The ULTIMATE Second Brain Setup in Notion

hey what is going on friends welcome back to thomas frank explains in this video i'll be giving you an in-depth look at my complete second brain system inside of notion this is at long last an all-in-one system that tracks all of my tasks my projects my notes my goals and basically organizes my entire life and this is what i have wanted inside of notion for the entire time i've been using this app ever since 2018 when i discovered it and they had that promise of an all-in-one tool right on the home page finally i have

a complete system where i can capture all of my notes ideas my tasks i can track my projects with both notes and tasks inside of those projects i can organize my entire life using thiago forte's para organization system there's even a full gtd or getting things done workflow inside of the system so in this video i'm going to give you an in-depth look at every single part of this system from an action-oriented standpoint which means we're going to look at it from the perspective of the actions we would want to take including quickly capturing items

when we're on the go organizing our lives and actually getting things done for most of my life i have had to juggle multiple apps to achieve this balance but now i can do it all inside of notion now this will be a bit of a longer video so you might want to check out the table of contents either right there or in the description down below so you can skip around to what interests you or go back and review things as needed and before we dive in i'll also mention that i've turned this entire system

into a template so if you want a complete done-for-you second brain system that you can simply add to your notion workspace and start using right away you can actually get it over at thomasjfrank.com brain the template is called ultimate brain and i'll note right now there is a promo code you can use which i'll put on screen right now it is ub launch to get a full 50 off the list price i'll have more information about that at the end of the video but for now let's actually dive in because i'm going to show you

every single part of this system so in case you want to build it yourself you can using what you see here as inspiration so let's get this show on the road and dig into this template once again it is called ultimate brain and on the home page there are several different areas here split into three different columns so i've got some smart dashboards one just called dashboard it is a very general purpose dashboard there's also an area for planning your day a quick capture dashboard and a page called process which is our gtd or getting

things done style dashboard and finally one for planning your future we also have some more traditional productivity views like a task manager a project hub a notes area an areas and resources page which uses thiago forte's para or projects areas resources and archive organizational methodology for doing total life organization and i'll actually have a mini lesson on how that works within this video one for goals an archive and then some special views a book tracker a recipe book a quick links area and we're gonna get through all of these in this video but like i

said in the intro i want to take an action-oriented approach to how we go through this system so i first want to start out with actually capturing ideas see a second brain is an external either combination of tools or single tool that allows you to get ideas or tasks or events anything you're holding up in your brain into that external system so you can go back to thinking and being creative and actually getting your work done and for that second brain to work well we need to be able to quickly capture tasks and ideas and

everything else with as little friction as possible so inside of ultimate brain i created a page called quick capture and this is a one-stop destination for capturing both tasks and notes into various inboxes this is the kind of page that you could add as a favorite to your notion sidebar just like this you could also add it as a widget on your ios or your android home screen so you could immediately open it and then capture something when it comes into your life so here we have two different views there is a task in box

and a note inbox and one of the design patterns that i use throughout the entire template but also here is these links to other dedicated pages so here i see a linked view of my task inbox and a linked view of my note inbox but i can also go over to the task inbox itself and i can go over to the note inbox itself as well and an inbox is simply a default destination for something that isn't yet organized so in the case of a note it would be something that hasn't been given a resource

or an area which is like a folder again i'll have a whole para tutorial later in this video and in the case of tasks it would be anything that hasn't yet been given a project so if i want to capture a task and i'll switch over to my table view i can just call this inbox task and it's going to remain in the inbox until i assign a project which is exactly how things work in other task managers like todoist or asana or pretty much anything you've used in the past now there is one additional

little feature here on the quick capture page there is a filter that will ensure that anything i add here be it a task or a note only stays here for 24 hours and that ensures that the quick capture page is always nice and clean uh to give you a very quick look at how this works in the filters i have a special filter called quick capture is checked and there's a formula in there that basically just says if this is older than 24 hours it's not going to be checked so it's going to go away

from this quick capture page and keep the page nice and clean however it's always going to stay in the inbox until i physically process it and put it somewhere else or actually do it and one other really nice thing about using inboxes is that there are extensions we can use like notions official web clipper and the save to notion extension that will let us actually clip web highlights and web clips into our notion template here so i want to show you an example of how that would work using the save to notion extension the official

