Smart Habit Tracking in Notion | Krista Lamen | Skillshare
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Smart Habit Tracking in Notion

teacher avatar Krista Lamen, Certified Notion Expert

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro and Project Demo

      3:17

    • 2.

      Project Layout

      6:39

    • 3.

      Input section

      7:06

    • 4.

      Learning time tracking | part 1

      3:25

    • 5.

      Learning time tracking | part 2

      7:57

    • 6.

      Stats section

      5:48

    • 7.

      Sleeping time tracking | part 1

      7:19

    • 8.

      Sleeping time tracking | part 2

      7:52

    • 9.

      Daily habits

      1:28

    • 10.

      Overall daily progress

      4:03

    • 11.

      Non 7 day habits

      5:47

    • 12.

      Weekly and Monthly statas

      7:53

    • 13.

      Aestethic tips. Days gallery

      4:58

    • 14.

      Congratulations!

      1:04

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About This Class

You can watch hundreds of videos about Notion and still not get an idea of its real power.

This class aims to show you how powerful Notion is and teach you how to use this power for improving your lifestyle.

Here we focus on using Notion for tracking life routines and calculating the stats for them. Tracking your routines is a good motivation to actually follow them. And Notion is a great helper here.

For more than 3 years Krista has been building life routines tracking systems in Notion. And in this class she will share with you her experience and approaches for building convenient tracking systems in Notion.

YOU WILL LEARN:

  • to build systems that are convenient for logging your daily routines data.
  • to build systems that can analyse and visualize the stats with numbers, progress rings and bars
  • to build systems that are pleasant to use from the aesthetic point of view.

WHY YOU SHOULD TAKE IT:

  • Notion learning curve is steep. To make it easy this class offers you simplified animated explanations and a lot of additional comments.
  • This class is thoughtfully planned. The sequence of lessons and practical parts is not accidental. Everything is planned to be given in the right time and in the appropriate order.
  • Krista has 3+ year experience of building systems in Notion. And you have access to her knowledge shared in this class along with possibility to ask questions in the discussion section.

YOU WILL BUILD

a system for tracking your own daily routines in Notion. This system will take care of adding a new log every day and calculating the stats over your routines. All you have to do - just input your data.

In the class we build a system for tracking meditation, workouts, journaling, learning and sleeping time. And you are encouraged to take your own routines to build a tracking system for. 

YOU CAN FIND KRISTA HERE:

Meet Your Teacher

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Krista Lamen

Certified Notion Expert

Teacher

Hello there! I'm a certified Notion expert and power user with over 4 years of dedicated experience.
I specialize in consulting, creating templates, and courses about Notion.



I worked as a software developer building huge applications. But I always wanted to create software for my personal needs, my life processes and collaborations.

My no-code adventure started from Notion. And it was the One. This tool was a missing puzzle to make it possible to craft software that is best suitable for me. This notebook of new generation opens the whole new world of no-code platforms which are powerful enough to let us create quick and flexible solutions without investing months of work into it.

Making videos is my another passion. That's why I am here sharing my knowl... See full profile

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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