- Notion has just released an absolutely
game-changing new feature.
In fact, without any hyperbole,
I can say that this is the feature
I have been asking them to build
for the longest period of time.
And I am absolutely stoked that it's finally available
for all of us to use.
So this feature is called Group by,
and it allows you to visually separate rows
in your database views, by pretty much any property.
So here, I got a list of tasks
that I have now visually separated
by the person those tasks are assigned to.
And here I've got a board view,
where I've grouped by the status of those tasks
in one direction and by the assignee
in the other directions, this is called swim lanes.
And for my favorite example,
here I have a list of video ideas in my content tracker,
and I can finally, finally group by relations
to other databases, in this case, my channels database.
So I now have a vertical column
for every single one of my YouTube channels and blogs.
It's so cool that I could almost cry.
So, what this video is gonna be is a breakdown
of exactly how to use this new feature
across your workspace.
You will be an expert in grouping by
across all your databases
by the time you finish watching this,
we are gonna go through a sample database
that I've created to show you exactly how to use it.
And then I'm gonna show you three different examples
of how we're actually using this new feature
in our workspace for our content strategy and planning.
So if you happen to be a content creator,
these examples will be especially applicable to you
and your business.
In fact, they are also built into my new Notion template,
which is called Creators Companion,
and it is literally a templatized recreation
of our exact system that we use to run my YouTube channels,
my blogs, and basically every media outlet
that forms my gigantic media empire.
So more on that at the end of the video,
first, let's get into the examples and the tutorial.
(lighthearted music)
Okay, so here I have a very simple task manager
that I've built with a list of tasks.
And then down here, we have a list of projects.
And if you've ever used my ultimate tasks,
task manager template for Notion,
this will look pretty familiar to you. If you haven't.
There's a link in the description down below that happens to
be free. So check it out.
But we have a bunch of tasks here,
and most of these tasks are associated
to a project via a relation type property.
We also have an assignee column.
We have a status column, a due date,
and then we have one very simple formula,
which simply tells us is the task late, or is it on time?
And it's late,
if it is past the due date and not set to done.
So right now, this is currently sorted by the due date.
But all of these different tasks
are sort of jumbled together.
We have tasks for multiple different projects.
We have some tasks that don't even have projects,
but what we can actually do now
is group via that relation in the actual task table.
So if I switch over to my default view here
to this table projects view,
you will see that I now have all my tasks grouped
by their project.
Here's the channel branding project.
Here's the sales page redesign project.
Here's my sky boarding certification project
that I'm totally doing.
And this is a really great way to see all of your different
tasks on one screen,
but have them visually separated by their project.
So what's going on under the hood here?
Well, if we come up to our little three dot menu
and we come down to this new little grouping option,
we can see everything going on here.
So we're now choosing to group by our project
and we're sorting manually instead of alphabetically.
And then we can choose to hide or show things.
So let's actually go ahead and do this over
on the default view where we didn't have a grouping before.
So I'm going to come back to three dot menu here,
go to the group option right here.
And we're going to choose to group by one of our properties.
Now we can group by a lot of different properties.
Note that even the late formula property
is available for grouping,
but right now I'm going to choose the project,
which is a relation type property.
Again, this is my favorite addition.
Being able to group by relation is immensely powerful,
and I'm gonna be using it in a lot of different places
within Notion.
So we've chosen project and by default,
our sort is going to be alphabetical and we can come in here
and we can choose either that reverse alphabetical
or my favorite manual,
because alphabetical doesn't usually help me.
I want to see the most important projects first.
So let's just say these sales page redesign
is actually more important than channel branding.
So I'll switch those around like that.
We can hide things.
So if we wanted to hide tasks that didn't have a project,
we could do that.
I think for a task manager,
we would actually want to see tasks
that didn't have a project.
So we could maybe assign them a project
or simply see things that don't have a project,
little one-off tasks.
And we can also choose to hide empty groups if we want to.
So if we had a project that had no task in it,
we could hide them and that would be all Hunky Dory.
And that is pretty much it for creating a grouping
inside the table view.
You will note that if you have filter and sort criteria,
it's going to apply to basically all of these groups.
So right now I'm sorting by the due date
and ascending order.
So we have due date sorting inside
of our little mini groups.
So now I want to show you the changes to the board view,
because this is probably where the biggest changes
have happened.
And also where we can see a sub-grouping,
which is a really cool feature as well.
So here we have a totally normal everyday board view.
The only thing that you may have not seen before is
that we now have a different color
that is sort of surrounding the entire column,
and that is something you can actually turn off
or on if you want to.
