Speaker 1: Notion has been my go-to productivity app for the past five years. It's the glue that holds my entire life together. I use it for everything from tracking my studies, to managing my YouTube channel, and running my business. So I'm super excited to partner up with Notion again as they release Notion Projects, which has made it so much easier to create the perfect life management system. I know starting from scratch can be difficult, so as a bonus, I'll be giving away my template for free. Because I love our rookies and I want you all to succeed. All I ask is that you check out Notion and watch the entire video. But before we jump into Notion, I want to talk about the intention behind this workflow. For me, I view productivity in terms of projects. Projects have action items, or tasks, and non-actionable items, notes. And all of these are important to manage if we want to work with as little stress as possible. There are two workflows at play that make this happen. I call them top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is planning. We know we have a project, like apply for law school. So we brainstorm which tasks need to be done and what notes need to be researched and stored. Bottom-up is adapting. You know, having been an entrepreneur now for a couple of years, I can guarantee that nothing ever goes according to plan. Random fires need to be put out. A brilliant idea spawns from thin air that steers the direction of the business. Mike has an emotional breakdown. So our management system needs to adapt with us. As new tasks and ideas come, we integrate them into our workflow to stay organized. And the best part is with Notion, we can do them both and we can do them well. So here's my management dashboard. I wanted it to feel cozy and homey, which is why Misty greets us when we come home. Kind of like a puppy. Across the top is the navigation bar with links to four different dashboards that are included in this template. Projects, sprints, tasks, and notes. Projects and sprints are top-down workflow. Tasks and notes are bottom-up workflow. Then a section for daily tasks where all of our to-dos scheduled for today appear. And yes, this automatically updates every single day. And we can change the status of the tasks as we complete them. Like I did this this morning. Thank God. This one I'm still working on, but we'll get there. The active items section shows an overview of our projects, our sprints, and our current tasks. I'll swing back to these later. Scroll down and there's a toggle called Do Not Delete. I know how tempting it might be when someone says, don't do something. The only thing that goes through my mind is I want to do it so bad. But this is where I put the instruction manual, the documentation, all the dashboards, and the databases that run this template. So if you delete this, you're going to break it. You've been warned. And then some shameless self-promo at the bottom. Join our Discord community, buy StudyQuest. Yay, okay, moving on. So starting with the top down workflow is the project dashboard. There are two sections in this dashboard. We have plan and active. Use the plan area to plan out upcoming projects. I've categorized different projects by tags. So if I have an upcoming school project, like, I don't know, apply for medical school. I'll add that here, use the plus new, or maybe I have to start an org or club for school. I also have tags for my business, which I called work, and also creator stuff on YouTube. If you want to make more tags, you can just click on the plus to the right of no tags here, and I can add a new group. I'll probably have one for personal. And then let's move this over here like that. Some personal projects might be file taxes, you know, summer bod 2023, level up my RIS game. Projects can be tagless if they don't really fit into any one of these categories. Like I'd probably move level up my RIS game to no tags because it's not strictly for me. It's also for my crippling insecurity. Inside each project page, we can continue to brainstorm from that top down approach. So hover your cursor over the project, click on the pencil to edit. I can add a lead who is in charge of this project. Maybe this will be me. I can plan out an expected date for this project, including an end date if I know it by hitting add dates. Let's say this is going to start today. I'll hit on this toggle for end date to give a date range. And let's say that applications open up on the 1st of June, which I think they do. But I always like to give myself a little bit of a buffer because let's be honest, I'm probably gonna procrastinate a little bit. So I'll choose June 3rd and I'll X out. And there you go. We can see a date range for this project now. Let's open up the project page here into a full screen and I'll have an area where I can outline my project and I can describe my project here. Maddie is going to apply for medical school again. Now I can also start adding action items or tasks to this project under the task projects area. The three emojis here stand for not started yet, in progress, and then complete. And this one over here stands for recycle or archive. We don't really need to see. So I'll start adding some tasks. This is a super simple tracking system. I can just click and drag items across as I complete them in progress and then finished. We can even get more specific