Notion Masterclass: Maximise Your Productivity & Organisation

1. Welcome to the Class: So we will have this endless list of tasks and projects and things to think about. And it can get pretty overwhelming to be honest for a long time, I felt like my life was a complete mess. But then a few years ago, I discovered a completely free and totally game-changing app called notion. Hey friends, How's it going if we haven't met yet that my name is Ali, I'm a Dr. turned entrepreneur, YouTuber and podcaster. And I've been using Notion for over three years, so my personal life and now we also use it to run our team of 15 people. We've got a 5 million dollar business built basically entirely on top of notion as a massive productivity nerd. Over the years, I've tried out dozens and dozens of productivity apps. But the one I keep coming back to and the one that I still think is the best way to organize your personal and your professional life is notion. And it's also free, as you might have heard by now, a notion all in one app that's sort of like a cross between your own personal website and a spreadsheet and a Google Doc. And you can use it to organize basically anything in your life. The only problem is that notion does have a little bit of a learning curve, especially when you look at other YouTubers and greatest fancy elaborate setups. And it can seem really complicated and overwhelming to get started with. That's why in this class, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know to maximize your productivity by using Notion most effectively. And we're going to split the class up into three sections. In the beginner section, we're going to talk about the fundamental building blocks of notion and how you can use the idea of blocks and pages to organize basically anything in your life. Then in the intermediate section of the course, we're gonna go over the idea of databases and talk about how you can build a database and how you can do roll-ups and relations and all that fun stuff. Then in the advanced section of the course, we're going to talk about a few extra sprinkles of salt that you can add to your notion workspace to make it look really good. Things like embedding and things like building websites and things like widgets. But to be honest, a lot of the power of notion is in its simplicity and its flexibility so that you can create whatever system works best for your own brand. So those are the three main sections of the class. But then in the second half of the class, we're going to show you a bunch of different ways that me and my team and other creators and other entrepreneurs, the ways that we leverage notion to organize our personal and our work lives. Whether you're a beginner or intermediate or power user, hopefully that will give you some extra inspiration of cool stuff that you could potentially do with your Notion setup. But the thing to keep in mind is that it's all ultimately to serve your own meaningful productivity to help you do more of the things that matter to you without having to waste time thinking about all of the other stuff that you have to do and all the organizational fat that's always in your mind. This isn't just a theoretical class. Throughout the class, we're gonna be building our own life operating system from the ground up. And I'll be showing you the features of notion as we build this thing together. So you can follow along if you feel like you can just sit back and relax and enjoy the show. And hopefully I will try and teach you every single thing I know about using Notion, having used it every day for the last three years, if any of that sounds interesting, I'd love for you to take the class and I'll see you potentially on the other side. 2. Class Project: Alright, welcome to the class. Thank you so much for joining this quick little video is to tell you about the class project. So throughout this class, we are going to be building a life operating system dashboard, sort of like a personal homepage. And in the class project section, I would love for you to share what yours looks like once you built it, it could be fancy, it could be simple, it doesn't really matter. But the nice thing about these projects is that a, you can see what other people are doing, what other students in the class are doing and be just kinda nice because you're actually working on a project as you're taking this class, rather than just passively absorbing the information. So please, I'd love for you to share a link to your notion page, or even just an image screenshot of what it looks like so we can all learn and inspire and get inspiration from each other. Anyway, let's get straight into the class. 3. 1.1 Getting Set Up with Notion: Alright, welcome to the first section of the course. This is the beginner section. If you already have Notion setup, if you already know what you're doing, feel free to skip along to future videos in the course. But right now we're going to talk about how to get set up with Notion. And broadly, there are two ways to access notion on your computer or your Mac or whatever, and then two ways to access it on your mobile device. I'm going to talk about the computer one first. The easiest one is by in fact actually just using notion in the web browser. And ocean is a web-based app, which means you can just use it on Chrome or Safari or Netscape Navigator or whatever browser you want. But you can also download the native app for Windows and for Mac and probably for Linux as well. So let's see what that looks like. Opening up a cheeky incognito window. One workspace, every team get notion for free. So you just click Get notion for free, nice and easy. It's going to ask you to sign up. I use my Google account for notion. You are welcome to continue with whatever you'd like. If you're signing up for the email, I'm gonna send you a code. So I'm going to check my email and get the code. And now we have an account on Notion. So if we zoom in first, tell us a bit about yourself. My name is Ali. I'm going to set my password. What kind of work do you do? Let's say, I don't know. The marketing. What is your role, solopreneur or a freelancer? Why not? What do you plan to do? A notion document editing and sharing, wiki, product management company, personal note-taking and other fantastic. Join your teammates on Notion. I'm not going to bother doing teammates, you type stuff, but I'm going to click create a new workspace for myself. So when you're using Notion for personal use, it's completely free when you're using it with a team. We use it with a team. We've got a team of 20 plus people who all use Notion. We use the enterprise version, but you can use the completely free personal plan. Take me to Notion what's going to happen. Boom. Now we have this Getting Started page. You can see in the top corner we've got all these notion and it's gonna give you all of these different templates to get started with. Now, I'm going to hit the Clear templates button because I want us to start from a blank page because I want to show you that kind of simplified version of how to go about using Notion as we're just gonna ignore the templates, but feel free to keep the templates around and you can explore them. It's kinda fun to explore the templates. And it's also fun to look on the Internet and see what templates other people have created and you can download them. But one cautionary tale is that if you try using too many templates without understanding the basics of motion first, you're likely to get overwhelmed and you're going to think, oh, it's too complicated, I can't be bothered with this. So generally, I would recommend starting from a blank page. I'm going to hit clear templates. It's all gone. And now we just have this Getting Started page. Now you'll notice in the bottom corner it says try notion for Mac and you can hit download app. So I'm going to hit that because I'm on a Mac, I've got the option of an Intel processor or an Apple M1 processor. This happens to be an M1 MacBook Pro connects to my display, so I will click Apple M1. If you knew you haven't Intel-based Mac, you can find out by hitting the Apple icon and then about this Mac, and it will tell you, so this says Apple M1 Pro, but if you have an Intel Mac, it will say it until something or other and you can download the Intel version. You will not have this problem if you have Windows or if you have any of the other bits of software that notion can potentially run on. So far, we've shown it on Chrome, but I've already got the app and so I would just log into my account on the app. Then once you have the app, you can use the app as well. And now I've got exactly the same thing on the map. So you can use Chrome if you want. You can use the app if you want. I tend to use the app for most things because it's pretty solid. And you can also download the app for your mobile device, for Android, for and for iOS. So that'll be linked on the notion website as well. So all these different ways of getting set up with Notion, Let's now move on to the next lesson where we talk about the anatomy of notion and understanding exactly what's going on. So thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. 1.2 The Anatomy of Notion: Alright, so at this point we've got the app and I'm going to take you through just understanding the bare bones of what's going on. So the first thing to talk about is the idea of workspaces. So when we signed up for an account, we created a workspace that is in the top corner over here, you can see Olly's notion tests that are live.com is the e-mail that I've gone with. And I have a ton of other workspaces as well. A workspace is basically a big broad account. So e.g. we've got our actual workspace for everyone in the team, which looks super-complicated. You don't need to worry about that. A lot of my friends also have workspace is my brother's startup. Bunch of other startups have workspaces. Essentially, you don't need to think too hard about workspaces when you're starting off, you're gonna start with one account and one workspace. But if you want, you can separate out into a business thing and a personal thing. I tend to keep all things in one because, why not? But I know people who've separated workspaces just to keep things simple. This course, this course is all about keeping things simple. We're just gonna go with a single workspace. Workspaces are backed up and stored on the Cloud so you don't need to do any Command S or Control S or any saving or anything. It is all on the Cloud. It's all secure. There's all this fat around security and stuff with Notion. But basically everything is secure on the Cloud, as you would expect in 2022, 23, depending on when you're watching this, it's sort of like Google Docs and then it saves automatically and you don't need to worry about it, right? So we've talked about workspace, Let's now talk about the sidebar. The sidebar you will notice is this thing on the side. And you can open it and you can close it with these buttons at the top over there. And there is a keyboard shortcut of command and slash, which opens and closes the sidebar, as well as generally somewhat useful to become, becomes somewhat accustomed to some of the keyboard shortcuts. And I'm gonna be sharing the most important ones with you as we go along. So you can just get a bit faster it using notion. Just as a general tip for productivity, we're all about becoming more productive. Anytime you can do something with the keyboard shortcut rather than the mouse, you should try and learn the keyboard shortcut for the thing. Because being fluid with using keyboard shortcuts will just massively level up your speed of doing stuff on any kind of computer sidebar in and out. One of the things we can do, we've got QuickFind. Quickfind is probably my most used keyboard shortcut, or you can hit on it and you can search anything in your Notion, you can search the titles of pages, you can search the contents of pages. This is not particularly useful right now, or we don't have a single page. But Command P, weirdly is not to print the thing. It's to access this quick, quick find bar. Thinking about me, I use this all the time. I use it like 100 and hundreds of times a day whenever I want to find something notion, I don't bother clicking through the sidebar and finding the thing. I just quick find it with Command P, It's super efficient. Next we have all updates. You can broadly ignore this. This is kind of more for team-based stuff. If you want to see what pages your team members at editing and what's happening on. I basically never used the updates thing. Settings and members is interesting. This is where you've got all of these billing settings, all this kinda stuff. You can add in more members. You can try other team versions if you want to pay for it. We use the enterprise version because we have all of our team members on it, but you can manage all that stuff from this account, from this page over here, e.g. you can change the icon of your workspace, upload an image, or pick an emoji. So I'm going to use this one. Why not? You can also have a different domain. We'll talk about this later, but essentially, if you want to share a page, it will give you whatever dot notion dot site. But like I've, I've got Testing Law dot notion, dot site. So that works nicely. And then you've got a few other settings which are all save, save, save changes based around like upgrading and billing and security and identity and provisioning, you can basically ignore all of these things. They have become more relevant when you have one of the more advanced plants notion. But again, you don't need it as a totally free for personal use. Then underneath that we've got a list of all of our top-level pages where if I want, I can add a page and another one and another one and another one. And you'll see them appearing here in the sidebar. And if I wanted to, within a page, I can have a sub page. And then you can have sub-pages within sub pages. And you can basically make whatever sort of table of contents you want, where your sidebar is sort of like the main, main home-based, as it were. Underneath this, we've got templates more on templates in a little bit, but you can basically browse an entire list of all possible Notion templates that official notion team have made. I've even got some templates in this that I've made. And the notion team were like, Hey, we like your template, can we include it? Notion, that's pretty cool, but more on templates later on in the class. We've got the import feature where you can import stuff from a different app. Generally I would say avoid this because generally, when you're starting off with notion, it is probably easier to start with a blank slate so that you can get to know the software a little bit better. And then we have the trash where any kind of deleted pages can be found. And that's basically it. That's kind of what's going on at the side. And then at the top left, top right hand corner of every page, we've got the share button where you can share things with bovine, an e-mail address, or you can publish it to the web, which creates a URL that you can share with anyone. You've got this comments feature, which is kinda nice. This helps you collaborate on things with yourself or with your team members. You've got again, this idea of view all updates, which is for a specific page, you can see exactly what the change log of updates to the pages. Again, more relevant when you have a team, not overly when you're an individual, you can star pages if you want, in which case they get added to your favorites and they get pinned to the top of your sidebar, which is quite convenient. And then you have this dot dot dot thing where you've got loads of other settings which we're going to come across at various points in the class as they become relevant 0. And finally, one thing I forgot to mention in the bottom-right corner there is this little question mark button. And the cool thing about the question mark button is that you can get the help and support guide. You can get like send us a message, send feedback if you wanna send feedback on motion notion for whatever reason. But the keyboard shortcuts one is in particular interesting. And usually that opens up a little website that you can have a look at and it can teach you all the different keyboard shortcuts. The notion, you don't need to worry about this at the start, but it's something you might want to look at over time. So that brings us to the end of this lesson. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 5. 1.3 The Basics: Pages & Blocks: Alright, welcome back. In this lesson we're gonna be talking about the fundamental building blocks of notion. And so all we really need to do to be honest, the thing we need to do to understand the vast majority of how most people, including me, use Notion, is understand the concept of pages and understand the concept of blocks. And we're gonna talk about both of those things in this particular lesson. There is also other fancy features of notion involving databases and we're going to talk more about those in a future lesson in the intermediate part of the course. But for now, let's just focus on pages and blocks because that's where you get the most bang for your buck. So what our pages and what our blocks? Well, basically on Notion pages are what you would expect. They are a page. So this Getting Started thing that I see over here is a page. I can hit Add a page. This is a new pitch. Great. And then I can type stuff on it. I can add another page. This is another one. And then I can type some stuff here. And it's kind of what you'd expect in like a word processing app or if you had a website like different pages, shouldn't be too hard to get our heads around that one. The slightly more tricky things to get our head around. The notion is that within a page, everything is a block. So pages are made up of blocks, multiple blocks equals a page. So e.g. this KG, baba, baba, baba, blah, that I put over here is a block. And you'll notice when I click this little six dots thing to the side of it, highlights the block. Okay, this is a block and it says Copy link to this block is like this is how Notion operates. And you can move blocks around. So I can just drag and drop blocks. And like there's no tomorrow. It's, it's kinda fun. Now I want to show you the thing that we're actually going to be building. And this is what I call a life OS, a life operating system. This is one of the ones that I've just sort of mocked up for this particular course. And we're gonna be building something like this. But don't worry if it looks overwhelming, we're going to be building it up from the ground up. And I'm going to show you all the different features that go into building one of these things. And we will level it up as we go along throughout the course so that you can build one of these life OS dashboards for yourself. But everything has a block here. This dashboard thing is a block and you'll notice it's sort of in the sidebar. I can move it around. I can stick it up there. Now it moves. I can undo that with command Z. I can move it over there if I really wanted to, I can move this morning pages thing over here. It's like the nice thing about blogs that you can move things around. You'll notice I can put it all the way over there and then just create a new column. And now I can put this within the new column. I could put that within the new column. We'll talk about more about like structuring and stuff. But basically the idea, I'm going to undo all these things. The idea is that every single thing in Notion is a block, text is a block, a calendar is a block, an icon is part of a block. A database is also a block. Everything is blocked. And if we understand this idea and we understand that these are building blocks that we can move around that really helps us unlock the power of notion because it helps us realize a block. This is sick. So let's do the page thing a little bit more seriously now. And I'm going to call this life 0 S. This is my life operating system. This is where I'm going to build my dashboard. Now, when you click this option to create a new page, you're gonna get a bunch of different options, empty with icon, empty templates, import, and then all of these different database features. We're going to ignore the database features for now because a page can also be a database, but we'll talk more about that in the intermediate section. For now. Empty with icon basically creates a blank page and creates icon at the top, which is kind of nice. That's one of the cute things about Notion. You can click on the icon, you can change it to different, whatever. It can be my life at where's etcetera, etcetera. That's kinda cool. Alternatively, if you created a page and you just hit empty, now you can call it, I don't know, life OS empty. And you can do whatever you want in the page. It's just like a word document, but whenever you want, you can always go here and you can hit Add icon. As a matter, of course, I make it a point to add icons to everything because it just makes using notion a little bit more of a delight when I see icons, you can change them. The other cool thing you can add covers, you can add comments. We'll talk more about those in a little bit. So now that you know what pages and blocks are in the next lesson, we're gonna be building up this life OS dashboard. And I'm gonna be showing you all the different tricks that you can use to create pages with these blocks within them. So thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. 1.4 Building Our LifeOS: Alright, so this is where the fun starts. This is where we're going to build up our life operating system. And as we're doing it, I'm going to show you all the different blocks and all the different features with the notion. And hopefully this lesson will give you an idea of what you can do and what you can create a notion so that you don't necessarily need to copy what my template looks like or someone else's. But you can decide, oh, I know, I want to build my own system like this. And this is really the true joy of notion. It allows you to almost like Lego Minecraft, depending on how old you are, build your own system using whatever kind of blocks you want. And it's super fun. So let's get started. The first thing we wanna do is this is gonna be a funky page. So we're going to add a cover. I'm going to hit Add cover covers. Not block is just like a feature within a page. You'll notice it gives me this painting. It's probably famous as you probably know what it is. But I'm going to hit Change cover. And now I can choose from all these different colors that they've got. Oh, this one's kinda cute. I like this one. If I want to, I can upload my own image. If I want to, I can link to an image or I can use Unsplash. And it's basically like an image search engine. So I can search for something cool. Oh, I can search for gradient. And that looks cute. Oh, this is nice. I like colorful stuff. Yeah, this feels, this feels like me kind of color. Now if I want to, I can reposition this and I can drag this up and down so you can see what it looks like. And I quote, I quite like it over here. That's nice. So now I've got the cover image for my life operating system. I'm going to change the icon to maybe some kind of home icon. And now this feels nice and homely and I've got my life OS. So what do I want in my life operating system? Well, this is where the world is your ester and you can do whatever you want. But the way I'm going to build this out, it's as if every single morning I want to open up this page and I want to figure out like, what are the things I want to be seeing when I open up the page in the morning. I'm also going to zoom into this significantly more on using Command and plus I, what I'm doing. There we go. And I'm going to hide the sidebar using command slash so that we can just see it all. And it's not sidebars, not getting in the way. Not the best way to explore all the different things that notion has to offer is by hitting the forward slash key and then basic blocks and inline blocks and databases and stuff like there's loads of stuff. This is where you can see all the different features that notion has. And you can toggle through the side, this list of blocks through scrolling your mouse or through just like using the keyboard or whatever. And you'll notice that Pavlik loads of different options and load the different things very easy to get overwhelmed with their staff, so many different embeds, but we'll talk more about this stuff later. We're just going to get started with the absolute basic text texted the thing that you don't need to really do a slash comment for it. Because again, in Notion, everything has a blog and you can just click on something and you can just start typing away. Now I'm actually going to start my life operating system off with a quote. This is one of my favorite quotes from the Brandon Sanderson books, The Stormlight Archive. This quote, life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination. That's just simple text. So now this is all a block. And if I click this thing, you can see again, this is how a block works. If I'd said life before death and to strengthen for weakness, antigenic for destination. These are now three different blocks with three different bits of text in those blocks, undo, undo. But if I'd done a Shift and Enter, and then Shift and Enter again. Now this is all still the same block, and you can always see where the blocks by using this leg dot-dot-dot, dot-dot-dot feature to highlight the thing. There's sort of like if you're trying to send a message in like WhatsApp or something on your desktop and use Shift and Enter. It will give you a line break without sending any message. So that's something to keep in mind. The other really cool thing about blocks is that, and again, this is where nursing can seem complicated, but it's very simple when you understand it. A block can be transformed magically into another type of block. So right now, this is a textblock, a basic text block. But if I click on this little dot, dot, dot, dot next to it, then it opened up the menu. And you'll notice it says turn into, so I can turn a block into another kind of block, text heading one heading to heading three page to do this bullet list number, let's toggle this quote, quote, call-out, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And I'm going to turn this into a quote, because this is a quote. And therefore I want to look at, to turn into a quick format. So I've clicked that and now this has transformed into a quote. And it's great because I started off with the text. I can just type the text. I can always just change it into a quote later. I don't need to decide what sort of block I want this to be right at the start. Alright, cool. So I've got my quote blog, start off with tech, turn into a credit. That's nice. What do I want next? Well, I'm gonna hit Slash and be like, You know what? Don't want a page, don't want it to do list. Yeah. Oh, I want a heading, a big section heading. This seems like it could be fun. And the heading I'm going to say is e.g. dashboard. Because I want us to be a dashboard for my life. I hit Enter and now this is a heading block. Again, we can notice because that blue is highlighted. This is the heading block. I've got my heading one. Now, if I wanted to, I could turn this into a heading two, which is smaller than anyone like that. Or I could turn into a heading three, which is smaller than a heading two, like that. Undo, undo. If I even wanted to, I could do it with keyboard shortcuts, exactly the same keyboard shortcut that you can use in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, which is Command Option 123. Command Option one heading one command option two heading to command option three heading three, getting a bit complicated, but again, keyboard shortcuts to boost productivity if we want to. Now, when it comes to my dashboard, the way I thought, I'd like to think of my life is that there's really five key pillars that I want to optimize for. And those are health, wealth, love, happiness, and impact. I'm thinking I actually want to have a separate page for each one of those, so that within each of those pages, I can have my own little Health dashboard or relationships dashboard or work dashboard or whatever that might look like. