- People love to say that there
is no wrong way to use Notion.
It's the all-in-one productivity app,
you can do whatever you want.
You can customize it to your heart's content.
But to that, I say, "Ha! And no",
there actually are wrong ways to use Notion.
And in today's video,
we're gonna be covering my top 10 mistakes
that beginners make when they start using this app.
Now, this list is gonna be split between actual mistakes,
things that you really should not do in your workspace,
especially if you're working with other people
and some little known tips, tricks,
and more efficient features that you just might
not have heard of already.
And because you haven't heard of those,
maybe you're doing things in your workspace,
a bit more inconveniently and inefficiently
than you otherwise could.
I'm Thomas Frank, this is "Thomas Frank Explains",
hit that subscribe button if you're interested
becoming a Notion expert, getting new build guides,
tutorials, and free templates in the future.
And beyond that, let's get into the video.
So item number one on our list
is not using your favorites bar
here on the sidebar of Notion.
Talked about the sidebar in other videos before,
but the favorites is well, pun intended,
my favorite part of the sidebar.
This is where I like to basically pin pages
that I wanna have really quick access to.
And that includes things that I'm working on
at the moment like this very video right now,
but also some more integral parts
of my entire Notion system.
So over here, you will see that I have, for instance,
my Creator's Companion, this is my gigantic dashboard,
where I run all the content planning for all of my channels.
In fact, you can use this
if you go over to ThomasJFrank.com/cc,
it is a template you can download and use
if you are a content creator.
I've also got things like this dashboard here
that I'm working on, and this will have access
to inboxes for tasks, and notes, and all kinds of stuff.
So, by pinning these more central parts of my workspace,
I have very quick access to them from my favorites bar,
but there's another more advanced trick
that I like to use with my favorite bar.
And that is to use what I like to call a Quick Links Page.
So here, I've got this page called, Quick Links,
which exists inside of my dashboard.
And the only purpose of this page
is to add link blocks to other pages inside my workspace.
And that is because,
when you use a linked page block inside of Notion,
it actually shows up inside your sidebar.
So if I come over here
and I toggle over my Quick Links page,
I'm going to see everything that I've linked to
inside the page itself.
So for instance, if I add something by typing "/link"
for that Link To Page block,
and let's just say,
"The Top 10 Notion Mistakes Beginners Make" goes on there,
you're going to see that it also pops up
in the sidebar underneath quick links.
So, I use this to essentially
keep my favorites bar really nice and clean.
I can toggle this close when I don't really need it,
which keeps my favorites bar from being super long.
But then when I need access to maybe,
a slightly less frequently used page, like these ones here,
I can just toggle open quick links
and I have instant access to all those pages.
Mistake number two is not using database templates.
So you've probably seen databases in Notion before,
but did you know that you can create templates
that will auto-populate new pages
with pretty much whatever content you want?
Let me show you an example of that.
I'm creating this little dashboard here called, "My Day",
which is essentially a whiteboard in digital form
for planning out your entire day.
This is gonna be part of a sort of ultimate productivity
system that marries notes and tasks,
and all kinds of things like that.
Stay tuned. That is coming out very, very soon.
But over here,
I've got this little section called, Daily Journal.
Maybe I wanna have a page where I just do, you know,
some morning writing, but also plan out my day.
I can add a new page to this database by clicking New,
and I'm gonna have a blank page,
but you'll notice that I already
have some database templates here,
and these will automatically populate
this blank page with content.
So let's click Daily Note and now
we have some automatically populated content.
Now I'm still gonna give this a title.
You could set a specific title,
but I wanna always give this a new title.
I'm gonna call this "February 8th"
and thanks to my template this is all ready to go.
I've got a toggle here with my daily habits
that I can check off.
I've got another toggle with a synced block
that links to this little Today block here.
And then I've got a couple of headings
where I can write my morning pages
and I can do a daily review.
Couple more examples just to show you
what else you could do with this.
