Time-Tracking in Notion — For Yourself or Your Team

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Christa. I'm a certified notion expert and system designer with a backhand software development background. For the past five years, I've been building custom setups and templates for people who want their tools to actually work for them, and I've helped thousands learn to use notion in a clear, simple way with the help of my educational content. This class is for anyone who wants to understand where their time goes, whether you're tracking your own work or your whole teams. We'll build a convenient and thoughtful time tracking system in notion with timers, buttons, dashboards, and smart formulas that do the math for you. Within the class, you can either build everything from scratch or extend your existing task management system with time tracking capabilities. You will be able to log your sessions and see how much time every task and project takes, and you will see your time tracking analytics by month by person, by project. And you won't have to figure anything out on your own. We'll go step by step and you will have access to companion document with all the formulas that we use in the class. Okay. Now let's take a look at the project that we are going to build together. 2. Project Demo: So what is the system that we are going to build here? By the end of this class, you'll have your own time tracking system in notion. It will include databases for sessions, tasks and projects all connected, and you can also use your existing task and project databases if you already have them. Buttons to start and stop timers with the ability to return to the same task multiple times. A way to see the total time spent on each task and project, as well as how much time each person has contributed. Dashboard showing where your time has been going over the past weeks and months with options for both free and paid notion accounts. And since this is a system for real people, we'll add a convenient way to log forgotten sessions and college the ones you forgot to stop. You'll be able to follow the whole class with a free notion account. It only gives access to one chart, but don't worry. In this class, we'll not only set up charts, but also alternative views to visualize the same data without them. You can use the system by yourself or adapt it for your team. If you want to extend your existing task management system with time tracking capabilities instead of building the whole project from scratch, just apply all the changes to your existing tasks and projects databases instead of creating new ones. To make things easier, I've prepared a page with all the formulas that we're using in this class. So you don't have to post the video and re type everything. You can just find a formula by the number that you will see on the screen every time we add a new formula and just copy and paste it. After finishing this class, you're not only getting the ready to use time tracking system, but you will also know how everything is working inside it. And this is the most valuable because it will give you the freedom to change and to adopt the system for yourself in the future, especially considering that in this class, we're going to practice with every notion lock that is essential for build smart, useful and helpful systems. Okay, so time to start. 3. Time Log Setup: All right. This is our very first practical lesson. Most likely, you've already used notion for a while, since time tracking isn't exactly the first reason people come to it. I'm guessing you already have some kind of system for managing tasks and projects, and now you just want to add a time tracking module. If that's not the case, no worries. In the next lesson, we'll sketch out a basic setup for managing tasks and projects in notion. But if you've worked in notion before, then you probably know its most powerful feature is databases. That's where we'll start. We're going to create a database to track work sessions or anything else you need time tracking for. So let's create a new blank page and call it time tracking. This is where all the setup for this master class will happen. Next, let's add a database. To do that, I type a slash, then table and choose TableView. You'll see it marked as a database. Let's name it time log. Now that it's created, we can start editing the columns. But first, I'll make the page full width. Click the three dots in the top right corner and choose full width. That gives us more room to work. Each session we track needs a start time. So I add a date column name it start and change the format to month, day, year, or whatever format you prefer. Then I duplicate that column and rename it end. This way, I don't have to change the format settings again. Let's create a quick sample entry, just to have something to work with. Now I'll add another column. This time, formula. This formula will calculate how much time passed between start and end. Formulas in notion are incredibly powerful. They let you do some really amazing things. Personally, I love them. But since this master class isn't about learning formulas in depth, I'll keep it simple. Some formulas, I'll write from scratch, others, I'll just paste in. You already have access to the formulas document. And every time I use one, I'll show you its number on the screen. So you can quickly copy and paste it. All right, let's write the formula. We want to calculate the number of minutes between end and start. Notion has a built in function called date between. We give it end first, then start, and we set the unit to minutes. Let's save the formula. Perfect. We can now see how long this session lasted. And when I change the dates, the result updates. Next, let's add another formula to show the same value in hours, we'll name this column spent hours to calculate it, I'll take the value from spent minutes and divide it by 60. Save and set it to show two decimal places. Nice. Now we can track time both in minutes and in hours. Let's add a couple more columns. I'll create select property and call it status. We'll use it to mark each session as active or completed. I'll set completed to gray, so active stands out more. Sure, we could see if is filled in to know if it's finished, but a status property makes it faster to spot which ones are active and which are done. I also want to add a way to indicate who worked on this session. If you're going to use this system for personal tracking, you might not need that. But if you're part of a team, obviously, you need to know who logged the time, though you definitely want to add a person property. I'll limit it to one person. Although if you're tracking things like group meetings, you might want to allow more than one. And with that, our time log database is ready to connect with a task and project system. This isn't the final version. We'll improve it later in the master class, but this gives us the essential structure to track how much time is spent on each task or project. Right now, I don't have a task and project system set up on this page. Of course, I have one in my personal workspace, but for the sake of this master class, I'll build a simplified version, and we'll do that in the next lesson. If you already have your own linked tasks and projects, feel free to skip ahead. 4. Tasks & Projects Setup: All right, tasks and projects. Now we're going to create the simplest databases, one for tasks and one for projects. We'll link them together, and in the upcoming lessons, we'll be working with the structure and building everything related to time tracking inside it. The process is very similar to what we did before. Below the time log table, I'm creating another table view. I'm naming it tasks. Later I'll move things around. But for now, all the databases will live on a single page. Before we move on, I want to mention one small nuance. If you can't place a table under the time log, that most likely means you created your first database a different way. What do I mean by that? Well, there are several ways to add a database in notion. The one I use with the slash command adds the database as a block, which means you end up with a page and inside it block that is a database. In notion, everything is a block. Text is a block, a bullet point is a block, and yes, a database is also a block, but notion also allows you to expand a database to take up the entire page. That means each database can become a full page on its own. And if you use the prompt at the bottom, you probably transformed the entire page into a database. And in that case, yes, you can't place anything underneath it. So if that's what happened to you, here's what I recommend. Create a new page, move your database inside that page. And then select the turn into inline database adoption from the menu, expand the page width, and that's it. You'll end up with the exact same structure as if you had added the database as a block from the start. Now, let's go back to the task setup. What do we do here? We rename name to task and let's add some basic properties. The ones that most tasks usually have due date, A person. Of course, this one is optional if you are using the system for personal planning only, and let's also add a status. Now we do the same for projects. Create a new database, tableview again. Let's name this one projects. We'll need the project title a status. Something like planned, active, or completed, and let's head managed by that is the person responsible. Now, let's connect the projects database to the tasks database. To do that, we add a new column of type relation, and we choose which database to link it to. In our case, tasks. Let's make it a two way relation so that we can not only see the tasks from within the project, but also know which project each task belongs to. We renamed this property to project And what do we have now? We have tasks and we have projects and we can link them to each other. If you're not sure how relations work yet, I really encourage you to explore it deeper because this is what makes notions so powerful, this ability to structure your data into databases and then connect them. So how does it work in practice? Now that we've connected the two databases, let's create a project, my new project. Now, when I create tasks, I can link each task to this new project. Here in this dropdown, all of your projects will be visible. Let's say I've got task one and task two. I can now see their relations inside each record. I open a task and I immediately see which project it belongs to. But that's not all later on, and we'll do this together. This relation will let you show a filtered table inside the project page with only the tasks related to that specific project. And the best part, you don't need to create a separate table. For every project. All the tasks will come from your central tasks database. We'll stop here for now and in the next lesson, we'll connect time tracking to our tasks and projects. 5. Time Summary: This lesson, we're going to link our time log database to the task and project system, and we'll set up a way to display how much time was spent working on each one. To make it a little more fun, I've already filled the tasks and projects with some test data. Now, let's connect them to our tracking system. So what do we do first? We had a column of type relation in the time log database. And link it to the tasks database. This will connect our work session logs to specific tasks. I'll name this column task, since each session will most likely belong to one task. Let's also enable the two way relation. So the time log is visible inside the tasks database as well. Perfect. Now, in the tasks database, I see a list of all the time log entries related to each task, and in the time log, I can choose which task a session belongs to. Before we go further, I'll quickly add a few test entries. So we have something to calculate and display. That looks better. The log isn't empty anymore. I'll also make it a little more compact by disabling the wrap column setting, which was breaking long names into multiple lines, and let's keep going. Now that we have a connection between the tasks and the time log, we can calculate how much time was spent on each task. That's what we're going to do next. Let's also make this table a bit more compact. Now I'll add a new column of type formula, and I'll call it spent minutes. In this formula, we'll take all the related time log entries and use the amazing map function to pull the time values from each log and sum them all up. So now, not only do we store the duration in the time log, but we also see the total time spent directly in the task itself. If you've linked several sessions to one task, the formula will show the total time across all of them. The map function is really powerful. I won't go too deep into how it works here, but it lets you grab data from connected records. So anytime you have a relation in notion, you can use map to pull something from the other side. Inside the parenthesis, you use the magic word current and then select the field you want from the related database. For example, if I remove the sum, I'll see not the total, but a list of values like how many sessions are linked and how long each one took. Sometimes that kind of info is useful too. You can filter the data, extract unique values, or