notion web clipper is really nice as well but i love the save to notion extension because it'll actually allow us to choose some specific property settings when we're clipping a web page and we can also clip specific highlights from that web page so i have the save the notion extension uh installed in my browser already if you don't you just add it to chrome or microsoft edge and here i'm on this uh article about front squat variations so i can open up the save to notion button in my little bar here i have some pre-setup

forms this one will add a note directly to my inbox and this one will actually make the note bypass the inbox and go directly to my fitness resource which is essentially a folder of fitness related articles and notes so i'll show you how both of those work here first i'm going to add it directly to the inbox i'll just click that and hit add new page and then when i go back to notion i will see front squat variations for lifters at every experience level right in my note inbox from there i could come in

here and i could give it an area or resource again that's kind of like a folder but i'm actually going to show you how it would work if i added it directly to that area or resource so i'll go ahead and delete it right now and i'll re-add it using the fitness form and if i go into this form you can see that i'm simply adding this area resource of fitness to my web clip so if i hit add new page i can go back to notion and it's not going to be in my inbox

because again the inbox is a default destination if i add it to a resource it's not going to be in the inbox it will disappear so i'll go over to my notes dashboard this gives you kind of a bit of a preview of how the notes dashboard works and i can see it in my recents so if you're coming from a tool like evernote or anything that has a reasons folder you can see it like that but i can also go over to my fitness resource and i've got a special web clips section where i

can see boom my front squat variations for lifters at every experience level i've also created a special view of the web clips section called by site and this will actually group my web clips by their base url so i can see everything from bar bend here i can see everything from body recomposition right here a very great resource if you want to learn about biomechanics and things like that by the way and if i open this up by default i'm going to see nothing but this actually will allow me to start creating some highlights and

i've got a whole video planned on how this works and how to leverage it but just to give you a bit of a example here if i highlight this and hit add highlight it is highlighted on the web page for now but i can also go back and see that highlight instantly in my second brain system so this extension is actually a very good way to do highlighting and note capture uh within web pages you're doing research on and then have them sync over to your second brain so that covers quick capture for now we've

got a lot more cool things coming down the pipeline for quick capture including an automatic speech to text to notion workflow that i'm very excited to share at the very near future but for now we're going to move on to the next portion of the template which is going to be planning your day i think this is really really important you want to have a way of capturing tasks giving them due dates giving them projects capturing notes but it's also very important to sit down either at the end of each day or the beginning of

a new day and plan out what you think you're going to accomplish on that day so i wanted to have a dedicated page for that purpose uh and this page essentially acts as a virtual whiteboard of sorts where i can just write down my plan for the day and just kind of get a view only of what i'm planning to accomplish instead of seeing everything else in my system and the point of the my day page that i've built here is to sort of facilitate that planning process and then give me this little virtual whiteboard

so the first thing i have here is a couple of little callouts very simple not database driven but they are inside of a synced block so they can kind of follow me around my second brain as well so i'll see them on the my day page but if i also went over to the general purpose dashboard i have this toggle where i see the exact same content and if i were on say the task manager or maybe even one of the time-based views like my today view i've got the same toggle so if i'm looking

at tasks that are due today and i want to plan do one i can just open up my toggle and i can add it to this exact same synced block but on the my day page specifically i have this little virtual whiteboard but i also have some useful sections that i can sort of refer to when i'm actually planning my day the first one is upcoming tasks so i have a calendar of tasks that actually have due dates and there's also a view called do next so within the getting things done methodology that david allen

created a long time ago he has this idea of tasks that don't have a specific due date that are priorities the ones that you are planning on doing as soon as possible those go on your next actions list or as i call it here i do next list so these are tasks which are grouped by their context like high energy or errand or home that haven't been assigned a specific due date but i do want to do them soon so i'm planning my day i can refer to these do next tasks in their contexts i

can refer to my actual calendar with tasks that have to be done on a specific date and i can plan out my day just like that i also wanted to add a specific self-care area and this was more for me than for the template but i think other people find it useful as well i find that as an entrepreneur who has a lot of goals and a lot of tasks it's very easy to de-prioritize workouts and drinking enough water and eating well when i have so much work to do because the work is very visible

