Transcripts
1. Intro and Project Demo: Hi, I'm Krista Lamen, and this is my class about tracking daily
routines in Notion, I have been using Notion for
more than three years now and it totally changed the
way I manage my life. I work with information, I track a lot of
things in Notion. I use it for work, for managing my finances. And of course, I created this class with the
help of Notion, and I want to share with you my inspiration about
this application. I have a wide experience in
building tracking systems. So I decided to focus this class on building a system
for tracking daily routines. Here is the short demonstration
of the class project. It consists of several sections. Goals, Input and Stats. The Goals are divided into three groups based on the data model used for
tracking. Daily habits, which are supposed to be
tracked with checkboxes. Then a routine which is being tracked with one numerical value: amount of minutes spent
for learning in my case. And finally, a routine
which is going to be tracked with
two numerical values. It is a bed time and
wake up time in my case. And to make the system
more interesting, I have added this detail: to learn from Monday to Saturday. Thus we will see how to make the system to calculate daily progress differently depending on the day of week. Input section serves
for data logging. And the Stats section contains all the calculations magic with the overall daily
progress and progress calculated by weeks and month. A fresh empty record appears
every day automatically. Thus all your job is to visit this page and input your data. You're not required to take these same routines that I'm going to add to
the class project. Actually I even encourage you to choose your own habits for tracking and apply the knowledge from this class to
your particular case. Because the main purpose of this class is to give
you several models for tracking that you can apply for your own routines and habits. But this class is not
only about building the system and you
repeating actions that I perform on the
screen. This class is about building the skill that you will apply in your other
Notion systems. I will give a lot of
additional comments and explanations for the features that we are going to use here. Notion Databases,
their properties, progress bars and rings, formulas and the basics
of page layouts. Before we start, there is a quick navigation
guide for you. Whenever you see
the Hammer sign on your screen, It's an invitation for you to do the practical part along
with the demonstration. If I demonstrate some actions in the class project and
there is no Hammer sign, it usually means that I show
some alternative scenario or just an example of how Notion works in
different situations. Ask a question in the
Discussion section if you face a problem or
it's unclear for you how you can apply the knowledge from the class for
tracking your habits. And I encourage you to share the screenshot of your
project once you've done it to inspire other students
and me too actually. Because seeing your results is the great motivation for me
to create these classes. Okay, we are all set, so let's start
2. Project Layout: Welcome to the first lesson! In this lesson, we're going
to set up the project layout, give it some style and colors, and define daily
routine goals to track with this Life
Tracker system. So let's start from opening the app and adding a new
page in the left menu. All the work is going
to happen on this page. You can see all the
shortcuts which allow you to convert the page to a
table or a calendar, but now we need an empty page. Let's give it an ambitious name "Life tracker". Notion pages
consist of blocks. There are many types of
blocks that you can use. You can see all of them by
typing slash / on a new line. There are different
types of textual blocks, like a plain text, headings, several types of lists. You can add media data like
an image or an audio file. You can embed YouTube
video or a PDF document. Many, many options for experimenting and
building very personal, very flexible workspaces,
leisure spaces, any type of informational spaces that you can come up
with. Before everything. Let's change page settings to enable the "full width" mode. You also can change
font settings here, I prefer to use the default one. And let's move on
to the page layout. "Life tracker" consists
of three sections: Goals, Input, and Statistics. Let's add a heading for
every of this section. Type "/" and "1" and
choose the heading of level one, which is the largest
heading in Notion. And let's type a
section name "Goals", then repeat it for
the Input and Stats. Instead of using "/" menu, you can type a name
and use hotkeys. Command + Option + 1 for Mac or
Control + Option + 1 for Windows. Command + Option + 2 or
Command + Option + 3 also convert the block that you're
currently standing on to headings of smaller size. Okay, now let's play with
colors a little bit. Notion has several
color options. You can either change
your text color or change the block
background color. Changing background color makes a section to look
more separated. That's what we need
in this project. So I suggest to change a background color according
to your preference. I'm going to use colors
which are close to these neon night
mood as eventually, I'm going to use this
tracker in a dark mode. Now let's fill the Goals
section. In this class, I want to demonstrate
different models of measurements that can be visualized using
Notion progress bars. To do so, I suggest to define three types
of goals to track. The first group of goals should consist of daily
habits that can be tracked using checkboxes without the need for numerical input. Let is be a list
3-5 daily habits. For me, it will be
physical activity, meditation, and journaling. A good
use case for bulleted list. You can use a "/" menu to
add a bulleted list or type a "-' followed by "space" on a new line to get
the same result. Then let's add a habit goal, which is supposed to be tracked with a single numerical value. It may be "to read 15 pages" or "to write 300 words for your blog". I will set "learning for at least 1 h from
Monday till Saturday". And the last type of
a routine to track is a habit which is supposed to
be tracked with two numbers. I will set a goal for
my sleeping time here, which is to sleep for at
least 8 h every night. With this goal,
I'm going to log the time I go to bed
and the time I wake up and calculate the
overall sleeping time based on these two numbers. If you're not interested
in tracking nor sleeping time, neither
calories balance. Please choose your own routine which is supposed
to be tracked with two numerical inputs
and try to apply the knowledge from this class
for tracking this routine. If you face a problem with that, just post a question in
the Discussion section. I'll be there to help you.
if any of your habits is not daily, define particular
days of week for it, Notion allows to create
multi-columned layout. So let's place every goal group to a separate column.