and add some properties to these tasks too. So I click on the edit again and I'll open this and decide peak this time, like who's going to do this task. This probably has to be me. I can choose a date for this task. Let's say that my MCAT is going to be in two days on Friday and I can choose priority for this task. This is going to be a high priority task. If I need to take any notes specific for this task, I can also add notes here. Let's close out of here. Whenever I need to take notes for this project for research or ideas or meetings or anything, I can simply click on add notes and make a new note. Study schedule for MCAT. I'll click on plus new and it'll create a new note for me and it'll appear right here. Cool. The great thing about this Notion projects workflow is that everything in this template already comes pre-linked. So all the tasks and all the notes that I make when I'm inside of this project page, they're already pre-linked to the project. So I don't have to mess around with these properties, making relations and formulas and stuff. It's super convenient. So let's go back to the project dashboard. I'll use the breadcrumb trail at the top of the screen to go to my Cajun Koi manager page and I'll go back to my projects here. So as you can see, there are a lot of projects that I have planned that I really want to do that'd be nice, but that doesn't always mean it's the right time to do them. So pick the projects that are most important to you right now and prioritize them. It's all about intention. That's why it's always a good idea to add priorities to these projects so we know which ones are more important. And once you're ready to begin a project, all you have to do is click and drag that project down to the active area into the in progress area, just like that. And now my application for medical school is in motion. I can see the priority for it. I can see what category of my life it applies to. This is school. I can see who is in charge of this project, especially useful if you're working in teams. And I can also see how close to complete this project is and that relates to how many tasks I put into this project. And so there are four tasks in this apply for medical school project, as we can see. And only one of them is in the done area and that's why it says 25%. There are also a few other views in the active section. If you prefer to see all of your projects in a table like this, you can click on the active view and we can just see pretty much the same information, but it's organized by in progress and tables like this. Timeline view is also really cool. If you want to see all your projects in a timeline like this and you can kind of just see how they stack against each other. Going over the all tab, you'll see every single project that you have either planned, completed or archived. The last view of mine will show you all of the projects that you are assigned to. This is again, especially useful if you're working on teams like I do. All right, so now let's move over to sprint planning, which is my favorite new feature with Notion projects. I've always loved to work in sprints. In medical school, we get dedicated weeks to study for boards and for clinical exams. This style of work leverages the principles of time pressure. When we set clear progress goals and create a sense of urgency around completing that goal, our brain focuses so much better. This is why techniques like Pomodoro and task prioritization are so effective. And honestly, it's why sprints have become so popular lately with the whole dopamine detoxing and monk mode craze. And it's definitely a tool I've been using a lot to improve my focus. So let's plan out a sprint in the sprint dashboard. And I'll use that example again of getting my application ready for medical school. So in the sprints dashboard, I'll first go to my all view to see all of my current or upcoming sprints that are planned. I'll begin by renaming this first sprint to apply for medical school. I'll choose a date range for this sprint. We already said that this is gonna be up until the June 3rd. Next, we'll start adding some tasks to our sprint. Over in the sprint planning view now, I can see my current sprint in a toggle and my next sprint in another toggle. I'm just gonna collapse this because we're focused on this current sprint. And if I scroll down to this backlog area, it's gonna show all of the tasks currently in this template. And what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna check the boxes for all of the items that I want to include in the sprint. Now, the really cool thing is I can include tasks from any project or no project at all into the sprint. So I definitely wanna include all of these tasks that are related to apply for medical school. But maybe in this upcoming sprint, I'm also gonna need to get ready for this trip I have coming up. I'm also gonna wanna add all of these tasks related to this trip that I'm taking to New York next month with Mike. And maybe I'll throw this into the sprint too because she can't wait forever, right? Now, I'm just gonna click and drag all of these items into that current sprint. I can click on remove sorting because I don't really care about that. Now, all of these tasks, regardless of which project they came from or if they had any project at all, are part of the sprint. If I go back to my all view, I can