dashboard, and even if it's not
recent, it's gonna be there. I can simply come and
favorite it right here, and I'm gonna see it on my
favorites bar right here. So this is an area to generally
manage all of your notes. And then if you want to
get more detail from there, you can add things to
resources or areas if you want. One of the really cool part
of the notes dashboard here is this fleeting notes toggle right here. In this area, if you add a note and then you do not change
it or update it for a month, it's actually going to
auto archive itself. And I really wanted a feature like this because sometimes I'm
taking notes that are not gonna be useful a week
from now or a month from now, like a meeting note about something we're gonna do right now. So I wanna be able to
capture that into my system, but I don't want it in this recents area, I don't want it floating around after its useful life has expired. So I now have a specific
fleeting notes area. And once again, this is just
driven by a simple formula with a checkbox and a filter. Essentially, if the last edited date is more than a month in the past, it's gonna auto archive
itself and get outta here. I can actually show you
that filter right now. It's pretty simple, where
updated is after one month ago. In fact, this doesn't even need a formula. It's literally just updated
is after one month ago. And after our note leaves
this fleeting notes area, it's not going to delete itself. It's actually gonna go to the archive and it'll be safe and snug in this old fleeting notes section. So this follows the PARA
philosophy of not deleting things, but instead sending them to an archive when they are no longer relevant, just in case you need them. That way, you're gonna be
able to come into the archive and actually access them, but they're out of your hair when you're looking at
your notes dashboard or anything else that is important
on a day to day basis. So let's now talk about goals and more future planning for your life. Originally, I just had a project hub in my second brain here, but I realized that a lot of
the goals I have in my life, like the one I just hit recently, hitting a hundred thousand
dollars in template sales, or one I'm getting close to, hitting a 1200 pound power lifting total, these have milestones, which are just like
small wins along the way that aren't very actionable. So if I come in here, I can show you an example
of some of these milestones, hitting a 500 pound deadlift
or a 405 pound squat. These are things I will
eventually do one day but they're not actionable right now. I can't just go to the gym and pick up 500 pounds
or squat 405 pounds. Maybe I could do it, but
it's not something that I'm confident I could do right now. It's more something that
I'm working towards. So within my second brain system, I created a separate database called goals where I could track these milestones. I could do journal logs for
specific goals if I want to, and I can have projects
within those goals. So the way I see it is
that a goal is almost like a higher level project that has milestones which might not always be actionable. So we might wanna actually
track projects within that goal. And here you can see I have
"set up a mini garage gym" as a project that will get
me a bit further towards this goal of hitting 1200 pounds
for my power lifting total. So you can plan out your goals here and you can add milestones to them. And then there is a page that
I created called "plan" where I can see all the goals and
all the projects that have been given a target deadline
within the current quarter. And this will update
with the current quarter. You don't have to use any filters. It'll basically just
update using a formula, which means whatever quarter it is, you can simply look here and see "This is what is going on in
my life for the next 90 days," which is pretty useful. And then you can look ahead,
so if you have things that you've planned out for Q3 of this year, you can see it in this Q3 toggle, whether it's a goal or a project. You can do the same for Q4, and years ahead on this one as well. This is totally dynamic. So as the years go by, you
don't have to change filters, which is really important to me. I also added this little priorities area, and this is reminiscent of my now page. I have this page, thomasjfrank.com/now inspired by Derek Sievers, who actually came up with this idea, And it's essentially
just a public declaration or at least an on paper
or on digital paper declaration of what's going
on in your life right now and what your priorities are. So I added an area within my second brain where I could write that down and just see in a very specific list, this is what is going
on in my life right now. And if there's something
that would come into my life and distract me from these or cause me not to get these done, I should reject that thing
or table it for a later date. So we've talked a lot about most of the features in the template. I am gonna get to these special
views like the book tracker and the recipe book really quickly. But I want to briefly talk
about archiving for a second. We talked about the
PARA methodology earlier and why it's useful to archive things. I just wanna show you quickly
how I would actually do that in my system. So if I have a note that
is no longer useful to me like this inbox note, for example, that I favorited for some reason, I can simply check archive
and that is gonna cause it to disappear from everywhere,
favorites, recents. But again, it's gonna go to my archive underneath archived notes. The same thing can happen with goals, projects, areas, and resources. If I have, say, a resource that is no longer relevant to my life, I don't want to see it
in my area dashboard, I can simply archive it like this and it's gonna disappear from everywhere and show up in my archive just in case I want to
get it back someday. So that is how I would archive things. This archive also shows
me all my completed tasks and this basically just
gives me a complete dashboard if I need to delve into the stacks, the musty dark hallways
of the library of my mind and find something to bring
it back to the surface. So now let's talk about
these special views here within this template. I included a book tracker
and a recipe book, and I thought that these would be useful, but they're more here as
examples of what you could do given the flexibility
of Notions databases. So both the book tracker
and the recipe book are actually using the
master all notes database that is within this template. So all of these notes here
on the notes dashboard, they use the all notes database. And so do the book tracker
and the recipe tracker. They are basically just special notes that have a specific type given to them, and then they have a
nice, useful template. So for example, this book
here, "The Deadline Effect," this is a great place for me
