How To Use Notion To Organize And Map Out Your Entire Life

1. Introduction To The Class!: Fail to plan, plan to fail. It's a simple yet powerful quote because without organization, you can never expect to achieve completion. Hey everyone, My name is Will and I'm the creator behind my brand sprout, a global community that empowers individuals to live a more fulfilling life through building the right mindset. Now I try and do this from a variety of angles. And you might've found me from YouTube videos, a weekly newsletter, these online courses, or many of the other platforms on social media. In today's class, I'm going to be using Notion to teach you guys how to organize, build, and create a variety of cool tools to plan out your life, to put it super simply, if you don't already know a notion is it's a project management and productivity app. And for me personally, I use it for literally everything I managed my business, track my expenses, plan, other documents with creators and so much more. My motivation behind creating this course is the personally I've had a lifelong battle with trying to understand how people who are already successful have achieved their success. And I think that notion is such an important tool because it's the one place that you can organize things in your personal life and your career, your relationships, etc. And so if you know how to use it and you can use it well, it's going to change a lot for you. So I've been working on building my Notion workspace for a little bit over a year now, and it's pretty complicated at this point. So what I'm gonna do in this course is take the most objectively important parts of it. And I'm going to break them all down for you so that you understand how to build them yourself. Before doing that though, we're going to actually understand how to use Notion. So how to build tables, pages, sections, all the different things that you can do in there to make it look pretty, make it look organized. And so eventually, when you learn the basics, you also learn how to build a few cool tools. Then you'll have a profound understanding of how to use Notion and it'll be able to set you off on your own course. At the end of all of the lessons, I'm going to give you a mini-project, a little bit of homework. It's very cool homework though it's not like in school. This homework is going to be that you're gonna have to design your own Notion workspace. And you're just going to have to share some templates and designs and how it looks with the class that way, not only am I going to be able to help you by giving you tools and templates and lessons from what I've learned. But your classmates will also be able to do the same thing for you. Okay, welcome to the course. Now it's time to head over to part one, which is understanding the basics of notion. I'll see you there. 2. Part 1 - What Is/How To Use Notion?: Welcome to part number one. The basics of using Notion, Notion very briefly is a productivity in a project management app that you can use, whether you're a business or if you're an individual. I personally, like I said in the introduction, use it for literally everything in my life, whether it's managing my business planning, my YouTube videos, writing in a daily journal, revamping my entire life and so much more. Before we get into all of the different basics of it, I'm just going to show you how you can sign up. It's super easy. You just head over to Notion dot. So it'll bring you right to the homepage and then you click this red button in the top right corner that says try notion for free. Personally, I signed up with my Google e-mail. And once you get in there, it's going to give you the option of either signing up as a business which you would have to pay for, or signing up as an individual which you would not have to pay for, notion is completely free. You would click on the individual button and then you have the choice of either using notion on your desktop or using the app. Personally, I download the app. And so we're gonna go right there and get started on the next lesson, which is how to incorporate pages and templates. 3. 1.1 Exploring Templates: Welcome to Lesson 1.1, which is how to incorporate templates. So I assume by now we've already created our Notion account. We now know what it is. Hopefully you've downloaded the app. Once you download the app and once you completely begin using Notion, you'll see pages that have already been inputted, like the ones that you're seeing on the screen right now. These are obviously called templates. I have my own Notion setup that I'm going to be showing you later, but I've created a completely new free account just so I can do this with you and show you how to build and look at things from scratch. Now one of the really cool things about Notion is its use of templates. So if you see where the mouse is right now, I click on this template button and it shows me a variety of different templates for a variety of different purposes. So if you're a designer, you can use things like our roadmap. If you're a student, there's literally templates for class nodes calculating your grades, making space for your roommates, you can create a resume over here. You can even set goals. So really if you just browse through this template section, you'll start to get, in my opinion, a little bit motivated about using Notion because it's giving you ideas of all these things that you typically weren't able to track before, but can now track because you will have the infrastructure to do so. Now when I was just starting, I did the same thing. I browsed over to the templates, created a few that I really enjoyed. And then I kind of started to mix and match and take things out that I didn't like, add things that I did like. And that's what brought me into figuring out my workspace. Now even though I'm gonna show you a few templates and how to build your own things from my personal experience, I do recommend that in the beginning, you start out by downloading a few of these templates and adding them to your workspace just so that you can get a gist of how Notion works. It's just going to be able to bring you into a more advanced perspective on how you can use Notion. Whereas if you just started with a bunch of blank pages, it would take you years to figure out what to do. Great. So you've browsed through your templates, you pick the few that you think would be cool to start out with. Now let's see how we can make some pages and some sections. 4. 