it's very tangible it's on my task manager so it's very easy to be like i'm too busy i can't work out today and that is why i actually want to put self-care items on this virtual whiteboard right next to my tasks so i can sort of mentally prioritize them just as highly as my work tasks finally there is a daily journal area and a priority projects area there is a priority checkbox for projects and i wanted that because over the years of using different task management apps like asana and todoist i eventually would have a

ton of different projects in lists and it would be hard to prioritize which ones i wanted to actually work on which one's really important so here i can only see projects in my project management system that have been marked as a priority if i open up this build new set project here which i've actually been working on for quite a while hopefully like the set i can see that priority is checked here and that is going to enable me to see that project here on the my day page along with set up mini garage gym

and this song that i'm working on now let's go back to the journal for a second because a lot of people love to journal and i wanted to add this as a feature to the template if i add a page right here this is actually just a page within the notes database but it has a special template that i can generate from called daily note so if i generate from the daily note i might give it a just a date name so i'm just going to go with 5 9 20 22 which is today's date

and this template actually gives me a useful little dashboard that i can use as a daily journal and as a place to plan my day if i want to so if you're really into journaling you might want to use this instead of a static my day page i've got the my day synced block right there i've got my next seven days i've got do next all that good stuff but i also have dedicated areas to do like morning page writing if i want to get into a writing habit i have a daily review area and

over time if you're using this journal template you're going to have a whole journal that you can look back on in fact if we go to the notes page there is a daily journal heading right here and this will actually show you all of your past journals over time so it can be pretty useful if you do like journaling so that's going to cover it for daily planning in this overview video now i want to go into life organization and the life organization methodology that i've chosen to build into my system is actually the para

method that thiago forte came up with in his building a second brain course he has this great article it's public on his website and free on the pera method so i will link to that in the description down below and he basically explains the entire thing but i'm also going to briefly explain how it works uh in this video and also show how using notion we can sort of improve on it in my opinion because pera was actually developed to be tool agnostic which means it has certain limitations based on older school tools that thiago's

been using for a long time so to properly do this section the video i'm gonna have to break out the whiteboard okay so like i said before thiago's methodology is called para which stands for projects areas resources and archive and this sort of forms a top-level framework for organizing the entirety of your life now i think thiago would agree with me when i say that para isn't a rigid system you have to stick to for everything but it's more like a top level starting point so you can create projects you can create areas resources you

can have an archive for dumping things that are no longer relevant and then within maybe a certain area or resource you can start customizing things and this is where notion gets really really useful because it's a tool that allows us to build our own tools but to explain pera from a non-notion more app agnostic standpoint each of these letters in the para acronym are specific and separate lists there is a list of projects a list of areas a list of resources and then an archive which contains lots of stuff that no longer matters so to

define these a project is an ongoing series of tasks that has an end goal you probably know what a project is an area he calls a sphere of activity with a standard to be maintained over time so i see that as what i love to call life buckets or the sort of slices of your identity maybe health your business if you're a musician like i am the music part of your life these are large pieces of your life that might have tasks to be sort of done on a maintenance basis but might also have resources

and you know things that you're collecting information notes that kind of thing a resource is a bit less actionable than an area it doesn't have a standard to be maintained it's more a topic of ongoing interest something that you're simply interested in like biomechanics or guitar something like that and then the archive is just a holding area for anything that is no longer relevant to you but that you don't want to fully delete an archive is a great way to make sure you can access things in the future if you need to but that those

things are out of your way on a day-to-day basis so within pera these really are separate lists and the reason for that is this is a methodology that can be applied to basically any tool so if you're using a separate notetaker like evernote or bear you can have a projects folder an areas folder a resources folder and an archive if you're using your computer's file system for file management you can have a projects folder an areas folder so on and you can do the same thing with task management so in projects you might have you

know garage gym things like that and in areas you might have a health area in resources you might have biomechanics and in the archive you might just have stuff that you have gotten rid of that no longer matters to you the cool thing though is that a notion we can sort of get a bit more flexible than what we're looking at right here because with notion we're actually using databases instead of rigid directories in a hierarchical structure so let me show you a bit of a diagram that i've created for this this is ultimate brain's

