I've been using Notion's brand new app, Notion Calendar,
as my personal calendar daily driver
for the past few weeks.
And in that time, I have found some pretty cool tricks
and features that I didn't talk about
in my initial video on Notion Calendar
and that you might not know about.
So in this video, we're going to cover 10 brand new features
and tricks inside of Notion Calendar
that you probably haven't heard of before.
And if you stick around all the way
to the end of this video, you, my friend,
are gonna become a certified calendar master
and I don't know, gain control over all space and time
and stuff like that.
But anyway, let's jump into the first tip,
which is, in my opinion, the coolest one.
It's why I'm putting it right at the beginning here.
Here on my Notion Calendar, you can see I have an event
on Tuesday the 23rd called Productivity Lessons
from Pokemon, which might be a video
that I publish on my main channel.
But weirdly, if I go two weeks into the future,
in a different color, I have the same Productivity Lessons
from Pokemon event.
So what is going on here?
Well, if we go over to Notion,
we can see that I have a videos database here
that has two different date properties,
one for the script lock date,
basically the date at which the script should be finished,
and one that is the publish date.
So the cool thing you can do with Notion Calendar
that I discovered just this morning
is you can put both of these dates on your calendar
even though they correspond
to the same exact page in Notion.
The way you do it is by making a calendar date
for each of those different date properties.
So let me quickly show you how that works.
Basically, if I open up, say, this Productivity Lessons
from Pokemon video right here,
you can see I have two different date properties,
each of their own different date values.
So over in this view, which I've called script lock,
I basically have a calendar view.
And if I open up this little three-dot menu here
and go into layout,
you can see that I am showing the calendar
by the script lock date property.
So over here, we have that Productivity Lessons
from Pokemon event at January 23rd, 2024.
But then over here in this publish view
that is also a calendar view,
we are instead calendaring by the publish date property.
So basically, we have two separate calendars
in this database that are showing the same pages
on different dates.
Well, the cool thing is in Notion calendar,
you can actually bring both of those views
into Notion calendar.
And I'll go ahead and remove them really quickly
just so you can see exactly how it works.
So I'm gonna remove videos twice here
from my little college InfoGeek area.
I'm gonna hit refresh just to make sure the calendar
is nice and ready for this operation.
We'll hit T to go to today.
And then if I go down to my college InfoGeek Notion workspace
and I add a Notion database,
and now we can see both of those calendar views
are available to be chosen.
So if I choose that script lock view, it comes in.
Unfortunately, as videos,
it doesn't show the name of the view quite yet,
but I can do the exact same thing.
Hit O, choose that college InfoGeek space,
choose that videos database,
and then also choose that publish view.
And now I have them both.
So we can see this videos view shows me the script lock date.
And then if I go over two weeks from now,
we can see the exact same page in a different color,
and that's going to represent the publish date.
Now here is where I have a feature request
for the Notion team.
Obviously this has a little bit of roughness to it right now
because I can't actually see, number one,
any of the database properties,
such as the fact that this is a script lock
or published date.
And I also can't even see which calendar view
this is coming in from.
Now, if I click these individual views over here on the side,
I can see published right there
and I can see script lock right there.
So it kind of works,
but I would love to see this fleshed out in the future.
So we could, again, represent multiple dates
for a single Notion page directly on the calendar
and see the context of those dates
on Notion calendar as well.
Tip number two is all about connecting
complex Notion templates, like my ultimate brain template
or anybody else's complex template you might be using
up to Notion calendar.
I got a lot of questions about this
in my original video on Notion calendar,
as well as over in our customer community for our templates.
So I want to show you how to do it.
And this is going to equip you to be able to work
with basically any complex template and this app.
So here I have a demo version of the task manager
in my template ultimate brain,
which basically has tasks and projects and notes,
a whole productivity system all in one.
And if we scroll down on the task manager,
we can see that there are calendar views
for these task views here.
But when I go over to Notion calendar
and I find my little template demos workspace
that I've connected and I try to add a Notion database,
nothing shows up.
The reason for that is basically stated right here.
Databases with a calendar or timeline view
in Notion appear here.
And the problem with these calendar views
is that they're actually linked database views.
Basically a linked database is a wholly separate block
in Notion that kind of gives you a window
to a source database that lives somewhere else.
