Master 80% of Notion with this ONE Feature

Mastering just one feature unlocks 80% of Notion's capabilities. And I know that's hard to believe, so let me just prove it to you right now. To illustrate

this, let's quickly look at the two wrong ways most people use Notion. Starting off with what most beginners do, what I call level one. They usually have one master projects page with separate pages for each project. And if I click into a specific project, for example, you'll see the project overview up top, a list of tasks and notes that I've taken during weekly meetings. At first glance, this looks fine. All the tasks and notes related to this Stargate project live in this one project page. Makes sense, right? But more experienced Notion users will immediately notice some issues. For example, there is no project status or deadline. Completed and ongoing tasks will start to clutter up the page and we can't filter these notes by relevance. This setup works for super simple projects, but as soon as things get busier, it turns into a mess. Now, some of you are thinking, well, obviously we should create databases. So, let's give that a try. Clicking into this level two improved page here, I have a projects view with the project name, status, end date, and even a URL property where we can link to a Google Drive folder. This is already much better. Now, if I click into a project, by the way, you can press command controlclick to open up a new page in a new tab. Click into this project. You can see that I've created a tasks database view where I can hide completed task by checking it off. I'm just going to press command- Z to bring it back. And also a notes database view that tracks when the note was taken and what type of note it is. This looks pretty good, right? But there's still a massive problem. For example, this task buy tickets for Tomorrowland has nothing to do with the Stargate project to my knowledge. And apart from these two notes, Google AI integrations into data center and negotiations with Nvidia, none of the other notes are related to this project either. Right now, I'm seeing tasks and notes from all my projects jumbled together, which is confusing and super distracting, right? So, let me walk you through the correct way to set this up using the feature I mentioned at the

beginning. Clicking into this simple dashboard, you'll notice it looks quite similar to the page we just went through. We have the raw databases up top here. Projects, tasks, notes, databases, and views of those databases below. Projects view, tasks view, and notes view. Right? But look what happens when I click into a project. For example, the Stargate project. Only the tasks and notes for the specific project are visible. That buy tickets for Tomorrowland task is gone. All the other notes are hidden as well. This is exactly what we want. And all this was made possible thanks to the relations property that you can see here under the tasks view and the notes view. And it's not an exaggeration to say that this one feature unlocks 80% of notion's capabilities, which I'll touch on towards the end of the video. So, how does the relations feature actually work? By default, our notion databases live in separate silos. This means our projects database has no idea that our tasks and notes databases even exist. and vice versa. The relations feature lets us connect our databases so they can share information. This means that only the relevant information shows up when we need it, which is also how our brains naturally work. Put simply, we can't build powerful systems like second brain setups in notion without mastering this feature first. But don't worry, it's actually super simple. We'll walk through this in 2 minutes. First, I've

linked this entire template below so you can make a copy and follow along. Okay. Now, let's click into the raw projects database. And all the way to the right, we're just going to click the plus icon to add a property. Search for relation. We're going to select relation. And here the task database to connect to. So, if you're following along, you should select the 193A task database. So, don't worry about what I have on screen right here. And notion is going to ask you if you want this to show up in the task database as well. You almost always want to say yes. So, we're going to turn on the two-way sync here. And then we're going to give this a meaningful name related to task database and this is related to projects database. And we're going to click add relation. And step one done. Now if we go back and open up our raw task database, we'll see that a new property related to projects database has appeared which represents the connection between our projects database and our task database. Back in our projects database, we're going to repeat the exact same process to connect our nodes database. We're going to click add property. Search for relation. Select it. And we're going to look for the notes database. This time right here, we're get again going to enable two-way relation or sync. Give this a meaningful name. Related to notes DB and this is related to projects DB. There we go. And that's it. We're done. Now that our project task and notes databases are connected, let's see how this affects our workflow. So there's a

