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There are many productivity apps and project management solutions, which claim to be an all-in-one solution, but in my experience, there are very, very few that can live up to that claim.
So when I first heard of Notion, I was a little skeptical, but they truly are an all-in-one productivity platform, and in today's video, I wanna show you why, I wanna show you the various different things that you can create and build and link together within Notion and why you should take a serious look at this very cool tool.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here, at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And let's start out by showing you just a few examples which I've created here within Notion,and I'm gonna start by clicking on this one called Scott's Notes.
Now one of the first things that I love about Notion is that absolutely everything is customizable. Everything from this banner image you see up here to being able to add a logo or emojis to different aspects of the things that you're creating, and yes, it's so much more than just a note-taking tool.
Now here you can see I've got a few simple noteswhich I've created here, but it gets so much better than this because when I click on any one of these notes, let's click on this website re-design one, here you can see I can add almost anything within a note.
Not only is it gonna keep track of everythingthat I've been doing here and I can add tags, I can add other properties here. I can add whatever other property that I like, but look at this beautiful link to the website,the little previews that you can add.
If I come down here I've got almost an unlimited supply of different blocks, Notion refers to these as blocks, and it's so much more than just text and a to-do list. I can embed other pages and other notes which I create here within Notion.
Come down here I can mention other people and assign people to different notes and things. I love how it gives you an actual preview, before you add something. Let's say I wanna add like a little board in line here. If I click on it, look at that, I can actually have a Kanban board within a note, if that makes sense, or if that's useful to me, I can break it out laterif I wanna make this my own project management tool, but it's all here within this note.
And even within the notes view here, I can add different views. Let me jump here to a task list which I created earlier, and here you can see, I've got sort of a simple Kanban format here and we've seen this before, right? With other tools that we've used, I can simply drag things over to change their statuses.
If I click on them, again, I've got this beautiful workspace where I can add any additional element, any other additional details that I would like, but what if I don't like the board view or what if I want a few different views? No problem, how about if I just add a few different views.
So I've already added these two already, if I wanna calendar view of my boards and all of my tasks, I can do so. If I want a more traditional list view, I can do that as well, is that not enough? Let's add a view, look at all these additional views that we can add, including a gallery view, as well.
So if you don't need all of them, that's fine. Don't add it to that particular page or to that particular workspace, but so much flexibility here within Notion.
Another one that I wanna show you here is the Weekly Agenda. And what's great about this one, or sorry, not the Weekly Agenda, it's my homepage, my team homepage.
What's great about this is that you can create your own custom dashboard. So here you can see there's a few different areas, right? Company, Operations and Meetings, and this is more than just notes because if I click on the office calendar, that's gonna take me directly to the office calendar, and I've even got a nice breadcrumb system here at the top left of the page.
So if I go back here and I wanna see what's happening with Requested Time off, I can see that, I can see what's listed here in that space.
But the other great thing is that you can create your own templates, so let me give you a quick example. Here under Meetings, maybe I want myself and my team to follow sort of a preset meeting agenda. I want the Date up front, and I want the Agenda items, plus some Follow-Up and some Reference Material that I would like to be added to each and every one of our meeting agendas.
Well, this is something that already took place in the past, but what if I'm setting up a new meeting? Well, here I've created a template, all I'm gonna selectis Create a Meeting Agenda, and this is gonna launch a new meeting agenda,just waiting for me to input the information that I need.
So it's already here you can already pre load it or pre format it the way that you like and of course I can edit this later on.
If we jump down here to Templates, Notion makes it so easy for you to get started, you can see that they've grouped it by industry, or the type of work that you are thinking of doing or wanting to do, whether that's design,human resources, product management sales, and if you click on them, each of them have several examples.
So before you choose to start using one of these templates, you can actually see what it looks like. If I go into Personal here, and if I wanna look at well what does the reading list exactly look like? How would that oh, cool, it's kind of like a database, like a spreadsheet format here where you can add your own rating system, you can sort this any way that you want. You can customize this table, but it's a great launching off point, right? If you don't wanna build something from scratch, you can come in here and start with a beautiful template.
Now another big advantage that Notion has over many competitors is the ability to create a database or a spreadsheet format right here from within the system.
Now here you can see I've got a fairly simple one setup, but the great thing about this is that I can manipulate and I can filter this data in so many different ways.
Now when it comes to this simple example, I could start by filling out a new entry here and just go column by column, but what I find a lot more effective is as I go up here to the right hand corner, and if I select New, I can start with my new entry.
So let's say this is my new entry, and I can just follow this, almost like filling out a form. I can say this is okay, this is an Onboarding Flow. The status is it's scheduled, it's scheduled for later this week, email, you gonna leave that empty, I'm gonna be the interviewer, so I'm gonna select that, and completion time, we're gonna say 14 days.
And then if I wanna add further comments, I can do so, and when I come back to the main view, there we have it. There's my new entry with all that information that I filled in.
So even if this is a very lengthy or complex database which you have created, it's so much easier just to fill that in using the new and if I wanna open this back up, here I can go and change those settings, I can add that further information down below.
So there is your quick taste, your overview of Notion and I would love to hear from you next.
From everything that you've seen here, what excites you the most about Notion? What are you thinking of using Notion for? I'd love to hear from you, so be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
And if you'd like to try Notion for yourself, you can use it absolutely free, just click the link in the description.
Thank you so much for watching today's video and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
