Notion feels incomplete without this note-taking setup

Today, I'm going to teach you how to build a complete note-taking system in Notion from scratch. We are going to start from a completely blank page, and by the end of this video, you're going to have a perfect system for quickly capturing any kind of note and keeping things organized with a tagging system we'll set up inspired by Thiago Forte's Parthod. We'll also set up an inbox for quickly processing new notes. We'll have special templates for journal entries and meeting notes. And we're even going to set things up so you can very easily capture research and highlights from the web using tools like fly lighter and even take notes with your voice, which is something I do all of the time. And this build starts right now in a completely free workspace, which I've set up to demonstrate that everything we'll do in this build guide can be done on Notion's free plan. So, we're going to start things off with this completely blank page in a free Notion workspace. And we're going to call this bad boy Ultimate Notes. This is also the title of a template that I have created which is 100% free and we're going to have a demo of that template in a second tab here which I'll be able to show you throughout this build so you can kind of get a little bit of a view of what we're building as we're going along. By the way, if you want to go through this tutorial, you are going to learn notion and master a few really important concepts like working with databases and even some light formula work. But if you just want a note-taking system done for you, this template is 100% free. I've got it linked in the description down below. And here is a quick look at exactly what we're going to build. We have this nice little note-taking section right here with several different views. We've got all of your recent notes. We have an inbox for any notes that don't have a tag. We have favorite notes and a lot more which we'll cover as we go through this video. And we also have a tagging system down here which uses Thiagofore's Parah method for splitting tags into areas and resources and a special third category called entity which isn't part of parah and I'll cover a little bit later. But this allows you to very easily put notes where they belong and very easily find them when you need to access them. So, we're going to be looking at this demo a little bit more throughout the build guide. But for now, let's go ahead and actually get our hands dirty by doing a little bit more than setting the title of this page. First and foremost, let's go ahead and give this an icon as well. And when I'm building systems in Notion, I like to use Notion's native icons set. And typically, I've got a little bit of a convention I follow. If I'm creating dashboard style pages, I like to use blue icons. And that helps me separate those pages from the databases we're going to create later, which I like to use red icons for. So, within these blue icons, I'm going to search for pencil. And I want to give this a nice little pencil square outline icon right there. Because I'm basically treating this page in my workspace as sort of an app or a dashboard. I also want to make a few customizations to the page itself. So, we're going to go up here to the three dot menu. I'm going to go and set this to full width. And then I also want to go to customize page. And I'm going to turn off the back links. I'm going to set my page discussions to off. And I'm going to set inline comments to minimal. Now, backlinks, page discussions, and inline comments can all be really nice for collaborative pages, say like a meeting notes document in a team focused workspace, but this page again is going to kind of function a bit like an app. So, we want to keep it as clean and minimalistic as possible. So, now that we've got our page set up, we're going to enter down just a couple of blocks to give ourselves some room. And to start this build off, we want to set up the databases that are going to underpin everything we're going to build a little bit later. And I want to give you a bit of a preview of what that's going to look like. So over here on our Ultimate Notes for Notion demo, we've got, as I showed you before, our note-taking section. We've got our tagging section. Down here at the bottom, we've got a page called databases. And this page is actually going to hold the notes and tags databases that are going to essentially run our entire note-taking app that we're building. So, back over to our blank page, we're going to do three little dash characters to create a horizontal rule or horizontal line just because I think things look nice that way. And then we're going to do slash page to create a subpage within that ultimate node's parent page. And we're going to call this bad boy databases. So, this will be our central location for the databases that run the template. And then, if we look at the actual dashboard here, these are going to be views of those central databases. and they're going to have their own filter criteria and different sorts and things like that to essentially give us multiple different windows or different looks into that database that are useful for specific use cases like viewing our favorites or viewing our notes in uh a reverse chronological order based on their update date, things like that. So, in our databases page, let's give our icon up here. If we go over to the icons tab, I'm going to find myself a stacked discs icon, which I think looks kind of like databases. I think I'm also going to set this to full width and I'm going to customize the page. Going to set the back links to off page discussions off and inline comments to minimal just as I did before. And on this page, we're going to create two different databases. The first one we call notes. So if we do slash database, we can create either an inline database or a full page database. For now, I'm going to go with inline. And now we get a few choices here. You might not have actually seen this in some of my older tutorials because this is pretty new. But with our new database

block, we can build a new database from scratch. We can actually build one with AI. And you can even do this in free workspaces. It's pretty basic right now, but it is worth uh testing out if you're curious. And we can even import CSV data. So if you've got a whole bunch of data from, say, an Excel spreadsheet, you could export that as CSV and bring it here into Notion very easily. But we want to build this from scratch and we want to really get our hands dirty and learn what we're doing here. So we're going to go with new empty database. I'm going to call this notes. And I want this database to have an icon. So to set that icon, I need to go to the database as a full page. Now that we're in this full page database, we can go ahead and set an icon. And like I mentioned earlier, I've got a bit of a convention I follow for creating databases. And that is that I use the icons set, but I set the icons to red like that. And that allows me to use the same exact icon, which I think describes this database very well, as the icon that I used for the Ultimate Notes dashboard itself. So, we're going to come back into this database really shortly and we're going to start creating some properties that allow us to say set pages as favorites or apply tags, things like that. But one of the properties we're going to create needs to connect to that tags database I showed you in our demo. So, let's go ahead and create that tags database first. Back here on our databases page, and I realized I might have done that a little bit quickly, so I used the breadcrumbs up here to go one level upward. We're going to once again type slash database. We're going to create a new empty database again and we're going to call this one tags. Now, because I have quite a few databases in this test workspace called both notes and tags because I do a whole lot of teaching and I have a lot of demo versions in here, I'm going to do something temporarily that you don't have to do if you don't have databases with the same names as these. I'm going to add a suffix here. So, I'm going to do a bracket and I'm going to call this uh scratch just so that if I'm connecting these databases together or I have to search for them, I am going to be 100% certain that I'm choosing the right notes database instead of having to guess. So, I'm going to go scratch here as well. And at the end of the build, I'm going to go ahead and delete these suffixes. Once again, I'm going to go full page on this tags database. I'm going to add an icon. And wouldn't you know it, Notion actually has a tag icon which I think will work perfectly for this database. All right, once more up the beantock or our breadcrumbs beantock. I think there were breadcrumbs in the beantock story. We're going to go into our notes database and we're going to start creating some database properties. Now, I want to quickly show you what these properties look like in our demo version. So, I'm going to go once again to the bottom of this demo and I'm going to go into our nodes database. And in this table view, you're going to see a whole bunch of columns in this table. These are database properties. And if you don't have a whole lot of familiarity with databases, I've got a whole notion databases for beginners video which you can go through. But essentially, database properties are pieces of information that you can set on every single page in the database. When you create a property, it is created at a database level, which means every single page, even if it does not have a value set in that property, does have that property. So, we're going to create properties like our favorites checkbox, our tag property, our type property, and so on. And to do that, over in our database, we can click add property. Now, this is also new. If you watched my older tutorials, you may have seen a different UI that sort of slides out on the right side here. We now have this little menu that pops up directly underneath the column that we've created in the table. And this gives us number one some suggested properties that we can create. But down here number two all of the different types of properties that we have available to us. So we have some basic ones like text and number. We have some more advanced ones that we're going to work with in just a few moments like relation and rollup. And then we even have some uh connector properties that can connect notion up to different tools which we won't be messing with in this video but you can use if you are say a GitHub user or a Figma user. So, the first property we're going to create is going to be called favorite. And this is going to allow us to favorite notes and add them to that favorite section I showed you in the demo. And I'm going to go ahead and give this a star icon as well. So, let's search for star. Go with that right there. And then one thing that I have noticed, and I actually am not a huge fan of, but it is what it is right now, is that we actually name the property first and then we got to grab the mouse and we have to select the type of the property like this. We can also mash the arrow keys if we want to. used to be that you set the type of the property first and then you gave it the name, but now they switched it around. So, we're going to go with checkbox like that. And something cool you can do with checkbox properties is you can change the width of the property to only show the icon. This is technically possible with any notion property. There's a bit of a trick to it. Uh, with most property types, like say the name property or the title property, you're going to scale it down and you'll sort of hit a minimum width right there. If you hold option or alt, you can actually make that a little bit uh narrower still if you really wanted to. Now, not super useful for title type properties, but I did want to