So right now with a Notion calendar,
we actually have to add the calendar view
to the source database itself.
Adding one as a linked view isn't going to cut it.
So let me show you a really quick trick for doing that
and getting to that source database very easily.
First, choose any page in the database
you're trying to work with.
So right here, I've got book reservation at Best Friend,
which is my favorite restaurant in Las Vegas.
Try it if you ever get the chance.
I'm gonna open this up as a full page
and that is gonna give me access to the breadcrumbs up here.
And directly to the left of the page that I'm on right now
is the database that contains that page.
So now I have made it to the source database,
this all tasks database.
And if I unlock it,
because we lock the databases in our templates
to prevent accidental changes,
now I'll be able to add a new view directly to the database.
So if I hit plus right here and then I choose calendar,
I can hit done.
And actually before I hit done,
I want to change this show calendar by property
from wait date to do,
which is what I want a calendar by.
If I hit done there,
now I've got this calendar view
directly in the source database.
And if I go back to Notion calendar,
give it a good old refresh with command R.
Now when I hit O and I go into template demos,
I can see all tasks UBCC
because we now have that calendar view.
So if I click to add that,
now I'll be adding all those tasks
directly to my Notion calendar.
And if we look back at Notion,
we should have a few tasks throughout the week,
book reservation, send newsletter,
get new dumbbells, et cetera.
So if we go back over to Notion calendar,
let's see if we actually see those.
Book reservation at best friend is on there with a time
and the rest of them are there as all day events.
And a cool thing you can actually do with Notion calendar
is drag your all day events,
even if they are Notion pages down into the calendar
and schedule them just like that.
So now I have a two hour event called get new dumbbells
and if I go back over to Notion,
I can see that the Notion page has gotten
that time and date range as well.
Tip number three is all about time travel,
specifically time zone travel.
So in my previous video on Notion calendar,
I did point out that you can add multiple time zones here
to the left side of the week view.
It doesn't quite work in the month view,
it's not gonna show you them there,
but in week view,
you can see up to four different time zones.
And here I've got one for Denver, one for the Philippines,
one for Poland and one for the UK.
But there's one small problem with this feature
and that's that,
while you can see what time it is
in each of these different time zones,
it's not readily apparent how this time here
on say an event called get new dumbbells
that is scheduled for 2 p.m.
translates to a different time zone.
But that can be fixed with their time zone travel feature.
So I'm actually gonna hit J and go over to another week
and here I've got this example meeting with Dave event
that is happening at 3 p.m. my time.
But Dave is actually in New York.
So if I wanna travel to New York time zone,
I can hit Z and then I can find Eastern Standard Time
in New York, enable that.
And now I have temporarily shifted my entire calendar
over to Eastern Standard Time,
which you can see by the red highlighting here.
And we can see that meeting with Dave
is now displayed at 5 p.m. New York time.
So this is a great way to basically shift
your entire calendar into a different time zone.
So you can see what it would look like
from the perspective of somebody in that time zone.
And then if I want to time travel back to my home time zone,
I can just hit escape and boom,
I'm right back in Mountain Time.
Tip number four is all about left aligning the today column
so you can see more of what's coming up on your calendar.
So here on my calendar,
you can see we're about in the middle of the week,
it's Tuesday, and this Tuesday column in my calendar
is right about in the middle of the UI.
But if I hit option T or alt T on Windows,
I can actually left align today
and I can see the next upcoming seven days,
which is pretty useful.
But I think this gets even more useful
if we go into month view.
So if I hit M to go to month,
you can see we're also about in the middle of the month.
So half of my UI here is taken up by days
that are in the past and are no longer relevant to me.
Once again, if I hit option T, alt T on Windows,
I basically take today all the way to the top of the UI
and now I can see basically six weeks out in advance,
which is great for planning.
By the way, in month view,
you can also use the mouse scroll wheel
to scroll up and down.
And then if you go to week view,
you can hold shift and scroll to go sideways,
back and forth, which is also pretty useful.
Tip number five is all about documents
that you might want to attach to recurring events.
So over here on my Monday column in my calendar,
I have an event called the GL meeting.
This is what we call the green light meeting
in my content team.
It's where myself, my script writer, and my editor
get together every single Monday and we brainstorm ideas,
we green light videos that we're going to make
and we look over the performance of past videos.
