For a long time now, Notion's calendar experience has been, let's face it, a little bit bare
bones.
Yes, you could create calendar views and databases, which was nice, but you couldn't actually
see the time spans of events in those calendar views because it didn't have a proper week
view, and setting start and end times to begin with was kind of a painful experience too.
But I am happy to report that that pain is largely going away because today, Notion is
launching a brand new app called Notion Calendar.
That's right, app, not feature.
This is a standalone app that connects to the core Notion app, but puts the focus squarely
on trying to create a great calendar experience.
And in the testing I've been able to do over the last week or so, I think they've largely
succeeded in that.
By far the best new feature they've added is the ability to bring multiple Notion databases
and see all the events that have dates or times from those databases overlaid in a single,
unified calendar view alongside actual calendar events from your Google accounts.
So in this video, I'm gonna give you a deep dive on that feature along with four additional
features I think you're really gonna want to know about, some really cool stuff, but
I'm also later on going to talk about my wishlist for future releases.
Because while Notion Calendar is a great app and I am genuinely excited about it, it's
not perfect.
And there is at least one big feature that I still think is sorely missing and that I
really hope we're going to see in the near future.
But first let's start with the good stuff and also a little bit on how you can start
using Notion Calendar for yourself.
So like you might've expected, Notion Calendar is an evolution and rebranding of Cron, which
is the calendar startup that Notion acquired in 2022.
So just like Cron, you can use it in Windows, in a Mac OS and iOS.
You can also use it in the browser over at calendar.notion.so.
And there's also an Android app in the works as well.
And I'm happy to report that Notion Calendar is free and works with Notion's free accounts,
which is great because I think if you're anything like me, you are actually going to want to
use it and integrate it into your normal Notion use, especially if you have multiple databases
that you would like to see in a single, unified calendar view.
Like I said before, I think this is the absolute best new feature in Notion Calendar.
And I want to jump right in and show you exactly how it works.
So here I have my own Notion Calendar.
And right now I'm just showing the events from my personal Google Calendar account.
So I'm just basically seeing my reading schedule, gym schedule, meeting schedule.
But down here, I also have this college info geek section.
And this is my Notion workspace with, as you can see, a couple of different Notion databases
connected.
So if I toggle those to visible, now I can actually see scheduled events from both of
those databases on my calendar alongside all my other events here.
So in addition to my meetings and my gym schedule, I can now see recurring business expenses
that are coming up.
So I can see if the charges that are coming up, if I want to actually keep those around
or cancel them, I'll show you that database behind that in just a second.
And I also have my editorial calendar so I can see which YouTube videos are coming out
on my channels in the near future.
And Notion Calendar has a very keyboard centric focus.
So in addition to UI elements, you can also switch over to say a month view with M, just
like that.
You can switch back to a week view with W like that.
And if you want to, you can even hold shift and scroll over multiple weeks in advance,
which I think is pretty sweet, then hit T to go right back to today.
And there are a lot of other keyboard shortcuts and hidden functionality, but for now I want
to show you how you can actually connect a Notion database to your calendar.
So the most important thing to know here is that the only type of Notion database you're
going to be able to connect is one where the core database has an existing calendar view.
So let me show you what that means.
I'm going to go over to my Notion account right here.
Here you can see my business expenses calendar.
This is basically a table, a sort of template of sorts that I created to show me the next
renewal date for all of our business expenses.
And after say January 17th passes, this one will go to February 17th, if it's monthly,
et cetera.
But you can also see that I have a calendar view of this database directly in the database
itself.
So this is important because you can also create what are called linked databases in
Notion, which are basically a view of a database that exists somewhere else.
But if you create a linked database and that has a calendar view, that's not going to cut
it.
You actually do need to create a calendar view in the core database itself.
And once you do, you're going to see this open in calendar button right there.
So to show you how that works, I've created this little calendar tasks database and notice
that it does not have its own calendar view yet.
So if I go over to calendar and I try to add it by going to this little three dot menu
down here and hitting add Notion database or hitting O, and I search for calendar tasks,
I'm not going to find it because it doesn't yet have a calendar view.
So if I go back to Notion and I add a calendar view or a timeline view, I should have mentioned
that as well.
You can also use a timeline view.
I'll hit done there.
Now I should be able to find this calendar tasks database.
So we'll go back over to Notion calendar.
I'm going to delete this here.
And now if I hit O, there it is, calendar tasks.
I can bring it in just like that.
And now you can see that I have these new tasks directly on my calendar.
And if I come down here, I can show or hide it.
I think I also can change the color of these tasks.
So let's go ahead and make those purple.
And just like that, now I can see the tasks from this database directly in Notion calendar.
Something else I can do is change their dates and times directly in Notion calendar, or
even create new events in that database from Notion calendar itself.
So let's say this shoot Notion calendar video should actually be on the schedule for today.
I could just drag it right down here.
Let's just say I'm doing it right now.
And it's going to take me about an hour.
So there I have adjusted the timeframe just like that.
If I go back over to Notion, you can see the time in the do column here has updated auto
magically.
Now, what if I want to add a new task from Notion calendar?
Well, I can do that as well.