To add a column. You can either
drag-and-drop Notion blocks, Or type "/column", and
choose a number of columns. To make this layout
looking more structured, we can add a Callout block for every column and move
the goals to it. I will change the color
of the Callout blocks to white. And make the
group names bald. Once you select a piece
of text in Notion page, you will see this menu for text formatting,
Choosing bold. Another way to make the
text bold is using hotkeys, "Command + B" or
"Control + B" for Windows. A Callout block icon
cannot be removed, but there is a good icons
library available in Notion. So it's a good opportunity to make the system look
more appealing. Let's wrap up this lesson with changing page icon and cover. For the icon, you can choose
one from the emoji library, or, again, from the
Notion library. It's also possible to upload your own icon or use a
link to an external one. I prefer to use icons from
the Notion library as they look minimalistic and the colors adjust to the theme. This a page looks good in
both light and dark modes. Same with page covers. You can either upload
your own cover, use an external link or
choose from a library. I will add this neon cover
from Unsplash library. That's it for this lesson. Now we have a basic setup for
the Life tracker project. In the next lesson,
we will learn the basics of using
Notion Databases, which is probably the most
powerful Notion feature
3. Input section: I'm glad to see you
on the second lesson. Here, I will give you a quick overview of
what Notion Databases. And we will add the
most essential part for the life tracker project. That is a database
for daily logs. If you haven't use
Notion Databases before, you will see Notion capabilities from completely new perspective. As for me, the Databases is the most powerful
feature of the app. So let's spend a minute to overview what Notion
Databases can do. Database in Notion is the way to structure and organize any
similar pieces of data. Let's see an example. This is a movies database. Every row represents
a distinct movie. And columns describe
properties of movies, like channel, year
of production, how do I rated, etcetera, quite similar to what Google
tables or Excel can do. In some ways. Notion is less capable and less flexible than these tools, but it has a great advantage
over them in how you can customize the way your data
is shown and operate it. Also, unlike Google tables, every database record in Notion is actually
a separate page. You can open it, some content into it and edit
as any other Notion page, you actually can put
inside another database. So Notion gives you huge
freedom on structuring your data from my
experience when it comes to track and
something in Notion, you will end up with creates
an atleast one database. So I invite you to create a database that will
solve for tracking your goals defined in the previous lesson to
create a database block, let's use the slash menu and choose database
in line option. Let's give it a name daily log, and look at this
predefined properties. Any newly created
database in Notion has these two properties are
columns, name, and tags. Any property in Notion Databases belongs to one of
predefined property types. You can see it by clicking
on a property name. And here in the type menu, you can see all the
available property types. I can change a column type to any other one from the list. Property types are
pretty intuitive. There are simple
properties like text, number, Select Data checkbox. There are out of failed
columns like created time, created by, and some others. And there are some
advanced properties, formula, relation and roll up. For the life tracker, we will use this property types. Every type has its
own unique icon. So you can get the property type just by looking at the icon to the left of its name unless you decide
to customize it. Notion icon library is
available here as well. We don't need to X for our system so we
can just delete it. Name property is a special one. It is title. Title property can never
be deleted or hidden. You cannot add
another title column. It is unique and created
automatically by Notion. And now let's add a new column
to the database as well. Building a system
for daily tracking, we definitely need
a date column here, but instead of using
plain data property, Let's add created time column. This one will be
automatically filled by Notion for every
new log record. Now all of these records contain the same grade at time values. Let's leave only
one record for now. In fact, this title column
is not very useful here, but we can add, get rid of it. For tracking systems, I usually fill it with inline timestamp. This is a special
inline-block and Notion which shows a timestamp
relatively do today. To edit, you have to type
at sign and type of date. For instance, March 15, a day, like last Friday, for instance, or today? Tomorrow. This title will magically
transform to yesterday, the day after tomorrow, it will transform to the
name of its day of week. And after some time you will see a date name instead
of this related name. By the way, you can
use such blocks not only within Databases, but also within some text. And you can actually
add a reminder to it, which is pretty cool
Notion feature. And now let's do
a vertical thin, which will save you and
me from a tedious work of adding new records and fill in their
title of every day. First of all, Notion allows to add templates for its Databases. Two plates allow you
to pre-fill some data and thus to save some time
on creating new records. In our case, adding timestamp as a title
would save us some time. So let's add a new template with a line time stamp as the title. Choose this option
data and duplicate it. Thus, the timestamp will reflect the date of record creation. Another option will stick to the date of creation
that in plate itself, and that's not what we want. So the first option, now, if I add a record based
on this new template, it already has the title field. You can make this template
to be the default one. And I will delete
this second record. Another advantage of using
templates and Notion is possibility to set the schedule
for creating new records. You can set Notion to create new records daily,
weekly, monthly. Actually, you can set up your
own schedule schema because there are additional settings inside of every
of these options, like here, you can set
particular days of week in which you want your
records to be created. And as this class project is supposed to be used
on daily basis, Let's enable our template to be activated every day at midnight. Click Save. And now you can see this blue arrows near
the template name, which means that there is some schedule set for creating new records
based on this template, we can check how it
works right away. But tomorrow you will see a new record in
your class project. To wrap up this lesson, configures certain
rules to make sure that all the records will always be displayed in the correct order. Let's add a sorting
by credit time. I prefer to see the
latest days on the toe. So descending order
works great for me here. If you prefer to see the
oldest day on the top, go with sorting in
ascending order. Okay, we're done
with this lesson and the project has got its
most essential part, that is the database
for daily logs. And in the next lesson, we will finally add our first progress bar
to the project itself. See you there?