brains parastructure and you can see here that we have a bit more flexibility going on areas can actually contain goals they can contain projects and they can contain resources so when thiago says an area is a sphere of activity with a standard to be maintained over time to me that means it's a big part of your life which may contain specific projects and it also may contain more specific and topical resources so why wouldn't you have them within an area in a tool like evernote tiago doesn't like doing that because you have to scroll through

all of your areas before getting to a resource but in notion we can get a lot more flexible same can be said for things like goals i think a lot of times goals don't have actionable tasks associated with them so we may actually want to have them as their own data type which can again contain projects and then projects of course contain tasks but they can also contain notes which will be very useful and then resources contain notes as well but the big thing which i put on this little sticky note right here is that

pretty much any of these pieces of your organizational system do not have to be contained by other ones projects can exist outside of an area same for resources tasks can stay in your inbox and not be assigned a project you have a lot of flexibility when you use databases in a tool like notion because notion is simply allowing you to relate information from one database to information in another database and you get to choose whether or not you do that so let me show you what that actually looks like inside of my second brain system

so here we have an areas and resources main page and this sort of collects all the areas in our life and you can see how these are sort of the big pieces of my life college info geek health music but also the resources the more topical interests things like interior design productivity business finance all this kind of stuff and if i go into one of these pages like the health page right here i can see that there's basically this dashboard for this entire part of my life i might have projects like setting up this mini

garage gym and i've got a progress bar and i can see if there are any overdue tasks how many tasks i have i have resources like fitness or nutrition i've got goals and i can also favorite notes so this barbell academy notes page where i was taking notes on a course i have it favorited inside of my health area i have all of the notes across any of these resources or not in the resource just in the area right here in area notes by updated alphabetically or i can even look at them in a sort

of matrix view where i can give them types so this barbell academy notes which you can see exists in the fitness resource has actually been given a lecture type and with these types i can create even more organization if i'm say taking a very complex class with lecture notes and book notes and all kinds of other things going on so this sort of gives me a bird's-eye view of everything in my life related to my health i can also go into one of these resources so if i go into fitness and i open that up

i have my barbell academy notes i can open that up i can take all the notes i need to and this is a pretty darn long note because i have the entire course's notes inside of this and i can also like i showed you before collect web clips that are related to this resource so this gives me again a top level base framework for organizing every part of my life i have my health dashboard i have the fitness resource which is very good for organizing everything related to fitness in terms of information that i'm saving

or notes that i'm taking and i also have projects so going back to my health area i have a setup mini garage gym project and what i've always wanted in basically any tool is a robust note-taking system and a robust task management system and from what i've experimented with there wasn't really a tool out there that offered both to me until notion so inside my project template i now have an area for tasks but i also have an area for notes i can take any notes i need to on this project and another cool thing

if i want to pull notes from somewhere else in my second brain into this project so i have like a a reference for the project i can actually do that i create a little property if i open up the more properties area here called pulled resources and pulled notes so using this one it's a simple relation property i can pull an entire resource into this project if that would be helpful and with this one i can get a bit more specific and i can pull specific notes into this project as well they are not notes

that are directly related to the project but i'm pulling them in as if i'm gathering all the resources i already have relevant to this project into one useful dashboard so let me show you how i do that in pulled notes i'm simply going to search for my front squat variations article and now if i come over to my notes area you'll see that it's still blank because the default view only shows me notes that i've added directly to the project i would want to see those but i can also go over to this polls view

and see now my front squat variations are showing inside of this project so again it's about creating a dashboard that is perfect for the given context and there's going to be times in my life where i am in project planning mode for a specific project in this case for the set up a mini garage gym project and i want to see all my tasks but i also want to see any information within my second brain whether i take it directly from here or i pull it in that's going to help me with this project if

i pulled an entire resource so let's just say pulled resources let's add in fitness entirely that will bring in everything from that resource so now i'm gonna have the entire resource showing down here and i can easily access it and i'm gonna see every single web clip and all of my notes from that resource in the polls area as well again i have this one stop shop dashboard for this project but like i said earlier we are not restricted to the rigid para model and if i want to have something that doesn't exist inside of