give you that little uh tidbit just in case you wanted to use it somewhere else. Uh and now that we have our favorite property, we're going to create a second property, and we're going to call this one tag. Now, this property is uh going to rely on the tags database that we created, which is why we had to create both our notes and tags database at basically the same time. So I'm going to give this once again a tag icon and we're going to choose relation as the type of this property. So relation property essentially allows us to relate rows or pages in one database to other pages either in that same database as in the case of say like a parent and subtasks relationship in a tasks database or to another database as in this case. We're going to be relating individual note pages to specific tag pages. Say we have a tag page like gardening. We might have um different care plans for different plants. We might have pages for each one of those. We would relate those pages to our gardening tag page. And to do that, we are going to select our tags database as the database that we want to link to. And here you can see why I might have wanted to put this little suffix after tags because uh it's not showing it here. But I definitely have additional databases in this workspace called tags and called notes. So here I can be 100% certain that I'm connecting to the right tags database. So I've gone ahead and created my relation here. If we wanted to uh give this the name tags, we could because we are actually not going to limit this to only one tag per note. I think some people may actually have uh several tags that they're going to want to connect notes to. So we're going to call this tags. And note here that we have an option for a limit. If we wanted to, we could say that you can only have one tag per page, but because we do want to allow multiple tags per note page, we're going to keep this at no limit. We are also going to turn on two-way relation, and this is going to create a reciprocal or related property in our tags database that links back to our notes database. So, we're going to call that notes. We'll add that relation. And you're going to see that we've got a tags property here. And if we go back or go up one level in our tags database, we have a notes property. So these two properties are connected. And if I created a sample tag page called gardening and then I created a page over here, something like maybe bee friendly plants, which is something that I really want to add to my yard either this or next season. We could tag that with our gardening page. And you're going to see down here bee friendly plants ends up in our notes relation. These two relation properties are connected. Now, I also noticed that even though we gave this property an icon, when we selected the relation type, it actually overwrote it. And you might want to keep this because this really indicates that it is a relation property. But if you did want to put this back to the tag like that, you could very, very easily do it. All right, let's go ahead and add some additional properties. I'm going to add one more property. I'm going to call this one type. And this is going to be a select type property. And this property is going to allow us to denote that certain notes have special types like meeting notes, journal notes, voice notes, and web clips. And I'll go ahead and show you that real quick. Over here in our type property, we've got uh quite a lot in this version. Actually, uh for this tutorial, we're going to limit it to just four that are kind of special. Some of the types that I included in the Ultimate Notes template are actually not special. They just kind of help you uh indicate that maybe this is a booknotee or maybe it's an idea. But for now, we are going to go with some special type properties or type options. And to do that, we can go ahead and click type right here. Go to edit property. And this will actually allow us to add options. So, we're going to go with uh voice note as one of them. We'll add web clip for clips from the web, highlights, research, that kind of thing. Let's add journal. Actually, let's do meeting. I'll do journal. Pro tip here. You'll note that when you add new options, they go to the top, which is why I tried but kind of failed to get in alphabetical order by starting with voice note. So I'm going to go ahead and move that. And now we've got the four special types of note that we can add as select values to any page in this database. Let's also add a URL property. Now some property names will automatically suggest a property type. In the case of URL, we do get that. So you could just type URL. See if it happens again. Yep. And then hit enter and you get a URL property. So that'll be really useful for capturing web clips from the internet. Let's create a note date property that also suggests date which is perfect. We're going to add a created property which is the created time and it'll do the same thing for a property called updated which will be our last edited time. It'll just show us respectively when a note was created and when it was last updated. We're also going to add an image property which will be of the files and media type just in case you're say capturing something from the web and you want to put like a screenshot or an image from a web page in this property right here. So that'll actually allow us to add files and media. And I'm going to create a second files and media property called audio file. And that is because I've got a whole tutorial on my website.

I'm working on a new video version of it as well that will allow you to take notes with your voice and create new pages in Notion with those voice recordings. I've got this amazing automation that allows me to go speak to my phone, sometimes even for an hour, and in minutes once I'm done, it's uploaded to Dropbox. every minute of that audio is transcribed near perfect text using the whisper speechto text model and then I get a brand new page in notion with that entire transcript and I can do that for free. Now there's actually an AI meeting notes block in notion now as well that you can use to actually record your voice and get transcriptions directly in notion but that does require being on the business plan or higher. So if you're in a free plan or you're on the plus plan you can use my tutorial to essentially get that capability for yourself without having to pay extra. Anyway, we're going to go ahead and select the files and media type for that as well. And now we're going to create yet another checkbox property, this time called archived. We're going to select the little container X icon for this property. And the reason we're adding this property is earlier I mentioned that we're going to be using Thiago Forte's Parah methodology for our tagging system. This is going to allow us to establish what are called areas and resources, which I'll explain a little bit later. But part of parah, which stands for projects, areas, resources, and an archive, is an archive area. And that is basically a place for you to put things that you don't want to fully delete, you want to be able to feasibly access later if you need to, but that you want completely out of your hair for now. And this archives checkbox is going to allow us to do that in our note-taking system. We're also going to create a property called root tag. Now, this is kind of optional, but if you want to do subtags and parent tags, say like a greater area for your home life that has subtags, like say the garden and um home inventory and things like that, you can actually do that. And we're going to add this root tag property to actually allow that. And for that, we are going to find the rollup type and set that there. Now, we're going to come back to this a little bit later because typically you would configure a roll-up right away, but right now, we can't do it. And I'm going to go ahead and explain what a roll-up does when we can actually configure it. So for now, just go ahead and create the property. And finally, we're going to create three formula type properties, which we're also just going to create and not worry about for now. One of them is going to be called URL icon. We'll go ahead and find the formula property for that. The next is going to be called URL base. Once again, formula type property. And finally, we're going to create one called updated short, and we'll select formula for that as well. Now, we're going to paste in the formulas a little bit later, and I'm going to be providing those formulas in the description, but I do want to give you a quick preview of what these formulas are going to do. So, if we go to our demo and we go back to the dashboard of our demo, you'll notice that we can actually see basically how many days ago each of these notes was updated. And that is due to a formula called updated short. Now, if we were showing the actual updated date property, the last edited time property, that would take up a lot more space horizontally here. Similarly, in our clips view, we actually have this nice little URL icon, which we can click to go to the URL in our browser. And if we were showing the actual URL there, again, we would be taking up a whole lot more horizontal space and things would just look a lot more crowded if you were on a width constrained browser or monitor. So, we can use formulas to create these really nice compact icons and sort of like updated tags. And we're going to do that a little bit later on by pasting in formulas that I'm going to give you. But for now, we can just go ahead and create these formulas. We're going to cover that a bit later in the video. And if you don't want to worry about formulas for now, go ahead and skip over it. And with that, we've actually created all the properties we need to create for this notes database. So, we're going to go ahead and now actually uh change the way that the notes pages look because if you click into a page like our bee friendly plants page, you'll notice that we have all of the properties in a huge uh vertical list here. And typically in a note-taking system, you would want to open a new page and immediately start taking notes. You wouldn't want to have to scroll a ton. So, we are going to change this into something a lot nicer looking. If I open up this article that I've captured from my website here, you'll notice that we have a few of our properties in a horizontal row and then we have the entire article from this web page that was captured using our notion web clipper flyer. And I'll show you that a little bit later in the video. If we want to see the rest of the properties though, we've got this little three dot button and that's where we can see all of the other properties. This uses notion's uh sort of new page layout tool. And here is exactly how to use it. If we go into any one of these pages above the title, as long as the database is unlocked, by the way, which we haven't locked it, so we're all good. We're going to see this little customize layout button. I also want to show you one more way of accessing this, though, because you don't actually have to go into a page to access it. You can actually go to the settings icon right here. And if we go to more settings at the bottom of this database settings submen, we can see customize page layout

