Notion for YouTube Creators: Easily Manage Your Creative Projects

1. Introduction: Running a YouTube channel means you're juggling a lot of moving parts, writing, filming, editing, promoting across social platforms, and don't forget the thumbnail. It would be great if you had a way to streamline your workflow so that every time you go to make a video, you have all your ideas organized. You know exactly what steps to take and when you'll do each task so that you can keep those creative juices flowing. Well, you can do all of that and more in the productivity app notion. And in this class, I'll be teaching you how, Hey, I'm assigned to a bean. I'm a Harvard educated video producer, storytelling strategists and content creator. I'm a YouTube OG. I've been on the platform for over ten years along my career. I produce videos for media companies like WGBH, the Star Tribune, and PBS. And I've also created under my own personal brand, a santa, the artist I've been using Notion to run my life and my creative business for the past three years. And it has completely changed. The game notion is an all-in-one customizable Workspace app that allows you to organize information, plan projects, and collaborate with others. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to use Notion to streamline your content creation process. This class is beginner friendly. So in the first part of this class, we'll be going over the very fundamentals of motion and how to use Notion databases. If you're an advanced user, you can skip the latter part of the class where we'll be using Notion databases, relations, and templates to build our comprehensive content creation system. Very exciting if you want to see a notion system in action before building one out, I've made several notion walkthroughs on my YouTube channel assigned to the artists. So feel free to check those out. There's a lot to learn with Notion and sometimes it can feel overwhelming. But if you take it step-by-step building along with me in this class. And you can build a system that stores everything you need to know while only showing you the slice of information that's relevant at that time, robust, yet elegant. You're ready to take your productivity to the next level. Then let's start building out our content creation system in motion. 2. Class Orientation: The project will be creating during this class is a content creation dashboard within notion, this dashboard is going to make it really easy for you to see what pieces of content are coming up next on your content calendar, where each piece of content is in the creation process and which tasks you need to do next. There will also be a section for brainstorming new ideas and an archive for you to have a record of your content after you've posted it. This dashboard will pull in three key databases and I'll be showing you how to build those databases in each lesson, the first part of the class, we'll be covering notion fundamentals like using pages, blocks, links, and creating an aesthetic workspace. Oh honey, we gotta have a look. In part two, we'll move into how to use databases to supercharge your workflow. Like these things are powerful. We'll also look at using relations and roll-ups to connect information between databases. And in part three, we will dig into building out our content creation workspace. So if you're already an advanced notion user, to start here, we'll talk about how to design your three databases to hold your tasks, video projects and content ideas. And you'll see how to use templates so that you're not reinventing the wheel every time you go to make a new video. Finally, in part four, we're going to bring it altogether into our content creation dashboard. That's where you'll be able to see your upcoming ideas, your content calendar, where each idea is in the production pipeline and an archive of your past work throughout this class, I'll be assuming that you're mainly producing full length YouTube videos. But the system can be adapted to suit any type of creative content on any platform. All you need for this class is the Notion app, which you can find on notions website, notion dot. So you can use the app in a web browser or download it and use the app on your computer, which is what I'm gonna be showing you this class notion can also be used on your phone. But for this class, I'd recommend using it on a computer. You'll need to create a notion account which is super easy and completely free. Notion does have paid plans, but everything in this class can be done on the free plan. I'd love to see the content creation dashboards that you come up with. So if you want to share and make sure to leave a screenshot and the class project area when you're done, I'm excited to start negotiating with you. So let's get started and jump into our first lesson. 3. 1.1 A Tour of Notion: In this lesson, I'm going to be showing you around notion. So you'd get a sense of the layout and what we're gonna be working with Notion is basically a blank slate. So we're gonna be building out our workspace over the course of this class. When you first set up your account and log into Notion, you're gonna see a page something like this. They have some pre-populated templates for you, another tutorial for you to get used to the different features I'm going to click Okay here. And I would encourage you to start to build out a page yourself before you get too far into the templates, they'll see on the sidebar, they have even more templates for you to browse. If you click on this templates, a ton of things to get into and start editing. But you want to make sure that you really know the underlying features and structure of notion before you rely too much on someone else's system, at least if you want to build out your own content creation system later on in this class to get familiar with the space, you have this sidebar and this is gonna be a bird's eye view of what's within your entire notion workspace. So this is a brand new workspace that I just created for this class. But you'll see you have a top view of your pages. And then these things are some pages within a page. This works like a folder system, so you can unfurl these folders and see the sub-pages. But I would actually suggest that you search with the command P. So that's going to allow you to find pages much quicker than you'd be able to find them by unfurling these. If you star a specific page because you want to come back to it, often, it'll show up in your favorites right at the top. And then private is everything else. On a top level in your workspace, you can import from Microsoft Word, from Evernote from other programs that you might be coming from. And then here is the trash. The trash in notion doesn't empty by itself. There's actually a little bookmark lit if you want to permanently empty the trash. But as of this recording, there's no empty trash features. So anything that you delete, you can always find within the notion trash unless you have emptied out the bookmark lit is basically a fancy link that will run a program to clear out the trash for you. It was written by someone else and the notion community and not by notion itself, but in case it's helpful, I will link to it in the resources section at the top of the sidebar or your settings. If you click into here, there are lots of different settings to change. If you wanted to upgrade your plan to one of the paid ones, you could do so here, naming your account, setting up different notification settings. So that's all here. And to close the sidebar because you don't need it all the time. You can click those arrows here to reveal it. Click those lines. This main space that you're in is a page notion will show you one page at a time and you can navigate through which page you're in with breadcrumbs. And it's easy to be able to see where you are in your sub pages via the breadcrumbs. So those can be helpful in locating where you're at. And as I mentioned, these subpages there, instead of folders, the top right corner you have the sharing menu. So this is something you can use to share to the web or send links to other people. Comments. You have updates that have been made on this page and you have the place to start your pages to favorite them. And you have a lot of different style elements of the page which you can explore at your leisure. We'll also be going into some of these in subsequent lessons. And in the bottom right hand corner you have the question mark menu. So this will take you to help documentation. Notion has plenty of walk-throughs of specific features and ways to get support as well. And then this page will show you keyboard shortcuts which are super helpful. I'll be going over a few of them in this class. But it's helpful to have a whole page to review them. Help you to work a lot more quickly, a notion, that's notions layout. And in the next lesson we're gonna be building up our workspace using pages and blocks 4. 1.2 Pages & Blocks: Let's get building using pages and blocks. So when you first opened notion, you're on a page and I'm going to create a new page. You can do that with this new page feature at the top. You can add it here to your private library or you can do Command N. And I'm going to call this page content creation hub. This could be any number of things, but I'm going to have an empty page for now. We'll get into these other views later. I can expand it fully. You'll see that it is now in our sidebar. These are the top-level pages in your space. I like to add an icon, like these other ones have icons. It's a nice little visual aid. And I'm going to make this a camera, which is a bit more relevant, I think, for our uses. And you'll see that now I have an icon in a sidebar that is a good little reference. I'm also going to create a page for these Notion templates just so that we have this grouped and out of the way. And you can drag these via the sidebar. You can see they are now subpages to this larger overall page. So trying to keep things organized, everything in Notion is a block. So pages are blocks, basically the building blocks of Notion. And then within a page, if I were to write a line of text, line of text, this line of text is a block. So you can see that with these six dots next to it, you can drag a block around to be next to another block or inside of a block. In the case of pages like we just did on the sidebar, if I were to type another line of text, that is another block. And so I can drag this and I'll see a blue line where the block is going to land. One thing to note about texts is that if you do a separate line that is different blog, but if you do a paragraph, that entire paragraph is one single block. So just to show you, if I type a new paragraph and I copy and paste that. You'll see this entire paragraph is going to have that six dots, those six dots next to it. And I can drag these. So if I type a new line of text, this is going to be highlighted and dragged around in its entirety. So let's say that I'm thinking about the different platforms that I have to create content for. So I will delete these, just highlight and pressing Delete. And I'm on YouTube. This is a bit of a list, so I want to separate some of these out. Patriot and email, newsletter or more community aspects. So I'm going to put those in a different column by just clicking and dragging. And as I mentioned, pages themselves are blocked. So we could turn these blocks that are simply text box into pages. So to do that, I'm actually going to bring up the slash command menu. This has a bunch of different blocks. I'm going to go over the most useful ones and then next lesson. But you can also turn one block type. Say there's so much in here, so much notion. Once the bedtime, you can turn into another type of block. So I'm going to click page. And now we have patriotic as its own page. And we can come in here and add content. We can go back to the main page and see everything is still laid out. I wanted to use that menu to create a new page. I can just do slash, page, hit Enter. And from here maybe I also have a blog. I just created a page that way. And I can go back to our main page using these bread crumbs at the top here. Really, I want all of these new pages. So I'm going to highlight, right-click, turn into page, and now they're all pages. Because I highlighted an empty space, it turned it into an untitled page and I can just delete that. Now that these are all new pages, you'll be able to see in our sidebar. We have all of these pages listed here as well. You can have nested pages and notion as many levels deep as you would like. So I could drag patriotic into my e-mail newsletter. Boom, I see it there. If I want to move one-page into another, I can also use move to. So clicking on these six dots, move to and say I still want to go a level deeper. I can type in Patreon. And now inside of email, newsletter is patriotic. Inside of patriarchy is my blog. And I don't want to drag these back to the main page. I can do so via the breadcrumbs here. Now, that's back in the main page. And I can drag patriotic back to the main page as well. Dragging text or any other element within notion into a page works the same way. If I were to type a line of texts here. And I thought that might work better in my blog page, I can just drag and drop. And now you'll see it is in this page. Now, if I want to delete a page and its entirety, I don't actually keep my blog current, so if I go to delete it, it won't be permanently deleted just yet. It will be in the trash. By having a trash folder, notion allows you to restore deleted pages if you accidentally deleted something by mistake. So if you go in here, you can choose to restore this page or you can choose to delete it permanently. I'll go ahead and delete it and we'll ask you to make sure that your shirt. And now the page is actually gone. Once you get several pages in this layout, it can be a bit tedious to go through and click the trash can icon on each page when you really are sure that you want to delete it. So someone in the notion community has created a really handy Bookmark Lit, that's basically a link that will run a program for you that will delete the trash. So I will link that in the resources section in case it's helpful. That's something that you actually run in your browser window. So you have to log into notion on your browser. Click the button and it will go through and delete the trash permanently for you. So that gets you started using pages and blocks and notion. In the next lesson, I'll be going through which types of blocks I find to be the most useful. 5. 1.3 Super Useful Block Types: Notion has lots of different types of blocks that you can choose from. In this lesson, I'll be going through the ones that I find to be most useful. So the first ones are headings. This keeps your space nice and organized. Love to have my headings. And so I want to have headings over these different platform types. These over here are a bit more algorithm based, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram. Whereas my e-mail, newsletter and patronage on our spaces where I'm really cultivating the community myself and I have more ownership and more control over what goes on there. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a new heading for these. And you can create a heading by using that flush command. Heading one is the biggest heading. There's a medium and there's the smallest one. So I'm going to do medium for now. See you know, what the real weight of it is later as I'm building this out, but these are going to be algorithmic and then I'm going to create another heading. And you can also do that by pressing the hashtag symbol, space, heading number 22 hashtags and saying that these are community-based platforms. And then I'm going to have this on top of this column and this on top of this column. And then I also want to start having a space for my video production items. So let me create another heading. This one's gonna be a big heading, video production. And I want to start making a to-do list under this heading. You can also use the slash command and bring up to-do list here. You can also have that by pressing slash and just typing too. And once you start typing in, it comes up just pressing Enter. Or you can do these double brackets, which is even faster. So I like doing those little brackets. Now, I'm just going to create a quick list here. I'm going to now I've created this list of things that I go through for most videos. But I don't need to see this whole list each time, especially if I'm just coming to this page to see about my different platforms. So I'm going to create a toggle list. And similarly you can use the slash, start typing toggle, boom. And you can also use this little greater than sign boom, papa for you right there. So I'm going to label this production checklist. Put that in right here, and close it up. And we want to make this production checklists more prominent. I can actually make it a toggle heading and 123, boom. Now it's a taco heading and I can close that back up. Taco heading is also a kind of block that you can pull up in this list. I also like using dividers, so then you can distinguish between different parts of your page. So I first want to have a larger heading that's going to have my platforms. Then I want to distinguish that from the video production. So here I'm going to start typing divider. The shortcut for this is to type three dashes. That's another way to get only need 1is notion does bulleted lists and numbered lists automatically when you start typing them out. So if you had a dash 123, you've got all this going there with bullets. And for numbers, just start typing out that number, 12, et cetera. The button block is another block that I find to be super-helpful. So instead of needing to copy and paste this production checklist every time I want to make a new video. Or having to generate this over again, I can just insert a button. So using that slash command button. Now I'm going to say to insert blocks into this page, and I can now copy this and paste and I'm going to label this new production checklist. Done. So now every time I hit that button, it will create a new checklist. Boom, right there. I also like using distinct blocks. This is great if you want a piece of information in one location, but you also want to have that same piece of information in a different location within your space. So let's say that I want my publishing cadence in the YouTube page, but I also want a reminder here on this main page. I can go into my YouTube page, click and just start typing it out. I've written out my cadence and I want a reminder of this. So I'm going to highlight this entire thing. Copy. Go to my hub, paste, and I'm going to choose Paste and sink. And now this is a sync to block anything that I add in here. So maybe I wanted to do a quarterly Q and a. If I go into my YouTube content, I now have quarterly Q&A in here. So that's pretty cool. Another way to do this is to click on that six dot menu, copy the link to the block. If I were to go into another page, paste. I can mention the block or I can paste in sync. So that'll give me another copy. It will also update anywhere that I update the copy. Gonna delete that and come back home. Linking to a page is also very helpful. And you can pull that up in the blocks menu, but you can also use the shortcut up at. So for more details, see, and then I want to mention the YouTube page. So at symbol YouTube. There you go. So that now wherever this block shows up, if I want to go to the YouTube page, which would presumably spell out my entire strategy. I can just click here, and I'm right in the YouTube page. I wouldn't usually link a page from the same page that it lives on. But this is most useful if you want to mention something that's in a totally different part of your notion system. And finally, we have databases. Databases are the most powerful feature of notion in my opinion. They are basically fancy lists that allow you to store data items alongside each list item. And they're just another block. Everything has a block. So you can pull that up with a slash command. Start using data. And I'm just going to label this tasks database. There's a lot to know about databases, so I'm gonna be going through the details of them in a subsequent lesson. So those are the various types of blocks and you can use to build out your workspace. There are other blocks you saw there was a really long list. Notion is always adding new ones too, and they're fancier wants and bells and whistles. There's now AI is a part of notion, but the ones that I covered are really good to get you started and lay your foundation. 6. 1.4 Getting Aesthetic: One of the best parts about Notion compared to other productivity apps is that you can really customize the look and feel of your workspace. So in this lesson, I'm going to be going through how to enhance the aesthetic of your Notion pages. So first and foremost, I like to add covers, especially to my most important pages. So if you hover along the top of the page, it'll show you a place to add the cover. Click on that. This is something automatically populated. I want to change the cover and it links to Unsplash and some other archives here as well. So I'm going to search for something relevant to the page topic. Naive got some rainbow multicolor camera action and I can reposition this. So if I want to scroll down, see more of those camera gears and save the position here. We already have an icon. But let's say I want to change it to a film strip. So just typing that into the emojis and you can add your custom icons here as well. So for YouTube, for example, I like to actually use the logo. So I'll add an icon, click Custom upload file, and then you'll need to navigate to where within your system you want to store your icons. So I have social icons here, the YouTube logo. And I will go in and add custom icons for the other social platforms as well. So now we've got icons that are just another visual aid to help us quickly identify where we wanna go. Emoji serve a similar purpose and I like to have them in front of the main parts of my page. So I'll just add one here. On platforms, I'll add a laptop. And for video production, I will add another type of camera. So that's helping those standout even a bit more. We already have a divider here, but that's another way to break up the page and columns help you to keep things organized as well. We already have two columns here. You can drag the width around as you please. So if we wanted to add a third column, we can also add a third column here, I'm going to move that back to half and half since we only have two, you can also change the color of texts. So maybe I want to make this orange. I can start typing orange there. Hit Enter, and I can turn this purple Enter. You can also change the background color of texts. So if you click on it, go to color the background. That's another way to add some separation. You can also change the styling on a page wide level by going up to this top corner. You have the default mode. You can have serifs if you would like. And this other mono font, you can have smaller texts. I will go back to the default. You can also turn this into a full-width page. So if you have larger databases, a lot of different columns to look at, that can be helpful as well. A line of texts you can do the typical inline editing functions as well. So if I highlight this, it's already basically bold because it's a heading. But you can italicize, you can underline, you can do strikethrough. If I wanted to change this toggle colors background here, that would change things for everything within the toggle as well. Another fun feature is a callout block. So if I enter and start typing call-out, keep this idea in mind. So that's just a way to remind yourself of something and you can also change the background color on these. I'm going to drag this beside my cadence to make an additional column. Keep it from being too cluttered. I'll make my weekly cadence bold and you can also embed elements. So I like having a little bit of inspiration in my pages. And I have a video, it's from box and I thought the style was really interesting, so I just copied that link from outside of Notion. And then I'm going to paste, and I'm going to say embedded video. And here I have it. And I'm going to put that here, a little bit of inspiration on the side. In addition to videos and links, you can also embed images and other files, although you might need to be careful with file limits on a free plan and you can embed other things like Google Calendar, notion of widgets. There are lots of cool things in libraries out there. I'll link to a couple in the resources section. So all of a sudden we have this really fun page that's colorful, that has different ways to attract our eye to important parts. And that has images that suit your taste. 7. 2.1 Why Databases?: Welcome to the portion of this class, but it's all about Notion databases. So by now in this class you know all of the fundamental notion features that you'll need to get her on your workspace. And now we're going to get into building out your workspace in a way that's going to take your organization and productivity to the next level. And we're gonna do that using databases. So what is a database and what makes it so powerful about databases are basically very fancy lists, where each list item is actually its own little packet of data that's an entry into the database. So not only do you have the list item itself, that's the name of the entry. Each entry has its own properties that allow you to store information about that list item. And you can set up those properties however you want. There are lots of different types of properties that you can add within notion, there are texts properties, checkboxes, drop-down selections, and all of these properties help you to store different types of data about those entries. You can use databases and a variety of ways from tracking your contacts to catalog in your travel destinations. But my favorite application of databases within Notion is a to-do list. I actually made a whole YouTube video about my notion to-do lists. I love it so much and I'm really dialed it in. So if you're curious about that, I'll link to it in the resources while you could just write out your tasks in a simple checklist. I think that using a database has four key advantages. First is being able to store information within the to-do list that will help you to complete the particular task or produce the piece of content. If a task requires you to go to a certain website, you can have a URL property that stores the link, could list out your upcoming videos and then have a notes property that helps you to keep track of ideas for potential titles and thumbnails. Keeping these kinds of notes inside your list means that actually getting the thing done will be that much easier. The second advantage is that with a database, you can write your whole list once, get everything out of your head, and then filter that list based on what's most relevant for you to see at the time, maybe right now you only want to see the tasks that are associated with one particular project or one particular piece of content. Or maybe right now you only want to see the tasks that you've planned to do today. Well, you can set up filters for that. Maybe you'd like to do administrative tasks in one setting and production tasks and another setting using a database allows you to filter for these different scenarios without needing to rewrite your list each time or keep duplicates in different places. And being able to filter out the irrelevant tasks can keep your list from feeling overwhelming. The third advantage is being able to better plan out your workload and better project. What inappropriate workload is going to be before I started using Notion, I would just list out a few things I needed to do each day, but most times I wouldn't get done what I thought I'd be able to get done in that day, because some tasks only take 15 min While some tasks can take 2 h. And just looking at a simple list, it's hard to give each item and appropriate weight. But within Notion, I have a property where I can enter an estimated amount of time that I think that task will take. And I can use a some of those entries to estimate the amount of work that I'm scheduling for myself each day. That way, I can adjust my workload and plan appropriately. I use another property to enter an approximation of how much time the task actually took. That way I'm always learning and improving my estimates as I go. This is super helpful for content creators because you'll be able to get a sense of how long it actually takes for you to make a video. That way you'll be able to budget your time more effectively and price your videos more effectively if you're working with sponsors. And finally, I loved that a to-do list database works as a built-in done list. Once you check something off your typical to-do list, It's usually crossed off and deleted. But within a database, if you use a checkmark property, then you still have that record. It's a readymade list of everything you've completed. It's great for going back at the end of a week or the end of a project to see how much time things actually took, to have a record of what you've accomplished and to be able to reflect and see what you might want to change about the process for next time. So I definitely think it's worth it to build out databases and notion. And in the next lesson I'll be teaching you how to do just that. 8. 2.2 Creating Databases: So now we are going to get into actually creating our Notion databases. So we're in the content creation hub that we've had previously. And I'm going to type a slash command and start typing database. Now an Inline database creates a database within this page That's similar to what we have down here with the tasks database, but a full-page database, which is what we're gonna do, has a database it's going to open within its own page so that we can just focus on building out the database. So that's what I'm gonna do now and I'm going to name this new tasks database. So by having this as a full page, we can now really focus on building out our entries and properties. So each entry is going to be a row. And then you have the properties which are columns. And then each different little rectangle that you can enter data in, those are fields. In order to add new entries, you can just type into the Name field. And you can add new rows as you need to like. So you can adjust these columns to be the right width for you and you can customize the properties here. So tags is a default property that notion adds to any database, but we're going to customize this to make it a little more personal to our needs. So I like to say what zone of my life a task is in. Is it business? Is it personal? And if you edit the property, you can see that this is a multi-select and there are all these different types of properties here. We'll go through some of them are multi-select. You can add in. You can change the color of these so I can have something more vibrant. Really, things are only business or they're only personal, they're not usually both. So I can actually have this as a single select. So if I edit property, I can change it from multi-select to just select. And it's easier as we just saw, to add a bunch of options within the multi-select and then change the type of property. So that's one pro tip for you. And now with this property, it can only be personal or business. And when I select business, personal goes away. I of course want to check mark to ad done to fill this. So I'm going to have that be a checkbox property and I'm probably have some notes related to each task. So I'm just going to add nodes property and I'm going to keep that as text, which is the default. I'll add a property that estimates how many hours something's going to take me. Estimate hours. Maybe estimated hours. Select to add, make it a number. You'll see you can have different types of formatting for that number here. I'm going to keep this as is. I'm going to add a status property. I'm just going to name that status. It could be helpful to have a field that says it's on hold. I will add that as an option here. And you can configure this status to say whatever markers you'd like. And finally, I like to have the time that I created that entry that just helps to sort things later on. Maybe you want to just look at the tasks that you just made or just look at the oldest task that you've added. Because I don't need to see the creative time as I'm doing my work and looking at my plan, I'm going to hide this. So I can click and then hide it in view. And you can create different views where certain properties are visible and others are hidden. We'll get into that a bit more in the next lesson. For now, I'm going to rename this view as the main view because we'll have other views later to come. So you can enter data into these fields individually. There are also some things you can do to change in bulk. So let's say all of these tasks are personal tasks. I can highlight this, copy and paste. And now these are all under personal. And if I wanted to add some business tasks, some things to do with content creation, I'll add some now, once I have those all in, I can also highlight right-click Edit property. And I can start typing zone as well if I had a really long list and add those to business. So as you're building out your database, think about what kinds of things you want to store, what properties you might need down the road. And don't worry about building everything out immediately because you can always add and delete properties later on, each database is essentially its own unit. So each entry is a block like everything else in Notion, and you can open it up as its own page. So it essentially becomes a page with the metadata that associates it into this database. So I can open up a task here. It opened in the side peak, and here you can see all the properties laid out. You can link to anything within this page. So if I wanted to link to my YouTube page, I could do that here. I can also hide this created time within this format as well. So always hide. You can add notes to yourself in this space and treat this page just like any other page within Notion, doing all the things that we've done in the class up until this point within this space, you can even link to views of other databases within this page. And that will become really handy when we build out our whole content creation system and start linking things together and making templates. You'll also notice that since I've added content to this page, a little icon shows up beside the planned production entry and that shows you, Hey, there's actually content within this entry. And when I delete the content from this page, that note goes away. If I wanted to open this up to be full-page, I could do that here and really go to town in this area. Otherwise, I will go back, collapses down. And finally, I'd like to add an icon to each database so that I know at a glance that it's distinct. So I will add something here and a check mark is my classic go-to icon for a database. So there you have it. We've just built a database 9. 