# The Notion task manager you'll actually use (full build)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Thomas Frank
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

today I'm going to teach you how to build a complete task manager from scratch in notion we are going to start from a completely blank page and by the end of this video you're going to have a full blown task manager with an inbox for quickly brain dumping tasks a complete project manager some useful scheduling views a calendar or two and even some Advanced features like subtasks and recurring tasks that you can even automate if you want to at the end of this build you'll have a simple elegant task manager with all your views accessible from a single page and you'll also be able to open up projects as their own Pages where you can add new tasks and make sure everything's getting done and this build starts right now over in screen share mode here we have our new page completely blank page in notion and the first thing I'm going to do is actually favor this page to get it in my sidebar which if I hit command back slash on my keyboard I can see right there that's going to give us easy access to this page and the sub Pages we're going to create in it throughout the video I'm going to go ahead and close this one more time and we're going to call this page ultimate tasks this is going to be the homepage of our task manager and we're also going to give it a nice little icon now when I create pages in notion I like to have a little bit of a convention I follow where I use blue icons and then later on I'll show you databases which I use red icons for so we're going to give this a nice little checkbox and there we have our ultimate tasks Page by the way ultimate tasks is also the name of a completely free notion template that I provide on my website so if you just need a task manager in your notion workspace and you don't want to go through this entire guide and build it yourself you can check out the link in the description down below and you can have that template in your workspace in seconds it's 100% free but if you do want to build this for yourself and learn all these tricks I'm going to show you in this video first let's go ahead and set this page as a full width page just like that and then let's do a little bit of customization because by default there are page discussions and a table of contents widget that I don't really want since this homepage is kind of going to function as an app not like a page of notes so let's turn those off I'm also going to turn off the back links function and I'm going to set my inline comments to minimal this basically makes this as blank of a canvas as we can get and to start painting on this canvas and to make it a useful tool I'm going to create our first internal page so I'll type SL page just like that and I'm going to name this internal page databases so this page is going to hold all of the internal databases that run our template and to give it a fitting icon here I'm going to go to add icon go to little icons tab to use Notions uh actual custom icons and I'm going to find an icon called stacked diss I think this represents databases quite well so this is a nice little icon for our purposes and just like before I'm going to go ahead and turn off all of that extra stuff in customized page I don't need discussions I don't need table of contents I'll set this to minimal and I'll turn off our back links so this page is essentially going to hold all the databases that will run our task manager we need a place to store tasks and we also our projects and if you've ever used a traditional task manager before like todoist or apple reminders then the setup is actually the same behind the scenes it's just that in those apps you usually don't see the actual databases but every task manager needs a place to store the tasks and it projects as well then when you go to say a doe today list or a specific projects list you're seeing a slice of those databases defined by filters and sorts and other criteria well in notion we get to build that for ourselves which does take a little bit longer because we set things up personally but it also means we get full control and we can customize things to our heart's content so to get that process on the road let's go ahead and create our first database I'm going to type SL database and at the end of this tutorial I am going to turn these databases into full pages but for setting up complex builds like this that use multiple databases going with inline databases to start actually make sense so I'm going to go ahead and call this database tasks and I have many tasks databases in my notion account so I'm going to say tasks current is the current name of this database so I'm going to create a tasks database I'm also projects database so once more database in uh inline configuration we're going to go with a new table just like that and call this one projects current and then I want to add something a little special to this task manager as well I'm going to create a third database also as an inline database and I'm going to call this database task Journal so the task Journal is a database that's going to allow you to create a daily journal entry where you can very easily plan your day in my second brain template ultimate brain which is what I use to run my own personal productivity system we have a bit of a more advanced dashboard called my day and one of my favorite features in there is this ability to check this little my day checkbox on any task in the inbox or in the scheduled views to add it to a specific execution view where you're basically deliberately saying these are the tasks I'm going to work on today regardless of the due dates they may have already on them and that's a bit more of a complex setup I want to teach that in a future video but here we're going to get something kind of similar where each day you can create a little journal page and you can very deliberately decide what you're going to work on for some people that works wonders and it's really easy to include

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

in a task manager like this so we're going to do it with this task Journal so at this point we have all the databases we're going to use for this build and now I want to give each of them an icon to do that we can't set it here in this inline view so if we click this little three dot menu next to the tasks uh databases title we can go to view database and here we see a full page view of that database up here we have add icon along with cover and description I'm just going to go with icon and a convention that I like to use when I'm building notion systems is that Pages have blue icons databases have red icons so I'm going to go with red right here and then we're going to go with a little check mark for the tasks database just like that I'm going to do the same thing for our projects and our uh task Journal databases so now we have our icons the next step in the process which is one of the most important is to start creating what are called database properties on our databases and we're going to start with our task database I think I'm also going to open this up as a full page which I can do just like this in addition to viewing the database right there and essentially the properties we're going to add to this database are going to be attributes which apply to every page in the database things like the due date the status that kind of thing and because we're building a task manager we can actually do this very quickly for a few of the crucial Properties by turning this into what's called a tasks database and we can do that by going to the little three dot menu here which is the view options menu inside of this database go into customize and then we can go to tasks right here and basic basically turning a database into a task database is going to ask us to pick properties that represent the assign the status and the due date of any task and once you've done this you will ensure that this database fits a specific schema or structure and that will allow you to actually see the tasks from this database in the little my tasks widget in Notions home feature got a whole video about that in case you're curious we're not going to cover it here but I do want to show you how to build a task database so here you can see we have no existing properties in the database already so we're going to be creating new properties for each of these three pieces of data assign status and due date we'll just turn this into a task database just like that and already you can see we have three new properties s do and status now from this point it's going to be way easier to follow things if we have some sample tasks in this database so I'm going to go ahead and add those in super speed mode so the next part of the process is to tweak some of these properties and add a few more that are going to be useful for our task management purposes now we're not going to add every single property that's going to end up in this task manager at the end of this video right now we do have a few Advanced properties like our recurring tasks properties and our subtasks properties that we're going to add later but we are going to add most of them right now we're also going to make a few tweaks so the first thing that I want to do is change up uh the options in this status property and what I'll point out is the status property has a name of status but it also has a type of status and Status properties are really made for task management they've got these three different groups that you actually can't change to do in progress and complete and then you can have multiple options inside of each of these groups but the other really useful thing about the status type property is that you can have a default option there's another type of property in otion called select which looks pretty similar to this but with select properties you can't have a default and with certain types of properties like a status property here we want to make sure every page we create has a default value instead of having an empty value so a status property really makes sense here now personally not started is not really doing it for me here number one I have a little bit of synesthesia and I think a task that is not started should be red not gray and I'm also going to go with to-do instead of not started that just seems a little bit better to me now an in progress task in my head is actually blue so we're going to keep that but we are going to name it doing instead of in progress and then done is perfectly good for me so I'm actually pretty happy with that we're also going to create another status property so let's go ahead and find status right here and we're going to call this one priority and with notion properties and databases you can actually give them custom icons now so instead of this little Walmart logo essentially we are going to find ourselves um an exclamation point I think is going to be pretty good exclamation point rather uh and now this is a little bit of a non-standard use of a status property because priorities don't really change too much for tasks you're either going to have a high priority task or a low priority task so a trick that I like to use when uh lever ing the default value of a status property in a property like this is to just move all the options into one of the groups and usually I just use in progress so let's go ahead and rename not started to low I think blue for low totally makes sense however uh the middle option medium should actually be our default so we're going to go ahead and set this as the default right here and all new pages are going to have Medium as their value I forgot that when you set a default you actually lose uh the name you typed in here so you got to do it one more time and then here is