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create pages here, which gives me then the option to click into those pages, which we're going to talk more about in a little bit. So I'm gonna go slash and I'm going to create a basic block which has a new page. That is interesting. This is where you can embed a page within a page, within a page within a page like Notion can become an endless list of nested pages, which is kinda fun. And that tends to be how I mostly use Notion. So let's make a page over here. And that page, Let's call it health. Yeah, nice and easy, empty with icon. Let's make the icon something to do with health, green salad bowl. And you'll notice in the top corner, it's now says lifo S slash health. It gives you the breadcrumbs. So you can see that health is a sub page within lifo S. And if I click on life advice, I got back here and now I can click on health. And I can click back on life OS like health back and laugh or OS, I click health. I could click the back arrow, which will take me back to life OS. I could click the forward arrow. This basically operates like a web browser. It's fairly intuitive if you've operated a web browser and if you're on, if you're watching this class, you have definitely operator web browser. But a keyboard shortcut that's really useful at this point is Command and square bracket left, or Command and square bracket rights. And with these keyboard shortcuts, you can cycle between pages forward and back. And it's just, again, the shortcut works in web browsers to, we should never be ideally clicking the back arrow on a web browser. We can just use Command and left square bracket. And now it's just like a super efficient way to navigate the stuff that we're trying to do. So I've made my health page. I can put whatever I want on this page. I can track my macros, I can track my DEXA scans. I can live with everyone, but let's not over-complicate things. I'm also going to create a page now for wealth, which has the work stuff. Now, previously I created a page by hitting Slash and by clicking page. But instead what I can do is I can hit Slash and I can type in page, or even just typing slash p and it will or PA, and it will select the page. You'll notice that through the key, but I can type in slash. And then whatever you type after the slash, it's going to search through the possible list of blocks that you can add to your thing. And it'll make that work. So if I want to make a slash heading, I could do slash heading and it will give me heading one if I'm disliked Page Act is my page. And this tends to be how I make pages. I don't bother with the clicking stuff because it's a bit as well as a lot of effort. I would just make the page. So I'm going to make any page and call it wealth empty with icon money. Right? Now I'm gonna go back. Good, new page and that page, I'm going to call it love. Empty with icon. Let's give it a heart. Go back with Command square bracket. I'm going to make any page, happiness. And let's put a smiling face back. And I'm going to say splash page, impact, where I don't know hospitals, hospitals have impact, y-naught. And then I'm gonna go back. So you see, you've seen very quickly I've created these five different pages within my dashboard, health, wealth, love, happiness, and impact. And now I can click onto those pages and do whatever I want with them whenever I feel like, but you know what? Let's make this look a little bit prettier. Now one of the cool things about Notion is that anything can look very pretty. There's a few different ways of doing it. If you want to select the block, you could click this thing over here. Or alternatively you can click this three dot, dot, dot thing over here. We named delete and more. It basically opens exactly the same menu, but just in different parts of the screen. I tend to use this one. What I can do is I can change the color of this block, so I can change the color of the text default gray, brown, and tetra. And I can also change the background color. So just to be a little bit funky, let me give each of these different elements of life a different color. So let's go for green, y-naught, that's gone green. Well, actually, I probably should've green. Let's do well for green. Let's do well for enlighten me, yellow, Who cares, love, it's gotta be pink. Thank you. Happiness. Let's make that blue and impact. Let's make wasn't ICA. Let's make purple. So now I've got a prettier looking thing. And you can basically, again, the cool thing about Notion is that it makes it look pretty and you can just tweak it to your whatever aesthetic you want. So now I've got this dashboard of health, wealth, love, happiness, and impact. Now let's create a new heading. I'm going to create a heading. I think it's gonna be heading one style and I'm going to call it reminders. I'm gonna be like, okay, what are things I want to remember? Now, an easy way of doing this would just be to type whatever I want. So I'm thinking, Oh, I need to remember to call my grandma. And each day I can just look at my reminders thing and I can just delete stuff that I don't need to do anymore. That's one way of doing it. Another cool thing that you can do notion is you can literally add a reminder. I don't use this feature very often, but it's just kinda nice to know. Slash, remind. And you can add an inline date or reminder instead of date or reminder and text. So I'm going to hit that mentioned a date. So let's say remind me tomorrow at 09:00 A.M. call money. Call my grandma. Now tomorrow at 09:00 A.M. this is going to give me a notification in Notion and this is going to go red. And it's going to say, Oh, you should probably do this thing. This is quite handy, is a great way of essentially using Notion as a pseudo to-do list with deadlines and stuff so that you know exactly what you want to be doing. So that's a reminder of made for myself. That's where I might keep on top of all the various deadlines I have. So let's add another one. And that'd be like today. I remind me to conversation with Peter, e.g. and now notion is going to remind me of that. It's kinda cool. Let's move on. Let's now have another heading and I'm going to say my things to do. Okay? So I want to have things to do and I want to use this as a to-do list. Now, generally when it comes to a to do list, my personal way that I like to do it is every day I set a daily highlight. This is the most important thing I want to work on because I've got a heading, one of things to do. I might make a heading two. So I'm gonna go slash H2 and it's going to say heading to medium section heading. My most important tasks. And let's say today my most important task is filming this course. So I can add a new block and I can add a to-do list block. So I'm going to type in to do. And you can see it's over here, basic block track tasks with the to do list. And you'll notice it's created this checkbox film notion. That's my most important task for the day. And once I've done it, I can tick it off. And that's kinda nice. And then over time I can always just delete it and replace it with another one. But this is how you use how you create a to-do list in Notion. But let's say I've got other things I want to do the way I like to think of those as I've got my most important tasks, my daily highlight. Then I have my might do list this stuff I might do today if I get around to it. So let's make another H2. H2 might do it. Let's do it. Now. What are the things I might do today? Return of trousers, spoke. Reply, Ruby's email, buy flowers for mother, and upload a YouTube video about how much money I make. That might be my might do list. And then as I'm going through my day, I can just take these off as I feel like now this point, this stuff like this top off, the page is looking pretty good. It's looking, looking kinda cute, but the bottom half of the page is looking a bit bare. And this is where we can add emojis to things. So you can add emojis like one notion, like you can in any other text editing software. And I like to add emojis to headings and sometimes even to text itself. So let's add an emoji to reminders. I'm going to use the emoji keyboard shortcut on MacOS, which is Control Command, Spacebar. And I'm going to search for o'clock. Good. That's now my reminders, emoji, things to do. Okay. You know what, Let's actually rename that to today. I think I like that, That makes sense. And I'm going to add an emoji of a calendar that feels good. My most important task, let's add a rocket because I like the rocket emoji and I might do list. Is there a list emoji? Is there a, you know what, let's use this one. Actually, no. Let's use the target emoji. So automatically this is now looking way nicer. And again, it speaks to the idea that like, I want this page to be something I genuinely lookout everyday and find useful and the prettier it looks, and the more it matches my own personal aesthetic, the more likely I am to actually use it. But okay, at this point we've got this page and we have to do a lot of scrolling. It's like a little bit annoying. This is where we can take advantage of a zooming in and out. So I could go Command minus, minus, minus and zoom all the way out, which is kinda nice. And Command Plus to zoom all the way back in. But I might also want to use the fact that notion can, can separate stuff into columns. So how does this work? Basically, it does take a little bit of getting used to, but essentially, you know how these blocks right now are taking up the whole page. The whole page as constrained by the sidebar of notion. What we can do is let's say I wanted to have my today's stuff. I'm going to select all of this. So I've selected all these blocks, as you can see. And I'm going to select one of these little dot-dot-dot things. I'm going to drag it. Now. I could drag it up there if I wanted to. But that doesn't solve my problem of the scrolling problem. I want to try get instead to the side. And you'll see this little blue dot comes up, BlueLine comes up. That blue line means that it's going to create a new column. So what does that look like? Boo, Okay, well, we've now column inside this sort of stuff. And now if I select these, you'll notice that this is what the block looks like now. And again, you can always select a thing to see where the blocks are to give the, to give you that visual representation. So this block has appeared over here. This dashboard block is now within a column, but now my health, wealth, love, happiness, and impact are a bit annoying. So I'm going to drag those underneath the dashboard. And you can see how big the block is gonna be by this blue line that goes underneath the thing. If I put it up there, it's gonna be within the column. If I put it up there. It's going to take up the whole page. So you can like move around and you can see, you can add things underneath. I could even add it as a third column, either over here or over here if I wanted to. So here's what that would look like. But that's a bit much, I don't really wanna do that. I'm going to undo. Instead I'm going to drag this and shove it underneath the dashboard and look at what happens now. Boom, That looks nice, that looks pretty sick. You know what? Let's add an emoji to dashboard as well. Let's add brain. This is starting to look pretty good. In fact, you know what might be a bit emoji overkill. Let's add dashboard is due today. Now underneath dashboard just for aesthetics, I'm going to add another block which is a divider. Visually divide blocks. That's kinda nice. So now I've got this little looks somewhat subtle line underneath dashboard. And I'm going to copy that line into underneath the today heading as well. And the way I'm gonna do that is I'm going to use Alt and drag. And like in other software like this, alt and drag lets you duplicate stuff. So Alt and drag, and I've duplicated the line underneath today. Alternatively, I could right-click it and hit Duplicate or use Command D. And then it will duplicate it underneath. And then I can drag that thing across, really, whatever you wanna do. But I've decided actually that doesn't look great, so I'm just gonna delete those. But at least you've now seen how to define a feature can do. And you know what, screw it. I'm gonna go back to my brain dashboard and I'm going to go back to my calendar. Today, reminds us why is let's put those underneath the dashboard block as well, just because I feel like it. And now we have what looks like a pretty solid first draft of a life operating system. Okay, Final thing to show, again, notionally super powerful, you can explore these slash commands for yourself and see what happens. But I want to embed a YouTube video because I want to have like a motivation that I always see on my dashboard. So I'm gonna go slash embed, and it's gonna give me this embed option. So I'm going to hit bed and then it says paste in any kind of link. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go on the youtube.com. I am going to see I don't know if Zac Efron motivation or something like that. Zac Efron beast mode workout motivation HD. Does that go from Jim motivation 2021? And let's look at this. Yeah. Okay, Cool. That's good, good motivation for me to get to the gym. I'm going to copy the URL here using the share feature on YouTube. Or I could just copy it from the URL. And I'm going to paste it into Notion embed link. And let's see what happens here. And now it has embedded the video for me. This is currently within this block, but if I wanted to, I could put it underneath. And now I've got this entire kind of Edwin it sort of motivation. Let's make sure this block, this block is currently within the column. But that feels a bit like weird because if the blocks within the column, then the next one, that method, I'm going to move that there. So now this is a whole page block. Let's add a little bicep over here. This is a bit overkill. You don't have to do this with your page, but I'm just showing you what the embed feature looks like. So now I've got, if I zoom out a bit, my life operating system, I've got my dashboard, I've got my most important task and each day I can just delete this and type in the next one. Each day. I can just tick things off my to do list or my to-do list. I can get rid of them. I can add new ones in. It's super-easy. And this is the page that we'll be returning to almost as my homebase. And this is the page that we're gonna be kinda flushing out as we go more through the course. Final thing to mention is the idea of bullet points and numbered lists. So if I go into one of my, let's say I go into health and I delete this and I'm going to say, let's do heading to my 2022 health goals. Now, if I wanted to, I can make a numbered list, 16 pack abs by the end of the year. Again, just like any word processing software, it will automatically create the number list for me. I don't know, 78 KG body weight and enjoying every step of the journey. That's my numbered list. I can equally do the same for bullet points. So if I wanted to, I could just select all these. Click this button, turn into bulleted list, which will be handy. And now it's bullet points rather than numbers. I could if I want to also turn them into toggle list, I really like toggle list. I use toggle list so much a notion because now I've created these as little toggles and this is sick because now underneath this, I can type in whatever I want and it can be hidden away 76 KG body weight. If e.g. I wanted to I could I don't know, track what my way it's looking like over time. And then I can always hide it using the toggle, enjoying every step of the journey. I don't know. I could add a motivational quote, journey before destination or something like that. And again, I can hide it with the toggle. This is the great power of Notion. Anything can basically turn into anything else. You've got texts, you've got headings, you've got bulleted list, you've got numbers list, you've got to do list, you've got toggled, you've got almost anything under the sun. And you can use these simple building blocks as if they're Lego to build whatever system you want. And that's like super fun. So that was a quick run through the life operating system. Hopefully you've seen some of the power of notion in these basic building blocks. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. 1.5 Using Links & Backlinks: Alright, this is a quick one I'm just gonna share with you in this video and this lesson how to use links and backlinks with a notion. So this is kinda useful depending on your use cases. Obviously, like, like little things. So let's say I want to go into, I don't know, impact. And let's say I make a new page called alleles rules, these rules for life. And let's say I wanted to sort of make a list of my general life principles that I didn't want it to reference at other places in my, in my Notion, right now, it feels a bit artificial because we've got three pages, but like very relevant to if we look at this where we have like 5,000 different pages and like tons of different team members and all this kinda stuff going on, on my actual workspace. But let's just keep it simple for now. Let's go back to a life operating system. And because I can't be bothered to come up with, I've just found a Google image for told Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. Fix your posture, good points. And I've just copied and pasted the image here just for the bands, purely to illustrate the page situation. So I've created that page, Ali's Rules for Life. And now let's say I want to link to it from something else. So let's say within health, I want to say, remember your rules for life. Now, I want to link to that page, but it's like the pages are sub page of impact rather than health. So how do I link to that page? The secret here is the bracket bracket command. So I'm gonna go square bracket, square bracket. Then that is going to let me add a link to a page or create a new page or add a new page somewhere else. But like I know the page is called rules or the bigger alleys, Rules for Life. And I can just type in whatever I want. And it will do this sort of fuzzy search thing to figure out what do I mean? I can hit Enter. And now I've created a shortcut to that page. So the Rules for Life page is still with an impact, as you can see at the top of a heritable then lifo S impact on Israels for life. But if I go back using the keyboard shortcut, probably I've now included the link here and you can use, you can see the little arrow icon on the icon that shows that this is not a page within the sub page, is a page that's linked elsewhere, but it's not just pages that you can link to inauthentic. And again, this is where it could get complicated, but it's actually kind of simple. Every single block also has a link. Let's take this quote, life before death, strength or weakness, journey before destination. This block. As we see it's a block because everything that notion is block has a link and I can click Copy link to block. Let's see what that does. Great. It's copied to my clipboard. So now let's say within happiness, if I want to paste that in, I'm going to Command V. And now you'll see what the link is. It looks notion dot, so such testing law slash like just ridiculous bunch of numbers. But what I can do is I could either paste it just as a URL, which isn't a particularly useful. But I can paste in sync or I can mention the block. So what happens when I click Paste in sync? Boom, look at that. It's literally copied and pasted that block. And that means that if I edit the original, then this one will also change. So this might be if I decide within lifo S, Let's add attribution. And now I go into happiness, will see that this has changed as well. And the fact that it's got this little red outline on it, that's when you know that that's a thing that you have imbedded from somewhere else. So if you change the original source, you can change this as well. And this is called a sink to block. And this is if you have quotes or life lessons or anything like that, you can use it. The way we use it is if we're creating an outline for a course, will have a sync to block basically throughout all the different sections. So that if we want to change, radically changed the structure of the course, we just have to change it once and that change affect multiple times. Alternatively, if you wanted to create a dashboard for your health, you could create a sync to block that was what is my current weight. And then all you'd have to do is change it once and on every page where you want to have your current weight, whatever that might be, it will just update automatically. Couple more things to mention on the links front just in case it's helpful for you. So let's look at impact. Let's look at rules for life. You'll notice it says one backlink. So the fact I've linked to the page will flag up on the page itself to be like, Hey, Hey, here are all the various pages that have linked to this page, which is useful if you're e.g. taking book notes and putting them from one place to another, they can. You'll find a use case for this feature, but crucially, don't try and find a use case because you know the feature exists. Recognize that the feature exists and you can use it if that's actually required for your ends. You don't need to use all the features of Notion. I use like five per cent of the features of notion and they've got so many, but I don't need to use the vast majority of them. The final thing to remember is that when it comes to links, you can always share a page. Now one way of sharing a page is by adding someone's email address and they'll get an email with the page. But the easier way to share a page is to click Share to web. And now that creates a URL testing load dot notion not Sites slash eligible for life, et cetera, et cetera. I can hit Allow Editing. I don't wanna do that. Allow comments, allow duplicate as templates. This allows other people to duplicate the page into their own Notion workspace. Yeah, why not? And search engine indexing is a power, a power user feature if you want to upgrade your if you want to upgrade the plan. But let's I don't want it. Let's say I hit Copy. Now I'm going to open up an incognito window in Chrome and I'm going to show you what this looks like. If I paste the URL and hit Enter. Now, incredibly, I've created a webpage and I've got my rules for life, and I've got my image. And I'm basically just created a webpage. And you'll notice in Chrome, all I can see as Ali's rule for life. I can't see that it's embedded with an impact on I can't see life OS because I haven't shared those pages. All I can see as this one, and this is fantastic for sharing. This is a feature we use all the time. If I want to walk together a quick outline of a course or a video to send it to someone in the team. I'll just send them a link. Um, I know a bunch of YouTubers who have sponsorship pages where they're just make a notion page that says here are my sponsorship rates. They make it look pretty. And then they can just send that link to brands without revealing the rest of the contents of the notion workspace, super handy, super, super useful feature to know about. So that brings us to the end of this discussion about links. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson where we flesh out life or west with some more funky features that you might want to know about it. Thanks for watching and see you there. 8. 