4. Learning time tracking | part 1: Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll create our first
progress bar for the project. Let's start with the learning
goal or whatever you're going to track with a
single numerical input, this will serve as the
best starting point for using native
progress bars in Notion, since I configured the schedule for adding new daily logs a day passed and you can see a new record which was added
automatically for today. And note that the timestamp in the title for the previous
day shows yesterday. To begin with the learning goal, a new column of the number type, and give it a name that reflects the nature
of your measurement. I will name my column
learning minutes for you. It may be worth written
or something else. And let's add some random
values to the existing records. Now it's time to open
Edit Properties menu for this new column
to see how we can customize the way this
column is displayed. There is a special section for customizing how number
columns should be shown. This section is only available for columns which store numbers. If you open Edit Properties menu for a date column for instance, you will see a different
bunch of settings. So let's review what
is available here. First of all, Notion allows display in a number
as a currency. There is a wide list of
currencies to choose from. And if you track how
much money you spent, you could choose a currency
to see the number as euro, for instance, if your column contains big numbers
which are not currencies, and you want to see them in
a bit more readable way. Try this number
with calm option. There is also possibility to see numbers and your number
column as a percent. We will take a closer look
at this option later. I will get back to this
plate number format and we can move
on to the xiao as section here you
can set your number to be displayed as a
bar or epinephrine. Once you choose
either bar or in, a new set of settings
will expand. You can choose a color and set a point where your bar
Orrin is fully filled. This divide by parameter, and all the values above
this point will be also displayed with fully
failed bars, orange. Now that we know where Notion progress bars
have been configured, Let's see some examples of using them beyond
our class project, there is a lot of use
cases for this type of data visualization like
tracking your financial health and senior income
trend for visualizing project progress or time
spent for project tasks. And of course, tracking
your daily routines. That's what we're
working on here. So let's adjust the settings
for our tracking goals. I will choose orange color
for the learning time bar. And as I have a goal to spend at least 1 h for learning
from one day till Saturday, I will put 60 as this
divided by perimeter, as I'm going to log data
in minutes, not in hours. You can see now how
the bar is filled proportionally to the time
I'm put into the database. For the values above 60, there is a fully
filled bars displayed. Great, we have just created
the first progress bar, and now you know how easy it is doable with native
Notion capabilities. In the next lesson, we will add the first
formula to the project. So I'm looking forward
to seeing you there.
5. Learning time tracking | part 2: Hello again. In this lesson, we will talk about formulas. I will give you a brief overview of Notion formula capabilities. And together we will add
a percent formula for calculating the progress of the first goal that
were implemented here. That is to learn
for at least 1 h for me and probably
something else for you. Let's start from understanding
what is Notion formula. Formula is one of the
properties of Notion Databases. This property is
indispensable when it comes to making calculations are some data transformations over the data stored in
Notion Databases. You might want to
some expenses in different currencies or
transform minutes to hours or concatenate several
columns text to get a summarized description
of the whole record. Actually, you can even create a custom progress
bar with formula if you are not satisfied with native progress bars
in Notion, Of course, we could do all these
calculations by ourselves getting back to the example with converting
minutes to hours, I could feel the values
for every task manually. And first of all, I would have to do a lot of
tedious additional work. But what is more important
if at some point I realized I had made a mistake and then corrected
the time in minutes. I would have to
remember to change the corresponding ours value. And as a human, I could just forget to do the
corrections at some point. And eventually my records would contain contradictory data
and dealing with formula, you construct it once and
it immediately starts to work for all your existing
and future database records. And you don't need to fill out every formula cell manually. The formula you build
calculates the result for you. Obviously you have to
instruct Notion which exact calculation or data
transformation should be done. And there is a special
language for this purpose. Partly this language is
described in the formula editor. Let's learn some of the most
important constructs of this language so that you could start using it as
soon as possible. Function number one is prop. You will need this function
to take a value from a distinct column to work
with it in a formula, the column name must
be placed within parenthesis after the prop
and be rounded with quote. You will see that
parenthesis follow most of Notion
formula constructs. Parenthesis tell Notion
that everything what's inside relates these particular
comment on the left. We also may think of Prop function as a reference
to a distinct column value. So let's add a formula column to the project and simply
fill it with Prop function referencing
the column that has been created on the previous
lesson, learning minutes. In my case, you can do this
either manually typing the probe function
or by clicking on the property name in
the list of properties. You can see that under
the hood Notion replaces the probe function with the actual value of the
reference to column. All what the formula
currently does is repeating the numbers stored
in the reference to column. And once I change a value
in the learning minutes, it will immediately be reflected
in the formula column. Arithmetic operators
in Notion formula, we can use same
arithmetic operators that you can find in your
smartphone calculator plus to some minus to subtract asterix to multiply
and slash to divide, I can add dividing by
ten, for instance. Or any other
arithmetic operation. Important thing to remember here is that
Referenced Column must be of the numeric type to use it with
arithmetic operators. If I mentioned, for instance, the textile name column and
error will occur even if I put a number to the name because
Notion checks the types, not the values themselves. One more important
thing to know about how Notion formula works
within every formula cell, we can only access the
data from the same record. Formula cannot get data from
records below or above. I cannot get the time
spent for learning yesterday within
the today's record, at least with formula property, there are tools and
Notion to access data beyond a particular record
and do much more magic. I mean relations and roll-ups. This topics are out of
the scope for this class, but if you're eager
to learn them, you're welcome to check out my other class where I dive
deep into these topics, getting back to our
project now that we know about arithmetic operators, Let's use this formula
column to calculate how successful they logged value
is in terms of the goal, the learning goal, in my case, formula for percentage is known, divide part by hall and
multiply it by 100. In my case, the
whole is 66 2 min of learning at a use you
desired number here, like if your goal is to
write 300 words daily, you should use 300 as the