right here. And I wanted to point this out because all of the customizations we are going to be making will affect every single page in the database, not just the be friendly plants page that we're working on here. Uh so to give you a sort of visual indicator of that, it's going to look the same as we scroll through any of these other pages. The properties are all in these exact fixed positions because this whole layout is defined at the database level, not at the page level. So, let's go ahead and change the way our pages look inside of this database. First, let's go ahead and make sure we're clicked off of any of these sections because we've got these page settings right here that we want to make a few changes to because we are creating, at least I'm creating in this tutorial, a individual focused notetaking system. I actually don't want to see this comment section right here. So, I'm going to change my inline comments setting to minimal and I'm going to change my page discussions to off. Um, you can, if you want to turn your property icons off, too. I typically like to keep those on. And if you want to, you can make full width pages, but I think for writing purposes, keeping your width constrained to a nice default setting is a little bit better. So, we'll go ahead and do that. If you're curious about tabbed layouts, we're not going to worry about that in this video, but I've got a whole video, which we'll link to in the description down below, where you can learn all about those. It is a pretty cool feature. Uh, but for now, we're going to go ahead and grab this property group and send it to the side panel. Now, I dragged and dropped it, but another option we have is to hit this three dot menu here and move to the panel just like that. And then, as you saw a little bit earlier, we have a few of our most used properties pinned beneath the title. So, to get that effect, we can click the heading box here. And you can see over here that we have pinned properties and unpinned properties. So, let's go ahead and find our tag property right there. Let's find our favorite property. Let's find uh type and we'll find URL as well. I think more often than not we're going to be setting the URL before the type. So I'm actually going to move that up there and that gets us our pinned properties. Now here you're seeing them in a vertical list and that's just because I'm very zoomed in. If I zoomed out a couple of ticks, that's how they're normally going to look at a more normal zoom level. I just am very zoomed in for these tutorials just to make sure you can very easily see what I'm doing. Now, this property group, we could leave it as is. However, if I'm thinking like an app designer, I know there are certain properties in this database that people are actually going to be using quite often. And then there are other properties that are sort of behind the scenes, things like these formula properties that I mentioned earlier. You never are really going to need to see or interact with those properties when you're on the page because they do stuff elsewhere. So, we can kind of get a lot of those properties out of the way. And the way I'm going to do that is by creating a couple of different sections for this property group and then setting the visibility settings for all these properties. So first I'll click add section and I'm going to go with general properties as my first section. And everything gets added to general properties since we didn't have a section before. And then I'm going to add another one called helper properties. So helper properties are pretty much properties that if I were able to, I would never show to the user. If I were designing an app from scratch, there would be a whole lot of sort of behind the scenes like boiler works. Like think of Kamaji in Spirited Away, just making sure all the water is hot in the bath house, there's a whole lot of piping and engineering that goes into keeping the bath house running. And a lot of that stuff is hidden in the walls and you'd never see it. Well, if I'm thinking like Kamaji or whoever built the castle, I would typically keep those things hidden. And the way I'm going to do it here is by dragging the properties like updated short URL icon, uh, URL base, etc. into this helper properties section. We're also going to bring root tag down there. That's really not that important. And I think that probably is going to cover it for all of our helper properties. So, we're going to go ahead and make these always hide for their visibility settings. Just like that. And that will basically reduce this entire section to just helper properties. people can access it if they're curious, but otherwise it won't clutter up our space. Now, we can order our general properties. So, I think that people are going to be accessing the note dates most often, uh, say for meeting notes or journal notes. Maybe they're going to be archiving notes. So, we'll put that there. And then we're going to put created and updated right there as well. These four we're going to keep always visible. We're also going to have audio file here, but we're going to set this to hide when empty. And that's because usually, at least in my voice notes workflow, I'm not manually uploading audio files to my note-taking system. I use a automation using a platform called pipedream, which will use the notion API to automatically upload the audio file. And so, because a robot is essentially working with this property, I'm going to keep it hidden until it has a file in it. Now, for image, we can actually do something a little fancier. We can click the image here and we can hit add to layout. And this actually creates a special box for the image. And we also have the ability to display images in

this property in landscape, portrait, or square format. I think landscape is a good default, but if you're say building a Pokémon card database, then perhaps portrait would be a little bit better. I'm also going to move this into our panel. And I'm also going to drag the property group beneath our image block. And let's see if I can actually do this while I'm so zoomed in. There we go. So now if we're say saving Pokémon card images or photos or whatever it is, we're going to have that right at the top of our sidebar. And I think that's actually all we need to do for customizing our notes pages. So let's apply this to all pages. And now when we check out our be friendly pants plant pants be friendly plants page, we've got our four pinned properties just like that. We can set a type if we want to. I don't think it really makes sense to do so now. And if we want to see the rest of our properties, here they all are. helper properties are nice and hidden. We can even toggle the section closed if we wanted to. And then all of the other properties are as we set them up. So to finish setting up our notes database, the last thing I'm going to do is set up a couple of default views inside of the database itself. And the only reason I'm going to have more than one view is because we are bringing in the archive concept from the parah system. So we're going to actually rename this table by right-clicking. We're going to rename this view to unarchived. And I'll actually go for a nice little uh pencil square outline icon there. And we're going to add a filter and a sort criteria to this view. So within our filter menu, we can choose any of our properties to filter by. And that will create what's called a simple filter. We can also add advanced filters down here. And because I've been using notion since advanced filters were the only way to filter things, I kind of just prefer to use advanced filters for everything. It doesn't really matter until you get into building compound filters. And we're actually going to be creating compound filters a little bit later in the video. So, I'm going to be using advanced filters for everything. The other reason I always use advanced filters in my tutorials is notion templates like Ultimate Notes, which is free, and my flagship template, Ultimate Brain, which combines notes and tasks, projects, and a whole lot of other things into a complete productivity system. If you go and edit any of the filters in that template, you're going to see something that looks like this. So, I always use this in my videos. And in this filter for this particular view, we are just going to go for our archived property right here. And we're going to say is unchecked. So basically any note where the archived checkbox is unchecked is considered not archived. It's going to be here. And we're also going to add a sort which is going to be our updated value in descending order. That ensures that any note that has been most recently updated will show at the top. One other cool little trick that I want to show you here and I'm going to set on this view. If I click my name property, I get a whole bunch of different choices here. And one of those is freeze. So if I freeze this particular property in the table view, I can actually hold shift and scroll my mouse wheel. And you'll see that my name property is frozen to the side here, even though I'm scrolling through all these other ones. And if you want to show multiple properties, uh, basically whatever the rightmost property is, if you freeze there, you're going to be freezing that many properties. Now, I think the name is pretty much the only one I need to freeze up to, so that works perfectly for me. But it's a nice little trick in table views that is worth knowing. And now that we've set this up exactly as we want it, let's go ahead and duplicate this view and call the duplicate archives. Now, we could of course make a brand new archived view from scratch. But to save ourselves some effort, I like to get as many common settings set up in a single view and then just duplicate that view and make tiny little tweaks here and there to set up all the rest of the views in our system. And we're going to be using that trick to great effect later on when we set up our actual notes views in the dashboard. So for archived, let's go ahead and choose a different icon. Let's find that container X icon like that. And then I'm going to change our filter value from where archived is unchecked to where archived is checked. And just like that, we've got a nice little archived view and an unarchived view to accompany it. So, we have finished setting up our notes database. We are one half of the way to having all of our databases set up so we can actually build out the dashboard. The next thing we need to do is do the exact same thing with our tags database. We're going to create the properties. page layout settings and we're going to go ahead and create our unarchived and archived views. So, we'll open this up as a full page once more. And for this tags database, we're going to go a little bit faster because you've already seen everything I'm about to show you. We're just now doing it for the tags database instead of the notes database. So, let's go ahead and move this name property inward just a little bit. We've already got our notes property. So, we are good on that front. So, now let's create a favorite property just like we did in our notes database. This will have the checkbox type. And we're going to go ahead and edit it to give it a nice little star icon as well. We'll go ahead and make this really, really skinny. Just like that. And then we're going to create another property called type. But unlike in our notes database, we are not going to use the select property type. We're actually status property type. The only reason we are using status for this is

as you can see there is a default value that will always be applied to new pages when you create them. And for our tagging system, we want to make sure that every tag is either an area, a resource, or something called an entity, which you can actually see over here on our demo dashboard. Every single tag is one of these three types. And the status type property is the only property in notion databases that gives us the option to set a default value. Select type properties don't have that power. So even though this looks a little bit set up to be for like task management workflows, we're going to kind of bend it to our own will and use it for our own non-task management use case. And to sort of drive that point home, I'm going to go ahead and move all of these options into the in progress group just to sort of ignore the fact that there are these separate groups in the first place. You don't have to do that, but I prefer it. Now, let's go ahead and rename these. So, I'll rename in progress to area. And because I've got a touch of synesthesia, areas are orange to me. We're going to rename not started, which is our default, to resource, which I think is kind of sensible as a re as a default here. And we're going to make that purple. And then our green done option will be renamed to entity. So at this point I want to do a little bit of an explanation of the parah method. And I'll go into fullface mode just to make this look like a proper YouTube video for a second here. So Thiago Forte, one of my friends, created this tool agnostic method for organizing all the information that comes into your digital life called parah. Parah stands for projects, areas, resources, and archive. And those are essentially four column folders where you can put basically anything that comes into your life based on its actionability. So if something comes into your life like say a task or um like a file that comes into your life that's very relevant to a project that's going on, you would create a project folder for that and that would go in the projects folder. If something comes into your life that is related to a very large area of your life, like say your home or work or say your health and well-being, those would be called areas. I've often called them life buckets in my previous videos. Areas are pretty much just like the large areas of your life where you have ongoing maintenance. They are areas of responsibility or spheres of responsibility. We have resources which are kind of just like topic based interests, things that you're interested in but don't represent tasks you need to do or things you need to maintain. So like gardening or guitar, things like that. And then the archive is sort of this void where you send stuff. It's like the phantom zone, right? you send stuff to be out of your hair, but it's not deleted. It's not gone forever. So, if you want to get stuff like basically out of the rest of your system, but you want to guarantee that you can access it later on if you need to, you put it in the archive. So, going back over to our tagging system, you will notice that there is an entity tag as well or entity type that is not part of the par system. So the reason that exists is when I was implementing parah into notion originally I had areas and I had resources which again are topicbased areas of interest. I kind of realized that there was another category or another way of organizing information that I wanted to add into my system. I wanted to organize information by its shape. So if we come down here to entity this will make sense. I wanted to create collections of apps of essays of GitHub repos etc. And those to me felt a little different than topic based organization like guitar or energy or productivity. So I took some of my resources which represented the shapes of information and I rebranded those as entities. And the only thing that really does in this system is it creates a little bit of separation where I can very easily come down here and see my entities or collections separated from my more topic based resources. If you want to be a parapurist, you do not have to add this to your system whatsoever. But I think it's an improvement. And a lot of our users, people who have bought our ultimate brain template and who give us feedback in our customer community, they really like this entity concept as well. Uh so I'm going to show you how to add it. And that's all you have to do. And in fact, it doesn't add any additional work to the system. It just gives you a nice little additional category. And if we wanted to, we could even rebrand parah as parah, which sounds exactly the same, but has more of a fruity connotation. So we've got our type property just like that. The next property we're going to add is actually in the form of two properties. So the first one is going to be called parent tag. And we're going to choose once again the relation property that we used for our tag and notes relation pair earlier. But this time we are actually going to link to the exact tags database that we are currently in which is going to create two different properties in this database. We'll have parent tag and we are going to limit this to one but we're also going to turn on two-way relation and call the related property subtag actually subtags because we may be able to have multiple subtags under a parent tag. So this is a feature you can