1.6 Styling Your Page: Alright, final lesson in the beginners section before we go into the intermediate fun stuff with databases and things. And in this lesson, we're going to talk about styling our page. So there's a few things that we've not yet talked about in terms of styling. And I want to give you a little quick rundown through what those are. So the first one is when you click this dot, dot, dot button in the corner, you've got a bunch of different options for what your page could look like. The default is a sans serif workhorse in terms of the font. But serif, good for publishing. What happens when I click that? Boom, suddenly this whole page is turned into a serif font. I don't like it personally. I never ever, ever used this, but it's an option. And you've got mono, good for drafting and notes. Here's what that looks like. Again, I think it looks a bit trash. It's not my vibe. Some people like it. The people that are more like program or a game or brewery who have very light black and white aesthetics. But I'm a colorful guy. I prefer this sort of model when it comes to the default thing. You can also use small text. And this is what happens. The text becomes a lot smaller. Heading size significantly decreases, but mostly it's the texts that becomes slightly smaller or you can go full width. Now this is useful if you use a big monitor, because full width means that, well, you can now use the full width of the page. It does sometimes become a bit weird. One pages are full width because like, if you look at the Zac Efron videos is absolutely freaking huge on my screen right now. It looks a bit weird if someone were to come into the studio and see this, they think What the **** is going on? Is this what you do for a job? And I'd be like, yes. But I tend to prefer pages that are not full width, but you do have that option. A lot of people I know who have life OS, dashboard and homepages use the forward so that they've got more screen real estate for stuff going on. The other thing when it comes to styling is that, of course, because this is basically a word processor on top of being all of the funky things in ocean. You can also style stuff in line. So let's see life before death, journey for destination. Let's say I want a bold that if I just highlight it as normal text, you'll see this comes up quote, link, comment. The quote thing is like helps me turn the block into something else so I could turn it into a call-out. I do quite like call it, I call it a nice because they look kinda cute. But let's stick with a quote for now. I could add a link. So e.g. if I wanted to add a link to my website, then now I've created a link, a hyperlink, pretty standard stuff undo that, I could add a comment. We're going to talk about the comment feature further down the line. It's kinda useful. Clap for collaboration. They being fully honest, not as good as Google Docs. So right now, I mean, for my book projects where we're collaborating with multiple editors and stuff, we're using Google Docs. I'd love to be able to use Notion, but it's just not quite there yet. But commenting is great for basic stuff. And then of course, bold, italic, underline strikethrough markets code. You can make it look kinda Cody, which is kinda cool. You can turn it into an equation or you can change the text, you can change the background just of that bit. I've made just that bit of green background. And this is what that looks like. Doesn't look great, but you can highlight things like this if you really want to. And then when you highlight anything at all within a block, you can use the dot-dot-dot to select the whole block and then do stuff with the whole block. Quote size has got a large. Why not? Kinda looks nice. And actually let's get rid of the Brennan Center sic, life before death, strength or weakness, journey before destination. And that was a few other things when it comes to styling pages that we've not yet talked about. So hope you enjoyed that lesson. Thank you very much for watching. Let's move on to the next section of the course now when we talk about the intermediate features, but before we do that, I just want to say honestly, 98% of my use cases for notion, especially as an individual, as a team, we use databases a lot, but as an individual, we've covered 98% of the use cases. If you want, you can just stop watching this class right now. I think one of the issues with the notion that people have is that they tend to over-complicate the **** out of it. There's no need for that. What I think mostly my personal use cases for Notion or at pages and texts and bullet points and to do this and toggles, that's about it. I don't really do much else with Notion. Want to use it for personal use, when to use it for the team. Now we have databases and commenting and inline all the other fancy integrations like crap. But a lot of it you don't need to do as an individual. So if you've gotten value out of this course so far, I love it. If you can leave a little review here on Skillshare or wherever you happen to be watching this, I love it. If you can post your class project where you show us what your own life OS dashboard is. But don't think that you have to use all the features or understand all the features. The great thing about Notion is you can learn as you go along and as you, as you think that I would love it if I had a calendar widget integrated onto my page. You can Google notion calendar widget and then you can go, oh, someone's created that. Here's how I do it. Rather than trying to learn all the things first and then implement it anyway. That aside, the rest of the course is gonna be about all these other fancy features. And we're going to talk next about how to use databases and the other intermediate functions of notions. So thank you so much for watching this section, and I'll see you in the next one. 9. 2.1 The Power of Databases: Alright, we are into the intermediate section of the course. So essentially notion is about pages and blocks at a basic level, but at a more intermediate and advanced level, it is also about databases. So instead of just telling you about databases, I'm going to show you and we're going to build something together. And as we're going along, we're going to explain what the deal is with these databases. So let's go into the love column. And essentially what I'm gonna do is create a personal CRM, CRM, customer relationship management software. It's like a thing that businesses use. Basically, I'm trunk, I'm going to create a glorified address book. That's probably a more reasonable way of thinking about it, a glorified address book. So how do I do that? Well, within my love thing, I'm going to maybe add a heading, my glorified address book. Now, this is where it starts to get interesting because where the little slash command, we can add a database. So you're underneath here, you'll see there's this, there's all the basic blocks, there's all the inline blocks, and now there are database blocks, table board, gallery list, calendar, timeline database, Inline Database, full-page linked view of database. Sounds complicated initially, but actually it's very simple once you get your head around it. And that's what we're gonna try and do here. What are we gonna do? We're gonna start off with a table view. Honestly, I think TableView is probably the easiest place to start to understand how a database works. Because which has different crucially to a table. So this is a simple table, right? This is not a database. This is just like a block that has a table in it and I can write whatever I want here by Amendment. There's nothing, there's nothing fancy about this. It's just, it's just a basic table. So this is not the sort of table we're creating. What we're creating is a database with a table view. Before we do that, just a quick thing. So in line versus full-page, now a database, full page, add a new database as a sub page. So what this looks like is I've got this database, let's say I don't know my new database. And it starts off with a table and it's quite nice, but it adds it in as a sub page. So now I've got this whole page going on, like this is actually quite useful. Alternatively, if we add the database inline, now it's sort of the database. It is not at its own separate page. It is just over here, my Inline database. Now, there's not a huge amount of difference between these two things. Because if e.g. we hit them more thing and hit View database, this is also a page. It just so happens that it's embedded within this page rather than as a sub page. So it doesn't really matter which one you choose, but it's more about kind of how you want it to look. In my case, I want to create an inland database. I'm gonna go slash inline in database in line. And I'm going to call it my glorified address book database. You can call it whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. Now you'll see that it's created, it's created for me a table where I've got name and tags. Those are the default columns. And this is essentially how you might imagine a spreadsheet. Think of databases or spreadsheets and think of pages as Word documents within Notion. So I'm creating an address book. So let's say name, Gordon Green form. And basically as you've seen, I've populated this database with a bunch of names. This is what I might have in my address book database. Now this is disliked. It sort of just like a spreadsheet. You can kind of do stuff with these columns. So now we've got tags. Tags. It's interesting at tags as a property, we can always rename, we can rename these things. So if I, if I click on name, e.g. I can rename it to name of person if I wanted to, but I think just named makes lot of sense. Name is a property within this database table. Basically every column has property. Name is a property, and if I hit Edit property, I can edit the type of it. So this needs to be a title because every single field within your database, every single database needs to have a title property of some sort. Now let's look at the property of tags. And I can hit Edit property where I can rename it. This is a multi-select. So essentially what this means is I can have multiple tags within this property. So e.g. I. Might say Gordon Green horn is friend and also team. Now I've created two tags, friend and team, because it's multi-select, gordon can be in both categories. Let's say Tintin Smith is friend and team as well. Let's say some Kramer is friend. But in turn, because time is one of our interns, let's say Angus is best friends. E.g. that could be a category. I guess. It's kind of a and let's say he's part of the team as well. Hermione Granger, let's say she is a life partner, which could be another tag. And you'll see that as I add these new tags into this property, I've now got the option to select from one or multiple and I can get rid of them. So this is kinda cool. Let's say Thomas Frank has internet print because we've never met in real life. And let's say he's a YouTuber as well. On data jade is, let's say friend and internet friend and YouTuber. If Cornwell, sheen, group friend, friend. Now family it actually because she is married to my brother. Now you can imagine that depending on what you want your database for, you might have different use of the multi-select thing, e.g. let's say you wanted to make a database with all the books that you've ever read. And he wanted to categorize them by genre. A book like Twilight might have the genre of romance, but also fantasy and also really good book. So those could be three different tags or whatever you wanna call it, within a genre that you have for that particular book. Alright, so at this point we've got our name, we've got our tags. It's all fairly simple so far. Now the crucial insight about Notion and about databases is that every entry within a database is also a page. Every single thing in the database is also a page. So if I click on Gordon Green Amman and I hit open, it opens as a page. And now this is a page, but it's a page that's within the database. If I wanted to, I could create a new page here called Gordon Green want, if I want to do it right. So now I've created a page within love. Sounds kind of weird, but I've created a page here, It's a sub page within love. I've kind of done the same thing here is just a sub page within the database of my glorified address book. So let's delete this now because Gordon Green on and everything else in this database as a page, it means that I can treat it as a page. I can type in whatever I want. I can include a photo of Gordon. I can type in details, I can type in notes from the last time that we met. This is actually honestly how I how I would use a personal CRM is just glorified address book in real life, I actually do it in Apple notes because I just think it's slightly easier. But when I actually know I mentioned it, i'm, I'm actually going to double with migrating into Notion. Initially this was just meant to be a little bit of an illustration of the database feature. But as I'm, as I'm explaining it, I'm thinking this actually could be could be quite useful. So e.g. earlier today, Gordon, I had breakfast, so I could write breakfast. Granger, and CO. What day is it? 27th of July, 2020 to me, I'm Gordon. And I could write notes. I could just take a few notes about the thing that we talked about. And that means that next time Gordon and I are hanging out and I'm going to remind myself of what did we talk about last time. I can just go into the Gordon Green on page, I can just find it using notion. So actually e.g. if I go in life OS and I'm like, Oh, I've just had to have a meeting with Gordon but or a breakfast and lunch forgotten or whatever. But I need to find this page to see what my notes or I can go Command P and I can just type in Gordon. And it's going to recognize because it's a page, it's going to show up within my QuickFind feature. So I can just go straight to Gordon and immediately bring up the notes from the last time I had a meeting with him. So at this time, if e.g. I'd written, Gordon has a new baby, 11 months old birthdays and 15th of August. Next time I see Gordon, it'd be like, happy birthday for your kid. And he's gonna be like, My God, you remember the birthday of my child? And I'm like, oh, it's because I looked at my notes just before attending this thing. I'm not going to tell him that because he's gonna, he's gonna feel that warm glow that I actually cared about him enough to remember that detail. In reality, I've done here, this is how companies use CRMs to keep track of their customers and stuff. And I think there are gains to be had in our personal lives from applying systems from the world of business, like a CRM, something like that. It's basically a glorified address book. No one actually remembers the birthdays of their friends. They just have it on Facebook or an address book or a calendar or whatever. Basically that anyway, the point was because this is a page I can do whatever I want within the page. Next, I'm I'm having a meeting I can type and stuff. It doesn't need to be particularly fancy. It's just a page. It's my entire page with Gordon Green one. So let's go back to the database. And again, you've noticed that this is now full screen because the database is also a page, but it just so happens to be embedded within here. So if I go here and view database, then it goes, it goes back to the full screen. So that's a page. Let's now add a few more properties to the database and we can see all the different options are, if I hit the little plus over here, it says property edit property, let's say a date of birth or let's say dataframe. And I can say Type is unsurprisingly date. Good. Date format for date, datetime 12-hour. Okay, Cool. So let's say Gordon's birthday is the 20th, 24th of July. Let's say, I don't know. 1999. Cool. I've got his date of birth. Let's put some random dates. And for these guys, alright, I've just populated this with some random dates of birth. Now, if someone's birthday is coming up, I've got that list. Basically it's like a spreadsheet. Imagine this like a spreadsheet. What are the columns you would add to a spreadsheet? Therefore, what are the properties you would add to the database? I'm also going to add a property called last meeting. Let's call it last Hangout. When was the last time I spoke to this person? When was the last time I met with this person? I'm also going to change the type of that property to date because, why not? So golden, let's say I'm at today Tintin, let's say I'm at, I don't know, three months ago. I can just populate this with random stuff. But you can see that you can always change this and do stuff with it over time. Cool. Now I've got my last Hangout. Now if I want to, I can sort this database. By the last time I hung out with a person, I can hit this sort ascending or descending, which will sort it out. Again, exactly like a spreadsheet works. Database is basically spreadsheets. We can think of it in those terms, but this is broadly, a very broad brush strokes starting point for what our database looks like. Now in future lessons. Here, we're going to look at a bunch of other fancier features like database views and link databases and templates and stuff. But hopefully this gives you an idea of basically a database is a spreadsheet and every entry within the database is its own page. So you can do all of the notion things with a page like we discussed in the previous section of the course. So thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. 2.2 Understanding Database Views: Alright, welcome back. I got so excited about databases. Actually spill some coffee down my top, so I hope you don't mind. But we're going to continue this lesson. We're going to talk about database views. So you will see over here we have table and then we have a little intriguing little button called add view. What does that mean? Let's hit Add view. Well, what's going on? It's created a new table. No, it hasn't created a new table. It's created a database. The database was already there. It's created a new view for the database. So just another way to view the same data. You'll notice over here I can give it a new name and I can select from table board, timeline, calendar list, and the gallery. So let's close that. Let's say birthday calendar because I wanna make a calendar view. Well, ****, it's just changed to a calendar. What's going on there? Well, it turns out what's actually going on is that there is a way to view the database in the format of a calendar. And it says show calendar by date of birth, and it's looking for the date properties within the database. I could also show it as last Hangout. But actually you know what, the show is lost hang-up that I feel like that makes more sense because a lot of people's date of birth looking 20 years, 30 years in the past. I'm going to show calendar by last hangout. Let's rename this rename last Hangout calendar. Now I can see the table of my database in my address book and I can see the last Hangout calendar. Isn't that cool? It's all exactly the same data. This Gordon Green horn. The last Hangout we can see from this was today, that'll July the 27th of July 27th, 2022. And in last time our calendar, Gordon's name is under here. And if we click on this oh, it's the same page because every entry within a database is a page. It just so happens to be sorted by the calendar view. And now if I go back, we should see 1010 Smith last hangout on the 12th of April 2022. And unsurprisingly, that matches exactly what it is in the property that we had in our table views or just a different way of seeing the same data in a way that might help you or might hinder you, pick whatever views make more sense. What are the other kind of views? Well, the board view is quite nice. This puts things in a format of a Kanban board. And essentially what it does is that it groups things by a particular either select or multi-select property. So we can see here, grouped by tags is currently what it's doing. Which is why it's showing best friend, family friend in turn, internet friend and that kind of stuff. This is pretty cool. You'll notice Gordon is replicated here within friend and also here within team as a bunch of other people. Because this was a multi-select. If it was a single select them, we wouldn't have duplication across the board. But this might be a way of being like, if I'm thinking, I wonder who my friends are, I can put the board view on and I can just go through and be like, oh, these are all the people who are my friends. That's one way of doing it. We're going to show you tons more details about exactly how we use Notion in the bonus use cases section within this course. But broadly, this is a board view. Videos that need writing, videos that need filming, videos that need editing at it needs approval and so on. And the idea behind a kanban board is that you can then move something from one area to another. And that's kinda cool. But by virtue of the fact that it moves through the Kanban board within the same database as the status of the video changes, it means that different people in the team can be like, hey, the writers look at the writer column, I look at the filling column. I've videographer looks at the filming column, the editor looks at the editing column, or even if you're just using it as an individual rather than with a team, you have an idea of how many ideas do I have in my production pipeline? One of the videos that need writing. What are the videos and you filming? What are the current videos I need editing. You can do this thing in different ways. Anyway, let's go back to our actual database here. So we've got the board view. In fact, I'm just going to open this up full screen because why not? This is the board view. Let's look at what other views we've got. So if I click Add view, we've got list. List is just simple. It's a list. I almost never use the list thing because there's just a bit too basic. And I find that table always does the same job as a list just with more information. But you can hit Properties and you can show it. You can decide which properties you actually want to show. So right now, this is showing e.g. the name and the tags. But let's say I just wanted to show name and date of birth. I can go dot, dot, dot. I can go Properties. I can hide the tags and I can show the date of birth. And now it shows the name and it shows the date of birth. The slightly annoying thing about this, which is why I generally prefer inline databases, is because the full database is a bit too long, like I have to look at and I've looked all the way across the screen. It's kind of annoying, which is why I like to have them in line. Like this seems much more reasonable because now it's squished the database view in a little bit. But for the sake of illustration, we're going to go full screen. So we've got table, we've got calendar, we've got bored, we've got list. We also have Gallery, which is kind of cute. So in Gordon's case, you can see that it's showing a preview of what the contents of the thing. But if I had an image, let's say, so let's find an image of Hermione Granger. I'm just going to paste it into here. Now we've got a picture of Hermione and I can like write whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever I want because it's a page. Now this image is gonna be, oh hello, I can hit repositioned. Now, this safe position. This is now what this looks like. Really like real-life example again, just to give you a little preview, here is how we use this internally. We use it kinda two things. Number one is whereas our Meet the Team page, Meet the Team. Here we go. Gallery view. This shows various people in our team and it shows the photos of them and it's just kinda nice. That's the sort of thing that a gallery, gallery is useful for. We can use a board to show them by department. We can show a table to show them by like other details and stuff. That's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is I actually have a video mood board that I have a notion. And this is a gallery view because this shows like just, it's where I put inspiration for videos and stuff. And if I want to create an animated GIF of something that I liked in someone else's video. I'll just chuck it into here. And you can see that in this database gallery view. And then finally we have timeline view. Now again, timeline view be a bit contrived when it comes to this example. So I'm just going to show you what it looks like where in our actual workspace. We use timeline view for this very course. So this is our notion skilled coach show Skillshare course. And this is our developmental timeline where essentially it's a Gantt chart. If you might be familiar with Gantt charts and product management, it tells you the date and you can select where you're hoping to do stuff Within project management is useful for those sort of things. If you know that you might need to use a Gantt chart, you can use a timeline view and you can experiment with it to see what the vibe is. So that was a little quick tour of the different views of the database and Notion. You can try them out for yourself. Another message I want to keep coming back to you in this course is that it's way better to just keep things simple. Keep things as simple as possible. Complexity is the enemy of productivity, and complexity is the enemy of creativity as well. The simpler your system, the more you can use it as a tool rather than as like a master if that makes sense. If you are looking for loads more inspirational exactly how to use databases. That's all gonna be in the bonus interview section where we have interviews with people on our team and me, and we'll show you our systems and other, other creator friends who use Notion and interesting ways. Admittedly, those organisms super, super complicated. So the main point is like keep things simple to start with, but hopefully those will give you some inspiration for what you can do with your own setup. So, thank you very much for watching and I will see you hopefully in the next lesson. 11. 