Notion just launched a brand new integration with Cron,
the calendar app that they acquired last year.
And in this quick video,
I'm gonna show you exactly how to use
this brand new integration.
And as a little bonus,
I'm also gonna share a little integration
that I coded up today,
which will actually sync new events
from Notion to your calendar.
Because spoiler alert,
this integration with Cron doesn't do that.
Maybe we'll get that in the future,
but for now it does something a little bit different.
Still pretty cool.
So later on in the video,
I'm gonna show you that little syncing automation
I coded up, share it with you.
But first and foremost,
let's dig into this brand new Cron integration
because it is pretty sweet.
So here in Cron,
which is my calendar app of choice these days,
if I click on an event,
I now have this new Docs and Links section right here
in the event details.
And this will actually allow me to link Notion pages
from a connected Notion workspace
directly in my calendar app.
So if I click this, I can first connect to Notion,
and that's gonna give us
our classic Notion connection dialogue here.
I'm gonna select my super experimental workspace,
allow access, and that is all you have to do.
Now you're gonna see this little dialogue that pops out
and you'll see all of your recent pages
from that connected workspace.
And I will also know if you wanna connect
additional workspaces,
you can just go to manage workspaces right here
and you can easily connect an additional one if you want.
From there, you can select those recent pages.
You can also search.
So for example, if I really wanted to add
my MTG combos page right there, I could search for it
or I could actually go over to Notion itself.
And if I'm on a Notion page, I can hit command L
which is going to be control L on a Windows machine
to copy the URL of the page to my clipboard.
I can go back over to Cron
and I can add it just by pasting that link right there
and clicking the title that comes up.
So this basically allows you
to very easily add Notion page attachments
directly inside of Cron.
There are other apps that work as well like Figma.
And then when you invite people to your events,
they're gonna get access to those Notion pages as well.
So it's just a really seamless way
to give people access to say meeting notes
or other Notion pages
that are relevant to a meeting you're having.
Now, before we go over to that little sync workflow
that I built for you,
I do wanna point out a couple other cool features from Cron
in case you haven't checked them out yourself.
First and foremost, there is a conferencing option here.
So you can automatically have a Zoom or Google Meet URL
added to new events that you create, which is pretty sweet.
And there's also this cool little feature
to the left of your calendar here
where you can actually add multiple different time zones.
And Cron has lots of other cool features as well.
So I'd recommend checking it out if you are curious.
But for now, I'd like to move on
to what this integration launch doesn't currently cover.
and that is syncing events from Notion to your calendar.
This is something that I have wanted from Notion
for a very long time.
We still don't have it.
And being kind of a code nerd at this point,
I do understand that there are a lot of technical reasons
that make it quite difficult,
especially when we're talking about two-way sync,
which is something that we just can't really do very well
at this point.
So I have taken it upon myself
to at least help us get part of the way there
by publishing an automation
that will at least push new events from Notion
to your Google Calendar.
And if you happen to use Google Calendar,
you can easily hook that up to Cron,
which I have done myself.
I've built this automation in Pipe Dream,
which is my new favorite automation builder platform.
And because Pipe Dream is so customizable on the code side,
I'm actually able to share the workflow I've built with you
and make it extremely easy to set up.
Let's go ahead and do it.
So first and foremost,
there is a link that I've shared
in the description down below.
I've also put it at the bottom
of this random meeting notes here in Notion.
If you click this,
it's going to basically open up a brand new workflow
in your Pipe Dream account.
And if you don't have a Pipe Dream account,
you'll be able to create one as well.
One of my favorite things about Pipe Dream
is it is extremely affordable.
In fact, their free plan will let you do
almost anything you want.
So you can run this for free,
and it's a lot more capable than Zapier or make.com
or basically any other automation platform
I've seen out there.
Basically what this is going to do
is trigger every 15 minutes,
or if you want to adjust the schedule, you can.
It's gonna look for new pages in a Notion database
that you choose,
and it's gonna push those to your Google Calendar.
So first we'll connect our Notion account
by clicking right here.
I've already got mine set up
and I've chosen my super experimental space.
One thing I will note
is that when you're connecting your Notion account,
do make sure to give it permission to the database
or the page that contains the database
that you wanna use for your new events.