But one other thing you can do
is add this little sub-grouping here.
So currently, if we look at group,
we are grouping by the status property.
This is one of the three old school properties
you've always been able to group by.
So if we really wanted to,
we could change this over to do if we wanted to.
And now we have last seven days today, tomorrow,
next seven days,
or we could group by the project if we wanted to,
I'm going to go ahead and keep it on status.
One thing I may also want to do is group
these different tasks by their project,
in addition to seeing the status columns here.
So if I go to my three dot menu here
and I choose this subgroup option,
I can come up here and I can choose project.
And what this is going to do is transform my board view
into this sort of grid,
where I have my normal columns for to do, doing, done.
Also have no status,
which actually wants to go ahead and hide here.
But what I also have are rows where I can see
the different projects that each task is associated with.
So I get both the status and the project,
which is super useful in the old board view,
we used to have all of our different projects
and it's sort of jumbled together inside of the columns
and we couldn't even call them by the project itself.
So this is super, super useful.
Now, if I go back to my subgroup settings here,
you're going to see that I can actually change
the same settings that I was able to change
with the normal groupings.
So I don't want to go by alphabetical.
I would rather go by manual
and I'm going to go ahead and move my channel branding,
sales page redesign and skateboarding certification
up to the top.
So I can see project specific tasks first.
I might want to do that.
So this is an incredibly useful view.
And like I said before,
when we're choosing our properties for a,
how to group our different tasks or rows here,
we don't just have to choose from selects
and multi-select and person properties anymore.
We have a ton of different choices.
So let me show you a few more sample views
that I've created here.
So here we have a table that is grouped by the assignee.
So if you're a project manager or just a manager in general,
you can see all the different tasks assigned to each person
on your team.
Here's Martins tasks, here's, Tony's one task
and we have nothing for no assignee here.
We also have one here for date.
So now we have groupings for last seven days today,
tomorrow, things like that.
And date is actually an interesting one.
If we go back to the grouping settings here
and we once again choose do,
we can see that we have some different little sub options
here .
So we can use relative grouping.
We can go by the actual day, the actual week,
the actual month.
I'll just go by week here to show you an example
of how that looks.
So now we have specific week groupings here.
In fact,
one person recently emailed me about creating
these specific week groupings, where it starts on Sunday,
ends on a Saturday.
This is how you can do that.
So that's pretty cool.
And we also have some board views.
So here's one where we have the project, again,
a relation type property as our main grouping,
but then we're also grouping by assignees
in the sub-grouping areas.
So we can see all the tasks that I have been assigned across
all these different projects. Pretty useful.
I do want to show you a few more because you can also group
by in the list view.
So here's my list view with a relation grouping,
we can do it in the gallery view.
So same thing, just gallery, but also grouped by project.
And we can also do it in the timeline view.
So this is going to be again,
really useful for project managers.
If you want to see the timeline for individual projects
and still serve those due dates,
this is exactly how you can do it.
So from here, let's switch over
to those three different examples of how we're actually
using this feature in my business.
And this is probably my favorite one.
Like I said before,
I have been asking Notion for the ability
to group by relations inside of board views
for a very long time.
And now we finally have that.
So this is the content ideas area
of our copy of creators companion.
And in the past, `
I used to have to use this little interim select property
that I call proposed channel.
And I had like Thomas Frank YouTube
Thomas Frank explains.
And then I would have to actually set the relation later on,
but now I am grouping by the channel.
So whenever I have an idea,
I can simply come into the channel
where I want the idea to go like right here,
maybe a video on what is building a second brain?
And that is automatically associated with that channel.
And I go in here and one thing this has allowed me to do,
and this is something that I've added to the template
for this release is add a little ideas area
for the channel itself.
And you will notice that what is building a second brain
is now listed inside this channel.
And if I want to,
I can go ahead and further organize these ideas
by tagging them.
So what does building a second brain that is going to be
something that is more productivity focused.
So I'll go ahead and put it in there.
And then if I head back to my little idea board
for all my different channels,
I can switch over to a tag view and inside a productivity,
I have what is building a second brain?
So this is insanely useful,
this ability to group by relations.
Next step,
I want to show you a brand new project manager view.
So this is the homepage of our copy of creators companion.
And as you can see,
I have many different channels here
and I could see the content specific to those channels
if I wanted to inside there.
But we also have a project manager view where we can see
everything going on across the entire business.
And it used to be kind of a jumbly mess
because we didn't have the ability
to create these swim lanes.
But now we do.
So we have our entire content pipeline.
