- Well, hello there!
And welcome back to Thomas Frank Explains.
So Notion has quietly released a brand new feature
called Synced Blocks, which many of us have been asking for
for quite a long time.
What are synced blocks?
Well, they're essentially a way to embed content
from one page in your Notion workspace
into another page or several pages.
As many as you want, in fact.
And once you've pasted a synced block,
you're gonna be able to see and even edit the content
within it from every location where that synced block is.
It's a really cool feature.
And in this video, we're gonna go over five different ideas
for how you can start using synced blocks
in your own workspace.
From embedding insights and quotes from your book notes
into articles you're writing, like in Roam Research,
to creating checklists in a company Wiki
and then porting them over to project templates,
to even creating a global quick link navigation bar
that you can put basically anywhere.
A lot of these ideas I'm already using in my own workspace.
And I hope that you find them helpful
for your next build as well.
(upbeat music)
All right, once again,
I am trapped within a circle on your screen
and we're going to start exploring the first idea,
which is gonna be embedding blocks of research
from book notes or other research sources
that you already have in Notion, within a, maybe,
video research page or something else that you're writing.
Maybe an article.
If you've ever used Roam Research,
you're gonna be very familiar with this technique.
If you've got pages of research already in Roam Research,
you can use their block embed feature to bring it
into something that you're writing.
So for example, I've got this
"Three Steps to Decluttering Your Phone" article
that I'm writing here in Roam Research.
Or was writing many, many months ago
when I was using Roam full-time.
What I also have is my book notes on the book "Hyperfocus".
So if we load these up, we'll see I have all these notes.
I've got probably 10, 20,000 words of notes on this book.
And there's a lot of great insights
that I would love to bring in
to the article that I'm writing.
Instead of copying and pasting these
and then bringing them over,
I can actually embed certain blocks from that research
right in this article I'm writing.
So if I just hit Enter here, type slash
and go to the block embed feature,
I can then start typing to search.
And I'm gonna go for multitasking.
And I know there's a block I can bring in right here.
Multitasking relies more on basal ganglia.
And when I hit Enter, that's gonna be brought in.
I can also come and click this little one here
and I can actually see the location of that block,
which is pretty sweet.
So now with synced blocks in Notion,
we're able to do something relatively similar to this.
So for an example, I'm writing this article
or making a video on
How To Beat Analysis Paralysis right now.
So in my Research and Notes area,
I'm taking some notes and you know,
I come to remember that there's a quote from "Antifragile"
about how failure actually gives us information.
It'd be great to bring
into this video on analysis paralysis.
And I have a whole page of notes,
actually highlights from Readwise about "Antifragile".
So if we come in here
and we find a quote that we wanna use, like,
say this one right here,
we can go ahead and turn it into a synced block.
I'm just gonna type /turn and start to hit sync
to turn this into a synced block.
And just to go on a bit of a tangent here,
turning things into a synced block in Notion is different
than turning things into other block types.
With synced blocks,
you're simply wrapping the existing block
in a new synced block.
You're not turning it into a synced block, actually.
So now we have this quote in a synced block
and we can click Copy and Sync, and then we can go back
to our research and simply paste it in.
So now I have a little exclamation mark here
because there are privacy differences
between those two pages.
But beyond that, this is now very usable.
If I want to make an edit to this, I can
or I can make an edit to it on the actual Antifragile page.
So this is a great way to take notes on books,
to take copious detailed notes on research sources,
and then easily bring them in to research
that you're doing for specific articles.
It's pretty cool.
Idea number two is gonna be syncing process documentation,
standard operating procedures, and centralized checklists
into actual project templates when you're working
on something in Notion.
So to give you an example of that, here is a look,
actually, exclusive first look at a premium template
that I'm creating called Creator's Companion.
This is based on the actual content planning
and management system that we use for my main channel,
for this channel, for all the kind of content
that we create.
And if you're running a content creation business
especially if you have a team, it's a great idea
to have a centralized company Wiki
where you can have documentation,
you can have contact lists, sponsor lists,
that kind of stuff, and you can have checklists
and standard operating procedures.
If you're hiring someone new,
it's great to have a centralized database where they can go
and get instructions and see how to do things.
So for example,
we have this YouTube video publishing guide here
and this has a checklist which is inside a synced block.
And this basically shows you exactly how to upload a video
to my main channel.
We need to do things like creating a thumbnail
and testing it with thumbsup.tv.
We test title variations.
We do all these different things.
And if we weren't able to look at this checklist,
it's very likely that my team or even me
would forget to do one or more of these things.
There's just so many little things here
and a lot of them are detailed
so it's great to have a checklist
But I would love to have this checklist inside
of every video project that I create.
So here's another great use of synced blocks.