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

going to be our high priority task so high is going to be red for Red Alert uh and actually medium I think will work as green instead of blue so that's our priority property the next property I want to create will be an actual select type property so I'm going to hit this little plus icon at the right side of our table view here we're going to find the Select Property type right there and we're going to call this property smart list now in my ultimate brain template which is built for complete life management there's another property called smart list there which is used for GTD workflows or David Allen's getting things done workflows so there's quite a few options in the smart list property in that template here we're going to keep things very simple I want to use Smart list as a place for tasks that I'm going to call someday tasks basically a task that I want to brain dump out of my head I don't want it kicking up here I want in a system I can trust but it's something I know I'm just not going to do right now we're going to use the smart list uh property here to ensure that we have a safe place to tuck those types of tasks without having to create some sort of arbitrary project for them or without having to leave them in our inbox which we want to have clear most of the time so here we're just going to add an option called someday and due to my touch of synesthesia I think someday is a pink word so I'm going to go with pink you can go with anything you want and of course if you have other types of smart list values you'd like to add here you can totally do that but we're going to stick with someday for now next on our list we're going to create a text type property so I'm going to find text right here we're going to call this property description and of course you could always put the description of a task in the page body but you might want to put it in a nice little description property instead so we're going to create that so you have the option next we're going to create created and edited Time Properties so if we type created here we'll see created by but also created Time is useful just for seeing when a task was actually created and I personally like having it just be called created instead of created time and uh with our created Property we're also going to pair that with an edited time property so if we look for edited we'll see last edited time I think that's a bit wordy so we're going to go with edited instead and finally we're going to create what is one of the most important properties in this database we need to create a relation property that will link this database to our projects database so to do that we're going to click plus just like always we're going to find the relation type and then we're going to click it and find our projects database now I want to give you a quick little tour of what relation properties are and what they do here is essentially a relation property allows you to basically link pages in one database to other Pages either in the same database or in another database and if you think about the way apps are designed this is crucial if we're building a task manager we're going to have a table of our tasks and we're also projects and we need a way to link specific project records to their tasks and vice versa there's all kinds of other uh relationships and databases that need these links as well think about a book tracker you're going to have a list of books and a list of authors or genres maybe genres and movies there's all kinds of links in data all throughout the world and relation properties are what allow us to forge those Links at least in notion so uh you'll see here the first database in a relation properties configuration is always going to be this database that would allow you to link other pages in the database and you're actually going to see an example of that later with parent tasks and subtasks but for our purposes we want to link task records here to projects in the projects database that we're building so we're going to choose this projects database right there uh and now here this is no longer the name of the database we're actually giving the property and name so I'm going to go ahead and give this uh property the name project and then the next item I'd like to bring your attention to is this limit option right here by default it is set to No Limit but we can also change it over to one page and essentially what it's asking us to do here is Define the type of relationship that we're forging between our tasks database and our projects database and I want to take a quick second to explain this because this is actually quite important for building applications either in notion or in really any other platform including a coding language and an actual database like my SQL so when we're working with data there are three specific types of relationships we can have and I just remembered that I drew a little graphic with these relationships so I'm going to put it right here and zoom in a little bit we have one toone relationships we have one to many relationships and we have many to many relationships ship so you can see here an example of a onetoone relationship would be a person to a set of fingerprints a person can only have one set of fingerprints and vice versa a many to many relationship would be like students in classes every student could be in multiple classes where every class has multiple students but then we have one to many relationships project to tasks being a great example one project may have many tasks but every task should only have one project and that is what we are basically deciding on here do we want to create a on to many relationship or a

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

many to many relationship and since we're creating a task manager we want to go with a on to many relationship so we're going to go with one page here and that'll mean each task in this database can only have one project to which it's related now we also do want to turn on this two-way relation option and when that's going to do is essentially create a related or reciprocal property in the projects database where we'll be able to set task relations so we're going to call that property tasks and uh we're going to use plurality here because again a project can have many tasks related to it so we'll add that relation right there and uh for now that's going to be all of the properties we create in our tasks database so the next thing we're going to do is take a look at each individual task page and how it looks so if we open up this lift weights task we can see that this is what we get just a big old vertical list of all these properties and I don't know about you but I think we can do better especially since notion just came out with a layouts feature that allows us to customize what the pages and databases actually like look like so if we go right up here above the page title we're going to have a couple of options add icon or add cover we also have this customize layout option right here and if we click into it we get this nice little interface where we can customize how every page in this database is going to look and I do want to stress that we're not just customizing the lift weights page we're actually customizing the overall layout of every page in this tasks database and I think I'm going to zoom out just a couple of ticks here to give us a little bit more breathing room here uh and we want to make some customizations so first and foremost I want to pin a few useful properties directly beneath the title of the page so if we click the heading box right here we get all these unpinned properties and we can choose which ones we want to pin now of course I want to remind you that you're building software for yourself here so you can follow what I'm doing to letter but you can also make changes and uh make tweaks to your heart's content and I encourage you to do that personally I want to go ahead and pin my status I also want to pin my due date property and I think I also want to pin my project property the rest of these can stay in the property group but these ones I'm going to be looking at and editing pretty often so I do want them pinned and I really like how they go in this horizontal line here instead of being this vertically stacked group now what I also want to do is not see all of these properties immediately because in many cases I want to open a task page and immediately jot down some notes in the page body so I can actually accomplish that by clicking the property group right here going to the little three menu and hitting move to panel that will move this over to this little side panel which is hidden by default and then in the side panel this property group here I can also customize how this itself looks and if we go over here we can see that I can turn on or off the visibility of any property I can also reorder properties and I can create specific sections for these properties as well so I'm going to create a section and I'm going to call this section General properties and then I'm going to create one additional section which I will call helper properties so help helper properties are usually just going to be properties that help to run the template but that we usually don't want to see things like formulas and rollups and things like that and we are going to create at least one of those in this video which we'll create right now uh and that's going to be a formula type property which I'm going to call Meta labels So Meta labels is a handy little property where we can show little icons or emoji on our tasks depending on their state for example we're going to add some formula code a little bit later on which will show us if a task is recurring as well as if it's overdue and of course with the formula knowledge you're going to gain from that part of the video you could add other labels if you wanted to and build all kinds of other cool formulas for now though we're going to leave that blank we just want to make sure the formula property exists and that's going to help us when we're setting up our views of our task database a little bit later now I'm going to go ahead and make sure that this metal labels property is always hidden I think I can also zoom in a couple ticks again so you can see this a bit more easily uh and then up here let's go ahead and uh do a little bit of ordering here I think I want smart list up there I want priority at the top and then description actually might be useful above priority just so you can add the description right there really quickly and then I think I want to go ahead and hide my edited property my created Property and I'm also going to hide the assign property since what we're building in this particular video is a single player task management system or at least that's the intention now I do have plans to do more team Focus tutorials in the future this year on this channel and if you are running a team or you're running a company my team can actually help you build a more robust and customized notion setup you can email me at the link in the description down below if that is you but for now we're trying to keep this simple and I'm trying to make this a great course for individual users so we're going to hide that assign property we do need it to exist though for this task database to be a task database in the notion home sense okay so let's go ahead and apply this to all pages and move on to the next part of our build our next task of sorts is to customize some of the views in the source database over here but I first want to point out here is our handiwork we have our nice

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

little pinned properties in this lift weights page and if I want to see all the other properties I can either click this view details icon right here or click the one up here which will open the little side panel and I can see all of those properties with their visibility statuses that we set so we'll go ahead and close that and our next task is to make this look a little bit prettier so first I'm going to go ahead and actually rename this initial view of our tasks database I'm going to name this to active tasks and I'm going to go ahead and give it a uh how about this little open do Circle icon this will be all of our undone tasks so to make sure this fits the name let's go ahead and give it a filter as well and you'll find the filter icon right there which will allow you to create either simple filters or Advanced filters now if you are somebody who is focused on minimalism you may like simple filters for example if you just click status right here you're going to get this nice simple little filter but personally I prefer Advanced filters so I'm going to go ahead and click that bottom option hit Advanced filter right there and that gives us this little UI here where we can build more complex sets of filters and for this view in particular we don't have to get too fancy but later on we are going to need Advanced filters and if we're going to need them at all I prefer to have a pretty consistent UI for my filters throughout my entire build so here because we want active tasks all we're going to do is create a filter where our status is not and then we're going to set is not to the complete category here so if we have a done task it's not going to show up here we may also want to sort this view so if we go to little sort icon we can do that and I think I want to sort this by the due date and ascending order of course we have no due dates right now but if we did they would be at the top and we can actually show that by maybe setting a due date let's say lift weights is due today and uh something else is due tomorrow just like that they are sorted now I also want to make this table view a little bit prettier it's kind of spread out and we're not going to be coming to this database very often because it's the source database we're going to use more customized views of it for most of our daily work but I do like everything to look a little bit prettier than its default state so let's go ahead and uh change these widths a little bit we'll make smart list skinnier because uh this setup guitar recording rig task only has somay in it and there's a lot of room over on the right side and if we want to we can even hide some of these properties by hiding them they won't be deleted but they will not show on this table so let's say created is not that useful to us we can hide it right there edited also not that useful uh and of course we can also reorder our properties so I think project is actually pretty important we're going to bring that over here aign again we're not going to be using too much in this build so we're going to go and hide that do is important so we're actually going to move that before Project Metal labels not that important in this view status very important and in fact I want to show you a really cool trick with status properties so of course we could make this really skinny and we could move it over but for most tasks you're going to be working on you are going to use only two of the status options to do and done you're probably not going to be using doing very often so something we can do on a per viiew basis is click the status property go to edit property and then we can show it as a checkbox instead of a select property and then once we've done that uh we can also scrunch this in so it only shows the icon and we have this nice little row of checkboxes which we can then move to the left of our task titles and that is a task manager if I've ever one now here's a cool trick if you want to get into those options you can actually hold option or alt on your keyboard alt if you're on Windows and that's going to bring up all of the options you have and if you go with an in between option you'll see a nice little minus box right there so nice little trick there uh at this point we are done setting up all of our widths and uh customizations in here so the next thing I want to do is duplicate this view this active View and we're going to create a corresponding done view so we'll call this done maybe complete actually uh we're going to find a nice little check mark icon for our complete tasks and uh because we've duplicated The View we don't have to make all those tweaks all over again all we have to do is just tweak the filters and the sorts to actually fit the purpose so here we're going to change our status is not done filter to status is done just like that save that for everyone and then we should maybe also change our sort criteria from do and ascending order to do in descending order that way you're most likely going to see your most recently completed tasks at the top Pro tip I'm not going to show this in this video but you could if you wanted to also create a second date property for the completion date and then you could use Notions automations feature to automatically set completion dates when you check tasks off we are going to show off an Automation in this video later on in the recurring tasks section but I'm not going to get too much into automations in this tutorial because they are a paid feature so we're going to try to avoid them as much as possible to make this tutorial very accessible now before we move on from this Source database here I do want to create one additional View and that's going to be a calendar view and I'll tell you why in just a second

