Top 14 Notion Tips for Productivity!

Key Takeaways

okay i'm not saying notion copied google but we know that cal dot new opens up a new calendar event meet dot new opens up a new google meets sheets dot new opens up a new google sheets file and notion.new opens up a new notion page suspicious now i'm just playing this shortcut is awesome let's get started hi friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is jeff and in this video i'm going to be sharing 14 of my favorite notion tips and workflows that have drastically improved my experience with this tool since there is quite a bit of content to cover i've broken these down into three different categories time savers designed to speed up your workflow organizational tips to help you better manage your notion workspace and aesthetics that preserve the functionality of your setup while making it look nice and pretty exhibit a just kidding going straight into tip number two create template buttons for items or pages you need to duplicate on a regular basis if you watched my weekly planner video you might have noticed i primarily use the template button in two ways first i press the template button here to generate an empty weekly planner page every sunday evening second within the planner page itself i have a template button here that just generates checkboxes for my to do list which is like five milliseconds faster than using the left bracket right bracket shortcut i know but it adds up if there's a part of your workflow that requires you to duplicate elements again and again uh journal entries grocery lists i highly recommend you create a template button by pressing forward slash template giving a name magic button and dragging anything from individual blocks to entire pages into it time saver tip number three take advantage of notions latest synced blocks feature staying within my weekly agenda page you might have noticed that i have a daily to-do list and a weekly to-do list what i used to do is at the end of every week on sunday evenings i would copy the weekly action items i have not gotten to yet and paste them into next week's planner page to get rid of this extra step i actually decided to make a synced block by copying the weekly action items column here going into the agenda page template i would create every sunday evening and pasting it and selecting paste and sync now the tasks from last week which i have not gotten to yet are automatically brought over and for the ones that are complete i usually throw it into the archives page beforehand so those do not show up in next week's weekly action item does that make sense tip number four set smart reminders for yourself so this tip is extremely helpful for those of you with a gtd or getting things done system in place in short if you want to remind yourself to take an action within your notion database instead of capturing that in another app like todoist you can simply go to the block you want to come back to press at remind click it toggle on include time and select when you want to be notified this way notion will actually notify you either through desktop or mobile depending on your settings and of course it wouldn't be a jeff suit video without keyboard shortcuts so tip number five includes the ones i use every single day to quickly go from one format like a numbered list to a bullet point instead of pressing backspace dash space or using the forward slash turn into function bullet list what you can do is simply even with the number list in place press dash space and it automatically converts well like what i mainly use this for is for let's say a check box big project instead of indented check boxes underneath i want to have bulleted list step one step two step three and after indenting you can actually press shift tab to unindent i mentioned this already but left bracket right bracket to quickly create a checkbox and for headers you can use one pound sign to create header number one two pound signs for header number two double kill three pound signs for header number three triple tap just like how you would triple tap that like button all right uh moving along command p or control p on windows to quickly search your entire workspace what i like to do is add a filter and select only match titles to improve search accuracy and i love to color code within my pages and it used to drive me crazy to have to click the block choose color and choose a background color uh right now i just do forward slash color yellow and use my arrow keys and enter to select uh the highlighted color so as you can probably tell i'm not an expert with notion if you have any time-saving tips i might have missed please let me know down in the comment section below because i love to learn from you guys and take credit for it in my next notion video um moving over to organization tip number six is to use the notion web clipper tool to quickly save a link and start taking notes in your notion database whenever i come across any online content i want to take notes on let's say i'm watching jeremy ethia's latest video on push-ups so i can build out my d cup i press the extension button here to quickly save the link into my knowledge database i'm going to make a whole other video on how i use my knowledge database to quickly capture learnings and inspirations from multiple sources but for now just know that the web clipper tool is able to bring over the link the title and the content in a neat little package for you to start taking notes on pro tip number one you can press enter at the end of your page title to create a line right above your content uh content below color gray to make it look nice and structured and pro tip number two is that if you have the notion mobile app installed you can actually clip links without installing anything extra you just click the share button up top here and if you don't see notion by default simply scroll to the right click more and select notion now you can literally just add to your workspace press save and within a couple of seconds it should update directly in your notion database notion organizational tip number seven is what i like to call hierarchical sort let me show you what i mean so in this database it has all my video ideas and i would like to first see the videos with an estimated publish date up top and the remaining ones sorted by last updated so what's cool about the sort function here is that the ranking dictates which one takes priority so right now i'm telling notion to prioritize the ones with an estimated publish date and then for those without a publish date list them in descending order by last updated and on that note i always create the created by and updated by properties in all my template pages since they're not created by default and hide them to keep the interface a little bit tidier tip number eight is to include an embedded archived page within every main page and template this is simply an empty page at the bottom here with a files icon that can just throw any outdated information into so in my weekly planner i would just throw all the completed action items into the archived page so i can start the next day with a clean slate and for those of you who are just gonna say oh why don't you just delete it i have fomo okay you never know when you need to reference that one task from two years ago and just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it'll never happen so just let me be all right clean freak organizational tip number nine is a trick i picked up from thomas frank and it's a roundabout way to create nested columns within notion so this is what we want to achieve one paragraph up here two columns in the middle and one paragraph at the bottom with a large image to the right that we can move freely however you'll find that if you try to do this the normal way it doesn't work if you try to move the large image to the right it becomes very awkward and you can't even move it down here it just doesn't work so what you want to do is first create a page and set up the two column structure like you normally would one paragraph two columns and a third paragraph down here and you embed it within a page now going back out you move the large image to the right of that embedded page and you click the embedded page and click turn into text you just need to delete the header up here and voila there you go with the nested columns very cool trick thomas thank you very much tip number 10 is use the toggle feature to hide blocks videos screenshots that you want to reference but do not want to take up too much a screen real estate this is a very simple feature uh everyone's probably using this already but come on look at how clean this keeps the entire page and by the way this is a small teaser for my notion booknotes video that's coming up in the next one or two weeks so make sure you're subscribed for that organizational tip number 11 is another quickie and it's about how you can link to any specific block within notion this is very helpful if you have a very long page this is my google photos video page and at the bottom here i actually want to reference keywords that i already have at the top so what i would do is scroll all the way to the top find the block that i need to copy that i need to reference rather copy link and go all the way back down highlight this command k and paste the link directly so now when i click it it just jumps directly the block that i need to reference multiple times as i go through my video planning stages finally moving over to aesthetics aka looking good so tip number 12 is using your own custom icons instead of a default ones like the one here so the platform i like to use is flat icons and my search for photos up here i find one i really like click download download this and of course attribute the author go back to my notion page click the icon upload an image choose an image select this image and now i'm super unique tip number 13 is of a consistent color scheme for recurring headers for example in all my pages with a notes section the notes header will always have a gray background and for the pages with an action items or next steps section the background will usually be in green this consistent color scheme just helps my brain process the information on the page that much quicker last but not least tip number 14 is use the comment feature to remind yourself of something without cluttering up the page with unnecessary text so let's say in this column i want to leave myself a note i could add a few words in brackets for example um new video idea and italicize it but this is not ideal instead what i can do is simply highlight the phrase i know i want to come back to command shift m or ctrl shift m on windows and simply add a comment now the comment will only expand if you click on the highlighted phrase or click the comment icon here this is just another example of how notion gives equal weight to form and function please let me know down in the comments below if you have a tip to share with me i love to hear from you see you on the next video and in the meantime have a great one