add to your tagging system if you want to have higher order tags like say areas that contain lower resources. For example, I might have a home area and inside my home area I might have a resource for say gardening. If you want to have that, this is exactly how you do it. And once we add that relation, we are going to see that we have both a parent tag property and a subtags property. So I'm going to go ahead and demonstrate that really quick. We already have a gardening resource. We're also going to create a home area. Let's give that a type of area. And over here, we can actually set the subtag value to gardening. And you're going to see that home becomes the parent tag of the gardening page. And now we can go do something that I mentioned a little bit earlier as a link back to earlier in the video. We can go back to our databases. We can go to our notes database. And we could finally configure that root tag rollup that we created earlier. Now again, if you're not familiar with databases, I've got a whole notion databases for beginners video that covers roll-ups in a lot of detail. But as a primer, a roll-up essentially allows us to reach through an existing relation in this database. So in this case, we only have our tags relation. And it allows us to get information about property values of the related pages. So you can see here the root tag right now is showing gardening because we're just showing the name of the property and that is identical to the tag value gardening. But what if we wanted to say get the parent tag of this gardening page or what if we wanted to get say the favorite status or the archive status of this gardening page. That is what a rollup allows us to do. It allows us to dig in to these related pages and get their property values. So in this case, we want to get the parent tag of whatever page is in our tags relation. And we're going to go ahead and show the original. So here we can see that home is the root tag of gardening. And with that, our root tag rollup property is all configured. So once again, up the beantock to databases. And once again, we're going to full screen our tags database. So we continue adding additional properties. We're going to add, as we did in our notes database, an archived property, which is going to have a nice little container X icon. And we're going to give it the checkbox type. And we're going to add a few formulas as well. So, one of the formulas we're going to create is called note count. And because this formula property will actually be visible, I'm going to give it a nice little icon here. And we're going to find, oh, I think a number icon. We're going to give that the formula type. And just like with our notes database, we're going to paste in the formulas a bit later. We're going to create another formula property called latest activity. And you'll see what that formula does in just a bit. And we're also going to create a formula property called latest note. And that's actually going to show us the most recently updated note inside each of our tag pages. Once again, formula property. So now we have all the properties we need in our tags database. So as we did with our notes database, let's go ahead and customize the page layout for each of the pages in our tags database. Going to open up gardening. We're going to go to customize layout. And just as before, we're going to click off of any of these sections so we have access to the page settings. And as with our note pages, I'm going to go ahead and set inline comments to minimal, page discussions to off. I consider our tag pages to be sort of an extension of the app that we're building. If you think about a more traditional note-taking app like Evernote, this is sort of like a notebook you'd be going into, so you don't really need comments or anything like that. Uh, so we're going to go ahead and turn all of that good stuff off. We are going to make these pages full width because again they're sort of mini dashboards in and of themselves. We're going to go into our heading here and let's go ahead and make our uh type property pinned. We will pin our favorite property and we're going to pin our note count property as well. Then we're going to add our property group to the side panel just like that. And we don't have quite enough properties to create multiple sections here. At least I don't think so. Uh, but I am going to go ahead and make latest activity always hidden, latest note always hidden, and the notes relation property always hidden. Now, for parent tag and subtags, we're actually going to do something a little bit different. We're going to take parent tag, and we're going to add that to the layout. But then we're going to come into the three dot menu on the parent tag box we get. And under advanced, we can convert this to what's called a relations group. Now, this looks the same as it did before, but if we come back to our property group and we go to subtags, we can add that to our layout and we can do the same thing, three do, but now under advanced, we can add this to the existing relations group. Now, this is sort of a holdover from how pages used to look before Notion's layout tool uh was released. But this is a really nice feature that I'm glad they left in because if we go up to the relations group over here

we can set the visibility or the show as value to minimal for both parent tag and for subtags. And that creates this really, really nice small box where we can set and view our parent and subtags, but where it doesn't really get in the way. It's really, really nice and small. So, we'll apply this to all pages. This is exactly what our gardening page is going to look like. And again, if we have more horizontal space, it's going to look like this. And we're going to get the actual content in this page a little bit later by creating what's called a database template. But for now, we'll go ahead and freeze our name property. We're going to go ahead and rename this bad boy to active tags. And I'm going to go ahead and find the tag icon. We're going to create an advanced filter where archived is unchecked just like before. And we're going to sort this. But because this is a tagging system, I think sorting by name makes a bit more sense. Now, if we duplicate this view, we can call the duplicate archived. We can find a nice little container X icon to represent archived tags. And we're going to change the filters so that anything showing up in this view must be checked on that archived checkbox property. And with that, we are now completely set up in terms of our databases. Notes are all set up and tags are all set up. So now what we get to do is the fun part. We get to actually build out the views on our Ultimate Notes dashboard here. We're going to build all these note-taking views. We're going to add this button up here. And we're going to create our tag views down here as well. Let's go ahead and dive right into it by going up the Beantock to our ultimate notes dashboard. And right here on our first block, we're going to type /list. Now, this is going to do two things. One, it's going to magically change the length of my beard. And two, it's going to allow us to create this nice list style view that we've seen over here in the demo. And this gets us a key benefit over the table style view that we've already set up in our source databases which is that if we are view constrained for any reason be you're on your phone or you just want to open up the content of a note inside peak here we can still see a lot of the information regarding the rest of the notes in our system in this lefth hand pane here we get a lot of the title and again if you're not as zoomed in as I am you're going to see a lot more of the title and you can also see your tags and your type and all kinds of other things here and you got your note in the right hand pane. name. So, we're going to be using list style layouts for most the other views for the rest of this build, but I will note there are other layout types, and you're free to mix and match and completely go off rails and off script and do things completely differently than what I'm showing you here. Uh, but for now, we're going to go ahead and link to an existing database. We don't want to create a new empty database here because again, we're trying to create a view or kind of like a window into the existing notes database we've already created. So, we want to link to an existing database. We'll choose our notes scratch database here. And then instead of choosing one of these existing views, we're going to go ahead and create a new list view. We're going to call this notes. And we're going to give it a nice little pencil square outline icon once again. And we are going to hide our database title so it looks a bit cleaner. I also want to set the load limit to 10 pages instead of 50 pages. And the reason for that is on our dashboard, we have our tags section underneath our notes section. So, by limiting our initial load to 10 pages, we make it so that we don't have to scroll super far just to get down to our tags. And with that, we can click done and we can start actually configuring and setting up this list style view here. Now, in the few days since I filmed the first half of this video and this half, we actually got a brand new notion feature, which you can see right here called conditional color. So, I want to briefly touch on this since you're probably wondering why you didn't see it until now in the video. Uh this is a brand new feature and it actually allows you as you can see right here to set conditional background colors on uh the actual pages inside of a database view. And this works for most of the layout types. Works for table views, for list views, board views, all kinds of stuff based on conditional factors or filters that you can set up. So, we're not going to be using it in this build, but as an example, if you had a task manager, say like the one in Ultimate Tasks or Ultimate Brain, you could very easily make any overdue tasks red as their background, which I think would be a pretty useful addition. So, if you want to play around with that, you'll find that under conditional color, but for the most part, we are going to be messing with the property visibility settings along with the filter and sort settings as we create these views. And I want to quickly just kind of give you a reminder of the different views that we're going to make and give you a bit of an explanation for the purpose of each of them. So the first one we're going to make is called notes here. And I define the notes view in a note-taking system as a view for your actual notes that you're taking yourself. So that kind of excludes a few special types of notes. That's going to exclude web clips. And these are kind of things that we're clipping from the web, like articles or highlights from articles or um screenshots, that kind of thing. We're going to store those in the special clips view here. It's also going to exclude a couple of special types of