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

so right here we can click this plus icon we can go to more and we can click calendar and just like that we get this nice little calendar view where you can see any of the tasks that are due on your calendar now we want to create a calendar view for this database because you're going to see this little open in calendar button once you create it if you give a calendar view to a database in notion you'll also be able to open that database view up in the notion calendar app and that'll allow you to bring database views like your task database into notion calendar along with your Google calendar accounts and if you want to mix those together like I do that's how you can do it I've got two videos on notion calendar so I'm not going to go too much into it here but it is really useful and this is exactly how you get that integration working so we now have our initial Source database the next thing we're going to do is really the most useful part of this build we're going to start creating the views that you're going to use every single day I'm going to go ahead and actually bring up another view here let's do first uh three4 to expand that this is essentially what we're going to be building in this section these really useful views that show us our tasks database in specific context we've got an inbox here we have a today view we've got a calendar view that has just the current week in it a scheduled view for all scheduled tasks Etc this is really the meat and potatoes of this tutorial everything we've done so far before this has really just been kind of prepped for this so to start this process we're going to use the breadcrumbs to Traverse our way up the tree back to our ultimate task homepage and this is where we're going to start building these views that way you got a single page in notion where you can just go and see your inbox see your due to-day tasks see really everything so to get that process started we are going to do a slash list command and this is going to allow us to create a specific layout type for either a new database or an existing database and that is what we're going to choose that latter option so if we go with list view right here you can see we can do a blank database or we can go with any database in our workspace that already exists so if we go with tasks current you can see that we've basically just created another view of the database like we did with the active and complete and calendar views but this view exists somewhere else it doesn't have to be a tab on that Source database that we created earlier which means we can put it anywhere we want so we're going to go with new list view right here we're going to call this uh inbox and because we're creating an inbox we're going to give this a nice little tray icon so an inbox is a essentially a default place to dump tasks that come into your life and it's crucial to have one of these in some shape or form if you're this far into this video it looks like you want to have it a notion but it's really crucial to have an inbox of some kind because if you don't have a default place to dump tasks if there's a lot of friction involved in getting tasks into your system you're not going to use your system and you're going to try to remember things which often doesn't work so the inbox is going to be a place where we can just dump stuff and then process it later on so we're going to go with the name inbox we are going to hide our database title and then we're also going to go ahead and not show our page icons over here because just like we did before we want to show our checkboxes over here instead so we'll go ahead and hide that page icon hit done and now we are ready to start configuring things we've got quite a few options here we can do our filters sorts we can do grouping all kinds of crazy stuff but for the most part all we really need to do in the view options menu right now is choose the properties that we want to see right now we only see the name of the page and that's not all that useful because we'd have to click into the specific page to see all the properties we can actually show the most useful properties here instead and to do that we can go back to that view options menu go to properties right here and choose the ones we want to see so I think I want to see the status property I think I also want to see project I want to see the due date and I also want to see that meta labels property now right now this is not able to show anything because it's just a blank formula but we are going to be duplicating this view quite a few times and we want to cut down on the amount of work we do so we are going to pre- this metal labels property in each of our views and then later on we're going to go ahead and type in the formula and I'm ordering things that way because formulas are a little bit complex and I want to put them later on in the video like a good educator would but again we do want to save on some effort here we can also reorder our properties and I'm going to go ahead and put status first just like that I think project and do are in the right places but meta labels maybe should go before both of them we also are going to use that nice little checkbox trick so we're going to go into our status property show this as a checkbox just like that and now we have all the properties that we want of course none of these uh tasks here actually have a project or metal labels property right now most of them don't have due dat properties but by showing those properties in the view options menu we can now click the little edit icon and we can add projects we can add due dates and if you have any other properties you want to show them there you can edit those properties from this

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

view as well now to make this a useful inbox we also want to add some filters so we don't just see everything because an inbox really is designed to be cleared and you clear an inbox in one of three ways you do the task check it off you delete the task realize wasn't actually that important to me in the first place or most importantly you put tasks that you should do later in the correct project where they belong we're building a tasks and projects system here not just a simple to-do list so to get our inbox into the shape it needs to be in whip it up into fighting shape we are going to create some filters once again I prefer Advanced filters of course you can do pretty much everything here with simple filters if you want but I really just love the way this looks and for the purposes of building an inbox the first filter we want to create is a status is not complete filter that way when we check off a task it leaves the inbox we also want tasks to leave the inbox when they gain a project so we're going to add a secondary Rule and we're going to say this rule is where the project is empty so the moment we apply a project the task is going to leave the Inbox and notice we get this little and option right here so it's basically saying any page in this view must fit both of these rules right here and finally because we created that little someday option in our smart list value or smart list property a little bit earlier we are also going to add a third filter Rule and we're going to say where the smart list is either empty or if you wanted to get a little fancy you could say is not the somay list now because we only have someday here I'm going to go ahead and just say smart list should be empty that way if we add that someday option we are going to get tasks out of the inbox that way as well so now we have our inbox rules we may also want to sort this view so let's go ahead and sort by due date in ascending order and that is pretty much our inbox view done now I do want to know you have other options that you could pursue for example if you we're building this for a team you can actually come up to the view right here and if you go to rename you could add a bit of an explanation of what this view is supposed to be for you can also do that for properties you can do that for property options if you get any of my notion templates especially ultimate brain you're going to find descriptions on literally everything and if you're building stuff for a team those can be really helpful to add but at this point we're pretty much locked in with how we want our inbox to be designed and the beauty of already setting our property visibilities and uh basically setting up all of this stuff as it is means when we want to create another view like a doe today view we can just duplicate this view instead of reconfiguring A View From Scratch every single time so instead of clicking plus and doing all that all over again let's just right click inbox hit duplicate and name this View today we're going to change this from a tray icon to maybe a sun icon like that and then all we need to do to get this view to actually show us our tasks that are due today is change the filters I think the sort is actually perfect as it is already do an ascending order makes perfect sense but right now it's designed to be an inbox so let's go ahead and get rid of this smart list is empty rule right there and then we can actually change this project is empty rule to where do is not empty but do is on or before and we'll find the today Dynamic value right there now one thing you may want to do is change the start date value to end date and that is because I'll actually show you here in notion we can Define date ranges for Pages as well as singular dates so right now we have January 27th that's just a singular date but if we go with end date here let's say for some reason we're going to do like a uh 3-day weightlifting session we could set the end date for this task as January 29th and now you can see because we set the end date to January 29th which is not today and our rule is targeting the end date we do not see that task as due today now if you have a task and you already saw this but if you have a task that doesn't have a range just has a single date that single date counts as both the start date and the end date so the distinction here in the filters really only applies to Pages where you have specifically set up a date range and I wanted to point that out because a lot of people ask me about it in our customer Community for our premium templates okay we are done with our today view that's perfectly good uh so now let's go ahead and duplicate it one more time and create ourselves a week view so this is going to be a nice little calendar view I'm going to change this over to a calendar icon and because it's a calendar view our layout type is currently not correct we don't want a list view we want a calendar view just like that and now with calendar views we get a lot of additional options here we can uh wrap our page titles which I do want to do we can ensure that we're showing our calendar by the due property which you can change it to other date or created or edited Time Properties if you want to um you can also show the calendar as a month or a week and I think I actually want to go with week here and then of course you can also hide weekends if you just don't ever want to work weekends which would be awesome if you could do uh now I love the side peak in notion I love it way more than Center Peak so I pretty much always set that open pages in option to