Let's go over to this book review here,
called "The Deadline Effect", book I just read,
I'm making a video on my main channel about it,
and I've got this whole summary
with a couple of different blocks in here.
And what I can actually do inside of my book tracker
is turn that into a database template.
And now lemme show you how you
can actually create a database template.
All you need to do is in any view of your database,
go over to this little blue arrow here
and you see your templates.
So I could create a new template
or I could go in and hit the three-dot menu
and edit this existing template.
And you'll see at the top,
you are editing a template in Books.
So that's how you know you're editing a database template,
which you can then apply to new pages.
And I call that an instance of the template.
So I can come down here and I can basically create
a skeleton for my book summary.
I might have an overall thoughts call out.
I might have a main takeaways call out,
and then I'm just gonna give myself a little bit
of a head start by creating a heading two for Book Notes
and a heading for Chapter One.
Now, this is a very simple example.
I've got maybe, five or six blocks in here,
but you can take database templates much further
if you want to.
And for my final example,
let's go over to Creator's Companion.
I'm gonna go over to my little demo area of it,
and I will show you the database template we use
for YouTube video projects
when we are planning out our videos.
And I'm just gonna open up,
uh, let's see here,
this one I think is pretty well filled out,
"How to Stop Feeling So Tired When You Wake Up"
in the morning and this is generated
from a database template.
So we have a project tasks area that brings
in a link to database from our task database.
We have an entire B-Roll list.
We have description, meta stuff. We have checklists.
We have internal pages for scripts,
research and notes, related content, topic validation.
I can come in here and I can get all this cool stuff
for validating my topic, for putting thumbnail drafts.
You can create basically anything you want
inside of Notion, inside of database template.
And that's gonna give you essentially a head start
whenever you start a new project.
Going back to my channel page here,
I can go down to this In Progress ideas tracker,
and let's click on this
How to Build Self-Discipline Idea here.
Currently, this is empty.
So, I can give you a perfect example of how this works.
If I hit this Thomas Frank YouTube template button,
and then all of this good stuff
just automatically pops in,
and the video project is completely ready to go.
By the way,
this is what is built into Creator's Companion.
So, if you are YouTuber and you wanna use the same system
that I use, you can and once again,
ThomasJFrank.com/cc.
Mistake number three is trying
to shove literally everything
and the kitchen sink into a single dashboard page.
Now you have probably seen on like the Notion subreddit
or on YouTube, or on Twitter,
people love to post these aesthetic dashboards
that have literally every thing pertaining
to their life on a single page.
And honestly, it makes me think of msn.com
or yahoo.com way back in the early 2000s.
They were these splash pages,
these homepages for the internet
that had all these widgets all over the place.
And the idea was you have this single homepage
where you can get all the information
you could want about pretty much anything from one spot.
And you can do that in Notion.
So I've got this In-Progress Dashboard
that I'm working on here,
but I would caution you against always doing this,
against always trying to shove
a ton of information on a single page,
because I think there is merit to splitting things out
onto their own pages.
For example, I've got this inbox here,
which literally just shows me my task inbox, nothing else.
It's simple. It's clean.
It's to the point.
I can go back and I can do the same thing for say,
tasks that are due in the next seven days.
I can go back and I can do the same thing for recent notes.
And this is especially useful when you're using Notion
on your mobile device,
because all the columns in your gigantic dashboards
are gonna stack up and it's gonna be really hard
to navigate through them.
You're at least gonna have to do a lot of scrolling.
It's a lot better if you just have a simple link to a page
that has exactly what you need and nothing else.
Now, let me show you a trick,
which will give you the best of both worlds
that I have been utilizing inside of this dashboard design.
You will notice that these toggle blocks
have underlined links here.
So what I've actually done is create pages
for things like say, the inbox.
This is its own page, tasks, inbox.
And then what I've done is hit Control L
to grab the URL for this page,
put it on my clipboard and go back
to the dashboard that I'm building.