see all the total tasks in each sprint. I can see my completion rate, which is how many of those tasks have moved to the done area. And then my favorite thing is to go back to the current sprint view and I can see all of the tasks in this current sprint that I'm in. And I can just manage it directly from here. I can just click drag things to move them along as I finish them, like so. And as I click and drag these tasks over in all of the different projects that I'm working on until I complete them all. All of my tasks have been complete. My progress bar is 100% filled up and I'll just click on complete sprint. A pop-up will come up. I'll see a quick summary of my results if I completed all the tasks. And then I can click this button to complete that sprint and then begin my next one. Boom. My current sprint changes to the next sprint that I had planned. If I go back to the all sprints view, apply for medical school is now in the past. That was when I completed that sprint. I really love this sprint workflow because of how focused it is on action. And it's not just organizing and planning things for the sake of organizing and planning things. This has been really useful, not only for school, but in my business where Mike and I have dedicated sprints to get projects done, get YouTube videos done and stuff like that. All right, let's move on now to the bottom up workflow. The bottom up workflow utilizes our CCC framework, which stands for collect, clarify and calendar. And it's loosely based off of David Allen's GTD. We first collect tasks and notes into Notion and then we clarify them to know which project they belong to. And finally, we put tasks into our calendar to stay focused. I made an entire video about this framework, so definitely check that out for a deeper dive. But starting with collect, we're constantly bombarded throughout the day with information from notifications, reminders, revelations, media. Obviously not all of that stuff is important, but for the stuff that is, we collect them into Notion so we don't have to rely on our brain to remember them because let's be honest, it kind of sucks at that. So action items go over to our task dashboard and non-actionable items go over to our notes dashboard. And in each dashboard, there's a link to a collection page. My favorite super hack in Notion is using multiple tabs. At the top left next to the breadcrumb trail, I can click on this to make a new tab. It'll duplicate the current page that I'm in. And now I can just use command one and two to switch between these two tabs like so. And in the second tab, I'll have this phone collect page open so that whenever I need to collect any information, whether that's a new task, I can use this new button right here to collect a new task or I can use this button right here to collect a new note. And then I can just use command one to get back to the page I was currently on. So a new thought comes to mind, command two, flip over here. I can click on plus new to add a new task. Now, if you're wondering why it says phone, it's because this page is also the one I use as a widget on my phone to collect stuff if I'm out and about and I'm not at my computer. So if I'm waiting in line at In-N-Out or something and I suddenly realize I need to subscribe to Keisuke Academy and like this video, boom, done. Or maybe I'm at the gym, you know, warming up with an easy 225 bench and I get an amazing idea for a YouTube video, I can collect that too. Notion syncs everything across devices. When I get home later, it's already waiting for me. I literally have no excuse now not to collect my thoughts. Step two is clarify. We have to decide if the stuff we collected is worth keeping and where it belongs. Let's start off with tasks. I'll use command one to go back to my task dashboard here. And we'll see that there are two database views here. Actually, the task inbox is at the top and inbox is basically just a place that we collect things. And then underneath that, we have our task calendar. So to clarify these tasks, all I'm gonna do is fill in the properties here. With Notion projects, this workflow is actually also great if you're working on a team or in a group. Like I would probably just assign all of this stuff that I didn't wanna do over to Mike. Here's another pro tip. If you click and drag on that circle at the bottom of a cell, you can copy that cell vertically to as many tasks as you want. And for all of these other tasks, I would just delegate them to people on my team. And that way, I don't have to do any work and I can focus instead on building hovercrafts in Tears of the Kingdom. Choose a priority for these tasks, low, medium, or high. If you wanna get more compartmentalized, you can even tag each of these tasks with something specific. The defaults in Notion projects are mobile website and improvement. These obviously are more relevant if you're working on like a product development team. But as a student, you can make your own tags, make my own tag, and just click on create to make your own tag for them. And if any of these tasks like study for exam here is related to a project, I can click on the cell and I can find the project that it's related to, like apply for medical school, and I can link that project there. Now by default, I have some filters up here that you can see that if any project is assigned to these tasks, or if