Let's say that I want us to clean the office at the end of the day on Friday.
So let's go over to 4 p.m.
We can just drag an event like normal.
I'll call that clean office.
And now instead of having it go on my default Thomas Frank's calendar, which is pulling
from my Google account, I can switch over and I can find that calendar tasks database.
Now we have clean office.
If I go over to Notion itself, there it is clean office with the do a date and time frame
in the do column as you normally would see it.
Now, one little pro tip I want to share here, if you'll notice on my Notion calendar, all
of my other database pages have an icon and I elected to do that so I could easily and
visually separate Notion database pages from Google calendar events.
So a good way to do that is to use a feature that I don't think I've actually shown you
guys yet in a video, which is that you can click and drag to sort of select multiple
database rows here.
And you'll see this little checkbox is selected for each of them.
Now I can go to this three dot menu in this little context menu that pops up.
And if I add icons, I might want to add say a checkbox icon, just like that to each of
them.
And now if I go back over to Notion calendar and I refresh, actually didn't have to do
that.
Now I can see all those little task icons on my task events.
So that is by far my favorite new feature in Notion calendar but it's not the only one.
And now I wanna share four additional features that I think you're really going to want to
know about.
So the first of those is one that is gonna be great for anybody working with a team.
And it's the ability to actually overlay a teammate's calendar on top of your own, which
is great for finding time to meet or collaborate or do any of that kind of stuff.
And I do wanna show you a cool little trick here.
If you do command K on a Mac, or I believe control K on windows, you get this cool little
context menu and you can see all these different actions that you can do in Notion calendar.
And a lot of them have keyboard shortcuts as well.
So as you use the app more and more, you're gonna memorize these keyboard shortcuts and
you're gonna be able to do things really quickly.
For example, if I wanted to overlay a teammate's calendar, I can hit P just like that.
And now I have all these different people in my organization, all the people on my team.
And let's say that I wanna see Alex's calendar so we can find some time to meet.
Now I've overlaid his calendar and I can see he's got CIG work for all of these different
days.
He's got a meeting with somebody else at 7 AM my time.
Oh, and another really cool feature is you can see multiple time zones on the left hand
side here.
And I've gone ahead and actually given all these different nicknames.
So this one is for GMT plus eight.
That's where some of my staff is.
I've got one person in Poland.
That's actually where Alex is.
One person in the UK and then Denver is my own time zone.
So now I can see this meeting is happening at 7 AM my time, but it's actually happening
at 3 PM Alex's time.
And this is great if you're running, especially a remote team.
And speaking of team, if I scroll up in this left sidebar here, I can see those team calendars
and I can easily toggle their visibility as I want.
So if I'm trying to say, schedule a meeting with somebody on my team, I can just toggle
that visibility and see when they're free.
Speaking of scheduling, even if you're not running a team, a lot of us have to schedule
meetings often with people who are in different time zones or who don't work right next to
us.
And the next feature I wanna show you is really useful for that.
So I'm gonna go ahead and turn this off right here.
And if you notice over on the right side, there's this share availability button.
And when I click that, I get this overlay over my calendar and I can draw and create
some open slots on that calendar.
So if I'm trying to let somebody basically pencil themselves into my own calendar, this
is perfect for that.
So let's go ahead and create an hour long slot after this launch fly out or two beta,
maybe one after this meeting as well, another hour that I have open.
And then maybe right before this clean office task, I'll also open one more hour as well.
So now that I've basically painted these different sections or different open slots on my calendar,
you can see up here we get a couple of different things.
First, underneath availability, we get this little snippet of text.
Would 30 minutes during any of these times, all in MST work for you?
And then it lists out those times and those dates.
So if I'm emailing back and forth with somebody and they prefer scheduling things that way,
I can just copy that, paste it in my email and they'll be able to see when I'm free.
Also, if I'm interacting with somebody who's not in my time zone, note that down here I
have GMT negative seven for Denver as the default time zone, but I could change that.
So maybe I'm trying to schedule a meeting with Dave over at Nebula.
Let's just do Eastern standard time.
I'll click New York and notice up here, all of these change.
All in EST is now listed.
And now these time slots have actually shifted into EST, but even better in my opinion is
that once I create this availability section, we now have this scheduling link.
And if I click it or I send it to someone else, they basically get what's kind of a
calendly alternative.
They can basically pencil themselves in very easily.
Let's say they wanna go for 1 p.m. They can add their email and they are gonna be on my
calendar.
And there is going to be a conferencing link automatically created.
I've set Google Meet as my app of choice here, but if you wanted to use Zoom, you could use
that as well.
The next feature I wanna show you is called calendar blocking.
So as you can see here in Notion calendar, I actually have multiple calendar accounts
brought in to Notion calendar.
And as I'm working with teams, I might sometimes have events that are important to me and that
are going to represent a block period of time on the calendar, but maybe I don't necessarily
want to share the details of what those events are.
So over here, for example, I have a doctor appointment that is scheduled on my personal
calendar for 8.30 a.m. on Saturday.
Maybe I wanna block that off on my calendar so my team knows I'm busy then, but I don't
want them to know I'm going to the doctor because I don't want them to know I'm getting
injected with Hulk serum, right?