I'm gonna recreate this just to show you what I'm doing.
So I create a toggle.
You can actually get that by putting
this little right arrow bracket and hitting Space.
And then I paste the URL,
and I have the option to choose Mention Page.
Now, if I choose Link Page,
it's gonna go outside the toggle.
But with Mention Page,
I get this page link inside of my toggle title.
And then I also still have the toggle usable.
So now I can click over here and boom, I'm at my inbox page.
Now you will notice that I have put this database here
inside what's called a sync block.
Anything inside these red outlines here,
and it's called a sync block. I've got a whole video on it.
I'll link to that in a description down below,
but essentially, I can paste this sync block
to other places in my workspace.
And I essentially have a window to that content
from another location.
So I'm going to do just that.
I'm gonna click on the edge of the sync block.
I'm gonna copy and sync. I'm gonna go back.
Again, Control bracket to go back
and I'm going to paste my sync block inside of this toggle.
So if I'm on desktop,
if I have a ton of window space to work with,
I can go ahead and toggle this open to show my inbox.
I can toggle this open to show my recent notes.
I can get this great, complex,
useful dashboard to work with.
But if I'm on my phone,
I might not choose to untoggle those things.
I might choose to just click into my inbox
or maybe even favorite my inbox.
That way, I have an instant path
to a much simpler view that is much more usable
on that small constraint screen.
Mistake number four is not learning
the markdown syntax and keyboard shortcuts
that are built into Notion.
Notion has a ton of these.
If you want to navigate your workspace,
if you wanna create new pages,
if you want to create text and format it much faster.
Notion actually gives you a bunch
of different ways to do this.
It gives you markdown formatting,
which is a way to essentially, add syntax to your text,
such as couple of asterisks here for bold text
or one asterisk for italic text,
or you can use regular keyboard shortcuts
like Command or Control B to bold things, like so.
Or you can use little context menu that pops up
to format your text as well.
There a ton of different options,
but if you take just a bit of time
to learn some markdown syntax
and the most useful keyboard shortcuts,
you're gonna be able to both navigate your workspace
and create content a lot faster.
So, for just a couple examples here, number one,
if you wanna create headings in say
an article you're writing or some notes,
just create a little hashtag symbol and hit Space,
you're gonna get a heading one.
Double hashtag is gonna get you a heading two,
and triple will get you a heading three.
I've already showed you bolding and italicizing,
if you create a single asterisk and hit Space,
you're gonna get a bolded list.
One will get you a numbered list.
And I did show this earlier, but I'll show it again,
this little HTML bracket is gonna get you a toggle.
And then for keyboard shortcuts,
the ones that I find myself using most often
are Control P to bring up the search bar here,
Control L to grab the URL of a specific page.
So I can do things like mentioning of that page.
And finally, one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts
is using the Control or Command if you're on a Mac,
bracket buttons to go back and forth
between pages in my workspace.
I have an entire guide on my website
and a whole video about the editing and text formatting,
and keyboard shortcuts in Notion,
so check that out.
I'll have a link below and Notion themselves
have a very detailed documentation guide
about all their keyboard shortcuts
and all their markdown formatting.
So if you really wanna get into it,
I will have that linked too.
Mistake number five, and this is a doozy,
is allowing people to have
too much access to your workspace.
Now, Notion is a wonderful app for collaboration.
If you've got a team, if you have collaborators,
if you have people you're working on a project with,
you might have to give them access to pages or databases,
or maybe even your entire workspace,
so you can get your work done.
Notion's great for that,
but a lot of people I know have been burned
by allowing people to have complete,
full access to their workspace.
And then those people accidentally change properties
and databases, or delete properties,
or delete pages altogether.
So, learn the access and permissions controls
that you have available to you on any page inside of Notion.
You can go up here, you can click this Share button
and you're gonna see what the permissions are.
Number one, you're gonna see if this page
is shared to the web.
