Speaker 1: So, one of the questions I often get is that, hey Ali, you work full time as a doctor saving lives, but then on the side, you've got this YouTube channel and the podcast and the businesses and how do you do all of this stuff? And one aspect of that is productivity, time management, environment design, all these things that I've made various videos about. But the other aspect of it that I haven't talked about as much is having this defined creative workflow for doing things like churning out videos and podcasts and blog posts and email newsletters. And in this video, I'm gonna break down how I use the free app, Notion. I've been using Notion for over a year now and before I discovered Notion, I had sort of video ideas that would be sort of saved on my phone somewhere, sometimes saved in Evernote, sometimes kind of written in a physical notebook. And often I'd get like ideas in the shower and while driving and then I would just kind of completely forget about them. But as soon as I started using Notion and started developing this kind of workflow for my videos, everything kind of changed. And now I can churn out two or three videos a week, hopefully they're reasonable quality. If you're a YouTuber or you wanna get started with YouTube, then maybe you'll find this directly helpful. But even if you're not, I still think there are a few takeaways from this that you might find vaguely helpful. So there's three features of Notion that I use a lot and that is Kanban boards, templates and linked databases. And to be honest, even if you're using Notion for project management or for your schoolwork or for essays or assignments or whatever, these are really helpful features and hopefully by getting an insight into my creative process, that'll give you some ideas for how you might be able to use this sort of thing yourself. So let's start with the high level overview of how this sort of creative process works. Basically what's happening is that every kind of video idea starts up either as no status or as an idea if I've fleshed it out a little bit. So you can see I've got 49 videos here that are no status and 47 ideas. So that is just under 100 video ideas that I've got going on and I've sort of been collecting these video ideas over time because whenever I have an idea for a video, it goes straight into Notion, straight into sort of the first bit of this kind of creative funnel or factory or refinery, whatever you wanna call it. That sounds a bit pretentious. Anyway, once me or my team start writing the idea for a video, then it becomes a writing in progress and you can see we've got eight videos over here, including this Notion video, 7th of July. Once the first draft of the writing is done, it goes from the writing in progress column to the script ready for review column. And this is where, for example, if one of my team members has written a script for a video, then I'll be able to look at it and I'll be able to kind of make some tweaks and change the language so it's more like how I would speak on camera. Once it's gone through a round of editing, then it is now ready to film. And this is the column of videos that I choose from when I sit down and then decide, okay, what am I gonna film today? I have a look through what's in my ready to film category and do it. This video, for example, Notion video, 7th of July. Once I filmed it, it was gonna go into this filmed column and then I'm gonna upload it via Google Drive to my kind editor, who will be editing this video, hopefully. And then that's gonna go to the with editor column. And this column lets us keep track of what's going on there. So for example, this life update, I'm moving to America video. It then goes to ready for publication once everything is sorted and we're basically ready to hit publish on it. And then it goes to published once it's been published. And so an idea starts off all the way on the left hand side as no status or as an idea. And then it sort of goes through these layers of the system and gets spat out at the other end as a published video. This is quite helpful because it means that if I wanna make videos and I know I wanna make two or three videos a week, it means that me and my team, we're never starting from scratch. It's never the case of thinking, oh crap, what video do we do this week? It's a case of, oh crap, we've got a video to do next week. Let's pick something from here and let's do that. So it's kind of like with writers that if you have like a good note-taking process, you never need to start from a blank page. The starting from a blank page is just not fun at all. I use this Kanban board style, kind of like Trello style Kanban board thing for videos, but I also use it for blog posts and email newsletters. And I know lots of writers who have kind of their ongoing writing projects. Something will start off as an idea, then it'll become a draft and then it'll be editing and then it'll be published. And I think just having this sort of workflow has really supercharged my own ability and my team's ability to kind of churn out these videos every week. So that was kind of a high level overview. Let's now talk about linked databases, which is another really helpful feature of Notion. So giving you a little insight into the behind the scenes of this YouTube channel. One thing that we always have to get done on time is the sponsored video schedule. So most Tuesdays slash Wednesdays will release a sponsored video. And those are the videos that have some kind of deadline. Whereas every other video doesn't really have a deadline, I can just kind of do it whenever. And so we always wanna be on top of the sponsored video schedules. And so here you can see a sneak peek of what's coming up on the channel up until like September. And we can see, so this is a Notion sponsored video. Thanks guys for sponsoring this video. We've got this on July the 7th. And that is linked to the videos database. This is sort of a relational thing. And that's one of the really nice things about Notion is that rather than just having individual databases, you can link those databases to each other. So we've got one database for sponsored video schedule, then we have another database for videos. And the sponsored video schedule is linked to the videos database. So for example, what I can do is we've got this CuriosityStream video coming up in July. I can click on that. And then it's gonna let me search through all of the different videos. And let's