- Notion has just released a brand new feature
called Recurring Templates.
And in this video I'm gonna show you exactly how to use it,
what it's all about.
And we're also gonna go over five additional
new features that you might not have heard about.
Welcome back to Thomas Frank Explains,
I'm Thomas Frank, and if you are into Learning Notion,
this is the channel to do that.
And we're just gonna jump right into this brand new feature
because actually pretty interesting
and Marks a very interesting turning point
for the entire Notion platform.
So what is a Recurring Template?
Well, you can see here I have a sample meeting
notes database inside of one of my workspaces.
And as you can see
I have all these rows in this database for meeting notes.
I've got daily meetings
I've got Monday, Wednesday, Friday meetings
and these were all created automatically using
Notion's new Recurring Templates feature.
And if I go up to this little blue arrow
on the new button at the top right corner
I can actually see how to set it up.
So I've got several different templates
inside of this database that I have to find.
And right now I would have to manually create instances
of these templates, but if I go to the edit button
for one of these templates, I now have a repeat option.
And if I change this from off to something else
I can have it repeat
and automatically create a brand new page
in this database using this template on a schedule.
So I've got a few choices here.
I've got repeat daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.
And I'm actually gonna go down to a new version
of this database and show you exactly how I'd set that up.
And you can see
that I've got a daily standup template right here.
And if I open it up and edit it
we can see that I've got a few call up boxes in here.
I've got action items.
And let me just open this
as a full page so we get some more space here.
We've got process improvements, we've got meeting minutes
and this is a nice little example
of a daily standup meeting template that you might create.
I also have a tag
in here that will automatically be applied.
I could have other ones if I wanted.
And normally, like I said earlier
I would have to manually create the new row every day
and then apply this template.
But because this is a daily standup meeting
we're gonna have it every single day
at least during the weekdays.
So I can now use the new Recurring Templates feature to
make sure this automatically gets created on a schedule.
So I'm gonna go to, again, this little blue arrow here.
I'm gonna edit this template
and I'm gonna set the repeat actually
to every week because if I set it to every day
I could have it skip every two days, every three days.
But what I can't do here is get it
on an only weekday schedule.
But if I switch over to repeat weekly
I can actually select Monday, Tuesday
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, leave my Saturday
and Sunday weekend days off of this schedule.
And then I have a few other options as well.
I can choose when this recurrent schedule is going to start
in terms of day, and I'm just gonna leave it on today.
And then I can actually choose a time when
the meeting is gonna be created and a time zone.
So I'm gonna leave it an MST
which is my time zone here in Denver.
But I'm gonna set this to, let's see
it's 3:39 PM right now.
So I'm gonna go ahead and set this to 3:40 PM and
if I save it, I should see a new daily standup
meeting get automatically generated
in about one minute.
- [Voice Over] One minute later.
- And there is my daily standup meeting generated
automatically from the recurrent schedule in the template.
And from here I can go and take all my notes, action items
everything that I would need for a daily standup meeting.
Now going back into the options here, I showed you weekly
we also have an every month schedule
and I can do 1, 2, 3, et cetera.
I still have the time of day that it will be generated
and the start schedule we have yearly as well.
So there's quite a bit of functionality
and optionality here for setting your recurrent schedule.
And I think weekly is gonna be a pretty useful one
for a lot of people as well as daily.
Now let's talk briefly about what this feature is
and what it isn't before I get into one additional idea
that I think is pretty cool for using this feature.
So Recurring Templates is exactly what it sounds like
and currently nothing else.
It is a schedule that you can set to automatically
generate an instance
of a template when you want it to be generated.
What it's not is Recurring Tasks inside
of Notion because what we can't do inside
of a template is say add a dynamic date property in here
like make it due two days after it's created.
We also can't look ahead and see template instances
that haven't already been created.
They're gonna be created on their scheduled date
and we can't see them like say
on a calendar view before that.
So this isn't a Recurring Tasks feature yet.
The team has said that this is kind of a building block
they're going to launch off of for
further automation features
but right now it's mainly just a mechanism to
automatically create new pages inside Notion.
That being said, this is actually a pretty interesting
and exciting feature because as far as I can remember
or as far as I can tell, this is the first instance
of actual automation existing in the Notion app itself.
Now we have the API, we can use tools
like Zapier or make.com or even work directly
with the API to bring an automation that way.
I've got a whole video on Recurring Tasks using make.com
but I don't believe that before this feature
there was anything that would automatically do stuff
on a schedule inside of Notion.
So this is our first glimpse of true automation
inside Notion and I'm very excited to see what they do
with it going forward from this point.
So I wanna show you one additional idea that I
think is pretty cool and
that you can use right now with this feature.
And then we'll get into the other five features
that I think are exciting enough to share with you.
So I'm gonna go over to my little notes area
and this is part of my Ultimate Brain template
which is a complete second brain for Notion.