build more advanced combinations. In short, map is the core behind many powerful and informative formulas in notion. It lets you surface summarized information without having to open every single project to task card. Let's go back to work now and add another column showing time spent in hours. So I create another formula column, name it spent hours. And here I could do the calculations. Either based on the time log records or simply dividing by 60, the time stored in spent minutes column. I'll set it to show two decimal places. And now we see how many hours were spent on a task. Next, we'll add the same calculation to the project's database. Let's tidy it up a bit first. Then I add a new formula column. For projects, it probably doesn't make sense to count minutes. We'll just count hours. We'll take the related tasks, use the map function again. And pull the spent hours value. We just calculate it for each task and sum it up. Quick note, you don't need to type these formulas by hand. If you miss a dot, a quote, or a bracket, it just won't work. That's why each time we use a formula in the master class, you'll see a formula number on screen. You can look it up in the formulas document, copy it and paste it into your database. I'll also configure it to show two decimal places. And now we can see how much time has been spent on each project. Now, let's add one more formula. This one I won't write from scratch. I'll copy it because it's a bit more complex and takes up a few lines. This formula will format the time spent into a more readable format. I've copied the formula, and now I'm pasting it into the tasks database. Important, when you paste the formula, make sure the reference to your column turns gray. That means notion recognized it. If that doesn't happen, sometimes notion can detect a column, or maybe a column has a slightly different name. Let's take a look at that case. Say the column has a different name. I paste the formula, and what do I see? Just the name as text. That means notion didn't recognize it. In that case, delete that part, leave just two commas and click on the correct column manually. Now it works. If you rename the column later, notion will automatically update the formula. It knows which one you meant. And what does this formula do? It formats the total hours into a more human readable form. You can't even define what counts as a day. For example, eight work hours instead of 24. So if you worked on a task for 16 hours, you'll see two days. Let's now add the same kind of formula to projects. Quick thing to note, we don't yet have a column for spent minutes and projects. So before we paste the formula, we need to create that. I go to the project's database, create a formula column, spent minutes And I calculate it by taking all related tasks using map and summing the minutes for each task. Now I can add the same formatted time formula we used in the tasks database. Great. It recognized the column, and now we see total time and hours spent for each project. And by the way, if you don't like the orange color used in the formula, you can change it to blue or black. Just replace the color in the formula. And update it wherever it's used. Now that we have this formula ready, why not also add it to the time log? After all, we already have spent minutes column there. It will be helpful later when we display logs as cards so we can quickly see how long session lasted in a human readable format. Right now, it doesn't look great. It's just a block of raw data. All the columns are next to each other and it's messy. But that's fine for now. At this stage, we are just building the back end, the raw structure of our system. Later on, we'll make everything look nice. We'll build a custom dashboard to track time beautifully, so don't worry. I'll look much better soon. And in the next lesson, we'll add functionality to start and stop work sessions with a single click. 6. Timer Controls: Basic structure of the system is ready. Now it's time to make it more convenient and visually appealing. In this lesson, we'll focus on improving usability and adding mechanisms to start and stop sessions with a single click. At this point, we already have a database where we can log work sessions or other activities, including start and end times, additional information and connections to tasks. But doing all of this manually is, of course, not very convenient. Information we need to enter is often contextual. We can extract it from the current situation. When we begin working on something, we want that exact moment to be saved into the start column. The same goes for the end. Usually the task already exists in notion. We're just starting to work on it. So ideally, that task should automatically appear in the sessions task relation. And of course, the person field should contain the person who created the session. Why not populate that automatically? This is a perfect use case for adding buttons. Buttons are one of the most powerful tools in notion. They stand alongside databases and relations as essential components. If you want to confidently use notion, you need to understand how buttons work. Now we'll add the first button to our system. Buttons in notion can be edited in two ways, either as a standalone block or as a column inside a database. We'll use both approaches, but let's start with a standalone button block. Let's add it to the top of the page. Type ash to bring up the list of available blocks, then type button. The button is created. Let's name it start the timer. We'll change the icon to something more appropriate. Now we configure the buttons behavior. We wanted to create a new entry in the time log database and pre fill all the fields that we already know. To do this, we select the second option at page two and then choose the Tog database. Et's give it a name work session. What can we prefill? The start time, we choose the time triggered option. This means that the moment you click the button will be saved in the start field. Then we set the status to activ and select the person as the one who clicked the button. What fields are left empty. But that's fine. The session just started. Also the task. That's totally reasonable. Notion doesn't know which task you're working on when you click the button. Later we'll create a smart button that links the session to the correct task. But this standalone button created as a separate block is useful in cases where there's no task yet, or you need to start quickly and link it later. So we filled in everything we could and we leave the task and end empty. Let's test how the button works. Click Start the timer. A new session is created. Awesome. What else can we add? Well, if you start a new session, you probably want the previous one to automatically stop. Although from experience, it varies. Some people prefer to stop sessions manually. But if you do want sessions to auto end, let's add another step, and it needs to run before the new session is added. So now we'll add this step and move it to the top. This step we edit existing sessions. We choose the third option, Edit page in. Let's drag this step to the top. Now, we select where we want to edit pages in the time log database. Currently, the filter is not configured, so it would try to edit all records. We need to narrow it down to only edit the ones we want. Which sessions are we targeting? The ones created by us and still marked as active, meaning they haven't been completed yet. Set the person to me, add another condition. Make sure it says and and choose status equals active. Thanks to this filter, the button will only update entries that meet these conditions. Usually, it will be just one record. What do we do with it? We said then time to the moment the button was clicked and update the status to complete it. Let's test the button. I already have one active session. Let's give it a name. I click Start the timer. Everything works as expected. The previous session was closed and a new one was created. Now, at the end of the day, you'll probably want a button that stops your session without starting a new one. So let's add another button that simply stops all your active sessions. We can cheat a little here. Just duplicate the button we just created and remove the second step, the one that adds a new session. We leave only the step edits existing sessions. Let's rename the button to stop the timer. We'll pick a more fitting emoji, maybe a square. It could also be something like a pause symbol. Let's test this one too. I click Stop the timer, the session is ended. Great. Let's start organizing our dashboard. Move the time log block to the right side of the buttons. Let's add a heading, something like actions. Let's change it to the largest available size. Under this section title, you can add a divider. Just type three hyphens in a row or choose the divider block. For now, let's reduce the column widths in the time log, so we can see more of the table data. Later we'll remove this table view from here entirely, but I'm keeping it for now so we can easily watch how the records change when we press the buttons we're working on in this lesson. Now we'll add a button that not only creates a session, but also links it to a specific task. This is exactly what buttons inside the tasks database are good for. So notion can understand the context. Let's add a new column of type button. Name it, start the timer. The button configuration interface looks exactly like it did in the standalone block, and we're doing the same steps. First, we want to stop any existing session that we started earlier. So we choose edit pages in and pick the time log database. Again, we set the filter. Set person equals me, and status equals active. Check that the logic operator says and the filter is configured. Now we set the end time and status equals completed. Next, we create a new session, choose at page two and select the time log database. Start equals time of click. Person equals who clicked. Status equals active and now we can dynamically link the task. Used the special variable. This page, it will be replaced based on which task you clicked the button on. We can also pull the title from the task, so the session has the same title as the task. To do that, choose Edit as formula, select this page, type a dot to access the list of properties, and find the one that stores the task title. Mine is stored in the task column. Yours might be different. Save and save again. Let's test it. I'll freeze the title column so we can see it better. Now I choose the task update homepage layout, and click Start the timer. A new session was created with the name Update Homepage layout. The start is set, the status is correct. The person is me, and it's linked to the task. Perfect. Everything works. Let's check if the previous session ends upon starting a new timer. I'll start Fix footer links. Update Homepage layout is now completed, and Fixed footer links is active. Let's move on we already have a standalone button called stop the timer. Now the question is, should we add the same button for individual tasks? Technically, we can do that, but in my systems, I usually don't add it. The reason is simple. Due to notions current limitations, this button can be configured to stop only the sessions related to the task you're clicking on. No matter which task you click, stop the timer on, all of your active sessions will be stopped. That creates confusion. It's not the kind of intuitive behavior users would expect. Still, I'll show you how such a button would behave by temporarily adding it to the tasks database. You don't need to follow along, I'll delete it afterward. So I create a new button called Stop the timer, and what do we want this button to do? We want it to edit pages in the time log database. We set the filter as usual, status is active and person is me. And I would love to be able to dynamically filter by task too. Remember how we used this page reference when configuring the start timer button. Well, here that option isn't available. Not for filters is probably a technical limitation of notion. We can only use a static task reference, which doesn't work for us. So we leave the filter with just status and person, and we set the end time and update the status to complete it. Now, here's the issue. Let's say I have an active session linked to the task, fix footer links. If I click Stop the timer on this task, everything's fine. But if I click Stop the timer on some other task like update homepage layout, that session still gets stopped. So again, this behavior isn't intuitive. Let's launch a new timer now. And when we go back to the time log database, we can see that even with just a few entries, the active session already gets lost in the list. That's not convenient. Let's make this better by creating a dedicated space where we can see just our active session, not in a table, but in card view. And now we'll unlock another bit of notion magic. The ability to show database content in different parts of your workspace. We'll add a view of our time log somewhere else, specifically showing only the active session. To do that, we use the linked view of database block. I type slash Link and choose Linked view of database. I select our time log database. Now it appears here too. Notice the little arrow next to the database title. That's how