1.2 Building Pages & Sections: Welcome back to Lesson 1.2, which is how to incorporate pages and section. Now if we go back to the Getting Started page on Notion, then we see that there's a bunch of tabs on the left-hand side and the sidebar. These are essentially tabs, but they're also pages. If I click on one, for example, the personal home one, I start to see that there's two sections. There's the daily section, there's a live section, and these four things, these yearly goals, travel plans, recipes, movie list, these are all individual pages. If you click on one, it brings you into the movie list. And then if you go back, you can click on the recipes completely different layout in a very typical broad sense. The reason why we use pages is to dig a little deeper as to provide a little bit more organizations. Because if you just had a, a 100 tabs going down your sidebar, it wouldn't be organizing. The point is to organize as much as you possibly can. So I like to dig deep into every tab in every page by adding more pages and adding more sections and organizing like that. Now, how do we create our homepage? Let's say we were to create a completely different page, a different tab here on the sidebar. Great, we have blank page, so let's call this our home section. Now if I click here, it says type the slash button for commands. So if I click the slash button, it brings me to a variety of basic blocks. And these are all different things that you can just insert yourself. And that's how you're going to create this layout of the page. You can put in a text box. You can make a new page, a to-do list, a variety of headers, tables, bulleted list. You see that really there's a lot of things that you can actually do. If I do the slash and I click on the page, it brings me to a new page. So this is a page within the page. So now let's call it our to do list. So if I go back to the Home section, I see now I have a page that I can click on. That's how you would create a page. And the next thing you would do if you wanted to section is you would press the slash again and you create a header. If you just start typing it, you'll see that notion recognizes that and it already appears automatically for you. So H1, H2, H3, and H4. So let's say we wanted to create an H1. Boom, I just press Enter. I've got an automatic. So if I want to talk about morning schedules, then I can now have a section. And if I want to add a divider, then type in divider. And now I can drag my page. So using these four dots that are just on the left-hand side of the page. You can drag it under. Now. It's organized. I wanted to do the same thing and I wanted to talk about my evening schedule. Could do the same thing. Add another page to do list. Now I would have a to-do list in the morning, a to-do list in the evening. So that's just the very basics of how you create a page and then sections. 5. 1.3 Creating Databases: Welcome back to Lesson 1.3. This time we're gonna go over databases which are called tables, Kanban boards, calendars, and so much more. So a database is a really great structure to use when you have multiple entries or a lot of information that you want to clog in to one specific area. An example of that would be if you're creating a daily journal and you want to have all your monthly entry seen in one table, or for example, if you're tracking your budget. So how would we create one of those? Well, let's continue back onto the same page we were doing in the last lesson, which has our morning schedule, our to-do list, or evening schedule on our to-do list. If I go into the morning to-do list, for example, if I click and press the slash button again to bring out the variety of options that I have for basic blocks. Now we don't want a simple table. What we want instead is we want to go all the way down to database and see you have tableView, a board view, a gallery view. You have a variety of use. Now what you do isn't so important because you're able to switch through them. I'll show you that in just a sec. Here's a pro tip. If you go up to the top bar here, you see the share button, the comment, the stars, everything. You click the three dots. You'll see that you have the ability to toggle between different font styles. And you can make your text a bit smaller and that you can make the page full-width. I loved doing the full-width when I'm making a table or a database, because it's more space, the better. So now I've got a blank template and what can I do with it? Well, let's say we're going to make this master to-do list. Like we said, we were going to do. Now I've got a variety of different sections that I can use to organize this. So for example, I've got this first thing which is the name. Here's my thing to do. If I enter that, then becomes my thing to do. So make my bed, clean my room, and journal. Now I've got three entries that I can just manage all in one space. I'm sure you understand the basic gist of a database, but for argument's sake, I'm teaching you as if you were a newbie. And then if you click on the property, it'll say Edit Properties. You can basically pick over here what kind of property you want in the type. You can have a text, it could be a number. You could select, multi-select dates, person's files, URLs, emails. Like you can even make it a formula. This is what makes using Notion really cool, is that it gets colorful, it gets pretty, but it also gets really organized. So for the sake of not wasting your time, I'm not going to bring you through this entire making a board process just yet. We're gonna wait, we're gonna do one together. So let's leave this as a select option. And you could do like high, medium, low. And this would just be, if I renamed it, I would make it, let's say priority. So what you can do is if you go over here, you just hover on the table button. It says Add view. If I click Add view gives me option for new view. It can either be a board, a timeline of gallery list, or a calendar. This is the exact same data, except it's plugged into a different view. A calendar doesn't really work here on a to-do list. It wouldn't work on a budget, for example. But there are definitely different views that make it easier to understand. The last cool thing you can do before we move on to the next section is if you see these Calculate buttons, you can click on them and you have options to organize your things even further and to see total value by clicking on count all it tells me the total amount of things that I have to do. If for example, I wanted to turn this property into a number. Then by clicking the number and the format, let's say I made a Canadian dollars, I could type in a $100.50 dollars, twenty dollars. And if I wanted to know the total cost of doing everything, then I could take the sum. And C, it would tell me the total calculation for counting all of the costs of things to do. The last thing you can do is if you scroll onto the right-hand side of the table, you'll be able to see a new templates that you can make, but we'll get into that later. You can also filter and sort by data. So I can sort by the priority in ascending list. Now I've decided that anything that is high priority shows up first. Anything that is low will show up last. In my opinion, this is the coolest feature about Notion. I used to do a lot of things on Excel and then because I didn't know how to share a document on Excel, then I would do it on Google Sheets. I had sometimes I was working on an Excel, was working on Google Sheets and some of my friends were working on different apps. So it just was a really confusing process to actually create tables and boards and organization in that way, notion allows you to incorporate all of those different apps into one. Now, I will say if you're a professional Excel user, meaning if you work in finance or quantitative work or whatnot, this is not going to completely replace that and you still wouldn't use your Excel. But in terms of very basic organization, these databases, that notion allows you to make our genius. Okay, so that's the basic gist of how to set up the database and use a table, for example. Now we're gonna move on to the next section, which is going further deeper into it and creating a template inside that obese. 