hole in your formula. The part is the
actual log value, which in my case is stored
in learning minutes column. Now that we know
the formula itself, Let's transfer it
to the project. I will rename the column to learning per cent
and build a formula. Okay, work is done. We have percentage calculated, Let's add some period. This long number looks confusing to get rid of
this fractional part, Let's round percent number
with function round. This function rounds
the value placed within the parenthesis
to the closest integer. So just wrap the whole Lauren percent
formula construction with it. Okay, The formula is done, but we're here to learn Notion data visualize
and capabilities. And it would be nice to see this progress not
just as a number, but get some visual
feeling of it. Checkout, Edit Properties menu for this formula
column, as you can see, Notion allows us to customize
this formula just the same way as we did it
for the number column. It's not always the case
for formula columns. Notion only enables the
settings section for formulas which are guaranteed
to return numbers. If I add a new formula column and put some textual
value there, I will not see all
the settings that Notion provides for
numerical values. Notion is smart enough to
analyze the formula that you build to understand if it
always returns a number. And only in this case
Notion will provide you with the possibility to
display your formula column, a progress bar, or Irene, we already have a bar. Let's use a ring this time. I will change the color to
sync with the menos bar. Okay, Do you remember
that Notion allows us to show number in
the present format. This is the perfect case
to use this setting. So let's enable it
and see what happens. Notion itself
implicitly multiplies a value by 100 when
displaying numbers in the present format
to get aligned with this Notion behavior and
save valid percent values. Let's add dividing by
100 to the formula. And we're done for this lesson. This lesson might
have been a bit dense because of
using the formulas, so I'm happy to see you
finished it in the next lesson, we will learn how to show
the same database in different Notion places with
the help of linked views. And we will add length view to start building the stats section
6. Stats section: Hello again. In this lesson, we will explore the
game-changing feature of Notion Databases, linked views, and we
will add a link for you to the stats section
for the class project. What is linked view in Notion? When you create a
database block, you create a home for both data and its views
under the data I'm in database records and
their properties and view is the way to
display them from scratch, you have an initial table
view and you can add as many views as
you need later to see the same data
in different ways. So data in views live together here in the
same database blog. But there is another block
linked view of database, which is a home for views. Only. This block doesn't
store any data, but allows us to invite
any other database data. Look at these blog. It looks pretty the same as the original database
was the only difference. It has this arrow sign to the
left of the database name. We actually can hide it. And now the only way to
understand that it is linked view and not a database
itself is to open properties. There is a possibility
to specify the data source fall linked view for the original database, the source is always its
data and you can change it. Actually linked
view block allows us to add several views just the way irregular database does with the only difference that
N-linked view block. You can add views for
different databases. You can work with data
in length view blog, just the same way you do it
with the regular Databases. You can add, edit,
or delete records, making changes to data
through linked view, your fact the original
data, not its copy. You will see the changes
in the original database. You may add many links views
for the same database, and you may add them
to different pages. Important thing to remember, if you delete a linked view, you only delete the bundle of views that you have
configured in it, and you don't delete
the data itself. But if you delete a
regular database, both its views and
data will be gone. So it's important to
be very careful here. Same with coping. If you copy a linked view, you only copy the views. But if you copy a
regular database, you will get a new
database with copies of all the data stored in
the original database. What are the use cases
for linked views? As an example, we
might want to see today's and tomorrow's tasks as two lists on the same page. Or we might want to see
the same database on several different
pages built for different workflows steps like
on the task planning page, I might want to see a
Kanban board or calendar. And on the action dashboard, I just want to focus on today's tasks in
the class project, I'm going to show you how to use a linked view in order to
separate data input from reading their statistics
will already have the original daily logs
database in the input section, let's add a linked
view to this database, to the stats section. You slash with the word linked to find this length
view of database block. Then choose daily logs
database to be the source. Linked view is added and Notion copied all the view settings
from the original database. Same columns are visible, they have the same width and sourcing configuration
is also here. Let's keep all the
columns shown for the stats for you for
now, probably later, I will decide to hide a column
with men and slogged if the view will get too much
overloaded with data. And now we move back to the original database view
in the input section, I suggest to adjust it
strictly to the input purpose. It is very likely that
mostly I will log data for today or
yesterday anyway. If I miss login for the
days before yesterday, I doubt that I'll be
able to recall what was happening in terms of
my track routines. So this is the case. I will just leave
those day simply and try to be more disciplined
in daily login. So I only want to see records
for today and yesterday. To do so, I have to configure filtering based on the
credit time column. I will use Edit Filter in
relation to today mode. And put to as the amount
of days to be shown. You might want to set this value to three or five or whatever is the amount of previous days that you would like to see for input. I will still see
all the records in the stats section as
there is no filter set. In order to make this view even more comfortable for data login, I suggest you to hide the formula column as it doesn't need to be
filled manually. Notion fills it automatically
based on your input data. And look at this magic
of Notion linked views. I edit data into
input section and it immediately shown
in the stats section, because both these views represent the exact
same source of data, you are free to customize every view strictly for
your particular purpose. In the next lesson, we will do the same for other
routines being tracked. We will live in this input view on the columns which
are supposed to be filled manually and show all the stats data in
the stats section. Thus, you won't need to remember which columns should
be filled by you manually and which of them will calculate the
values automatically? Well done. In the next lesson, we're going to add
tracking of the slip and go or whatever you are
going to track instead. Whereas to numerical inputs
7. Sleeping time tracking | part 1: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will go further in
using Notion formulas. We're going to extend the class project capabilities to track the sleeping time. And I will also
show how to do the same for calories
balanced tracking. If you have chosen another
routines to track, and it's not clear
for you how to apply the knowledge from this lesson
to your particular case. Please feel free to ask your question in the