2.3 Inline Databases: So we've been working on a full page database, but you can also have an Inline database and that's going to allow you to see the database as well as other elements on the page. So if I go back to the content creation hub, we have this database which is inline. And the benefit of that is that you can see how this data interacts with other information. Another nice thing about inline databases is that you can add information by dragging and dropping. If we go to our production checklist, we could highlight all of these items. Take these, drag them into the database. And now we haven't had to write out all of these entries individually. If you create a database is an Inline database, you can open it up as a full-page, like so, but this database still lives on this page as a whole. So the original instance within this page, I've found that if I create databases as inline within pages, I can sometimes lose track of where the original lives. And it's nice to know where the original lives when I'm trying to back things up and I want to backup the entire database. So what I'd like to do is to create a database on its own page, like we did in the previous lesson with this new tasks database. And then if there's a page where I want to see the database information, I use a linked view of the database to put it into another page. So we can do that here with a new task database, make some space and type linked. And we'll see link to view of a database come up. So we can have our source new tasks database. We can copy an existing view from the original instance, so we can copy main. Now we see this laid out here. And this arrow on the edge of the icon tells us that this database doesn't live here in its original instance. The original instance of the database is in another page. Now that page lives here, but I like to have a page that stores the original instance of my databases. So that way I know basically where the nucleus of my system is and I can go through, check things, back things up easily from that central page where all my database is live. Now I can move this page to anywhere else in my Notion system and still have this link to you here. So if I moved this into the YouTube page, the link to view was still remained. Also with this linked view, you can still drag and drop things in. So if we generate a new production checklist, you can also drag things as new entries. So you kinda get the best of both worlds with a linked database. So those are your options as far as having inline databases, full-page databases, and linked databases? 10. 2.4 Filtering & Sorting: Databases start getting really powerful when you use them to filter and sort for different types of tasks within your different contexts. So let's say that I want to make a business focused to-do list that sorts my tasks by the date that I intend to do them. So I'm going to need to add a date property here. So I'll go ahead and do that. That way. I know that it's the date I intend to actually do the task. You could also have a DUE, due date, but because content creation is so self-paced most of the time, I'm usually working with this to-do date, so I will duplicate this view and I will name it business. I want to filter for things that are only in the zone of business. So I will do that here. Zone should be business. Now we only have those tasks showing, I think that putting the due date close to the entry makes sense. And honestly, since all of these zones, our business, we don't really need to see the zone. So I'm gonna hide this in the view. So now we're focused on the actual task and the date. So brainstorming ideas comes first. I want these to be sorted in the order that I actually want to do them. So I'll go in and sort by the to-do date and ascending shows as we have it here, Descending would be in reverse order, but I will change it back to ascending. And now we have a sorted list. And this view, we can really just focus on knocking out our production tasks. Finally, I really want the satisfaction of checking these off of my list and having them disappear. So I want only the unchecked items to show up in this list. Once it's checked, I want it to disappear, so I'll add another filter. John is unchecked. So that way when I check these off, boom, it's done. It's out of here is complete. What's nice is that these entries aren't completely going away when I check them off. So if we go back to our main view, we see all of the data still here, all of our entries, we still have a record of them. And if I want to undo that, I can highlight the done click Delete, and it will uncheck everything and you'll see we have our business tasks back. I also want to view that has everything that I need to do today. So I'm gonna go back to my main view where we have both personal and business tasks. And I'm going to move this date field up, bring the column over and add some days to these personal tasks. So again, instead of starting from scratch with a new view, I'm going to use this business view because they've already set up this nice checking and unchecking feature. So I'm going to click, right-click, duplicate that. And then I'm going to have tomorrow's tasks. Could also do today's tasks, but I've happened to set everything up for starting tomorrow. And I'm going to filter another filter. Date is and I can say this is relevant to today. I can have it by the actual date on the calendar here. I could also switch to an advanced filter and say that the date is today. Or I could say that the date is tomorrow. I'm going to have it as tomorrow. And I want to show business and personal tasks so I can actually delete this filter. So now I'm seeing all the tasks that I have to complete tomorrow. So that's a look at how to use filtering and sorting to create different views for different occasions. And they're actually lots of ways to view your data in databases that are not just the spreadsheet format. And we're gonna look at those views in our next lesson. 11. 2.5 Database Views: One thing I love about Notion compared to other database software options is how visual you can be with laying out your data in different ways. Not only can you really craft out your page and decorate it the way that we covered in a previous lesson. But you can have different database views to show your information and visually appealing ways. So let's look at some of that now. So to make this database a bit more interesting, I'm going to add some status variation here. You'll notice that we have these status markers that mark things as done. And then we also have these checkboxes to mark things as done. And that might seem redundant right now. But as we get into our next lessons on relations and roll-ups, lesson on formulas, you'll see that these properties aren't as redundant as they first appear. Now let's look at some of the different views you can have of this database. So we will duplicate this so that we keep our main view untouched. I will just title this Layouts and here in our settings and our View Options, let's adjust the layout. So we have a board, which is a Kanban board. And these are things that you can group by different select or multi-select options by default, notion will pick one of your properties to sort this board by. But you can change what property that is. So we can go in and have this sorted by to-do date. That's what that looks like. I like having things by status. You can color the columns if you would like. You can also have these cards be a bit larger and you're going to have different elements on a card preview. So if you have a page cover or content, you can show these. If we do page cover and then add some covers to these pages. So again, each entry is its own page. So you can add things here. Then you'll see we get a really nice visual looking bored. I tend to like these to be medium. You can also have them small. All depends on how much information you're trying to see at one time, what you're trying to juggle. And of course, rather than having random images, it would be the most useful to add something that is related to the tasks. And as you're creating templates for tasks and projects, as we'll get into in a later lesson, you could have this image in the Cover be your default for all of your writing video tasks. That way you know exactly what you're gonna be doing and you can see that at a glance. So now we have a Kanban board that's really showing us the tasks that on our plate. As opposed to just telling us as I finished different tasks, I can move them to different statuses. So if I finished brainstorming, I can move that here. If something goes from that started to in-progress, I can change that. So I can also display other properties below the title of each entry if I wanted. So if I want to bring back the distinction between business and personal, I can do that zone. I'm now showing the zone of each task on the board. And let's say that I want to prioritize the business tasks so I can sort the board by zone. And so now if I change to descending, I'm going to have business on top and personal at the bottom. And the reason why that's descending is just because when we made our types, we had personal in their first business was the second type of zone. If we switch to that, then that would switch here and we could just switch our sort as well. Another handy view is the calendar view. I'm going to change the layout to calendar. And now we can see our tasks mapped onto the upcoming week. Here we are showing the calendar by two due date. Since we only have the one date field, we can really only do that. You can do create a time that's a little less helpful. You can see we created all these just now, so they're all here. But going back to the layout and switching this back to due date, so I can show the calendar is a month. You can also show it as a weak, not sure why it jumps to September, but if it ever gets off kilter, you can always just press today, bring it back to center. And now we see the upcoming week. Notice that it's kinda nice to have this emoji and the icon here to distinguish it visually within this view. And we can also have different properties showing here. So if we want to do the same thing with the zone, now we're seeing the zone prop up on the calendar as well. In this, you had kinda like to know the status as well. So I can shift the order of that. Maybe take it back to the month view. And so now you see another visual layout for our tasks here, gallery view is the most visual, so we see all of our images here. If we switch to the page cover, page content will show you what's within the page. So if I switch back and I add an image here. Now within the layout, if I say to show the page content that will show up here, I prefer to have page covers because page content will also display anything that you have in this body. So if you have, That's also going to be displayed and that's a little less visually interesting. But most of the time I am using pages to actually store information. So if I just have a visual that's really nice and a representation of the entry. I do tend to keep it on page cover. Gallery views are the most useful when they are sorted in some order. Otherwise these are gonna be pretty random. So I want to sort these by status, and I also want to see the status of each element. So I'm going to make that property visible within this view. And then I'm going to add a sort not for zone, but I'm going to change this to status and make sure that these are ascending timeline view is another one that you can use. I tend not to use this as much, but if you have multi date tasks, that's when this becomes the most useful. With stretching that planning production out. I've actually changed the to-do date. So now this has a start date and an end date. And then ListView is the simplest, most pared-down view that you can use. This is just if you'd like that simple this look. If you show properties in this layout, they display alongside here, I mostly use the list view. If I'm trying to display this information in a larger page that has a lot of other things going on. And I want to just keep this information symbol. So if we wanted to go to our content creation hub, we could create another instance of this as a linked database. Have our new tasks database. What's also nice is that these are showing up here for us to use without needing to recreate it within this page. So if you make a view within the primary original instance of your database, it can carry over as you link it out other places. So that's what we have right here. So those are the ways that you can view your data and different layouts, things get even more interesting when you start to connect data across databases. And that's what we'll be covering in our next lesson. 12. 2.6 Relations & Rollups: Roll-ups and relations are tools that we can use to connect information across databases. And one instance where this is super handy is when you're working with a tasks database and a project's database. So let's go ahead and create a project database. So I went ahead and move the task database to the top of our layout here, new database, full page. Now I want to relate these projects to some of the tasks that I had that were individual content creation tasks. So let's say that those tasks and the artist database where all for our beginner advice video, we'll add a relation property here. And when we go to add this, we will need to link it to a particular database. So I want my new tasks database and I want the relation to go both ways. So not only do I want to see the tasks for each project within the project database. I want to see the project for the tasks and the tasks database. So we're going to click this on and it shows the name of the field that will show up in the task database that's called projects, that feels very appropriate. And so I'll go ahead and add a relation. So we have a relation now, there is no limit to how many pages can be linked in each relation, which is what I want, because I want to be able to link multiple tasks to the same project. Since there are a lot more tasks than there are projects, it's probably easiest to go into the tasks database and add the projects from there. I'm gonna go back to our new tasks database, gonna go to our main page. I'm going to make sure that I can see our new property. So these are hidden. I'm going to show the projects property that we have now here. I'm going to add create beginner advice video to one, copy and paste. So we have these connections here and we can see them within the project page. And if we go to the project's database, we can see that relation on this side as well. Now because it's interesting to see how the projects and tasks relate to each other. I want to create a linked database so that we can see both of them together on this page. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a link to view of the database, link it to the project's database. Use this view here. So now we have our projects and we have the tasks that relate into those projects. Taking this a step further, we can add roll-ups that actually tell us a bit about the information that we've pulled up through the relation. We can do that within the projects Page, create a roll-up, and I want to count all of the tasks. How many tasks are attached to this project? So roll-up, we're selecting this new tasks relation and we want to calculate, not just showing their original values again, but counting all of the values that exist in connection to the project. So we have seven tasks attached to this project. It will be even more useful to know how many of these tasks are complete versus incomplete. So we can now how many incomplete tasks that we have remaining for this project. So we can do that by not just pulling up the relation itself, but looking at a property within that relation. So we're going to use this done checkmark. This is where the checkmark field really comes in handy because I can calculate how many are unchecked. So that means that there are five that we have yet to complete. So I'm going to name this tasks remaining. Now we have this tasks remaining field, which is a rollup field. And it is showing us that indeed we have these two checked off, meaning that we have five left that are in relation to this project. And if I were to check off writing a video, you'll see that I have four tasks remaining now. So that's pretty cool. Now we also have this estimated hours feature that we haven't really used yet, but we could also use roll-ups to at-a-glance see how many estimated hours we have left to complete the project. So if I say that writing a video is going to take me an hour. So now we're going to add another roll up. This is also connected to that same task database. And the property that we want to look at now is the estimated hours. So instead of just listing those hours, we actually want to sum those hours at all of them together. It's showing that we have 6.75 h of work in this project. So now you can see your projects on one hand, your tasks on the other. And those are a couple of ways that you can use roll-ups and relations to gain insights across databases 13. 