Notion was HARD until I Learned These 8 Tips!

today we're skipping past the overwhelming rule of notion features and instead I'll share eight specific use cases from my daily workflow that you can Implement immediately let's get started most of us have a notes database in notion and a beginner mistake is creating new pages for every single meeting while this is fine for oneoff chats for recurring meetings where we want to refer back to previous discussions this is extremely inefficient because we would have to like open close open close close open close right instead for meetings that repeat you want to use one notion page

and if I scroll down here you'll see that I've added toggles to create what I call a notes thread for each toggle there's the date of the meeting SL chat and a meaningful name that reminds me of the context of that meeting ah this is the first chat with my new manager and this was um the notes I took during our first face tace in New York all is enabled by this new thread button and expanding the settings you'll see that we're simply inserting a toggled block below the button and there's a dynamic like today's

date here a reminder to add a meaningful name and a divider line so if I expand this is simply notes divider line bullet point divider line and to see this in action we'll click this button and I can easily update this date to the date of the meeting add a meaningful name week before I resign kidding obviously Commander control enter to expand a toggle and I can start taking notes Pro tip even when all the toggles are collapsed on this page we can press Commander control F search for word enter and notion will still be

able to identify and bring us to that phrase or word within the page staying on the topic of notes productivity tip number two is to always include an outstanding section up top here with checkboxes on the left and resolved toggle on the right by including this at the top of every nose thread page we're creating a visual reminder of unresolved issues no not those kind of unresolved issues and unlike normal tasks outstanding action items and questions take a longer time to resolve for example when can we expect the software update to be ready for testing

my manager might need a few weeks to figure that out but we can't afford to forget about it so we keep it front and center until it's addressed once this is dealt with I check it and move it into the resolve toggle I'm risk averse I don't like deleting information if I can help it I prefer tucking it away for future reference the third and final tip for not taking in notion naming I recommend using the year quarter topic naming convention for notes thread Pages for example 2030 q1 weekly manager 101s this naming convention aligns

with how our brains typically process and store information we often remember events in relation to time periods rather than specific dates in practice when we're searching for a specific note we recall that discussion happened in early 2030 so it's either q1 or Q2 probably q1 so as you can see this naming system acts as a built-in filter for one-off meetings like this one I found the year month meaningful name format works best for example 2030 March coffee chat with Jane this again allows us to identify the context of the note without even opening the page

next up I've been extremely impressed with the new notion Ai and I'm super lucky they agreed to sponsor this video because I probably would have talked about them anyways diving right into an example I'm responsible for sending a recap email every month and this is the exact template that I use every time here's where the magic happens I'm just going to create a new section up top so you can see a side by-side comparison of notion Ai and what I had previously press space to bring up the new notion AI draft a November digest oops

based on my October so I'm literally telling notion to reference my October digest and let's give it another one to reference September digest enter and because notion has access to all my previous monthly recap emails it generates a new email using exact same format with new content so let's accept this so you can see uh body uh November digest blast from the past and even the footer text down here are all exactly the same taking this a step further this is the ideas page for my weekly productivity newsletter and this is the tip I want

to share in next week's email the content is there but it's very rough so what I can do is highlight all this ask the new notion AI uh rewrite this using the number one format and number two tone of voice of my previous uh workspace Essentials newsletters found in and this is a crazy part at my master content database so yes we can reference an entire database and not just individual pages so what's happening is that notion AI literally referen the 182 newsletters I've written over the past couple of years to produce this refined draft

in my tone of voice and now I can just make some final adjustments as you can probably tell by now notion ai's biggest Advantage is producing output specific to my preferences because it has so much Jeff Sue specific context if you want to try this out for yourself click the link below to unlock the new notion AI in your workspace tip number five is to always create an inbox view for your databases moving right into an example I have a task view on my command center page right and let's say one day I'm in a

rush I create a new task send address to brother after I land and I forget to assign a due date because my tasks view here only contain tasks with a due date the task I captured just now will most likely slip through the cracks unless I created an inbox view where I filter for tasks that are not done and the due date is empty and as you can see that task without a due date is captured right here put simply an inbox view acts as a safety net for your digital workspace it catches all those

items that don't yet have a clear home the tricky part of course is identifying the properties we need to filter for to create our inbox views here's another example because I follow Thiago Forte's par method every single one of my not notes should be related to a project an area or a resource put another way notes that I create that are not tied to one of those properties are at risk of Disappearing and not being found again so for my notes database I create an inbox view that filters for notes where the related area resource