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

side Peak and I think showing the page icon actually might be kind of nice for the calendar views here so within our calendar view uh because we changed the layout type our displayed properties are going to be reset and because this is just a calendar view I think it doesn't make sense to show the due date it's already kind of obvious when it's due but we do want to show say the status and maybe the project as well I think that's going to be perfect for our purposes here now we're also going to create a view that shows us all of our scheduled tasks no matter what week they fall in so let's go ahead and create another duplicated view of our today view here to get that list layout one more time we're going to call this scheduled and I think I'm going to go with the little calendar icon one more time and then the filter on this view is going to change from where Do's end date is on our before today to where do is simply not empty so this is going to be a view still sorted by our due property in ascending order that shows us all of our scheduled tasks and I think this is also a great opportunity to teach you about the grouping option because it can be quite useful here so I'm going to scoot over to our inbox real quick and I'm going to say change the HVAC filter is a task that's actually due a couple of months from now let's just say March 10th is the next time I need to do it so in scheduled we've got this big list of tasks and you can imagine this could be pretty big but some of these dates are quite different than the others so if we go to our view options menu we can actually Group by our due date property pretty much any property but in this case we're going to go with due date and you can see here this creates nice little toggleable groups for tasks that are due in specific date ranges and we can date by this relative property by default we can also date by specific Days by weeks by months all kinds of stuff I'm going to go with relative right here and of course we can also sort if we want to as well so I'm going to go ahead and keep this just like this will create these nice little groups to show you what's do today what's do tomorrow what's do in a different month and I'm going to call that our scheduled view done okay the next view we're going to create is actually the exact opposite because this view right here is not showing us any tasks that do not contain a due date now the inbox would but if we created tasks and put them in projects we wouldn't see them here so let's make sure we have a view that will show us those undo tasks we'll duplicate this one more time call this view no do let's find maybe a nice little dot Circle for that view just like that uh because these tasks are not going to have a due date we do not want our do grouping uh so I think I'm actually going to set this to Smart list instead and I think I will not hide the empty groups I'll put someday down here and then if we change our filter value from where do is not empty to where do is empty now we can see all of our tasks that do not have a due date yet and it doesn't really make sense to sort those by due date here since none of them can have one so let's go ahead and get rid of that view uh or that sort Rule and you could either have no sort here and drag things around or it might be useful if you went with edited and went with descending order that way the task that you most recently edited will show up at the top here and I've added smart list grouping to this view because if you have stuff in your somay list this gives you a really easy way to see that somay list also minimize it if you don't want to see it without us having to create a very specific somay view which is just going to crowd up all the views here in the horizontal tabs speaking of our horizontal tabs we're going to create a few more useful views one of those is going to be a by project View so let's go ahead and duplicate our no do view right here call this one by project we're going to give this a nice little rocket ship icon because of course projects are rocket ships that take you to the moon and uh we're going to set our grouping from Smart list to you guessed it project and what this creates is a really useful view where you can see all of your projects as groups and then you can see all the tasks inside of those projects and to teach this a little bit better let's go ahead and actually create a couple of sample projects so we'll go beneath our tasks database we're going to create a project for uh setting up video studio and we'll do another one for uh building out garage gym and maybe we'll also do like a maintenance project as well so I'm going to do home ongoing which will just be for like Home Maintenance tasks so now if we go back to our little homepage here maybe we want to add a few of these tasks to their requisite projects guitar recording rig seems like one that would go in our video Studio project same with setting up the stream deck just like that and as you watch me do this you're going to start seeing some project groups popping up here and just like that we can see these nice little groups for our projects now we're also going to be able to go into project Pages later on and see all the tasks within those project pages but this gives you a really easy way to see everything so let's go ahead and customize this view maybe we don't want to see any uh tasks that don't have a project here so if we wanted to we could add a filter for that let's just say where project is not empty just like that and I do want

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

to note that I'm keeping this build purposefully simple since a lot of beginners may be watching this and I'm trying to keep it from being like 3 hours but in the ultimate tasks template again linked to description down below I do have a fancy filter in here with a special formula that figures out if a Project's status is active and only shows tasks from active projects because you may have projects you've created that are just planned or on hold or maybe even done and maybe you don't want to see those groups in this kind of view so there is a way to do that and you can feel free to study my free ultimate tasks template if you want to learn how to do it there's a bit of a complex formula behind it which is why we're not doing it here so we have our little rule set right there let's go back into our grouping and make sure that we're also hiding empty groups we are you could also sort this by manual if you had a particularly uh important project you wanted to put at the top just like that and because we can already see the name of each project right here in the group we may also want to go into the properties here and just hide that project because it's just a little bit redundant looking if we have it there and to finish this view off let's go ahead and set the edited and descending order sort rule back to do in as sending order because again you're probably going to have a lot of tasks in here with due dates and you want to see the uh most upcoming tasks the ones you need to do soonest at the top per project okay let's go a and duplicate this view we're going to create another view called all and like it sounds this view is going to show us all of our tasks so let's go with this check mark list icon for that one uh for this view we're going to go ahead and strip the grouping off entirely so in group we'll go to group by and we'll go to none just like that and then we're going to change our filter rules to be real simple here we're just going to have the status is not done filter we'll get rid of this project filter right here and this is going to show us literally all of our unfinished tasks and then finally to finish this big view off for this big set of views let's go ahe and duplicate all once and we're going to call this view done or maybe complete let's go ahead and do this little big check mark Circle for done we're going to go ahead and set our filter criteria to status is done and nothing else and then I think do in descending order is totally going to make sense there so as we check tasks off we'll say we uh got the video filmed we read this book awesome pawesome we lifted weights over here incomplete we can see all of those done tasks and with that you are now done with the tasks part of this build if you don't care about projects or any of the fancy stuff we're going to add a bit later you're actually done you can very easily add tasks to your inbox give them due dates give them projects and manage your tasks to your heart's content but our projects database could use some TLC so let's do that part next back into our databases page we go we're going to scroll on past our tasks view right here and we're going to find our projects database which as you can see has that reciprocal or related property that connected to our project relation property in our task database and as you can see here it doesn't have a limit if we edit the property we have no limit and that's exactly the way we want it because again multiple tasks can be associated with a single project also projects can have statuses they can have progress bars so let's go ah and add a few more properties to our project database to make it useful let's go ahead and open this bad boy as a full page just like that create another property of the status type like that and uh once again I want to change the colors up because I've got some synesthesia but I also want to add a few more options because at least in my book projects have more statuses than just Todo doing and done so let's go ahead and add a few other ones so I'm going to go ahead and rename not started to planned you plan to do this project in my mind that's a blue status option but in the to-do category you may also have projects that did get started at one point but are now on hold for some reason so let's go ahead and make an on hold status I'm going to make that red and then in our in progress area we're going to have a doing uh category or type that's going to be green for me but we're also going to have a type called ongoing see some projects in your life can act as containers for pieces of your life that need to be maintained indefinitely Like Home Maintenance tasks I need to change the HVAC filter every so often I need to check the radon system every so often that's a project that will never end until I leave this Mortal coil so I think it's like Shuffle off the Mortal coil if I wanted to say it correctly I'm going to make an ongoing status and uh maintenance projects like that will get that ongoing status for me that is an orange option right there and then done can be called done but it needs to be purple for some reason in my head so we have our status property all done let's go ahead and close that out let's scrunch it up make sure that the longest possible option doesn't clip I think that's looking real good now let's go ahead and make some additional properties so another property we may want to add is a checkbox property that we're going to call archived and that is because you may want to Archive projects that have the done status so that way

### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00)

