Notion Calendar for Life System Design — Sync Your Life OS

hi everyone in this video we're going to start a two video series on the two best calendar apps for a personal life system where notion is the core foundational platform starting today with notion calendar itself in this two-part series I will consider and compare these two calendar apps with direct notion specific Integrations however because their notion Integrations vary quite a bit they lead to two different system some workflows I'll compare and contrast the differences more directly in the next video after covering the capabilities of each first today let's Deep dive into using notion calendar as a component of a larger notion life system notion calendar is a separate calendar app apart from the core notion software platform it's a satellite app that has increasing integration built into it was originally called Kon and notion purchased KRON about 2 years ago and has been starting to integrate it and move it into the notion ecosystem it is the First Independent app that notion has purchased and released separate from the cor ocean platform and has started a lot of speculation on a whole ecosystem of independent apps that will follow just like this notion calendar app apart from the core notion platform then in the next video I'm going to look at a different Standalone app with a deep notion integration these are the two best options for notion system users at this time there are cases where each would be optimal for different users so I'll cover when where and for whom after getting into the capabilities of each a life system or life OS is comprised of several segments and one of the core segments is action execution this is the pipelines portion of the pillars pipelines and vaults life operating system for the most granular specific rubber meets the road part of action execution a good calendar is essential in terms of professional success the calendar tells all the notion platform is the foundational framework for alignment in ppv that's connecting your lowest level detailed day-by-day hour by hour actions to your highest level life aspirations and notion is the comprehensive skeleton holding together any notion life system but the calendar is the killer app for making things happen the ultimate point of granular impact for Action execution items need to make it into your calendar if they're going to actually happen the calendar tells you how much will fit and it forces you to make hard choices it carves out specific actual blocks of time for an activity to happen nothing actually happens without having specific Literal time to do the thing the calendar is the map and documentation of all your time so calendars matter a lot if you want to accomplish life objectives the notion calendar app is free and it's a super elegant experience it's increasingly integrating notion databases using database date properties we'll look at where that stands today and consider what the future is likely to bring notion calendar is an option for you if you use Google Calendar as your base Cloud calendar that's the only Cloud calendar supported at this time if you're not using Google Calendar and you're not willing to switch to it then notion calendar will not work for you they have continually said they will be adding more Cloud calendars but they've been saying that for a very long time long before notion acquired it which was about 2 years ago if you're not going to use Google Calendar then check out part two of this video series notion calendar lends itself particularly well to a personal system with a ppv due date protocol so if you're using ppv you're already set up to take full advantage of notion calendar no adjustment no changes to your system are needed if not you should consider a system where all action items have a specific due date that's a do date for when you specifically plan to do the activity not when it's due this means all individual tasks in your planning system have a specific date on which you plan to do them and the first tasks within a project have a date on which you plan to do them these dates can be changed or bumped later but you have a tentative sketched out map of the day for each task you're adding to your system in notion calendar you cannot see or sync tasks that do not have a date and even if that were added they're not all queed up for each date as they are with the ppv due date protocol forcing yourself to plan a specific date for each action item and evaluating what will and will not fit into your calendar day by day is a transformational approach to making things happen in life so let's dive in and see how we can apply notion calendar

to our life systems regardless of your calendar app planning your next day the afternoon or evening before is the best practice and a core ppv Foundation Planet when you can make rational decisions and are not in the moment fighting distractions and avoidance impulses create a clear road map for your day the afternoon or evening before if you're not doing this already this is a transformational first step you can take to improve your process before we dive into the practical Hands-On look at notion calendar and how it integrates with our notion life system let's look at a flowchart where we can see the basic steps in each app the notion platform app and notion calendar and see just how that basic workflow goes knowing that we're going to be planning the evening before for the next day but step by step in a practical sense what are the elements being done in each calendar so here we see notion calendar on the top and notion itself the full notion platform on the bottom this is what we've always done so this is nothing new and I'm showing this because it'll make an interesting comparison in the next video where we look at a different workflow that's enabled with the other application so as always and this is pretty standard for most people we have manual events added to our calendar we personally add them sometimes and other times calendar invites come in and they're automatically added so the dots connect an automation that's happening and the manual events with the arrow are you