If you want that, I've gotta link the description
down below along with a discount code.
But I'm gonna go back to my notes area.
And within the notes area of Ultimate Brain
there is a daily Journal feature and there is
also a daily note template.
So if I go inside of this template here
I can see that I have quite a few little useful areas here.
I've got my daily habits with check boxes here
I've got a little my day area and I've got
morning pages and daily review.
So this is pretty similar to that
that daily standup meeting template.
And if you wanted to make sure
that you were actually taking notes
and keeping a journal every single day,
you might want to use this new recurrence feature right here
and set up a repetition schedule for every single day.
That way you're gonna get a new journal entry every day
whether or not you actually remember to generate it.
And what that means is we can actually start to
do some fairly more robust habit tracking inside
of Notion where we couldn't really do it in the past
or at least you'd have to be very diligent
about creating new rows.
Because if I make myself a new row here
and it's gonna make it manually and call it Daily Journal,
what I can start doing now is creating checkbox properties
for habits.
So if I open this up
and let's go ahead and open this entire page up
I might create a checkbox property for, you know
drink two glasses of water
and now I'm gonna have this property inside
of my daily journal entry.
And I know that without fail
I'm going to have a daily journal entry created
for me every single day, even if I forget to make it myself
which means I will also have an unbroken string of drink
two glasses of water check boxes for every single day
which means we can start using relations
and roll-ups to do more robust habit tracking
than we really could in the past.
And with that being said
I now wanna go into the lightning round
and share five additional new features that you
might not know about which came out recently
and I think are cool enough to talk about.
And the first one is a bit
of a tweak to how pages that are not full width work.
Now if you have multiple columns on a page,
you can actually change the width
of those columns and have them go
beyond the normal width of a non full width page.
So what do I mean by that?
Well here I have a set design page
and this is actually within our knowledge base
for our company.
And we use this page to document how we get shots like this.
So I have all the camera settings,
I have the lights and the gear that I've used.
So what if I wanted this to be next
to some of these camera settings?
Well, I could come and make a new block.
I'm gonna do -2C for two columns
and you'll see now I have two columns instead of one.
And I'll drag this picture up into the second column
and then I'm gonna grab all of this detail here
and I'm gonna put that in the left column.
So what this new feature allows us to do is
once we have two columns or more on a page,
we now are able to drag those columns
and their overall width as a set to be wider
than the non full width single column here.
The second feature we're gonna cover here is
in addition to how you can display relations
on a page within a database
and I'm gonna go over to a different page here.
I'll go over this TJF website redesign
that we're working on here,
and I'll show you how this works.
So in the past and even right now I have relations displayed
with all my other properties here and the top of the page.
And then I have all my body content here
beneath the common area.
What I can actually do now is move this
below the common area
and kind of have it it displayed in a more inline fashion.
And I can do that by either coming
up here and going to customize page,
which will customize as it says here,
all pages in projects, CIG, that database.
I can also come here and choose the Show As option.
And now I have a few different choices,
I have As Property which is the classic way to show it
but it also As Page section and minimal.
So if I change this to As Page section
I now get this new section and I did misspeak.
It doesn't go beneath the comment area
but it is its own section.
And like I showed you in my last new Notion features video,
we have the ability to customize the properties
from the related database in this area here
which is really nice.
So maybe I wanna see what area this is in
it's in my Notion area
maybe I wanna see the progress of this goal.
I can see it now and that's really nice.
It also lets me very easily go
into the page by clicking the open button here.
I can click it inside peak,
which is really, really nice
and I can see everything that I have associated
with this goal here.
So that's one way you can do it.
The other way is we can show it as minimal
and now it looks basically like a minimal page back link.
In fact, if I'd link to this page somewhere else.
So let's just do a double bracket
and do TJF website redesign.
We now have back links right here
and we have our goal right there.
So we can click here to see our back links.
We can click here to see our goals.
And just like before,
we can customize which properties from the related database
that we wanna see inside of this modal.
So pretty cool feature.
New feature number three I wanna share with you
is the ability to automatically apply property changes
to lots of different rows in a database all at once.
And here I've got this cool little movies database
which I will zoom in so it's a bit easier to see
and I'll show you exactly how this works.
So let's say that I track the movies
that I've seen recently in a Notion database and I went
on a "Fast and Furious" binge, which I still need to do.
I did this as an example
but I haven't actually done the binge yet.
I can click this Checked Property here for seen recently.
It'll apply it to this "Fast and the Furious" row here.
But now we have this little circle
in the bottom right corner here.
And if I drag this then just like an Excel or Google Sheets,
I can apply the same property change to multiple rows
with just one little drag here, which is really nice.
Another cool thing that I can do
and this will be very fun for you, keyboard navigation
of Phish Autos is I can hit enter to check or uncheck
up checkbox here, but if I hold shift, I can arrow down
and select multiple rows and if I hit control D
or command D at a Mac, I will duplicate the property value
from the originally selected row
to all the other selected rows as well.