If I put this into a sync block like I have
and then I go ahead and copy and sync it,
then I can go over to the projects template
that I use for my YouTube videos.
So to do that, I'm gonna go over to this channel page here
and inside the channel page, I have a link
to my master content tracker.
Actually, just click that to show you what it looks like.
This is a master database
for tracking any content project that we create.
It could be YouTube videos for the Thomas Frank channel.
It could be College Info Geek articles.
It could be stuff for the Thomas J. Frank blog,
all kinds of cool stuff.
But within here, we have templates
for each type of content we create.
So I'm gonna open up this Thomas Frank YouTube template here
by going to Edit and you'll see something
that should be quite familiar.
If you've seen my videos before,
this is my project template.
So we've got things like our, you know,
related content area, our research and notes or script
and an area for checklists.
So I would love to have a publishing checklist inside
of every new video I create.
And to do that, I'm going to add that synced block
to a page here in this template.
First I'll click plus here, and I'm gonna click a page.
I'm gonna call this publishing checklist.
And then all I have to do is paste my synced block
containing my global checklist.
Now, anytime I create an instance
of this YouTube project template,
I'm gonna get this publishing checklist in here.
And I already had this on my old templates.
I'm gonna go and show you an existing video
just to show you that that exists.
Let's go back to How To Beat Analysis Paralysis.
So I open this up and you can see this is generated
from that template.
So if I go into my publishing checklist,
I'm going to see that checklist.
Now here's one thing to keep in mind when you're doing this.
If I make changes to this checklist,
say I check off a few items because I'm actually doing them,
because this is synced, when we go back to the original,
we're going to see that it's actually been carried out
across every instance of that same checklist.
We don't actually want that to happen.
We want this global checklist
within our Wiki to always remain unchecked.
And obviously, we also don't want things being checked off
on projects that aren't yet ready to be published.
That's gonna be very confusing.
So let me uncheck these real quick
and we'll go back to that publishing checklist
within our How to Beat Analysis Paralysis video project.
And what we need to do before checking things off here
or making any changes that we don't want to propagate
across every instance of our sync block
is go to the three-dot menu here and click unsync.
I'm gonna be given this option,
do you really want to unsync this?
Yes, I do.
And now these blocks are just blocks.
They're sitting here.
You can see they're all selected.
There's many, many, many of them.
They are no longer synced to that synced block.
So if I go off and you know, upload my video
and I'm checking things off as I go,
now when I go back to my Wiki right here,
we're gonna see that none of these are checked off
because I unsynced that instance of this synced block
and the checklist within it.
Idea number three is going to be creating a global inbox
that you can place in multiple locations
around your workspace to shuttle data around.
They give you basically a scratch pad
that you can work off of wherever you are.
So to show you an example of that,
here is a beta version of my ultimate tasks template
where I can play around with things and make changes.
And what I've created here is a little toggle block,
that's within a sync block.
And I can open that up and basically add anything I want.
It could be video ideas, it could be tasks.
In fact, let me add another task here,
test responsive design on sales page.
And I can just add that wherever I want.
Now, if I sync this global inbox across my whole workspace,
I'll be able to drag things as needed
into their correct spaces,
maybe in task lists and databases.
So if I go to my web design project right here,
you're gonna see that I've also added this global inbox
to the side of this task list within the project.
And if you've watched my other videos before,
you know that Notion has something
that I like to call Forcing Functions,
where you use the filter criteria of a database
or a linked database to essentially force new rows
that are created within that view
to take on certain properties like due dates
or an association with a project.
So if we look at the filters here,
specifically the top one here,
everything in this database view has to have
its project related to the web design project,
the demo project that we're currently in.
So if I drag anything from this global inbox
into this database view,
like test responsive design on sales page,
it's going to be associated with this project.
I don't want to remove my sorting
so I'm gonna cancel that.
But now I have a new task associated with my project.
And if I open it up and look at the properties,
we can now see that it's associated with website redesign.
So imagine if you were to put this global inbox
inside a meeting notes template, then if you have a meeting
with your team every week, I can actually show you this,
I've made an example for it.
You could drag things from your meeting notes
into this global inbox and then organize them as needed.
So for example, I wanna do a performance analysis
on this video that over-performed.
So I'm gonna go ahead
and drag this block into my global inbox here.
It doesn't even matter if it's indented.
And now if I go over to say, my today tasks, I'm gonna see,
do performance analysis on watch time drop offs
from my meeting notes and I can just go ahead
and drag it into my today list.
Cancel that.
And we're going to see it is now due today.
Again, because we are using forcing functions
and the filter on this view specifically says
it must be due today or before today.
So that's the global inbox idea.
I think this is a very versatile idea.