So like you might expect, we have a meeting notes database
where we have a specific meeting note
for every one of these meetings.
And you can see here in the little document link area,
I have the meeting for our GL meeting three
on this past event.
But this is actually a recurring event in Notion calendar.
And if I go over to next week, I can see the exact same thing
nine o'clock Monday next week.
But over here in the docs and links area,
I don't have a link to that GL meeting three
and I actually wouldn't want it.
Ideally, I would want the link
to the next week's meeting notes.
And I would love if Notion gave us the ability to say,
spawn a Notion template based on a recurring event
and just automatically attach it.
But in the meantime, a little workflow trick for you
is instead of attaching that specific meeting note
right there, I would recommend attaching the database itself.
So here we have one of our GL meeting notes here
and this lives inside of our meeting notes database.
If I hit command L to copy that URL to my clipboard,
I can go back over to Notion calendar
and inside of this recurring event,
I can actually add that instead,
which I'll just do by hitting meeting notes right there.
I'll go ahead and send the update
and I'm going to choose this and following events.
So that way this meeting notes database
is on every single GL meeting that we have in the future.
Now, this isn't a perfect solution
because it does actually add an additional click
to the process.
I have to click into the meeting notes database
and then I have to find the specific meeting note
that I want.
But I do think it's a little bit of an improvement
over having to make a new page every single week
and then manually link that page
to the specific recurrence of the meeting
that you are going into.
So again, I think Notion could make this a little bit better
with a feature update,
especially tying into that recurring templates feature
that they released a couple of years ago.
But until then, I think linking a meeting notes database
to your recurring meetings
instead of the specific meeting documents is an upgrade.
Speaking of meetings, tip number six here,
last week I showed you that you could hit P
and overlay a teammate calendar on top of your own,
but there's also another feature that's really useful
if you need to actually schedule a meeting
with someone on your team.
And that is if you hit F,
you can actually do a meet with feature
and I'll just select Tony right here.
And this will overlay their calendar automatically
on top of yours.
And also basically bring up that little scheduling interface.
So it's gonna show you all the areas
where either one of you has a currently booked event.
So you won't be able to book your meeting
during those times,
but in any of these open areas,
you can just draw like you could normally
to create a scheduling link
and you're gonna automatically create a meeting
with that person.
It's going to automatically generate a conferencing link
and you can even send the invite just like that.
Tip number seven,
you can actually get rid of the weekend days
on your calendar and you can zoom the hours in
just to see your specific work hours.
I had somebody specifically ask about this,
so I wanted to show you exactly how you could do it.
So right now we have a bit of a cluttered UI.
First and foremost, if I hit the little back tick key,
I can get rid of that left side menu.
Can't do it with the right menu yet,
but that alone is pretty helpful.
And then if I don't wanna see these weekend days,
I can hit Command + Shift + E to get rid of them.
I believe it's Control + Shift + E on Windows.
And then if I do Command + Shift and period,
I can actually zoom my hours in.
So if I just wanted to see between the hours of say 11
and I think this is 5 p.m. right here, I could do that.
If I wanted to, I could zoom out with Command + Shift + Comma
and then I could zoom back out.
And this is a way where I can basically zoom in or out
to specifically see only a slice of my day.
So here, this is basically nine to five.
So this now gives me just a view of my work week.
I'm not distracted by my weekends.
I'm not distracted by what I'm doing in the evenings.
I can plan just my work hours.
Now I do have another feature request
for the Notion Calendar team here.
Please give us this in the form
of a single keyboard shortcut.
I think a good way to do this is number one in the settings,
allow people to set their work hours,
maybe eight to five or nine to five
and then create a keyboard shortcut
that will hide those weekend days
and zoom directly to those work hours.
I think that's gonna be a real boon,
especially once, hopefully this happens,
we get non-scheduled Notion pages from connected databases
so we can drag them in and basically time box our weeks.
And speaking of dragging things,
that's what tip number eight is all about
because did you know that you can actually drag
multiple events to new time slots
even if they're in a different week?
So if you click and drag in Notion Calendar,
you're basically going to be highlighting an area
where you're gonna create a new event
and this will be like a three-day event right here.
But if you hold shift and then you click and drag,
you'll actually select multiple events
and then with them selected,
you can easily drag them to a different day
such as me dragging them over to Thursday right here.