you know this is a linked view. The original database doesn't have that arrow. This is important. If I delete the original database, I delete everything inside it. Let's undo that. But if I delete the linked view, nothing bad happens. That's why later, we'll store all the original databases in a separate place that we never touch and we'll build our dashboards using only linked views. Another way to create linked view is to just copy an existing one. Right click Copy Link to view, paste it, and select linked database view. Same result. Now let's configure this view. First, I want to change the layout from table to gallery. Then I turn off card preview. Since my session entries don't contain images or text that needs previewing, I also reduce the card size to small. Next, I go to properties and make sure the status is visible on the card. Right now, we're seeing all the sessions. This is the same information we see in the main table displayed as cards, the start and other columns are hidden here. We only see the name and status. All the other information is still available inside the card. So let's go to the filter settings. We want to see only entries where status is active. Let's take it one step further. Transform the filter into advanced and add a second condition. Person is me. Now we're showing only our active session. Let's rename the view to something like active or current timer. And above the block, I'll add a section header called timer. With a divider underneath. Also, let's hide the database title. We can always show it again from the view settings. One tip, when the database name is hidden, it's harder to tell if you're working with a linked view or the original database. That's why I recommend keeping originals somewhere safe and always building with linked views. Another way to check, if it's the original database, you'll only see the layout option in the settings. If it's a linked view, you'll see source as well, meaning you can switch to another source database anytime. Now, I suggest adding the stop the timer button directly to the card as well. Here on the main dashboard, this button might not be that useful because you can achieve the same thing with the button. We already added to the list of actions. However, if your list of actions becomes longer, it might actually be easier to simply glance at the card. You don't even need to open it and click the button directly on the card. Later, this button will come in handy when we add a sessions table inside individual tasks, but that's for later. For now, let's just add this button to the card. As before, we can edit in the main database by creating a new column. You can also do this directly from the record page. Just open any record and click Add property. Choose button and name it stop the timer. This time the behavior is simple. We just want to edit this session. So we choose edit property, and inside that, we update the end time to now and status to complete it. Make the button visible. Let's test it. Works perfectly. The session is now marked as completed. Let's start a new timer you'll see the new session immediately appear in the active section. But now I want to see how much time has passed since this session started. Let's make the necessary column visible on the card. This is the time spent column, but as you can see, nothing has changed. That means this column is currently empty. Let's open the card. Yes, it's indeed empty, it's empty because it depends on another property, spent minutes, and that property is also empty. Why is it empty? Because we don't have the end time for the session. Only the start time. So we can't calculate how many minutes have passed between the two. Now I'll change the formula in a way that if the end time hasn't been set, the time will be calculated from the start time up to the current moment. If you copied the ready made formula, you probably already have this change. But if you were writing it manually by following me, you'll need to update how the formula works now. So what are we going to do? Here's the logic. If end is empty, Use now. Otherwise, use end. So this whole construction consists of three parts before the question mark, between the question mark and the colon and after the colon. The first part is the condition. If it's true, then we go into this part and skip the other. If the condition is false, meaning the enti is not empty, then we ignore this part and execute the part after the colon. Basically, it's the equivalent of an I function just in a more compact form. Save the formula, and now we see that 3 minutes have passed since this session began. This value is also shown directly on the card. We might move the time spent field a bit higher you can even hide the status field because everything in this view is by definition active. One final thing to know this timer value doesn't auto update in real time. You'll see the new value after refreshing the page. So if you've been working in another tab for an hour and come back, it will still say 3 minutes until you refresh. That's how notions formulas work. And just like that, starting and stopping timers has become much easier. In the next lesson, we'll go inside task and project cards, display sessions there, and explore another powerful property type. The roll up. 7. Task Page Customization: A new lesson. In this one, we'll configure how sessions are displayed inside task pages, inside project pages, and how other properties appear. We'll also slightly adjust how tasks and projects are structured and explore how notion allows us to customize the layout of a page. We'll start with tasks, and I'll demonstrate everything using the first task. Update homepage layout. I'll open it in full screen mode. So what do we already see here? Basically, all the work sessions related to the task are listed in the time log column. If you're comfortable viewing sessions this way, you can leave it like that. You can make these entries more informative by displaying the time spent, the person responsible, and also showing the status. If this works for you, you can leave it as is. But let's take a look at alternative ways to display sessions and more generally, any related records. We go to the customized layout menu. Make sure to click somewhere on an empty part of the page so that no specific element is selected. Then switch to the second display mode. Taped This will enable an additional section on each task page where you can add tabbed views showing related entries. What we're interested in here are work sessions related to the task. So we select time log and configurates view. I think the table layout works best, but we'll hide a few properties. First, take note that the filter is already set up automatically and correctly filtered by the current task. This means we're seeing only those sessions that belong to the task on the page we're viewing. That's why we can hide the task column because whenever we see a session here, we already know it belongs to the current task page. You can move the start column. And this is also a good place to enable text wrapping for the task title. Let's make the columns more narrow. We'll leave the stop the time or button and the time spent time visible. The rest of the columns can be hidden. We'll keep the person column and I think the status column can stay too. Let's move it closer to the beginning. Optionally, you can remove vertical dividers. You can also change the icon for this tab. Let's save the changes and see how it looks. Now, using the tab, we can see all information related to the task. When we switch to the time log, we see only the sessions related to this specific task. Let's add another tab that shows the active session for this task. This will also be a view of the time log. Let's name the tab as active session. We'll now configure the filters so that it shows not only the sessions related to this task, but also filters by status to display only active sessions. Let's switch to the gallery layout to display the session as a card, just like we did on the main dashboard, we'll display the status so that you can immediately see from the card that it's an active session without needing to double check. We'll also display the stop the time a button and the time spent property. You can also display the person so that if you open the task and see an active session, you'll know who is currently working on it if there is one at all. Let's save the changes. Now I'll start a session for this task. I start the timer, and let's take a look. The card has appeared, but we need to twik it. Let's remove the preview. And move the stop the timer button to the very bottom. Sometimes you may want to space out the elements a bit more. For example, I'd like the stop button to be a bit lower. How can we do that? Here's a trick. Let's add a technical column to the time log and call it separator. Let's make it a formula. We'll insert a line break symbol into it. It should look like this. Backslash and make sure to include the backslash and surround it with double quotes. Now we can add the separator above the button. Let's see how it looks. So what do we see? The button is displayed a little bit lower. I often use this method. Instead of using a line break, you can also insert a series of dashes to visually separate a group of properties from what comes before or after. You can add several of these separators. Just keep in mind that one separator, like any other property, can only be used once. The layout reset because I didn't save it. So I'll hide the preview again, and I'd also like to change the icon. Let's use a play symbol here. I think that's more informative. Okay. Everything looks fine, but I'd like some of this data to be displayed at the same time as the time log, and that's possible. We'll take care of it now. Once again, we go to customized layout, make sure the heading is selected, click on it if it's not, and choose which properties we want to display under the title. You can select up to four, so pick the most important ones. What might those be? Most likely the project, the task status, the person responsible, and how much time has already been spent on the task. I'd like to add the due date, too, but that would mean giving something up. So we'll leave the due date to be seen in the first tab, which we can rename, for example, to details. What else can we do? We can hide the list of properties because the time log is already available in the tabs. The total minutes and hours spent isn't really necessary either because we can see that info over here. We can add the due date and the start time or button instead. As another option, we could move the due date to the top and put the total time spent below. Let's see how it looks now. We switch to the log step, then back to details, and we can see the due date and the start the time or button. The properties we moved to the sidebar are always accessible via these three dots. You can view all of them there. Optionally, you can hide the page con and configure all pages to always be displayed in full width, which I definitely recommend. If you don't need to leave comments, you can just disable that section. I'll leave it enabled for now. Let's save the changes. Now we'll move on to the project, but before we do a few words about these tabs and why they're so great, the point is that when you customize the layout of a page, those changes are automatically applied to every single task. So if I open any other task now, I'll see the exact same tabs already set up. And that's a huge advantage. It means you don't have to configure each page manually. In the project's database, we'll use a different method, and you'll see why tabs in more convenient. That other method uses templates, but templates need to be applied manually to each existing page. Tabs are simpler. At the same time, this can also be a disadvantage because you can't configure tabs differently for specific pages. In those cases, templates are the way to go. Another downside of using tabs is that when you open a tab, you lose sight of everything on the first tab. There's no way to display both tabs content at once. You'll have to use templates again. Sure, you can always see the four selected properties under the title, but you can't display more than four. Maybe that'll change later, but for now, that's how it works. 