say we were doing a personal knowledge management video there, that would show up. And then if we look in that video, if I change the status of that to ready to film, you'll see that that automatically updates within this kind of linked database. And that's kind of the power of linked databases and this sort of relational relationships that you have within Notion. And so what this means is that when we go on our videos database and we change the view to calendar, for example, we can kind of see in a calendar exactly what videos are coming up and exactly which videos are sponsored and which ones are not, which is quite helpful in terms of managing deadlines. And we've got loads of other views here as well. So for example, the everything view, which I look at occasionally, this basically is all the video ideas that we've got in the database. And so if I wanna add a new video idea to this, I just hit the new button and then we've got a new video added to the database. So that was the linked database feature in action. And now I wanna show you how we use templates to try and make better videos. And this idea was taken extensively from my friend Thomas Frank. He's done a video talking about his own Notion setup for how he makes videos. And I watched that and my mind was blown. I was like, oh my God, this is incredible. But I thought his was a little bit too complicated for the workflow that me and my team use. And so I kind of simplified it a little bit and added my own elements to the point where this is now the process that we use for making videos for this channel. So just to start again, we go on the videos database, we click the new button, open this page, and then we can just kind of title this video anything. So let's say I was making a video on is our donuts good for you? I can add a little icon to that donut, perfect. This makes me feel a little bit good. And now if I scroll down a little bit, we've got a new video template over here. And this is where all the magic happens. This will be linked in the video description, by the way, if you wanna copy this video template for yourself. But when I click on new video template, suddenly this has now been sort of significantly fleshed out in a way that means I don't have to continuously copy and paste stuff. So let's look at what's going on. It's upgraded the status to idea. So now we know this is an idea. I can look through and I can set all the different parameters for this video if I want. So let's set myself to the writer. We don't need to set a publish date yet, because it's just an idea. And so if I want to, I can fill out all of these fields, which I will later. But the interesting bit is this, this is the template. And I think the template is really good because one of the things I like about discovering new apps and new workflows is that when you find the right one that works for you and for the thing that you're doing, it becomes almost a tool for thought. It encourages you to think about things in a way that you wouldn't have before. And there's an argument that none of these apps actually make any difference. And making videos, you can just use pen and paper to organize your life just as well as you can use Notion. But I think when an app is designed in a certain way, it encourages you to think about things in a certain way. And the nice thing about Notion is that you can encourage yourself to think about things in the way that you want to think about them. This sounds very meta. Anyway, so what we're doing is we've got title and thumbnail. We've got notes. We've got all of this story stuff. We've got some story structures and we've got all of these details about the video and then a publishing checklist. So this is just sort of a very quick overview. There's gonna be a link in the video description if you want to check it out. But instead of just explaining this, I will show you now from yesterday when I was writing the script for this very video, how I used the video template to kind of go through that. So if you're interested, this is the process that I used to actually make these videos. Quick plug just before we get started with that. For the last few weeks, I've been streaming fairly regularly on Twitch. So a few times a week for a few hours, I do like a study with me stream or a stream where I'm using Notion to kind of make videos and stuff using these sorts of templates. You should follow my Twitch profile link in the video description. And then you can follow me along in real time and ask questions and stuff if you want to see how I actually use Notion to do this stuff in real time. Anyway, this is me from yesterday using Notion to create this video about Notion. So looking through my sponsored video schedule, I see that we've got this Notion video coming up on July the 7th. And so that's gonna be the video that I'm gonna make today. So what I'm doing is this is a link to my video database. So let's go into the video database and we're gonna hit new and let's call this one Notion video 7th July or something. It doesn't really matter what the title is. The important thing now is I'm gonna use my new video template. Now this is something that's based loosely on what Thomas Frank uses. And I will of course link this in the video description if you wanna check it out. When I hit new video template, look what happens. Boom, all of a sudden we've got all of this stuff that has been pre-filled by default. And this kind of encourages me to think about making my videos in the right kind of way. And this is sort of how Notion's transformed my video production process cause I didn't really have anything like this before. Anyways, I'm gonna say writer is me. Published date is the 7th of July. Status, writing in progress. Sponsor, this is Notion. Video intention, this one's interesting. I said, apparently there's only three sorts of video intentions. There's discoverable, community and sales. This is a discoverable video. I want people to discover the channel through watching this video. Video genre, let's call it apps and partly productivity and creativity is another one. Channel, this is for my main channel. Editor is gonna be my boy Christian editing this video. Now this one is interesting. So this sponsor date, this is a link. And it's a link to the sponsored video schedule. So what I can do now is I can find this video. Ah, here we go. Notion video, 7th of July. And I can add it in here. And now this is updated because it takes the