But if you just keep on dragging,
you'll actually go into another week.
So if I wanted to put these on Thursday next week,
that is how I could do it and that's super quick.
Tip number nine is that you can actually set
a different calendar to be your default calendar
here in Notion Calendar.
And this is something that might be obvious to some people
but I actually didn't know it until just recently
and it's quite useful.
So for a bit of context here, inside of Notion Calendar,
you can see that I can actually bring in
multiple Google accounts into Notion Calendar.
So I've got about four different email addresses here
with multiple calendars for each
which basically gets rid of the need
to have a single Google account
that subscribes to all of your other Google accounts
and makes like this single unified calendar.
Basically, Notion Calendar does that for you
but by default, you're still going to have
a default calendar here and in my case,
it's the one associated with my personal calendar account
which would be fine except for a lot of my events now
have to do with team meetings or basically are things
that my team needs to be able to see.
So if I just right click here on a different calendar
within a different account, I can make that my default
and now if I make a brand new event just like that,
let's just call this, I don't know, Pogo Sticking,
it's going to be on the CIG Thomas account by default.
Of course, I can easily switch it over if I want to,
I can still do that cool little blocking thing
if I wanted to but having a different default calendar
I think is pretty useful.
For tip number 10, I wanna show you how to reclaim
a little bit of the vertical space here in Notion Calendar.
So before I showed you with backtick,
you could basically close that menu,
get some horizontal space but we have a ton
of all day events right here that is taking up
a ton of vertical space near the top of my calendar
and I just can't see a whole lot of what's going on
in the actual schedule but if I hit Command + K
and then I search for collapse,
I can actually collapse the all day section
down to a single line and then if I want to,
I can either click it or if I go ahead and collapse this
one more time, you can also search for with Command + K,
expand all day section.
Weirdly, there doesn't seem to be keyboard shortcuts
for this just yet, I'm guessing that is something
they could add pretty quickly but until then,
again, it's just Command + K, search for collapse
and there you go.
And for tip number 11, because I'm going above and beyond
in this video and bringing you a bonus tip,
up here in this little week dropdown menu,
if you got a number of days, notice that you can actually
show more than seven days in the week view.
And in fact, if we go to number of days and other,
we can show up to 31 days in that week view
which because I'm so zoomed in with my UI here
for these tutorials, it's not very useful
but if we went and set say 14 days,
so I'll just type 14 and find it right there,
this could be pretty useful if you were say,
booking a vacation or planning a team retreat
or planning a business trip that spans more than seven days.
Now month view is gonna show you all those days
and we'll show you little blocks for the events
but for that kind of planning, you might actually wanna see
these specific time slots for things like restaurant
reservations or shows you're attending or meetings
or anything like that.
So I think this is a pretty useful feature
even if it's pretty niche.
And with that, you now have 11 more tips
for getting the most out of Notion Calendar
which should hopefully combo with the tips
from my first video to make you a true master of this tool
and like I promised in the intro,
now a master of time and space itself.
Now speaking of comboing, Notion Calendar now combos
really well with the core Notion app to create
a basically perfect personal productivity system.
You've got your calendar here and then over in Notion,
you can do note taking, you can do project management,
you can do task management and a whole lot more,
especially if you have a good system that helps to do
all those things in one place.
And that is exactly what you can get
with my ultimate brain template.
This is the product of me learning and tinkering
and experimenting with Notion for basically five years
at this point and building what really works best for me
as a personal productivity system that brings tasks,
projects, notes, goal tracking and a whole lot more
into a single system.
And if you would like to try this system out for yourself,
you can get it over at thomasjfrank.com/brain
and you can even use Let's Go 2024 as a coupon code
at checkout to get 50 bucks off of the template.
And in addition to the template itself,
you also get access to our customer community
where we have a great beginners course
all about how to use this template, get the most out of it
and also maximize your personal productivity
and if you get stuck, we also have Notion certified experts
in our support spaces that make sure every single question
gets answered.
So if you want the best productivity system for Notion
and a great companion to Notion calendar,
get ultimate brain over at thomasjfrank.com/brain
and don't forget to use that code,
Let's Go 2024 to get 50 bucks at checkout.
If you didn't see my original Notion calendar video,
you can watch it right there.
There's also one more video right there
that you might find interesting.
Otherwise, I will see you in the next video.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)