an area or if i want to have like a resource it's on its own i can do that because again we're using databases where our relations are optional so if i go back to the areas and resources main page here you can see that some of these resources which are again basically just like little topical buckets for things i'm interested in some of them are contained within areas i've got guitar music production and singing inside of music so if i open up my music dashboard i'm going to see all of those there and i can

also see all of my notes related to all these resources inside the area notes pretty useful but there are certain resources in my life certain little topical interests that aren't really related to any overarching uh identity that i have like as a musician or as an athlete for example interior design doesn't really go in an area or maybe if i had a house area i could go there but if i don't have a house area or if i just want to have a resource i need to create one you know kind of quick and dirty

i can just do it in no root area and now i have this perfect little interior design resource where i can clip uh you know 21 mid-century modern chair designs that kind of thing so we have a lot of flexibility here and this allows us to use thiago's para methodology as a starting point and then to create really useful customizations from that starting point to give you an example of that i have this notion area in my actual copy of this template which i'm keeping private i'm using a demo for most this video but i've

got this little notion tools note which normally would just be filled with text that's normally what you do with notes and notion but this is actually far better served by a custom database with some custom properties so within this note i've created a database and that allows me to use this in a far more useful context than if it were just a bullet list full of uh you know just random text so we've talked about para organization life organization we've talked a lot about project management actually i will show you the project hub really quick

this just shows us our projects by their status which is very useful and then groups them by their areas so i can see anything that is currently going on i can see projects that have been planned which i don't have any yet i have ongoing projects and this is actually really good for recurring tasks which i will cover a little bit later in the video tasks that have to be done again and again on an ongoing basis i collect in these ongoing area task projects i have done projects here and then i can also set

projects as on hold if i need to so that's a pretty useful hub but now i actually want to move on to task management inside of notion and specifically inside of ultimate brain so i have this whole little task manager dashboard here and this will show me number one a calendar so anything that has actually been given a due date i can see at a glance right here but then i have lots of very useful views so i can see projects and tasks in their proper context first i've got my inbox where i can simply

dump tasks that haven't been processed yet i've got time-based views so this view would show me any task that is due tomorrow or before i've got three right here i could go to my month and i could see anything that is due within the next month today would show me anything due just today or before those are really useful and then there are these process views which i will talk about in just a bit because they are related to the getting things done method i do have a special views little header here which will show

completed tasks cold tasks which are pretty useful actually coal tasks are essentially tasks that are more than two weeks overdue and not high priority and the reason i added this is because using todoist and wunderlist before that remember the milk back in the day when i was a high schooler i would often have tasks you know it was very busy in my life i would often have tasks that were very far overdue and they would just sort of gunk up my do today list and i would either have to go through and process them automatically

or just have a mess of a task manager and despite my best efforts sometimes in my life this happens so when i started using notion for task management i thought couldn't i just create a filter that would get these really overdue tasks out of my hair and into a special place and that is what cold tasks is it basically just checks off a cold checkbox property if the task is more than two weeks overdue and it is not marked as high priority it's going to get itself out of my today view my next seven days

and go to this cold area and the whole philosophy here is if you have a task that is more than two weeks overdue and you didn't physically mark it as high priority and you didn't come and update its due date or do it was it really that important anyway it probably wasn't so again we're not getting rid of it we're not deleting it we are getting it out of your more important views where you should only be seeing tasks that are actually important and actually a priority going back to our task manager we have once

again have a high priority project list and then we have these process views so the process page which is again its own page inside of this template is a complete getting things done or gtd style processing dashboard so this would be for anybody who actually uses david allen's gtd method and it basically lets you use that entire method in one page there are also specific pages for each of the gtd lists but you can also just use it on the process page itself now i'm going to explain gtd a little bit in this video but

i also have a full video planned that will go in depth on what gtd is how to actually use it and whether or not it's going to be useful but to just show you the workflow of how to process items that come into your life i'll come over to this little whimsical board right here and we'll take a look at this flow chart so essentially getting things done is a methodology for processing anything that comes into your life and figuring out where to put it and in fact thiago has mentioned that pera is sort of

almost an add-on to gtd it sort of tells you where to put those things if they're projects or areas or resources but the gtd processing methodology is really what we can use to uh you know go through the actions of processing things that come into our lives so this starts with an inbox everything comes into an inbox which in my case is either a note inbox or a task inbox and then we start asking questions first and foremost is it actionable if not we'll either delete it if it's totally irrelevant we'll add it to our