2.3 Using Linked Views of Databases: All right, Welcome back. We're going to talk about linked databases here. So within our love thing, you Bobby, we have our Inline Database, my glorified address book. In fact, we can delete the heading because it's already in there. Then as we showed, we can view the database and we can see that this is all a database which has a page. And as we said, every entry in a database is also a page. Now, we've got this stuff over here, bored less gallery or this kind of fun stuff. But what if we want to reference a database from somewhere else in our workspace? Now again, this is a somewhat contrived example, but I'm just going to show you that illustration purposes. Then in the bonus section of the course, I'll give you a little sneak peek of what it looks like in our system and then we'll run through it in the bonus materials so that you can actually look at real life use cases rather than these contrived examples. But of course, contrived examples are useful for illustration purposes. Let me get rid of this motivation thing. This is all spheres starts to feel a bit weird. Delete whatever. Okay, So how might I want to use a linked database? Let's say I want to make a heading called upcoming birthdays. Great, and let's see, where is this block? This block is over there. Let's add it down here. Good. Oh, actually, no, You know what, Let's put it over here. So it's within this column. Let's say upcoming birthday is. Now, if I want to add in this separate view of my database, I linked database, I can go slash and I can search for link, linked view of a database, add an existing database to this page. So I'm going to hit that. And now it's going to say Select Data Source. So this is where I select my database. My database is this one, my glorified address book database. And I can copy an existing view. So I can show an existing view, which is fairly self-explanatory because we've already created table and calendar and board and listening gallery. Or I can create a new empty view. So that's what I'm doing. I'm going to go new empty view. I'm going to say I want this to be a table. And I'm going to say upcoming days. It's gonna be the title for the view. I don't wanna show the database title. So you'll see that underneath this hides and shows the database title isn't only to see the title. And let's hit Done. Now, what I want to show is I want to show the name of the person and just their date of birth. That's the only thing I want to see. So I'm going to hit Properties and I'm going to hide the tags, and I'm going to hide the last last Hangout. So all I see is the name and their date of birth. And that feels pretty good. And so now if I scroll to the side, I've created this in a way in line frame within my life arresting, which shows me my upcoming birthdays. And if I wanted to, I could sort them because of good date of birth. It's a bit more difficult to sort. But if I wanted to actually, I could rename this edit property. I could say birthday. Actually. Now at the moment this is still a bit, Let's put fake data birth. But if Cornwell and these guys and these guys, whatever. Now at this point, this is not like overly useful because it's not currently sorted. The issue with sorting by date is that if I sorted ascending or descending, it's going to take the year into account. So we're going to make this a little bit fancier with a formula for the down the line. But the point of this lesson, it was just to illustrate that if you want, you can have, you can have a link to view of a database from anywhere within your workspace. So I'm going to show you a preview of what this looks like for us in real life with the notion stuff that we've been doing for years. And we have this whole content production engine, which is like super fancy. We've got, we've got a video on our bonus section where we show you exactly how it works. But essentially this entire content production engine is a single database and then tons and tons and tons of linked views of the database. So if e.g. I. Have my own page where I've got all of these various linked views of the database. Gordon, our videographer, has its own page where we've got all these different linked views of the database. Christian or editor has a link for you. Jamie are huge producer has a link to view. The typewriter is for our writers. It's like we're essentially creating these different pages, which for depending on the person and what their needs are, we've created different linked views of exactly the same database. Everyone's working from the same database, of course, a single data source, but they're creating views or optimizing views to suit their own workflows. This is super complicated, loads more details on exactly a walk-through and exactly how this works in the bonus section. But if we bring things back down to our basic CRM, hopefully we've seen that using linked views of a database, we can add in something like upcoming birthday, something like this. Again, somewhat contrived example because you might not want to do this, but hopefully it gives you an illustration of the feature, which is what we're trying to do in this half of the course. And then the second half of the course, we're going to show you all the different use cases that people do in real life. So, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. 2.4 Understanding Relations & Rollups: Alright, so, so far we've been through the basic features of databases. We've talked about views, we've talked about linked views of a database. In this lesson, we're going to talk about something a little bit more complex which has relations and roll-ups. Now, I was caveat that we don't use this very much. There are a handful of use cases that I know some people use it. It's not a thing that I use personally, but I'm going to illustrate it with a somewhat contrived examples so you can see what the power of notion is. So you can decide for your own use cases, whether you want to use this feature or whether you can completely ignore it broadly like I do. So how did relations and roll-ups work? Well to do that, we are going to actually create a proper projects and tasks database for managing and productivity. And I'll show you how these Mike, what might work within that. So I'm going to create a brand new database, but I'm going to make it as a sub page. So let's call this our projects. Let's just call it Project, where we can add an icon and I don't know. I don't want to, they'll present. This is all of our projects. So let's say I have a project of become a gym shock. So I've populated this database which is just roundtable with a few different potential projects. Because as we've talked about, every entry within a database is a page, become a Gymshark athlete is also a page. Which means if I wanted to have a task list, I could do it like this. I could say, I don't know if body fat 16%. I could write bodyfat 16%. Post more Instagram's whoops, nope, kidding. Banter. I could say buy more Gymshark gear, get more hands. I could do the to-do list within the project page itself, but we're not gonna do that. We're gonna do it a little bit more sophisticated Li, which may well be over-engineering. You don't necessarily have to do this, but it just shows you the power of relations and roll-ups. So I'm going to, I've got my product database. I'm now going to create a new database, again, full-page. And I'm going to call it tasks. Okay? Maybe you can see where this is going, where I contribute half. Let's do it like this. So one of the tasks within one of my projects might be, I don't know if I can get a DEXA scan or for my book project and might be finished draft of chapter nine or from my organizing surfing trip to Morocco is looked at in Morocco. So I've got three different tasks, but they're associated with three different projects. In fact, let's just add a few more. Cool. So I've populated with this with a few more tasks and in my head I know what projects these are associated with. But the point of relations is that we can link the tasks database to the project's database. So let's see how this works. Firstly, I'm going to delete the tax property. I'm just going to click on it. And I'm gonna hit Delete property because we don't need it right now and yes, I can delete it. And I'm going to add a property. But crucially, the type is going to be relation. Scary. Let's try that. And this lets me link to databases together. This is very exciting. Now these tasks have nothing to do with my address book, but they do have everything to do with projects. So I'm going to link it to the project's database. I'm also going to hit Show on projects which mean that within each project that will also show the tasks that are linked to it. So I'm going to hit Add relation. And now you'll see that there's this new property which has this little arrow icon, which means relation, and it's linked to projects. Now essentially what I can do is that for every entry in the database, I could link it to one or more potential project. So get a DEXA scan is part of the become a Gymshark athlete. So you'll see that it's essentially going, going through the database and it's saying, Hey, which one of these projects I entries in the project's database would you like to link this to, would you like to relate it to become a Gymshark athlete? Great. First draw from chapter nine is about the book project. So if camps in Morocco is surfing holiday, find suitable dates in surfing holiday organized flights is surfing holiday high personal trainer is Gymshark athlete by more gym clothing as Gymshark athlete by trainers is Gymshark athlete. So you can see that each every task is associated with one or potentially more projects. And each project may have multiple tasks associated with it. So let's look now that we've done that, what does our project's database look like? Whoa, look at that. Let's leave the tags things I don't really care about it. Delete property. But now you can see that for each of our projects, we've got multiple tasks. And if I open this up as a page, we can see that we've got our tasks database link to it. And then because the tasks database is a database, every entry within the tasks database is also a page. And so I can click hire a personal trainer. This is the page for that. And I can put in and I can put in any details of the task itself. I could go back to the project and then I can write some notes on the project itself. And it just speaks to the idea that again, every entry within a database, There's a page, but you can connect these different databases together if you need to. Now, real-life examples, we're going to show you a handful of these in the bonus section where different people will talk about how they use this in different ways. Like I said, I almost never use relation like relational databases in this way. One case where I used to use them was where we had a database for sponsorships. Another database for content. And we'd be able to link some sponsors with certain videos. And that was quite useful, but we have since stopped using that particular method because there's other ways of doing the same thing in Notion, right, so that was a quick overview of relations. Let's quickly talk about roll-ups. Now, roll-ups get unlocked when you have relations. So what is a roll-up? Let's try it. So we're going to create a new property and the type is going to be roll up. Now, roll-up requires them to be a relation. So I'm going to select the tasks relation. And the point of a roll-up is that it calculates something about the relationship. So potentially if I click on the calculate thing, it could count all. So it might just count the number of things that there are. If I do this, you'll see it's counting how many tasks there are for each one. So I could edit the name of the property and say number of tasks. And now I have the list of tasks which is linked to with the tasks database. And I've used a rollup to calculate how many tasks there are. Another way of doing it might be as follows. Let's go back to our tasks database. And let's add a property just for the sake of argument to say, how long will this take approximately? Let's make this a number. How long will this take? Hours. Cool. So now I can estimate how long each of these different tasks will take. So let's say you get a DEXA scan will take 4 h finished this drought will take 15, that will take one that'll take 0.5. I'll take one, that'll take two, they'll take 0.3 and that'll take 0.5. So I've said how long each of these things will take in terms of hours. Not useful, potentially useful if I'm making a task database. But let's look at projects now. Now nothing is showing up right now because that property is within the tasks database. But if I create another roll-up, at this point, we can select the relation of tasks. I can take the property of how long this will take. Now I've got the option of showing the original, so it just copies and pastes that basically it shows me what the property basically says for each of these entries. But I could say some because these are numbers. So using some, what this is doing is essentially summing up the individual number of hours taken for each of the tasks into a rollup, which gives me an idea of how long the overall project will take. So if I rename this, I can say total hours projects will take. Now if I wanted to, I could actually sort this, Let's say sort descending. So now it's taking me, you'll see over here we've got the sort. And now it's sorting my project by basically how long each of them are gonna take. I could sorted ascending in terms of how each of them are gonna be based on this roll-up property. Again, this is more of an advanced feature. Most people who I know use Notion on a daily basis will never need to use the relations or the role of properties. But now that you know they exist, you might find that you have a compelling use case for them. But again, the thing I caution against is that you don't want to find a problem to suit the solution. You want to find a solution to the problem. Don't invent a problem just because you know that this thing exists. This is a classic trap in any one who discovered software for the first time I was like, Oh my God, I've got to figure out a way of like, this is somewhat contrived. I will probably never need to use it in this kind of system. But hey, at least, you know, it's there with the warning label that it might just be over-engineering for whatever you need anyway. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. 2.5 Saving Time with Templates: All right, Welcome back. In this lesson we are talking all about templates and the power of templates. And this is another fantastic feature in the notion that I use on a multiple times a day basis. How do templates work? Well, there are a few different ways we're going to start with, but basically what we're going to go over all of them. The first one is, let's think about how templates work within databases, because I find that that tends to be the most, most common use case. So let's go back to our glorified address book database. Now. Like we said, each of these entries in the database is a page. So let's open. I don't know, Tintin Smith, e.g. you'll see when I open the page, this page or any page, it will say press Enter to continue with an empty page, which I could do or create a template. Now I'm going to hit create a template and we're going to see what happens. Create a template. Then it says here, you're editing a template in my glorified address book database. And let's call this person template. Now here is where I can basically create a template of kind of options for what I would want prepopulated for each of the entries in my database potentially. So here's what this might look like. Let's say, I would say, I don't know, last Hangout. And then I can say notes from hangout. I could say gift ideas for birthday. On something like that. I might say details about family life and spouse and kids, etc. So if I've decided that for a lot of my different entries in the database, I would like to have this information pre-populated. Cool. I've created a template. I'm gonna go back. Now you'll notice it says press, press Enter to continue with empty page or pick a template. And you can keyboard up and down to select or you can click on it. And I'm going to hit Person Template. Now here's what's gonna happen. Boom. There we go. Has basically copied and pasted of the template into my thing so that I can say, cool. Now, I can basically treat this like a page, a template. It's basically a glorified copy paste job. But it's kinda helpful for saving time if you know you want to repeat something across multiple pages or across multiple entries in a database. Again, somewhat contrived example. I'll show you a little preview of what this looks like in real life. So let's say I have an idea for a video. I'd say I chuck it into this little database. And this is a new video idea. I'm going to open up with a page because everything has a page. You'll see we've got podcast template, video template, and short template. So let's look at video template and look at what happens. This is very elaborate and very somewhat, somewhat advanced, but we'll see what that looks like in the bonus section. Now we've got a video shot list Potentially which we can use. We've got a whole writing section where we have titles and thumbnails and market research, concepts and descriptions and hugs and content and best practices and all of this just gets automatically copied and pasted into a new video template. Which means that it encourages me or whoever else is helping with the video to think about these things as we go along. And we have different templates or podcasts or shorts and for Instagram content in social media content and all these other things. And that is one way of using templates. Like a nice way in real life. If I want to edit a template, what I can do is I can do this thing. It says press Enter to continue or pick a new template. And there's three dots. And I can hit edit this template so I can edit or duplicate. And if I hit Edit, then it says you're editing, editing a template in my glorified address book database. And so maybe if I decided, oh, actually I don't like, like Hangout. I don't like gift ideas, but maybe I want to replace the last Hangout with what is their occupation. I can do that and then I can just hit back and that will save automatically. So now when I insert that template in any field, it will be replaced. And this is how we do our video templates. Like it has changed a lot over the last two and a bit years, three years old, most of using Notion, I think it's been three years actually. It's changed a lot over the last three years, but each time we just update the template, which means for videos moving forward, it means the templates updated, but it doesn't change anything going back. There's nothing fancy about this. It's literally just a copy paste job. Now, there is another way of using templates and that's like template blocks. I don't really use this, but I do know a few people who do so I'm going to show you what this looks like. Let's make a new page for morning pages. Okay. Cool. Now morning pages, It's just a thing from Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way. Basically the idea is that every morning you write three pages of handwritten by hand journaling. But he might wanna do it digitally. You might want to do it on something like Notion. So one way of doing a morning pages template might be basically what I would want is I'd be like, Okay, I'm going to create a toggle for today's date, which is 27 July 2022. And I know that every morning, I want to say three things. I'm grateful for. One, cool. And that can be a, whatever coffee, the sun and the sky. And I want to say, what's my daily affirmation? And I might write that there. And then maybe free form journaling. Cool. So if I want to do this within a toggle, then maybe tomorrow I can duplicate this with Command D. I can make a 20th July, and that could work. And then 29th. Then I can keep duplicating this whenever I need to do stuff with my morning pages. But I don't think I could do is I could create a template block. Now here's how that would work. I could go slash templates, and this basically allows you to duplicate blocks with a click. So how does this work? I'll create a template button. What should this button be called? A new entry. Okay, and then here are the blocks that I would want to duplicate. So let's copy and paste them from here. Three things I'm grateful for. I'm going to do that. One. I can say what's my daily affirmation? I can say free from journaling. Maybe you know what, I'll give this an H2, I'll give this an H2 heading to give the stage to give this a little emoji because why not? Daily affirmation? Let's give it a rocket and free form journaling. Let's use the writing emoji. Now I've created this template. Now I'm going to hit Close and we'll see what happens. Now when I add a new entry. It will automatically copy paste those things. And I can add another one, and I can add another one, and I can add another one. As I do this, I realized that actually that's not particularly useful. What I need to do is edit this. I can use the gear icon there. And I actually want to put all this into a toggle. So I'm going to add a toggle and I'm going to say today's date. And then I'm going to drag and drop all these things into the toggle. Cool. So now when I create a new entry here, it adds a toggle and another one and another one and another one and another one. And if I open up the Toggle, now I've got my template and I can type in whatever I want. And this would be another way of saving time. Again, essentially a glorified copy paste job, but we don't necessarily have to do it within a database. We can also do it within normal pages. The final thing to mention when it comes to templates is that you can hit this template button and you can find low the templates on the notion website created by people around the world, including me, created by the notion team themselves. And it just kinda nice to look through and be like, Oh, I wonder, it's just a good way of getting inspiration for what other people are potentially doing. Let's go personal goals. You know what? I like the idea of having a goal thing to do, doing Don, Oh, this is nice. I like what they've done here and I can hit use this template. And that's going to duplicate the template into my workspace. Now as you've seen on my sidebar, I've got getting started, I've got lifo S and I've got goals. I can just use this. And it's worth spending a little bit of time understanding how the template actually works. But I can see what's going on. It's a Kanban brute group to do doing done. I can sort it by due date. That's kinda useful. And I could add more things to this notion course. In fact, I'm doing that right now. Let's see what the properties are. Tags, interesting, work and fun because work is fun and do, let's say Q3. Now I've seen how that template works and I can modify the template if I want. Because really the key thing to remember with notion is that templates are nothing special there, literally just a copy paste job. So all we've done here by clicking use this template is to copy and paste the contents of that template into a page on our notion workspace. And therefore we can do whatever we wanted this, we can change it. We can add a cover, you can add a description, and you can add comments, you can do whatever you like. And generally, something like this is a very easy way to learn how to use Notion and to get some inspiration for how other people use Notion. And if you browse on YouTube, if you look at my channel, if you look at our friends at channels, people will often just share that template because it's so easy to do. Let's say I make this life a lesson. I want to share it with someone. I can just hit share. And I can share to web. And now anyone can grab this link. And I can say allow duplicate as a template if there's sensitive information in there that I don't want to share, I can just copy, paste the page, get rid of all the sensitive stuff, and basically then share that page as a template. And this is how I share all of my templates are notion, especially if they have personal stuff, I'll just duplicate it, removed the personal details, and then share the page. So that brings us to the end of discussion about templates. We are now going to move on to the next section of the course, which is the Advanced section, where we talk about the stuff that you'll probably never need to use, but maybe it's still kinda helpful to have. And it's kinda nice and adds a few more supercharged or features into Notion. So, thank you so much for watching the intermediate section of the course, and I will see you in the next one. 14. 3.1 Having Fun with Formulas: We are now into the advanced section of the course. And in this case, I'm just going to show you some other tricks and tips and tools and stuff you can use to supercharge your notion workflows. A lot of this stuff is completely unnecessary, but it's useful to know that it exists so that if you decide you need it for whatever reason, when the warning label that over-engineering, it's probably bad. You can at least have a basic tutorial and what this kind of stuff is. In this lesson, we're going to talk all about formulas. Formulas are actually somewhat useful within databases. I'm gonna show you exactly how they work and then we'll explore how to, how to go about creating them. So we're going to basically decide we want to calculate someone's age for whatever reason. I've got the date of birth. So I don't want to manually have to calculate their age and I wanted to update each year. Obviously, I'm going to create a new property. I'm going to call it age. But instead of it being a text or a number, I'm going to make it a formula because what we're gonna do, it's just like a spreadsheet. We're going to calculate their age based on the date of birth. So how would we do that? We're going to hit Edit and now we're going to write a formula. Again. You'll probably never need to do this, but you know it exists in case you want to. You can see here that we've got a ton of different things that we can do with a formula. I think the thing I want is date between, so the first property and this is gonna be now because that is today's date. The second property is gonna be prop, date of birth, which has the property we've already gotten in the database. And the third argument is going to be years. We have now basically calculated their age. So in theory, Gordon Green horns birthday is July 24th in 1999, and therefore he's 23 years old based on that. But if we changed it to July 31st, he should be 22. Perfect. It works. So that is one example of a formula. Formulas on Notion can get ridiculously complicated just like spreadsheet formulas can get ridiculously complicated. So you can always Google it, load the people on the Internet have created these little snippets of formulas and stuff if you want to, when it comes to calculating obvious things, or if you're a massive nerd, you can just dive into it and figure out these formulas for yourself. Realistically, most people are unlikely to need to use the formula feature unless you want to do something specifically fancy. So that's just a quick introduction to formulas. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. 3.2 Working in Teams: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about the power of working in teams is going to be a quick one. I'm just gonna give you a blitz of what this is like, because most people only really need to use Notion for personal use. But if you want, you can start using pages with other people. Now, there's kind of two ways to do this. The first one is free and the second one is paid for. So let's start with a free method. Let's say I wanted to work on a page with a friend of mine, let's say Tintin who's sitting over there, e.g. I. Could make any page. This is a joint project or a group project. And I could do stuff. And let's say I want to collaborate on this page with someone else. Now, it easiest and the freest way to do that is hitting the share button and then adding that person's e-mail address. So I've got tend to Natalie up.com. He's already got an account, a notion which is why it's given the name and his face. So I can say can edit. Cool. And I can't default access because that's the personal pro pay plan, but that's fine. Tintin can edit this and I'm going to hit invite. Then I can share the workspace, or I can only share this page. Now, crucially, I do not want to share the workspace because if I do notional going to charge me for that privilege, I just want to share this page. These people will only have access to this page. They will not be added to your bill. That is exactly what we want. So I'm gonna hit Send Invite. Now I can edit this. And I tend to, it's gonna go into Notion page and he's going to try and edit this page and we're going to see what this looks like. There we go. He's in there. He's in there and he's making some changes and he's doing some stuff. You haven't got time. Hi there. I'm editing. I see. No hands. I'm not doing anything. Tintin is the one editing this page from all the way over there. And crucially I haven't had to pay for his access to Notion. So this is probably the best way to use teams for a lot of students. If you're working on a group project, you want a friend to edit something. When I use when I'm organizing holidays, I will share the holiday page with people so that I don't have to add them to my whole workspace. Whereas if you want to add people to your whole workspace, that tends to be if you're a business and you have like, I don't know, however many people in your business and you want all of them to have access to your entire workspace. That is, when you can use the notion Teams feature, we call the enterprise plan. We got it for free because we like Notion and they like us and we have made videos for them in the past. But normally I think it's something like $10 per user per month. The prices go up significantly as you have more and more people on your team. But this is like a very good way to use the Teams feature completely for free. I'm not gonna go into the paid feature too much. If you do need notion for Teams, you can check it out. If you just hit your settings, the member's page, you can upgrade your bidding plan, you can add members, etc, etc. And you can even try notion for Teams completely free for a month. So you can give it a go and you can see if you like it. And if you do it, you can continue using it if you want. But you'll notice over here that guests Tintin, an urban added because there's access level is to one page. So I can always see who has got access to all the different pages on my Notion. And that is the freeway to use Teams. So thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. 3.3 Level Up with Widgets: Alright, welcome back. We are now talking about various interesting ways to level up on ocean. Again, this is bells and whistles that you probably will never need, but it's kinda nice to have. So the first thing we're going to talk about is a funky little website called option, option.co. It's free, it's great. It's good vibes. And essentially it's Notion friendly, embeddable widget apps. What does that mean? Well, let's find out. Let's say I want to have a flip clock. Cool. I like the idea of having a flip clock as part of my Notion page. I'm going to hit Flip clock. And it's going to say try it in your page demo. Paste the URL into your notions, embed block, quick tutorial Paste, Notion, click Embed, done, you're ready to go. Cool. Flip clogged up TK. I'm going to copy that URL. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go into Notion into life OS. And let's say, I don't know, underneath the dashboard, I want to have the time right now. So I'm going to paste that link. I'm going to hit Create embed. Boom. I have a flip clock. It's currently 146. That's pretty cool. Let's see what other random apps we can play with it. It's kinda cool, fun, a fun thing to browse. Moon phase comments, Pinterest charts, time, I will kinda wonder whether they've got to whether one, Let's search. Weather widget. Yes, perfect. Visit the website and get your HTML code, generate the embeddable URL. Alright, let's do it. So Visit website and now this option thing has generated an embed. I'm going to copy that. I'm going to go into my thing. And let's say I wanted my weather to appear, zoom out a bit just underneath my dashboard. Let's hit paste create, embed. Let's see what happens. Boom. We've got the weather incredible. But I don't like the fact that it's in there. I want to put it there. I'm going to put it just underneath that. And now I have got the weather in my Notion dashboard. So that was one way of embedding widgets using option, which is completely free. Let's now use another website which is indefinable, which is also pretty solid. And this is also free. And it's a nice way of getting, getting interesting widgets for your notion. So I'm just gonna sign up with Google. Thank you. Your email has been verified. Don't care. Add a new widget. Let's create a widget for quotes. Why not of the day? Continue. This is kinda fun. It's kinda fun to play with the sort of stuff generating new widget. And let's just use this. And I can select different. Let's do the good quote. Why not set background color? I can make it white. And let's copy this embed URL. It's Copy to Clipboard. And now let's put it under today. I'm just going to paste it. I'm going to hit Create embed. And hopefully we should now see a quote of the day. There we go. So this is just kinda cool option in defied. There's a bunch of other websites that have sprung up recently that let you create these embeddable notion widgets. It, it's kinda nice to have, you might like to create these. I'm just going to delete them because I don't personally like them. You might like to create these for your life operating system or for whatever Notion pages you want. But again, just keep in mind, this is all kinda fun to play with. You almost never need these things. You can embed a Google Calendar as well if you want. So you can see where your calendar looks like. And it's not kinda up to you to play around and figure out how you want to extend your life operating system based on widgets and other funky stuff. So that's it for widgets in the course resources area down below, we'll put a few more links to things that you can check out. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 17. 3.4 Create a Website with Super: Alright, welcome back. The other really cool advanced thing that you can do a notion is you can actually create an entire website using Notion. And that is by virtue of a super cool platform called super create websites, where the notion create website and less than a minute, that's easy to manage and looks great with instant page loads, SEO optimized optimization and to no code. All your contents days and notions that you can focus on creating more super, super handles the rest. So let's try this out and we can see what happens. And I'll show you a couple of examples of friends and team members who've made websites with this, get started for free and create a test account. We're going to create a new site on Super, Let's say elisa test websites. And I can copy and paste it free site actually, notion page URL. So here's how this works. Basically, I'm going to create a new page and say, please test websites. And let's give it an icon. Let's give it a cover image. And let's copy and paste some content onto here. This is my test website changed cover to something more legit done. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit share and I'm going to copy the link to this page and I'm going to copy and paste it into super. And we'll see what super does Copy Paste Notion URL create. This page cannot be found unless I have to share it publicly. I click Share to the web now and now refreshed. And now if we go on this refresh, it says all these tests website made with super, I've literally created a website, Ellie's tests website, that's super dot site, purely based on a notion page. And now if I change this page, version 2.0, and let's say I change this to red or whatever that color is now forgotten super and hit refresh. We'll see at least test website has been updated to version 2.0. I can refresh here and it's been updated. Now, there's a few different examples of this. George and Willem from our team have some pretty cool notion sites. This is one that George put together. He's one of our freelance writers league. Willem has another one. Basically use the same theme. Writer, create a storyteller and writer creator collaborator. You can check them out if you need examples of, if you need to hire a freelancer for writing and stuff. But I think super is really nice because it just shows you how you can use Notion to do something like creating a website and how you don't have to use like Squarespace and Wix and these other different things because you can just make a page Notion and literally converted into a website. So that was how you can potentially also use Notion to create a website. And we'll put a little discount link to supra down in the Course Resources area if you want to check it out. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. 3.5 Conclusion: Alright, welcome back and well done You have reached the end of the official component of this class. We have gone through beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We talked about how notion is that ultimately composed of pages and pages just made up of building blocks, almost like Lego. We talked about formatting, we talked about styling. Then in the intermediate section we talked about databases and how you can potentially link them together with formulas and relations and roll-ups and all that fun stuff. Then in the advanced section, we went over a little bit of extending notions capabilities using widgets and using embeds, and even potentially creating a website with Notion. But the thing I want all of us to keep in mind and the thing I like to always, whenever anyone on our YouTuber Academy or anything is asking about notion. The thing to keep in mind is that most people can get a lot of value out of notion by just using the bare basics. Now in the bonus materials you're going to see my own run-through of my own notion system. And it's fairly basic that I don't use many fancy features of motion. You're also going to see a bunch of other creators and friends who do use fancy features of notion and things work for them. But the point I would make overall is as you're building your own ocean system, make it your own. But start really simple. Don't feel like you have to use all these different features just because all of these different features exist. And really remember that notion is ultimately a tool which are designed to serve you and your productivity to help you get more of the things done that matter to you. And you are not the slave to the master of notion where you have to use all the different features that they've got. They always keep on adding more features. They're going to continue to add even more as you see in this class. But hopefully by keeping in mind the basics that everything is blocked and blocked makeup a page. And the basics of databases that a database is basically a spreadsheet and every entry in a database is a page in itself. Hopefully just with that basic foundation, you'll be able to go forth and conquer and make pretty looking Notion pages, which are more importantly useful for you and your life, and your work and productivity, and your health, and your happiness and your impact and all of that fun stuff. Thank you very much for watching the class. If you liked this class and do please leave a review that would be lovely wherever you happen to be watching this, that'll be awesome. And please do submit your class project as well that will be sick. It would be great to see a screenshot and a link to what your own life operating system dashboard looks like. And potentially, if some of them look particularly proceed, we might even feature it in future lessons in this class. So that's it for me. We're now going to move on to the bonus section of the course, the fun stuff where we're going to go over mine and various team members and various creator friends and entrepreneur friends is use cases of notion. So once you've learned the basics in this first half of the class, you can get some inspiration of how other people use Notion in the second half. So thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the bonus materials of the course. 19. 4.1 Bonus Materials: Alright, it, You've reached the end of the main component of the class. Now we're gonna go into the bonus section. Now this is going to be super fun. We've collated a bunch of interviews and screenshare and set of tutorials from me, from our team for a bunch of our other creator and entrepreneur friends. So you can hopefully see how me and us lot and how other people use Notion to give you inspiration for your own setup. One warning before we get started. Some people's notions setups can look at are very elaborate. Even if you look at ours, it can sometimes seem ridiculously overwhelming. But the point to make is that a lot of these have been built up slowly over time. There's this concept in systems thinking called Boyle's Law, which is that a complex system that works always evolves from a simple system that works. And often just like copying and pasting someone's template into your, into your thing. I'm trying to make this system work is very unlikely to work for you. So I want to think of these bonus bits as like tutorials for how to set up Notion. I would think of them more as inspiration. Maybe follow along with some of them, maybe see how they're doing and what I'm hoping that we'll do a spark some ideas in your own mind for how you could potentially build up your own notion. And I'd love for you to share it in the class project section, or drop me a DM on Instagram or send me an email. I just love checking out people's notions, setups because it also gives me a ton of inspiration for my own. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this bonus material section. 20. 4.2 My Resonance Calendar: Alright, in this bonus video is actually what kind of cheating. And just including my YouTube video that I made a couple of years ago, which is all about the Resonance Calendar. I don't quite use this exact system anymore. I've adapted it since then, and you'll see more of that in my actual tour, how I actually use it. But I think it's good because it will give you an idea of the different ways that you can use things like the notion of web clipper and the way that you can integrate notion with other apps to create something like a Resonance Calendar. I've actually heard from a bunch of people who still use the Resonance Calendar system. It might, it might work for you, it might not. Either way, the whole point of these videos is to give you some inspiration for all the things that you can do with Notion so that you can tweak your own setup. Anyway, let's roll that video now. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Ali, I'm a Dr. working in Cambridge. And in this video, I'm gonna show you how I use the app notion to be more reflective about the stuff that I read, watch, and listen to. Now, before discovering this method, I used to spend absolutely ages listening to podcasts, reading books or watching videos about business, entrepreneurship, productivity, self-improvement, all that stuff. And it was that classic trap of consuming too much stuff but not really acting or reflecting on any of it. But all of that changed when I discovered this amazing method that I like to call my Resonance Calendar. Let's dive in and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. So this is what my Resonance Calendar looks like at the moment. And the idea is that anytime I read, watch, or listen to anything that resonates with me, that's kinda my bar, anything that resonates with me, I will drop it into the Resonance Calendar and I'll take some notes on it. So e.g. if we look at this episode of The Phantom street podcast called it the great game. This was June 03, 2019 at 11:00 P.M. clearly, I was listening to it quite late and I've got these various nodes. So at timestamp 23 or five I wrote, happiness isn't found by seeking it, It's found by being engaged in the world. That's me writing down the stuff that the guest on the podcast was saying because I that particular thing resonated with me equally at timestamp 27. How can I add fun and delight to the person in front of me? That was the stuff that we're talking about. And at the time I thought all this is some pretty legit stuff. Why don't I make a few notes on it and shove it into my Resonance Calendar. And as we can see here, I've tagged it with podcasts because there's a podcast episode and life because I think this is pretty legit life advice. I'll talk more about the tags in just a moment and let's take another example. This is an article that I read in March about the para method for organizing digital information by my productivity guru to Tiago Forte. And what happens when you share an article into notion is that it just gives you the whole article. It'll automatically copies and pastes the entire article into Notion. So you can always come back to it without having to go back to the website. Here, I've added some notes on it about the various ways in which I'm gonna be applying this to my own life. So previously, what would have otherwise just been, I read an article and think, oh, that's kinda cool and never do anything about it. Now at least I'm writing down my thoughts and ideas and writing down what I plan to do with the information. So that was a quick overview of what this Resonance Calendar actually it looks like. I'll expand more on that in just a sec. But first, let's talk about how we actually get stuff into the Resonance Calendar. Firstly, we can use the notion Web Clipper add-on thing for Chrome. So let's say if I go on my own website and I find an article that resonates with me using notions of residence calendar with when did I went on to write this? I wrote this in March 2019. So if you sign up to my e-mail newsletter which I send weekly, then you can keep up-to-date with this sort of stuff. And you can find out about these use cases six months before I actually make a video about them. Anyway. Let's say I discovered this article on keystone habits that I wrote in February, again, as part of the email newsletter. And I was talking about something that James Clear wrote in Atomic Habits. But whatever, I can put that straight into Notion using the notion of Web Clipper. So I click this little icon here, I can add some notes to it. I've made my few notes and then I hit Enter. And that goes immediately into my Resonance Calendar. And so if I open that notion, we see immediately keystone habits. And here are my notes about it that are formatted weirdly. So here are some notes about the article, what I'm planning to do with it. So it's copied and pasted the entire article into Notion, and it's written my notes above it so that when I'm returning to it, I can see exactly what I wrote. So that's what I use if I'm reading stuff on Chrome and I want to get it into Notion. More often than not, I tend to be reading, are consuming stuff on my iPhone or my on my iPad. So let's have a look here. Let's say I'm on Castro, which is my podcast app of choice. And I'm listening to the alternative CV podcast, which is run by one of my friends. And just coincidentally, let's take this episode, episode one, which is how to overcome fear, put yourself out there and get started, which is a two-part interview with me. Or I talk about all this stuff. Let's say I was listening to that. Again, I'll put a link in the video description. If you want to check it out, I can hit this little Share button. And then the share dialogue opens up and I could message it to people Don't mess of stuff to, or I can share it directly into Notion. It gets added to my Resonance Calendar. And if I want to, I can change this to all the various databases that I've got with the notion. But because Resonance Calendar is the one that I always just add things too. That's the first one that comes up. I can write the title so I can say Ali interview on a CV, podcast. Whatever it does matter if this typos. And I can write a few notes about this. And then what I want, I can hit Save. And that's gone. And if we look immediately on Notion, which is linked across all my devices, here we go. I'll his interview on the ACV podcast. Let's fix the typo. Let's hit Enter, just fix the formatting. And yeah, here we go. Here are some notes I wrote about this incredible interview. And here are the show notes which automatically get populated here, which is just really handy because now when I returned to this, I can immediately see all the references and all the links from this podcast. And normally want to take notes on podcasts. I like to refer to the timestamps so that let's say in six months time, I'm making a YouTube video and referencing this podcast. I know exactly where the timestamp peers and I can get a clip from the podcast and shove it into my YouTube video. That was method number two for getting stuff into the Resonance Calendar. And then the third, and I think most interesting way that I get stuff into the Resonance Calendar is actually by using my Apple Watch. Now often when I'm listening to podcasts, I'm listening to them at double speed and I'm listening to them in the car, which means like, yeah, I could stop by the side of the road and write down notes on my phone if I really wanted to, and I do sometimes do that. But recently I've discovered this app and drafts for the Apple watch. Here we go. This is my Apple Watch. This is the app or draft, so I can tap on that and then I can hit the Record button and I can do this while driving so that it's just two taps. Then while I'm on drafts, I can record anything that I want to say about this podcast. And as you can see, it is automatically transcribing that into text in quite a reasonable fashion. If I'm honest. Then I hit done. Then that gets saved to my drafts inbox. And then I can open up draft on my Mac. And usually it's things reasonably. And here we go. We've got the draft that syncs to Mac. And so if I want to add something to the root, to the Resonance Calendar, I just hit the New button and then I have to do, I do have to manually input this information. So I would write Ali Abdullah interview with or something like that. I'd find the URL and then I will just copy and paste the notes from draft into notion. And then I would archive the draft using a keyboard shortcut. And this would be the way there is a bit of manual labor and I would like it at some point, I'm sure notion is going to open up the API and you'll automatically be able to add stuff from draft into Notion. But for now, I think just copying and pasting it from one window into another as very reasonable way of doing it. And it also means that I can then quick capture all the ideas that I have while I'm driving without having to stop the car on the side of the road, get my phone out and then get late for work. So that's how I get stuff into Notion. And now when it's in Notion, I can use various fancy filtering features of notion to make it more useful and more organized. And often what I'll do is because I tag stuff there and then I can answer questions like, if a friend is asking me, Hey, Allie, what particles would you recommend? I can be like, funny, you should ask, why don't I use this filter out a filter. Let's see, tags contains, podcast. And now when I filtered it by that, it's showing me all of the podcasts that have resonated with me over the last I don't know if since when was the first one? Since March 23, 2019 when I first discovered Notion and this president's calendar thing. Or if we clear that filter, Let's say I'm writing an article or working on a YouTube video about productivity, I could just type in the word productivity on the search thing. And it would automatically find all of my tags that have been tagged with productivity, but also all of my resonance calendar items. They just have the word productivity in them somewhere. And that just makes it a lot easier for me to create content about productivity. Because now all of my stuff about productivity, everything that I've ever read or listen to or watch that resonated with me about productivity is now in this resonance Canada. There's another pretty high-tech feature of notion that I do use quite often and that's the ability to add related database items to the Resonance Calendar. So I'll show you what I mean by that. So at the moment, this whole Resonance Calendar thing is a database. And because notion is based on the notion of databases, it means you can have different views depending on what you want to see. So this is the list view where I'm just looking at the title of the notes and the tags. I could also view it in calendar mode if I really wanted to. That's how I started doing this initially. So here we go. June 2019 was when I put a load of stuff into this because for some reason I'm just consuming lots of content. And we can see that across across the calendar. I