2.7 Playing with Formulas: Formulas help you to play around even more your data and gain even more insights. Notion is no code, so you don't have to know how to create formulas. And you don't need to know it for the rest of this course. But formulas are a really powerful part of notions. So I feel like I'd be remiss not to go into how you might be able to use them. Now you do need a little background knowledge on how to structure a formula. It's basically a lightweight form of coding where you're telling the app what calculations you want it to make. Now, coating is beyond the scope of what I'd be able to cover in this class. I haven't the minor in computer science in college, so I actually really love algorithms and formulas right now. I'm just going to show you a few of the possibilities. If you are interested in digging more into notion formulas, there are resources that will walk you through that process and I'll leave a few helpful links in the class resources. So we're in our new tasks database. And one thing that you might be interested in calculating is an overdue formula. So if you've marched that you want to do something on a particular date and you've passed that date, you could have a property that just alerts you, hey, this is overdue. So let's say that the first task number one is something we actually wanted to do yesterday. And so we need a formula. It's going to say, okay, If the two due date is before today, that means this thing is overdue. So I will create a new property. It's going to be a formula property. I'm going to edit the formula. And again, you can walk through what all of these operators and functions are. I happen to know date between. So it returns the time between two dates. So if the time between today and the date value is less than zero, meaning it's a negative number. That means the to-do date has already passed. So we want to take that enter the property of to-do date. And we are comparing the to-do date to now, which returns the current time and date. And we want that to be returned in the value of days. So if the day is less than zero, right? So that means this is now checked. So yes, this one is overdo, this one is passed. Now as far as how this property looks, I don't really want a checkbox here. I'd rather have some sort of alarm. So I'm going to add a little graphic, enter this formula. In order to do that, I need an IF formula. So if this part is true, if that difference is less than zero, then show me a big red alarm. If it's not, then don't show me anything. I'm going to wrap what we currently have in an IF formula. So if this thing is true, then show me the emojis. So I just brought up my emoji pan off this, otherwise, don't show me anything. So I'm just going to have quotes with nothing in the middle of them. Done, boom. Now we have our formula. I'm going to call this property overdue. And so now that's going to show an alarm whenever we have something that's overdue. If it's on today, then we still have time to do it today. So it's not gonna be overdue. A formula can also save us a bit of energy and checking off this done property. This done and the status are a bit redundant. It would be great if whenever the status was set to done, this check mark was automatically checked off. It's helpful to have a checkmark if you want things to interact with roll-ups, like we covered in a previous lesson. So we want to keep these two properties but have them kind of dependent on each other. So instead of having this be a checkbox, I'm going to turn this into a formula. So I'm going to change the type to formula. So in the way that I didn't want to see a checkbox or the overdue formula. I actually do want to see a check box for the Dunham formula. So to create this formula, my thought is that if the status is done, then we need to have it checked off. So I'm going to use an IF formula. If the property status equals done. And if this were named complete, I would write complete here within the quotes. If it's done, then true, right, So check it off. Otherwise it's false, which means don't have it checked. I have that. There you go. Click Done. And so if we go back to our content creation hub, we had our projects roll up that was relying on this checkbox. It's blank now because there's a little confused because we changed the whole type of the property. But if we go in and we just sort of mess around with this and basically reset it, changes to some other things and then change it back to counting the unchecked things. Now we have it showing up again. Now this is still relying on checkboxes, but the done will be checked off automatically. So now this goes from on-hold to done. It's checked off and we only have two tasks remaining. At this point, we can basically hide the done checkbox. It's just a utility helping us with the formula. And we can do everything from this status element here. And again, only have one left now, only this one. Another handy way to calculate things without needing formulas is just by using the Calculate feature that shows up at the bottom of every database. So if we go back to our new test database and we go to our business view, we only have this one here because we've checked all these off. But if we put some of these back to being in progress, then we have all of these. We have the estimated hours and you can also calculate here what the sum of our estimated hours will be. Then you can calculate how many tasks you have in total. So those are the types of things that you can do with formulas and Notion. I guess not strictly necessary for this class, but definitely fun to play around with, especially if like me, you're really into optimizing your workflow. 14. 2.8 Supercharge with Templates: Creating templates for your databases allows you to easily plug in values without needing to go through each field every single time, especially for very common types of entries. This is gonna be super helpful later in the class when you go through setting up a database to capture the common types of content and projects and content creation tasks that you're doing all the time. So right now I'm going to create a template for a video creation project. Project's database. You often have lots of different types of projects. I use the same database for personal and business projects. That way I can see everything in one place. But for videos, we want a specific layout basically every time when I go into create a new entry, I also have this little arrow and I can create a new template. So I'm going to call this video project. For each project, this is going to be business. And I like having icons on projects. And so I'm going to have a camera to let me know that this is a video project. And then within the page portion, I really like to see the tasks related to the project. I'm going to create a linked database here. I will just start with the main view because I'm going to edit this. So I want to filter this to only show tasks that are linked to this project. So I can do that here. Filter by project. And the project contains video project. So I'm going to show us only things that are linked to what we create with this template. Just to have a sample so we can see what it's going to look like. I will add something here. I'm going to open this full screen just so that I know what we're working with. Another thing that I could filter for within this view is for the zone to be business. So if I wanted any task that I would add to automatically have the business zone applied to it, which makes sense because this whole project is within business. Then I can add that as a filter. Filter by zone. The zone is always going to be business. And I like how that looks. To clarify that this is a template. I usually put new in front of it so that I know this is not like an actual video project. This is just my new video project template. I'm going to delete this sample. Now, when I create a new project, I can create new. Now you can see this new video project template that pops up in the body of the page. So I can just click on that and add new tasks from here. Later in the class, I'll go over how to automatically generate this list of common video production items. But for now if we expand this, you can see that we have our tasks laid out here and you can start to manage this. We already had business filled in for us. And this video essay is going to have this camera icon so that when we go back to projects, you'll be able to see which ones are videos and which ones are not videos very easily. You can also go back and apply templates to other projects. So if I apply it here, you can see now all of these tasks that were already connected are visible in the body of the page. And I can do that for this project as well. Within this larger page view, you can hide this because we don't really need to see it if you want. We can also hide these tasks now since they're showing up high that property. But that's how you can use templates to very easily add data into your databases. 15. 3.1 The 3 Essential Databases: There are three databases that you need to build. An efficient content management system has been on for content, one for tasks and one for projects. And I'll tell you why each one is necessary. You need one and only one content database because you want all of your content to be working together to engage your audience. And the only way to see how things work together is to have them all contained in one place. That way you can see all of your content on one content calendar. Have it all showing up within one archive. And if you want to isolate just your Instagram posts or adjust your YouTube videos, you can use properties and filters to do those things. As I'm deciding how broad or narrow to make my database. As a general rule, if types of items have the same type of properties that I keep those items in the same database. That's why I have all of my social content in one database. Also for content has a publishing date, has a channel that it's going to go on, has a day that I have to write the content, has probably some sort of title or maybe an image or thumbnail to go along with it. And having everything in one database is going to allow me to track all of my content through the various stages of production in one pipeline that's going to help me to manage my tasks and my time better and then see my archive of content all in one place. I like everything associated to content to that one database I have that database is a one-stop shop to see what's within the posts and why they need to be creating. And then I can use filters to make sure that I'm not seeing any irrelevant properties within the particular contexts. You need a task database to hold all of the individual tasks related to creating content. The task database has properties related to completing tasks like URLs needed or notes to complete the task. All of my tasks that are business, personal content, they all go into one task database because all tasks have the same properties. The task database has properties related to completing the task. Like, how long do you think it's going to take you? What type of activity that task is going to be. Is it focused? Is it admin? Is it creation links to resources that will help you to complete the task and a place to mark off the task as done and mark when you completed it and how long it actually took you to complete. And thinking about how broad or general that task database is within my own system, all of my tasks have the same types of properties. And so whether a task is business or personal, whether it's from my YouTube channel or whether it's something else on my to-do list, all of my tasks go into one database and then I use filters to filter things out appropriately. If you're content tasks are integrated into your larger tasks database, then you can keep track of your time overall without having to create duplicates. The properties in your tasks database help you to track and plan how you're going to spend your energy in a day to day, hour to hour basis. Then you need a project database to aggregate the information about larger pieces of content that really our projects, YouTube videos definitely fall into this category. Not every piece of content is going to warrant its own project entry, but things that are more complex like podcasts, videos, things that take days to write, film and edit. Those wind up being projects within my system, a project entry helps you to easily view and manage the tasks related to completing that piece of content. While the content database entry has things around the visuals, the ideas, the title, the thumbnail of the content, the project entry helps you to just focus on task management. Having a project database also allows you to integrate your content projects with your other projects so that you have an accurate picture of everything that's on your plate. And so you're able to plan accordingly. Having these three databases will allow you to manage your individual tasks and manage the big picture of your content strategy 16. 3.2 Designing the Tasks Database: So we're going to start on the smallest level of detail and build out our tasks database. And this is a database that you can use not only with your content creation tasks, but with any of your tasks, all your to-dos in general can live within this database. So I'm going to start on what will become our content creation dashboard. And I've made this brand new tasks database. And in this lesson I'm going to go through why I add all of the properties that I'm going to add to this database. So of course we have the name and then instead of tags, I like to have what zone of my life the task is a part of? Is it business? Is it personal? You can have other zones as well, but those are the two main ones for me. So going to edit this property, add some options here, so I like those. And let's just add a sample task here so we can get an idea of what these are going to look like that I'm going to add the day that I want to do the task. So I'm gonna call this a two due date. Going to add it. I'm going to make it a date field. And if I wanted to do that today, and then just in case I need it, I'm going to add a due date DUE, maybe there's some things that are due back to a sponsor or due to ions, what have you. So it's nice to have a place for that. If you have a bit of a looser schedule, it can be sometimes helpful to add a timeframe. So there are certain things that I want to get done right now, maybe within this week, maybe within the next couple of weeks soon. And there's some things that I could do later. So I'll just add a timeframe. It can be another helpful property to just organize and arrange your tasks, fine. So I'm going to make it a single select and I'll add an option here. And then the things that are really not that much of a priority don't get a timeframe. Let's say there's something I want to do this. I also like having fields that will just help me to put tasks in a particular numerical order and say, okay, this is the task that I want to do first within this project. This is a task that needs to happen second in the project. And so I just added a number field and I have number in the project. At that it's a number field. And similarly, I like to have a property that is the number that I'm going to do something today. So as I'm arranging my to-do list for the day, I'm using a number of property to say, okay, I want to do this first today. Second, third, et cetera. I have another number property that I like to use as an estimated amount of time. I think this task is going to take me half an hour. I will put 0.5 if we create another sample task, maybe that task takes me 2 h that I think so maybe that third task is probably going to take an hour. And so then I can sum up how much is on my plate here in any particular view. If I have my estimated time, then I also want to have a place to put the actual time once I've completed the task. So I have actual time is another number field and something that helps me to keep track of my time is to write down the start and the n times. So that's a text field. And the end time. Also a TextField. This is an extra tidbit, but if you use a text expander, you can set up a shortcut but automatically inserts whatever the current time is. If you're doing that, it's not actually that much of a hassle to jot down the start time and end time. I'll add a link that's useful if you want to dig into that in the resources section. And then since we are going to use this for our production tasks, I want to keep track of what kind of production task I'm doing. This is going to help me later when I want to tally up how many hours that I spend writing this video, how many hours that I spend filming, how many hours that I spend editing? I probably did those things in separate chunks, especially video editing. I probably did like 2 h, 2 h there and checked off each chunk as I did it. So having a property to keep track of this will allow me to total that up in the end. You can add these options and as granular away that you want to keep track of. Maybe your production tasks or just pre-production, production, post-production. I like to keep track of research. These are actually in reverse order as I want them, so I'm going to reorder these. You could also just add them in reverse order. There you go. And then outside of the production content creation tasks, there are other types of tasks which you need to do throughout your day. Communications tasks like making phone calls, sending e-mails, administrative tasks, little desk and office work, other sorts of production tasks. So I like to have an activity type that just gives me an overview of what type of task I'm setting myself up to do that day. Activity type, making it another select field. I'm going to add some options here. Leisure activities I like to schedule in my fun as well to again, make sure that it actually happens and picking things up from the store, et cetera. And then there are some tasks that you're really waiting on someone else before you can finish the task. So again, these are basically in reverse order of importance. If I can look over my to-do list by the activity type, I can use this to plan for my energy levels. For instance, if you know that you're more focused and concentrated in the morning, maybe that's the best time to get your writing tasks done. So you can group your writing tasks or go to a filtered list with just her writing tasks. And look at those things that you have to knock out. It can help you to group your meetings on the same days. I also know that I like having a variety of different types of activities throughout my day. So if I have a day that is full of just writing tasks that I know I need to mix it up, switch it up, have properties to mark the completion of a task and what stage a task is in. So I can do status. I like having a date completed property that way. When I mark something off, I have my done list and I can put it in reverse chronological order to see what I got done each day. So I'm gonna make that a date property. I'd want to make sure to check out the date completed before I marked it as complete. And lastly, we'll create our connections to the project and content databases that will be creating in subsequent lessons. 