6. 1.4 Building Templates Within Databases: Welcome back to the class. This is less than 1.4, which is how to create a template inside of a database. So why do this? Well, at the start we went from creating a simple template and then updating that template by creating pages and creating sections. And within those pages, we've created tables and databases, calendars, whatever you chose to do. Now we want to add templates because we want to have multiple entries and we want to have some sort of similarity and increase depth in the data that we're actually inputting. So it's getting very complicated very quickly. But at the same time, you're also learning a lot like I wish I knew this when I was starting out. I'm just giving you a really fast dragged guide on how to focus on what's important, okay, so we're still in the to-do list right now, the same table. Now what I'm gonna do is we're going to imagine that we want to add more details into the actual tasks that we're doing. So let's go ahead and delete the previous entries. I'm going to remove the cost because it's a little confusing right now. And we're going to add three more things. So let's say the first thing we want to do is we want to work out. The next thing we want to do is we would like to stretch. Then after that we would like to clean our room. Now, if you see when I hover over one of these boxes on the thing to do, I have the opportunity to open it. So if I open it, it brings me into a completely new page. And you see here, press Enter to continue with an empty page or create a template. Now if I click on create a template, then I can design a master page. So let's say we're gonna do it for the first one. And anytime we have a workout that's added to the list, we want to make a template. So what we're gonna do is let's say create a header and it's going to do exercises to do. We create a little section like that. And then for example, you just, you just would leave, leave it there. Next thing you would do is create a section and you could do cardio to do, just as an example. I'm really making this up on the spot. You can do it. You can do it however you would prefer to do it. And then we go to Back. Now we've got a little template here that says workout. So if I click on it, it will automatically change the page to that exact template. And that's how you can create it. You'll see that the icon is there. That will be the next section we're going to go over how to change those. But now anytime you have a thing to do when you want to press this open button, you have the opportunity to select from different templates. So you can just pick the empty page, or you can make it a workout, or you can make your own template. You can have five or ten different templates. And it can just help you organize things in a more concise way depending on what data you're putting it. Now just to show you a really brief snippet on what it could look like. I'll go into my actual workspace and I'll show you all the way into my social media. If I was planning out something, this is literally a template that I made for my YouTube videos. So this is just an example of how in depth you can take things. But again, we'll go over that a bit later. 7. 1.5 Making Everything Pretty: Welcome back to the class. This is less than 1.5, which is all the help making things look pretty and organized. Now we'll go back to this homepage that we've created together and you'll see again, the design is very simple, very black and white. Let's say I wanted to add a bit of color. What I could do is click on the four dots just the left of the header, and you'll see the option to change the color. Now I could change the color of the text or it can add a background. So if I did a green background, I would highlight it in green. Conversely, if I wanted to screenwriting, I could just do that and you can do this with virtually anything. But anytime you're writing plaintexts, Hey, there you very BAD sentence to typo, but you can turn that into green texts and so you can organize and color-code things like that. Another thing you can do is you can actually create different columns in Notion. So if you don't like seeing everything vertically like laid on top of each other and you'd rather have it side-by-side, then what you can do is create columns. So if I actually drag this again, I've got to press those four buttons. I drag it out to the side and align it with my morning schedules. And now I've got two blocks, but the thing is it doesn't sync properly right away. So we've got a drag. Again, always use the four dots if you're trying to move something, drag everything. And then from there, you can actually create two full-blown side-by-side columns. And other thing you can do is you can change the icons. The icons are a very playful and fun way to design things I love is, you'll see on the sidebar here everything has an icon except for the homepage that we've designed. So at the top, if I'm scrolling and hovering on the home text, I can add an icon right here. It'll automatically pull went in for me, but of course we wanted to change that. Let's say we really like our homepage and we want it to look like a home because we're That's what we decided. There's your icons, it pops up on the sidebar, but it also shows up at the top. Now you can also do this for any page that you design it. For example, I click on the page, I go into the to-do-list. Same thing by one might think to be an avocado. It's an avocado. I can also click over here, make it an avocado as well. Whenever you want, you can pick, but not only can you actually choose an emoji from the standard iOS emoji list. But you can also upload your own image. For example, if I wanted to go into my personal stuff, I don't know. Let's say I wanted to make it my face, Here's my face. Literally I can plug that in. Now the icon for my to-do list after a Lowe's is my face. The other thing you can do anytime you create a page is you can also add a cover. So if I'm again hovering on the home header, I added cover. It automatically gives his banner image, but I can change it. And again, I can upload it. I can choose an image if we wanted to make my face again. Then there you go. There's my face being loaded and then I can reposition it. So it says creepy as it possibly can be. But again, if you don't want it to be your face, you can change the cover and then you can use this thing called Unsplash, which is incredible. I'm, when I first found out that notion and Unsplash for partnering together, I was honestly really, really impressed. Unsplash is just a huge database of free pictures that you can use, but they're all super high-quality. So you can look for whatever you want. So I don't know running shoe, I can pick that. It's a 4k image and it's your new banner. The opportunity here really is infinite. You can do as much as you want with designing notion. You can also change. If we go back into the templates, Let's say we wanted to change and add a new template or we wanted to edit one. If I click the three dots and I edit, I can also add a cool icon, my template. So now every time I pick a workout, it automatically updated to put someone putting up some solid weight. That's how you would design an organize your Notion workspace. And I know that the prettier it looks for a lot of people including myself, the more likely you're going to want to use it and maintain it and upkeep it. Now we're gonna go into the final part of the basics on how to use Notion, which is how to link pages to each other. 