reference materials in this case it would be a resource or maybe an area we'll add it to a some day list or we can add it to a snooze list which has also been called a tickler file essentially it's like snoozing an email in your email inbox it'll come back into the inbox a little bit later on or at least get a reminder about it so if it's not actionable you do one of those four things but if it is actionable you keep moving on the next question is is the next action clear and obvious

so if you have something very big in your inbox like write an entire paper if you're a student or make an entire video if you're me the next physical action is not very obvious in that case make a video is not obvious because i have a lot of different sub tasks in that process i need to script the video or outline it i need to turn all lights on in the set there's a whole lot to do so if your next action is not obvious you're actually looking at a project you would create a project

out of that you break that project down into smaller tasks that are obvious and from there you can go on to the next step the next question is can you do it now in under two minutes if yes then simply do it don't worry about getting it into your system or processing it because it would take less time to just do it if you can't or you need to put it off for some reason can you delegate it if yes add to a delegated list and maybe add yourself a reminder to check in with the

person that you delegated it to finally if you cannot delegate it you ask does it have a hard specific deadline if it does you add it to your calendar and if it doesn't you add it to your do next list or your next actions list and these sort of colored boxes here indicate the different lists we actually have inside of gtd or the actions we'll take so for anything actionable in your system if it's not done within gtd it is going to be on one of six specific lists your inbox your do next list or

your next actions list your delegated list your snooze list your someday list or the calendar itself and inside of my little second brain process page here a notion we have a view across this little tab bar here of each of those lists so we have our task intake which i just called intake to differentiate it from the classic task inbox which does not use gtd rules and it's going to stay here until i move it to one of the other lists i can either move it to do next so here i have inbox task and

i'll give it a do next smart list option and that will actually move it over to do next and i could give it a context as well so if it's a high energy or a low energy task i could give it an energy context if it is a errand i could give it that context and these contexts would allow me to look at my do next list at specific times the day and see which tasks are going to be useful for the context that i'm actually in so i can identify what's truly actionable right now

i can also look at my next month list and this is exactly like the next month list in the task manager this shows only tasks that have a specific due date we also have a delegated list where i can add a wait date and this will just be the date that i actually delegated it so i can see how long things have been delegated and if they're done or not i can add a note like delegated to anna right here and then we have a snooze list so this is again like snoozing an item in

your email i could basically just say i want to snooze this until may 1st or april 15th these were snooze quite a while ago and i will go and look at them maybe each week when i'm processing my system so it comes back into my life when it's actually relevant again and finally there is a list called someday and this is just for things that you don't want to forget that you might want to do someday but you're not actually sure if you're going to do it so put it on the sunday list so this

gives me an entire gtd workflow for all tasks and for all notes and web clips here i've got a clip from the technium 103 bits of advice i wish i had known really good article actually and from this processing dashboard i could go ahead and give that an area or a resource i'll probably just add that to college info geek for now and it gets out of my inbox so that's the gtd style processing workflow and using this or simply using the regular old inbox you could process your tasks give them projects give them context

if you want give them due dates and then every single day when you're planning your day you can look at what's due today or you can go ahead maybe a day or next seven days or a month and view what's coming up and plan your day accordingly here i'll also mention that this template completely supports recurring tasks and i won't get too much into how those work but i will call out that we have an entire video on how to create automated recurring tasks inside of notion this template has all of the notion-specific stuff you

need to run recurring tasks so it does pretty much like 75 or 80 of the work for you there's also a full blog post that shows exactly how to set this up in a written form so if that's more your speed you can check that out i'll have those links in the description down below along with everything else that i mentioned so let's now talk about note-taking inside of your second brain in notion and this is actually what i've been doing inside of notion for quite a few years now i think i moved over from

evernote to notion for note-taking about two years ago uh fully and partially about three years ago but there were some things from evernote that i really really missed and wanted to recreate inside of notion so the notes dashboard that i created inside of this template essentially does that and you can see here we have basically all of the sort of main lists that i had back in evernote or that you'd have in a more traditional note-taking app like bayer on mac or ulysses and that consists of number one an inbox so again this is a