I'm also going to change the timer
from every 15 minutes to every hour.
And that has to do with how Pipe Dream handles the credits
on its free account.
You can do every 15 minutes,
but it's gonna use most of the credits
that you're gonna get in a day.
So I'd recommend going to an hour instead.
After that, I'm gonna select my database ID
and I'm gonna go with the all tasks UB database right here.
So basically I'm going to sync tasks
from my Notion workspace over to my Google calendar.
I'll hit create source right here
and that is going to basically set up this trigger
and that is the first step we have to actually go through
to get this working.
And once the trigger is finished setting up,
we now have to select an event.
And basically what we're gonna wanna do
is actually go over to Notion and create a test event,
which we can then use as like sort of dummy data
to set up the rest of our workflow.
So to do that, I'm gonna go over to the task manager here
in Ultimate Brain.
This is my template for complete personal productivity
inside of Notion.
I'm gonna head over to the today view right here
and I'm just gonna create a brand new task
called fittingly, film cron video.
I'm then going to give it a due date
and I'm also gonna give it a due time and an end date
because I wanna show you how this integration
actually works for both of those.
And let me scroll down a bit so I can hopefully,
there we go, get the dialogue looking a little bit better.
So I'm gonna set this from, let's just say 3 p.m.
to 5 p.m. and that will be our dummy event.
And now we can go back over to Pipe Dream,
hit this Try Now button, and it should grab our event.
And there it is.
I'll select the event right there.
It's going to bring in the details,
which you don't have to worry about.
And I'm gonna hit Continue.
Now I've got this second step,
which is called Notion Settings.
And the first thing you're gonna wanna do
is select the exact same Notion account
and the exact same database that you were working on before.
So I'm gonna find my database.
There it is, All Tasks UB.
And then these two different properties are gonna pop up.
event name property and then the date property.
So the event name is going to be just the task name
or the event name.
And the date property is the date property
that you want to use for setting your dates
and times inside of your calendar.
In my case, I wanna use due,
but there are some other choices you can see as well.
So I'll click due here, I'll click test
and we should get a success message in just a second.
There it is.
And you can see we have a name, we have a start date
and we have an end date.
And if you don't set an end date,
your end date is going to be the exact same
as your start date.
I'll hit continue there.
And then finally, all I have to do
to select my Google Calendar account, and that's it.
These three values are pre-filled for you.
You don't have to mess with them.
We can hit test right now.
And it looks like we have a successful event creation.
So let's hop over to Cron and see, there it is,
film Cron video, and we even have the start
and end time filled in correctly.
Last but not least, back over at Pipe Dream,
you'll hit deploy, and that will make your workflow live.
So from here on out, basically every hour,
Pipe Dream is gonna check for new pages
inside of that Target Notion database.
And for every one of them,
it's gonna kick off this automation.
it's gonna send it over to your Google Calendar
and then it'll pop up in whatever calendar app you use.
Now, admittedly, this is a pretty simple automation.
Right now, it doesn't handle updating events
and it definitely won't do two-way sync,
but at the very least, you can now add a task
or an event to a Notion database
and you can have it pushed automatically to your calendar
and I think that is pretty useful.
So link is in the description down below.
You will also find written instructions for this automation
in case the video is a bit too fast for you.
And if you do want a full system inside of Notion
for managing not only your tasks and your projects,
but also notes and goals and all kinds of other great stuff,
definitely check out my Ultimate Brain template as well
over at thomasjfrank.com/brain.
Over 20,000 people have already used this template
and are using it to manage their lives.
And if you want a truly all-in-one solution
for managing your personal productivity
and your second brain in Notion,
if you wanna stop juggling
tons of different productivity apps,
I think you're really going to like Ultimate Brain.
And it also comes with tons of tutorials,
onboarding guides, and active support,
along with a 30 day refund guarantee.
Best of all, right now, if you use the code
let's go 2023 at checkout,
you'll also get 50 bucks off of Ultimate Brain
or any of my other templates as well.
Now, if you're curious about Pipe Dream,
which we showed off in this video in a very simple way,
you might also wanna check out that video right here,
which shows you how to use Pipe Dream
to actually send voice notes,
get them transcribed and get them summarized
and send all that over to Notion.
I'll see you there.
(upbeat music)