to take notes on this book, maybe give it a rating and a book status, and all I need to do to add
a new book just like this one will be to go to the book
tracker, add a new book, which is automatically going to give it a type of book like this, due
to the filters in this view. And then I could generate from
the book notes template here. So maybe I want to add
"The Power of Habit," which is a book that
I've already read before. Now I have that there,
I can enter an author, which is going to be Charles Duhigg, and just like with all the other books, I could add my overall
thoughts, takeaways, and book notes as I read the book, and over time, I'm gonna
get this nice bookshelf with all my book statuses and ratings. And I also have a nice little view where I can see everything,
and a table view. I can add date started, date finished, and recreate Good Reads for myself inside of my own Notion system, where I can easily access my book notes. Same thing with the recipe book. If I wanna add a new recipe
to my recipes database, I can simply create a new note here and then choose the recipe template, which is gonna bring
in some useful columns, like the ingredients and the recipe. And I'll just show you an example of that with this top tier French toast recipe. Seriously, this is top tier French toast, and this recipe comes with a template. Also I'll just put it on screen now so you can screenshot it. This French toast is amazing,
you should definitely make it. But I've got my ingredients
here, I've got a recipe here, and I even have a view of the inbox so I can add some ingredients that I need directly from this recipe page, which is I think a pretty useful addition to this little template here. So I think I showed everything
in the template so far, except for the actual dashboard itself. Again, this is a very general
purpose home base area for the template. So this will be a great candidate for adding to the favorites page and actually another great
candidate for that is the quick links page, which I
designed specifically because in my own workspace, I often have a ton of pages that I add to favorites. Well, one cool trick
you can actually do is instead of directly adding
a page to favorites, you can add it as a page link to a page you already have in favorites. So for example, let me go
over to our book tracker and let's just go to
"Children of Ruin" here. Great sci-fi novel, by the way. I'm gonna use control
L, command L on a Mac, to grab the URL, go over to quick links, and I'm going to actually
paste it and link to the page. Not mentioned, but link. And in doing that, I'm
actually gonna see it underneath my quick links
here in the sidebar. So this is actually a
cool little trick for adding lots and lots of pages
to your favorites sidebar if you access them frequently, but not having them make
a super duper long list that you always have to sift through to find what you're looking for. So that hopefully is a
comprehensive overview of my entire second brain
system here in Notion. This is a complete productivity system, and now I can do pretty
much everything related to planning my life inside
of one Notion system. Now, like I said at the
beginning of this video, I've also turned this into a template. So if you want a complete
done-for-you second brain that you can just add to your
workspace and start using, you can get it. It's called "Ultimate Brain". You can get it over at
thomasjfrank.com/brain and there's even a promo
going on right now. Right now you can use the code UBLAUNCH to get a full 50% off the
template's list price. So I think it's a pretty fair
price, and for that price, you get more than just
the template itself. You also get, in my opinion, world class beginners
guides, onboarding tutorials, and actual honest to goodness
support if you have questions, and with our beginners tutorials, we have put a ton of
effort into making them as comprehensive and
as useful as possible. If you thought this was a
comprehensive overview video, the playlist of video tutorials
for "Ultimate Brain" itself is over six hours long, ranging from very beginner
focused stuff that's very quick to more advanced tutorials on how to actually change and customize
the template for yourself. We have a full tutorial on
how to integrate Readwise, integrate your own databases,
all kinds of useful stuff. So once again, if you wanna get a complete second brain system
done for you in your Notion ready to use right away, go
over to thomasfrank.com/brain and use UBLAUNCH at
checkout to get 50% off. Thank you so much for watching. If you have questions, I'll be down to the
comment section down below to answer them. And I will be back very
soon with a new video. See you there. (rhythmic electronic music)
Definitely. We use this structure in our company.
I’ve built a few variations on this for clients, releasing both free and paid versions next week.
Can some here explain the appeal of this for me? It seems like the amount of work that people make for themselves to then do some work is so high.
For me, and admittedly old school, There are a few pretty simple rules to actually get things done.
Number one, if it takes less than five minutes, do it now, unless you have a series of related five minute tasks, then see 2
Number 2, don’t spend time on to do lists, schedule it in your calendar
Number 3 (that everyone swears they can’t do but they can) - don’t leave email and chat open all day, schedule times to check both and see rule 1/2 to compelte sction
3a) don’t be the first to reply in a multi mail, particularly if subordinates are working on it.
I understand reporting / oversight at the management level; that’s not what I’m discussing here - we should be scheduling time to review such dashboards after allocating the time to get major dashboards in place. Spending time typing things into lists to then check them off is so much more hassle than clicking a button to add something to a calendar and then doing it.
On the bookmarks and notes and whatnot- how many times do you bookmark a bunch of things and never go back? I just can’t see how anyone ever goes through this much and creates output.
The idea of having an all in one is nice, it it’s impractical and it’s a reason clickup Doesn’t do anything expertly.
Recipe bookmarks? Get the paprika app Project management? Where’s the RACI, RiSk, gantt, dependencies, rescheduling, portfolio overview of the above plus financials? Notes? Ok, probably where motion shines, onenote does too Inbox task list? Both my phone and calendar app, and outlook have this.
Finally his idea of projects, aren’t any kind of a project I’ve seen. It’s a categorised task list.
Anyway sorry, long post, I really dont get it. Less system more doing is my theory but I’d love to understand how this doesn’t d prolong and helps to get things done - if anyone is willing to explain the benefits.