There's probably a lot more you could do with it
but we are gonna move on to our next idea now.
Idea number four is going to be global headers
and footers in page templates that you create.
So say you're trying to create a unified workspace
that has maybe a header or footer
that is pretty much on every single page.
You can easily create a block and just copy and paste it
across lots of different pages.
But then if you wanted to make a change to that footer
you would have to go and make a change in tons
of different places, synced blocks solve that problem.
So for an example, here, I've got yet another instance
of the creator's companion template that I am creating.
And by the way, if you wanna get on the wait list
for this template, if you're a YouTuber or a blogger
who wants to manage multiple channels in Notion,
you can go over to thomasjfrank.com/cc.
There's a waitlist there you can sign up for
but I've got this synced global footer in the template.
And if we go over to, say this channel page here,
we're gonna find that exact same synced global footer here.
So if I wanna make a change to this,
say I want to just, I don't know, add copyright.
Yeah, 2021 right there.
Then when I go back to the original template page,
we're gonna see that that change has synced across.
So this is a great way to create easily changeable,
easily updatable footers and headers.
And this can be especially useful
if you're using Notion to create your own website
using tools like Super and Potion.
And our fifth idea, one that I am pretty excited about
in particular is using synced blocks to create a synced
and global quick links bar that you could put
basically anywhere in your workspace.
Like the one I've created right here.
I've got this inbox view part of ultimate tasks
and I've got this little toggle bar that I can open up.
And I see all of these links that I have set up
to frequently used pages in my workspace.
So this is a bit of an upgrade
or at least an augmentation on the sidebar here in Notion.
The sidebar is very powerful
but there are some limitations.
One of the biggest ones is that
with database views like this one here, if I twirl into it,
I can't actually look at the rows inside the database.
Instead, I just look at the different views I've created.
So if I wanna link to specific pages in a database,
I actually need to create links on a page to those pages.
And that is exactly what I've done
inside this quick links bar.
But because it's synced,
I can now put it anywhere in my workspace.
I could even make it a global header.
So it's basically part of every single page if I want it to.
So how do you create this links bar?
Well, first and foremost, you probably noticed
that I have a toggle here with multiple columns inside
that if you've ever tried to drag things around
to create multiple columns inside of a toggle,
you will know that it's actually not possible.
So we actually have to do is use a little trick
that I'm gonna be teaching you in more detail
in an upcoming video about nested columns here in Notion.
But I'm gonna show you real quick how to do it.
First, you wanna create a page with your multiple columns.
So I've got my links here.
I've created columns and it's a page called quick links.
I'm gonna go one level up
so I can see that page block here.
And I'm gonna turn that page into a toggle list.
So that's a useful trick.
If you put things in a page and then you turn that page
into a toggle or a heading or whatever,
you're gonna preserve that nested column structure
from the page you had created.
From there, all you're gonna do is turn this quick links bar
into a synced block, which is gonna make it synced.
And I still have a toggle here
so I can collapse that if I want
and then I can copy and sync it throughout my workspace.
So there you have it, five ideas for how to use
the brand new synced blocks feature inside of Notion.
One thing to note is that as of today,
as I'm recording this, synced blocks are still in beta
so we're probably gonna see some changes
coming to sync blocks.
I've already sent off some ideas to the Notion team myself
for some changes that I would like to see
but everyone has access to synced blocks
and you can start using them in your workspace right now.
So hopefully these ideas get you started
with some cool things.
You can start adding using these within your own workspace.
I have a full article on synced blocks
that includes these five ideas along with a full tutorial
on how to use them.
So check that out.
If you wanna learn more about how to use sync blocks,
we'll learn more details.
And if you wanna learn more Notion stuff in general,
I've got a whole course called Notion Fundamentals
which is free and public and you can find it
over at thomasjfrank.com/fundamentals.
There are all kinds of articles teaching
basically every single part of Notion
as I'm recording this right now, it's still coming out.
But if you're watching this far in the future,
then the entire thing is probably gonna be published.
And you're gonna wanna check it out.
Last but not least, you can sign up
for my Notion tips email newsletter
right on that fundamentals page,
where you can get notifications
whenever I publish new tutorials or make new templates.
And speaking of templates, I've got a ton of templates
including a brand new habit tracker template
over at thomasjfrank.com/templates.
So check that stuff out if you're looking
for some cool templates to add to your workspace
or don't cause as always, I'm not your dad.
But I am curious to know,
what are you gonna do with synced blocks?
What are your ideas with this?
And what are your questions?
If you've got questions, leave them down
in the comment section down below,
or follow me on Twitter @tomfrankly
and send me your question there.
I do my best to answer every question that I can
as long as I'm able to answer it.
So as always, thanks for watching
and I will see you in the next video.
(upbeat music)