default place to just drop a note so you can process it later but maybe more importantly we have a favorites area and a recent area so in many cases i am lazy which means i don't want to go navigating through areas and resources to find a specific note especially if i used it really recently so this recent area basically just sorts all of the notes in my system by their updated date and it gets rid of anything that has been archived which means i can just come right to recents on the notes dashboard or i

can come to the specific reasons page i might favorite that on my sidebar and i can quickly get to any note that i've worked on really recently but if i want to make sure that a note is always going to be available on that dashboard and even if it's not recent it's going to be there i can simply come and favorite it right here and i'm going to see it on my favorites bar right here so this is kind of an area to just generally manage all of your notes and then if you want to

get more detail from there you can add things to resources or areas if you want one other really cool part of the notes dashboard here is this fleeting notes toggle right here in this area if you add a note and then you do not change it or update it for a month it's actually going to auto archive itself and i really wanted a feature like this because sometimes i'm taking notes that are not going to be useful like a week from now or a month from now like a meeting note about something we're going to

do right now so i want to be able to capture that into my system but i don't want it in like this recent area i don't want it floating around after its useful life has expired so i now have a specific fleeting notes area and once again this is just driven by a simple formula with a checkbox and a filter essentially if the last edited date is more than a month in the past it's going to auto archive itself and get out of here i can actually show you that filter right now it's pretty simple

where uh updated is after one month ago in fact this doesn't even need a formula it's literally just updated as after one month ago and after a note leaves the splitting notes area it is not going to delete itself it's actually going to go to the archive and it'll be safe and snug in this old fleeting notes section so this sort of follows the para philosophy of not deleting things but instead sending them to an archive when they are no longer relevant just in case you need them that way you're gonna be able to come

into the archive and actually access them but they're out of your hair when you're looking at your notes dashboard or anything else that is important on a day-to-day basis so let's now talk about goals and more future planning for your life originally i just had a project hub in my second brain here but i realized that a lot of the goals i have in my life like the one i just hit recently hitting a hundred thousand dollars in template sales or one i'm getting close to hitting a 1200 pound power lifting total these have milestones

which are just sort of like small wins along the way that aren't very actionable so if i come in here i can show you an example of some of these milestones uh hitting a 500 pound deadlift or a 405 pound squat these are things i will eventually do one day but they're not actionable right now i can't just go to the gym and pick up 400 or pick up 500 pounds or squat 405 pounds you know maybe i could do it but it's not something that i'm confident i could do right now it's more something

that i'm working towards so within my second brain system i created a separate database called goals where i could sort of track these milestones i could do journal logs for specific goals if i want to and i can have projects within those goals so sort of the way i see it is that a goal is almost like a higher level project that has milestones which might not always be actionable so we might want to actually track projects within that goal and here you can see i have set up a mini garage gym as a project

that will get me a bit further towards this goal of hitting 1200 pounds for my powerlifting total so you can plan out your goals here and you can add milestones to them and then there is a page that i created called plan where i can see all the goals and all of the projects that have been given a target deadline within the current quarter and this will update with the current quarter you don't have to use any filters it'll basically just update using a formula which means whatever quarter it is you can simply look here

and see this is what is going on in my life for the next 90 days which is pretty useful and then you can look ahead so if you have things that you've planned out for q3 of this year you can see it in this q3 toggle whether it's a goal or a project you can do the same for q4 and years ahead of this one as well this is totally dynamic so as the years go by you don't have to change filters which is really important to me i also added this little priorities area and

this is sort of reminiscent of my now page i have this page thomasjfrank.com now inspired by derek sivers who actually came up with this idea and it's essentially just a public declaration or at least an on paper or on digital paper declaration of what's going on in your life right now and what your priorities are so i added an area within my second brain where i could write that down and just sort of see in a very specific list this is what is going on in my life right now and if there's something that would

come into my life and distract me from these or cause me not to get these done i should reject that thing or table it for a later date so we've talked a lot about most of the features in the template i am going to get to these special views like the book tracker and the recipe book really quickly but i want to briefly talk about archiving for a second we talked about the para methodology earlier and why it's useful to archive things i just want to show you quickly how i would actually do that in