manual way and an automated way to leverage the relations feature. Let's go through them one at a time. For the manual way, we're going to start off by opening the Stargate project page. Under the tasks section right here, we're going to type forward slasht and create a database view of our task database. We're going to click the table view and link to existing data source and we're going to look for the task database that you just made a duplicate of like this. And we're going to select the current view. Now you should actually see the related to projects database property. And if you don't make sure that property is enabled or made visible under the property visibility setting. Now remember the only task related to this project is the negotiate data center deal task. So under the relations property, I'm simply going to click and select the Stargate project. All right. And just for fun, we're going to assign other projects to these tasks. So for this one, let's say launch notion Toolkit. This one is for robo taxis. And this one is notion toolkit. All right. And what this enables me to do now is to go to settings under filter. I can create a new filter related to projects database the relations property right and I'm going to select this project the Stargate project for those of you not using notion teamspace you will not see save for everyone selection it should your filter should save automatically so don't worry about this now we'll see that one task related to this project is visible right and to clean this up a bit further we can click three dots here and hide database title perfect watch what happens when I unlink the stargate project from this task. I'm just going to click in and I'm going to click this to unlink this. Watch what happens. Right click. The task disappears from this view, but it's still here under the raw task database. It's just not mapped or assigned to any project. If I click this and I add the project back, the task immediately reappears in my project page. All right, I'm going to skip the notes database setup because one, the steps are exactly the same, and two, I want you to do this yourself to test your understanding. Moving on to the automated way to use relations. Obviously, we don't want to set up these views and filters every single time we create a new project. So, this is where the self-filtering template comes in. Back in the projects database, we're going to click the little arrow next to the new button over here. And project template I already created for you, click the three dots and we're going to click edit. All right, expand this out. And bear in mind this is not a new project page. We are editing a template as represented by the yellow banner up top, but we will be repeating some of the same steps as before. Under the task database or task view here rather we're going to type for slasht select the table view link to existing data source and we're going to select the task database. All right we're going to choose the current view like before except for this time under filter we're going to add a new filter. Select the relations related to projects database and we're going to select the new project template which is the template page we are in right now. All right, we're going to save this. We're going to click three dots, hide the database title, and we're going to click here for a cleaner look. Now, watch this. Back in the projects database, I'm going to create a new project. And we're just going to call this, let's say, uh, project Tomorrowland. By the way, I've never been. For those of you who have, please let me know how whether or not it's worth it. Status, let's say not started. And I'm just going to expand this to full page. And as you can see, Notion has automatically created a task view. And what's even more incredible is that the filter is already set to show task related to this new project, project tomorrowland right here. This means any new task I create here. So let's try this out. research DJ lineup is automatically connected to this project, Project Tomorrowland, and only this project, Project Tomorrowland. That's crazy efficient. This one-time setup saves us so much time and effort over the long run. And again, I'm going to challenge you to set up the notes database view yourself in the projects template page to really make sure you understand how and when to use the

relations feature. To close the loop, let's come back to this main homepage and under the projects view, we're going to type for/t table view. And this time we're going to choose link to existing data source our projects database. We're going to create a view of our projects database, not our notes or task database. And we're going to select the all view. Under property visibility, we're just going to hide all the properties that are not useful in a simple dashboard view. We're going to we can sort these projects by status. Let's say ascending. That's totally fine. And we're going to click three dots here. Hide database title. And this looks super clean. To give you a taste of the advanced features we now have access to, I'm going to create a view of the task database by typing for/t, selecting table view, link to existing data source, selecting our task database, and choosing the current view. And here I'm going to actually add a property called rollup. Okay, we're going to select the rollup property. And under this rollup property, we're going to uh select it again. Edit property. We're going to choose the relation because the rollup property only works with the relations feature. We're going to choose the only relation property we have related to projects database. We're going to choose target property equals to status. and we're going to choose calculate show original. All right, I know that looked really complicated, but what we did was super simple. We basically pulled the status value from the projects database, right? As you can see here, and mapped it to the tasks down here. This lets us actually let me just rename this so it's easier to understand. Rollup uh project status. And this lets us create a filter whereby filter add a filter roll up project status and I want to select projects that are work in progress wip. All right. So now we only see tasks that are related to projects that are in progress. Does that make sense? This is super useful for project management. Don't worry, I won't overwhelm you with any more advanced setups, but just to showcase how versatile the relations feature is, let's say you're a student, you might have a college applications database. And in addition to tasks and notes, you'd also want to create and connect an essays database so that when you open the Emory application page, for example, you only see the essays and supplements for Emory. On a completely unrelated note, if you are a high school student or a parent, I strongly recommend checking out the college essay playbook. It's a fantastic free resource for high schoolers that I wish I had access to when I was much younger. Okay

at this point it should be clear that the relations feature is the foundation of building life organization systems in notion. In my own command center, for example, I take this concept a few steps further by connecting my projects, areas, resources, task, and notes databases using the relations feature, which lets me easily organize my life. For example, these are all the areas of my life. And if I were to open the health area page, you can see that I have health related projects and health related resources like research on which supplements I should be taking now that I'm old. Dur. and let's say a log of my weekly fasting over the past year. If you're interested in building your own command center, I'll leave a link to the full course down below. See you all in the next video. In the meantime, have a great one.