And if so, you can open up these toggles here
and see what people can do if they are not logged in,
if they're part of the public,
but more importantly, and pertinent to your team,
here, you see which groups or people specifically
in your workspace, have access to this page
and what level of access they have.
So this page here, everyone at College Info Geek,
which is my company.
So pretty much everyone in the workspace
has full access to this page,
which may not be the best thing.
So I could come down here and I could change it to Can Edit,
but they couldn't share with other people.
I could change it to Can Comment, or Can View,
or take their access away altogether.
And actually, as of last night,
as I'm recording this video,
Notion dropped a brand new feature,
which I personally have been asking for.
A lot of people have as well.
And that pertains to how permissions work
inside of databases.
So I'm going to go down here to a little toggle
called the brain in Creator's Companion,
and I'm gonna go to the Master Content Tracker.
This is an actual database.
And here, we see one more option for permission control.
I go up to the Share menu.
Right now, everyone at College Info Geek
has full access to this page,
but I'm the only person who should be
making actual changes to the database.
I'm the only person who should be changing properties,
deleting properties, adding new ones.
No one else should be.
So there is now an option where if I toggle this open,
I can let everyone else edit the content,
but not the databases, views, or structure.
So if I choose this and restrict access,
I now have full access, but everyone else on my team,
they can add new rows.
They can work on 'em, but they can't change the database.
I highly recommend if you have people
on your team who are non-Notion experts,
who are not supposed to be administering your workspace,
set this permission level for them and have you
or other administrators be the only people
who can actually change the databases themselves.
Speaking of changes,
mistake number six is making big changes to your workspace
without telling your team or anyone else who relies
on the pages in the configuration they were in
before you made the change.
I have made this mistake so many times.
I get excited, it's I don't know an evening,
I got a glass of whiskey.
I'm making a few changes, making some upgrades,
you know, making Notion a lot better.
But then I forget to tell my team,
"Oh, Hey, I completely changed
how our knowledge base works".
Or "I made a brand new notes database,
and now everything's moved over there",
and they don't know what's going on.
And in my head, everything's makes perfect sense.
I've made this beautiful elegant system,
but I didn't teach my team how to use it.
So if you are working with other people
and you are gonna make a change to your workspace,
document that change and let 'em know.
In fact, I would recommend even making
maybe a loom video or a screen recording,
showing them the changes you made
and how to use the workspace,
now that you have changed it.
Mistake number seven is trying to reinvent
every wheel with your workspace.
Notion's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.
And that strength is you can pretty much
do whatever you want.
They give you these granular building blocks
and you can use them to create your own complex systems.
The problem comes when you're trying to make
your own tools and also invent
your own productivity methodology
at the exact same time.
Things get messy, and that's why people often quit Notion.
That's why people often go back to tools
that have a more rigid structure like Todoist
or Evernote because they get overwhelmed
with what they've created.
They've created this Frankenstein's monster
of a productivity tool for themselves.
So, I would urge you when you're creating a system,
like say this dashboard here,
if you're gonna build new tools from scratch,
maybe follow an existing methodology
or philosophy and let it guide you,
while you craft these tools.
So for example, this dashboard here integrates tasks,
notes, projects is a pretty much
all-in-one productivity system
and nobody has created this specific configuration
of blocks inside of Notion before.
And if I had tried to also invent my own methodology,
I don't think I would ever get it done.
So instead, I am essentially
taking Tiago Forte's P.A.R.A methodology,
the Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive philosophy
to essentially guide me as I'm building this tool,
which means that I have tasks and notes
and they can live inside of projects,
and then projects are inside themselves of areas.
And so for example,
I've got this music area and this will show me projects
inside of the music area,
but also notes inside of that area as well.
The methodology, the P.A.R.A. system is helping me
to design this tool.
And once over the tool is solidified,
I might actually tweak the methodology.
I might make my own changes to it,
but I do think it's a good idea not to try
to reinvent multiple wheels at the same time.
Focus in on one area, make your tweaks there,
and use tried and true systems everywhere else
until you can then shift that focus.