8. 1.6 Pro-Tip: Linking Pages: Welcome back to the class. This is less than 1.6, which is how to link pages to each other and save a lot of time in the process. Now this is a very short lesson. It's a really good tip that I honestly didn't know until about a few weeks ago using Notion, and it allows you to take one page and directly input the same link to head over to that page in a variety of different places wherever you need it to be. So let's say we have our homepage here are mourning schedule. And just for simplicity sake, we're going to rename this as morning to-do list so that I can differentiate it between the morning and the evening. Now let's say for example, I was in this reading list template and for some reason I really just wanted to refer back to my morning to do is, let's say, I'm reading a book called Atomic Habits. Great. This is part of my morning to do because every day you decide that you want to read. So how can I connect that to do list directly to this page if I just type in at, you see now I can mention a person, a page, a date, or I can also link to a page here. If I continue to type in the page To Do list, you'll see that there's the page that actually shows up. Now I've got this direct referral link to that exact page. I'm in the reading list, but I click it and it brings me right to my morning to do list. You can do this with any page. You can insert it into templates. You can put it wherever you're allowed to type, except for in an actual database. And it's a really simple tip, but really time-saving tips as well. Great. So now we've covered pretty much everything that I think you need to know in terms of learning the basics of notion, you know how to use templates, how to find them, you know how to create pages, how to divide those pages up into sections. And if you want a vertical layout or you want a side-by-side layout now you know how to do that. You've also understood how to make a database and see it from different views. So make a table or a board or a calendar, and then organize your data in that way. But you've even gone further and you can create a template inside of your database for added specificity and to organize your data. And of course, you know how to make it look pretty. You know how to add an icon, how to add a banner, how to color your texts. I would say just from a personal standpoint on having used notion for over a year, you know, everything you need to know right now to get started. We're gonna go into part two, which is going to start with me showing you my workspace. And then after that, we're gonna get hands-on and practical and learn how to build a few notable tools through notion which by the end, should help you become a pro at using this app and organizing your great power one has done. Now let's head over to part two. 9. Part 2 - My Workspace & Building Tools: Welcome back to the class. This is part two, which is going to be about building out your own Notion workspace and building some tools that I guarantee objectively will help change the direction of your current life. Now I'm gonna start off the second part of this course by bringing you through my own personal notion workspace. Again, if you see it and you feel intimidated by it, know that I've been working on it and changing it for a year-and-a-half. So it's really a long-term game when you're building something out, when you're planning your whole life in your business and everything on one app, you know that your personality is going to change, your preferences are going to change. So keep that in mind for yourself and when you're watching this. So let's get into it. We'll start off with the homepage. Very clearly I wanted to put my name in big as a picture. And so my homepage, to be totally honest with you, is not a page that I really used, but it is just kind of sitting there. I have this thing where I decided to make weekly objectives. It's kinda like a very broad overview of a to-do-list. I'd have that type of tasks that it would be whether it was business, client work, Finance, health, YouTube. And then I would track whether it actually happened or not. And I kind of made the same thing every single week. Clearly, as you can see what the dates I'm recording this, it's March 16th, so I don't really use the weekly objectives table anymore. Instead, I just use this paper journal and it helps me track it a lot better than online. Notion doesn't have to be your only source, but I'm really trying to make you understand that it should be your only digital source. You can still pair it with physical things like calendars and planners and journals and whatnot. I've got a sidebar on the homepage that basically just links all the different pages that I would need to use. And of course just has a little list of goals that I have for this year. So the next section would be finances. Now I'm not going to jump into this right away because it has sensitive information, but we're gonna get into how to build your own budget tracker in a few lessons, essentially, I keep all the business information that I have here, anything that's important for accounting. And then on the left-hand side, I've got the budget for every single year, whether it's business or personal expenses, they're kind of like income statements and it helps me personally track my spending and helps me understand if I'm spending too much, if I could be spending more and where the money that I'm making is really coming from. So again, whether you're an individual or business, this is really recommended and underrated. Next, I've got a goals page. I don't really use this to be honest, they'd got a little bit too complicated for myself. Instead, what I did is just set personal goals and business goals and a manifestation of my life. After that, we've got the social media page. Now this is where I create all of my content, all of the planning for it, the scheduling, the organizing, the scripting, all of the ideas they come from this section. And so it looks really simple when you just look at it briefly. But if you open up the notes, you know, I've got a lot of different pages out here. Again, links to the business licenses, important information, any