8. Project Page Customization: O. Let's move on to projects. I'm opening a project entry. We'll use the website redesign project as an example, and let's start with something we already know. We go to customize layout, enable full width pages for all projects and select the most important properties to display at the top. Let it be status and person responsible. Of course, in a real situation, there would be some dates here. I just don't have any. And maybe we'll also show how much time has already been spent on the project. We can hide icons and move all other properties into the collapsible sidebar, since we don't really need them right now. The tasks and related sessions will be part of the content on this page. We'll set that up next. Let's begin by displaying the tasks related to this project. And you already know which block we'll need. We used it in the previous lesson to show the active timer separately. You've probably guessed it's the linked view block. This time, however, we'll use it for tasks instead of the timer. We select the tasks database and configure a filter. We want to see only the tasks that are related to this project. So in the filter, we choose project and select website redesign. We can hide the database name and use the tab name to display something like tasks. You can also change the icon to something more appropriate. Et's leave only the most essential columns. I think there's no need to show the time log here. There's also no need to show the project column because we already know all the tasks in this table are related to this project. Let's move the status to the beginning. We can reduce the size of the due date column. I think the person responsible should be placed right after the task name. What else can we do here? The start the timer button actually takes up quite a bit of space, and we can fix that by making its label shorter. I often use images in button names. Let's do that here. I'm looking for a black triangle to symbolize stating the timer. And now the button is much smaller. I can now narrow the column down as much as possible, holding down option on MCOs or Alt on Windows, and then I can move the button. For example, to the beginning or place it right after the status. You can also change the icon to make it clearer what the button does. I like to remove vertical dividers, then we can adjust the sorting settings. For example, sort the tasks by status or due date. You can also add other tabs with different task views. For instance, I'll duplicate the tab, and now I'll configure a board view where tasks can be grouped by team members. The group by setting is automatically set to status, but I'll change it to person. I'll enable status display to make things more clear. Maybe I'll also show the due date. I'll rename the tap to B person. You can change the icon to, and if a new task appears, for example, update visuals and it hasn't been assigned yet, it will show up here. It's probably better to move this group to the far left so you can easily see all unassigned tasks, and I will reassign one of the tasks to Anya to make more sense out of this view demo. So now we can see how tasks are distributed over two persons. You could filter out tasks that are already completed or tasks that were created or completed more than a month ago, for example. You're only seeing the most relevant ones, and that's how you can create as many tabs as you need to work with your tasks. You don't even have to use tabs. You can take views one under another. For example, the board could be located under the task list. And instead of switching tabs, you'd just scroll down and manage statuses from there. So here you're completely free to set up the workspace the way you want to see it. Let's say we're done with tasks for now and move on to displaying sessions. And along the way, we'll run into a problem. Let's use the linked view block again. We choose the time log database and now see all the recorded sessions. But we're only interested in the sessions relate to this specific project. So we open the filter settings. And what do we see? There's no project here. We haven't edited it. We can filter sessions by tasks, but if we add a new task, we'd have to go back to this project page and reconfigure the filter manually to include sessions for that new task. That's obviously not a great solution. So we need to improve the system so that we can filter sessions by project, not just by task. We can set this up right here since we're inside the time log database. We'll add a new column to help us solve this, and it will be a roll up column. Roll up is essentially a window that allows you to pick into the properties of related records. When setting up a roll up, you specify which relation you're interested in. In our case, it's tasks, and then you choose which property from the related task you want to retrieve. Select project. Let's name this property project by task to make it clear that this is the project related to the task that the session is linked to. And VoalA now for each session, we see not only the related task, but also which project the task belongs to, and therefore, which project this session belongs to. Now, in the filter settings, we can filter sessions by project. We choose website redesign and configure the view. We can hide the database title. We can also hide the task associated with the session. The same goes for the project. What we care about is the start and the stop the timer button, how much time was spent who started the session and the status. I'll also remove the vertical dividers here. Rename the tab. And change its icon. By the way, let's also update the icon for the time spent column to better reflect its contents. It's also worth configuring the sorting so that sessions are sorted by date. I prefer having the most recent sessions at the top. Choose the ascending option instead, if you prefer to have them at the bottom. What else can we do here? We can add a square icon to the stop button. Let's go to edit. I often use this site to find emojis, pick the one you like, copy it and paste it into the button's name. You could even remove the word entirely and leave the square. But since this button is used on the main page and in the card, I think keeping the word makes it look nicer. In fact, you could create two buttons, one with the square and one with both the square and the word and use them in different places as needed, even if their behavior is exactly the same. What else should we do here? We should add headings. That is section titles. For example, tasks and then below that, work sessions. When you use headings, it allows you to navigate by section and you'll see a navigation menu on the right. If you use headings of different levels like H one and a two, the hierarchy will also be reflected in the navigation menu. Now, let's compare this method of organizing the inside of a page to the one we used for tasks. In the project, we went inside the card and customized the display of tasks and sessions, but we didn't use tabs. Here we have a simple structure enabled, and if we open a different project, we'll see that nothing has changed inside it, unlike with tasks, where we edit tabs to one task, and they appeared in all the others. So how can we make this structure appear in all other projects? That's where database templates come in. First, I'll copy everything I edit inside the website redesign project and create a new template. To do that, click the arrow next to New, then select New template. Let's name it a new project. And inside the template, paste everything you just copied. Now in this copy, all the filters are still pointing to the original project where we configured the display of tasks and sessions. So we need to update those filters. Instead of website redesign, we should specify the new project we just created. Unlike all the other entries, the new project isn't really a project, it's a project template. Let's remove website redesign. Naturally, the list is now empty. Let's do the same thing in the second tab. Change the filter to match the template. When you later create a new project based on this template, notion will automatically insert the new project into that filter, and this is a very important and awesome feature of notion that you should absolutely remember and use. Chances are you'll need it often. We'll do the same thing here in the work session section. Can also add an icon, for example, a briefcase and maybe give it a blue theme. Let's return to the project's database. And now let's set this template as the default for all views. From now on, whenever you create a new project, this template will be applied automatically. That's it. The new project is created, and it already includes tasks and work sessions. And when I create a new task, it's automatically linked to this project, new task of the new project. If we go to the main dashboard and look at the tasks table, you'll see it's already there. The new task is properly linked to the new project. Everything is working beautifully. However, there is one downside. All your existing projects will have to be updated manually. You'll need to open each project and inside it. You'll see prompt to apply the new template. If a project already had some template or content applied, you'll either need to delete it if it's no longer needed and then apply the new template. Or you can save that content somewhere, apply the template, and then bring the blocks you need back to wherever it makes the most sense. I wouldn't recommend applying the template to all your projects just yet. That's because in the next lesson, we'll be adding even more changes. Specifically, we'll look at different ways of displaying work sessions inside the bottom table. So this is not the final version of the template. You have a lot of existing projects, I don't recommend applying it yet. Otherwise, you'll have to redo all that work later. Also, I'd really prefer to have the time spent displayed in blue, so I'll update the formula for that, too. So in this lesson, we changed the layout of task pages and project pages, explore two different ways of customizing that layout using the tabbed structure and the simple structure and reviewed the pros and cons of each. With the tabbed layout, any changes we make are immediately applied to all records in the database. With the simple structure, we need to create a template and manually apply it to each existing record. However, using templates gives us more flexibility in customizing what we see on a project page, allowing us to display various views of related data alongside the properties of the page itself. Also got more practice with one of Nan's most powerful tools, the linked view block and saw how a simple property list inside a page can be made much more structured and organized. In the next lesson, we'll go even further with customizing how work sessions are displayed inside a project. Right now, is just a long list of sessions, but it will be far more useful to see the total time spent on the project, the time spent month by month how much time each team member has spent on the project. This next lesson will be especially exciting for those using Notion's paid version, because we'll set up beautiful and insightful charts. 9. Project Analytics: A new lesson. Here we continue working inside the project page and add a few new ways to display the sessions related to the project. To make the display more interesting, I added several new sessions. Okay, let's open the website redesign project card and scroll down to the work sessions. Right now there are 39 work sessions. In the first part of the lesson, I'll set up the session views for the free version of notion. In the second part, I'll show how to make the same thing using charts which are available in the paid version. At the end of the lesson, we'll also update the project template with all the new views that we are going to create here. So the first view I want to add will show how work on the project progressed over the past months, how many hours were logged each month. I create a new tab, choose a table layout, I leave the database as it is because I still want to work with the time log. I remove the database title, rename the tab two by month and set up the grouping. I click Group B and choose the start property. Sessions are now grouped, but it's better to change the grouping granularity to a month. If you want to see weekly breakdowns, you can choose week instead of month. Next, I want the newer months to show on top, since that's the most relevant information. Now we're done here. So we can close the settings panel. Next, we go to the group settings and enable show aggregation. Then I click More Options, some and select the spent hours to summarize. We now see how many hours were logged in April. If you collapse April or other months, you can quickly see totals for each month. If you don't like the long decimal numbers, we can fix that. Let's temporarily show the spent hours column and update the formula. Right now, the formula technically returns many decimals and notion then rounds it visually due to the decimal settings. But that extra precision is still there, which is why we get such long numbers. So we'll modify the formula to round properly, multiply by 100 round divide by 100 again, save it. Now, the numbers next to each month are much more readable. After that, we can hide the stop time or button in this view. What matters most here is the aggregated number. You can collapse all groups at once with a keyboard shortcut. You'll see the shortcut on screen. So with just a few clicks, we've built a monthly time summary. If you want both monthly and weekly summaries, just duplicate the tab and change group into week. Let's move on and create another view. This time grouped by person. I duplicate the existing tab and rename it to B person. Change the icon if needed. Now go to grouping settings and switch from start date to person. And we don't need the person column inside the table anymore. It's already in the group header. The right side aggregation settings are already copied from the previous view, so we immediately see how much time each person spent on the project overall. If you want to see this for the current month only, just add a filter. In the filter settings, choose start and