discussion section. I'll be there to help you. Okay. My goal is to track the amount of time
I spend sleeping. I could log amount
of hours every day, but it's not really convenient because it requires
some effort for calculating time
from getting too bad to get an app,
a small effort. But this is a system is the higher probabilities that
I actually keep using it. That's why I prefer
to log the time I go to bet and the
time I wake up. And let's Notion, do all
the calculations for me. There are several ways
to look time in Notion, you can use date columns or select columns with
predefined options. I'll look time as a
text or a number. And I can say that for me, using date columns is pretty
inconvenient for time login, even if they seem to be so
natural to be used here, you have to make
too many actions. Select columns are
good when there is not too many options
to choose from. Like if you usually
get to bet 10-1130, you could add the seven
options and choose from them. If the range is wider, you will either have to
create a long list or change the timestep from
15 min to 20 or 30. Actually, in my systems, I often use number
of columns to log time values just because it's easier for me
to login number, I sacrifice some accuracy here because usually
I approximate time values in order
to make it easy to convert time value
to a number value. I like number columns
just because it's easier to work with them
in Notion formulas. So I suggest you to try
this option as well. Later in this class, I will show you how to calculate the sleeping time based
on select columns, but we will start from
number of columns. Let's add some values to the existing records to make this system look in more alive. I will do this in
the stats section just because I can see
all the records here. Now it's time to edit
column to calculate the amount of hours
between these two values. So let's add a formula column and start building
the formula itself. To get the amount
of hours we have to subtract the bedtime
from the wake-up time. This formula works but
only for the cases when bedtime value
cross the midnight. For the before midnight
bedtime values, we have got negative numbers
because in this case is bedtime and wake up time
align in different days. And between these points, midnight rosette happened to compensate this
midnight resit effect. Let's add 24 h to
the wake-up time. Not bad. The issue
is before midnight, bedtime values is fixed. But now we have this unfairly
increased number for the case where midnight
reset compensation was not required. I will update the
yesterday record to have two cases before midnight and
two cases after midnight. To remove those extra 24 h, let's add a modulus operator. This operator returns
the reminder or the leftover after dividing
by the number provided, the modulus operator will only affect values higher
or equal to 24. In some sense, this
operator will perform the midnight Rosetta effect to the values which are
missing this effect, if you prefer to use valve
hours based time format, just used valve instead of 24 in the formula with 12 h format, this formula will work
incorrectly if you sleep for 12 h long or longer. If it is a rare case for you, then probably it's
not a problem. But if this is something
that happens regularly, then probably it's better to
use data columns or select columns instead of numbers
are used 24 h format. To finish with this column, let's change display settings to show sleeping hours
amount as a bar. I'm going to track if eight-hour
slipping goddess, heat. So I put eight as the divided by parameter and I will change
the bar color to pink. I suggest to add the
formula for calculating the percentage of achievement
there sleeping time go, just the same way it is done
for the learning Habit. To make things easier, we can just copy the formula and replace
the referenced column. And the value which is used as the divider here
for sleeping time, it should be two instead of 60. And I will adjust the color for slipping progress rings
to be pink as well. I copied the property in the stats view just
because it is visible here and it is hidden in
the main database view. But this property is
also available here. We could actually enable it for showing if it wasn't needed. But this view is supposed to
be used only for data input. So I suggest to hide from this input view of the columns which are not supposed
to be filled manually. Before finishing the lesson, Let's see how the calories balanced could look like
in the class project. To measurements to
look here would be calories intake and
calories burned. I would use number
of columns for them. A formula column for calculating
the resultant amount. Just abstract burned calories
from the calories intake. And I would add another
formula column to calculate the calories amount towards my desired daily calories value. The same percent
formula that we used for learning and
sleeping time tracking. I'm glad you've
finished this lesson, and I hope that
now you feel more comfortable with
Notion formulas and probably get some
ideas of how you could use them for your
other Notion systems. In the next lesson, I
will show you how to use select columns
for time login. We will use very
useful functions, slides and to number. They're probably in
the top five functions that I use in my
systems all the time. So don't miss it out. See you on the next class?
8. Sleeping time tracking | part 2: Hello again. In this lesson, I will show you how to use
select columns for time Logan, if you're not going to
log your sleeping time, I still recommend you to
stay because we are going to discuss here some very
useful Notion functions. So let's start by
adding two columns of CELAC type and
preconfigured list of options for every of them. First of all, I will rename the existing columns to
release the bedtime and the woke up names for the new columns and then
add new Select Columns. Now, let's configure
the bedtime options. The menu for
configuring options is available under the Edit
Properties settings. Just type an option and
press Enter to have it edit. And let's update the colors to make the options
look more consistent. Now let's do the same
for the vocab column, which will have its
own range of options, but the process of adding new options is the same as
for the bedtime column. I can figure time options
that are relevant for my bedtime and the
time I usually wake up, please choose the values
which are relevant for you. For the values before ten, use as zero in the beginning, it is important for the changes that we are going
to add here soon. You may choose the same color for all the values
if you prefer. And let's choose some values for all the existing records. And now we have to calculate the time difference
between these two values. When it comes to calculations, Notion only accepts
numeric values. We can add, perform
subtraction over select columns as
under the hood, Notion sees them
as pieces of text. But once we convert
these values to numbers, we can go with the
formula that we have already built in the
sleeping time column. And I suggest to do
this conversion in this number columns as they already used in the
sleeping time formula. So eventually these
columns should contain numeric representation
of time values from the select columns. For 730, for instance,
there should be 7.5. Of course we need to change
them to formula type. We could delete
these columns and do all the conversion within
this sleeping time formula. But in this case, the
sleeping time formula would look too complicated. Later you will see why I suggest to you this
intermediate columns. Thus, we divide the whole
process into two steps. On the first step, we convert values from the select
columns to numbers. And on the second step, they time calculation happens
in some cases convergent texture numerical value can be done simply by adding
two number function. This function converts a content placed within the