the done column in the board view we're going to create in a little bit doesn't get super crowded over time so we're going to call this archived I'm going to find like a little X trash bin container X icon for it and if we want to we can check off a project is archived and send it to a special archived view that we're going to build later let's also create our customary created time and edited Time Properties I'm going to shorten those to created and edited respectively so there's created and there is edited and finally we're going to create a formula property in this database called progress and this is going to get us a nice little progress bar to show us the percentage of tasks that are completed uh in the Project's database we're going to code that formula in just a bit but first I want to go ahead and actually set up our project page layout just like we did with our tasks database so let's go ahead and open this bad boy up right here again we have this really annoyingly long list of all of our properties that we don't want to see when we go into this page in fact what we really want to see is a list of our tasks that need to be done but with their properties so we're going to create those views in a bit and to set ourselves up for that let's go ahead and go back to customize layout and uh set our layout up as we want it so in the heading box I'm going to go ahead and pin a property or two I think status makes sense to pin I also think progress we're going to have a nice little uh bar there once we get the formula coded up and then again I'm going to move the property group over into the panel I think I'm going to hide the created Property hide the edited property and definitely hide that tasks property we pretty much never need to see it in that configuration archived we can leave open that way if we want to uh archive a project we can just go right here check it and we can archive it just like that and that is going to be our page layout for our projects database to pair with that page layout let's go ahead and create some actual views for our projects database and to do that we need to escape the database itself head on up to the databases page and then crawl one level up once again like the spunky protagonist going up a ladder to the ultimate tasks homepage here so beneath these task views let's go ahe and do a slash one for the heading one we'll make a projects section right here and first and foremost we're going to create a really handy view for our active projects so let's do slash list one more time let's find our projects current database create a new list view of that we're going to call this active and uh I think a good icon for active is going to be the fast forward icon right there playback fast forward I'm going to hide the database title I'm going to show the page icon because we won't have check boxes here and I'm going to hit done now for the filters and the sorts in this view I'm going to go with once again an advanced filter which is my preference we want to make sure that we're only seeing projects that are in our doing category or in progress category so that's going to include our doing and ongoing statuses and we can check the in progress group to get them both we also want to make sure that if we've archived a project we don't see it in any of these views so we're going to add a secondary filter rule make sure we have and here and we're going to change this over to archived is unchecked just like that now because we want to see both ongoing and doing onetime projects I'm going to create some grouping for those as well so into the view options menu we go we're going to find group just like that and we are going to group by the status but we're only going to show uh ongoing and doing so I'm going to do a little trick here I'm going to uncheck hide empty groups and then I'm going to purposefully hide these specific groups that I don't want to see now of course our filters also ensure that we're only going to see projects in these categories but this basically ensures we won't see these other categories ever uh doing and ongoing are in a perfect order I'm totally happy with that let's go into our properties menu right here and maybe show our status and our uh our progress formula property and in fact actually status is a little bit redundant here because we can see it like that so I might actually hide it there and only show our progress formula which we're going to create pretty shortly here uh now in terms of sort you could leave this with no sort rules so you can drag projects around or if you wanted to you could do an edited sort in descending order and that's going to make sure that the projects you have most recently updated are going to be at the top now there is one little caveat there that would have to be edits specifically to the project page itself if you wanted say edits to specific tasks to change the sort order down here for projects you would need something a little bit fancier and I have actually built that into ultimate brain my second brain template which you are free to study or describe a copy of ultimate brain if you want it in your life but this is a pretty good simplistic way to do stuff okay so now we have our active view that's going to show us all the stuff we're actually doing in our lives right now let's pair that with a few other views where we can see projects that we've planned and projects that are done on hold all that good stuff so we're going to go ahead and uh duplicate this active view because we want another list view we're going to call this one planned and we're going to give the planned view a nice little clip board icon so find clipboard right there we will go ahead and get rid of our

### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00)

grouping because we're only showing the planned status so no need for grouping there and we're going to go ahead and uh change the filters to where status is planned specifically and nothing else now we do want to keep on hold projects out of here because I think planned and on hold are very different types of statuses so we're just going to go with planned and then I think edited in descending order actually makes sense here as well the next view we're going to build is going to be a board View or a conon view of all of our statuses so once again we can duplicate here it's just my preferred way of doing things uh we're going to call this board and we're going to change our layout from list to board just like that we're going to go a and keep our database title hidden we are going to set our card size to small so we can see more on a smaller screen we'll wrap our properties we'll Group by status I do want to color my columns and I think that's all good for these settings here now the first thing I'd like to do to this view is go to our grouping rules and actually not hide empty groups because I want us to be able to drag projects from one status to another we also need to edit our filters because before we had uh duplicated this so now we have a status is planned filter let's go ahead and get rid of that and make sure that we can see projects throughout all statuses in this board view I think we also want to go ahead and change this from the clipboard icon to just nothing so we get that little board icon like that so now we can very easily just drag projects from one of these conbine categories to another just like that and I think setup video studio is actually a doing project not an ongoing project build out garage gym maybe is something I'm not doing yet so I'm going to keep that in planned and just like that if we go back to our active category here we can see the projects that we are actively doing as well as ongoing projects that represent maintenance tasks in our life so to finish out our projects view here I'm going to go ahead and duplicate the planned view one more time and we're going to make a view for any projects that we've archived these are projects that are done and we just don't want to see them anymore in any of the other views we'll go with container X for that icon there and I think I'm going to go ahead and just change our filter rule to where archived is checked we'll get rid of the status rule Al together and then edited in descending order I think actually makes sense perfectly for this view as well and while I'm thinking about it because we are only showing a single status on these two views why don't we go into the view options and also show that actual status just like that uh and do the same thing over here so we can change that status very easily if we want to so that's all of our views done but the next thing we want to do is actually be able to go into a project page and see all the tasks that are due within that project right here and yes we can go over here and see all the tasks in this relation property but that's just not very useful instead what we want to create is something a bit more like this in my demo copy here where when we click into a page we actually see all of the tasks that are due and we can see their status as well within the project so to do that we are going to go one level up in our uh notion Advanced complexity hierarchy here and we're going to create a database template so far what I've showed you is the ability to create blank pages in databases and one thing that I will note is when you create a page in a view that has filters like this one right here the filters are going to force that page to have certain property values like if I create a page in the doing category and we name it like nothing uh you're going to notice that its status is doing because it has to be doing we are forcing it to have that value by creating it in this particular area but we can go a bit further and we can actually make it so that when you create a new page it has default content on the page body that's called a database template so this is very useful for projects and to build one we can go to the little blue uh Arrow icon right here next to New and we can create ourselves a new template so let's go ahead and do that we're going to create a template right there I'm going to go ahead and make this a full width page and because this is again basically a piece of soft software we're building not like just a page of notes I'm going to make this a full width page and I'm also going to turn off our table of contents so getting out of that menu the next thing I want to do is give this a nice little uh default title so I'll just call this project it's going to be applied on every new page you create and then you can change it we'll give it a nice little icon and again I think a blue rocket ship icon is going to be perfect for this purpose but the most important thing we're going to be doing here is creating another view of our tasks database so let's create a list view just like that let's under tasks current database we'll do a new list view just like that and I'm going to go a little bit faster because you've already seen me doing this so I'm going to go with list hide the database title hide the page icon hit done go into our properties we'll grab status we'll grab not project because we know we're in the project already we will grab meta labels and do we're going to go ahead and grab status put it right there change it over to a checkbox value just like that and what do you know we have a task view that looks pretty much like it did for the inbox but importantly we only want to see tasks that are within this project in this particular

### [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=3300s) Segment 12 (55:00 - 60:00)

view so let's use filters for that purpose so if we go into our filters we are going to create one of the most important types of filters to know about in notion this is maybe my favorite feature in notion actually if we set our project relation property to the template right here this project template we create what's called a self- referential filter this is essentially a filter that will update itself when we apply this template to a new page so say we applied this project template to our setup video Studio project if we looked in the filters you're going to see that it auto updates to the setup video Studio project instead of pointing back to this template and that's what's going to allow us to always apply the project template and have the filters set up magically without having to do any work ourselves so project contains project that's pretty much all we need here and I think for the purposes of actually looking at all the tasks in a project we may want to see the done tasks in the same view as the tasks that are still uh to be done so let's go ahead and sort this by do in ascending order just like always we're going to go over to our grouping and we're going to group this by status personally I only use too and done in list views so I'm going to not hide my empty groups but I am going to hide the doing group just like that and then I'm going to duplicate this View and I'm going to create a board view as well so we'll duplicate this call this one board I'm going to change the layout to board just like we did before change the card size to small keep all the properties wrapped we're going to group by status as always color those columns and if we go in here we can actually shortcut over to the grouping settings so we can make sure we're not hiding our empty groups and that's going to give us our board view we can check our filter and settings again do in ascending order makes sense this is perfect as our one filter for the board View and to finish this off in the project template we're going to go ahead and also duplicate this one more time and create a calendar view so this will give us a nice little calendar specifically for the project we'll wrap the page titles we are going to show Pages inide Peak because that's my preference of course you can do whatever you want uh and the properties we're going to show should include I think the status and that might be it and it does occur to me that I think I forgot to change the property display in the board view so let's go into our three dot menu one more time go to properties and uh I think we can show uh the due date here and that probably is all we need to show right there so now we have this essentially reusable project template and whenever we apply it to a project page we're going to be able to very easily see all the tasks inside of that project and we can actually demonstrate that right now so let's go back to our project's database um in fact we can just crawl up the tree a few more steps and go right back to the projects section we created so if I open up setup video Studio you'll see that I have not already applied a template and I also don't have any content on the page so I can very easily click project and just like that you see all of the tasks that are within that project and like I said before the self- referential filter updates automatically to reference the page where this view is so we can do the same thing for home ongoing and I do want to show you a trick let's say that instead of this view here you already had just a bunch of content on the page like that well if you already have content on the page you can't apply a template so you can either delete all that content or if you want to keep that content I'd recommend going ahead and copying it to your clipboard so you can very easily paste it later on so now that I've gotten the page empty again I can apply the project just like that and I could paste the content that I already had on the page down here so I don't lose it um and the last thing I want to do with this project template is ideally make sure it's always applied when I create a new project page I always want to see this stuff so we can accomplish that by closing this little side Peak View here and then going once again to our blue dropdown menu going to the three dot menu for our project template and setting it as the default and if we choose for All Views in this Project's current database it's going to become the default project template or database template that has applied anytime we create a new page no matter where we are in this database so if I go over to this board view right here and I create another planned project and this one is take over the world same thing we do every day pinky we're going to see our template automatically applied so at this point we have our project template set up we've got our project views set up we have our tasks View set up as well but we haven't given much love to that task Journal database so I want to help you create a view for that as well before we do I'm going to show you how it looks in the ultimate tasks template this is that free task manager template that I showed you or that I mentioned in the uh beginning of this video so there we have this little nav bar and that shows a whole bunch of internal Pages which at this point in the video you should know how to create you should also specialized views of a database so if you want to create an internal page like this with specialized views of your Journal you can totally do that to save on time in this video though we're going to keep things very simple and we're just going