set it to this month option. Rename the view this month. The icon shows that it's grouped by person, and the title tells us it's about the current month. If you want a view for the previous month, we'll need to use a trick here. Let's duplicate the current view. Now, I could hard code the filter from March 1 to March 31. And it works. But the problem is, you'd have to manually update these dates every time, and we want to avoid manual work as much as possible. So we'll add a formula that calculates how many months ago a session was. Add a new column formula, call it months past. Now you'll see a formula number on screen. Copy it from the reference doc I shared and paste it here. What does it do? It calculates the number of months between today's month and the month of the session date. If a session is from last month, it will return one, even if there are only a few days between today and the session date, and we can filter by that value to only see sessions pertaining to the previous month. So instead of specifying exact dates, I configure the filter based on this column that shows how many months have passed since this session. Session belongs to the current month, this column should show zero. If it belongs to the previous month one, if it's from the month before that, two, and we already have some sessions like that. View the sessions from the previous month, I just need to set the filter to show only those entries where the months past column equals one. Since this formula always provides up to date information, it will adjust dynamically. Right now it's April, so the number one will be shown for all March sessions. As soon as May begins, April will become the previous month, and the number one will be shown for all April sessions, while the formula will return two for March sessions. And in June, one will show for May so this filter, once set up, will always work correctly and show only the sessions from the previous month. So we changed the filter to months past is exactly one. You can now hide the formula column let's move on to setting up charts, and here's the good part. For charts, we don't need this month's pest formula. Create a new view, choose chart layout and connect the time log database. We leave the chart type as vertical bar chart for now and adjust the settings. Group by start date and choose week granularity. Now we can already see how many sessions happened each week. Change the Y axis to spend hours and summit. And now the labels show the number of hours spent each week. Let's make the color prettier. You can even use intensity to reflect how many hours we're spent. The more hours, the stronger the color. If you want to see how much time each person spent, each week, just enable group by person. And it is better to return to auto cooloring when grouping. There's also a line chart option that works really well for timeline data. And finally, charts support cumulative totals, so you can see how the time spent on the project grows week by week. And let's rename it to B weeks. Let's create another chart to show how much time each person contributed overall and change the type to a donut chart. Choose person in what to show setting. And some of spent hours in what each slice represents. Now each segment shows how many hours a team member logged. You can see the total time on the project and how it's distributed. Rename it total time, and I actually forgot to add a very important setting. We are inside the website redesign project, so all the work sessions must be filtered by this project to only show sessions related to it. Let's fix it for all the views. Now rearrange the tabs based on priority. Most useful views should be on the left. If you have a paid account, then probably you won't need the table views at all and only have charts. Now, we're ready to copy this to the template, copy the whole block, go to the template. And paste it. Delete the old view, but don't forget to filter each view by the template, so you're only seeing relevant sessions after applying this template to your projects later. Now that this is done, we are ready to move on. In the next lesson, we'll build a dashboard for managing work sessions and viewing analytics. 10. Time Tracking Dashboard: This lesson, we won't be adding anything new to the existing structure. Instead, we'll set up a dashboard for tracking sessions, your personal sessions, and those of your team members. Essentially, we'll configure various views of this session table so that when you land on this page, this dashboard, you immediately understand how your time is being tracked and see all the information you need. We'll build this dashboard directly on this page. Later we'll add a main dashboard and some navigation, so you can switch between dashboards. But for now, we'll stay here. Before we go any further, I suggest moving the original databases to a safer location, placing them separately, and from now on, we'll only work with linked views, meaning database windows and won't touch the originals. So we currently have three databases on the page, projects, tasks, and time log. Here's what I recommend doing with each one. First, transform the database into a page. Do this for each database, choose the option, turn into a database page, do the same for the time log. Now we have three database pages. You can open each one individually. Nothing inside has changed, but now they are listed separately. For now, let's place them at the bottom of the page in a separate section. Let's use a callout block and name it system. Let's find a suitable icon. And actually, let's place all the databases on a single page. That's usually how I do it. We'll also change the icon here to something more appropriate. Now we begin building our dashboard. Technically, we've already started. We have an action section and one that displays the active timer. By the way, let's start a timer for one of the tasks so the list doesn't look empty. Next, let's think about what we might want to see on this time tracking page. First, let's configure a view that shows how your personal time was spent. We'll place this to the right of the action section and the timer. Let's name this section. MT log. Turn it into a first level heading and move it to the right column. Now we need to move all these blocks under the action section, so everything sits in one column. Let's shrink the left column a bit. Add a divider to keep the visual style consistent and insert a linked view. Choose the time log database. I'll first show how to configure a table view if you're using the free version of notion, and then we'll do the same using charts. We want to see only our own sessions. So let's filter the data by employee and select the M option. That way, each team member or page viewer will only see their own sessions. Let's hide the table name. Perfect. Now that we're only seeing sessions relevant to us, let's configure the sorting, so the most recent sessions appear at the top. Then at a grouping by start date. Change the date by setting two months, for example, and make sure the most recent months appear at the top by adjusting the sorting to newest first. Next, let's configure a time sum next to the month title. To do this, click the three dots, select show aggregation, then click the number that appears, choose more options, and set it to the hours spent column. Now you can see your time data for all previous months. If you press Option plus Command plus T or manually collapse each month, you'll be able to see how your time allocation has changed over time. What else can we do here? We could limit the number of months shown in these tats. For example, only show sessions from the last two months rather than all sessions. To do this, modify the filter and use the months past column. We added in the previous lesson, set it to less than or equal to two. That will include the current month, value zero, the previous one, value one, and the one before that, value two. Nothing changes in our case because I don't have any data from earlier months, but if I had logged any sessions in January, that data would now be excluded from the view we just configured. Let's rename this view to last three months. Okay, now we need to clean up the view itself, remove anything unnecessary and keep only what's essential. We'll keep the start and end columns. Remove the button column and remove any unnecessary display of spent time. Let's make the columns a bit more narrow, hide the project column two, and keep just the status. Next, you'll probably want to see how your time was distributed across projects. So let's duplicate the view we just created. We'll name the new view by projects and change the grouping. Now, let's group the data, not by date, but by project. What do we run into here? The project property can be selected because grouping by roll up column in notion isn't available for some reason, so we need to add the project in another way, and there aren't many options here. In such cases, we have to use a formula. Let's figure out how we can identify which project the session is linked to. What do we have? We have the task and from the task, we can get the project. And we have a roll up column. Let's try using that. A roll up can technically contain a list of projects. For example, if the session was linked to multiple tasks and each task belonged to a different project, you would see several projects here. But since we always have one project, we can confidently take the first one and use dot notation to access the project properties and select the name. Let's save it and check. The project name is there. Now let's group by project instead of date. The project is now available for grouping. And what do we see? A few sessions aren't linked to any project, and we can also see how much time was spent on each project where I logged time. You can also change the icon here. And if you want to see sessions grouped by project for all time, you should clear the filter that limits sessions to the last two or three months. What else could be useful? I often want to check what I've been doing over the past week. So the most relevant period for me is usually the one closest to today. I want to see how much time I've worked and how that time was distributed across projects. Let's set up a view for that now. We'll copy the first tab and name it last seven days. Then we'll change the filter to only show records from the past week. We'll use the start column and set the filter to start date is within the past week. So we'll see entries from the last seven days. Now let's switch to the board layout. The board is great because it allows for two levels of grouping. We can group by both dates and projects. I want the columns to represent projects since there are usually fewer than seven, and that way, I won't need to scroll too far sideways to see everything. So I change the first grouping to project. Then I go back and add a second grouping. These will be the subgroups. And here I'll choose start and group by day. I'll also adjust the display to show newer dates on the left. That way, the first column will show today's sessions, the second, yesterday's, and so on. The time spent aggregation for the subgroups remains intact, but we need to manually configure it for the columns. Click more options, choose some, and select spent hours. This way, I can see how much time was spent on each project over the past seven days. That's the total time for all seven days and also how much I worked each day within that week. Looks like there is a problem with filtering as I see too many work sessions. I think filter settings were reset when I changed to the board view, so let's add them again. Person is M and start is past week relative to today. It looks better now, and that could be a good stopping point. As you can see, even with a free account, it's possible to set up some useful calculations for your time tracking. But now I'll show you how to do this using a paid account. Of course, charts will look much more minimalistic with no extra clutter. They'll also be more visually appealing and take up much less space compared to the detailed layout we just saw. Yes, you can collapse the layout, but charts still present the information in a much neater way. So what might I want to show? For example, a chart showing time spent over the past three months broken down by project, similar to what we did on the Project page when splitting time by team members. Let's select the Donut chart. Under what to show we pick project, and for each slice represents, we choose spent hours. So each slice shows the time spent on a specific project. Now I'll add two filters. First, for the last three months. Second, to only show sessions linked to me. The viewer, this is where the mi setting should be used. Let's rename the tab to last three months. I'd also like to see how my time was distributed across projects in the last few days or weeks. And if I were building this on a paid account, considering how much free space is around the doughnut chart, I would place charts side by side instead of using separate tabs. What could that look like? I add two columns using the slash menu. Let's place the doughnut chart on the right, and on the left, I'll place a bar chart showing how much time I spent on different projects over the last seven days. I changed the