parenthesis to a number. There is no magic. If you try to convert word to a number, you will get nothing. If you configured the
select options list to have numbers, you actually could just wrap up their references ways
to number function. But if you use this good
looking time values, you will need to
convert them into numbers in a bit
more tricky way. Let's decompose this
task to smaller tasks. I use the zeros for time values
between midnight and ten, and I do it for purpose. As I make it easier for me to convert these values to numbers. To perform the conversion, I have to derive
first two symbols. This is number of hours than
I have to derive the minutes and divide them by 60 to
convert minutes to hours. Finally, I have to
sum these two values. So the main problem
here is to cut off parts which represent
hours and minutes, a perfect task for the
slides function size carts apart from a text-based that we give to slice in
the first block. And we can tell this
function where to start slicing and
where to end it. Text bases or strings
consists of symbols. Every symbol and a string has its sequence number zero
for the first symbol, one for the second, etc. similar to fluoresce numbering, which starts from zero
for the ground floor, we can use the
sequence numbers to tell Notion where to
start and where to analyze in Notion understands
this numbers as before which symbol it should start and before which symbol it
should add slicing. That's the simple mentioned
in the second block, will be included into
the resultant slides. And the symbol from the
third block will not, after the slice in Notion will return this part of
string and it will contain the zero symbol S and will not contain
the edge thimble. Oh, if I wanted to only get the last words in this example, I have to instruct slides
function this way, providing 11.18
to the second and the third blogs note that there is no visible 18th symbol, but we're F2 it as if it were there in order to get
the tail of the string. Actually if we want to slice it the tail
part of the string, we might only tell Notion
about the second block. Notion will understand that we want a tail and
we'll give it to us. And now let's apply
this function to a time value from
the select column. First, we need to
get the our value. To do that, we need to put
0.2 into slides function. Let's write it to
the bedtime formula. Notion always
considers the result of slicing as a text pays, no matter it contains
digits are now, but we want to work with
bedtime as with numbers. And this is a perfect case
for using to number function, which will make Notion work with this output of the slides
function as with a number. Let's do the same for the
waking up time formula. And you can see that the sleeping time
formula already works, but currently it
only counts hours. So we have to add a managed
part to the converted values. Class function will
help here as well. To cutoff minutes part, we have to put 3.5 into
the slides formula. And again to number
function is needed here. As long as we have to
convert everything to ours. Let's divide this
managed part by 610. And let's copy this managed part for the wake-up time formula. Cu, We are done. Now you can hide all
the formula columns and only live cells fall again
time in the input view. And I will also hide this intermediate
number of columns in the stats view as they don't give any additional
information here and only serve to simplify the
sleeping time formula. Congratulations, it was
nationally the lesson. If it goes hard, if there is something
unclear or you prefer another way to
log you sleeping time, please ask a question in the discussion section and I'll be there to help you
the next lesson. We'll compensate a little bit. It will be short and easy. So again, I'm waiting
for you there
9. Daily habits: Welcome to this lesson. Here we will extend the class project to
track Daily Habits, to track daily habits, we will use checkbox columns. Checkbox type is
perfect when there are only two possible
values for property, yes or no, true or false. In the context of
Habit tracking, we're going to mark if
a habits related action is done on not just
two possible values. So our needs are satisfied with jukeboxes
pretty well here. You can also change columns, icons to reflect the nature
and sense of your habits. Notion doesn't show this nutrient box columns
in the stats view. So I have to do this explicitly. And let's rearrange the columns to make this system look better. Okay, this is done. Let's see it for
this short lesson. Finally, we have done everything
needed to log the data. And in the next lesson, we will move on to calculating the overall daily progress
based on the logged data
10. Overall daily progress: Welcome to this lesson. The project is ready for
logging your data and we move on to calculating the
overall daily progress. Let's start from figuring out
of the calculation logic. We will measure daily
progress at the percent of completed activities in
my particular system, there are five activities
being tracked, learning, sleeping,
and 3 daily habits. So the overall progress consists of progresses
of those activities. For simplicity, let's consider them to
be equally important. 100% of success means
the Taylor and for 6 min slept for at least 8 h and
it worked out a meditation. And my journaling, every of these five activities checks one-fifth of my daily success. So I know the whole for
the percentage formula, which is five, to get aligned
with five as the whole, I have to convert
the progress of every activity to numeric
value on the range 0-1, where zero means 0% progress
and one means 100% progress. And then sum up
these values to get the part perimeter of
the percentage formula. Let's start building the
overall percent formula. In this lesson, we will
focus on the stats section. So I will add this new column
to start sections view. For now, I will use zeros
as placeholders for the progresses of
my five activities and put five as the hall. And soon I will
replace the zeros with the progresses of my activities measured in the range 0-1. For the learning activity, it is pretty easy. I can just use the output of the learning
per cent formula. Remember that under the
hood Notion multiplies this number by 100%
for Martin is enabled. But if I reference learning percent column in the formula, Notion is this the
original value? Same for the sleeping time will already have a formula column which converts sleeping hours to the percent based progress. So you can just take the
output of this formula. Now, daily habits, we use
checkboxes for Daily Habits. Checkbox has done give any space for intermediate
values and activity might either be
marked as done or not in terms of the overall
present formula, the values for daily habits
may be either zeros or ones. So our task here is
to convert and check checkboxes to zeros and
check checkboxes two ones, Notion allows to do this pretty easily with the number function. Just wrap a reference to
a checkbox column with this function and get zero or one depending
on the checkbox state. So let's replace zeros in the overall
percent formula with references to daily
habit properties wrapped up with two
number function. The formula is almost ready. We sum up the progresses
for every activity and divide the result by
the amount of activities. I will not multiply it by 100 as I'm going to enable
present for myosin. And Notion will implicitly do
this multiplication for me. And I will set gray color for
the overall progress rings. You may have different
amount of activities. So probably you will use six
or seven as a divider here. Okay, we're done with the most important part
of the overall formula. Just a couple of
things left to finally finish with formulas
and the class project. And in the next lesson, I will show you how to
add support for non seven days habits to the overall formula
Self. See you there.