17. 3.3 Creating Task Templates: Within your task database, it's helpful to have the templates so that you can easily fill in the information for the types of tasks that you do frequently. Instead of having to manually go through and populate each field for every new task, you can click one button and have a lot of that stuff show up automatically within each entry. So to do that, I am going to be in my task Database, come up here next to New and click new template. So one thing you might be doing a lot of his writing. So I'm going to have a new writing task. And I always put knew before a template. That way when I'm searching for a page, I know that this is just the template is not an actual database entry for writing tasks. If I'm writing a video, making videos is under business. So I'm going to add that as my zone. Four activity type of all the kinds of activities that I'm doing. It's that focused writing activity. Then within the different production tasks that I'm doing, it's a writing task. So I'm going to add that here. And if you tend to write in 1 h chunks like I do, then you can even put an estimated time of 1 h. So that's my writing template done. And so now when I go to create a new task, right? Video and I opened that and apply a template here. All that information automatically populates. Another task you might do often is editing a video, and that is in a similar category as writing a video. There are both production tasks. They're both under business. So instead of starting from scratch, I could duplicate this template like so. I'm going to say new editing task. I'm going to change the icon to scissors for cutting. And then this is going to be more of a production task activity type. And I'm going to change that to editing specifically within the context of video production. Maybe I'd like to edit into our chunks. So I'll put that as the estimated time. And so now you can see we're building up a little library of templates. And along with production tasks, I also have templates for the chores that I do every week around the house and the little things that I do for my business once a month. Having these templates can save you time and energy as you're planning out your tasks. 18. 3.4 Designing the Projects Database: So now we're going to create a project's database that's going to allow us to group our tasks and easily manage them from one place. So they're actually quite a few pieces of overlap and the properties that I want to have in the project's database versus the tasks database. So instead of starting from scratch, I'm going to duplicate the tasks database that we just created in the previous lesson. And I added a cover. I'm going to name this projects. I'm going to change the icon to a briefcase and I'm going to go find a different cover that I like. Aspirin, the properties. I like to have a zone as well, business and personal, so I'm going to leave that as is. I don't have a to-do date for an overall project. It's too big of a scope for a single date really. So I'm going to delete this property. Yes, I do want to delete it, but I'm going to keep a due date because sometimes you do have an overall project that really is due to someone else. So I'll keep that, I'll also keep timeframe. I don't need these number fields. So I'm going to actually go into properties and delete them from here. I don't need the production task that doesn't apply to a project, so I can delete that, but I will keep the activity type and then I still like having the date completed to have a record of the projects that I've done. I'll keep the status. I'm also going to add a notes property because it's sometimes useful to keep track of things over the course of a whole project. And so those notes can live here. So I'm going to delete these and create a sample project. I find the project's database to be the most powerful when I link to the tasks for the project within the project page. So to show you that this actually copied over our templates from the task database so we don't need those will be creating project templates in the upcoming lesson. So first, let me link the project's database to the tasks database that we created earlier. So I will create a relation. Connect that to the tasks database. I want the relation to also show up within the tasks database relation. And now I'm just going to add these tasks. And so we have an example. Instead of showing them here, I want to show them within the page itself. So I'm going to create a linked view of a database. I'm going to have the task database and I'm going to filter it so that I only see things where the project is, this current project which is sample project. So now all of these are connected to this product. In particular, if I add another sample task for here, you'll see that it's automatically also connect it to this project. So now I can hide this property, will always hide it. I can manage my tasks from here within this page. I like to have this inline task database automatically added to any new project. And so in the next lesson, we're gonna be learning how to do just that 19. 3.5 Create Project Templates: Creating a template for a project is similar to creating one for a task. It'll help us to populate data into our properties automatically, but it will also help us to see all of the tasks for a project within that project page, inside of each entry. So that's what's really helpful about this. I use a new video project template all the time. So let's build that out now. So right next to New and the project's database, I'm going to have a new template. I'm going to name it new video project. I name it knew I know that it is a template and not an entry itself. The zone is always going to be business. The activity type will always be something that I'm producing and I'm going to give it an icon of a movie camera. This one more property is the link to the tasks database. And I really like having the task displayed within this page area. So I'm going to insert a link to view of the database. It's the task database. Copying this either is fine. Go ahead and make this a full screen page while I work this out. And I think that the number of task in this project is worth bringing to the forefront. That way I can put them in order. I can hide this because this is not my day to day To Do list. And the rest of what's displayed here, it looks pretty good, pretty relevant to me. I'm going to filter though to make sure that all the tasks are linked to this project. So I'm going to filter by project that it's attached to. And if I insert the name of the template, then each time I create a new entry with the template, it will be automatically connected to whatever that new entry is. I'll do that here and then I can go back to our project's database. And now if I create a Video Project and I apply our new video project to it, we have an area to add our tasks in here. So if I add a few in, these tasks, are automatically going to be connected to our current video essay project. You can also see that here. And if we wanted to go into these tasks, we can make this full page and then add our tasks templates to these tasks on this page, you can do things like easily mark out the two due dates for each task. Cbo, estimated time the whole project is going to take based on the estimated time for each individual task. And from here you can add other tasks to the project and organized what order you want to complete the tasks. And if I just add this business down here, of course you can have a, a film video tasks template to maybe I also want to do some research for this video, but I want to do the research first and then I need to write the video. Then I'm going to film it, then I'm going to edit it. I want to be able to sort these by the number in the project. So I could do that there. And if I add any more task to this project, I want the zone to automatically be business. So you can do that by having a filter that makes sure that everything in this view has the zone of business. So now if I add another task like uploading the video, that's gonna be business here. You can link to any database that you want here in the body of the page. I also find it handy to link to the content database, which we'll be covering in a subsequent lesson. But you can see how creating this template creates a nice hub for you to see all of your tasks and manage them from one place. Now of course, it's a little repetitive to have to write out the same types of tasks that you do for each video project. So in the next lesson, I'm going to be teaching you how to create recurring tasks us, so that you don't have to make things a new every single time. 20. 3.6 Creating Recurring Task Sets: If you've been making content for awhile, you'll have noticed that every piece of content that you make basically has the same steps to create it for every YouTube video, you need to write out a script, whether it's word for word or bullet points. Maybe you do some research beforehand before you start writing. After it's written, you need to plan out how you're going to shoot the scripts. Then you need to actually shoot the script, probably shooting talking head first and then shooting B-roll footage later. If you need to, then you need to edit that footage. Then you upload and do the metadata, and finally you publish the video. But that's a lot of tasks and I don't want to have to write out all of those tasks each time I make a video. Instead, I create a recurring task set so that with one click, I can generate that whole list each time these tasks that's live within my project page. And because I have a project template specifically for video production, these tasks show up within my video projects the same way each time. I'm going to go into our project template and create these tasks. Opening this up full page, so we're filtering here. I also want to make sure to sort by the order project. And I want all of the zones of these tasks to be business. So now add things in. So I've named all of these and they're always going to have different to due dates and due dates each time. But there is an estimated time that I know it typically takes me to do each step. I can insert those. I also am going to have a consistent production task and activity type for each type of task. So I have these fields entered, mostly is production tasks with the activity type. And I'm going to make sure that these are in the right order by numbering them. So research would go first. And lastly, I like to have emojis. I know at a glance what's on my plate. So I'm going to add those into my tasks. So here I actually upload a custom icon because I like having YouTube here. So here we have our tasks with all of our classifications filled out. The properties are looking great. And now we just need to templatized this. So in order to make this a template, I need to disconnect it from this specific template page. If I keep this connection, it's going to be wonky so I can show you what happens if you don't disconnect it. So if I go back to projects and I tried to create a new maybe Q&A video. I will apply the project template to it. I have all these tasks, but they are connected to both this Q&A project and this new video project templates. So we don't want that go back into the template. And I'm going to delete this project connection. Now, this is not showing anything here because I only want it to connect to the new thing that I start. I'm going to need to create a new view specifically to edit these template tasks and pull them out of here. So I'm going to duplicate this view. And I'm going to call it template adjust. And I'm going to call this one the main view. And instead of having the filter for this project, I'm going to remove that. And now I want to sort actually buy created time so that the most recent tasks that we just created bubble up to the top of this list and I can bring those out. So I actually need to make a creative time field within our task database. And I usually have a creative time field within all the databases that I have because it just comes in handy in situations like this. So I don't need this to show, I can hide it. It's just a utility function. I create a sort for Creative Time. I'm going to sort by that first and I'm going to have it descending, so it's in reverse chronological order. So the ones that we just made are going to come out first. So now we see that these are our template tasks. These are the ones that have all of our fields nicely filled out. They are not connected to any project at this point. So we can take these out of the database. You can highlight them. Click drag. Now they're outside of the database because they're in the reverse chronological order of how we created them. They're actually not in the order that they are done. So I'm going to rearrange that real quick because I'm detail oriented. Sorts of things get to me. So now everything's in order. I usually edit videos in two sittings, which is why I created two different tasks. And I'm going to create a drop-down so that this is just a bit more organized. So it'll be a toggle list. Video production tasks. And I will add the tasks to this toggle list, collapse it there, and go back to my main view. So now if I go to create a new project, apply the template. I have my production tasks right here. I can highlight these, click, drag them to my project database. And now all of these fields are populated and they are attached to this new Q&A video project. What I would usually do is add a little tag at the end of the names to say which video this applies to. So in this case it'd be Q&A, so copy and just paste. And that's how these are Trump and my day-to-day to-do list, as I populate what the to-do date is within the template page, I could probably move this to-do date up now that we don't need to really see these, they're already populated. If you have different types of videos that take different lengths of time, you can make a new video production task toggle for each different format of video. For a Q&A video, it might take you much longer to film those because you're riffing off the cuff. If you're doing a home video essay, there's probably gonna be a lot more research. It might take you more than just a cursory half-hour. Maybe you add one where there's 4 h worth of research. So I really like having those toggles so that there are different options to choose from for different video formats. Another way you could do this is through buttons. I will show you how to do that, but I actually prefer the first way. And I'll tell you why, you'll see why as I demonstrate this. So let me duplicate this. And so I'm going to add a button here. So the way you would do this is that you can add these pages to a database. So you could add them to the task database. So in this case you would say research video. You can edit the properties from here. So if you want to say that it is the first element in the project, you add a one. If you want to say the estimated time as a half-hour, you can add a half here if you want to see the production task. Research. I just realized I've been spelling research wrong this whole time. Spelling doesn't count, it's fine. The activity type is going to be studying. So that's how you would add that. We can add another page with another step. So there are a couple of reasons why I don't prefer this method. One, as you're inputting these tasks, it feels a bit more tedious and you really have to remember to capture each and every property as opposed to down here where you see all the properties visually laid out. So it just feels easier for me to create these template tasks. And then secondly, if I just name this button Video task list to Alice, have to make sure that these are linked to the project. So this page is why I would choose. I need to make sure that these are also in the right zone. Can also duplicate this and add a few more. So now I have several of these laid out. Click Done. So now if I go to create a new video, this template, using our version one. And I create these tasks from this button. They do automatically pop in here without you having to click and drag. These are nicely populated. However, there are no emojis. Emojis as icon, so you would still have to go back in and add these icons if you want them. I think that the icons are super helpful in being able to quickly navigate my list. I mean, it makes such a difference. So I prefer to drag them in from this. That way. I have all the emojis right where I want them now of course I wouldn't have Dragon both to. So if we delete these, and then we drag in the ones that we created before. Now we have these with the emojis and we can go ahead and label them based on the video that we have. So there you have a quick and easy way to create tasks within projects for the content that you make on a regular basis. 21. 