media, kids, things like that. You can just throw them in here. Systems video planning for trips, for Tiktok videos, I've got a master list where it's a table, and it allows me to script these videos and to track whether they're published and when they've been published. Now if I open up a page, we've got a standard script or if I was going to create a new one. And I did new video, I open that up. I have my tiktok video with the Tiktok icon over there. If I click it, it just gives me this very brief outline. That's what I decided to do. I mainly use this page though for my YouTube videos, which is a very, very complex table. This has taken me a lot of time to figure out, honestly, I learned it mainly from watching other YouTubers who have made their own Notion workspace videos. I highly recommend that on top of watching this, if you are a creator, than you also watch what they're doing as well. Just watching 23 or four of them will inspire you to see formats that you might think are better for you and work easier on your eyes and whatnot. After that, I've got the sprout page. This is where I managed literally my entire business. I've got different products that I'm trying to build right here. I've got lists of things for my brand identity client work that I need to do, planning my trips and so forth. After that, we've got this mega to-do list, which is something that I was showing you guys how to do in the earlier parts of this course. This is a page in the tab that I decided to put on its own so that I wouldn't have to click through five different buttons just to get to see what I need to do. And it's a mega list that has different types of tasks that I need to do. Just writing down literally anything that comes to my mind, like if I'm out and about, I'm walking around and I think of something I really need to do or something I see. I go into my Notion, I go into my mega to-do list. I added, I said in the type, the status, the date, the priority, and then I can go and check back on it later. It's just matter of fact that I did actually get my jeans hence, so we'll take that off. Now. The final section is the William section. This is a personal section is where I manage my whole life. So here I go through annual reviews, monthly reviews, and I've got some self-growth tools which would be a morning journal, fitness tracker, eating track or language learning, and a reading list. These are all very important things that I'm gonna show you how to do it pretty soon. That's essentially the surface level view of what my Notion workspace looks like. Now we're going to start getting into how to actually build some tools here. 10. 2.1 Creating A Budget Tracker: Welcome back to the class. So this is gonna be less than 2.1. And in today's lesson, we're going to be creating a Spending Tracker from complete scratch. So by the end, you'll be able to have this tool that allows you to track all of your revenues, all of your expenses, and then see a big overview of your yearly profit. Now, I'm going to show you briefly what I did for my personal. This is what it looks like. You've got the first section, which is your yearly profit. It's got a total of your years revenues, a total of your expenses, and then your net profit. And then you've got two different tables that organize your total revenues per month. So there's a table for each month, free revenues, a table for each month for your expenses. And so now we're going to create that exact same thing from scratch. So I've gone and click into this blank page called the sample budget template, which again, I've clicked the three dots here and allowed it to go the entire width so that you can get a better view of the entire table. And what we're gonna do is we're going to create three tables together. So we're gonna go into our database and create a TableView. Now this isn't gonna be linked to anything. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna call it your yearly profit. After that, we're going to create another table and we are going to call it your revenues. So what we're gonna do is we're going to build the revenue table first. And then we're going to make basically an exact copy of it and turn it into the expenses after. So we don't have to do as much of the work. We'll start off by making our first tab named the source. So this is just basically whatever your source of revenue is. You describe it, say where it comes from. Next up we're gonna do something really cool, which is we're going to organize it by the month. So we're gonna make a new property and the type of property is going to be is just to select. The difference between select and multi-select is that you can only have one option with the select. And that's what's really going to allow us to actually differentiate the revenues and expenses and be able to see a nice overview of each month's work. So if we add an options, we're going to add in literally every single month of the year together. And I'm actually just going to switch that around and reverse the order so that the first months of the year come first and the last months of the year column last. Instead of having it be the opposite of what it is right now. Now again, if you want to change the colors, you are welcome to do that. You would just click the four dots next to any of the options and then input whatever, if you prefer. I'm gonna leave it as is just for simplicity sake. And then we're going to add another property and we're gonna call it the amount. And this time the type is going to be a number. Now you see when you enter the type as a number, you also get a number format. We can change this and it could be a Ruble or rupee. A one could be whatever currency you're working with or a plain number. For me, I work in Canadian dollars, so we're going to keep it in Canadian dollars and we're going to shorten that a bit. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go and hover under these different properties that I have for the sources I'm gonna do with count all. So I can see from a brief overview how many resources, revenue, or sources of expenses that I actually have every month. And then for the amount we're gonna do the sun, just so that we can see how much in total were earning or how much in total eventually we're going to be spending. I like to make everything as organized as possible. So I always like to include another property that is a type, and this again is a select. And the options are just going to vary based on what kind of work that you do. Let's say you do client work, then that could be a type. Or if you make money on YouTube, that would also be a type. Or if you get money from family, that's also a type. Just as an example, you could do those three things and those would be the way you differentiate what kind of source of revenue you have. And then eventually if you're looking back on your years and you're months, you can see which type of income made the most money for you. After that, we're going to have the date that this revenue incurred. I'm going to create a date column, very simple. You click on it and allows you to put in whatever day the revenue actually happened on. This is perfect. Now you can see you've got this table do you that I'm hovering on right here. Now here's what we're gonna do to make it very cool. What we're gonna do is we're going to right-click and we're going to duplicate. If I duplicate, I can now rename this into the month that I would like this to be. So I'll rename this to January. And now you see basically that I'm organizing things by the month. Now here's what we're gonna do so that you make sure that every source of data that you actually input goes into the right month. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to the January section, the original one that we made. I'm going to click Filter. What I'm gonna do is click on month and the month is January. So now we've got a filter that the only way that you're gonna see any piece of data show up in the month of January is if you have clicked January, the select tab for them. Because of that, you see anytime I click any new source of revenue in January, it automatically updates it so that the month is filled. So that's how you know that whenever you put in something from January to kind of show up. Conversely, if I'm in February right now and I forgot there was something I needed to do in January and I added then it'll show up in the January section. So this is how you just make things organized. Then we're gonna go into February. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to go Filter month, but this time it's gonna be February. There you go. It shows up February, January, February like that. Then I'm not going to show you how to do this, but you're basically right-click duplicate and you're gonna, you're gonna name it March, and then you're gonna change the filter again in March so that the filter and the month is the same matching month. And you'll see it'll show up like that. I'm not going to show you how to do it for all 12. Instead, we're gonna go into making the expense tab. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the entire table, we're gonna click on it and we're going to Command D, which means we're going to duplicate it. This will bring us an exact copy of that table and we're going to name it Expenses. Now the only thing I'm going to add to the expenses that is gonna be a bit different than the revenue is just the card that you used. This, it's not really relevant if you only have one credit card, but if you have a debit card, credit cards use a parent's card and use a business credit card, then this is something that you definitely want to be incorporating. Again, it's a select option. You could do Amex, Visa, MasterCard, debit, whatever you use. That way anytime you have an expense, you can track where you spend most of it. Maybe where points are coming from or maybe you're paying with stuff with the wrong card or your debit too much or whatnot. Yeah, great. So we have all the same thing. You'll have to do the exact same thing basically for February, January, March. But if you create your whole Revenue tab with all 12 months before even copying your expenses, then you'll save time like that. So now we've got the revenues to a table completed, we've got the expenses table completed now we just need to fill out the yearly profit table. So all it's going to require from us is one row. We're gonna name, we're going to rename the first property to just be called the prophet in order to actually do what I have is very complex and to be honest, I don't think I want to recommend that you try it right away. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna change the two different types of properties for the total revenues and the total expenses, but they're not gonna be roll-ups anymore. Instead, they're going to be Canadian dollar. And the profits are going to be your revenues minus your expenses. And that's that. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take all of our revenues. Let's say money from mom. Mom gives you $20. Awesome. You're gonna see that that's some shows up, let's say money from YouTube that makes you a $100. So you've got a $120 that's going to show up as your revenues. Then let's say. But new camera in February, $5 thousand. So now you've got a $120 of revenue in January and February, you have $5 thousand of expenses. So what you can do is just add all of these total sum values into your revenues and expenses and you'll be able to track your total profit. So there you have it. That's how you would be able to make your budget. And from there you can track how much you spend and how much you earn every single month. You can duplicate this page and create a separate one for your business. And that's that. So let's move on. 11. 2.2 Creating A To-Do List: Welcome back to the class. In this lesson, we're gonna be going over how to make a mega to-do list. Now you've probably made a ton of to-do list at some point in your life. The thing that I love about using Notion for to-do list is how easy it is to actually organize and filter things out so that you recognize what's important and so that you actually do those things. Now if you just bury your to-do list in any of the tabs that already exist on your sidebar or in another page. I guarantee you're not going to be able to find it and you're not gonna do anything, you're not going to stick to it. It's just gonna be another waste of space. Trust me, I've been there and one of the problems with managing a lot of your life it online is different tabs and not being able to see everything at once. You really want to make sure that when you have something as important as a to-do list, It's right in front of your face every time. That's why we're gonna go back into our workspace and we're going to make it its own tab. So we'll start out with a mega to-do list. Now you'll see that this exact same page exists just a little bit higher up. That's because I'm recreating it with you guys. Pick an icon. I like the checkmark. Sounds like a very good way to stay on top of things. And of course, I'm a big fan of the full-width pages anytime we are going to be making a table. That's our next step. We'll go into our database here, TableView. It's gonna be a new database. This is going to be our master list. So it only needs one view, basically just the table. And we're going to organize this table in the way that your items and your to-do list is going to be ranked by its category of important. Let's get into that. First. We'll rename our original property and we will call it our task. The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna change this tagged property. We're going to rename it into priority. And the type is going to go from multi-select to just select. And then we're going to go low, medium, and high. And I'm gonna change the colors to reflect that we want green as a high priority, medium to be yellow, low to be red. That's personal preference. Of course you can change it if you want. We'll make it a bit smaller. And what we're gonna do right away is we're going to jump up to the right-hand side of the table. We're gonna go into sort. So we're going to sort it immediately by