11. Non 7 day habits: Hello again. Here I will show you
how to add support for non seven days habits to the overall progress calculation
to the class project, I have set a goal to learn for at least 1 h since
Monday till Saturday. And now I want to update the overall progress formula
to reflect this condition. Let's return to the
progress Formula logic. This logic is based on
the expectation to have five activities done daily
to reach 100% success. But considering the
learning time goal, this value of five should be
replaced by a dynamic value, which is calculated based
on the day of week. I want this number to
be 54 days from Monday to Saturday and four are
for Sundays as on Sundays, I don't expect any progress
for the learning activity. Notion allows to do that, and we will need to
new functions here. One of them is day. This function returns a day of week has a number
for a given date, zero for Sandy, one
for Monday to Tuesday, and so on until
six for Saturday. Notion has a bunch of functions
which works similar way, year, date, month, our, etc. the next function is a function. It is used to change formula output dependent
on some condition. This is one of the most useful
Notion formula function, so it's time to figure it out. Their skeleton is never changed, but these three blocks will change depending
on your needs. The first block is a condition, which means we put a
question here which may only be answered by yes or
no, true or false. In other words, we put the instructions for the yes
case to the second block. And for the no case
to the third block, Notion will execute
instructions from either the second
or the third block, dependent on the answer to the question here
in the first block, Notion will never execute both the second and the third
blogs instructions. It will always run only
one of these blocks. Let's see how it works in
the context of getting four or five depending on the
day of week. The condition. Our question here is, is this record for Sunday if
years we need 4.5 otherwise. In fact, after figuring out the answer to the question and the first block Notion will replace the whole
if construction with either the second
or the third block. In our case Notion will replace the if construction with
either four or five. In more complicated cases, there could be nested IF functions instead
of four or five. And in such case, Notion would continue
to calculate what is the final value to replace this whole initially if
construction with, now let's ask our question in the proper way so that
Notion could understand it. We already know
how to get the day of week with the day function. And to complete the question, we have to check if the
day number is zero, which represents Sunday for
the day function output for comparison in Notion formula
use two equal signs. And now let's type
this formula in a separate column to make
sure it works properly. The formula works well. It returns for for Sundays
and five father days. If I wanted to skip my learning Habit on
Saturday says Well, I would add this OR operator
to the condition part of the IV construction and repeat the J check for the Saturday, which is six in re
function output. That's Notion would
return for instead of five for both
Saturdays and Sundays. And even more complicated case, if I wanted to skip not only learning but also
journaling on Sundays, I would need to S3
instead of four for Sundays as two
activities are supposed to be legally
skipped on this day for four Saturdays and
five for the days. This is the perfect case for using nested IF constructions. I will remove this check
for Saturday and put three instead of four to
get three for Sundays. And now I will replace five
with an aesthetic function, which will check if
it's Saturday and give me four or five
depending on the answer. Notion will process this
formula this way for days other than Saturday
or Sunday, is it Sunday? No. Okay. Then maybe
it's Saturday? No. Got it. Five activities I expected
to be done for Saturday. Is it Sunday? No. Okay. Then maybe
it's Saturday? Yes. Got it. For activities I expected to be done and for Sunday,
is it Sunday? Yes. For activities as
opposed to be done? I will return to my initial
simple IF function. And now let's replace
the divider in the overall progress
formula with the calculation that we have built in this separate column. This is actually a good example
of how we can work with lung formulas to minimize the risk of breaking
it are getting lost. You may build separate
pieces of a formula in a temporary formula
column and then copy the result to the
main formula column. Now you can see
that for Sundays, myths and during activity
is not needed to get 100 per cent for the
overall daily progress. And I can say were
pretty down here. All the logic behind this
system is finally done. And we can move on to the final views adjustments
to make the system more convenient and useful in terms of statistics calculation
12. Weekly and Monthly statas: Where clause to the finish. And I'm glad you went this far. In this lesson, we will explore Notion database settings for calculations over
the log to data. First of all, let's take
a look to the date. You can see that
this automatically filled timestamp is too long. It includes time, not only date. I don't really like
these phobias format, so I will share the trick
that are used in such cases. I add an extra formula
column in which I format the creation time the
way Like it with the help of former date function for
mutate function converts a given date to a text in the way you instructed
in the second block. Here are several examples
that you can use. I prefer to see month
followed by date. And now let's hide
creation time column from everywhere and live
this well formatted data. Instead. We already have this stats view which shows all the calculations done over the log data and it's time
to adjust the column size, show hide some columns to make this view look the
way you prefer. Notion doesn't let you make the column as narrow
as you wanted. Use this trick, change the
column type to checkbox, then narrow it down and change its type to
the initial one. You will get all
the values back. And now let's explore
wish calculations Notion allows to do over your data
beyond database formulas. First of all, you can use this calculation settings
under the table view, there are different
calculation modes available. You can sum all the values, see the highest one, or calculate the average number, which is the most suitable
for this tracking system. So let's add calculating
average where it makes sense. And now I will share with
you a trick which will often help you and build in
similar systems in Notion, you can see that
currently the average for my sleeping time is about 5 h, but actually the average
is more than 8 h. And this calculation shows
five only because it is affected by
this empty logs. So this empty logs
kind of pollute my stats data and
I'm going to fix it. So let's take a look to the
sleeping hours formula. Currently, the
formula takes values from the vocab and
bedtime columns. No matter these
values exist tonight. But I actually can
instruct the formula to check if there are
values in these columns. Proceed to slip in time calculation only
if bedtime and wake up time exist and just leave the cell empty in
the opposite case, let's see how it
works in practice. If statement will serve perfectly
here, equation will be, is woke up hours or bedtime
hours empty in case of, yes, I want to see an MT output in case the values
and attempt to, I wanted to see
the sleeping time calculated and I already
have no case implemented. Let's look at the question to
ask it in Notion language, we will need empty function. This function checks