writing in progress from there. And that means that immediately I can, like if I'm looking at my sponsored video schedule, I can see, okay, where have we got the gaps and where do we need videos? So let's say a curiosity stream. Well, let's go for this brilliant one on the 28th. I'd be able to look through all the video ideas and then I'd be able to figure out, okay, which video are we gonna plug into the brilliant sponsor on July the 28th. Anyway, let's go back to this video. Notion video, 7th of July, opening it as a page. I can kind of ignore the rest of them, but I wanna show you the template now. So it's, it asks me for the title and the thumbnail first. And this encourages me to actively think about what the title and thumbnail for the videos is gonna be. So I'm gonna brainstorm some ideas here. So, and like some of these are a little bit, a little bit ridiculous, but it just sort of having the title up here just encourages me to actively think about what the title should be, which is just something that I didn't really do beforehand. And then in terms of thumbnail, like actively thinking about, okay, what's the thumbnail gonna look like? So we can say. Okay, so I've got some title ideas. I've got some thumbnail ideas. Now let's move on to the actual video. And the key thing here is that within this template, I've made myself think about the story. So this is sort of the seven part standard story structure. So who's the character? Me. What do they want? And over here I've highlighted points number four and number seven, because commonly these are the bits that people pay less attention to when it comes to stories. And these are arguably the most important bits of telling stories. And so I've highlighted them in the template and therefore brings my attention to it. Okay, so this is the sort of thing that I try and do for every video. And it's a little bit ridiculous. And clearly I won't be talking about all of these within the video, or I might, who knows. But just kind of forcing myself, like asking myself these questions, forces me to think about the video in more of a story mode fashion, rather than in a, you know, here are five ways that I use Notion, which is what I used to do in the past. I've got another template thingy over here. And this is also based on one of the courses from video creators, which are very good. And this lays out the two different story structures. So let's go over the three act structure first. So we've got, you know, act one, the character wants something. Act two, the character faces conflict. And act three, the character overcomes or is overcome by the challenge. Usually the character overcomes the challenge and the idea is you wanna sort of create tension and add obstacles and stuff. I don't quite think the three act structure is suitable for this sort of video, because this isn't really a sort of a journey kind of video. Instead, I think the hero's journey is what is kind of what maybe we can sort of use for this video. So character living in the status quo, I can talk about how, you know, my process before Notion was just like really bad. And I want something more, is forced to take action because now I've got like a full-time job and I need a system, winds up in unfamiliar territory, must adapt, experiences victory. It's like, oh, you know, I discovered optical help from others, discovered Thomas Frank's video. Like, oh my God, this works. Has an inward realization that about how tools for thoughts like Notion are important in giving us a nice workflow, winds up back in familiar territory, i.e., oh, I'm now sitting at my computer, but now I've been changed by the journey of, you know, appreciating the app and I therefore changed the environment that I've now got this whole process for the videos. So this is another way that I can think about telling the story in more of a story sort of fashion. But again, this is just something that I keep within the video template so that I'm forced to think about it for every single video. There's basically four parts to the video. There is the hook, the intro, the value and the custom playlist. So the hook is gonna be, you know, I don't just wanna do a, hey guys, welcome back to the channel. That would be sort of the intro. I wanna think about sort of a 10 second hook that if someone is discovering my channel for the first time, they'll be like, oh, I kind of want to watch the rest of the video. So the way we're thinking about this is we've got the title and the thumbnail, which sets an expectation. So let's say How Notion Transformed My Creative Process. Let's say that's the title that we're using for this video. And let's say we're using this sort of thumbnail. The video is clicking, the viewer is clicking on the video expecting to get some sort of value from it. And I wanna deliver that value within the hook that encourages them to keep watching. So How Notion Transformed My Creative Process. So now I'm kind of thinking about my video in terms of these four parts. And in just a few minutes, I've kind of got a structure in mind. And then I'm gonna change this up and I'll add some bits and bobs here and there. But it just sort of gives me a good structure that I can use for absolutely every single video. And then we've got like this, you know, uploading and publishing checklist. So description, call to action for the sponsor, tags and card caption files using rev.com, which is a caption service. And these are just sort of final tick boxes at the end. Just to, you know, make sure we've sort of hit everything. So this is, you know, a bit of a meta look behind what the process is like for creating a video like this one. All right, so that was my kind of creative workflow. Again, you know, if you wanna see me do this stuff in real time and you have nothing to do at home, you should follow me on Twitch because I stream myself studying using Notion and I stream myself making these videos using Notion. All the templates mentioned in this video are linked in the video description. So you can check them out. You can duplicate them into your own Notion workspace. And if you like this video, you can also support me on Patreon. And if you like this video and wanna learn more about how I use Notion, here is a playlist that has all my Notion themed videos where I show you the behind the scenes, my workflow for different other aspects of my life and how I managed it using Notion. So thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.