notes that I alluded to earlier. We're going to exclude the journal notes and the meetings notes. And the reason we're going to exclude those two in particular is that journal entries and meetings typically, at least in my experience, don't need to be given a specific tag. Now, you could make a tag for journal instead of doing that. Um, but I really like having a special view for journal entries and meeting notes, and they don't really fit into the para model in my opinion. So, we create special views for those, and we're going to exclude those notes from our sort of default notes tab here. Now, in addition to notes, we are going to create an all tab. And this will literally have everything. So, if you're searching for something or you just want to see literally everything, you can build a view like this. And then we're going to create a few additional views. We're going to have an inbox, which is basically like a default dumping ground for any new note that doesn't yet have a tag. Then you can go through and process this by adding tags to your notes on a regular basis. We're going to create a favorites view for anything that's really important to you. That's why we created that favorite checkbox earlier. We'll have that aforementioned clips view where we're going to see our nice little URL icon that allows us to easily access these web pages. We're gonna have a voice view. So, if you want to go ahead and set up my notion voice notes automation and take notes with your voice like I do, all those voice notes are going to show up right here. And then we're going to have those special journal and meetings views as well. And the really nice part is for the most part, we aren't going to have to configure all these from scratch. We really just have to build one of them and then we can duplicate the one we build and make small tweaks to it to get all the different functionality that we want in each of these unique views here. So, let's pop over to our actual build and let's set up the original notes view. For our notes view, let's go ahead and set some property visibilities. We do want to make sure that we can see our tags property. We want to make sure we can see our type property. And then we're also going to add this updated short formula property. Now, at this time, we are not actually going to see anything in this formula property because we haven't added a formula to it. But once we get finished configuring all of these notes views, we're going to go ahead and add those formulas as its own section of the video. And once we do, we're going to be able to see things like this little updated tag here. And the web clips view will be able to see this little URL icon. And all that good stuff will be configured. For now, though, we're going to go ahead and just set the property visibilities. They're going to be ready for us when we get those formulas pasted in. And we're also going to set up our filters and our sorts. Now, I can click here or here to set those up, but I prefer to actually click the little filter and sort icons at the top of the database view. So, we're going to go ahead and do it that way. Inside of sort, I'm going to go ahead and sort by my updated property. We're going to set that to descending order. That way, the most recently edited note shows up at the top. And then I'm going to go to the bottom of the filter list and I'm going to add an advanced filter. And the first criteria we're going to add to this is where the archive property is unchecked. Remember that we are following the para method for this entire build. So if we archive a note, we want it to be nowhere else other than our archived view that we set up in the source notes database. Along with that, we're also going to create a second filter rule here. And that's where our type property right there is not one of the special types that we don't want showing up in this default notes view. So it's going to include journal meeting as well as web clip. Now, you could uh take voice notes out of here, but I personally consider voice notes to be kind of equivalent to my written notes. So, I'm going to go ahead and allow voice notes to continue being here. Uh, and then we're going to create a compound filter. And this is something that you can actually only do in advanced filters. It's another reason why I use advanced filters for everything. We're going to create a filter group, which is basically a nesting of different filters. Uh, and we're going to create a filter here where the URL is empty or and this is why we have to use the filter group because if we add another rule in this box, it gets us access to this or keyword instead of and up here or where the type is voice note. Now, I don't have an example in the demo right now, but typically when I use my notion voice notes automation, uh, the cloud storage link is going to be here in the URL. So, the way that my automation works is I upload a voice note to Dropbox or Google Drive that will trigger a pipe dream automation and that will create this whole note inside of notion with the transcript and the summary and anything else I want. And I also typically fill in the link to that Google Drive or Dropbox file here in the URL property. And because I consider voice notes to not be web clips but to be actual notes, we over here create this compound rule that essentially carves out an exception for pages that do have a URL value uh where if their type is voice note, we are going to allow them to show up in this notes section. And if that doesn't make sense to you or if you're not interested in the voice notes automation, you can go ahead and leave this out of your build. But that's kind of how I have found it to work really well for me. So, I'm including it here. And I'm also making sure that this

matches up with the ultimate notes template. So, with that, we've got our filter set up. We have our sort set up. And we also have our property visibility all set up. So, that pretty much means we are done setting up the initial view, which is again our default notes view here. And that means that we can just duplicate it to create everything else. So, I'm going to create probably the simplest view next. a view called all. And I'm going to go a little bit faster here now that I've explained everything. So, we're going to find an asterisk icon here. And the purpose of this view is going to be to allow us to see all of our notes. No matter what they are, web clips, journal entries, meetings, what have you. We're going to see everything here as long as it's not archived. So, in property visibility, I'm actually going to go and I'm going to add the URL icon formula property that we're going to build a little bit later. I'm going to move it above updated short. And that is going to allow us in our all view to see the same URL icon for web clips that we can see here in our clips view. With that one change being made, we're going to go ahead and change our filter and sort criteria. For the all view, the only filter we need is where archived is unchecked. So we can actually remove the other ones. We'll remove that. We'll remove this filter group right here. And then we're going to keep our sort criteria where updated is in descending order. And that creates our all view. Next, let's duplicate notes again. We're going to create a new inbox view here. We're going to find a tray icon for that. Not try, but tray. And our filter criteria for the inbox is going to be a little bit different than the one for our notes view. We go ahead and get rid of all of this good stuff. The only thing we want to make sure in our inbox view is that number one, our tags value is empty. That's going to allow us to set tags on notes and clear them from the inbox when they are tagged. And number two that certain special types of notes don't show up either. So if we find our type property, we are not going to show is not we're journal or meeting notes in the inbox either. Again, we kind of want to have journal notes and meeting notes in their special views and other than the all view kind of nowhere else. Now we are going to show web clips and voice notes in the inbox because at least in my personal practice I apply tags like resource tags or entity tags or area tags to both web clips and to voice notes. Those two types of notes often have topical tags that I want to apply. So that's going to be our set of filters for our inbox view. Again, updated in descending order is going to be perfect for this view. That way the most recent stuff kind of floats to the top. And we can go ahead and duplicate notes one more time to create our next view. This one we're going to call clips. It'll be our special web clips view. So let's go find a globe icon. I think that'll be a nice one for uh this view here. And then in property visibility, once again, we are going to want to make sure we're showing that URL icon so we can very easily click and get to the web pages from our notes dashboard for these clips that we've got here. uh within clips. I'm actually going to move this both to get it into a different position, but also to demonstrate to you that you can move these views as you want. I think I kind of like that order there. I'm also going to set some different filters. And our filters here are going to be just a little bit different again from our nodes view. In fact, they're going to be almost the opposite. So, just like with all of our other views, we're going to have archived is unchecked. But then we're going to create a filter rule where our type is not voice note because if you remember from earlier I explained that voice notes often have their URL property filled in. So we kind of want to make sure they're not considered uh clips in terms of our view here. So we're going to say where type is not voice note and then one more filter group here where URL is not empty or and we automatically get that or there so you're all good there or where type is web clip. So this gives us a way to either explicitly say a specific page is a web clip even if it for some reason doesn't have a URL. I don't know maybe it's like a screenshot you took and you just want to uh denote that as a web clip or in most cases where the URL property is not empty. And that creates our web clips view. And right now this view is entirely empty. So I think I'd like to create a sort of test page just so we have something in here to see. And I want to show you exactly what happens when our URL property gets filled in. So, over in notes, I'm going to create a new page. I'm going to call this um the flow state. Go ahead and open this up. And I'll alt tab over to my browser real quick because I've actually got an article about the flow state open in the browser. And if we copy the URL and paste it into our URL view, watch this over here. It's going to disappear from our nodes view because now our URL property is filled. It no longer meets the criteria we set in our filters. URL needs to be empty, but we are going to see it over in our clips view. Now, normally you probably wouldn't want to be copying and pasting stuff over from your browser. So, at this point, I do want to show you a really cool tool that my team and I have been working on called Fly Lighter. If you want to