if a given argument is empty and returns
true if yes and no. Otherwise, you can give to it
a reference to the column. So we can just use
empty function with the references to bedtime
and wake up time columns. And the question for
if statement is ready. Now let's move on
to the yes case. We cannot leave this part
of if statements empty, even if we actually want the
formula to return him to result to MC quotes represent
empty string value. In some cases, put into
quotes would be enough. But in this particular case, we have to add one
more update here. Notion doesn't allow
to return a text in the case and a
number in no case, it wants to see both yes and no cases
returning outputs of the same type in
our particular case Notion already treats
are no case as a number. So we have to make this empty
string to also be a number. To do this, you can
use to number function the one that we used for converting checkboxes
two numbers. It is a bit confusing because in both cases the output
is an empty value. But the difference
for Notion is crucial because Notion looks
at the types first. Okay, let's try to update the formula according
to this instruction. You can see there is an
error from Notion which disappears as soon as explicit conversion
two numbers added. I will refresh the page to have this average
value corrected. Now you can see that
average flipping time is more than 8 h and interactors
doesn't affect it animal. In the context of our
system, this trick, Mandy, makes sense for the activities which are tracked with numbers, not checkboxes, and which are not suppose
to be done daily, like learning in my case, I will add this same change
to learning per cent column. And to be consistent, I will add the same change
to slip in percent column. Okay, now I invite you to explore Notion
grouping capabilities. Let's copy the stats view tab. When you copy view tab, the copy will have the same configuration of columns to be shown together with filtering
and sorting settings. And this new view
is synchronized with the original database and all the changes
made to the records content will be reflected
in all the other views. And now let's enable grouping
by date and adjusted to use a week timeframe to group the records and showing the
newest week on the top. As you can see, Notion has
split the records into groups. Each group represents
a separate week and all the calculations under the table I performed
for each group. Additionally, you can
choose one value to be calculated and displayed
next to the Week name. Let's set it to be the average
for the overall progress. This way, you can see how it progress was
from week-to-week. And if you collapse the groups, you will still see the average for the overall daily progress. Let's rename this view to buy weeks and create another
one with the same settings, but with records
grouped by month. As soon as a new month begins, Notion will add a
new group for it. I will rename the first
view tab to stats and fill the empty records with some random data to make the
system look more or life. We have made the system
more verbose and readable. In the next and final lesson, we will add some
beauty tweaks to make the system or
pleasant to use. So see you there.
13. Aestethic tips. Days gallery: Welcome to the final lesson. You who will make
the life tracker more attractive and beautiful? I have three new records here, so I will let some data to them. And now let's try one more
way to display the data in Notion Databases,
a gallery view. This view allows to show every
record as a separate card. You can even add
images to your cards, but we don't really
need it here. So I'm disabling
the card preview. Small card size will
serve me better here. Now let's enable the properties which should be
shown on the cards. I think the overall daily
progress should go first, then daily habits, then sleeping hours, and learning time. I prefer the bars here. They easy to read for
me than the rings. And I want to get a feeling
of a day progress by taking a glance to this
hopefully fully filled bars. So I will only show the sleeping hours and
learning time and my cards. I don't really like how
these two properties are too close to each other on my cards and there is
a trick to fix it, I will add a formula property, which will always
return an empty string. And put this property right after the overall
progress on my cards. If you use the same trick, you might want to fill this separator formula with
dashes are some images. Instead of M2 line. I prefer to see the empty line, so I will roll back this change. Just the same way we
did it for TableViews. We can add grouping for
gallery view as well. So let's add grouping by weeks. With calculating the average for the overall daily progress. I will change the sorting for the ascending order to see
days from Monday to Sunday. If your page is wide enough, you will see every week as
a separate line of cards, which looks pretty good. So I will set this view as the default one by moving
it to the very left. To finish with the views, I will add separate
ones for Daily Habits, sleeping, and learning goals. This views, I will enable all the columns relevant
for those routines. Notion allows to use custom
icons for the views. So you have this freedom of choosing icons of
your preference. To wrap up, let's add a color-coded map to make
the data even more readable. Let's add a new column to the left of this statistics use. I will zoom out a little bit to see each week on one line. And now let's add
the code blocks with different color
settings to designate which color of your stats
relates to which activity. You might want to add some inspiring image
with a quote or something what motivates you or section for quick notes
about your routines. There is also plenty of
space in the input section. So some horizontally
oriented image could look good here as well. I think that please neon style goes much better
with the dark mode. If you liked this image, you can download it from
the Resources section. And finally, I can say that you are done with
the class project. Congratulations. I hope now you have a good idea of what Notion laws to do with your data using its native progress
bars and view settings. And you have your
daily tracking system now which is ready to be used. Please show it to the world. I invite you to add
a screenshot of your system to the
project section. And remember, if you
have any questions related to tracking life
routines in Notion, you can ask it in the
discussion section and I'll do my best to help you
14. Congratulations!: Congratulations, you have
completed the class. I hope it was useful and now
we have an idea of how to apply Notion features for
tracking what matters for you. I asked you to share
the screenshot of your class project to
celebrate the completion and inspire other students and me either actually a feedback about this class
is very welcome. It is very quick to do at
extra message is not required. But if you have something
to say about this class, an idea about some other class that you would love to see here. Please share it. It will help me lot to improve
my future classes for you. If you want to keep
in touch with me, please visit my blog where
I share my knowledge and experiences in Notion
for improving my life. If you want to go deeper
to the database topic, I totally recommend you my
other course on the platform. It has great reviews and I cover so many aspects of Notion
Databases there in a profound way that I think it definitely worth trying for a person who wants to embrace
the real power of Notion. Thank you for
learning with me and good luck and build a
new systems in Notion
Krista Lamen, Certified Notion Expert