### [1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=3600s) Segment 13 (60:00 - 65:00)

to add a journal tab directly to this set of tasks views here and this will also serve to show you something that I don't know that I've showed in any video content before which is the fact that when you create what's called a linked database block right here the tabs in it can actually link to different databases so far all of these views we've created all these tabs linked to the tasks database but if we create a new one we can actually create a list View and it'll ask us which database we want to link to so in this case instead of task current we're going to find our task journal and there it is and now we have a brand new list view of our task Journal database which is inside of this link to database view which mostly has uh task database views so we'll go ahead and call this journal we're going to go ahead and give this a nice little open book icon so let's find that icon right there book open we will hide the database title show page icons I think it's going to be perfectly good like that and if you wanted to use this on a daily basis maybe you put this journal uh view right over here next to your inbox or if it's less frequently used you come down here and you put it at the bottom totally up to you but you can create brand new pages in here and to make things a little bit easier we can leverage database templates just like we did with our projects database I want to show you a couple of cool tricks that I haven't already shown you with those database templates first let's create a blank page in our task Journal because I want to go ahead and give it a another property so let's call this one today we'll open this as a page and add a property we're going to find a date property and we're just going to call that date totally good so let's now go ahead and delete this uh page because we don't need it we're going to create one from the template in just a second we'll once again go to our blue arrow right here create a new template inside of our task journal and if you type the at symbol and uh type today you get the option to reference the date when duplicated or the specific day when you create this little date reference so we're going to go with date when duplicated we'll call this today tasks and then in the date property we also get Dynamic values including now and today and you can see it's date or time when duplicated so we're going to set today as our Dynamic value here and essentially now with this database template in place we're going to get a bit of a smarter journal entry when we create one let's once again set this as a default for All Views because we pretty much always want to apply this template now you don't always want to go with default across all views for every kind of database you're uh designing some databases might have multiple templates but in this case it really does make sense and now that we have that in place we can create a brand new page and just like that we have today tasks as our um our title if we go into the page we can see that this is the date that gets automatically applied and on this page you can basically brain dump all the tasks you want to do or and this is a really cool thing I'm going to zoom out a couple of ticks for you can make this essentially a split view where you're looking through all of your task database views you're looking through your inbox tasks that are due today and maybe you're creating a specific little just checkbox list of the things you're actively going to work on again not everybody Vibes with this style of task management some people are just going to want to look at their actual views here and check things off but a lot of people I know really benefit from essentially having what amounts to a digital whiteboard where they write out what they are planning on getting done because sometimes due dates just get out of sync with reality some sometimes the system gets messy and when the system is messy just writing stuff out and getting stuff done sometimes is the order of the day so you can use this as a blank whiteboard you also know now how to create database templates so if you wanted to create like a call out in here or journaling prompts or really anything you want you can do that because you now know how to create those database templates so with that we are now going to move on to one of our more advanced Topics in this whole mini course and that is implementing recurring tasks because wouldn't you believe it notion actually can do these now and if you want you can even automate them so to enable us to do recurring tasks in notion we are going to have to create a few new properties inside of our tasks database so to do that let's go onto our databases page one more time let's go ahead and find a task here that actually makes sense as a recurring task I think change a HVAC filter is actually perfect for this and we're going to go ahead and open this up as a full page I'm also going to open up the property panel and show all of our properties and I think I actually want to create a special section for these as well so let's go ahead and customize the layout one more time we're going to click our property group we're going to add a section and we're going to call this section recurring tasks properties and uh we can create the properties in here but now that we have the section we can also apply this all pages and we can open up the property group one more time and create them outside of the layout Builder which is my preference and to enable recurring tasks we need a few different properties the first one is going to be a number type property and this is going to be called recur interval we're also going to create a select type property we're going to call that recur unit and in

### [1:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=3900s) Segment 14 (65:00 - 70:00)

recur unit we are going to have a few different options days weeks months and years now for the purposes of this video we are keeping things simple and these options do need to be all lowercase if you want to get fancier you can see my recurring tasks in notion video that I published very recently that video will show you how to get fancy with your uh recur unit options and you can even do some really fancy stuff inside of ultimate tasks and ultimate brain like nth week of the month every third Thursday of the month basically uh some crazy stuff like that here again we're keeping things real simple so we got recur interval recur unit that is going to lead us to a formula type property and it's going to be called Next do so if we have a do date like March 10th 2025 if we have a recur interval like say three and unit like say months so this is a task we want to do every 3 months we can build ourselves our first notion formula I'm going to zoom in real far so you can see exactly what I'm typing here this might be a little bit of a leap if you're new to notion but stick with me and this is going to make sense essentially we can write formulas that are kind of like Excel formulas or Google Sheets formulas which will output a value based on the code we write in here and other properties that we want to reference so what we want to do is apply the recur interval and the recur unit to the current due date essentially we want to take a number of months in this case and add it to whatever is currently in our due property so to do that we can reference our due property just like this then we can do Dot and we can do date add and this is a function that is going to add a number of units and uh those units are going to be defined here to the current date so we can go with our recur interval option as the number unit option or property as the unit there and I actually want to show you the reference for this property here because every function has one it says here adds time to the date the unit argument can be one of years quarters months Etc and here you can actually see the syntax so this is going to be your first argument you could either use the current date which is now or a date property just like this and then you can uh put the other arguments inside of the parentheses this is your unit right here which is a variable for us and this is your or that's your recurrent interval and this is the actual unit which again is a variable that we set over here so this is the power of notion formulas we can reference properties which can have different values per task or per page so if we save this now we can see this task is due uh June 10th 2025 now let's say we are really up and up on our HVAC and we want to make sure we're changing the filter every single day which you'd never want to do but for the sake of example uh we're going to do that if we set the recurr interval to one and we set the unit to days now it's a daily task um and if we want to automate this we actually can do that now I'm going to go through this really quick L because I'm trying to make this video as accessible as possible to everyone and that includes people who are not on Notions paid plan but I do want to mention this because it is very useful if you happen to be on Notions pay plan you've got this little lightning icon right here for creating automations and what we can do is actually automatically move the due date of a task a recurring task specifically to its next due date when we check it off and I want to show you quickly how to build that automation uh I also want to note that if you are in a free plan you can get ultimate tasks again for free in the description and it comes with the automation which will work out of the box if you get a template with automations they work you just have to pay for notion if you want to build your own automations or edit them so to build this automation we are very quickly going to duplicate our complete view right here just to get ourselves a list view I'm going to call this view recurring uh let's go ahead and give it a repeat icon like that and it's very important that we create a view specifically for recurring tasks to build this automation so I'm going to go ahead and change my filter criteria to where do is uh not empty and also to where our recur interval is greater than or equal to one so this is building a view that we know will only contain recurring tasks inside of it and once we have a view with those rules in place we can create an automation that will only trigger for tasks in that specific View and that's pretty important because we don't want this Logic triggering for onetime tasks we only want it to trigger for recurring tasks that have the recurrence rules that we set up so we're going to change this over to the recurring view we'll go ahead and name this process recurring tasks and then our trigger is going to be whenever our status property is set to the complete option which is we've named done uh and the action which will happen automatically whenever this happens is that we're going to set our edit property to status and we're going to set that back to Tod do but we're also going to edit another property we're going to edit our due property and this is one of my favorite new uh notion features that came out last year we can set the DU property to a custom formula and look at this is just like what we had earlier with that next do formula