3.7 Designing the Content Database: Now we're ready to build out our content database. This is going to have entries that represent any and all content that we're gonna be making from Instagram posts to email newsletters. In this class, we're focused on making YouTube videos. But of course, this can be tweaked to fit whatever content that you're prioritizing. So let's walk through the methodology of creating one of these dashboards. So I'm going to create a database now, name it content database. So we're not confusing it with our dashboard that we're gonna be making later. Give it an icon. And I'm just going to add some demo pieces of content here so that we can see what we're working with. So the first thing that we're going to add as a status property, so I'm gonna change this to status. And with this, they give you to do in progress and complete. You can break this down how you see fit. I like to have to do as pre-production. So writing anything that happens before I actually start filming the video. And then for in-progress, I'm going to add some options that are having to do with filming the video and editing the video. And then under complete, I'm going to have things like exporting, uploading those final touches. And of course, once it's actually published, so I'm gonna go ahead and add those in now. And so now I have all of my stages of production in order from first to last. I've also color-coded these, so anything that is in pre-production, but it's actually started within the process is yellow. I keep things not started if I haven't really worked on it, I'm not even sure if I'm gonna do it. I'm just sort of putting it into the database as an idea. And then if I'm brainstorming around this, and I actually know that I really do want to do this idea. Those are different phases. Then we get to things that are ready to film and actually filming. Then we get to post-production and editing, sacked and manage the files, manage the media, and makes sure everything is copied over. Do the editing. Maybe I need pickups, a couple of extra shots here and they're creating the thumbnails. And then once the edit is complete, it's ready to export, That's the field there. Then I have these in brown because by this time most of the work is over, so I can have it kinda shell, whereas this is like, Okay, we're ready to go into production. That's my main hurdle, is getting things ready for production. So that's what I'm really focused on. By the time it's here, we just have exporting, caption and description writing, things that are ready to publish. And then finally, things that are actually published. Again, you can be as granular with these steps or you can have this bigger picture. I'm really detail oriented person, so I like breaking everything out like this. So that's how it's going to look. And the next thing I want to add is the destination. So as YouTube creators were often promoting our things across platforms, people also have instagrams that support their YouTube or vice versa. So I want to be clear about where this is going to live. So I'm going to name this destination and add a few options here. So we have YouTube. So those are some basics, making these the colors that are more representative of the different platforms. And I'll add some variety within here. There are different formats of video that you can have across platforms. You can have a full length YouTube video. That's a lot of what we do. You also have vertical shorts. You can also just have photos. So I'd like to have a media format property to demonstrate that. So I'm going to make this a single select as well. You can only have one of those formats at a time. So there we have our options, and I will similarly just insert a few of these into our demos. The next thing I like to keep track of within my content, our buckets. So this gets a bit into your content strategy. But often there are different categories of content that you want to make sure to maintain. Maybe you have a few different angles to your area of expertise that you want to make sure you're putting in front of the audience. Or maybe you have slightly different formats that you want to keep track of your buckets of content, what topics usually cover. That's another thing to add to this database. So these are a couple of buckets that I've had over the years. Let's say these are my main three that I'm focusing on. I can label these accordingly. Next, I'm going to add some dates. We of course want to know the date that we're going to publish these things. But I also like to know what target dates. I should be writing a video, editing a video and shooting a video here in a couple of dates. So we get the just. And the next thing I'd like to have as a field to jot down notes on YouTube title ideas and YouTube thumbnail ideas. That'll be a text property that as I'm doing my documentation, because everything we check off is going to be basically are done list for content. I like to keep track of what I actually made the YouTube title and what my actual thumbnail was. The title can be a TextField. The thumbnail can be an image upload field, really an asset upload field. So I'm going to create those. And I added little emojis just so that I have an extra reminder that these are for the ideas and these are for the things that I actually wound up doing online. I like having a published day, like day of the week field because it helps you to see things in the board view It's also nice to keep track of what your typical weekday is so that you can see trends around that day. So this will be a select field and I'll just add all of the days of the week. Similarly published time can help you to keep track of what times perform optimally or what times you tend to upload. And Notion doesn't have a specific time property that's formatted. So I use a text property and just use AM and PM ahead of the time so that I can put it in an order. So once this is published, I'll put Pm one for 01:00 P.M. so that way if I have something that I published at 09:00 A.M. and I want to sort this in ascending order and we'll sort on top of PM for the archives purposes, I want to keep track of the URL that I actually wound up hosting the video on. I also use properties to jot down my promotional copy for other platforms, especially platforms that have character limits, then I like to track my time so that over time I get a sense of how long it takes me to write a video, edit a video, shoot a video, and I'll add some properties for that here. So since we have already categorized our tasks via our tasks database and tasks templates, I'll just have to go through after the project is done and look at how many writing tasks happened, filming tasks, post-production tasks. Look at the total that the database will tell me at the bottom with these Catholic features. And then I'll add a formula property that's going to sum all of these and tell me how many hours of video took me overall. So add this formula. I will edit the formula. So I just want to add all these properties which I can do with the symbol plus sign. So you can see that if we had 2 h here, 1 h here, 3 h here, that'll give us the total. I also want to make sure that my videos aren't turning out too long or too short. So to do that, I keep track of the final length of the video and I keep track of how many words were in the script that I use to prep for the video so that eventually I get a sense of how many words my scripts should have in them. I will add the script works as a number, and I'll add the length as a text property. And I'm a format that like maybe I had a video that was 8 min and 50 s. I'll also add a space for sponsors and collaborators. This of course, is optional whether you work with sponsors or collaborators, and you could have separate databases to hold all of your sponsors with the sponsor information up to you. I'll leave some properties to hold those here. And finally, we're going to link to our databases. So we want to link to art projects database and our tasks database so that all three of them can be talking together. And we're going to link to the content database so that the content database can reference its own entries within the entry page. And I'll be going through that in the next lesson. But for now, I'll just add these here. So these will be relations. Tasks. Show it on tasks as well. And I'll add the relation here. Relation to the project's same thing. I'm going to relate this database to itself because this is a self-reference. So we can just have it go in one direction rather than separate directions. But if you wanted to relate one piece of content to another piece of content, you can make that relation as well. Now, these are a lot of properties and they're not all going to be relevant at the same time. I like to use emojis as you're seeing here to delineate and help me to recognize the properties and say which properties I actually need to fill in each time. I actually always want to have the self-reference filled in. I use a little blue diamond. So that's my designation for necessary properties to fill in. I'm going to bring that up to the front. Everything will always have a name so you don't need to remember to put that in. But I do want to make sure that I'm updating the status. Everything has a particular destination in mind when I create it. So I want to make sure that's inputted, and I want to make sure that the media format is inputted. Everything else I might be adding an updating along the way as ideas occur to me or as the piece of content progressives. And I'm just gonna make sure to add these self references here. I like adding a little cover as well, spice it up. So that's our content database. And in the next lesson we'll be building out our specific content templates 22. 3.8 Create Content Templates: This is a juicy at lesson. We're gonna be building out our template for creating YouTube videos. This is gonna be within our content database. And within that entry we're going to have a page that's laid out in order to wrangle all of our ideas and how some creative inspiration to keep those creative juices flowing. So let's get into it. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a new template here. And I want an icon here, but I'm going to add my own icon. I have just a folder of social icons so that I can add things to different templates. So I'll click Custom upload file and find my YouTube icon. Here we go. Then I want to order these properties. Most important things that I always need to be filled out or at the top. So the destination is always going to be YouTube because it's a YouTube video, so we can have that. Then by default, I'm usually doing a full video. That's what I'm referring to with this new YouTube video. So I'm going to have that selected as well. And then these are a lot of other properties to see. And scrolling down this page, we're going to display some of these more nicely in the page itself. So I'm going to hide a lot of these properties within this database section here. Customize page is going to mark a bunch of these is always high. Alright, so now we just see the essentials and let's get into this page. So I'm going to start with a drop-down that's going to make it easy for me to fill in the metadata for this database entry. So this is not the video metadata on the YouTube platform. This is metadata, things that I think about when I'm setting up a video project within here. So I'm going to create that as a heading and I want to have a drop-down, you Danielle data. And now we're going to have a linked database that is this same content database within this page. And this is where the self-reference is going to come in handy. I'm going to have this be a full-width template because we're going to have a lot to work with here. As far as the properties that I want to show here, let me start by hiding everything. And I really want to show the project. So for most YouTube videos, they are longer projects. I want to make sure the project is gonna be connected. If there's a collaborator and a sponsor, I want to make sure that I enter those values at the beginning and I have a note space as I'm brainstorming things to include in the video. So I'll add that notes property here. And then if you number your videos, you could add a number here. I actually do number my videos and I have a numbering scheme that's dependent on the current year. So it's 2023. If this is my first video, 2023, then the video number is 23.1. That's totally optional. That's like because I'm a professional producer and I have to keep track of everything. So those are all the properties that we want to input right at the start. And when we're filtering, the most important thing is to filter by the self-reference. And you want to say that it contains new YouTube video. This is going to be replaced by whatever we actually create with this template. So there we are. Now, just to demonstrate, if I now apply this template, you're going to see this new video metadata and how to achieve your goals here. And we can input those values very easily right there, going back into the template, the next thing that I want to show is my production schedule. Those are all those date fields that we had. So it's gonna be a similar layout to this. I'm just going to copy and change this to production schedule. And then in this one, I want different properties to be showing. Hide all these to start and then I'll go and select the dates. So writing date, if you work with different editors, are different producers, are different camera people. It could also be useful to assign a video to a different person through this, if you're just in this workspace yourself, you could do that through a select property and then just add person and just label your team that way for your own use. Or you could add people to your notion workspace and have a property to actually add a person to this. So if I had editor and that is going to allow me to add people who I've added to my Notion workspace fins are not using those right now. I will delete them. This production schedule is obviously going to be useful when you are mapping out your actual production tasks. Now we keep those in the task database, which we usually manage through our project page. I'm also going to add this production schedule element to our video project template within our project database. So I'm just going to copy this, go back to our dashboard projects. So I'm gonna go into this one, open this up, and I'm going to paste this mess. And I don't want to sink it exactly because I needed different I'm not filtering for the self-reference. I'm filtering for any project delete filter. So I'm filtering for a project and I want the project to be connected to this new video project. And I'm going to put this at the top of the page so that now I'll be able to unfurl this, see what the appropriate dates would be and make sure that my actual individual tasks and line up with that. So let's pull up our new YouTube video template. And having that project link is one reason why it's important to fill in the metadata. And that's I want an area to map out and plan my title and thumbnail. I'll start by duplicating this because I do want another reference to the same database. The properties that I want to show this time are the title ideas and thumbnail ideas. And this is also a place where you can give yourself a little guidance and remind yourself of things that you want to include. So maybe you want a reminder to include keywords in your title and thumbnail so you can just add something within this area to brainstorm what are your keyword is gonna be just added a little blank list element there. You also might want a couple of images for inspiration so you can add a place to store those here. There are resources out there that will help you to workshop your titles and workshop your thumbnails, treating your titles like headlines. One that I like as far as YouTube thumbnails is thumbs-up dot tv, so I will add a link to that. Okay, got my two columns. Headline Analyzer is one website that can help you in workshopping your titles. I'll also copy that link and create a bookmark. And so you're able to build out a little section to help you to brainstorm. And it will all fold up within this area here. So these are things that you're thinking about and inputting at the beginning of the process. Now, I'm going to have a divider and make a new section for when I'm actually starting to write the video. I have a writing checklist. I'm a checklist type of girl. And this can really be anything that you want, things that you want to include in each video or things that you want to include in your process of creating each video. So these are things like creating a compelling hook, making sure that you have one topic that is central to the video or one question that you're trying to answer, making sure that you don't go over a certain length with your scripts so that the video doesn't run too long, making sure that you've checked pronunciation of names, things like that. You could also have a link to your script here. If you do scripting within Notion, you can link to the page or create a new page. So the script could live here, or you could link to whatever software that you're going to write in that Anna toggle. And you can have an area for brainstorming resources. Things that you use for coming up with creative ideas. One that I like is Oblique Strategies is really fun. So feel free to explore that. I'll leave a link in the class resources as well as I'm writing. I'll often come up with things that I want to include it in the video description or links that I want to make sure that I'm sharing with the audience. So I'll have a section to take notes on that. And then here I want an area for my video tasks. So once I get down to making it, I also want to be able to see my tasks here. So I'm gonna create another linked view, the database. I'm going to use the task database that we created. And