actively entering those and then we have all our scheduled events the calendar which is what a calendar is for just as always in notion we set our tasks as active we enter an active task in our action items database or whatever you call your task database in the case of ppv we assign due dates do dates the date we plan to do them and then we set priorities so that they're sorted in sequence of the importance in the order in which we intend to do them so they're all queued up now we will work between these two apps throughout the day we'll be looking at our calendar to make sure we show up for and are ready for any scheduled events and we'll be bouncing over to notion to see our priority tasks and any quick items any errands anything that's not a scheduled event as I'll show you in notion calendar you can get closer to actually time blocking it does make time blocking easier but it does not completely solve the time blocking challenge therefore we still do need to bounce between the two throughout the day which is okay this is what we've always done so let's dive into this workflow looking at notion and notion calendar together so here we are in the action Zone in my pillars pipelines involved system if you're not using ppv you would have some daily Focus area which zeros in on the specific items you want to accomplish that day it's the focus portion of your notion system for daily implementation and action we call it the action Zone and this is where we Implement that due date do date protocol so we'll have our very focused lineup of action item for today and down here we'll have the calendar where we've lined up our short mini due date to-do list for each day we avoid that endless burdensome stress inducing massive to-do list by having a small mini viable manageable to-do list for each day of the week we keep it all small manageable and viable in this way it's not overwhelming and we know what we can fit in and what we can't and we can make the decision on what is worthy of getting into our schedule and what's not so we've got our lineup here and let's say one of these actually has a scheduled time so let's not only give it a date but let's give it a time because this will be relevant for our calendar so now we've got one item typically in ppv you would actually make that scheduled as a priority but let's just for the sake of showing the integration with the calendar leave it there but have it at a 10 a. m. so now we go over to the notion calendar app and we will see it's a very minimalist well-designed well-laid out calendar interface it's a very nice app to use I would say apart from the notion Integrations this doesn't have any big Innovations fireworks but it has a lot of really small thoughtful usability touches and some of these small usability touches I find to be massively valuable so I'm going to go through this first show The primary notion database Integrations in notion calendar we're going to go through the list of those things first but then at the end after that I'm going to touch on what I really think are the much bigger things that make notion calender a great user experience and highlight my favorite aspects of it just as a calendar app apart from the notion database integration so I actually think that's the highlight of this video to tell you the truth but since the main attraction is the integration with our notion system we're first going to go through the notion database Integrations so to repeat the first big feature this is free and that's amazing to have one

of the best calendar apps out there available for free there is no paid plan at this point and I don't see one on the horizon for notion calendar this is available on all of the notion plans including the free plan so as we look at this we'll see on the left we have the calendars up here these are the Google Calendar Integrations you can have one Google Calendar which is tied to a specific email address and you can have as many calendars as you want in that one Google Calendar so they're different views of calendars with different colors and different purposes under a single Google Calendar account or you can bring in multiple Google Calendar accounts either way you'll have a list here of all your Google Calendars in this demo I have one set up and you can toggle it on or off as you have multiple ones I have one for birthdays although I don't have any birthdays in here for holidays you can toggle that on so these don't actually have any active items but you'll be able to toggle all of your calendars on or off and see the view you want it's always present and easy to access right here which is awesome the big innovation and addition here now that notion has taken over what used to be Kon and is now making it notion calendar is we can now add notion databases here you can add any notion database that has a date property of course you need a date property to appear on a calendar and so these are two of my databases in the system that I've connected all of these are demo tasks and demo activities and demo events but you can see I have an action items or a task database and I have my content pipeline which is the publish date and we can turn either of these on off or leave them both on so right off the bat we have a big innovation a big Improvement that we never had before with our notion systems which is the ability to see multiple calendar databases from our notion system in one calendar view you cannot do that in notion itself We Now can calendar so that by itself is a big win and a big step forward with our notion systems so we can bring in multiple ones a great example here is the content pipeline in our task database but any calendar you want you can lay it over top and see all of your scheduled calendar items from your notion databases in one view so this is great so this is week view and this is month view so this has a lot of great keyboard shortcuts just hit W to switch to week view M to switch to month view couldn't be easier that's just awesome there a lot of thoughtful keyboard shortcuts built into notion calendar that's one of the great features of it you can always hit command K on a Mac or believe alt K or