### [1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=4200s) Segment 15 (70:00 - 75:00)

editor we get the full formula editor here and we can do trigger page Dot and then we can access a property of the page that triggered this automation which in our case will be next du that's all we have to do so if we save this and we create it now if we go ahead and check off this task in just a second notion automations is going to trigger we're going to get the STA set back to do and our due date is going to be set to whatever it is March 11th because we said that as a daily task as a reminder you can get that automation for free in Ultimate tasks if you're not on a paid plan otherwise you can see how simple it is to build so let's go back up to our ultimate tasks homepage because now that we have recurring tasks it might be useful to have a specific view in our task manager that shows us all of those recurring tasks to do that I'm going to go ahead and just rightclick my today View and duplicate that since it's going to be a list view I'm going to call it recurring just like that we're going to change the icon to that nice little arrows repeat icon and I want to also see my done tasks in this view so I'm going to go ahead and group this by status I'm going to unhide my empty groups but hide doing just like that and I'm going to change my filters to what we already created where do is not empty and where recur interval is greater than or equal to one that's going to ensure that I always see my recurring tasks what it's also going to do is allow you to manually process your recurring tasks if you want to if you don't have access to those automations when you check off a task you could just change the due date to what's displayed in next due and that's a pretty simple way to do those if you're not automating things okay so we have built in our first Advanced feature which is recurring tasks we are now going to move on to our second Advanced feature which are subtasks it's actually a built-in notion feature now and I want to show you how to implement them in your database now this is kind of complex subtasks do have some pitfalls so um we might have a little bit of extra work to do here to make them work really well but if you do really like subtasks we can get them working pretty well so in our tasks database underneath our databases page we can go into our three dot menu just like that and if we go back to customize tasks right here you'll see that there's also this subtasks option so if we add that and turn on subtasks we are going to get two new properties in our database we're going to get two relation properties that are actually connected to each other and you can also see that we have this little toggle arrow and we kind of actually have to drag out our status property right now because the toggle Arrow is sort of blocking it but we can actually fix that and I'll show you how first notice that when we have this Arrow toggled open we can create sub items underneath our tasks here and I actually don't want to add one to a recurring task I'm just going to go over to the active area here and instead find a mark floor spots for tripods We'll add a sub item called by Gaff tape I think that makes sense and just like that we've created a subtask as part of uh this task right here now I can see my checkbox here I can see these arrows here I don't like that so I'm going to go over to my view option I'm going to go back to customize tasks go to subtasks and I'm going to go to my advanced settings right here and here you can see show nesting toggle on title I actually like that quite a lot for table views so I'm going to go ahead and do that uh and we're going to actually have to come back to this subtasks setting quite a few times because this nested in toggle view while useful does have some pitfalls especially with the projects and tasks setup that we've created here so before we get into all of that I do want to open up one of these tasks and show you the new properties that were created and I also want to customize how they look so down here inside of helper properties you can see that we now have a parent task relation property and a subtask relation property and they are actually connected together so this is an example of a relation property that exists in the same database and it models a parent and sub or parent child relationship right here so I actually want to show these over here to make it more obvious uh when a task has subtask or when a task is a subtask so to do that we're going to go back to customize layout just like that we're going to go to our property group head over to helper properties and we're going to do something that at least today is a little fancy hopefully it's going to be easier in the future but I'm going to click this parent task relation property we're going to add it to the layout and I'm going to do the same thing back into Property Group for the subtask property just like that and by adding it to the layout let me go and zoom out a couple of ticks here by adding it to the layout I can now click the three dot menu on the parent task and I can go to Advanced and convert to relations group and if I do that I can then do it for the subtask relation as well Advanced convert to relations group or add to relations group and that will create a single box here for any relations that I care to add I could also add the project relation to the relations group I think personally I'm just going to go ahead and keep it like this or I'm showing subtask and parent task now if you wanted to you could go over here to the relations group make sure it's selected and you could change the visibility for each of these uh properties you can make them minimal and always make sure you have to click on them before you see any content but I

### [1:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=4500s) Segment 16 (75:00 - 80:00)

think in this instance it's actually quite useful to be able to open up a page and see the subtasks right there something else that is quite useful to do is that when you have a relation property here on a page there's this little three dot icon here called customize shown properties and if you click that you can actually show specific properties from these linked pages and I think it would be quite useful to show the status and maybe even the due date uh for your subtasks here we can also do that for projects now it's not very useful to do up in here because it's a pinned property but if you click the project on a task you got the same option here in the relation picker and we might want to show both the status and the progress which we're going to show as a progress bar in a little bit right here on all these projects okay at this point we have subtasks on but I do want to note that there is a potential Pitfall you can run into with those subtasks and it has to do with the uh task views that we put into our projects template so let me explain this can get a little bit complicated but I think it's pretty important to understand if you are going to use subtasks if I create a subtask underneath this task right here you can see that it does not automatically inherit the project relation of its parent now again if you have a paid notion plan and you have access to this automations feature you could create an automation that syncs uh the parent project to the subtask in fact we ship that Automation in Ultimate brain it's disabled by default but it is in there and you can very easily enable it even if you're on a free plan uh but by default notion won't do it and you can run into a little bit of a pitfall in that situation because look here we can see buy Gaff tape directly under Mark floor spots for tripods but if we go into the setup video Studio project we've got these sub items on but look Mark floor spots for tripods it's not there and that's because the filters we created are only going to show tasks where the project relation directly contains setup video studio so this is one issue that I do have with subtasks in notion people often build setups like this I think this setup is incredibly useful but then they'll go and create subtasks in another view where we don't have these filters and then go into a view like this and go where are my subtasks I don't see them so for that reason and I'm only going to show this in one instance just to keep this video from being super long uh for that reason I prefer a different way of viewing subtasks in most instances so in an inbox for example instead of showing subtasks in this nested toggle view I think you should only show parents create subtasks directly in the page like this and if you agree with me what you can do is go over to your view options right here you can go to customize tasks for this view you can go into subtasks and instead of showing this as nested in toggle you can show parents only and if you have subtasks in an inbox task let's say that uh WR video script has a subtask right here we'll add one called do the research you're going to see this little icon indicating that this task does have subtasks I think that's quite useful and this is pretty important to also Implement in the project template so if you're going to use subtasks I recommend going back into your project template here editing it and then in these views that we created earlier just going into that customize area one more time going to subtasks and setting that to parent only now for date-based views so here this is not a date-based view I think this is a Project based view but for date-based views like the today view uh if you are going to not show that toggle view instead of parents only it's actually important that you go to a different option so if we go to subtasks here for a date-based view it's pretty important to use flattened list instead and the logic there is that if you give a due date to a subtask you should see that subtask listed in the order of its due date you shouldn't have to drill into a parent task that may have a much later due date because otherwise you may miss the due date for that subtask so the rule is if it's a date-based view use flatten list otherwise use either the nested and toggle list if you like it or to be safe use the parenton view now a few times throughout this course I've alluded to a progress bar that we want to show on our projects and we currently don't have that so let's go ahead and fix that now let's go to a random project because at this point we need to do a little bit of formula coding to get this to be something other than empty we want to actually show progress bar so I'm going to go ahead and open up this setup video Studio project and I'm going to add one more task to this project let's go ahead and call this um Mount the backdrop and I want to check this task off just like that and I want to have six tasks for a reason that will become evident in just a second so to show ourselves a progress bar we need this formula property to Output a numeric value I'm not going to get too much into formulas in this video I've got a whole formulas video planned as well as a formula reference website with literally every function documented but the gist is notion formulas can

### [1:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=4800s) Segment 17 (80:00 - 85:00)

output data with different data types you can output strings which are text value uh you can output numeric values that you can do actual math on you can output arrays or lists you can output dates all kinds of stuff and for a progress bar we need to Output a numeric value so if we did something like say 5 ID 6 we're going to get a numeric value there and once we have a numeric value in our formula property we can actually edit that property and we're going to see the same number options that we would have in a number type property including our number format which we would want to switch over to percent and the little progress bars here so let's go to Bar you could also do ring and here we can see we have 83. 3 33% repeating along with a nice little progress bar so we have two tasks at this point get rid of these trailing decimals and just get 83% but also get some accurate numbers in here because right now we just have 5x six so we thinking about a progress bar we need to take the number of done tasks in the project divided by the number of and here is how to get that number first we're going to take our tasks relation property and as you can see this actually outputs a list of all those tasks we're going to pass that into the filter function and the filter function allows us to Define criteria uh and only the pages in that initial list that meet the criteria will come out of the filter function and be its return value so we can use this little keyword called current which basically references the current item in the list that's being fed through this machine that is filter and we are going to say where the current Pages status equals which is the equality operator done the string done so we can see we only have one in here so if we pass this a return value there which is just a single a list with a single element in it if we pass that into this length function here we're going to get number one which because we've already formatted this formula as a percent will say 100% so that is our first element but we want to divide that by you can probably guess this but the number of tasks in the project uh without any filtering there so we're going to do tasks. length for that and just like that we get 16. 666 repeating uh in this little return value here so we fixed one of our issues we have accurate data but we still have this decimal repeating problem so what we can do to fix this is pass this whole thing into a function called round so I'm going to put a parenthese in front of that right there I'm going to put another parentheses at the end and if we do uh do round we can get a rounded value but the problem is because we're using decimal values we rounding to uh the nearest integer which in this case is zero we don't want to do that so here's another trick if you multiply everything that you're doing in here by 100 you're going to get uh a bigger percentage and then if you divide your rounded number by the same number 100 you're going to get the actual percentage right there now if you did buy 1,000 and 1,000 you would get the next decimal position if you did buy 10,000 and 10,000 you would get two decimal positions and that's a cool trick for rounding to a specific decimal point which can be very useful also when working with percentages so I'm going to go with just 100 that gets us a nice round integer percentage and with that we have our progress bar awesome now we can see our progress across all of our projects let's go and zoom out just a little bit so you can see that a bit more hopefully I'm not too zoomed out and if we go back we're now going to see our progress bars on all of these prog uh projects and it looks like I've done none of my tasks for home ongoing but if I check off check my uh raidon system levels we can actually see 50% now for an ongoing task we're usually going to have or a project recurring tasks only in here which if we're automating them are often going to get set back to to-do so progress bar really only makes sense for doing uh projects not for ongoing but still it's pretty nice okay so we've built one of our two kind of complex formulas in this video and actually I think we actually had three because of next do but we have one more and that is the meta labels property that we set up all the way back when we were setting up our initial tasks database and the metal labels property to show you a little example here is going to show us these little icons when they are relevant so this little yellow icon is going to basically alert us that this lift weights task is overdue and then this little icon is going to show us that this readbook task is actually a recurring task so if you want that we can build a formula to get you that and because we thought ahead and we already showed metal labels on all of our list views all we need to do is write the formula and we're going to get the benefits of it across all these views without having to edit them again so let's open any task let's open this as a full page open up our view details area right there and we tucked that metal labels property in the helper properties right there so let's access our formula editor and start thinking through the problem so we want to build