layout to chart hide the title. Select to show start date by day, show spent hours, group by project, and filter the sessions to only include the last seven days. Now, let's rename this tab to last seven days. We can also add another chart to show how time was distributed over the last three months. I'll update the filter so that only sessions from the last three months are included. Each bar will represent one week. And what are we showing the sum of time spent in hours grouped by projects. This way, I can see how my productivity changed week by week and which projects received the most focus. Depending on whether you're using a paid or free account, this right hand section will either include several customized views like I've done here. Or several charts. There's no real need to keep both. Since I'm working on a paid plan, I'll remove the table views. What's next? Let's add a section that shows what your teammates are currently working on. This section isn't necessary if you're using the system on your own, but if you're working in a team, it's a really useful feature. Let's move the system section down and continue below everything we've already built. Let's call this new section what the team is working on. You could also name it more briefly active sessions, but the longer name immediately makes the purpose clear. Let's insert the same type of card we already use in the time section to display a single teammates session. You can even copy that card, paste it and select linked database view. Have the work is done. What I want to do now is set it up so that we can see a similar card for each employee. To do that, we need to switch from the gallery layout to board layout and group sessions, not by status, but by employee. There's no need to display the stop button on each card, since we just want to view what someone is doing, not accidentally stop the timer, but it makes sense to show how much time has already been spent. It might also help to display which project the task belongs to, and a link to the task itself could also be useful. Let's filter this view to only show active sessions. The currently marked with the active status, to ensure long task names don't get cut off, let's enable the rep cells setting. This will tell notion to break long titles onto the next line instead of hiding them. Let's now start a task for Ana to see how this view works. Going back to the dashboard, now I can see what both employees are doing. There's one more view that would be helpful here. Let's duplicate the active view. This one will show what employees have been working on today. And instead of filtering by status, we'll filter by date. Et's choose only sessions that were started today. Start date is today. This filter tells notion we only want entries that belong to today. In this case, it does make sense to show session status, so it's clear whether the session is active or not. We'll also sort the entries so that the earliest sessions appear at the top. We have one more section left the history section. It will be similar to what we've added inside projects and also to the setup for personal sessions. We'll come back to what the team is working on section later when we configure synchronization with the notion calendar. So now let's talk about history. We add a heading and by the way, we're already starting to build a navigation system. The system section can also be set as a first level toggle, so it doesn't get nested under the history section. Later on, we'll actually move this section with the database sources to a safer place. The history section should include whatever is relevant, specifically to you. I'll suggest several options. You don't have to set up every single one I show, though you can do it if you want to get more practice with the settings. That said, most likely, you'll only be using a couple of these views in your day today. Or maybe you won't need the history section at all, especially if you're the only one using the system, and you've already set up the section that shows your personal time log. The first view I'll add is a display of all sessions grouped by month with total time spent calculated per month, we choose the link view, select the time log database, and right away, we can remove the unnecessary columns. Let's keep the start and remove almost everything else except for the time spent. Let's also keep project since we have enough space here. We'll name this tab by month and set grouping by start date. Then we change the grouping from relative to month and we set the newer months to show up at the top. Then we do the usual setup next to the month name, enable aggregation, and change it to show the sum of spent hours. Now we can see how much time was spent each month across all employees. You can create a similar view grouped by person to see the total time logged by each team member for the whole tracking period. The process is exactly the same. Only difference is that in the group by setting, you'll use the person column instead of the start date. The next view we can set up shows how time was distributed across projects this month. To do this, let's duplicate the view we've just created. We'll name it this month and select an icon that symbolizes projects. Open the group by setting and choose project and then set a filter to show only those records that belong to the current month. To do this, we can either filter using the technical column we created and select only those records where the month past value is zero or use the star date field and apply the condition. Start date is relative to today and this month. Next, we can set up a similar view, but grouped by person. This way, you'll be able to see how much time each person has logged during the current month. To do this, simply duplicate the existing view, keep the title this month, and change the icon to reflect that this view is about team members. Then update the grouping so that the sessions are grouped by person. All you need to do. Since the filter settings are already configured to show only the sessions from the current month, the total spent hours is already displayed next to the group name, so nothing else needs to be changed. To create similar views for the previous month, you can duplicate this view and adjust the filter. Instead of filtering by start date, use the technical column month pest. And set it to one. That way, only the sessions from the previous month will be shown. You can also make a similar view grouped by project. Remove the start date filter and use month past equals one. This way, it's easy to see the time breakdown by project for the previous month. And of course, we can also use charts here. Let's set up two charts. One will show how time was distributed across projects in previous months. The second one will show how time was distributed across team members. So let's add a chart. We'll keep the default part chart. What do we want to display? In the Xxs settings, choose the start date and group the dates by month. For the YXs, let's display the sum of spent hours let's start with projects. Right now there are only three columns because I've only logged sessions for the past three months. Over time, the number of columns will increase, and the chart will become more informative and visually appealing. Let's name this tab by project. Now, let's create the same chart, but grouped by person. The only thing we need to change is the group by setting. This time, choose person instead of project done. And with that, we've finished setting up the time tracking dashboard. Now on this dashboard, you can see how your time has been invested in different projects. Recently, check what your team is currently working on, view what your teammates were doing today. And also analyze how time was distributed by project and by person over previous months. In addition, you can always come to this page to start a new timer, check whether you have an active session and stop it if needed. In the next lesson, we'll add a small change to this page to synchronize work session records with the notion calendar. 11. Notion Calendar: New lesson in this one will add a way to display your work sessions inside the notion calendar. Notion calendar lets you visualize anything that lives in a database within your notion workspace. But to make that happen, you first need to create a calendar view for the database you want to display. So right now, we'll add a calendar view for your time log database. I recommend placing it in what the team is working on section. If you're using the system just for yourself and haven't added that section, simply create a new one, call it calendar and add a linked view of database block for your time log. So let's create a new tab, choose calendar view and select the time log database. That's it for now. Let's check which date property the calendar is based on. You can see this in the view settings under Show calendar B. Right now, it's using the start property, and we'll leave it that way for now. We'll adjust it later. Now, to actually display this view in the Notion calendar app, hit the opening calendar button. Done. The calendar has been added. One important thing to know, there's a limit. Currently, you can't add more than ten calendar views from all your notion workspaces to notion calendar. If you've hit that limit, you'll see an error message. You can change the color of a calendar, toggle it visibility, and so on. But here's something that doesn't work great at the moment. Each log appears as a thin bar, meaning we're only seeing the start time of each session. That's because this calendar view is currently based on the start property. And unfortunately, Notion calendar doesn't have access to the end property. It simply doesn't know when the session ends. The way notion calendar works right now, it can't look at two properties, start and end to determine the full duration of a calendar entry. So building our calendar based on the start property wasn't the best idea. Let's fix that. We'll update our time log database by adding a new column that will store both the start and end of the session. We'll use this new column only for the calendar display. We won't need it anywhere else. Let's open any record and add a new column formula. Let's call it start end. And in this column, we'll use both dates by applying the date range function. We'll pass in the start and end dates. As you can see, this column now displays both the beginning and the end of each session in one place. And if you want the formatting to look cleaner, here's a neat trick. Temporarily change the column type to date, adjust the date format, and then switch it back to formula. This will apply the new formatting. A little known workaround I discovered just by experimenting with notion settings. Now go back to your calendar view and change the setting so it uses the new starch and property. And as you can see, the work session now has a visible duration. If you work in a team and want to display different team members sessions in different colors, that's possible, too. Just keep in mind the limitation. Notion calendar currently allows you to add up to ten database views total from all your workspaces. Chances are some of those ten will be used for displaying tasks, events, or meetings from your notion workspace. So in practice, you'll have fewer than ten slots left. Whether that works for you depends on the size of your team. If it's small, you can totally make this setup work. Let me show you how. In my workspace, I have two people Krista and Anya. What we'll do is create two separate calendar views, one for Krista, and one for Anya. In the filter settings, choose the appropriate person. Okay, the time log has been updated to only show Krista sessions. Now, let's do the same for Anya's calendar. Everything stays the same, except the filter for person. We'll now change it to Anya and again, open this calendar in notion calendar. As you can see, we now have two calendars, one for Christa and one for Anya, with color coding showing who worked on what, and that's it for the notion calendar part. At this point, most of your system is already built and configured. In the next lesson, we'll add a few final touches to make the system more convenient to long missed sessions. 