a due date is assigned for these tasks, a due date meaning I put it into my calendar, then it's gonna disappear from my inbox. After clarification, moving on to step three is now to put them into my calendar so I know when I'm gonna do that. And to do that, all I have to do is click and drag the tasks that I wanna do from the inbox and into the proper date in my calendar. So if I wanna do that one today, I can move it there. If I wanna do any of these tasks or multiple of them on the same day, just like before, I'll use the checkboxes and then I'll click and drag these into tomorrow, like so. I can also just rearrange tasks when I wanna do them right here in the calendar by clicking on tasks and moving them around. And we'll also be able to see the status of the task, whether it's completed, whether it's not started yet. I can also see which projects it's related to. I can see it's priority and I can see who is going to do those tasks. A few more useful views in this database here. If you wanna see all of your tasks by project, click on the by project view and we'll be able to see all of the tasks that have no project at the top. I can close this toggle. I can see all of my tasks related to the trip to New York I have planned. I can see all of my tasks related to this YouTube video and then all of my other projects here. Completed tasks view, pretty self-explanatory. It just shows all the tasks that I've already completed. Something I like to do in here is a periodic purge. So I'll click on this checkbox up here to highlight all of my tasks and I will delete them from my knowledge base. Last view, all tasks, probably not that useful, but it'll show you all the tasks in this template. All right, let's pop over to the notes dashboard to clarify our notes now. I'll go back to the Cajun Koi manager and click on notes. The notes dashboard only has one database with two views. So it's a lot simpler. The first view is for recent notes, which doubles as my notes inbox and all my recent notes because I have them sorted by last edited time. To clarify this inbox, click on the pencil icon next to these notes, add tags to my notes. This distinguishes like what type of note it is. I can click on add tags. This is an idea. Then I can also relate this note to a project if it exists in one. So I can add a project here. This is actually a new YouTube idea. So I'm gonna create a new project here. I'll be jacked in 30 days and I'll create a new project for this note. Something that I really love about Notion is the relational linking. And what I mean is that any note can be a part of multiple projects. So unlike in Mac Finder where I'd have to make a copy of a file and then put it in two different folders. In Notion, I can actually just link one note to multiple projects. So let's say that I want this get jacked in 30 days YouTube video note that I have to be in multiple projects. I can actually just link another project here like my one-arm pull-up challenge. And now we'll see that this note lives in both of these projects. I can open the project to show you that's right here. That note lives in get jacked in 30 days and it also lives in my one-arm pull-up challenge. I absolutely love this feature because it makes it so much less stressful to clarify notes to think where should I put this note? Because I can put it everywhere or I can put it nowhere. So as you can imagine if you collect a lot of notes and ideas you're probably wondering how on earth are you gonna find any of your notes if they're all in this one database? Don't worry, I got you. That's what filters are for. It's like online shopping. We can filter it by different tags. We can filter it by who created the note especially useful again if you're working on teams. And if you're still unable to find that note there's a search feature right here this magnifying glass next to sort and I can search for the note in this database. Probably should have started off with that one. The second view in notes is the project view. Again, just like the task projects view this one just shows all of our notes by the project that they're related to. And just like that all of the notes that needed to be clarified and stored into the right projects have been done and I can easily find them whenever I need to. So that's how the CCC cycle is used for bottom-up management in Notion. The whole idea is to simplify the process of managing but keep it flexible so I always know what are the next steps to move my project. So now I wanna show you how I use the homepage dashboard to maintain my entire life management system. So in the active items area I can just get a quick overview of the ongoing projects I'm working on or the tasks or any sprints. These are just the same views that we've already seen from these dashboards. But I also wanna highlight a unique new feature that Notion just dropped. It's very, very cool called AI autofill. I'll give a few cool use cases for autofill here. First, as a student oftentimes I had to read research papers and articles and stuff mostly from online resources nowadays. And if you're anything like me I like to take reference notes as I go through articles or I'll grab highlights directly into Notion from Readwise on my Kindle and stuff like that. It's really easy for me to get notes into Notion. But something that I struggle with is when I come back to something that