the property in ascending view. So anytime you've got something that's high is automatically going to be ranked by something that is lower. So if I all of a sudden decided to go high, then you'll see how it switches and so forth. The next property we're going to create is a type. As you can see in probably tell, I'm a big fan of explaining things as much as possible because the more obvious something is, the more likely you're going to actually do it. For the type. It can be whatever you want. You don't necessarily have to fill this in. The way I have it is it's like business operations, Finances, personal life, YouTube, etc, etc, etc. There's a variety of different things you can put. You can have as many options as you want, so I'll leave that for you to figure out. And then the next property that you're going to put in is the status. So this is again is gonna be a select and you're only gonna have two options, so you're gonna go not done or done. And again, we'll make this obvious. Mukden green will make not done red. Now what we're gonna do again is we're going to filter everything out in your tables. So if I left this status thing as done or not done, eventually after adding tens and hundreds of different items and tasks to your to-do list. You're going to have this crazy long to-do list and it's not going to become organized at all at some point. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a filter so that every time that you finish a task, it disappears. So we'll click again on the right-hand side of the table, will press Filter. And what we're gonna do is we are going to click on status. We only want to show things that are not done. Which means if it happens to eventually be done, you will see it will disappear. So let's say make bed, let's say clean my room. And let's say do the laundry for example. Let's say I end up doing the laundry and I press Done. Now it's gone. It's the gum. You won't see it again, but you can remove the filter of the status. Let's say you erase it and then everything pops up after that. It's not actually lost. You just can't see it because we've put a filter on it to simplify everything. And let's say making my bed is a low priority bud cleaning my room is high. That will show up first. Fantastic. Now the last thing we're gonna do very simple is we're going to be date of input. I like to put this, It's not necessarily the most important thing, but it's interesting because if you have tasks or thoughts that you just slam into this to-do list, and it's been two months since you've done it or since you've thought about it. One, at least it's there but two, you know how long that you've been holding out that thought and not acting on it. And it should hopefully motivate you to get started on it. So I like to put a date of input again, we're gonna put a different sort. Now, you can see at a sort we're going to go date of input ascending. Now if you look closely, you see that there's a ranking. The priority sort is first, the date is second, which means even if this is on March 16th, it's the most recent. But this I did in February. It's not going to reverse the order because the priority of cleaning my room is high, but making my bed is low. Now if I end up making them both high, then you'll see the date will change. This is exactly all you need. You just put a whole list of your tasks, define it by its type, to find it by its priority. And then eventually when you knock it off, it disappears and you keep adding this, you leave on your tab bar. Trust me, it's perfect. 12. 2.3 Creating A Daily Journal: Welcome back to the class. In this lesson, we're going to be learning how to make a daily journal by scratch. Now, whether you're interested or not in actually using this journal, I highly recommend that you do it and you listen and you make it anyways, because in terms of self-improvement and self-growth, journaling has been the most profound activity that I've used. I've been doing it for four or five years really, really consistently. And when I first started, I was at a really low point in my life. And I really do think that journaling and channeling my own thoughts and understanding more about myself was really what unlocked all of those secrets to growth that I was holding. You know, whether you're a guy or girl, older, younger, it doesn't matter. Journaling, super important, you've got to get to know yourself. Gotta be self-aware. And if you can do that, then I promise it'll help you build the right mindset to achieve whatever success you want. Notion again, a very valuable tool in terms of that. And so today we're gonna be building out a notion journal template. But at the same time, by building this, you're going to learn again how to use a table and how to use filters and sorts and everything. But you're also going to learn how you can design your own table database template. So it's a very fruitful lesson. Again, I have my own morning journal here written in myself, Growth Tools, which is on my personal page. What I've done is gone to the bottom and just create a journal template, blank page, pencil icon, again, three dots, full-width. Table database. Again, most of the things I got to be honest with you that I use on Notion, our table databases. That is really the best part of notion for me. So we've created our table and what we're gonna do is we're going to list it by the month. So let's say we'll start out with January. Or we're gonna do here is we're gonna rename the first property and call it the day. All you're going to do anytime you enter a journal entry is you're just literally going to write the date, January 12345. And here we're going to start out by renaming the property. It's going to be the day of the week. So this is now going to be a different property. We're gonna make it a select instead of a multi-select. So we're gonna add options. So Sunday, Saturday, Friday, etc. We're gonna do every single day of the week. And then all we're gonna do after that is add a happiness level. Happiness level of very simple number format. And you can add emojis if you want to make this happier. And you're just going to do basically a ranking on ten. You feel like a one, you feel like a nine, you feel like a tan, you feel like 7.6. It doesn't matter. What you're gonna do is just write your feeling on ten at the exact moment that you're starting a journal. After that, you're going to write highlight of yesterday. This is a textbox. You're going to write one amazing thing that happened yesterday, even if nothing you think enjoyable happen, but maybe you watch a good episode on Netflix or you had a really nice lunch. That could be something you want to write down your highlight. And then after that, I'm going to write a motor, a motivational quote to yourself, motivational message. So sometimes this is a favorite quote that I like to include. Sometimes I'm like wealth, suck it up. It's time to stop being hard on yourself, stop being sad. There's a lot of positive things in the world that are going on, focus on the positives. And now basically what you have is this overview that you can track