can see the stuff that I consumed, which I guess would be quite a nice way to look at things over time. I've also got my table. And what the table does is that it lets me add links to ideas from the calendar. So I've got the second database called ideas. These are ideas for either blog post or e-mail newsletters or articles or videos scripts that I might make at some point further down the line. And some of these are my own ideas, but actually the majority of them are ideas that I've picked up through reading, listening, and watching to stuff. And so I'd like to link to the original source. There's a very easy way of doing that. So e.g. let's take this one, decision-making Windows versus doors. This was on the arianna Simpson episode of the My First Million podcast by the hustle. And I've got this property within this database style called resonance link. And that means I can link items in my Resonance Calendar to these ideas items. So if I search for Simpson, that should come up. Here we go. Are we Arianna send some Bitcoin believer? I can add this as a resonance link to this particular idea. And that's useful if I come across this idea, I can see where the source of it was. But it's also useful because if I go back on the Resonance Calendar and look in the table mode, now at this point, if I go on a specific item, I can see all of the related notes, the related ideas that have been linked to that all in one place. So this is really good. This means that if I'm writing my weekly e-mail newsletter in deciding, I usually pick three or four things that I enjoyed that week that I want to share with the audience. This is going to be quite high up on the list because 12345. There are five different ideas that are generated from this one podcast. And now these ideas can then later be turned into blog posts and articles and stuff. So again, if we go back to my ideas database, I just love showing the stuff off because I think it's really cool. And I go into refinery mode. This is the Kanban view that notion has. So we've got no status, which is just where all the ideas go. We've got idea, we've got draft, we've got e-mail, we've got published. So actually this Windows versus doors one, it starts off under no status and then I can drag it over into idea. When it's something that I'm actively thinking about. Draft when I'm actually writing something about it and email when I've thought about turning it into an email newsletter and then published when it becomes a blog post on my website. So I like to think of this as the refinery. I call it refinery because I think I'm cool. As sort of a refinery for ideas, I get the idea of either self-generated or from other sources that I consume. And then it goes through different layers of the refinery, ultimately turning into a blog post. And I suppose I'll have one over here called and video. So if I turn a particular thing into a video, then that's one step further along the pipeline, as it were. The nice thing about this is that, and I fully recommend that anyone does this. He creates any kind of content at all. Because every Sunday when I sit down to write my weekly e-mail newsletter, which again, you can subscribe to you with a link down below. Back in the day, I used to start with a blank slate and used to think, Oh crap, I need to write something today. What should I write? And it would take me an hour or two to think of something over the top of my head, turn it into a reasonably coherent few paragraphs and send it out. But now, instead of starting with a blank slate, I can just think I need to write an email today at earlier today I thought exactly that and I look down my list and earlier today I actually wrote this Windows versus doors one. And then this idea which I got from the podcast became an issue of my weekly e-mail newsletter. So that was that whole process took me about 20 min, whereas before it would have taken like an hour or two because I'm not starting from scratch because thankfully I've got my Resonance Calendar were added notes and stuff to everything that has resonated with me over the past few months. Yeah, That was quick run-through of how I use Notion as a Resonance Calendar. I use Notion for a ton of other things as well. And I'm gonna be making videos over time about that. But I think the great thing about the Resonance Calendar is since I started doing this in March 2019, it's really encouraged me to be a lot more reflective. The stuff that I'm consuming an activity, think about a how can apply it to my own life and how I can change my behavior based on it. But B, also, because I'm a content creator, creator, it lets me think about how to take those ideas from other sources and apply my own lens and knowing my own perspective to them, and then release them out into the world as my own creations and stuff. And obviously I link back to the original sources and it's quite nice doing this sort of thing. Because now whenever I write an article that's based on someone's blog or on someone's podcast or a feature in a video, I can tweak them saying, Hey, I wrote this thing that features your work and is it speaks in glowing terms about it. You should check it out. And then these people who I admire and want to connect with and stuff see my tweet and like, oh, this guy is giving me free publicity. This is awesome. My overall, a lot of good things that happened in my life just because of this resonance calendar. So if you want to check out this Resonance Calendar, I'll put a link to it down in the video description. And the great thing about Notion is that you can make any of your pages public if you want to. You can make your templates public. So this is now a public template. You can now click on it in the video description and then you can duplicate it into your own Notion account. Which means you can just get this template for free just to do whatever you like with, and you can modify it to suit your own goals or whatever you wanna do with it. And you can just add stuff to it over time. On the notion of website, you'll find a ton of other templates. This is really cool personal Wiki, one that's used by Ben, one of the notion marketing team. And that's something that I'm going to be experimenting a lot with as well. And I really liked his browsing through the templates and seeing all the various use cases for notion. But yeah, that was my Resonance Calendar link in the video description. And yeah, that's pretty much the end of the video. Thank you very much for watching. If you liked this video, you should check out a playlist over there somewhere of my other notion, related videos and productivity related videos that you might like as well. So thanks for watching. Have a great day and I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye. 21. 4.3 My Content Production Engine - Angus: Alright, welcome to this bonus episode of the course where Angus, who is our General Manager for the entire business and man managers or team of around 15 people. And this is gonna be taking you through a nice little fun tour of our content production engine. The elaborate system that you might have seen during the course, which is all about how we personally use Notion to create videos like this, and courses like this, and podcasts and shorts and all of the other content that we as a business produce, which ends up making us around $5 million every year, which is absolutely insane. Anyway, I'm not going to hand over to angus to take you through the system so that you can hopefully get some inspiration for your own notions. Have hello and welcome to this bonus section of the notion Skillshare course. My name's Angus. I worked for alley. I've been working with him for nearly three years now. I'm the general manager of the business. And we thought we'd do in this bonus segment is just go through how we use Notion as a business. I'll show you as much as I can. And we're just gonna go through how we use it, how we use it for the content Production System. The other aspects of notion which I'll go through in terms of the departments of the business and how we have succinct it up to things like Slack and things like that. So I'll just go through some of that now. Yeah, hopefully give you an insight into how we use Notion. So we're opening up here on the team homepage. This is where anyone can come. It's kind of a top of our, of our team, of our general team space. Because some widgets at the top here, just general o'clock. And then we've got links to alleys, key social media and YouTube. Podcast links, moving down. Team calendar. So we have a team Google Calendar documenting all the main events for the team. So it's things like sabbaticals, team socials, when alleys away, as you can see, we're just kinda key when we need to know when he's gonna be here so we can record and other things like that with the team calendar. And then along the left-hand side here we've got almost everything that you'd need to get to know if you're joining the company, e.g. there's various different handbooks and things like that as well as meet the team page where we've got the team members here, a little bit about everyone and things like that. Then we've also got things like graphic design requests are working with a graphic designer at the moment. This particular database is actually linked up through Zapier to Slack and our graphic designer is on Slack. And so whenever, whenever anything gets added into this, e.g. there was an example here. This is filtered for when it actually gets tagged and taken. So there's no examples in here because they've all been dealt with. When something is added into here, it pings or Slack channel, which are graphic designers in. And so he knows that something has been added to this particular table. I can go and have a look and then, and then deal with it as and when. That's the graphic design request. And we've also got things like the dangerous GSD list, again, similar kind of thing. Dan is our alleys EA and it's kind of his getting **** done list. So if anyone needs anything that needs to get done and just drop it in there. Same thing again, it pings down on Slack and then he can take it from there. Also got team training resources. So links to courses and things like that that we have access to that the team can use and take to upskill them. Obviously, passwords not gonna go in there. And we have our company operating manual for all the SOPs of every single area of the business. I've also got a quick links to the different departments, which I'll go into in a minute and then just further information and resources further down the patient that's like the team homepage company handbook is the go-to place for everything really in terms of when you're joining the team and key policies and things like that. So that's I won't go into too many of those is for security and productivity reasons. But yeah, so this is our team home. Moving down. We've got the studio. This is obviously at least studio where we're based. And we've set up kind of key pages in here. We've got the posterior in the library and equipment cupboard. Forget the names. It was a day when I wasn't very imaginative. The post room, again is similar. It's linked up via Zapier to slack. Whenever anyone order something in this database, the database, the link goes through dislike. And I then know given that I'm managing the office, know that someone's ordered something and know to expect something because I'm here every day. So this is a useful thing to add on when we're ordering things like as we see, books and things like that that have been ordered. We've got the library. As you can potentially see, we've got thousands of books in here, hundreds of books. And what we do is we let the team take them as and when. And so we've got a massive long list here. And then when someone takes 1 h, they just take it a bit like any old library operates, I guess, who is taken out by him and when it's going to return it and things like that. Because we want everyone to be able to use the books that they want. And then the equipment cupboard is just a massive long list of all the gear we've got. Won't go into that obviously. And basically to make sure that we're across everything and everything is on our insurance policies and things like that. So that is the studio. Moving down. We've got the, this is basically divided into the key core verticals of the business. We've got the Ali Abdel brand. We've got courses, which is the paid element of our, of our business. And then we've got PT, which is certainly a course, but because of its size and scale, we separate it out into a different department. So I'll just go through all those now. The other Dell brand, as you can see, we've got all his relevant links across the top here. We should be able to click on them and it will take us to. The aspects here, again, Spotify link specify logo there essentially wrongs and it's taken us to Apple podcasts. So moving down, the main thing that we operate everything from is called V content production engine. This essentially is everything that we produce, a YouTube, social media podcast. Everything finally filters through this content production engine. This has been very useful as the teams expanded, getting everyone on the same page, having decent cameras in different views for different people, e.g. a. Filming view, database, editing view, and things like that so that people can quickly and easily see what they need to see. Often with databases like this, like the cotton production engine, it ends up being a database that has 20 different properties, thousand different cards when it's in its core form. And therefore, filtering and sorting means that we can actually condense it down to ten or 20 things that each person needs to see. On this main page, we've got relevant different dashboards. So there's one for Ali, the typewriter is for the writers and editors space, one for deep dive itself, and then one for clips. You're editing company that we work with occasionally for editing things like the clips for Deep Dive. This is kind of the main view that I operate from overseeing the YouTube channel and things like that. This is what I use day to day to make sure to see like what's going out, what the progress is on that particular thing. Do we have a sponsor for that video? If so, have we got the relevant documents in place? Does anyone know what he needs to talk about in that integration and things like that. So just diving in here, e.g. we've got a journal every day for three months. Here's what I learned when you watch this video, all have been released hopefully on September the 9th and go back and check if you want. I'm destination main channel status needs editing and that's actually just been edited so now and he's just publishing. We have a club series. Ali likes to put everything in buckets that are clubs. And then we have a sponsor which is, which is morning group. And then we've got the editor, which is Christian, and the publishing date here. Further down, we do have the scripts and things like that. I won't go too much into that, but sometimes we use this database here we are. We either write down titles when we're actually filming it to make sure that we had on the same page or we use this database which we do have a template for. But basically this counts up the characters in the title. So YouTube title shouldn't be more than 55 characters in order to be seen on the widest screen possible. So we do use this to check whether the character length is, goes above that little tip. If you do want to check what a title looks like in a thumbnail looks like, checkout, thumbs up TV. Then you can enter your title and your thumbnail. And that will show you what it looks like on all the different devices. So if you aren't a YouTube and watching this, then you use that website. Yeah, that's kinda the the main publishing calendar that I look on a daily basis. They're filming calendar we generally feel on Thursdays. And so each card has a filming deadline. And as you can see here, these are the three videos from last week, and we're actually filming on a Friday this week. So here's the fit three to two videos that we need to fill them in as a podcast recording as well tomorrow. And likewise, if we move further down this week, the 19th is our pockets filming week. So we've got what we got so far. We've got nine books in there for one week, which is, which is really good to batch film like that. This is a bit of an odd one in terms of we are actually filming on Wednesday next week. So this is the filming thing. And then we've also got an editing deadline for when the video's needs to be edited by. Some of these are stacked up. But it's mainly fought for Christians view to know when things, what things are going on, when things are happening, when they're needed by. And that means that I can just send, upload the footage to Google Drive, which we do. And then I know that Christian knows when it's going to when it's needed and I don't need to message him every time we upload something saying it's where I need to edit it by. He just looked at this and he knows when it's needed. So moving back to the publishing candor and moving further down, we go to information and resources. We've got an AB test database, so we use too buddy to test our thumbnails and titles. A, B, test thumbnails and titles. It's been very successful for us over the years. And so we've got a DSpace for that. We've got a style guide. I'll leave quite particular about what he, what he likes and what he doesn't like. So over the last year or so as we've been working for more writers, this is expanded from initial ten points and initially wrote two along with pages. Now it's massive. So it's basically alley every time he is looking at scripts and he's like, Well, I don't like that. Please don't say that. Then this just gets added to this particular page. It's just useful for anyone coming in, any freelancers that we worked with to be able to say, okay, this is the kind of tone that Andy likes to adopting in videos. Same with the rise of the writing guide on all of these things are just sort of resources that we sometimes use to help us produce the videos. As we get further down here, there's a boring stuff. Graveyard is basically an archive like more, more, more than that. I missed the CPU core as I was discussing. And if we go back to just like the table of the height, you can see it's just like absolutely massive famine and 48 things in here. It would be overwhelming to try to go through all of these different properties and all of these different cards. Without some sort of filtering and sorting, which is why, as I said, these things like the publishing kinda e.g. has a number of different filters on it, number of different roles on it, and things like that. So that's really useful. So that's kind of a very brief overview of the CPE. If you do have any questions on it, please do. Drop them in the comments on the Skillshare page and we'll get back to you and answer those questions in terms of if you want to know how things are, certain things that filtered or sorted it. Filters and sorts can be quite confusing sometimes if you're new to Notion, get do let us know if you have any questions on that. Moving on to weaving back sorry to the brand. I don't think we need to go through every single one of these, but we have other pages that are similar in style. Brand guidelines again, draws upon alleys, rice and guidelines, as well as other things for the brand more broadly. So again, if we're working with a designer or a freelancer, we can send them these guidelines and they'll know what to do, what styles only likes and that kind of thing. Social media that's managed by Becky and that has its own publishing calendar, which is on a Gantt chart. As you can see, it probably should be sorted so that we can see things in order. But this is kind of everything that's going out. Every single post that we do has a separate card. Even if it's being repurposed. I think it's easier that way to keep across what's been posted, what hasn't. As I said, this is kind of our our targets for certain things in terms of post per week. We don't always try to hit that arbitrary number. It's generally if we have the content that we think is good enough and relevant and useful and providing value, then we will put it out. Yes, that's the social media side of things. And again, we can have request a post here, so e.g. Becky. Is managing the social media side of things, but there are numerous different departments feeding into social media and wanting to post stuff on social media. So e.g. part-time YouTuber Academy, when we're kind of going up for a launch. For that, we tend to put out more YouTube related content on social media. So Tommy, who's head of that department, might ask Becky to put out more water to YouTube related threads are weak. Similarly, courses and Gareth managers courses, we're launching a course next week, e.g. it's important for them to have a space where they can be like, I want this to go out, I need this to be featured in some kind of posts on social media so they can use this to request those, those posts. Again, back to the, back to the brand. And I can also use this drop-down here to get to all these pages. I don't tend to use that, but we can obviously use that. Sunday Snippets is alleys newsletter. If you haven't subscribed to subscribe, there'll be a link in the description. This is the newsletter factory that we use. Again, very similar. This is a simpler version of a CPU, which basically just documents when the nucleus is going out. If there's a, again, if as a sponsor to it, who's bought courses it in, is it in alleys? Do we have someone helping with the research and the writing, grilling, often. Mercy and His name that often helps with the research for that, for the newsletters. Then we put it out every Sunday, as I said, with the relevance sponsor again, making sure that we have everything in place. You have to write copy in place. It's especially for the sponsors. So that's not white and then there's a board view there as well for the status updates. So if we go back, one annoying thing about Notion, when you go back, it tends to take you back to the, even if you are in a database card. Anyway. Let's go back through the, that's the idea of Dell brand. And we've got alleys book which is being worked on, dive too much into that space. Their website, the friend zone is like the discord community. And then product launch planning, which is top-secret at the moment. Now we'll move back up to the sidebar and then courses HQ. So this is all managed by Gareth. As you can see, we have the spinner, which is our main courses, and different resources and strategies across the top there. I won't go too much into that because again, these courses are in development, so we will keep those hidden for the time being. And then the parts of each book, ebony, we have a number of different hubs across the top here. So the PTI team hub takes you to their meeting database. We've got the community which takes us to our circle community, which will just load here. This is where we host all of PT way. There we go. It's loading slowly. Today. Yes, This takes us straight to their community when so these are all the winds at various people in their community have had Lovely. This is now 705 posts lung looking really healthy. Yeah, that takes you to then then these other widgets or Help Scout as our, as our supporting box. Outstanding action points. So every meeting we have action points from those and those get populated into this particular database as they go along. And we've got QI team pages and then reference pages and public pages to know which bits Can everyone see which, which pages should be shared more widely to the web? So e.g. it goes to the resource vote for cohort two. We got to share. And it would have explained this in the video. You can see that this is shared to the web. We can see that we haven't allowed commenting or editing or anything like that. It's just sheds the web so that people can come into this page. And find all the resources they might need from the course and all the relevant discounts and things like that that we get from being on the course. So that's the part-time YouTuber Academy, the reference page and things like that. And there's various login details that we need for hosting Zoom events and things like that. Obviously, I'm not gonna go into that, open that dropdown. Then we've got the marketing page. So Yaakov is in charge of this. We've got various different dashboards that draw upon his own database that he put it, he created number of databases. Basically. There's a question database kind of bees are all the questions that we're trying to answer. So e.g. what percentage of people who joined our Crash Course end up buying the crisp? And of course these are the kinds of things that we were looking for as a company to work out. How effective is our email sequence to actually converting people into buying the course. Obviously, we want to try to increase that and make sure that people are going through the crash course, find it valuable and useful enough to be then potentially convert into, into buying the course. And these are all things that we are monitoring and tracking through, things like UTM links. And this is where yak of basically lives. He's got so many experiments on the go at the moment and making sure that we are really using the data that we're getting from these different sources. Effectively. I won't get too much into all of that. This is basically just more databases and more calendars and things like that, that just, I guess the point with all of this video is just to show the various ways that we, that we use the notion and the fact that as a company we have probably five to ten really key databases that are linked across the various different pages here. The key one obviously being the content production engine. We also have different departments that use different databases and different ways of effectively using notion, as well as linking up to slack. Slack is our main form of communication in the company. We use Zapier to link up Notion with certain Slack channels. If you haven't done that already, it's fairly easy to do. Just set up as Zapier account and you can then connect it to your notion database or Notion pages. Pages or databases are best for this, they work effectively. Some of the integrations can be a bit sort of Genki, but some of them work really well. As I mentioned earlier, when the database input one, the lag time between something being inputted and then the message appearing on Slack is less than 5 min. It's really, really quick. So that's a really good automation. If you do want something useful to take away. If you own a company or run a company, having that as a, as a, as an integration that you can use to effectively keep track of what's being added to a page, e.g. we could make that even more effective by linking up Christian, who's our editors, Slack channel, like DM with a change of property and the content production engine. So when I change it from needs filming, editing, that could, if we did it properly, link to his own, his own Slack channel and give him a notification for that neat for then that needs needs editing and the video is changed datas we haven't set up yet, but it is, it is possible. So moving down these shared spaces to these alleys management space, I won't go into that. That's kind of where I sit with most of my stuff. And that's where all the management, finances, business stuff is kept. And that's where I live most of the time going through all of that. But yeah, so that's kind of a very quick run-through of everything that the company does. I'll go back to the team homepage. The company does and uses and how we use Notion. If you have got any questions, queries, concerns, then please do drop me in the comments section on Skillshare and we will get back to you if you want to talk to me about how I use Notion and how I've set up different ways of using Notion, then please do, drop me an email. My email will be linked below. I'm happy for happy for you to send an email if you have any particular questions. So I hope that was useful. Very quick run through of how we use Notion. Quite a broad overview. Obviously you can appreciate there other areas of that we can't necessarily show on camera, but I hope that they'd give you a bit of an overview of how, how in depth we go with Notion and how efficiently you can run those. And even with quite a basic setup and some pages. And also how you can make it look pretty with widgets and things. Some of these widgets are from, if I posted these are from a website called into phi, into phi.com. Quite useful. I'd recommend go and have a look at that and play around with that. You can make your motion look quite pretty. That'll be linked down below as well. Otherwise, hope you enjoyed that. Any questions, let me know. Yeah, bye. 22. 