So planning stage research, stage writing stage and so on,
but we also have our channels doing these sub-grouping here.
So I can see everything going on
for the Thomas Frank YouTube channel.
I can come down here and I could see everything going on
for the Thomas spring explains channel.
So I have this really nice visual separation between
these two channels and I can just sort of hone in
and see only what's going on in one channel at a time,
if I want to, without having to go to some other page
and to give you a look at how the settings look here,
we can just go to our groupings and see the word grouping
by status.
We have colored the columns turned on, which is nice.
You can turn it off if you really want to,
but I like to have it on.
And we have a few different things hidden like
ideas on hold, needs, update.
Those are hidden.
And then we can also look at our sub-grouping settings
to see that channel is our sub-grouping selection
for the property we are sorting manually.
And I've dragged my most important channels,
I guess most used channels up to the top here.
And if I really wanted to,
I could go ahead and it changed this at will,
and that would be pretty useful.
And what we're on this project management page.
I also want to show you how we're using this new feature
for task management.
So if I go to middle on-page navigation
and zoom down to content tasks,
so before all of our content tasks,
you could actually see them separated if we went
into the content project,
but here they would sort of be all jumbled up
and using this grouping where you're grouping again,
by the content relation,
we can see all the tasks related to a specific video,
and I can come down here and see all the tasks
related to yet another video.
So this is another very useful use case
for this new grouping feature.
And coming back to our homepage here,
I want to show you one little beta feature
that I'm now creating using this,
which is this little page called writer's room.
So, one thing that I would like to do
is sort of create pages for the different departments
of my company.
So people who are doing writing should have a page
where they only need to focus on things
that need to be written right now.
They don't see anything else.
So if I come in here,
we can create this little writers' room and we can only see
if you look at the filter criteria here,
projects where the status is either research or writing
and using our little swim lanes.
We can create a Kanban board with the assignees
as our main grouping here.
So I have me, I've got Ransom, I've got Martin.
We are the three people in the company who do writing
for all of our content.
And then in our sub-grouping I've got my channels.
So Thomas Frank, Thomas Frank explains, so on.
And so I can go ahead and assign writers.
And if somebody is a writer on my team,
they can just simply come to the writer's room
and they can see here is exactly what I need to do
across any channels that I am working on.
So hopefully these examples we've gone through
have given you some ideas for how you can use this
in your own workspace,
we are using this in quite a few different areas of ours,
and it's very helpful so far.
And I will be having a blog post up on my website
with some more reference information
and a fuller tutorial on how to do all this stuff
as soon as I can.
And if you are a content creator,
if you are a YouTuber or a podcast or a blogger,
and you're interested in checking out, creators companion,
it is actually now live in beta.
Like I said before this is a templatized version
of the exact system we use to manage all of my channels
and web properties.
So my social media channels, my main YouTube channel,
this YouTube channel or podcast when we were running it,
our blogs, everything goes through this one Notion template.
That takes us from the idea generation stage
to the project management and planning stage,
and also serves as a very useful archive.
So we can go and we can review our content
and we can see how we can do better in the future.
It's all in one system.
And we have attended on launching fully this month,
bumping the price up to the full price.
But as it turns out,
I am going to LA tomorrow
for three different video collabs
with a bunch of other YouTubers that I did not expect.
So I will not have time to do all the crazy marketing work
around that launch.
And my busy-ness is your gain.
This is the last time that creators companion
is going to be in beta,
which means if you want to check it out,
you're going to be able to get it at the lowest price
it's ever going to be at.
Once again, that'll be in the description down below,
check it out if you're a curious, but otherwise,
hopefully you found this video helpful.
If you have questions about this new feature
or Notion in general,
leave them down in the comments below
or over on Twitter.
I'm Tom Frankly, there,
I love answering questions on Twitter.
That's probably the social network
where I am the most active.
So follow me if you haven't already,
ask me your question.
And last but not least, if you haven't done so already,
you might want to consider getting on my Notion tips,
email newsletter,
I've got the link right there and you don't have to,
but people who are on my newsletter find out first
about my new templates
and I'm working on a brand new note taking template
right now.
So they're going to find out about at first,
as well as new tutorials and content that I put out.
And if you're on my newsletter,
I will send you a link to all of my free templates,
as well as all the supplemental resources
and examples stuff for Notion fundamentals,
which is my beginner series on how to learn Notion.
So that interests you get on the newsletter.
You're going to find out about all the cool stuff
before it comes out on YouTube or Twitter or whatever.
And beyond that, thanks for watching.
And I'll see you in the next one.
(upbeat music)