option K on a PC and it'll open the shortcut menu here you can see what they all are and you can search for a command here or start typing the first few letters and you'll get the command pulled up and then you can learn the shortcuts here and it becomes a very fast quick easy intuitive way to work with the Calendar app now you'll see we have both of our database visibilities on so in the month view we have all these listed of course they don't fit because you have a lot but when you click on it opens it up into week view and now you can see them nicely laid out you can see the one that we added a time to which is a workout here since it's overlapping with another is half width now if we Shuffle you can see it's the full width but this was the one in notion we added the time to and if we were to move it to a different place and adjust its length perhaps you'll see it's also updating in notion so we just moved workout from the 22nd here over to the 23rd and changed the time and changed the length of it you'll see it's fully updated here so it's a two-way sync so any changes to the location on the calendar or the time and date in notion is going to update in the other we have two-way sync for the date property in the database which is fantastic just jumping back to the calendar you'll also see at the top in week view we're just seeing this scheduled times but you'll see at the top it has the number of tasks that don't have scheduled times because most tasks so you'll see the total count for each day if you open this toggle you'll get the full list which is great and then if you want to do time blocking you can now do it far easier than you ever could before by dragging these items into the scheduled time area I'm recording this at 8:05 on Tuesday we can take any of these items and start mapping them out for time blocking and block out our schedule for the day as we wish so that's the fast easy way to start doing time blocking but there are a couple problems and this is where we get into some of the shortcomings that I find frustrating about the current state of notion calendar of course this is ongoing in development but I would think about 2 years after the notion acquisition we would have more integration than this because first of all we just brought in tasks you can't tell the difference between the tasks and the event

they look identical most importantly there's no check box we can't check the task done in fact when you click on it look over here we don't see any of the other database properties not only can't we change database properties we can't even see them the only database property you can change is the date property by moving it around the calendar but it would be incredibly valuable to see other date properties we're also not sorting by priority so we've got the list up here but in notion we have them sorted by priority these are not sorting these are just ad hoc random and when you pull them in you can't see that they're tasks they just look like any other event and you can't check them done by not being able to check them done and see the other properties that means you have to bounce back and forth between notion and your action Focus dashboard and the calendar you cannot run your day in the calendar you also can't notion because you don't have all the events here in notion it's cuz it's not two-way syncing Google Calendar so you still have all your events here and you have many of the functional aspects of your tasks in your notion focus zone for the day neither of them cover sufficient access to the other the events versus the tasks to work entirely out of one or the other so you do need to continue balancing back and forth now that's what we've always done and that's not a big problem that's worked fine for years I've gotten an immense amount done doing that but I'm looking forward to the point where we can actually run our whole day out of one page out of one View and I think the calendar would be optimal for that because you've got the timeline down here that's showing the time throughout the day and you can see what's coming up and what's moving around and you should be able to check things done see what's a task versus what's an event because events typically mean we need to coordinate with someone else it's a different kind of thing so that's where we are with the actual workflow integration and the other big shortcoming is when you do this time blocking you drag in these tasks in here these do not sync to your Google calendar which mean they don't sync to anything else that is sync to your Google calendar they are only visible in this time block format in notion calendar so if you use other calendars or you use other apps that are checking your calendar they're not going to see the time blocking you've done here which kind of defeats the purpose of a synced Cloud calendar syncing all your time based applications so that's a bit frustrating we have been waiting for Google Sync from notion for years now it was actually teased years ago and we still haven't seen it it's really surprising to me we see this really ambitious new calendar app before we see the most basic thing which would be a Google Calendar Sync so hoping to see progress in that front soon if notion calendar did sync with Google Calendar in the cloud then this would in fact be an intermediary that gave you Google Calendar sync but it doesn't and it's a bit confusing for these tasks to look like their calendar events when they're not even syncing to the rest of your calendar sync Network so be aware but there's another really nice touch that I didn't expect and I found to be super useful as I've been using this for a number of months which is you can link to documents so let's go into one of the events now this is not task that's been time blocked although you do have a very quick easy access link to go into no which is welcomed and at the same time in notion at the top of every calendar that's synced you have a button now to opening calendar you just click that it takes you right to the calendar so you have a quick access back and forth but again you're going to need to bounce back and forth but the other really