every single month of how you're feeling on what days. And also you're able to kind of recap what's happened to you every day of the year. So if you write down your highlights, you'll be able to see what made you happy, what day it happened, why it made you happy, and then you also have your happiness level. And on the day of the week maybe you find that you're happier on Sundays but more ****** off on Mondays. Like that's a trend that you can analyze through keeping track of these journal entries. So right now you're golden. But what we're gonna do that's gonna change this up. We're gonna make it a little bit more complex, is we're going to add one more property when to call it the month. Now, again, this is going to be a select. And what we're gonna do is do the exact same thing that we've done. And we're going to name all of the months out for ourselves. And the reason why we're going to do this is because we're going to start creating filters for ourselves so that we're able to track different months and not have a bunch of different clusters on one page. We've got the month here. This is January 2022, so this is January, January 1st. Perfect. What we're gonna do is add a filter. And we're only going to show this entry if it's corresponding to the specific month. The month has to be January. If it's not January, it won't show up. Now what we're gonna do very similar to what you did when you made the budget, is you're going to duplicate this. It's going to become February. You're going to have the exact same outline, but the month you're gonna switch it into February and that's all it's going to be. It's not gonna be any other entry from any other month. Again, copy paste, duplicate. You're going to create this for 12 months. So now the final thing we're gonna do is we're going to head into the first column, our day tab, and we're going to open it as a page. Now you see, we went into this before in Section one that you could create your own template. To create your own template, quarter is gonna click that button and it's going to be a journal entry. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just directly going to copy paste what I've written in my personal template. So this is what I recommend that you do. Again, totally subjective. I start off by including a today, I'm feeling so in this section you're just going to be writing down bullet points of emotions and feelings. It could be just words, it could be sentences. And you didn't talk about your day. How was your day? How do you feel What's wrong, What's going on? You're basically like blurring it out as if you were in therapy except you're writing it to yourself on the computer. After that, very simply, you're going to rank your happiness levels for your career, social life relationships, health, emotional, ambitions, really the essential components of living a fulfilling life. And then after that, you're just going to write what can I do today in this week to improve any of those ratings? What are some small things? Can I work out more? Can I journal more? Can I go see friends? How can we improve those numbers so they get higher at some point. After that, I always like to remind myself of two goals that I have for this week, this month, this year. Again, this goes back to goal-setting to be sure that you're on top of things, whether it's in a business setting or your personal life. And then last but not least, is a legitimate manifestation. One sentence, What's one thing you want that you don't have right now? For me a lot of the time it's like I want a 100 thousand subscribers, but sometimes I change it up and I say I want to be a good dancer. You never know. But now you have this template. You can see right here that it's a journal entry. This will show up anytime you want to create a new entry. When you copy, paste your tables and duplicate them into the different months, this template is going to stick with you, so you won't have to re-import it every single time. Essentially that's it. For every time you enter your journal, you're going to see that your template when you open up the page is right there. And so you can input it every day of the week, track how it looks and feels. And I guaranteed this is the best thing you can add in terms of your personal well-being on your Notion template. I do it every single morning for 20 minutes and changes my life. So now you know how to make a journal template on Notion to get after it. 13. Conclusion - Thank You For Watching!: That pretty much sums up how to use Notion to organize, plan, and map out your life. I've showed you the basics of showed you how to use it from scratch, create templates, Paige's sections, databases, all of the necessary things that you need to be able to work around the app and start using your own creativity in your own desires to make those pages that you want. I've shared my personal workspace with you guys didn't change anything. It looks exactly like that. So if you want to go back into those videos, pause it, look at what I did and just kinda see the format of things, then you can start to build your ideas. And it might be a good thing for inspiration because I know that that's what I did when I was watching other notion videos. Then finally, I've showed you a few tools, the journal, the to-do list, and also the Budget Tracker. These are three things that are really important for your personal well-being and of course, just in life in general. So I know there's a lot of different apps and tools for productivity and organizations. I really do encourage you guys to use Notion for me. I consider myself to be a lifelong self-help addict. I always read books and listen to podcasts and try to figure out the best tools and ways that I can be organized and successful. Notion has been that one thing, truly the only one app. When I started using it and I got into it, it took over everything. So if you give it enough time and you downloaded it to totally free, it doesn't cost anything. Then I think you're going to get to really enjoy it and really loved it. Thank you guys so much for joining me on this course. Again, I'm Will and I'm the founder of my brand sprout. And if you guys want to watch some of those YouTube videos or subscribe to my newsletter or check out my website, or even just getting contact with me. All of that is going to be linked in the About Me section of this course and on my personal profile on Skillshare, you'll be able to get all those links right there. Yeah, when you guys start working on your workspaces, please take screenshots and share them and add your own templates into the projects in this course so that everyone else who's watching can do the same thing. And you can have so many different examples to choose from and compare and contrast and just kind of build off of what you already think about. I hope that this course, albeit being pretty short, can change your direction of your life and set you on a better path by having a tool that will forever be there with you to help you get better. So thank you guys so much. I hope you have an awesome day and I'll see you next time.