then thinking about what property is are the best to show here. I'm going to hide them at first. And I want to know the activity type. The production task is going to show up by default since we're using our task templates. So I don't need to see that. I want the due date. I don't usually have a due date, so I'm not going to include that one. As I'm planning out the project, the estimated time is always helpful. And while I'm usually working out of my project page, I couldn't be working on this page as well. So I want the properties that are going to allow me to check this off so I can mark the start time, the end time. And from that, I will be able to know how much time the thing actually took me and then when it was completed and the ability to change the status. So we'll have that. And then we want to be filtering for where the content is, this new YouTube video. So that's where I will be able to see all of the tasks related to this piece of content. Now usually come back to this at the end of a project to see how much time I spent in each phase of production. And in order to do that easily, I need a couple of more views. So I'm going to make one view for each phase, pre-production, production and post-production I'm going to duplicate this. And with this, I don't need the things to mark off the completion. I just need the actual time. So I'm going to calculate the sum here. Move that up to the front, and I'm gonna make sure the status is checked off as well. I'll have that visible. And now I'm going to filter for production tasks that are in pre-production. So if I have production tasks, this should count writing, research, and shoot planning. And now I'm going to create one for production. I will change this so that now we're accounting for the filming tasks. And I'm going to include photo shoots in that as well. And then I'm going to duplicate that here and just call it editing just because I don't want everything to start with p and because they all look similar. And then the filter is going to be for editing and creating the thumbnail publishing, documentation, everything that comes after filming. This, rename this all tasks. So for our system to work me and make sure that the tasks are connected not only to this piece of content, but also to the project that's going to represent this piece of content. So I'm going to add a filter here to filter by project. And then we have to make sure that we add a project to this filter before we add tasks to this database view here. So I like to add little notes to myself within notion. So I will say Add project filter. And I wanted to do the same thing and the reverse direction from the video project template. I'm gonna make sure to do that. And then here I want to make sure to add a filter to content. I'm just going to add a note to myself. And then I also want to be able to add our task list from this page. If I prefer to work in this page for now, I'm gonna go grab that out of our video project template and add that here as well. So to see how this works, if we go into one of our other pieces of content, we can delete this. So then we can put a fresh version of the template in here. And I'm going to want to make sure that I create a project. So I'm going to name this and now we've got that. And I'm going to make sure that this is filtered to how to achieve your goals. And the video production tasks that are right here. Click and drag them here. So now we have all of our tasks and you can see which ones are pre-production, which ones are filming, and which ones I post-production. And then I also go into the projects page and set up new video project. So we see these are already connected to our project from our task on the other page. And we have our production dates here. So all three are length, are all talking to each other. They're all working together. And these just have a little bit of space because our project name is kinda long. So going back to our YouTube video template, I like to put all of this in a toggle, so I'm going to name that production tasks. So you can always pop in here and see how the project is progressing. It will also help to sort these by status. If you want a list of only incomplete tasks, you can duplicate this. Complete and filter for the status is not a done tasks. So now we also have an incomplete tasks filter. This would also be a place to have other production checklist. I have checklists for setting up my set and my home office and the right way, I have checklists for editing videos to make sure that I've gotten all of my elements in place in my timeline. So you can have those here in the last section I like to have is for video documentation. So similar to the new metadata that I input at the very beginning of the process, I have things that I keep track of that I input at the very end. So I will copy this section up here. Duplicate the properties that I want to show here are the actual YouTube title, the actual YouTube thumbnail that wound up going out. The URL that I wound up doing. I want to capture the amount of time that I'm going to check within that task view. I want to note how long the video was and how many words mount of being in my script. If you wind up having a budget for your videos, you could also put the cost of supplies in this line. So that's gonna be our template that helps us to generate ideas and keep track of things as we're making the video. I like to have a really robust template like this as you can see, but you can feel free to pair this up or down as you see fit 23. 4.1 Why You Need A Dashboard: A dashboard is a place for you to pull in all the relevant information from the different databases you've created so that you can see things at a glance and see how everything is working together. Without a dashboard, you would need to look at your databases one-by-one. You would need a different view for your content calendar. You will need to click again to see your upcoming content by topic, it would be a lot of navigating with a dashboard and you can think about what information you want to bring to the surface and then show that information and only that information. And then if you want more detail, you can always click through to the database or to the specific entry. I like to have the original copies of my databases live by themselves on a separate page. That's not super pretty, but it mainly serves as an index to let me know all the data there. Then I use dashboards to display that information in a visually appealing way. This is where it's nice to have Kanban views and galleries. You've already inputted your data in the spreadsheet life view, and now you can view it in a way that's more bite-size and appealing. By dashboard is a page that has different sections where information is organized based on the specific contexts or use case that I have and what I want to see in a moment, the content dashboard is a page with different sections that are designed based on what my priorities are and what information I want to see in different contexts. We'll be using linked views of our databases to create our content dashboard starting in the next lesson. So let's jump right in 24. 4.2 Upcoming Content & Pipeline: Alrighty. Now we're going to put everything that we've built into one cohesive dashboard. The first part of the dashboard is gonna be for upcoming content and our content pipeline. I have gone ahead and move to the original copies of the databases to their own database storage page that I know where the originals live. So that our dashboard is a blank slate. So I'm going to create a linked database to our content dashboard. So I'm gonna be able to just see basically a list of the different content ideas that we have coming up. And I'm going to go ahead and make this page full width because there's gonna be a lot for us to look at. So starting from zero hiding the property says start the properties that I want to see are the media format. I want to see the status. And I actually want to be able to put these videos in an order even if I don't have a published it yet. So I'm going to make a new property called vid order. I'm going to make it a number. And I'm going to go ahead and put that first. Because this is a view where I'm going to see what's coming up next. And I want to be able to edit that. I also, for the sake of clarity, want to change this to post subject because this might not be the final name of the post that would be in the title. So going back to the properties I do want to show and I do want to see if we have ideas for the title, ideas for the thumbnail. If it's in a bucket, it would be useful to see that the published date, if we have one and any notes that we have as we're coming up with this content. Now I want to have this part focused just on YouTube content. That's my focus. That's what I want to be at the top of my dashboard. So I'm going to filter this so that the destination is just YouTube. And then I want to make sure that I'm capturing things that haven't been published already. This is upcoming content. So I need to have the status be not published, so status is not published. So this gives us our upcoming YouTube content and we can hide the database title because we know what database does is it makes it a little cleaner. Now I do like to have those icons at the beginning of each entry so that I know what platform it's for at-a-glance. And so to do that, I might not be ready to apply the entire template to the video yet, especially if it's in the idea stage. So what I'm gonna do is create a new template that is just an icon. So new YouTube video icon. So I'm gonna get rid of the body in this page because I might not be ready for all that. I'm going to keep the destination YouTube and I'm going to delete the format because it could be a short on YouTube, it could be a YouTube story. Have that here. And now I can apply that to my other entries as well. So now we have everything that is based on the YouTube platform. Since this is upcoming, I want to be able to sort by what's going to come up first. So if things have a published date, so now you'll see have shifted if there isn't a published date, but I'm still trying to get these into a particular order that I want to sort by that video order property that we just added. So that's our secondary sorting mechanism. We have those there because this is a demo, we only have a few entries. Eventually this is gonna become a pretty full database. So I want to make sure that I'm only seeing the ones coming up next. So I am going to make sure the load limit instead of 50 pages, I'm going to change it to ten pages, so I'll only see the ten videos that are going to come up the soonest. And I'm going to rename this video's, this view is great for seeing what topics are upcoming. It can also be helpful to have a view that is focused on the schedule and making sure that the publish dates are where I want them, but also the dates for writing and shooting and editing or where I want them as well. So I'm going to duplicate this name, this video schedule. And for the properties here, I'm focused less on the ideas and the bucket, and more on the dates. So I brought in the writing date, shooting, and editing date. I also want to make sure if I'm looking more at the scheduling and the management of this is a project that I have a project connection that I have the self-reference established two. So I'm going to show those properties. Move the notes to me. And since we're mainly focused on scheduling here, and I can hide this as well. So now we have a view that's focused a bit more on schedule and where things are in the process. This view is just showing us things that are going to live on YouTube. But we also want to keep track of the content that we're sharing across platforms. Gotta get that cross-promote. It is secondary though. So I will have it in a drop-down. So I want to make a toggle. I'll make it a number two heading and I will duplicate this. So copy Paste. So because this is not just videos, the video order isn't as relevant. Saw hide that and the view. And instead, I will bring the published date to the forefront. And I want one of these for each other platform that I'm on. So instead of YouTube, I will say patriotic. And I will rename this patriotic. I'll go ahead and duplicate it for Instagram and change the filter to Instagram. And I'll go ahead and create other ones for the other platforms. And then I'll create one that just has all content. Maybe create a little divider here. Upcoming videos. I actually would love to separate this with a color. So if I were to color this entire thing, what's inside of the toggle would also be colored. I don't want that. I just want this one line. So I'm doing this, I'm just going to turn that into a regular toggle list. Now I have a little separation in our dashboard. We have this that can toggle up or down depending on how relevant it is. And then YouTube videos, which are our focus, are always gonna be visible here at the top. Now let's make our content pipeline. So this is going to be a board view of that same content database. So we can do a linked database board view. So I'm gonna make these cards smaller because we do have a lot of them and I want to be able to see as many as we can. And then I don't need to see all of these stages because I only want to see what is actively in progress throughout this pipeline. So not the ideas, not things that I'm just brainstorming or haven't started and not things that have already gone out there and published. So I'm gonna go in to the group and hide things that are not started. Showing the other groups. I'm going to hide this, it's published. And the brainstorming and the ideas that I need to put these in chronological order from the beginning of the process to the end. Because of notions way of sorting things, I'm going to need to do this manually, so I'll go ahead and sort manual. So now we're starting to see things in the right order. I want to see the media type under each of these. So I'm going to go into the properties that are visible and display that. I also wanted to display the published today so that I stay on top of what I need to get finished. And then the sort will allow us to have certain things at the top of the column. And I want the things that are going to publish the soonest to be at the top. So I'm going to sort by the published day. Now if two things are in the same column, the one publishing first will show up on top. This is our full pipeline. You'll see that because our pipeline is pretty detailed, it stretches out a bit. You could duplicate this if you wanted to see everything at once. So you'd have pre-production and production on one level and then post-production on the other level. I'm fine with scrolling across, so I'm just going to keep it as is. It might also be nice to focus on youtube videos. So I'm going to have a full pipeline and a video pipeline. For the video pipeline, I'm just keeping track of my full videos. So the media format should be full video. That a clean up the appearance of bed. I'm going to hide this title as well as a content pipeline heading here. I had my emojis lined up like this. I might give this its own color for now as well. So now we see the content that we have coming up and where each is within our stages of production. 25. 