nice notion database integration that I love if you look at any of the events these are the ones that are synced with Google again it's not clear which one's which but they are colorcoded so you can look at the left the blue ones here are actual events synced with Google the purple and orange are the database tasks synced with notion if you go to the actual event sync with Google you've got your typical conferencing option you can schedule a meeting through zoom and have it automatically set up a zoom call attached to the event which is great that'll be something that everybody sees on both ends and you can add participants which is awesome that's pretty standard you add location all standard stuff but the new thing that integrates with notion very nicely is docs and links you can click here and it will give you a view into your pages in notion and just by going through the navigation or searching for a page you can create a link to any page in your notion database and if you don't have one already established you can create a new one so say you have meeting Pages for your agenda or for your notes for the meetings you could link to it directly in the document here and if your whole team is using notion calendar they would all have access to that so that's fantastic and even if the page want to link to is not a notion if it's a web page anywhere you can paste a link

to anywhere on any website and it'll be here accessible in the calendar event which I think is great then finally one other aspect of this implementation with the notion databases that I do find frustrating is that in week view it's great having the list on top of the tasks in your task database or your action item database in ppv in month view you'll see it's piled up down here and there's just not room for them you got five more four more five more it doesn't work in month view so you can turn that off which is great and that's no problem but then in Weak view you want to have it then it's turned off so then you got to turn it back on it's so nice and quick to go week view to month view with the w andm keyboard shortcuts that's so convenient so efficient but every single time you need to then get the mouse go over here and turn these off in month view you quick switch to week view now you want to turn them on and you've got this additional mouse keyboard stroke to constantly be turning these off as you switch between week view and month view so what we really need is separate visibility toggles for month view and for week view for the notion databases so that we can have them on in week view and have them off in month view and not have to Mouse over and make that change every time we switch between month and week view I've actually submitted this request to notion but no response so who knows and that's the notion integration aspect of this it does move us a lot forward than we had with any option prior to this year and when this came out it was clearly the best integration we'll talk in part two the video following this one about another one that recently came out shortly after this that does a different type of notion integration and gives us different options but this is clearly one of the top options for a calendar app working with our notion system and integrating it but there are some fantastic really wonderful usability elements to this aside from the notion database integration and that's what I'm really most excited about looking at and using notion calendar so let me highlight those my favorite aspects of notion calendar aside from the notion database Integrations so number one and this is awesome is in month viw or in week view but let's start with month view if you just scroll up it rolls week by week most calendar apps like almost all you go up and down and it gives you a whole month and that's how you advance month by month but so often your split between two months and jumping back and forth doesn't give you a clear view of the layout between that break and months now with this we can just scroll up and we get a wonderful view of any segment any five or six week segment of the calendar that's awesome in week view same thing and I've never seen this before scrolling to the right using either a horizontal scroller or holding shift and using the vertical scroller will scroll left and right anywhere you want that is awesome the other thing I absolutely love is the control T function I just hit contrl T it took the today date and moved it to the left wherever you are anywhere contrl T put it on the left today's Monday let's say we were deep into the week and we can only see a few more days in the week you can either scroll to the right or you can just automatically jump to putting today in the leftmost column that's wonderful same thing with month view which I've never seen before so we're on the 21st here and we can only see three more weeks not only could we scroll down we could hit contr T sorry it's not control T it's option t on the Mac keyboard should be alt T I think on the PC keyboard hit option T and it puts the current week at the very top and gives us great visibility of all the weeks to come that is a really nice feature seems like a small thing but I have found that is a massive usability benefit also time zones are great in notion calendar you'll see on the left I have three time zones you can add as many as you want I have Pacific time Hong Kong time and UK time which covers Us Asia and Europe you can click and rename them and label them however you want and you can add as many as you want and very easily you now see if it's 8:00 here it's 11:00 a. m. in Hong Kong it's 4:00 a. m. in UK makes it very easy to schedule beyond that if you just hit Z on your keyboard which is one of our keyboard shortcuts you can transform your view of your calendar to the view of any other time zone so if you want to think and view it the way that one of your International colleagues might view it or a friend or family around the world you could just hit Z and it opens up this window I could hit eastern time and it has now given me a red column on the left to let me know we're looking at