And I'm actually gonna stay on this page
for our fourth feature here because it's a very simple one.
If I come up to share, as always
I have been able to share this
to the web and allow it to be published as a template.
I can make it available for search engine indexing.
I think you have to be
on the personal pro plan at least for that one there.
But now we have this little Link Expires option.
So let's say that I wanna let this be available
as a template, but I want the link to expire
so I have the option to maybe change the link up,
make sure that it can't be shared too easily.
I can set this from never to any one of these options here.
Hour, day, week, choose date.
And I think that this is gonna be less useful
for template creators like myself who like sell
or give away templates to the public, but more useful
for people who are maybe sharing project briefs
or just you know, pages with clients
or people they're working with
and they want those pages to kind of disappear
after maybe an hour.
So you don't want to invite somebody
as a guest to your ocean workspace
you just kind of want have like an expiring page.
This is a cool little feature that actually enables that.
And that brings us to our fifth
and final lightning round feature, Roundup wrap up.
I don't know what you want to call it in this video
'cause I've been filming for like two hours this point.
But this is a really cool one
and that's why I saved it for last.
We can now make really quick edits inside of board views
and we can do that with this little pencil icon.
So let me open up this board view here.
And this is inside of all Ultimate Brain as well.
And now we can see that
on the board view I have this little pencil icon
and if I click it, I now have fields for any
of the properties that I have decided to have displayed
in this board view here.
So I can easily add due dates,
we'll just make this due today, why not?
We can add an assignee
which will just be me at this point.
We can add a smart list value if you're like a GTD person
you wanna do like your due Next,
Next Actions or delegate it or someday.
And if I wanted to add another property to this view here
I can come over to the view options menu
for this database view and I can go
to properties and I can decide to show other ones.
So this is within a project, I'm not gonna show that
but maybe I want to actually show the Done Property.
Well now there it is.
If I wanna do like maybe Kanban tag, I'll see that as well.
And if I come to edit this one more time, now
I have a blank space for Kanban tag and I can add any kind
of tag that I want, which is a pretty nice feature.
Additionally, when you're editing a card here like this,
this icon changes to open and side peak.
So if I wanna do some more heavy duty editing maybe
to properties that are not already listed here,
I can easily open that up
and now I have access to everything.
So a pretty simple feature
but I think that's a very nice little Quality of Life update
and I'm very glad that they have added it.
And I'm also very glad and thankful to you
for sticking around and watching this entire video with me.
If you wanna learn more about Notion,
make sure you're subscribed to this channel.
I've got tutorials ranging from beginner level,
absolute blank page beginner stuff to more complex stuff
working with Notion formulas, Notion APIs
that kind of thing.
In addition to this channel,
you can also go over to ThomasJFrank.com/fundamentals.
That's where you're gonna find my
Notion Fundamentals course,
which even though it has the label course,
is a completely free and open video and text tutorial series
if you wanna learn Notion, that is the place to do it.
And last but not least, I did show
off my Ultimate Brain a template in this video.
This is my complete productivity system inside of Notion.
And if you want a system that gets you tasks, projects,
goal tracking, note taking, tons of internal templates
even a recipe database and a book tracker
all in one package, one second Brain all inside of Notion,
this is the tool for you.
You can find it over at ThomasJFrank.com/brain
and you can even use the code Fall 50
at checkout right now to get a full 50% off
of the purchase price.
And I'll just show you a couple of different views in here.
We have a task manager with a calendar view,
we have time-based views,
so you can easily add to your tomorrow list,
your next seven days list.
But we also have a full GTD
or Getting Things Done Workflow.
So if you're the kind of person who wants to have an inbox
like GTD and add things
to your due next list or your actual calendar
or delegate them to somebody else, you can do that here.
There's a full note taking area.
There are areas and resources which uses Thiago Forte's pair
up organizational methodology
for organizing your entire life.
Everything you need to manage your life
and your productivity system is in this template.
And it also comes with killer documentation
tutorials and active support.
We have an active support community where lots
of customers actually answer questions.
We also have a full-time support person.
His name is Alex.
He is amazing and he answers every single question.
A lot of Notion templates don't offer any kind of support
but we wanted to do it because ultimately
our goal is to help you take our templates
and expand upon them, integrate them into your own systems
and kind of build whatever it is that you need to build.
Because that's the whole point of Notion is to
build your own tools, your own software, your own workflows.
So once again, ThomasJFrank.com/brain to check
out the Ultimate Brain template and use that code Fall 50
at checkout to get a full 50% off of the purchase price.
Thanks so much for hanging out with me.
If you have questions about Notion
let me know when the comment's down below or follow me
on Twitter over @TomFrankly, if that site is still alive
and kicking by the time this video comes out.
I'll see you there.
Thanks again for watching and have a great one.
(upbeat music)