and project properties are all empty for example um I created this note to capture equipment I need to buy from my new studio I was clearly in a rush I forgot to categorize it so when I'm reviewing my notes inbox I'm like okay this is related to studio so under area I'm going to type in and search for Studio assign the studio and you'll see that that note has disappeared from the inbox view if you're new to relational databases and the PA method don't worry I'll leave a link to my free notion toolkit down below

you'll get the notes thread template I talked about earlier right away and you can let me know in the comments what other templates uh you want me to create moving on to a slightly more intermediate tip we should always think of the raw database as the hidden backend infrastructure and views of that database as the front-end user interface what do I mean by this well this is the raw view of my tasks database and as you can see there are 330 entries so obviously I'm never going to be doing work in this page I mean

it's a mess and it lags even when I scroll down right but on my command center page where I spend the majority of my day within my tasks view you'll see that the source is the task database I just showed and I simply filtered for tasks that are due in the next 7 days so as you can see the raw task database serves as my comprehensive task repository while targeted views like upcoming 7-Day tasks or monthly calendar task views provide actionable and manageable workspaces another example my raw notes database looks like a mess right and

yet if I click into let's say the business operations area page and scroll all the way down you'll see that all notes related to business operations are neatly sorted by last edited time clicking to the settings here you'll see that the source is the notes database we just saw and I'm simply filtering for all notes that are related to the business operations area so what's the implication here well whenever we create new databases let's just go through a simple example for SLT uh let's create a new table let's name this resources database we want to

gain the habit of clicking the table block block turning this into a page and clicking into the page in this raw database view create your properties organize it however you want Resource One just as an example and in another page where you're actually going to perform the work um let's create a resources section here blue for SLT table view we can now refer to the resources database we just created and create an actionable view base based on that Page's context Pro tip when it comes to workspace organization I try my best to consolidate all my

back end/ raw databases in a single location so I know exactly where to go to make changes buttons is one of my favorite notion features and here are the top three ways I use them first up once all tasks are completed in a project for example usually the last step is to update the status property instead of scrolling all the way back up to change one property I created a button that once clicked simply changes the status to completed simple yet effective another use case I've added three buttons to the top of my command center

page for quick capture purposes let's say I come across a useful prompt online I want to capture it as quickly as possible I click this button I rename this to explain hard concept because that what's the prompt does uh it's tagged as captured automatically and I simply paste The Prompt I copied press escape to exit out and I did all that without having to navigate to the promps database create a new entry and then come back to the command center the button did all that in one go third example this is a trips project page

I'm going to Japan later this year and you can see that once I click this button here not only are multiple task cred all at once but they're all related to this project sltrip page clicking into the button settings uh you'll see that I'm simply adding empty pages to my all task database naming those tasks and for the related project selecting the dynamic option like this page meaning no matter where this button is the task created will always be related to the page that it's on Pro tip this Dynamic quality of the buttons feature is

super useful in team settings for example in my notion team space you see that for the new task button the person who clicks the button is assigned as the owner so if my colleague clicks they're assigned as the owner if I click I'm the owner next up we have synced blocks as a quick refresher when we turn a normal block into a synced block any change we make will be reflected across all instances of that synced block this is extremely powerful when the synced information goes through frequent or regular updates for example as a product

marketing manager I have to follow a standardized process whenever I launch a new campaign at work and for a reason I'm apparently too dumb to understand the finance team changes the process every quarter which I just love I mean who doesn't like surprises all right so I have this campaign launch sop checklist right and note that first uh only the toggle block is synced and not the checkbox itself since I don't want that synced across all pages just the steps themselves let's add a new Step another another useless step yay that's automatically going to be

reflected in all future instances leading to Time Savings and a reduction in errors over the long run Pro tip I found sync blocks to be especially useful for prompting for example this is a prompt I use to brainstorm use cases for my newsletter and this is the full prompt found in the toggle below and I've added that to the newsletter template I use every time when I write a new newsletter and since I make small adjustments every time I use this prompt those incremental improvements are automatically applied when I make changes to the sync block

saving me the hassle of going back to the template to make changes every time let me know if you want a full video breaking down my prompts database and if yes make sure you're subscribed if you enjoyed this you might want to check out my full notion playlist see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one