### [1:25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=5100s) Segment 18 (85:00 - 90:00)

a property that can output one or potentially multiple icons depending on certain statuses of the task whether it's overdue whether it's recurring and if you wanted to you could add additional status types in the future so what we're going to do is use a really handy function called lets and lets let's us Define variables and then give those variables values and then we can reference the variable names later on instead of having to copy and paste the same value multiple times or the same code so we're going to create a variable for recurring label going to call it recurring label and use camel case just because I can and uh I'm going to give it a comma there that's the name of the label or the variable and then the value of this variable is going to be an if statement so we can use if right there we can enter down and the condition here is going to be if this task next do property is not empty so we'll do not empty and put next do inside of the empty function here then if it's not empty we are going to Output a nice little Emoji which will be our repeat Emoji so we'll put that in quotes which is defining this as a string or piece of text and then the else case so if next do is empty we are going to Output nothing so we won't put a comma at the end of our last argument inside of the IF function but we do need a comma right there after the IF function itself so that'll be our recurring labels value and you can see if our final uh argument in lets is simply recurring label it's going to show us either empty or that little icon If This Were to be a recurring task and in fact read book and take notes is probably a recurring task so let's go ahead and give that a recur interval of one a recur unit of days and there's our next due value and there's our meta label check that out but we want to get a little fancier of course we want to also be able to see if tasks are overdue so instead of showing recurring label only we are going to define a secondary Val variable which is going to be overdue label and once again we're going to use an if formula right here pause the video and think through this problem if you want to get a little bit of practice here or maybe even try to do this ahead of me uh but assuming you've unpaused it and you haven't solved it yet we're going to do if uh today which is a nice little function which is going to Output the current date is greater than or later than the doe property we are going to Output a string value which will be I believe it's just called warning there we go which is weird in the formula editor but does look correct in the rest of notion otherwise will show nothing so we've created our two labels now what we can do is Define a list with these little two brackets just like that and we're going to go with uh overdue label recurring label as elements in the list and then we're going to pass that list into a function called join and we can join whatever is in there with space character and that's it so if this task were both recurring and overdue we would get both of those labels if it were not an overdue task or a recurring task at all for just overdue we're going to get that label right there and if we go back out to our uh ultimate tasks homepage and see our tasks views now we can see these handy little icons on our meta labels property for each of these tasks so with that done I now want to teach you a little bit of button automation to make your task manager a bit more usable especially on the notion mobile app so beneath our ultimate tasks title here and above our view right here I'm going to enter down and I'm going to type slash butt because I can and I'm going to do a button block here and the button block is essentially a little way to trigger automations by clicking a button in notion and even if you're on the free plan you can use this so it's really powerful and in this case we're just going to create a very simple button that creates a new task uh so we're going to call this new task we're going to give it a nice little checkbox or check mark icon and when the button is clicked we're going to do two things first we're going to add a page two we're going to select our tasks current database right there uh and if we had any sort of um page templates inside of our tasks database we could actually apply those if we wanted to Ultimate brain comes with quite a few like a task history template um there is a Time tracking template there's all kinds of stuff I'm going to teach these in future videos too U but because we don't have any we don't have that option but we can create a brand new task in that database and then we can add a second action where we open that specific page so let's do that open Action let's open the page that we added in the button we'll change it over to side peek and now we have this nice little button where if we're on mobile we can just do new task easily just brain dump a task into the inbox we'll call this I don't know Peta hippo and if you're on your phone that's a super duper quick way to add a task without having to click a tiny little button on these specific views here and if we wanted to we could do the same thing for projects so just enter down from projects quickly now SLB new project just like that let's give it that rocket ship icon because we love that for projects do an action add a page two we're going to use our projects current database this time here you can

### [1:30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=5400s) Segment 19 (90:00 - 95:00)

see we're automatically applying that default project template which is kind of what I alluded to before we're going to open that page inside Peak so page added from the button switch from Center Peak to side Peak and now you have a super quick way of creating a brand new project so we still have a few spit and polish items to do here and to do those we're going to scoot on over to our databases page one more time first we have this little current uh suffix on all our databases and maybe you didn't create those but I did so I want to go ahead and delete those really quickly and then we are going to turn these into full pages and we are going to lock them up and I'll tell you why in just a second so we're going to go ahead and get rid of those current uh suffixes if we want to we can click the six do icon right here and turn this into a page which just makes things a bit more organized in our databases page and then I highly recommend once you are done with your customizations to go into each of these databases go to the three do menu up here and lock the database this is especially important if you're using this template you've built with a team because if the database isn't locked it's very easily to accidentally click a property and delete it or change its settings or do something else you might not want to do and that's especially likely to happen if you have a bunch of people using the same tool and if those people maybe don't know notion as well as you now do so keep your databases locked when you're using them day-to-day unlock them when you want to make customizations and you're basically uh using this tool like you would with actual software where sometimes you're the developer and sometimes you're the user and with those databases locked you are now done you've got a fully functional task manager you have project support you got that journal view you have quite a lot built into the system so I want to show you what else you could add give you a little bit of inspiration here I'm going to do that by showing you a few of the features in my ultimate brain template this is what I use to manage my daily life you can also get it over at thomasj frank. com brain or you can take inspiration from this little segment right here to add some additional features to your own task manager which I would encourage if you like building stuff yourself so first and foremost in addition to recurring tasks you can do task history for example in this lift weights task here you can see every time that I've done the task on this little demo copy here this is the result of an automation that creates a historical record every time you check off the task and it kind of turns notion into a habit tracker as well as a task manager it's quite useful something else you can do is if we go down to our projects section here you can actually sort your projects by latest activity across the tasks or maybe even notes inside of the project this is something that requires a bit more of a complex formula to build but ultimate brain actually has open documentation link to the description down below so if you want to check out the formula we built to do this type of sorting you can actually do that it's completely free to read our docs uh the only thing we sell is the actual templates itself something you can also do which is really useful is go into a project template like the one we built earlier and in addition to your tasks views also show views of a notes database that way this projects page becomes a full home base for everything involved in the project both the tasks as well as any notes and reference materials you have for that project and lastly I wanted to show you my personal favorite part of ultimate brain this is where I start every single day this is the my day dashboard so in this tutorial we built that really simple task Journal database this is kind of the next level up where if we want to do a task we can check this my day checkbox right here and it's going to add it down to this execute section I find this to be very useful because when you just rely on due dates sometimes you're not really fully prioritizing and taking seriously the tasks you need to get done in a day so if you give yourself some kind of way to say yes I'm going to do these tasks today maybe even order them maybe even label them with the location or the level of energy that require um you're just so much more likely to get things done and to manage your time more effectively finally speaking of time something else you can do inside of notion is actually Implement time tracking active time tracking where when we check start on a task like this it actually starts being actively tracked and if we open up me zoom out just a couple of ticks here if we open up our properties we can actually see that there are time tracking properties we can create and we have active SE sessions that are being tracked you can actually do multiple sessions across a single uh task in your task manager and I've got a whole video in the works on how to build this it's already live in Ultimate brain so if you do want it and you want it done for you can go over to thomasj frank. com brain and get a copy of ultimate brain that is a paid template it helps to support my work here and of course if you want just the basics a little bit beyond what we built in this tutorial but uh a bit more of a basic task manager you can get ultimate tasks which is totally free both are linked and description down below thanks as always for watching right here you're going to find one more video on how to upgrade your task manager even further or if you want to build a full

### [1:35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2IFv_GBdUQ&t=5700s) Segment 20 (95:00 - 95:00)

second brain in notion from scratch and do the job yourself this video right here will show you exactly how to do it

---
*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/20791*