Eastern time and all of the times are now on the East Coast time in the US I'm on the Pacific coast so that's a great view we could change it to any time zone we want hit escape and it goes away hit Z again we could look at India Standard Time it jumps to the view of the calendar from someone as if I were in India same thing with month view hit Z again we can go to any time zone we want here's Hawaii and we're in Hawaii time zone all these times down here adjusted hit escape and it goes back that's super convenient especially as more and more of us are working with remote teams and we're just communicating with people all over the world so that's an awesome feature another great feature that this has let's go to week view here is you can go over here and share a visibility of specific dates you want to make available for someone to schedule a meeting with you so you click on that button over there on the right and now you can schedule some blocks of time for meeting time options that others can choose from so let's say we choose these three times it creates this perfectly worded statement that you can copy and paste in your email letting them choose from any of these available times if they work for them it's well phrased and very polite so you can easily send that without offending or being pushy you can also send the scheduling link if you have that activated you can update some of these individual criteria for the scheduling and then hit create now what it's done is it's say the snippet to the keyboard and the link for them to go to what would look like a calendly invite page with the dates you chose they can click on it and see the times that you permitted and they can book any one of those I didn't add it but we can add a zoom actually it was automatically added to give it a zoom invite but you can do it for Google meet as well and you've got a meeting set up as soon as they select one now what's great about this that I've never seen in any other calendar app is it marks the time zones here on your regular Calendar use until it's scheduled showing the invitation zones time zones that you have offered to the other person to schedule so you know these are tentative possible times that the person might choose to schedule of course if you book something it'll remove it from their options but you want to keep some options open to them and this makes it very clear as you go through your day until they schedule what you've sent to them that's wonderful as soon as they book a time it removes the other ones from your calendar and doesn't Mark them off as potential meeting times from the calendar invite that's really well done and then you can delete this if you don't want to have that invite out anymore and then finally something new they've added which is quite nice we can now click here to create a new event that's how we would and by default it's set as an event but now we can change it to focus time and it'll block it off as Focus time make it busy here like with all calendars when you share your availability with others you have the option to have them only see that your time scheduled spaces are busy rather than show the individual activities for privacy sake if you schedule Focus time that'll show up as busy as well and that's how you can block off some deep work time but when you toggle back to your notion system and work on your top priorities and you can schedule this very simply similarly you can do an out of the office now I have found as you see down here it's not actually working this was ruled out very recently it won't actually schedule it and my C calendar is syncing and actual events will schedule so my Google Calendar Sync is working but for some reason the focus time isn't working but I trust that Bug's going to be fixed very quickly because they just rolled it out and promoted it so hopefully that'll be fixed soon but it's nice to have that feature where we can block off focus time for deep work of course you have light and dark mode and a lot of thoughtful features those are my favorites but there are even more so I encourage you to give this a try it's easy to sync your Google calendar if you're using Google Calendar and give it a whirl and test it out and see how you like it but I think it's really one of the most thoughtful and elegant calendar app experiences I've ever used and it's increasingly getting notion database integration even if it's not quite where we really need it ultimately it's well on the way and the most important thing and the most valuable aspect to me is that by launching a calendar app branded notion calendar notion has clearly put a flag in the ground they have committed to doing this so we know the follow-through is going to be there given how boldly they've put their brand around this so I have every confidence that all the suggestions and ideas and things I'd like to see to take it all the way will be implemented it's just a matter of time for them to actually build it out so there you have it part one of our video series on integrating the top two calendar apps with our notion life systems notion calendar is an excellent option it's going to continue to get better and better notion is committed to it and even aside from the notion Integrations it's just one of

the most elegant and pleasant and efficient calendar apps that you could possibly choose and use in your daily workflow in the next video we'll go into the other Top Choice for a calendar app that integrates deeply with notion and can Elevate an integrated workflow between your notion life system and a calendar app if this is of Interest be sure to hit the Subscribe button and the bell icon to get updates on future videos and please hit like if you found this video valuable I also write the life design newsletter on enhancing your lives through personal systems I give away several of my best notion templates to anyone who subscribes to the newsletter I've also added a new regular section to the newsletter sharing any and all notion updates since the last issue of the newsletter so you'll always be aware of new features in addition to the notion the newsletter link is also Below in the show notes thanks for watching lots more to come