my system so if i have a note that is no longer useful to me like this uh inbox note for example that i favored it for some reason i can simply check archive and that is going to cause it to disappear from everywhere favorites recents but again it's going to go to my archive underneath archived notes the same thing can happen with goals projects areas and resources if i have say a resource that is no longer relevant to my life i don't want to see it in my area dashboard i can simply archive it like

this and it's going to disappear from everywhere and show up in my archive just in case i want to get it back someday so that is how i would archive things this archive also shows me all my completed tasks and this basically just gives me a complete dashboard if i need to delve into like the stacks you know the musty dark hallways of the library of my mind and find something to bring it back to the surface so now let's talk about these special views here uh within this template i included a book tracker and

a recipe book and i thought that these would be useful but they're more here as examples of what you could do given the flexibility of notions databases so both the book tracker and the recipe book are actually using the master all notes database that is within this template so all of these notes here on the notes dashboard they use the all notes database and so do the book tracker and the recipe tracker they are basically just special notes that have a specific type given to them and then they have a nice useful template so for

example this book here the deadline effect this is a great place for me to take notes on this book maybe give it like a rating and a book status and all i need to do to add a new book just like this one would be to go to the book tracker add a new book which is automatically going to give it a type of book like this due to the filters in this view and then i could generate from the book notes template here so maybe i want to add the power of habit which is

a book that i've already read before now i have that there i can enter an author which is going to be charles duhigg and just like with all the other books i can add my overall thoughts takeaways and book notes as i read the book and over time i'm going to get this nice bookshelf with all my book statuses ratings and i also have a nice little view where i can see everything in a table view i can add date started date finished and kind of recreate goodreads for myself inside of my own notion system

where i can easily access my book notes same thing with the recipe book if i want to add a new recipe to my recipes database i can simply create a new note here and then choose the recipe template which is going to bring in some useful columns like the ingredients and the recipe and i'll just show you an example of that with this top tier french toast recipe seriously this is top tier french toast and this recipe comes with a template also just put it on screen now so you can screenshot it this french toast

is amazing you should definitely make it but i've got my ingredients here i've got a recipe here and i even have a view of the inbox so i can add some ingredients that i need directly from this recipe page which is i think a pretty useful addition to this little template here so i think i showed everything in the template so far except for the actual dashboard itself again this is a very general purpose sort of like home base area for the template so this would be a great candidate for adding to the favorites page

and actually another great candidate for that is the quick links page which i designed specifically because in my own workspace i often have a ton of pages that i add to favorites well one cool trick you can actually do is instead of directly adding a page to favorites you can add it as a page link to a page you already have in favorites so for example let me go over to our book tracker and let's just go to children of ruin here great sci-fi novel by the way i'm going to use ctrl l command l

on a mac to grab the url go over to quick links and i'm going to actually paste it and link to the page not mention the link and in doing that i'm actually going to see it underneath my quick links here in the sidebar so this is actually a cool little trick for adding lots and lots of pages to your favorite sidebar if you access them frequently but not having them make a super duper long list that you always have to sort of sift through to find what you're looking for so that hopefully is a

comprehensive overview of my entire second brain system here in notion this is a complete productivity system and now i can do pretty much everything uh related to planning my life inside of one notion system now like i said at the beginning of this video i've also turned this into a template so if you want a complete done for you second brand that you can just add to your workspace and start using you can get it it's called ultimatebrain you can get it over at thomasjfrank.combrain and there's even a promo going on right now right now

you can use the code ub launch to get a full 50 off the templates list price so i think it's a pretty fair price and for that price you get more than just the template itself you also get in my opinion world-class beginner's guides onboarding tutorials and actual honest goodness support if you have questions and with our beginners tutorials we have put a ton of effort into making them as comprehensive and as useful as possible if you thought this was a comprehensive overview video the playlist of video tutorials for ultimate brand itself is over six

hours long ranging from very beginner focused stuff it's very quick to more advanced tutorials on how to actually change and customize the template for yourself we have a full tutorial on how to integrate read wise integrate your own databases all kinds of useful stuff so once again if you want to get a complete second brain system done for you in your notion ready to use right away go over to thomasjfrank.combrain and use ublaunch at checkout to get 50 off thank you so much for watching if you have questions i'll be down in the comment section

down below to answer them and i will be back very soon with a new video see you there