So I can go ahead and block on calendar by right-clicking right here, and then I can
go ahead and choose one of the calendars.
So CIG Thomas is the one that my team can typically see.
And now I get this little block event on CIG Thomas dialogue that gives me some options.
I can choose to include the details there or show as busy, and I can choose for that
preference to go to this event or all events on this entire calendar.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and stick with this event.
I'm gonna hit show as busy.
And now if I hide my personal calendar, we're gonna see this busy slot on my professional
calendar, my team calendar, and anybody who wants to overlay my calendar onto theirs and
see when I'm available, they're just gonna see busy.
They won't see the details of the event that actually exists on my main calendar, which
I think is a pretty sweet feature.
And last but not least is the ability to attach Notion pages to events from your Google account,
your actual calendar events.
So I'll show you how to do that really quickly.
Over here, we have an event called the GL meeting.
This is a new Monday meeting that me and my content team have.
It's for greenlighting new content ideas and going over content performance.
We're doing this every single Monday.
And like you'd expect, we have a meeting notes document in Notion that we use every single
time to record the details of that meeting.
So I've got GL meeting here on my calendar for Monday.
It's grayed out because it's past Monday now.
But if I wanted to add that meeting notes document to this event, over here in the docs
and links area, I can click this, and then I can actually search for Notion pages in
my Notion workspace.
So I'm gonna search for GL, and there it is GL meeting two.
That's the one we had on January 15th.
I'll add that to the document.
And then if I wanted to, I could click it to immediately go to that doc inside of Notion,
review those notes as needed.
And again, that is a pretty sweet feature.
So we've covered the features now.
At this point, I wanna talk about my wishlist items for future releases, hopefully sooner
rather than later.
Now I'm not gonna call these missing items or like a critique list because as a startup
founder myself, as somebody who is literally building productivity software with my team,
I realized that software is complex and building quality software takes time and takes a lot
of testing.
So I'm guessing that a lot of these features are probably planned coming down the pipeline
at some point.
I just wanna express my desire for them and hopefully maybe prioritize them a little bit.
So first and foremost, I talked about the coolest feature in Notion Calendar being the
ability to bring Notion events from a database in Notion to Notion Calendar.
One missing part of that feature, I think that we do need in the near future is the
ability to see pages that don't yet have a date property set.
So if I, for example, create a task without a date and I don't give it a due date, there
is no way in Notion Calendar to see that that page exists.
So what I would love to see is maybe like a little section over here where I can see
pages from connected databases that don't yet have a date property set and then I could
easily just drag them from that list onto my calendar and that would actually be a really
big quality of life upgrade for daily planning.
Say you have a list of tasks that haven't yet been scheduled, now you could just drag
them right onto your calendar, you could do timeboxing, you could do week planning, that
would be super cool.
The other big wishlist item I have right now and one that I've been asking for for years,
so this is a bit of a reiteration, is for true recurring tasks support.
And this is something that we're not going to have with a Notion Calendar release, it's
actually going to require a kind of big update to the Notion core product.
To get into it just a little bit, Notion basically needs what are called R rules.
All big calendar apps have these and they're basically rules for how singular database
items can be shown multiple times on a calendar or a timeline view.
So if you have a meeting that happens every single Monday, you'd wanna see that across
every Monday on your calendar, but that's actually represented by a single database
entry that has a single list of attendees, a single description and a single location,
which means if you say update the description or update location, it should update across
all upcoming events.
That's what R rules basically let calendar apps do and that is what Notion needs.
So hopefully see that in the near future.
Again, this is just customer feedback for the Notion Calendar team, I'm sure a lot of
these features are top of mind for them already, this is just me adding a little bit of weight
to the scale if I can.
So hopefully this was a good video introduction to the features in Notion Calendar.
If you wanna try it out, you can go over to notion.so/calendar and there you're gonna
find links to the web version as well as the downloads for the desktop and mobile versions.
If you are new to Notion or you want to upgrade your Notion skills, you can go over to thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals
where you're gonna find my Notion Fundamentals course that goes from the absolute basics
of pages and creating links to more advanced things like databases and formulas.
So if you wanna upgrade your knowledge, everything is there, it's completely free, it's completely
open and there's also a link where you can get lots of cheat sheets, all my free templates
and all sorts of other cool stuff.
There's also my Notion Tips newsletter, so if you wanna get notified when I publish new
tutorials and templates, definitely hop on that newsletter.
I am gonna give you a quick teaser of an upcoming video that I'm gonna be working on in the
near future.
Earlier in this one, I showed you a pretty cool little business expense tracker that
I use for my own business.
This basically shows me when all of my business expenses are going to be renewing, so it makes
sure that I will never be unwittingly charged for say something I bought a year ago that
is going to be auto renewing in a year.
So if you're interested in that, I'm gonna be building a tutorial and template for it
very soon.
Hop on that newsletter or make sure you're subscribed to this channel so you don't miss
it.
Otherwise, I'll have a couple of other videos here and here which you might be interested
in watching and as always, thanks for watching.
I'll see you in the next one.