capture stuff from the web to Notion fast, as you can see right here, this is a browser extension we have been working on for quite a while now that allows you to do that in a really, really cool way. You can set up what are called flows which will capture notion pages to any database that you want. You can set any property values even capture highlights from the page. You can capture screenshots. You can capture full articles. For example, if I wanted to capture the entire article here, I could open up flyer like so. I've got a UN3 inbox or ultimate notes 3 inbox uh in my demo folder here, which I can do. And if I want to capture the entire article, I can go to our content tab. And right there, we've got the article as a suggested piece of data. So, I'm going to add that to my little content editor. And I could also even set a tag value if I wanted to. So, if I consider this to be a productivity type article, I can go ahead and add that. Maybe I also consider it to be an essay for purposes of entities and our modified parah methodology. And if I capture this, it's going to use the notion API to create a brand new page in that ultimate notes demo that I've already showed you. So right here, we've got the favicon for the website. We've got all these different properties like the URL and the tags that we set. And we've got the entire article captured as well. If you want to be able to capture stuff from the web to notion super duper quickly, flyer. com is where you can go. It is a completely free web extension. We do have a pro account if you want to sync all of your settings between multiple different devices to get access to some upcoming more advanced features, but everything I just showed you is completely free and always will be. Check it out once again. Flyer. com. And with that, we're going to head back to our build because now that you know how to capture web clips to your note-taking system very easily, we want to create a few more of those special views that I already showed you. So, I'm going to once again duplicate our notes view. And it kind of doesn't matter which of these views that you're duplicating. You can do whichever one you want. Uh but we're going to call this one voice. And we are going to add a microphone icon. Now in this case, our filter criteria is going to be extremely simple. Instead of all of this goblet, we can just remove this. We can remove this and we can create one filter underneath our standard archive filter where type is voice note. Super duper easy. When my notion voice notes automation creates a page in notion from an uploaded audio file, it's going to apply this voice note type. And that's kind of all you need for this particular view. And what's really nice is that the exact same thing is true for journal notes and for meeting notes. Now, in the case of voice notes, I think we do want to make sure under our property visibility that our URL icon is visible because you may want to click over to Google Drive or Dropbox, wherever your audio file is stored. Uh, but beyond that, it's going to be pretty much identical to those other views we're going to create. Which means we can just go ahead and rightclick, duplicate on voice, call this bad boy journal, and maybe get like a quill or a pen. We don't have one for quill, but how about a pen? I think that looks pretty good for journal. Uh, and I think for journal, we're not going to have URLs in the URL property, so I'll go ahead and actually hide the URL icon. Uh but for our journal view, all we need to do is change our filter type to journal instead of voice note. Now for our journal view, instead of sorting our notes by the last edited date, you may want to create a sort of chronological journal based on the actual date of the entry. So instead of sorting by updated and descending order, we're actually going to sort by the note date property that we created earlier. In fact, the note date exists kind of for journal entries along with meeting note entries. We might be able to use it for other things, but this is really what it's built for. And now that we've got that all configured, we can duplicate it and call the duplicate meeting. Uh maybe get a nice little like group icon or people icon. There we go. User three. Uh and all we need to do is edit our filter one more time so that instead of journal, it is meeting. And with that, we have finished making all of our original views. We might want to reorder them somewhat. I'm going to go ahead and go with that order. And I just realized that I spoke a bit too soon. There's one that I forgot to make. So, let's quickly make the favorites view as well. I'll go ahead and duplicate meeting just because I'm already on it. I'll call this one fave. Get a star icon. I think I'm going to move it over here after inbox. And here, what we're going to do is go with archived is unchecked and favorite is checked. Uh, I think in the case of our favorite view, we're actually going to have no sort whatsoever. So, I'll just go ahead and delete that. That way, we can drag notes around as we want them and make a custom order. Uh, and because you might want to favorite web clips, I'm going to go ahead and make the URL icon uh, here it is, uh, visible as well. So, with that, now that I finally got all the views here, we have all of our notes

section defined and ready to go. And in fact, we could even see our bee friendly plants in our favorites view. If we check favorite, just like that. Boom. There it is. Now, earlier I mentioned that we don't have anything showing for our URL icon or for the other formula properties that we're showing because we don't yet have any formulas pasted into the formula properties themselves. Let's now rectify that. And to do that, I think it's going to be easiest if we just go back to our databases page. We go back into our notes scratch database. View that as a full page there. and we scroll with our shift key over to the formula properties we created. Remember that we've got three of them. URL icon, URL base, and updated short. In the description down below, you're going to find a link that contains the formulas which you can copy and paste really easily. And I'm actually going to do that instead of typing them out just to save some time in this video. So, first we'll do our URL icon because my notes offscreen have URL icon first. I'm going to go and click into there. Paste that bad boy in. And boom, we've got a URL icon. Now, in this case, it's going to show as empty because this bee friendly plants page does not have a URL property value. But if we switch the preview window over to the flow state, look at that. That is what it's going to look like. And we get a nice little clickable URL icon just like that. For URL base, I'm going to go ahead and copy that bad boy to my clipboard as well. Come on in here and paste it one more time. We get empty for befriendly plants. But if we look at the flow state, we get the base of the URL, which is just the actual domain name, collegefoggeek. com. And we're going to use that a bit later to build a custom view of web clips inside of our resource pages or our tag pages. Um, that will give us groups based on these base URLs, which I think is a pretty useful thing to add. And then let's get that little updated short formula as well. Go on in here, paste that bad boy, and there it is. 0 days since this has been updated. So again, you're going to find in the description down below those formulas so you can very easily paste them. If you're interested to learn what the heck I'm doing with all of this formula gobbledegook here, I will point out if I alt tab over to the browser one more time, that on the Thomas Frank Explains channel, which you're watching right now, there is a 55minute notion formula video that you can go through. So if you want to learn notion formulas, this video goes through them at five different levels of complexity. It's basically a master class of learning notion formulas. And in addition to that on my website, if you go to thomasjrank. com, you can go to learn notion and notion formulas and we have created comprehensive documentation on notion formulas. There is a cheat sheet page that has a example for literally every single function that you're going to find in notions formula language. And then we also have a full page for every one of those functions. If you want to learn notion formulas, this is the way to learn it. We've got full documentation for everything. If you want to become an expert in notion, this is probably going to become one of your favorite resources. We put a ton of work into it. So check that out. Link is in the description below along with those formulas as always. And I think while we're pasting in these formulas, we probably should do the same thing for our tags database, too. Just so the uh timestamps in the description are nice and logical and evenly laid out. if for no other reason. So, let's go up the Beantock one more time to databases. We're going to go to full screen for our tags database and we're going to find the formula properties we created for that as well. Again, we've got three note count, latest activity, latest note, and just as with our notes database, I have the formulas in an offscreen window. So, for note count, we're going to open this up and paste this fairly complex looking formula, which actually is pretty simple. In fact, all of this stuff here is really just dealing with plurality. like is there an S on the end of note? We'll hit done there. We're going to do the same thing for our latest note formula which just happened to be next in list in my notes. And then we're going to have latest activity. And as a brief explanation, uh latest note, as you can probably guess, just shows us the most recently updated note in this tag page that isn't archived. And then latest activity is a bit more of an interesting formula. This is actually going to allow us, and I think I want to show it in the demo real quick. This is going to allow us to sort our tags in this recent view a bit more intelligently. So, if you think about it up here in most of our views, we are sorting by the updated date of the actual pages. But in our tag pages, we're not going to really be updating the tag pages themselves very often. Instead, we're going to be updating the notes or the web clips that we find within these tag pages. and that's not going to result in an edit being made to the actual tag page itself. So, if we were just sorting this by the updated date of each page, then things wouldn't move very often and we wouldn't really get an accurate look at

the most uh currently important tags in our lives. So, this little clever formula kind of helps us to work past that problem. Instead of sorting by the most recent update in the tag page alone, we are getting a date that represents the latest activity in the tag both in the tag page itself and across any of its notes. So that actually allows us to sort our tag pages based on edits to the notes themselves. And as an example, if we open up workout routine and we just put a space character in there, check that out. well-being goes to the top because we made an edit to one of the notes inside of that tag page or more accurately related to that tag page. So, we now have all of our formulas pasted in and as we build out the rest of this template, we're going to see those formulas actually become useful. them in action. So, up the Beantock once again, now we actually see that nice little updated short tag value there. If we go to our clips, we're going to see that little URL icon just like that. Um, maybe we also want to add a productivity page. So, if we go to tags, we can actually create one. Productivity, new productivity page, just like that. And now that we've actually added this tag, maybe we should go ahead and create a section so we can view and organize all those tags. So, let's enter down. We're going to do slash one to create a tags heading. And then just like before, we're going to do slashlist to link an existing database. We'll choose our tags database this time. And we're going to create a brand new list view, which we'll call recents. Maybe just recent. I'm going to add a clock icon. icon to indicate recency. We're going to stick with our list here. We're going to once again hide our database title, set our load limit to 10, and then hit done. And then for our property visibility, we are going to want to see our latest note. And we are also going to want to see, I think, our type. Now, I can see that the sort icon is already lit up for some reason. And we are sorting by name. But as I just mentioned, instead of this, we want to actually sort by our latest activity formula value in descending order. That way, again, any edits to the notes that are related to these pages will influence their sort order. Now, we also want to add a filter, but the filters for this particular view are going to be a lot simpler. We literally just want to say where archived is unchecked. And before we create the rest of these, I want to go ahead and give you a little preview here just to preload your brain. So, in addition to our recent view, we're going to create a favorite tags view. And we're actually going to bring in a gallery layout type for that. We're going to create an a toz view that is just alphabetized instead of sorted by recency. And then we're going to create a types view which will bring in a new feature that you might not have seen yet which is called grouping. And that's going to allow us to see our areas, resources, and entities all in their own little subgroups. So back over to the build, we're going to once again duplicate our recent view here to save ourselves some work. Call this new duplicate A to Z. Get maybe like a little list icon. I think it's going to be perfect. List bullet. And then we'll keep all of the property visibility the same. We're going to change our sort criteria to name in ascending order. Just like that. I'll duplicate this guy. I'm going to call this one types. I'm going to find a shapes icon. Circle, square, triangle. That works pretty well. And underneath group in this view, we can go ahead and group by our type property. And if you want to hide empty groups, you can. But I think it's actually beneficial to not hide empty groups. That way, if you want to very quickly create, say, an entity and you don't have one, you've got this little new page button underneath the entity subheading, and that will automatically apply the entity type to the page that you create, such as, let's just say, essays. Boom. It is an entity. Now, in addition to these three list type views, I'm going to create a favorites view. So, I'll go ahead and duplicate this one more time just to set our source database, but this time uh instead of setting a view name initially, I'm going to go to layout first and I'm going to change that to a gallery view. Uh now, gallery gives us quite a few additional options compared to list. So, let's go through these real quick. For card preview, I'm going to go with none. For card size, small. I'm going to show the page icon. I will wrap the properties. I'm going to set my open pages to uh side peak just because I prefer it. And we will keep that load limit at 10. Now, when we go back, you're gonna see it actually changed for some reason. So, I'm gonna delete that, call it favorites, maybe fave, uh, find a star icon, and the one big change here, you can probably guess it, is that our filter value is going to gain an additional filter, and that's going to be where favorite is checked. Uh, now, one thing I just remembered is that when we switch layout types, we also have to reset our property visibility. So, let's head on into property visibility. And I think I just want to also show the type