4.3 Content & Production Calendars: So now we're gonna get into building out our content calendars. We want to be able to see when we're going to publish things, but we also want to see the dates for the different phases of production. So I want to create a calendar linked database you. So I will do that here. Let's start with the publishing date. That's really the most prominent date. Showing it as a month is fine. And then center peak is how these will show up here. I think that's fine. As far as the properties that show up, I want to see the status. I also want to see the destination where it's going to live. I don't want to see the media type that's gonna be going up. Since these are all arranged by date, there's no need to filter or sort. This is only going to have things that already have a published date established. So it's not gonna be that many things. And I will name this calendar published, then I can hide the title and create a larger title up top. What's nice about this calendar view is that you can move things around and see them visually, how they're stacking up in your schedule. And I also want to be able to do this for my editing and for my shooting schedule, and for my writing schedule. So I'm going to create duplicate calendars that show those dates. Now I had assigned these writing gates before, but by seeing it mapped out on the calendar like this, I can say to myself, maybe I won't have the bandwidth to write five videos in one day. Let me spread these out a bit. Now it would be helpful to see the published date on these or to see the shoot date on these, maybe even both. So instead of showing which platform, which I can already see because I'm using these icons, I'm going to show the published date and the shooting date because shooting is the next step in the process. So now I can see that if I push this farther than the 13th, I'm going to run right into my shoot day. So I'll create my shooting calendar and my editing calendar. On the shooting cow, I have the editing date because that's the next step in the process. I have the final published date to see it overall. And then for the editing, I just have the published date. Unfortunately, one limitation of notion as of this filming is that you can't see multiple date properties on the same calendar for the same entries. So that is a bummer. You have to separate these out. What I like to do since you are adjusting multiple of these oftentimes is to break them out into different panels, essentially, within toggles, I will have the publishing calendar and then I'll have a toggle for the writing calendar, the shooting calendar and editing calendar so that I can see these side-by-side. So now if I go into look at my writing count in there, and I want to stretch these out. I can see that this one doesn't publish until June 27th, so I can probably write that later. This one doesn't publish until the 30th, so I can write that later. And then I could go into the shooting calendar and adjusted here. I can also navigate to that specific area. If I make this into R, If I apply our template that we had just created, and I can look at the production schedule here to make sure that everything makes sense and is following an order. Here. I'd probably want to push the shoot day back. And the editing date might go back as well. And it doesn't publish until later. It's also handy to be able to do that at the top of the page right here. That's part of why we have these all laid out. The calendar view also makes it easy to stretch out your dates. So I'm often writing videos over several days. So I can easily stretch that here. In addition to calendars, I also liked being able to see what's just publishing this week by platform and by weekday to see just what's about to go out right now. So I'm going to create a published this week section. This is going to be in the board view so that I can see the different platforms and the different columns. Since we already have a board view, I'm just going to copy from up here. And instead of having this by status, I'm going to have it by destination. There's no destination. I can hide it. I still like to see the status here that way I can make sure that things are ready to publish. And then I want to filter by things that have not already been published and that only fall within the upcoming week. So I'm actually going to use an advanced filter to set up that date filter and the publishing filter. Now at this belts are I'm only showing things that are not published and where the published date is, either this week, it could be today or if it's before today, that means the published date has passed, so I'd better get it up there soon. And I'm already sorting by published date ascending. So that looks good to me. I can hide this database title and I will rename this five this week by platform. I'd also like to have this week by day of the week. So this is where that day published day is going to come in handy. So I will duplicate this. Delete this one. I'm gonna go ahead and rename this. I will hide things that don't have a published date associated with them. I'm going to just make sure that these are in order. And so now we can see what days we scheduled these things. And maybe we want to make sure that we upload every couple of days. So you want to stretch these out, you can adjust that here. Now, there is the conundrum that June 15th might not actually be a Saturday, so you would need to go and check to see and maybe adjust the actual published date. But there's a formula that can help you to make sure that the published date is aligned with the day of the week that you want to be putting out that content. So I'm going to actually add that property up here. In our scheduling view. We have our published date. I'm going to add the published day, and I'm going to add a little formula to help us make sure that they're aligned. I have this formula that calculates what day of the week this published date is and returns that in a string and a text format. I wrote this formula. It's a bit complicated. Here it is. How to write this formula is beyond the scope of this course, but if you just want to copy and paste this into your system, I will leave it in the resources section. So with this handy dandy formula, you can say, Okay, June 15th is actually a Thursday. Either I need to change this pub day to a Thursday or I need to change June 15th to the day that I actually want it to be if I wanted it to be a Sunday. So those are a few ways that you can integrate a content calendar into your notion dashboard 26. 4.5 Managing Content Tasks: Now we're going to look at how to manage your tasks within this content creation dashboard. So I'm going to create a task section right underneath our content Pipeline. I'm going to create this within a toggle since it will be a long list. And I will make a linked view of the task database. So in this first view, I want to be able to see the tasks that are associated with the content that I'm working on in my content pipeline. So I need to see the due dates. If there is a due date for our client or a sponsor, and then the to-do date so that I can assign it. And then I need to see the content stage and things about the content. I want to know what stage the content is in. So I'm going to use a rollup to do that. So I'm going to actually create a new property content stage by having this road that connects to the content database and showing the status property, I now can see the stage that the piece of content is n. So I'm going to bump that up to here. And I also want to know when the contents published data's. That'll let me know how urgent this really is. I'll make another relation property here for that. Since this is gonna be helping me to plan out my workload for each day is helpful to have the estimated time. As far as filtering, I only want to see things that are incomplete so where the status is not done. And I only want to see things that are connected to a piece of content. So these first couple of sample tasks shouldn't be in here. So I'm going to set up those filters. And then as far as sorting, I want to sort by the stage that the content is in. And I will do that descending so that the things furthest along in the pipeline are the things that I can finish the soonest, that if something is within the same contents stage, I want to work on the thing that's going to publish soonest. I want to work on that the soonest. I'm also going to sort by the content pub date and that should be ascending from here, I'd be able to see content in the pipeline and add these two due dates. So if we wanted to set another one up, Let's say we make a project out of this one. New video project. We haven't connected to content here. Makes sure that it's connected to content here, add in things from our template, add a note to ourselves about which video this is related to. And now if we come back to our dashboard, will see these right here. So we can use this view to assign our two due dates. Once I have my two due dates, establish, I might just want to see the tax that I have to do today. I'll create another view just for that. And then as far as properties in this view, I mainly want to be concerned with actually checking the tasks off my list. So I'll still show the due date and the to-do date, but I'll hide these. And I really want to see things involving the execution and tracking my time around that estimate of time, the start time, the end time, the actual time that it took, and making sure to have the status there and the date that I completed it, I want to make sure the date completed gets checked off first because once the status changes to done, I want this to disappear. So as far as the filters, This looks good, this looks good and I want to add something around the date. So now I'm seeing what's on my plate for today. I can see that this is an estimated 5 h worth of work. I can mark the start and end times here and say, okay, I thought it took 2 h. It actually took me 2 h. So my estimate is a good one. I completed it today. And when I check this off, it'll go away. This lords that we had before makes sense. But we could also sort by the order in which we want to complete the tasks today. And so we had a property for that. It's called tasks today, number today. And if I show that property here, and I can make that sort primary, I have a particular order. Then if I wanted to do all of my writing first, so maybe writing first thing in the morning, then planning the shoot. Then I want to do a little research. And then I like doing visual things in the evening, so I'll do it in that order. A version of this kind of to-do lists could also vote in your main dashboard within your larger notion space to handle all of your tasks that you have to do in a day. Then in addition to seeing these out in a list, it's nice to have your tasks on a calendar. So I'm going to have a calendar view here, just duplicating that. And I'm going to change the layout, the calendar, showing the to-do date right now, which is what we want. As far as the properties. It might be nice to see the social content since there's not a lot of the line that shows. So I'm going to show that and I'm going to show the published date so that again, we know how urgent this task really is. The filters that we have still make sense the sorts do as well. And we don't need this view so we can just delete it. Seeing this out on a weekly and monthly basis is another way to better visualize your workload and be able to easily change things from day-to-day. And with that, we've created a task management area within our content creation dashboard 27. 4.6 Brainstorm & Archive: So now we're going to create an area for us to brainstorm it. So we're going to grab another innervation of this database, going to create it inside of a toggle and bring up a linked database. So for the properties, I definitely need the posts subject. I also want to know the status and that's how I'll change it from an idea that's just in my head to something that's gonna go into my pipeline. I want to know the notes that I'm thinking of and the ideas for titles and thumbnails, as well as the bucket that it's going to go into. Does this fit into one of my content verticals? I also want to know the destination, what platform, and my thinking this is gonna go on the filters. I don't want anything that's already in the works. So I'm going to filter out by status. And I'm only trying to see things that are not started brainstorming or ideas that I want to sort by status. So if it's higher up, I want to see that. So Ascending might also want to sort by bucket. So I will add that as a secondary sort and I'll rename this to all ideas. It can also be helpful to brainstorm ideas around one bucket and particular. So you can make another view that is filtered by bucket. So I'm gonna do that here. And I'm going to filter and say that bucket since they already have to productivity ideas, I want a couple of mindfulness ideas. And so I could use this space to start jotting anything that I add. We'll have the mindfulness bucket already applied. And as you want to change buckets, you can just change the filter here. So there you have a brainstorming section. Next, we're going to create a section where you can look back on an archive of the content that you've already published. This is not only super satisfying, getting to look back on all the work that you've done. But it will also allow you to reflect on your process and optimize it along the way. So I'm going to create another section here as an archive. And I'm also going to create this within a toggle because it's only relevant to look back on some of the time. So first we're just going to have our written documentation. So I'll have another linked database here. And for the properties after the post subject, let's have the published time and the published day. That way we can be figuring out which days and times to post are the best for our audience. We can also have the length of the video and the script words. So we're going to find out what the optimal length is and how long of a script that we need to get to that length. I also definitely want to see how many hours it took me to complete this video. I want the total number as well as the number of hours for writing, shooting, and editing individually, we can include the URL just for easy access and the actual final YouTube thumbnail and YouTube title along with the sponsor and collaborator, if there were any. So having these fields is going to allow me to see my process, how it's played out in ways that I might be able to optimize it for the filter. We want the status to only be published. And then for the media format, I'm interested in seeing how things went for my full videos. These are old videos that I've published, I've added to this demo here so we can see what we're looking at. I want to sort by the published date in reverse chronological order, so I need to make sure that I'm showing that property and I will sort by that property. Because as we just saw, this can start to get pretty long once you've published a lot of videos, I do want to limit the load to ten pages. So this view is just for videos. I will name it accordingly. And I also want to view that's going to have all the published content. I'll duplicate this. And this B is gonna be very similar, except I'm going to remove the format filter and I'm going to go ahead and hide the property specific to videos so I don't need the length, I don't need a script words, I don't need the video number. I might hide these specific production phases as well. Although I might have, you know, writing tasks for any piece of content and the title and thumbnail I'll keep because those are stand-ins for the title and thumbnail of other types of content as well. So that's the written documentation, but I also just want to be able to look back. And so I'm going to create a gallery view. I've just copied this and I'm going to turn this into a gallery now. This is not very pretty just yet because the card preview is the page content. So that's showing what's within the page here. It's going to show the template that's been applied. Instead we want it to show the YouTube thumbnail. So I'm gonna go to the layout card preview. And if you have any file property, you'll be able to add that here. So now we have our thumbnails popping up and that's what we want. Adding a thumbnail, adding a thumbnails really easy. If you have the file on your computer, you just navigate to it within your file system. Dropped down here. I'll just pull that up, just drag and drop uploads pretty quickly. And you'll see it's been added to our gallery here for the properties on here, I'd just like to see the published date itself. So I'm going to add that the filter should be fine if it's published and it's sorting by pub date, so that's what we want. And then I'm just going to duplicate this view similarly and make one that shows all of the content that we published and now we can see everything. So if you also add images for your other types of posts, you'll see those here with the gallery. I don't want to limit it to ten pages. It's not that big of a list. So I'll expand that here. Delete this view. I'll go ahead and expand it here as well. So over time you'll be building out a beautiful and very satisfying gallery of your past work. 28. 4.7 Dashboard Design: We've just built out one really robust dashboard. We have a section that's a list of our upcoming content. We have our production pipeline, we have our calendars, we have a section for brainstorming. We have our archive and we have our content task list quite a lot. So feel free to break things up according to your own priority is take what works for you and leave the rest. I'm someone who likes a one-stop shop so that I can look at everything and just scroll down and things are really right next to each other. If you are someone who forgets to scroll down to page, then feel free to link these out to other sub-pages. You could have one main content dashboard that links out to other sub dashboards that have different contexts and allow you to focus. It all depends on how much you want to see at one time, a couple of ideas for secondary dashboards. You could have one page that is current content. So maybe you pull in things that you're actively writing or actively filming. You could pull in the published this week section and not have anything else. You could also have an idea generation dashboard. This is something that I find useful and it's an area that is just for brainstorming. You can lay out your entire database of ideas and have different inspiration, different captures of thumbnails and even title ideas and have a space dedicated just to that, the possibilities really are endless. And that's part of the fun of notion is that you get to design your workspace, exactly how you see fit 29. Conclusion: Congratulations, you have now created your own custom content management system in Notion, and you've finished this class well that over the course of this class, you've learned how to use notions, blocks, and pages to create custom layouts. You've harnessed the power of Notion databases to capture and organize your information. And you built out a workspace to manage your projects, tasks, and content ideas in a way that'll keep your content calendar flowing. I hope this has inspired you to take your notion game to the next level. There's so much you can do in Notion. So this class is just the jumping off point, and they're always adding new features and integrations. If you're interested in keeping up with how notion evolves, I will link to their product announcement page in the class resources. But even though there are lots of fancy bells and whistles, now you know the key aspects of the tool that you need to create an effective system. I'm excited to see how you personalize your context ration dashboard. So make sure to share it with us in the project section here on Skillshare. If you're interested in seeing more of my Notion setup, you can visit my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash assigned to the artist here is to being productive while producing content. Happy notion