4.4 Thomas Frank's Notion Setup: In this bonus episode, we are hearing from my good friend and fellow creators, Thomas Frank, who is one of the most famous productivity influences in the world. And Thomas is going to take you through his incredible creative system again on Notion. Again, just to caveat the ideas here is not that you necessarily copy and paste them on system wholesale idea is that you get inspiration for your own setup. But in Thomas's case, he actually has this whole like create her compendium pack thing with Notion Templates and systems and processes and tutorials. You can find a little dot over on his website and we'll put a link in the project and resources section where you can check that out if you would like. Anyway, I'm not going to hand over to Thomas Frank. Yeah. We'd love to take a look at your ultimate brain. Yeah, and I know that this class is for notion beginners and they've kinda just like learned about all the building pieces in blocks of notion. So what I think I'm gonna do is start off actually with our knowledge base. Because we've been using notion since 2018 as a team. And back then we really did not know everything there was to know about Notion. And there are also quite a few fewer features available. So it may be an easier introduction just to show what we use as a kind of like Team wiki. Because it's not using tons of databases and crazy stuff like that. It's just using pages and some multi column layout. So first thing we say here is like our knowledge base needs to be implemented with the just-in-time concept. So when something comes up in our business and we think that would be really good to document it. That's when we document it. And yes, we've kinda created these little subcategories with headings that give us these pages full of processes that we can follow. So a good one that I can show is our video workflow tutorial. We've been building this since 2018. This is our video workflow tutorial, and it's kind of just like a sub page with the exact same layout. We have different subheadings and then sections for things that we do often. A good example here of how we create documentation is to turn frame I'll comments into an ocean Bureau list. I will actually record my screen using a tool called Loom. Talk through what I'm doing. And that gives anybody who's working on this process literal step-by-step video instructions are where they're supposed to do and they embed directly into Notion. And then when we have time, we will also create written documentation and sometimes a full checklist. So we tried to run the gamut in terms of what anybody on the team would possibly need. Whether it's just a super quick checklist or a full breakdown of how to actually do things. I think this is also pretty similar. We have our OBS Output Settings here. We take a lot of screenshots. And this just allows us to very quickly create documentation that helps the team, helps establish processes, checklists, all kinds of stuff like that. I guess we have a channel specific editing guide that I made a long time ago for Thomas Frank Explains and to 2020 this is like right when the thing came out. So this is sort of like level one of how you could use Notion with a team, also with just your own personal productivity. You don't have to mess with databases. You can just create pages and create stuff as the speed of thought. But when you start wanting to do things like sorting, filtering, tubing, due dates, properties, That's when using databases really becomes a very handy thing to do. So I'm gonna switch over to my video demo workspace and show off a demo version of the second brain template that I use. I also sell this as a template that anybody can use, but this essentially runs my own personal life and integrates notes and tasks and projects to group those two things together. I'd also use a little bit of Tiago Forte is para, organizational methodology. I think Tiago, I think Ali, you made a video about that on your main channel awhile ago, maybe about a year ago. And this just kinda gives me a place for everything in my life. And I think the easiest and simplest place to start would be a quick capture dashboard. So I want to place two automatically and very quickly record notes and tasks. And this gives me that I also have a shortcut link on my phone's home screen. It goes immediately to this homepage. This will allow me to, if I switch over to a table, be easier, just instantly add a task. And it basically goes into my inbox. I could do the same thing with notes, so I can add a brand new notes. Take notes as I usually would. And it's going to go into my inbox that lets me very quickly and very easily record new things. It gives me one singular place on all my devices to record both tasks and notes, which is pretty nice in the past, they used to have separate apps for both things. And then I have an inbox where I can process everything and give IT projects. I can give it due dates. And that's going to move them to specific smart lists, just like you would have in an app, like to-do list or like TikTok or Apple reminders. If I add it to a project is gonna go to that project folder. If I give it a due date, it'll go to a specific due date list. And it's basically like a task manager. And this is the cool thing about Notion is like you can replicate existing tools, but Notion gives you the flexibility to bring those tools together and combine them, and also to add in your own customizations. For instance, there's not a tool that I know of that actually gives you the ability to create areas and resources like Tiago teaches in the Building a Second Brain course. So I can just build my own areas and resources dashboard. And when I was reading through toggles material, I was like, I think resources should go inside of areas which is not something he teaches, which is not something he doesn't ever know. But I can just build that inside of Notion and create an area for something like music and then put resources inside that area. So in my interpretation, my resources are just basically buckets for notes that I take for web captures. About a specific topic, like say, music production. And I've got everything in there. And then areas can have actual projects. So this was a song that I was working on in this project has actual tasks like programming the jumps or tracking the chords. But I can also bring in notes like ideas for lyrics, things like that. I can even pull in and tire resources. And if I switch over to my poles view, I get all of my nodes that were in that music production resource inside the project. This is a big thing that I always wanted in basically any project management tool it can never really get. I knew that I'd collected all this material over years or months about a specific topic that will be relevant to a project I was working on. And I had to go looking for it every time I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I could bring in all that material directly into the projects management hub. So I have an entire video on my YouTube channel going over this entire template, which is like 45 min long. So I don't think we have time to go over the entire thing, but hopefully this gives you a bit of a look into how you can start crafting your own productivity systems in a bespoke manner using Notion. Or what else would you find that the baby people often complain about the speed of quick capture into Notion. And a thing like to do as to where it's like a millisecond or Apple Notes, which is a millisecond, It's like compared to Notion with maybe 0.5. The second blank. What's your take on actually the speed of quick capture and into Notion compared to the other things. And what's the, what's the trade off there. So I do agree. And right now I kinda Hackett, I use this tool called Zapier or Zapier. I never know how to pronounce it, but they have a connection with to-do list and they have a connection with Notion. I've built my own custom little Zapier script that allows me to dump things into newest and they just show up instantly in my ultimate brain setup inside a notion that's my interim setup. In the future, I would like to, I don't know either convinced notion to create quick capture tools or maybe create them myself. Do you do the same for notes or do you just for notes? For notes. I really don't. The only I honestly feel like opening a note in Notion is totally fast enough, especially when I have like I've got on my phone, I can't show it, but I have the quick capture page as a widget on my home screen. So I just tap that, tap new note and I'm good to go. Personally, if there's like a few milliseconds, I could shave off of that. I don't think it's a big deal. The one thing I really do want is the ability to speak my mind if I'm driving or out on a walk, just like talk and make an audio recording, have that auto transcribed and have that show up in Notion. I have figured that out, but it's a bit of a Rube Goldberg you kind of situation. I have to use like three different apps to make it work, but I have gotten it to work. The cool thing is you can get pretty much anything you want working inside of Notion. Right now it may not be the most efficient way to do it, but it does give you that centralized hub instead of having to use a lot of different apps. And what I think we're working towards is a future where the efficiency is actually there. To go on a little bit of a tangent here. When I was in high school, I hated Apple products. I don't know why, but I was just like super into MP3 players that were not made by Apple. So I literally was on a forum called anything but iPod. And this was like 2007, maybe 2006. I remember people on that forum being like, why would you ever want a phone that plays mp3s? Because yeah, maybe it does both things like phone calls and MP3s. But a true MP3 player is always gonna be better. It's always gonna be better then a combined device. And it's just kinda funny to look back on that sentiment. Now, having Smartphones, Android phones, and iPhones, like nobody now uses a dedicated MP3 player because smartphones have gotten so good at both things. Nobody would ever want to carry around a single or two devices. They have a single device. And I kinda see the no code sphere, not just notion, but the entire no-code sphere as going in that same direction like right now, we're in that nascent stage. But in the future we're going to have those quality of life features and those customization features. I think web design software kinda got there already and now no code is the next thing that's marching there. Nice. Okay, you're already selling me on this thing of actually using Notion for all of the things because I still have a combination of notion but also helpful nodes but also to do with it. And I'm, I always feel a bit like that's like that's the trade-off, right? Because it's very easy to dump a task into do is dump a note into Apple notes. And then you're like, Well, I want to have a team documents. I'm gonna put that on ocean and then you start going like, where is that thing that I was looking for? And that's kinda what I wanted to get away from. What does your daily notes look like? So let's say it's eight a day in your life, it's the morning. And what are you opening on notion? Take stock of your life and what does that process look like? I'm opening a page called my day. And so one thing I like to do is basically like write out what I'm gonna do as if it were on a whiteboard. So I'll have my calendar right here and it will show me if I have things that are due. If I've marked projects as priority, they'll show up here so I can review them. But I have never, even when I was using wanderlust back in high school and college, I've never liked to use the actual task manager. Even if I think maybe Microsoft to do is like the one exception here because you can mark things as like part of my day and they won't show there if they're due today. They only show there if you specifically mark them. That's what I like. I like. Little ritual of sitting down and writing out here is what I'm planning on working on today, regardless of whether the to-do lists said it was due today or not. Like, I want to make a specific plan for myself. So this is just like an area where I can dump that. And I can look at this and reference it to make that. That's for me personally, not everyone wants to do it that way, but I just kinda like listing out what I'm gonna do, listing out what I'm gonna do in terms of self-care, working out hydration, nutrition, that kind of thing. And it just gives me like a single-page for it. Nice. That's pretty nice. Do you journal in Notion as well? I am very bad at journaling. So I will say that I've built a way to journal inside of Notion. So if I add a new page into this little Daily Journal area, and if I give it today's date, which I could just do add today if I wanted to. I have a daily note template. And this is another really cool thing about Notion is like these blocks can be embedded in multiple places. So this little, I guess, virtual whiteboard that I've got them, the My Day page. If I open up my journal template, I also have it right there. If I was the journaling type of person, I could run my whole life for these my whole day from this template and I could do morning pages, I could do a daily review. I can look at views of my Task Manager and see what's actually been marked as du. And I could even do like a little bit of simple habit tracking. I'm the kind of person who aspires to journal. But then every day that comes, I never get to it because I'm trying to get to the gym and then getting into the projects that I'm obsessed with. Nice, That's fantastic. Can we go back to the ultimate brain kind of dashboard homepage you'll thing. So this is sort of like a Quick Links area, but actually I have a dashboard dashboard. So I guess this is a kind of a cool thing to highlight for people who are getting into Notion. This is designed for desktop platforms, like if you're on a big computer monitor. And what that allows us to do is see things like tasks and notes on the same view. But if you're on your phone, this wouldn't actually be very helpful because it will all get compressed down to one big super long column. So a couple of tricks I use. One thing as I create this little twig Quick Links toggle, which is just a toggle block with a table of contents block inside of it, which will allow you to zoom immediately to stuff. And then I also like to create dedicated pages for things like modules that exist on a dashboard. So e.g. the note inbox has its own page. And this would look really good on a phone and it would be really easy and wouldn't be super-duper long. Nice. And let's say you've got a note. What do you do it what do you then do with setting up once it's in there? I would give it an area resource. I believe I have programming for this one. And that takes it in my inbox. That's it. And then I go into that resource. There it is. My wife flips. We even created a nice little view that will organize our web clips by their URL. Okay, that's pretty cool. Then there was a bit aren't planning. I wonder if we can zoom into that. In your homepage. There was a bit plan. Oh yes. So this is like future planning. With ultimate brain. There's two ways to organize your tasks. There's goals and then projects. And I guess goals don't necessarily only taken tasks because goals may have milestones that are not currently actionable, like hit $50,000 in sales. That's a milestone, but it's not like it doesn't point to an action you can take. I split goals away from projects which should only have actionable tasks, but both goals and projects will have a target deadline. And using a couple of formulas, we can create filtered views that only show us goals and projects that have a target deadline within the current quarter. Then we have a couple of lookahead areas or I guess one look ahead area where we can see all the goals and projects by their specific quarter and this year or if they've been set for a year passed this year, they'll go in the years ahead area. So it's just kind of an area that I created for people who really want to plan out their life and nine day increments or look into the future and see what they're planning on doing in the future. And so what does what does your personal planning process looks like? I'm not thinking I'm curious because I haven't really stumbled. I haven't really figured out like a planning methodology that works for me, but yeah. How do you do plans if till right now? It's a bit more chaotic than this. Like I have a couple of projects I'm working on and I've kind of gotten fortunate to be at the point where I could just like sort of hyperfocus on those things. And so that's what I'm doing right now. And I know I need a poor as much effort as I can into this project. I don't know and I can get it done because it's simply huge, but I'm just going to get it done. So I create the project and ultimate brain, but it's not like I'm coming here all the time looking at this. I built this for people who asked for it essentially. That's kinda thing like when I was creating this, I kinda had to create it from a product designers mindset as well as my own mindset. There were things that I knew I would use. And then there are like the remixes on those features that other people are going to want, e.g. in the to-do list area, I always just use a checkbox for toDo or done. But a lot of other people wanna do like Kanban stages. So I added another property that actually allows them to do that as well. I think that's one of the nice things about Notion is flexible enough that you can create your own whatever system from this thing. And generally what I advise people and what we're saying in the course is that, hey, if you're going to buy a template like this one, then I would always recommend just using it wholesale. But actually more like understanding what the template does, why it does what it does, and then figuring out the method that works for you using the template. Yeah, I think like templates aside, like basically with anything if you get access to a big tool. And I would say this for like Asana or ClickUp or Jira, anything. There's a ton of information out there. There's a ton of ability and capability, your fingertips, but You're not going to really learn it unless you need to use it or want to use it for something that actually matters to you. So don't try to read the whole manual, don't try to use every single tool and a template. Just go, I want to do this thing and now what's the piece of this tool? Lets me do that thing. And through the process of using it that way, you're going to start to understand and become an expert at that piece of it. And then you slowly branch out over time. I mean, this is me using Notion for four straight years. It's not just like getting access to the tool of building this right away. Love it. Okay, so we've taken a look at the ultimate brain system. I wonder, can we take a quick look at the creator, the creator notion system that you've got. And then just sort of whistle-stop tour so that we can, if people want to find out more about that, then they can always hit the language will be down in the projects and resources area or whatever Skillshare call it these days, where you can find loads more information about the greatest companion. So yes, it would be great to just do a quick whistle-stop tour. Yeah, So creators companion is the system that we built as a team to run our entire content creation process. So this one was much more like this is exactly what we are using. Let me just turn it into a template and then add a few bells and whistles. It kinda gives you a dashboard where you can see a page for every one of your channels. So if I go into, say, Thomas Frank Explains, I have a page where all my in-progress videos might be and we have a Kanban view for the stage. So we have planned research writing. I've been kinda get an overview of where everything is. And this is a demo version. I can't show what all the projects I have in progress and everyone is. And then we have completed projects where we can see everything that we have done and published. And this is like the biggest thing I always wanted because proper project management software like Asana back in the day was really only focused on what's going on now. And it didn't really have good guarantees that it's going to be a good library and archive for stuff in the future. Well, when you're a video producer, you have a lot of archival stuff that you really want to have access to, like your scripts or maybe your shot lists. So I'll go to my Thomas Frank page to show good example of that. We have. I know this one is a good example of a project that is pretty fleshed out. We have an entire page for each project that gives us number one, an area for people on the team to have comment discussions about how the video is going. But also, there's basically a piece of this template for every stage in the production process. So we have a researcher notes area where we can do our outline, we can do our research, essentially this brain dumping stuff that we find in the research process. And we want to keep that. We have an actual video script which we will either create as a bolt list or in this case, we created as a full script that actually read out from my iPad memorized lines and then set them to the camera. And then we have things like publishing checklists. So every, every project gets a copy of this checklist, which we can go down and actually checkoff to make sure we're doing everything correctly, like adding tags, adding n cards, making sure we check the video for errors. Making sure we send it to our sponsor if it has sponsored that kind of thing. And we also have a B-roll area where we can look at our shot lists. And like I said before, I want to have access to this stuff even after this project is published, because maybe a year down the line, we're doing another video related to sleep. And we already found a ton of great B-roll that we could reuse. Or maybe there's stuff we didn't even use in the first video. We can go here and we can refer to the ideas, and that gives us a good idea. We're going to find that footage on our server, which is really useful. Another cool thing about Notion, I will expand this B-roll List as a full-page to show you is you can create databases and then create multiple views that have different sort criteria. So this was, I think my first aha moment with Notion. Before Notion I had been writing out B-roll lists in Google Docs and then I would copy them to do it and manually drag and drop them to try to get them in a batched order. Because when you're gathering B-roll for I like it as a creator, you don't want to go in chronological order because you may have some shots over here. You're going to film some shots in the middle you're gonna do as a whiteboard and then some shots and at the end you're going to film as well. You'd want it like batch task all the film shots and then take time to go to all your whiteboard shots. So we have a process where we can create our B-roll ideas. And they're automatically timestamped when we put them as comments and framed at IO, which is a review tool, we can bring that in here and we have the timestamps and then we can tag them as what kind of action do we have to take to get that piece of B-roll? So film. Archive stuff is stuff we already made whiteboard stuff. I'm going to have an overhead camera and drawing on the whiteboard. And we can go over to this Gather tab, which is simply sorted by those tags. And that allows me to go through and batch things efficiently and the gather process. And then when I hand the project over to Tony for editing, he can just go to the chronological view and go right on down the timeline based on timestamps to edit in that most efficient way as well. I guess that's like a single project. So now show a bit of the overall dashboards we built in there. So we have those actual pages for each channel. But if you're running a big operation, like you are all, you've got like, I think two or three different YouTube channels. You might want to see everything that's going on across all channels. So notions board view lets you do this. We have it grouped by project status, but then sub grouped by their relation to our channel database, which means I can see all the projects and progress for the Thomas Frank YouTube channel. All the ones that progress with Thomas Frank Explains for the blog, for College Info, Geek, etc. And you can collapse them as needed. There's a new keyboard shortcut for opening and closing all of these, but I forgot what it is and I don't want to accidentally shut my computer down, but you could do it pretty cool. Then we even have a publishing calendar. So this would have all of our content when it was intended to come out if this were not our demo, amazing. This is Typical. Our system is very much heavily inspired from yours that we, that we use were less checklists with stuff. But every time something doesn't work, I always think ****, if only I had a checklist for this. And then I think, Oh, but the effort to make a checklist feels like too much of a heavy lift. I'm not gonna make it. And then we have mistakes happening and that's really Atul Gawande. They have that book, The Checklist Manifesto that basically sticks to the power of systems and SOPs and checklists. And we use them during surgery and stuff. I just have a repulsion to using them for my YouTube channel. And I really should now that I've seen this. Staff that have checklists, they do for some of their stuff. But yeah, I should I should probably insist upon it a little bit more, especially when if I actually as as as, as, as if I spot a problem, then we can just-in-time create a checklist for it because this is now becoming a problem. It needs to check list. Whereas I feel like when we try and be like, Hey, we need to check list if I everything in the business, it will take a whole year to checklist everything in the business, which is also I guess it's not really the point. Yeah. And if you do it that way, you end up like treating your team kinda like they're kinda gardeners too. I've seen managers like hand tons and tons of checklists to teammates be like, alright, you need to check off every box. And it's like, Well, didn't you hire me to just be good at this? I think it's worth identifying. Oh, we forgot to do something in this process. Let's make a checklist. Yeah, I forgot to hit record on the camera. Let's begin. This is fantastic stuff. We'll put links to all of these in the project and resources area. Where's the best place for people if they're watching this and I like it, They want to learn more about your use of notions slash you. What's, what's the best place for them to support them to offer notion. I've got the Thomas Frank Explains channel on YouTube. My main online hub is just Thomas J frank.com should be pretty easy to find most things from there. And then if you want to connect, I'm on Twitter at Tom, Frankly. Amazing. Tom, thank you so much. This has been wonderful whistle-stop tour through your incredible Notion setup that you guys use to run the business, run your life, where are all the things. Thank you so much for joining us for this bonus segment of this Skillshare class. Yeah, thanks for giving me the chance to show it all off. 23. 