12. Logging Missed Sessions: Let's talk about forgotten sessions. It's inevitable. There will be times when you forget to start the timer or forget to stop it. Now, we're going to adapt the system to make correcting these missed sessions more convenient. Let's start by adding a new button to the action section. This button will create a new session, assign it today's date without the time and open the session so you can edit it right away. So choose the button block and name it something like d a session or log miss session. Add the plus icon. What will it do? It will add a new page to the time log database. Give it some name. We'll set the start date using the date triggered option, meaning the date when the button is clicked. Earlier, when we created buttons to start new sessions, we use the time triggered option. So both date and time were captured. But this time we're logging a missed session, so the actual start time probably won't match the button click. That's why date only is a better fit, and we'll fill person as usually team members log their time by themselves. And status field should be set to complete. Next, let's make this newly created session open automatically for editing. We add a new action, open page or URL from the menu of options, select page Edit, the page we just created. This means when the button is clicked, a new page is created and opened right away. You can choose the format for opening. In this case, I suggest using centerpik not full screen, but a centered pop up. Now that the button is configured, let's try logging a miss session. A new session is created with today's date set and the page opens automatically. The formulas are not empty. They're already calculating time because we set them up to count time from the start if no end is provided. Right now, Notion thinks I started working at midnight, but you can ignore that for now. We'll fix it in a moment. You can now set the correct start and end time directly in the session. Just enable include time and change it to what you want. But honestly, that's not always convenient. Most of the time, you'll probably want to enter just the amount of time spent to make sure that the time spent is counted in the linked test or project. To allow manual input of time spent, let's add a new column of type number. Let's name it something like senten minutes manual. I'll move the column higher in the page and enter, for example, 45 minutes. Of course, that's not enough because the formulas we've already set up have no idea that a new column has appeared that should be taken into account. So we need to update the formulas or rather just one formula spent minutes because all the others depend on it. Let's open the formula and change the logic. On the screen, you'll see the number of the finished formula. I'll just expand the one we already had. Since we're adding the condition, I'll start with the I function. The first argument is the condition then we add what should happen if the condition is true. I'm just adding placeholders for now and replace them later. The third argument is what should happen if the condition is false, which is the formula we already had before. Then we close the I function. Now, let's define the condition. It's simple. We check if the spent minutes manual column is not empty. So if it's not empty, what do we return? We return the number that was manually entered the number of minutes from that column. If it is empty, we fall back to the original logic, and to make the formula easier to read, it can help to break different parts of the I onto separate lines. To do that, press Shift plus Enter, save it. And as you can see now the formula works correctly. If I remove the manual entry, the formula behaves just as it did before. Now I can link this session to a task it belongs to. Let's say update visual effects. If you don't yet have the task you want to log this session under, you can create a new one right from here. Type in its name, select new to create a new task, and it'll be linked to the session. Let's remove the previous one. By the way, you can configure this relation so that only one task can be linked. Let's do that now, set it to one page. Okay. Now, if we open this task, we can link it to project and return to the session. Most likely, at some point, you'll also want the ability to link a session directly to a project, maybe because no task was created, or it just doesn't matter which task the session was related to. If that's your case, we'll need to add another relation because even though we already have two project columns, they are actually read only. They simply pull in the project from the task this session is connected to. No task, no project, and you can't add a project directly in those columns. To make that possible, let's add a new relation between sessions and projects. Choose relation and pick the project's database. Again, limit to one and make sure to enable two way relation so that in the project view, sessions directly linked to it will show up as well. Perfect. Now we can link a session directly to a project. Let's say it's a new project, and now we'll need to update a couple of formulas. We created earlier, so this direct session project connection works properly, and so the sessions linked directly to a project are also included in the total time calculations. First, let's update the project formula. This one helps us group sessions by project in different views. Right now, it pulls the project name from the tasks project column. But for sessions linked directly to a project, there won't be a task. So in those cases, the formula should get the name from the direct link instead. Let's go ahead and change it. Open the formula and do what we did before. Add a condition. If the direct project column is not empty, we use that. Otherwise, we fall back to the task project column. You'll see the formula number on screen. I'll update it directly here. We add an E function. The condition is check if the project column is not empty. If it's not, we take the first project from the relation. Even though we've limited it to one, relations are still treated as a listing formulas, so we always need to grab the first item. Then we use dot notation to access the name property, and that's it. Format the branches of the condition on separate lines to keep things readable. Save it and the formula works. Now let's go to the project's database and update the formulas there. As you can see, even though I logged this session, the project still doesn't show any time tracked, even though it should already display 45 minutes. Let's go update the formulas to fix this. We'll work with the spent Minutes formula. Right now, we're already summing up the time from tasks linked to this project. We just need to add the minutes recorded in the time log entries linked directly to the project. To do that, we take those entries and use the map function to convert each record into the number of minutes stored in it. Then we sum the result. It's a small change, and now we can see the total time spent on the project. There's one more adjustment we need to make so that the directly linked sessions also show up in the work session section of the project. Rather than editing here, let's go to the template itself and update the filters. Open the template, and let's reconfigure the filters. We need the filter to check not only the tasks project column, but also the new projects column. Let's convert it to an advanced filter and add another condition. This time, we'll use OR logic, meaning it'll include any session that meets either of the two conditions. Choose the projects column and set the condition to contain. New project. Right now, I can't tell which is the template and which is the new project I just created. So I'll temporarily use a workaround like this. The top one is the template. Okay. Now I'll repeat the same process for all the filters I set up on the project page. For the current month, we are using a more complex filter, so we'll need to turn this condition into a separate group. The second condition, the date stays as it is, the connector remains, and this subgroup will be configured the same way as the filters we've already set up. We'll use the same logic for the previous month view. Or project link contains template. Now, let's apply this updated template to one of the projects. The new project Note that we do not see any connected sessions yet despite there is a 45 minutes one that I connected directly to this project. To apply an updated template, I delete the page content and click on the template name. And now the session is visible. I won't apply the template changes for other projects now because soon we will be adding a navigation panel to the template, so I will postpone applying the new template until then. Now let's take one more look at the session page. I'll open it from here and expand it to full width. Right now, we're seeing all the properties related to a work session. Many of them aren't actually necessary. They take up space and distract from what's important. I suggest hiding the properties that we definitely don't need to display. This one is just a divider, and this one is a technical column that helps us show sessions more conveniently elsewhere. Project by task is optional since the project column already shows which project the linked task belongs to. Let's also hide start, and that's a technical column used solely for synching sessions with the notion calendar, and then there's time spent here. It's up to you. You can leave the version that suits your preferences best. The remaining columns can be rearranged in the order you use most often or in the way that makes the most sense to you. This is actually the third type of layout we've customized. We've already set up tabbed views for tasks and a template for projects. For sessions, we don't really need page content. In most cases, there won't be anything inside session itself. All important info will be stored in its properties. So we can keep the page simple. Show only what you need and hide anything that's not essential or rarely used. Now we have a button that lets us quickly log a forgotten session. You can choose the date, for example, if it was in the past, Enter how much time you spent on the task and link it to the relevant project or task. But what would be even more convenient is if that link were created automatically. That's exactly what we're going to do next. Here's what we'll do. We'll add a button to both tasks and projects. These buttons will let you log a forgotten session and link it automatically to the right record. Let's start with tasks. In the final lesson, we'll build the main dashboard where tasks will be displayed in a cleaner format. But for now, we'll work with this basic table view. So let's take a look at the task page. We already have a start the time button on the main tab. Now let's add another button under it for log in a forgotten session. To do this, open the full list of properties and add a new one. Choose button and name it ad session. Then configure it the same way we did for the standalone ad session button. Create a new page in the time log database, give it the title work session. Although in this case, we can actually use the task name instead. Set the start date to date triggered. Set person to whoever clicked, set the status to complete it, and link the new session to the current task. Just like before, we'll also open the newly created work session page, so you can adjust the time and enter the number of minutes spent. Save the configuration. Actually, let's give it a bit different name. And now we need to move this button right under the timer start button. So open customized layout, click the plus icon and search for your button. Done. Now, let's do the same thing for projects. I open the site properties list, add a new one, and select button. I name it plus session and edit the button behavior. The button should create a new page in the time log database. Set the title, set start to date triggered. Person to whoever clicked status to complete it. We can't link it to a task because we're in the context of a project, not a task, but we do know the project, so we select this page. Meaning the session will be directly linked to the project. We also add an action to open the session immediately after it's created. Save it, and now let's move this button from the property list into the page layout. Again, click customized Layout. If you have open slots, you can place the button right there. If not, add it as a separate block below the title. Later, we'll configure a main dashboard for managing projects and tasks, and this button will appear on the project cards. That way, you won't even need to open the project page to add a forgotten session. You'll be able to do it straight from the dashboard by clicking this button on the card. So ready to test, let's add a new session. Manually enter 10 minutes. The project link is already there. And let's say the date is yesterday. That's it. Nothing else to change. Minimum effort to log a forgotten session. Okay, we finished handling the case where you forget to start the timer. Now let's talk about the case when you forget to stop it. This can happen, for example, when you start work in the morning, you might not notice that there's already an active timer running because you begin your day from a different page in your workspace. You launch a new timer and your previous one, which has been running all night stops automatically without you realizing it. What we can do is configure notion to make suspiciously long sessions more visible so that you can spot them early and adjust the time to a more realistic value while you still remember when the session actually ended. We'll do this by adding a formula to the time log database. This formula will check the session's duration, and if it's unusually long, it'll display a warning message. What counts as unusually long is up to you. Personally, I consider sessions longer than 5 hours suspicious. I rarely work that long without a break, and if a session ran overnight, it's likely to be at least 10 hours long. So let's go with that number. We'll write a formula that flags any session over 10 hours. Let's create a new session and call it very long session. I'll keep the start time, but set the start date to yesterday. So the session now lasts 24 hours. Then