This Simple Notes Management System Changed My Life!

Key Takeaways

all right this is it this right here is how I manage all my notes within notion I have one master notes database and by creating different views of that Master notes database I ensure that only relevant notes are shown based on what I'm currently working on don't believe me this is my actual Master notes database with hundreds of pages of notes extremely messy right but if I go over to one of my project Pages tax filing for this financial year if I scroll down only the notes that are relevant to this project are visible stupidly simple yet extremely effective let's get started here's a visual representation of how the system works I organize my life in notion by projects areas and resources my master notes database cuts across all three and only surfaces the notes related to those categories can you use a system even if you don't follow Thiago Forte's pair method of course if you had projects trips and learning for example you would use the same method to surface relevant notes I go through exactly how to set this up in a moment but the benefit should be obvious this system guarantees you have instant access to only the most relevant information based on what you're trying to achieve at that moment in time as a result after you set this up you should never need to go into your master notes database ever again you will only interact with your notes through the different views you have created so how does this work if we first take a look at the notes template within the master notes database you will first notice these three properties related to projects related to areas related to resources and all three are relation properties I'm not going through the relation property today I'll include a link down below to this amazing video by Thomas Frank but essentially the relation property allows you to relate this page to another notion database of your choosing why does this matter let's go through an example I'm organizing a workshop and I took some notes here during this kickoff meeting under the related to projects property I select Secret Workshop project and when I open the Secret Workshop project page scroll down I only see the meeting notes for the kickoff meeting instead of all three notes that are part of the master notes database let's go through this step by step I first create a table like so and then under select data source I select the master noes database uh select all view and under filter I select related to projects and I select this Secret Workshop project which is this project and boom now I only see the kickoff meeting notes uh that is related to this project Pro tip if I now create a new notes page from this view notes for second meeting you'll see that notion automatically added a relationship between this new notes page with this current project and we can double check by going to the master notes database and yes indeed we see another notse page has been generated and it's related to The Secret Workshop project this brings me to the most important instruction in this entire video for every single one of your notes you must relate it to at least one other notion database because if all three relation properties are empty you risk losing track of this note and forgetting about its existence Pro tip to avoid this problem we can create a view under our Master notes database called missing relations and the filter is set to related to areas projects and resources are all empty so if we create a note my mistake with no relations it will show up under the missing relations view reminding us to add a relation by the way this video is not sponsored by notion for whatever reason but it is supported by those of you who subscribe to my paid productivity newsletter on Google tips Link in the description to learn more moving on to my typical workflow for taking notes there are only three ways I can start taking notes within notion first on my home screen I have this new note button here and if I click into the settings you'll see that I'm adding a new page into my simple notes database using a simple notes template yes I'm very creative with my naming the date is automatically populated with today's date and I'm adding this new page and opening it in side peek and this is how it looks like when I click that button the second way is what I mentioned earlier from within a project area or Resource page in the notes view I've already created I simply add a new note and notion automatically recognizes this note is related to this project this second method should be the most common way for you to add a notes within notion because you're usually taking notes when you're in a particular mind space you go into a meeting about project a you open up the project a page and you take notes related to project a you watch videos on how to invest in the stock market the notes you take should be related to the personal finances life area makes sense right the third method is through a free browser extension called save to notion if I'm reading an article online or watching a YouTube video and I want to save it I click the extension button select the notes template I want edit the fields and click save page Pro tip I've set up the extension so that all notes I add from the web are related to the Curiosity area it's just a knowledge database I named curiosity so that if I were to go back to notion I can see all my web clip notes on the Curiosity notion page and then I can update the Rel properties if I wanted to I've made an entire video on this free extension so I'll link both that and the master notes template database that I went through today down in the description below so you can just make a copy once you set all this up and you get used to the workflow here's an advanced productivity tip that will save you hours every week for example this is my Project's database and if I create a new project right now and I name it something like create Jeff GPT expand this scroll all the way down you'll see that a view of my master notes database has automatically been created and if I start a new note brainstorm ideas notion has automatically related this note to this current project at first glance this is not that impressive we saw this happened earlier on in the video but behind the scenes if I were to open up the template page within the Project's database and scroll down you'll see I created something called a self-referential filter for this template view a self-referential filter is where the related project property of a notes page contains the project template page so whenever I create a new project page this notes view will by default only show notes related to that new project this means I never again have to manually create a notes view for every project and then have to manually filter for the current project hope that wasn't too confusing if you have questions leave them down below if you enjoyed this you probably want to check out how I plan my day and week on notion as well see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one