4.5 August Bradley's Notion Setup: Alright, welcome back to the bonus section. In this little video we are hearing from August Bradley. August has one of the most popular YouTube channels in the world around notion. And he's all about building a life, operating and like life principle in life design systems using notion, his pillars, pipelines and vaults approach. August also teaches a course about this and it's more than just about how to use Notion. In fact, it's not really about how to use Notion at all. It's more about how to think about intentionally Designing Your Life, where an app like Notion can help facilitate that. And I'll put details of that over in the Projects and Resources video description area. But now let's hear from August Bradley and a tour of his notion setup. Hi everyone, I'm August bradley. This will be the overview video on the pillars pipelines in vaults, life operating system in Notion. Before we dive in, just wanted to mention, we've just launched our online membership community with a lot of people very passionate about knowledge management, performance systems, life operating systems and all these topics across productivity, mental clarity, systems thinking. And if you're interested in those topics, checkout the year zero, collective years zeros about fresh starts and reboots. It's all at year zero dot io. Now in this series and in this approach to building a life operating system, we're big on systems thinking. Systems thinking is the ability to look comprehensively, holistically at how various systems interact with each other and interact with the system that they are a part of the larger systems that they operate within. And when you'd take this very holistic view, you can see how qualities emerge, arise from the interplay across the system that doesn't exist in individual components. This is what makes a comprehensive life operating system and notions so powerful. A lot of people approached notion having little segments of their life, little pieces here and there in different notion builds, but it's not comprehensively integrated. And that's where a lot of the power is. When you haven't comprehensively integrated. You have this emergence where new capabilities, new powers, new insights reveal themselves. Faster ways of doing things arise, more knowledge is present when you're focused on a specific task. All of these different pieces compliment each other when they're interconnected. And that's what this whole approach and pillars, pipelines in vaults is all about. There's nothing wrong with doing a little segment of your life in different parts of Notion or across different apps. But when you take it to the next level and really integrate everything, that's what a lot of these superpowers start to arise because of the interconnectivity. Weigh the different parts of your life are informing each other in revealing insights across the system that you wouldn't get if each piece was fragmented. So first we're going to start with a new diagram that simplifies the organizational structure of the pillars, pipelines and vaults system. And then after that, I'll show you the interfaces that let us control the most important aspects of our lives. And the ultimate purpose of all of this is to accomplish three things. Focus, alignment and knowledge resurfacing at the right time and place. Focus. So that when we sit down to do the work, we have the ability to focus on what matters and do the task at hand and get it done. That's easier said than done, but a well-designed system will help you do that, help you bring the focus to do the things that you tell yourself you're going to do alignment so that the things we do day-by-day, hour-by-hour are directly aligned with our high level aspirations. It's more important to do the right things inefficiently then to do the wrong things efficiently. And alignment ensures that every day, every hour, we're doing the right things, we're doing, the things that are going to move our lives forward, that are going to help us become the people we want to be and help us achieve the things we want to achieve, whether that's work-related or family related, or pertains to mental clarity or creativity, creative output. All of these things require that the time we spend putting effort in is on the things that will move the ball forward that will help us climb the mountain. It's so easy to make our list of goals or list of aspirations at the beginning of the year or even the beginning of a month, and then just drift away from them, loose sight of them as day-by-day, we're pulled in different directions and everything becomes reactive with a system like pillars, pipelines in vaults were able to stay on track with the things that matter because we have alignment across the system. We have direct connections between what we do hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week, month by month, up to our highest level aspirations that we have very clearly defined and articulated. So everything is done with intentionality and in a very deliberate way. And then finally, to be able to quickly capture ideas and information in this firehose of media that we live in to capture the pieces that have insight and meaning to us. Bring them into a system that stores them in a very safe and organized and accessible way than aggregates them into topic categories where our best thinking, the best wisdom, the best ideas we've come across, all aggregate, across each topic in what we call the knowledge vault. And then ultimately, that information is at our fingertips and arises almost magically in the right time and place because it's built into the system and the system knows what matters, when it matters, and where it matters. So the system will have things bubble up in the right context and the right time and place when we need them, because they are captured in such a way that they were slotted into the right tracks to resurface in the right context. That's all part of the system we're building here. That's the vault section, the knowledge management component. The whole pillars pipelines involve system. So with that, let's dive in. This shows the relationship between pillars, pipelines and vaults. Let's first look at pipelines and vaults. Pipelines are the action in our life, the things that go through a process flow with various stages of progress and then ultimately completion tasks and the bottom database, each of these cylinders is a database, a separate database in the system. So we have the action items or tasks database, the project's database, the goal outcomes database, and the value goals database. Don't worry about those, just think of them as a goal database. There's a separate video that explains the distinction between them. So this is progress in process flow. So this would relate to assist them such as GTD or getting things done. This is a different system, but this would cover the scope of GTD. Vault is about knowledge management or personal knowledge management or business context, business knowledge management. This would cover the scope of something like para or building a second brain that all fits within the vault section of the pillars, pipelines and faults system. Each of these is the database, so we have a lot of input databases like the media vault. We recapture books and articles and videos and podcasts and notes and ideas and highlights from all these pieces of information that we saw value in. We wanted to save them into our system so that, that thinking, those ideas would be accessible to us later. And the system will organize these in a way that they will resurface at the right time and place in context. And that is the power of doing this in a comprehensive system. We have a database here on courses and training. This is where your capture notes, the notes and ideas. This is where we capture our own thinking and put it in here so that it can also resurface at the right time and place. And then the tools and skills vault when we review software, when we review professionals are companies that will help us in some way. We do it, but a lot of research and we capture it. And then that research is available in the knowledgeable as we need it as a whole section of videos on personal knowledge management and the knowledge vault in particular that show how this resurfacing and contexts works. But this is the component of the system where that happens. So we've got the pipelines for action and getting things done. We've got the vaults for knowledge management. So what are Pillars? Pillars are not at the same logical hierarchical level of pipelines and vaults, There's something different. So while pipelines and vaults are running up vertically here, pillars are horizontal organizational categories across all of them. So every one of the pipelines and all the databases and elements within the pipelines and all the databases and elements within the vaults. Each will be organized and sorted by Pillars. Pillars are categorizations. They are breaking your life into segments such that everything you do will fall into one of these segments. It's not about a high standard, is not about aspirations, it's not about vision. It's just about categorizing the whole spectrum of your life into different structural categories. Now, these are the big groupings of the categories growth, home life and business. And within these, within growth, we were to have health and fitness. We would have mental clarity, home life would have family, would have friends, it would have social life, it would have personal finances. Business is going to have all the parts of your business. Marketing, sales, product design, product development, customer operations. So each of these segments within these groupings is a pillar. These are the big groupings, but we can see how all the things that fit into the growth segment, all the things that fit in the home life, and all the things that fit into business will then across the pipelines and vaults, organize and categorize everything within all of these database stacks underneath it. They're all organized by these different categories of your life that we call pillars. And then the one element outside of the system is the cycle reviews. Because these are time-based, so these are not organized by pillars. These are periodic review cycles. So we're gonna be doing weekly reviews, monthly reviews, annual reviews to make sure things are on track and see where things are getting derailed and pull them back in line. It's a very important balancing process to keep the system on track and going in the right direction so that we don't drift away from our goals. We don't drift away from our aspirations as we are apt to do if we don't have these periodic review cycles where we check where we are relative to the path we've set for ourselves and realign. And he drifting that has happened. And then at the very bottom, the daily entries are that habits and routines, the things we want to improve in our lives that we're tracking on a daily basis to make sure we're moving forward. So we have habit trackers and we have data tracking to keep an eye on the things we've identified as most important. Not everything, just the most important things. Because the thing is we track, we have insight into, and we know whether they're moving forward or not in the very act of observing them dramatically increases the odds then progressing forward. So pillars are just organization across all the different pipelines and fault elements. Pipelines are action-oriented process flow vaults are knowledge management, structuring it such that it will resurface at the right time and place. And that is the pillars, pipelines and fault system. That's what it does. That's how it's organized. So I wanted to share this just to give you that overview. Now for those new to the system, I just want to show you the top-level Dashboard so you can get a little bit of a look at the window into the system. So this is the command center. This is the top-level Dashboard for the entire system. It's the top-level window into how the whole system works. The system is all about focus and alignment. So in red, the very first column here. Is focused on alignment. Within that we're the action zone in alignment zone, the three big mega dashboards in the system or the command center that were in the action zone, which is all about focus, focusing on what we're doing throughout the day. It's the daily view of what we're doing hour to hour. And I'll show you that in a moment. And the alignment zone, the alignment zone is what ensures that the things we're doing day to day are aligned with our high level aspirations. Through the project level, the gold level and the guiding principle levels. So it'll keep our highest level values and our highest level aspirations in sync with what we're doing day to day and hour to hour. And if you can do that, you're going to move things forward. Your life's can move forward. Your business is going to move forward. The things you want to accomplish in life will happen and you will ultimately become the person you want to become. Because you're steadily, consistently making progress in the direction you have designed for yourself. Then we have three categories here. These are the three pillar categories that we saw here. Growth on life, business, the categorizations. These are the groupings. Within those groupings, we now see the individual pillars we see for growth, health and fitness, mental clarity, learning. We see for home life, family, home and household, personal admin and finance. We see for business, team and administration, client operations, content creation, product development, these are my pillars. You can define these however you want. You're basically going to break your whole life out into anywhere 5-15 categories and everything will break out and they will be grouped by growth, home life, and business and laid out here. Every single one of these is the dashboard. You'll click on those and you'll have a sub dashboard into that section of your life. All of the pipeline elements, the action-oriented process flow, getting things done. Elements of your life within each of these will be presented in an organized and clear way that brings a lot of transparency and what's moving forward and what stuck and all of the knowledge. The idea is that the wisdom and insight that you've either captured from other sources or entered from your own thinking will also resurface across each of these categories in those dashboards. So each of these are the dashboard into that slice of your life. And they're organized by these groupings. And then down here we have databases. This is the organizational structure of the notion assets. So pillars will have the pillar structure, which is what these entries are up here. Pipelines is again, the databases we saw in that previous diagram, the tasks which I call action items, the task database, projects and goals, then some specialty pipelines if you happen to do content creation, I've got to content creation pipeline. If you work with clients, I've got a client operations pipeline. Those down here as well, the part of the pipelines section of the system. And then finally the vaults, which is all about knowledge management. We've got the global vaults and we've got some specialty vaults. All of these are designed to resurface the right information at the right time, making it super valuable because it's at your fingertips in the right context, we have the ability to do quick capture for notes and meeting ideas here. And we can embed widgets, things that are useful, keyboard shortcuts, whether whatever it might be useful, just drop it in these embedded segments if you want. In that is the on-ramp to everything else in the system. To just quickly show you two more dashboards to get a sense of how this actually works day to day. The alignment zone is how we align our high-level aspirations with our daily actions and hourly actions. We start with a guiding principles. We define what is meaningful to us in life, what we value through a process here. We then define our pillars, which are the categorizations we've talked about, Pillar support or things that help you implement and achieve what matters within each pillars. To have a section where we design habits and routines. We have knowledge vault items from the vaults that are related specifically to the pillars. Again, this is pillar support, mindset and identity sculpting work where we shape our mind and our identity. How we see ourselves into the person we want to be, into the person we need to become in order to achieve the things we want to achieve. And health and fitness, all of that supports and enables success across our pillars. Then we set our goals, are high-level aspirational goals that are measurable, quantifiable, tangible steps towards our goals, the outcomes that will get us to our ultimate aspirations which are valued goals, the goals based on the things we value most in life. And then we break our goal outcomes down into individual projects to help achieve those goals outcomes. Or we define habits and routines that will help us achieve those goals outcomes. And then finally, the projects break down into tasks. That is how we achieve alignment. And through cycle reviews, annual, monthly, weekly review cycles, we keep everything on track and if we start drifting away, we realign it. And finally, the actions don't miss how we run our lives day-to-day. So we have this toggle here for today, which has basically a to-do list. Everything is organized by due date, not the DUE date, but the DO date, the date in which we intend to do the item. These are all spread out across the calendar. Each day has a, has its own task list defined by the DO dates. The task list for each day let you have a series of short task list rather than a giant to-do list that is just a burden that will never get done and just seems hopeless. You have shortlist for each day that are achievable. They may be reaches, but they're doable and you have the chance of actually completing everything you set out to do that day, which is incredibly empowering. The idea of these giant heavy to-do lists that are endless and will never get done is just burdensome and it's exhausting and it's impossible to actually live that way. So we play out the next week potentially too, with individual to-do list. For each day, things may roll and adjust as they need to, but it's a rough outline of the next week or two. And it gives you a much more manageable, much more transparent view on what you need to accomplish each day. Down here, we have client operations, so each client we have would be laid out here with a card and all the information for each client. We'd have active projects. So the projects that we've defined as active for this time period would be laid out here. And within those projects, we can see all the tasks in order that we need to achieve. We turn a few of them on active and the rest are queued up to be addressed in the future. And then finally, our goal outcomes. That brings incredible clarity. After my morning startup, I spend my whole day in this one today toggle with that one list. And I just go through them one at a time. The queued up in order. Immediate, quick scheduled items if there's a specific time, then first, second, third, fourth priority. Any Aaron's reminders? It's all queued up. I worked through it in order the night before I set this today priority list. So when I come into the office the next day, it's queued up for me. There's clarity on what I need to do and the sequence in which I need to do it. There's no wondering what I should do and getting distracted and drifting off. There's a clear plan of action every day when I come in because the night before, I have set up the to-do list for the next day. And that's pretty much it. There's lots of nuance and lots of empowering features built within and a lot of connectivity from one part to another that automates and brings the right information into the right place and gives you alerts when things are going off track. But this brings total clarity to your day. Keeps you on track with the things that you've defined are most important to you and gets them done all while capturing the information that you find most valuable and bringing it to the surface in the right place when you need it and keeping it out of the way when you don't need it so that you only focus on the things that matter now and you only have the information that you need to do. The thing that you're focused on. Pillars, pipelines involves organized every aspect of your life. Everything you do fits into it, everything you need to know and every action that has to take place is all contained neatly within this overall structure. And it flows in a way that's intuitive, gives you an incredible transparency on what's working and what's not so that you can adjust as needed. Helps you learn faster, helps you move faster, helps you grow faster. It just empowers you in every aspect of your life. That's why I'm so excited about it and why I've committed so much time and energy to laying this all out. If that's of interest, consider joining our online community. It's a membership community called the collective that's all available at year zero dot IO. I'm also very active on Twitter and happy to engage in a broader range of ideas there. Thanks for watching. Lots more to come. 24. Exclusive Bonus Resources: Hello again. How's it going? Just to let you know, we have just added an enormous amount of totally free bonus material over to my website, which facilitates all of the different Skillshare classes that we have here on the platform. So if you head over to Elliot del.com, forward slash Skillshare resources, that link will appear here and also down in the project and resources section or wherever you happen to be seeing this sculpture often changes the structure of the website. So it'll be linked somewhere on this page and also right here, so you can go to that URL and that will give you access to a bunch more bonus information relating to all of the different Skillshare classes. For some of those that might be Notion templates for some of them might be PDFs and worksheets and bonus material. It's all on the website. It's all completely free and you can check it out with that link. Anyway. I hope you enjoyed the class. I'd love it if you can leave a review if you haven't already and hopefully see you in the next one. Bye bye.