here. Now, you could also show note count if you want to or really anything else, but I think type is going to make sense. And while I'm thinking about it, underneath types, it probably doesn't make sense to see the type underneath the type. So, we can go to our property visibility and turn that off just to make things a bit more elegant. And with that change, we are now done with the dashboard portion of this build. Look at the beautiful work we have created so far. So, all we need to do now to finish this project up is to add a few database templates that are going to allow us to spawn specific types of pages without a whole lot of manual work. I want to go ahead and prime your brain for what we're going to create here. So, first and foremost, we want to make sure that our tag pages look more or less like this, where we have this automatic notes section here with a few specific views and a web clip section as well. So, we can kind of keep those nice and separate. And we're also going to create special journal and meeting notes templates as well. So for journal pages, if I create a brand new journal entry, number one, it should reference today's date and reference the date here, but it should also have some uh initial sections for the plan and review as well as a sort of free form journal entry. And for meeting notes, we should get something sort of similar where automatically when we click new page, we get a date reference in two places, the title and the actual note date. and we get a couple of pre-made sections and an action items call out. Now, the journal and meeting notes templates are way simpler than the one for tag pages. However, the tag page template is way more important. So, to respect your time, we are going to start out with the tag page template first. The way in which you will create a database template is by clicking this little blue arrow right here and then clicking new template. And essentially what we're defining here is kind of like a blueprint. If you create a new page and you apply a template, then any uh property values that you set on the template are going to be automatically filled in. And any content on the page is going to automatically generate as well. And that's the really important part here. So, I'm going to full screen this template just to have more room. I'm also going to go up here and make sure that it's set to full width. And it is. Uh, and for this tag template, I'm actually not going to add a default title because you're generally going to want to set that to a custom value anyway, like say gardening or productivity. And I'm also not going to set any default property values. But we are going to create a whole lot of, as you can see here, a whole lot of stuff on the page content itself. We're going to create a notes section and web clips section. So on the page, let's do a slash one for notes, double enter, slash one for tags, and then just like before, we're going to type slashlist to get a list view of a database. We're going to link to an existing database, and we're going to choose our notes database. So we're creating a brand new list view inside of this tag page. And looking at our demo here, we actually have a few different views that kind of mirror the views we created on the main dashboard. These are all going to be filtered by relation to this specific tag. But when you go into that tag, you're going to have all the same functionality. Recent notes, favorite notes, a toz, and we'll also create a by tag view that you haven't seen before because we are going to include the ability to sort by subtags as well. The idea here is that just like in Evernote or any traditional note-taking application, you could go into a folder or a tag and you could very easily sort the notes in different ways and those kind of applications as well. That's kind of what we're trying to get here. So, I'm going to go a little bit faster than I did with the initial view setup because for the most part, this is going to be the same. We're going to go ahead and call this recent. Uh, get a little clock icon. Once again, we're going to go with no database title, load limit of 10. Done, done. Though, there is one really, really important difference that we are going to be setting up inside of this view, and that has to do with one of the filters we're going to add. So, like before, we'll add an advanced filter. We'll add our default archived is unchecked. But here's a really important one. We're going to add a filter group and we're going to say where the tags contains and then we'll have this new page right here. And this creates what's called a self-referential filter. It essentially means that when we create a new page from this template, like a page say called gardening, this filter is going to automatically update to that gardening page in that page instead of continuing to reference the template. And I can actually show you how that works and what that does here in this homepage in our uh demo. So if we go into the view settings and we go to the filters for this particular view of the notes database, you're going to see that we have where tag contains home. I did not manually set that home value here. Instead, when I created this homepage and I spawned it from our template, this automatically updated from being pointed at the template to being pointed at home. And that is a super useful feature. In fact, it's one of the most useful features in notion. Takes a

little bit to explain and kind of grock, but once you get it, it's really really helpful. Now I also want to point out that we have a secondary rule here where root tag contains home as well. So what is that getting us? Essentially if we want to have a sort of like parent and child or parent and subtag relationship here, uh this is going to allow us to see any notes that are within subtags in the parent tag page as well. For example, I've got this home area page and I also have this guitar page down here. Let's say that I wanted to consider my guitar page as a subtag of my home area system just for example here. So I'll go ahead and set that as a subtag. And you're all of a sudden going to see guitars I want to buy in the notes section for our homepage even though its tag is guitar. We also see this Shector Hellraiser Hybrid C7 electric guitar uh web clip again in our home section. And that's because we've set up our filters so that in addition to tag values including pages in this view, root tag values will allow us to do that as well. And where this gets really useful is in the by tag view that we're going to set up because now I can see all the notes that are associated not only directly with this page but also with tags that are subtags of this page. So if you want that functionality in your system, you're going to get it in this build. So over here we'll finish up our filter that we're setting up with another rule. says where root tag any contains the new page and that's our template. And then because this is a notes section instead of a web clips section, we're also going to create another filter group and that one is going to be where URL is empty or where type is voice note. That exception case where we might have a URL value but it's not considered a web clip. So we've got our filters. We're going to go ahead and sort this by updated in descending order just like we did at our normal dashboard. And then for our property visibility, let's go ahead and show our tags. And if we wanted to, we could show our type. But I'm actually going to kind of optimize this for being really, really width constrained because we're often opening this up inside peak. So I think I'm actually just going to show the updated short value as well. That gets us our recent view. We're going to duplicate that into an A to Z view, which will have a list bullet icon. That sort is going to be changed to name in ascending order. Gives us kind of like a library style view. I'm going to duplicate that into a by tag view. Going to find a tag icon. And this time we're going to keep the sorting the same, the filters the same, but the grouping is going to go by tags. And we'll actually uh hide empty groups there as well. That way, if we do have subtags, we're going to very easily be able to see those in this buy tag view. I'm going to duplicate A to Z one more time. We're going to call this one favorite or just fave. That one's going to have a star icon, and that's going to actually have some different filters and sorts. So, our filters are going to be um this one will be there. there, but we're going to go ahead and get rid of the URL web clip filtering and add in favorite is checked. Just like that. And once again, we'll get rid of our sorting. So, you can kind of sort things however you like with your favorites view. And then uh I also because I am a fiend for voice notes, I also want to create a specific voiced view as well. Once again, we'll find that microphone icon. We're going to change our filtering to remove this compound filter and replace it where type is voice note. And again, we're keeping this filter group on all of these views because this is crucial for ensuring that only the pages associated with either this tag or its um subtags are showing in this particular view. So that gets us all of our notes views. Now we're going to create our web clips views. And I just realized that I brain farted earlier and typed tags. So this should actually be web clips. I'm sure that my editor will put a note earlier in the video to uh correct that. We're going to create our web clips views. And again, as a bit of a preview or a bit of brain priming, just going to go and open this up as a full page here. We're going to have like we have up here, a recent view, an a toz view. We're going to have a tag view again for subtag purposes. We're also going to have this cool little by site view. And this creates grouping based on the base URL of all of our web tags. So, if you had a ton of web tags or clips from tons and tons of different sites, we'd be able to easily group them. So, say you were clipping tons of stuff from Sweetwater, but also from Guitar Center, you'd be able to