Mistake number eight is importing thousands of notes
from Evernotes or another note-taking tool
that Notion allows imports from,
and then trying to organize them all at once.
I do think this is a mistake and it's something
that I consciously decided not to do,
even though I was using Evernote for more than a decade
before I started using Notion.
And Notion does give you this tool, right?
We can go down here to this import area
and we have the option to, I even get $5 in credit
if we import from Evernote.
We can import from Trello, Asana, all these tools.
And it's very tempting to do it, right?
We kinda wanna have all that stuff we've created
imported into the new system that we are now using,
but I don't think it's a good idea.
And I purposely decided not to do it
when I switched over to Notion,
because I realized I have thousands of notes.
And the harsh truth, and this is a harsh truth for a lot
of you digital hoarders out there,
the harsh truth is the vast majority of that material,
you're never going to need again.
I am never going to need to go into my MIS 101 notes
from November 30th, 2010,
to learn about "Star and Ring Networks" from that class.
If I wanna learn about those,
I'm gonna go on Wikipedia and I'm gonna learn about them.
I don't need those notes.
So I'm going to leave them to Evernote.
And I'm going to just create
a brand new notes database in Notion.
I'm gonna start using it.
I'm gonna tweak it.
And I'm gonna have a manageable amount of material
in there that is pertinent to my life right now.
And then if I do need something from Evernote,
I'm going to use the Just-In-Time method
to go over to Evernote and get it.
And I've done this several times.
Sometimes they have recipe from Evernote or something else,
I will go in. I will copy the content of that note.
And I'll create a brand new note in Notion
inside of my organized clean system, because I now need it.
By the way, my friend Tiago Forte agrees with me here.
He is a heavy Evernote user,
but he told me in a recent colab that I filmed
in LA with him, that he would do the exact same thing.
Use the Just-In-Time methodology.
Don't try to import years and years and years
of stuff into a brand new system.
By the way, that is going live on my channel,
my main channel later this month.
So get subscribed to that channel if you are not already.
Mistake number nine is not using linked databases
in your workspace.
So you have probably used databases before
and maybe like me,
you even have made multiple views of those databases.
For example, I've got this B-Roll database down here
with a Chrono view, which sorts by timestamp.
I've also got this Gather view,
which sorts by tag and all these different views.
When I first started using Notion, this is all I used.
I used databases and I would create different views
and I would switch between them all the time.
But then I learned about possibly Notion's best feature,
which is the linked database.
And what a linked database allows you to do
is essentially create a brand new view
of an existing database in a different spot
in your workspace.
And that view can have its own Filter criteria,
its own Sort criteria,
and you can hide and show properties differently
in that view than you would in the original database.
So let me show you how to create one.
Type your slash command and start typing, "Linked"
to get "Create Linked Database".
And then it will ask you to Search for database.
I'm going to bring up the notes database that I'm working on
on my ultimate productivity system beta,
and I'm going to get a database that looks pretty much
like the original one.
Once it pops in, it's gonna have all the content,
but this view is unique.
I can tweak it to my heart's content
and it's not going to change the actual databases view.
So all this stuff is here.
I've got title, I've got tags.
If I've got favorite,
if I go back and I go and I turn all those properties off,
I go into Properties here and hide all,
nothing is going to change about the original database.
So this is a great way to have persistent database views.
So you don't have to constantly switching views all the time
and to have those views in other places
inside of your workspace.
You've probably already seen this in this video before,
but I'll show you again,
this little dashboard here has all these different views
for today, for tasks that are due tomorrow.
And you'll notice these are all the same database,
"caAll Tasks", but they are on this page
and they have their own Filter and Sort criteria.
So we can go ahead and do that with this as well.
Maybe, I wanna create an inbox of sorts
for this All Notes database.
So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna create
some filter criteria.
And I'm gonna say the inbox is essentially anything
where the note doesn't have an area.