I add a new property. Choose formula and name the column errors. You'll see the formula number on screen, so you can copy and paste it. We'll use an F function again. Condition. Then what happens if true? What happens if false? The condition. We check if the session lasts more than 10 hours. The number of hours is stored in the spent hours property. So we check whether its value is greater than or equal to ten. If yes, we show the message. Work session is lasting for more than 10 hours. It stand out, let's make the text bold and read. To do that, we use the dot style function. Inside the parenthesis, we apply the styles using double quotes. If the session is under 10 hours, we just return an empty string. Even an empty string needs to be defined. It's just two double quotes with nothing inside. Let's save and make sure the error only shows up when there's actually an error. The second option, hide when empty tells notion to hide this property if it's empty. Now, let's hide the properties section. And as you can see, only the error is visible because right now there is one. If I change the start date back to today, the error disappears, and so does the property itself. What's next? Let's go to our dashboard where we have the card that shows active sessions. And since this is the place where you'll most often check whether there's an active session, it makes sense to also display suspicious sessions here so you can fix them right away. What do we need to do? We'll update the filter so it shows not only your active sessions, but also your sessions that have an error. The condition for person stays the same. But the first condition will now become a group where we check either the status or the errors using the OR connector. Now the filter will show all sessions that belong to you and are either inactive status or contain an error message. Currently, that's just one type of error when the session is too long. Let's also display the error message on the card itself so you can immediately understand what's going on. I'll fix the date and that's it. And now I can congratulate you. We've officially finished setting up the entire time tracking system. We've done a huge amount of work and covered a lot of notion topics. If you followed along and built everything with me, then you've already been working with notion on an advanced level because many of the techniques and little features we've added are exactly what make a system advanced. We worked with databases, relations, roll up formulas, buttons, the notion calendar, different data views, and even charts. And I hope that your system looks better and works better for you than it did when you first started this master class. But I'm not saying goodbye just yet. We've still got two more lessons ahead. In the next one, we'll set up navigation for your workspace, and then we'll create your main dashboard for working with tasks and projects. 13. Navigation: All right, we're on the home stretch, just a few steps left. And in this lesson, we'll add navigation between pages. First, let's create a new page. In the next lesson, we'll use this page to build the final dashboard for working with active tasks. So let's call this page Work hub. I'll set it to full width. Now that we have two pages, it finally makes sense to add a navigation bar. We're going to place navigation at the top of each page. There are different ways to create navigation, but in this master class, we'll use a callout block. It visually separates the navigation from the rest of the page content. And remove the icon or use something thematically appropriate like a compass. Then we list the pages we want to link to. I usually do this using plain text. Start with home, which should point to the W hub. Then I add three spaces, dot three more spaces, and the name of the next page. This way, each page name is visually separated, making the navigation easier to read. Right now, this is just plain text, but we can turn each page name into a link using the formatting menu. Click at Link and select the page you want to link to. And just like that, navigation has been added to the W hub. Now let's also add it to the time tracking page. Just select the navigation block, copy it and paste it onto the other page. Now I can already switch between pages using the navigation. Alternatively, you can use a Sync block. A sync block lets you see and edit the same content in multiple places within your workspace. Any changes you make to it will be reflected everywhere that block is used. If you have many pages in your workspace and your navigation block changes from time to time, instead of manually updating each page, you can just update it once on your main page. It will be automatically updated everywhere else the synced block is used. You can turn the block we already created into a synced blog. Just open the menu, click, turn into, and select synced Blog. That's it. Now it's synced. How can you tell? You'll see red border when you hover over it. That only appears on synced blocks. Now select it and click Copy and sync. Go to the page where you want to add the navigation, paste it there. And now you have a single block displayed across two pages. The original block lives on the main page. Just to demonstrate that the sync block is working, let's add a link to the page with your databases in the navigation block. And you'll see the change reflected right away on the time tracking page. Now, let's also add the navigation block to the databases page. And to the projects pages as well, I'll go into the project template and add the navigation block there. Then I'll reapply this template to all project entries so that all the changes we made in this course will be reflected across your entire system. Et's keep going. Right now, both of our pages, work hub and time tracking are on the same level, and the original databases are still located inside the time tracking page. I suggest moving the system block into the work hub, since the work hub is the main page and time tracking only describes one part of the overall workflow. Now, the original databases live in the Whub but both pages are still at the same level. Why is this important if you're using a free notion account or if you're working with contractors and inviting them as guests to your work hub, it's much easier to manage access if everything they need to see is nested under one single page. That way, you can simply invite guests to the main page via the share menu, and they'll automatically have access to all nested pages inside your system. But if some pages like time tracking right now are at the same level instead of being nested under the main page, and you invite someone only to the time tracking page, they won't have access to the actual databases since the originals are stored inside the Whub. As a result, all those database views will appear empty to them. The buttons won't work either. Since they rely on databases the guest can't access, you'd have to manually grant access to each page and database, which is a hassle. To avoid this, it makes sense to move all your pages into the main page and organize them under a section called system on a separate page. You could name it something like pages. Inside, you can store all your dashboards and workspace pages, and don't worry. Your links will still work. For example, clicking on time tracking will still take you to the same page, but now its path has changed since it's nested inside the work hub. Great. Navigation is all set. 14. Main Dashboard: All right, the final lesson in this one, we'll set up the main dashboard where you'll actually be working with your tasks. We already have a time tracking dashboard, and that one is more about reviewing where your time went, seeing how it's distributed across team members and projects, and checking who's currently working on what if you're working with a team. So that page is more focused on giving you information rather than letting you interact with or modify it. The dashboard we're going to build in this lesson will serve as a control panel. Place where you actually interact with your tasks, start and stop timers for them and move through your day. It's not meant for planning tasks. It's a tool for working with the tasks you've already selected for today. Let's start with the left column. We'll set it up exactly like we did on the time tracking dashboard and add the actions and timer section. We can just copy all those blocks from the time tracking dashboard and paste them into the work hub. And I think it'll be useful to expand the actions list with two more buttons. One to create a new project and one for a new task. For that, we'll need two new buttons. New project. We'll add a page to the project's database. And open it in a center pop up. Notion automatically applied the project template we previously set up. Let's add an icon. Okay. Now I'll duplicate this button to create one for tasks. New task. We just switch the database. Everything else can stay the same. You can also reorder the buttons or add dividers to group them by theme. Like this. And now we're ready to move on to the sections that will go on the right side of the actions and timer block. Let's begin by adding the project section. I'm dragging an empty block to the right of the actions heading. This creates a two column layout. I'll move all the blocks under the actions section. So they sit together in the left column. Now let's move on to the right side of the page projects. Let's display all active projects here. To do that, I'll add a linked view of database and choose the project's database. Let's set some projects to the status active. Then I'll switch the view from table to gallery. I'll hide the card preview and set up a filter to display only the projects with status active. I also want to see how much total time was spent on each project and have the ability to add a forgotten session directly from here. I'll remove the title of the view and rename the tab to In Progress. That's it for the project section. Now let's move on to the tasks section. Add a heading tasks then a divider. Now we add a linked view of the tasks database. I'll remove the view title and rename the tab to today because first, we'll configure it to display the tasks scheduled for today for the specific person viewing this dashboard. In the filter, choose person contains me. Then add another filter. Due date is today. I don't currently have any tasks scheduled for today, so I'll open one of the projects and assign today's date to a few tasks. Okay. Now I'll remove the unnecessary columns. I'll keep the project relation time spent and the start time button. The button should be as narrow as possible, and I'll reorder the columns. Next, we'll sort the tasks by status so that completed ones appear lower in the list. It's also a good idea to hide icons and remove vertical dividers. Alternatively, we can hide the status column and instead group tasks by status. One more improvement I suggest here is adding a formula that shows whether there's an active timer for a task. Let's call it time status and paste the formula. Now, it's easy to see if a task has an active timer. And although I initially suggested not using stop buttons in the tasks database in this particular case, when we have clear indicators of active sessions, it actually seems like a good idea. So the button to stop active timers. Sitting the filter to only edit sessions started by me and with status Active. And updates include setting the timestamp and the status to complete it. And I will give this button a short name to match the one for starting the timer. Narrow down the column. Now it's possible to stop sessions right from the tasks table. Just keep in mind that the stop button will end all of your active sessions, not just the one linked to this specific task. And the last thing we'll add here is a view for today's sessions. Of course, there's a full dashboard to explore your time log, but this additional view might be more convenient for a quick glance and for making some quick edits. The filter should be set to only show sessions related to me and start date equal to today. Name it work sessions, for example, and rearrange the columns hiding the ones that are not needed here. Let's add summing up time in hours. Thus, you can easily see how much time you have been working today. The last thing is sorting. Let's add a sorting in ascending order here. Okay, that's actually it. We are finally done. Your time tracking system in notion is ready. 15. Congrats!: Gress You did it. You didn't just watch how time tracking system works in motion. You built one by yourself. You've practice setting up databases, buttons, relations, formulas, and you have a tool now that you actually can use every day. And most importantly, you understand how it works under the hood. If you enjoyed this class, I have something to say about it, please leave feedback. It actually affects the financial feedback from the platform to the teachers. So it's also a good way to say, thank you, not mentioning that it's the only source for me to understand I can do better for you in my next master class. I encourage you to share your project on the project page to celebrate the completion of this class and to inspire others. So that's it for now, and I hope to see you in my other classes.