I read in the past I have to try and figure out what that chicken scratch was that I wrote. But with autofill that problem is pretty much gone. So switching over to task view here, here is a paper I'm working on about how memory works. And all of these different tasks are actually different articles that I've read. And I'm gonna have AI autofill summarize key bullet points for each of these articles so I don't even have to go into them. So let's go over and add a new property here with a plus icon. I will choose summary AI which is a new beta feature. And what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna edit this property because I want to enter my own custom prompt in. So I'll click on summary AI, edit property and I'll change the summary type from here to a custom autofill. And let's ask this to list the top three takeaways from these notes in bullet point format and explain it simply because I'm lazy. I'll use this to try on this view and save changes. And so sick, AI is now summarizing everything that's inside of these pages right from the front. And I'm gonna wrap this column so we can see it better. It's given me three bullet points and then summarize the article so I don't have to go back in. I'll go down. I wanted to summarize these ones as well. Let's update this. So cool. And let's do it for this last article as well. Let's update it. Boom, just like that. And so if I'm compiling resources for a paper I'm writing or a project I'm working on, I can get quick summaries just from this overview page. So next up as a creator, one of the most important parts of YouTubing is coming up with catchy or viral titles for my ideas because what I found is that ideas are really only as good as their packaging. So let's go back to the projects view here and in my planning area, I'm gonna look at some ideas that I've had for YouTube videos and I'm gonna have AI generate some alternate titles for me. So let's go over to the summary AI area again. I'm going to edit property. Again, I'm going to try a custom autofill and let's ask AI this time, give me a bullet list of alternate viral or catchy titles for a YouTube video and I will try it on this view. Save changes. I'm gonna turn on auto update as well. So that if I change this title, it's gonna give me different ideas again and we can go ahead and wrap this up so we can see what it did. 30 days of gains. 30 days to a stronger body. Mastering the art of Riz. Riz like a pro. Some of these are actually kind of funny. But anyways, let's see what happens if I change this idea from 30 days. Checked video challenge. Let's see how AI auto updates this to be. The summary just auto updated because I changed the name of this project. And finally, as an entrepreneur, I do unfortunately have to take a lot of meetings nowadays and during meetings, I like to jot down all the deliverables and follow-ups that my team has to do or that Mike and I have to do. But for some reason, immediately after the meetings are over, I forget everything that we just talked about. And what I can do is just have AI summarize for me in bullets again, actionable items from my meetings. So here's an example. One of our ongoing projects right now is to redesign the Cajun Koi Academy website into something really epic. We're gonna have a profile picture generator. We're gonna have skill trees. We're gonna have a lot of really cool stuff. And we've been working with a design team. And so what I can do, I will go over to my summary AI area. Once again, let's edit this property. I'm gonna use another custom prompt this time. Summarize in a bullet list, the key takeaways and action items. Let's try it on this view. Save changes. I'll X out again. Now, if I go down to my meetings over here, I can click on this update button and it should update with that new prompt. Let's see what it gives me. So it gives me some key takeaways, what we talked about in our meeting and our action items. I can do this for the next one as well. Key takeaways and action items, looking great. And then one more time, I'll update this last one here. Boom, very, very cool. So having AI just do a summary for me, super useful if I come back to this task even days or weeks in the future, I'll not have to go through my notes again and I'll always see the ongoing action items for this task. That's a taste of my management system in Notion. It's been incredibly effective for me to manage not only my life, but also to run my business with Mike. Check out Notion projects. I barely even scratched the surface here with the new cool stuff they rolled out, like more app integrations, task IDs and automations. Links to everything, including this template, will be in the description. But I do want to mention that this template, it's really just one small part of our overall management system. Because as students and creators, we also need to manage our studies, our mental health, our side hustles, along with our productivity. So if you're interested in our ultimate Notion workstation, that also comes complete with a full guide for building a study system and then putting it all together, you should definitely check out StudyQuest. This right here is a great introductory video into what it is. We've just gone through a massive update and overhaul to StudyQuest. So this video is a little outdated, but it still has a lot of value. So I'll see you there.