So area is empty actually,
where it doesn't have a project,
that's also gonna be empty and where it doesn't have a tag.
So if it doesn't belong in any of those areas,
it's gonna be essentially my inbox or my default
Catch-All-Place for brand new notes.
Now, I've got unique Filter criteria in this linked database
that doesn't exist anywhere else.
And that brings us to our 10th and final mistake,
which is deleting database properties
when you could just hide them.
I got an email about this just the other day.
Somebody had bought Creator's Companion,
which has like 58 different properties
inside of the project template.
And they're used in many different places.
And they were like, "Hey, can I delete some of these?
They're kind of in my way."
Well, you could, but something might break
or you could just hide them.
So, take a look at this Set Design Ideas note here,
and I can show that I've already actually hidden some
of these properties.
We have, you know, probably 15,
16 different properties in here,
which when I click into this note,
I have to scroll past to get to all of this cool stuff
that I put here, all this cool set design inspiration
that I've been collecting.
What I can actually do, is hide properties,
so I don't have to see them until I toggle open
this 10 more properties button here.
And there are a couple of different ways I can do that.
I can right-click on any property.
And then I can go to Hide Property and choose,
Always Hide, Always Show.
Sometimes, you're also gonna have the option
of only showing it when it's not empty.
So I'm gonna choose Always Hide for this updated one,
or I can go over to the three-dot menu
in the corner and I can choose Customize Page.
And I actually have a lot more control here.
I can choose my Show and Hide criteria
for every property in the database.
So let's just say,
I want to also hide the created property.
And then you also see here Hide When Empty
for properties that can have text or content inside of them.
But I also have some options for Back Links,
Top-Level Discussions, and Page Comments.
So right now we notice there is a back link to this page.
And maybe I don't wanna see that there is a back link.
Maybe I just wanna have it be really clean.
I can go over here to back links
and I can choose instead of Show and Popover,
I can choose Off, and now I don't see it.
So utilize that Customize Page area
or just Hide Properties individually,
and you're gonna have a much cleaner database property area,
and you don't have to delete properties
that could be useful in other places.
So that's it.
Those are my 10 big mistakes that I see
beginners making in their Notion workspace.
Hopefully, you found something new and useful in this video.
And if you haven't already,
hit that subscribe button,
so you get access to new build guides,
tutorials, beginner's guides,
and free templates coming down the pipeline
as I release them.
If you are a beginner with Notion,
you're just trying to get your head around the software,
I've got a completely free, completely open,
beginner series called "Notion Fundamentals",
and you can find the over at ThomasJFrank.com/fundamentals.
There is a full YouTube video for each part of the software,
just like this one.
And there's also a full written guide,
which acts as more of a reference.
There's shortcuts, tables, all kinds of cool stuff in there,
so check that out.
And there's also a signup for a Notion Tips Newsletter.
You can get on that.
It's completely free, easy to unsubscribe if you want to,
but I think you are going to enjoy it
if you are trying to unlock the secrets of this tool.
Lastly, if you are a content creator,
if you make YouTube videos like I do,
if you make blog posts, if you do podcasting,
Creators Companion is a tool that's going
to upgrade your workflow immensely.
It is exactly what me and my team use
to manage multiple channels, YouTube channels,
blogs, all kinds of stuff.
And it turns Notion into a one-stop shop
for collecting content ideas,
for green lighting projects,
for managing it throughout
the entire content production pipeline,
from research, to scripting, to editing.
The whole thing is done inside of Notion.
You can find that over at ThomasJFrank.com/cc,
it's called Creator's Companion.
And it's a great way to support this channel as well
if you have been enjoying the content
that I've been throwing up here.
So that's it.
Thanks as always for watching.
Seriously, appreciate you.
Thank you for subscribing if you've done that as well.
And if there are a Notion mistakes
that you have noticed that I did not include in this list,
I would love to hear about 'em
in the comment section down below.
Thanks again.
And I'll see you in the next one.
(energetic hip-hop music)