have two nice little groups for uh those two specific sites. And I just hit my foot pedal, which scrolled the page up. So, we're going to go ahead and create those views real quick. Again, sort of lightning speed. List view, link an existing database notes, just like before. New list view. We're going to call this recent. get a clock icon, hide our database title, set the load limit to 10. That gets us our base right there. And if we take a peek at our filters in our recent view, they're going to look pretty similar to what we had up there. Archive is unchecked. Uh we've got our sort of tag and root tag situation going here. But like we did on the actual sort of global clips view, we're going to have this different compound filter that ensures either our URL is not empty or where our type is web clip. Sort of manually indicating something is web clip even if it doesn't have a URL. So we're going to go ahead and create that really quickly. Our filter is going to be advanced. It's going to say where archive is unchecked or yep unchecked. We're going to have a filter group where either our URL is not empty or where our type is web clip. And finally, we're going to have one more filter group indicating that tags contains our template page just called new page or where root tag contains our new page. Just like that. So that gets us our recent view. Let's go ahead and set our property visibility and sorting. For property visibility, we're going to show t tags just like we did before. We are going to show our URL icons. We can very easily click on that URL icon and we'll show updated short just like we did on our notes views. And then in our sorting again, we can access that from two different places. We're going to go with updated in descending order to solidify our recent view. We're all good there. So, we'll go ahead and duplicate it just like before. You've seen me do this a couple of times in this video. We're going to call this one a toz. Simply change that sort value from updated and descending to name and ascending. We'll duplicate that one to create a by tag view. Find a tag icon. Add grouping. And this time we're going to go with tags just like we did up there. Hide empty groups. Uh we'll duplicate that one more time. And we're going to call this one by site. So for by site, I think this little globe icon is going to be ideal. And then underneath grouping, instead of going by tags, we're going to group by that URL base formula we created. And in this case, we are going to show our empty groups because in the case of a web clip that doesn't necessarily have a URL, maybe you just took a screenshot, you're not actually going to have a URL base at all, but you may still want to be able to see those web clips in this view. So, we're going to make sure that no URL base is a valid and visible subgrouping there. So, we'll close that out. And with that, we are finished setting up our tag page template. Now, the last thing we want to do, if we go back up to our Ultimate Notes dashboard, last thing we want to do regarding this tags database here, is we want to come down into this little arrow one more time, and we want to make this a default for all views in our tags database. That way, the moment we create a tag page, we're going to get all of that content automatically in the page. There's really no instance in which we'd want to create a tag page that doesn't have all of that template content. So, we're going to make that a default for literally every single view in our tags database. And you can verify that just by checking these different views. They're all going to say default. With that, we can come back up to our notes database. And if we head over to our journal view, we can create a journal template like the one I showed you earlier. So for the journal template, I'm going to give it a title of journal and then I'll do a colon and I'll type at. And you can see here that we actually get now or today when this page is duplicated. So it's not a hard-coded date. It's actually a dynamic date. So I'm going to go with today when duplicated as that reference there. I'm going to open up our pane and do the same thing for our note date. today when duplicated. And then I'm going to quickly fill out this little section here. So let's go with heading one for day plan. We can do three dashes for a horizontal rule there. We'll open this up as a full page. And then we can do slash callout to create a nice little call out there. Here's a cool little tip. You can style call outs by going to color and setting them to default background to make them look a lot better. Look like that. And then I think I'm going to go with a uh star icon in blue. Boom. To create the icon for that call out. So this one I'm going to call the most important thing. Triple dash to create horizontal rule. And we'll say today I will. So this kind of just gives you a place in which you can really u buckle down and dedicate the day to a specific task. If you're

trying like the eat that frog thing, this is the frog that you will define. We can also create a day review section. And here we might add a couple of different review questions. So slash callout. We'll add a little question mark icon. And we'll say today's wins as the first one. Add a little blank line there so you can actually write down what went well. And then we'll do another call out and we'll say what didn't go plan. And here you could actually just sort of write down any process improvements you need to make, anything that uh derailed you, any unexpected stuff. And beneath that, we can finish this off with a just sort of free form journaling section. There's our journal template. Let's head back to our journal view here. And let's go ahead and make this the default, but not for our entire notes database, just for this journal view. That way when you create a new page here, you're automatically going to get that nice little journal entry. And we'll do the same thing for our meeting notes view right here. We're going to create a meeting template. So meeting at today when duplicated. We'll go into here and we'll change the note date to today when duplicated. Something I forgot to do in our journal template. We'll set the type to meeting. And then underneath meeting, we can do agenda. maybe enter down a few times. Do notes. And then down at the bottom, let's do a call out with a star. And we'll say action items. And we'll add a little to-do block there just to sort of pre-fill it in. Uh let's make this a default template for the meeting notes view. We'll head back to our journal template and fix the mistake where I forgot to set the type there to journal. It's pretty important. And then to cap this project off, let's add a little button that allows you to create a new note really easily. So if we enter down from the title of the page, we can type slashbut to create a new button. I'll call this new note. And I'm kind of just doing this to show you how to create a button because when you click the button, you can do all kinds of stuff. In this case, we are just simply going to uh add a page to our notes database. We are not going to set a template. We're title. You could if you wanted to. Uh but underneath after under after under neath that's a fun word but underneath that action we're going to open a page form URL and we're going to select the page that we've added in step one. We'll set that to side peak. Hit done. And just like that we've got a big old button that allows us to create a new note like that. And I'm primarily showing you that just so you know how to create a button because there are more advanced and more in my opinion useful ways in which you can use buttons. For example, in our ultimate brain template which combines note-taking with task management and a whole lot of other stuff for full life management in notion, we have this global navigation bar on every page and there's an action center where we have a new task button, a new note button and a new project button. So basically, no matter where you are in the template, you can very easily create new tasks, notes, or projects. And creating these types of buttons is really, really easy. So I just wanted to add that little section in this uh video so you know how to create that button for yourself. Now, to finish this up, all we're going to do is go down to our databases. First, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of these little scratch suffixes from the databases because I don't really want them to look like that now that we're done building. And then I'm going to turn these just so you can see how to do it. Uh, and if you have a preference, you can do it yourself. I'm going to turn these into pages. So, little six dot menu there, turn into page. That makes my databases page nice and clean, which comes really in handy in cases like in Ultimate Brain. You have a lot more than just two databases. You get like time tracking databases, uh, goals databases, milestones, all this stuff really just works as full page databases. Uh, and then we can go into each database and like I may have mentioned earlier, can't remember 100% if I said it already. Uh, we want to lock our databases like so, three dot menu at the top, just like this. when we are done customizing them. This still allows anybody with edit access to create new pages, to edit the content in those pages, to change property values, but it prevents properties themselves from having their type changed or from being deleted. It prevents uned structural changes to the database from being made until the database is unlocked. So at this point you now have a fullfeatured note-taking system with this beautiful notes dashboard this full tagging system. You've got para functionality if you want to take notes in notion capture research and web clips from the web perhaps using flyer. Again you have

everything you need in one place right here. So at this point in the video I want to show you just a couple of things that you could do to upgrade your system. For example in Ultimate Brain we ship a few additional note templates. One of them being note with tasks. So if you were to build a template like this, not only do you get this little notes section here, but you also have a view of a tasks database directly inside the note. So if you're say uh running a meeting and you're taking meeting notes inside of notion, which is a pretty useful thing to do. My team and I do it every single week. You also have a way to really easily reference tasks that need to be done or perhaps to dump tasks from the meeting notes directly into a true task manager. For example, let me show you a cool trick here. If you create a uh regular to-do block with those brackets there, and let's just say I have to walk the dog, which I already did today, but I'll just say walk the dog. Check this out. If you drag this block into a database view, it's going to become a page in the database. Now, walk the dog is a task in my task management system. And if you were just brain dumping some tasks in regular to-do blocks while doing some note-taking later on as you're doing sort of postmeating cleanup, you could drag those to-do blocks into your task manager just like that. And now you can give them due dates. You can uh put them into projects. You can do all the good stuff you do with more advanced task management. You could also, if you wanted to, integrate an entire task manager into your system. You don't just have to have a note-taking system isolated. You could have notes. You could also have tasks. You could have project management. You could do all of your para life organization in a single system. And with the tutorials on my channel, everything that you need to know and a lot of the steps that you need to actually take are actually shown to you on my channel. So, I've got videos that will show you, for example, how to create a task manager. If you want all this done for you and you don't want to go through the hours and hours it took me to build a system like this, you can get Ultimate Brain for Notion. This is the exact system that I use to run my entire life. I do all of my task management, my daily planning, my note-taking, and everything else inside Ultimate Brain. It's really convenient to have all that in one place and to be able to see projects along with all of the notes and tasks related to those projects. And if you want to do the same thing, manage your life inside of notion from one tool and have it all done for you, you can get this template over at thomasjfrank. com/brain. It also comes with my favorite thing that I have ever built, which is the myday page. This is a hyper opinionated page that is entirely focused on helping you plan your day and stay on task. I personally have a lot of problems with utilizing due dates in a task manager, and I know a lot of other people have those problems as well. So, I designed this page to really not rely on them at all. You've got a normal view of your task manager up here in this plan section. But then, if you're going to do something, you check this box over here and it adds it to this execute section. So, here is where you can build this super clean list of only the tasks you plan on doing today. So, let's say I want to buy new car tires. I want to create this social media post and I want to run these midmon financials. Some of these tasks are overdue down here. Now, I don't see anything else. I don't see all the other stuff that I'm not actually planning on doing today, which might be competing for my attention. I only see the tasks I'm going to do. I can order them as needed, just like that. And I can even give them little tags like this is going to be a home task. an errand task. Um, and if I want to, I can even do native time tracking. I can start time tracking and I can end them and I can even do multiple time tracking sessions. We ship all this stuff in Ultimate Brain. It's really advanced stuff for Notion, but it's super simple to use. And personally, I find this my day page, especially this execute section here, to be incredibly helpful for staying on task and for building my day plan in the first place. So again, if you want to get yourself a copy of Ultimate Brain, you can do so over at thomasjfrank. com/brain. Otherwise, I've got a video right here that will teach you how to do pretty much the same thing we've done in this video, uh, but for a task manager. You want to build a full feature task manager yourself for free in Notion, check out this video right here. I'll see you there.