This one is for the list lovers.
The note takers.
I'm Sanne.
I love to read.
I'm a freelancer working in publishing, I love documenting things.
Obviously,
I have a booktube channel,
and I like to keep things organised when it comes to reading.
I am half a messy person,
half an extremely organised person,
and I'm always floating somewhere in the middle.
But basically I wanted to make a video where I share how I document my reading,
the different platforms that I used.
But I'm also using this video to complete setting up my
reading Notion.
You might have seen all these Notion videos pop up on the Internet,
and basically,
I would describe Notion as your note app on your phone meets Google
Docs meets Trello.
Oh,
for a very long time,
I had all my YouTube planning organised in
Trello.
First I had a Google word doc that was 20 pages long.
Then I put it all on Trello
and now I've put it on the notion,
and I put some of my reading on notion already,
but I kind of want to tidy up,
add some things and show you what I'm doing as well.
I have also been looking at people's videos for inspiration on how they organise their reading
notion.
But most of them are kind of documenting everything they're reading,
which is not how I wanted to do it.
Here we go, figure out how to do a recording,
Recording! A lot of how notion works is that you
have this.
It looks like a spreadsheet,
I guess.
It's like a table where you have different entries,
and then you can tag those entries and sort of those entries and put dates on them and stuff like that.
I can show you an example of one entry looks like.
So 'set up a Notion reading tracker with me' working title so far.
So you can open that up and you can see it's tagged and everything,
and you can put whatever text you want in there.
And then here I can make my own statuses topics,
posting day consorted.
This is how a lot of people document their reading.
But for that kind of documenting,
I use the story graph.
So I used to use goodreads.
Now use the storygraph,
and that is just where I put all the books that I've read.
Sometimes I review them.
Sometimes I don't.
But that's where they keep track of that.
It is an indie company,
as compared to goodreads,
which is owned by Amazon,
which I like to avoid As much as possible.
Storygraph also gives you great stats,
page numbers,
nonfiction fiction.
This is how I document my general reading,
so I don't want that on my Notion.
It can be quite hard to find good inspiration for notion like how you can
make it look beautiful.
But Joel from Fictional Fates,
who also has a booktube channel,
posted some screenshots of his incredible
Notion pages they look absolutely gorgeous and what I noticed
most is that I want to add a quote to my page,
and I want to incorporate some imagery.
If you go to my main page.
I haven't really done my like banners and icons,
and I know you can get really fancy with it.
What we're looking at is the reading section.
So the first thing I want to do is that on my lists,
one which contains places to visit things that like to
learn or do in my forties,
I made an articles reading list,
and actually,
I think that should be in reading.
So I'm doing that over the articles reading list is in that same sort of like
table situation.
This is where I save articles that I'm interested in that usually I would bookmark and they just kind of
disappear.
Or I have a tab open for 20 days,
and I end up closing the tab without reading it.
So here I can have them in a place where I know where they are.
And if I have some free time to read article,
I can I can go there and have a read.
OK, so far I have 2021 reading priorities,
which I think is empty.
It is empty,
so that's what we need to build up.
I have Reading for YouTube,
which is kind of by theme,
which books do I need to read to be able to film certain videos?
We have a closer look at that as well.
Then I have my top 10 books list.
This is technically also reading for YouTube,
but they're all top 10 lists.
Then I have the Lonely Hearts Book Club,
which is a book club I'm doing with friends at the moment.
And so this is where I started taking notes.
But I maybe want to do that in a different way,
and then the articles reading list.
Okay,
so I'll pull up notion on my phone.
Okay,
so now I have my references for what I want to do on my phone.
Let's do 2021 reading priorities.
I'm going to do fiction.
Shall I put it up as a table?
So I think I don't want to make it too complicated,
and I know what's what.
So I think for now I might just make,
like, a fiction and non fiction list and then just do like
some check boxes.
And I can always go more complicated later if I want to.
So what colour shall we pick?
Let's do green and then I do bold and
italics.
We're going to make these to do lists.
Maybe I'll put them side by side, fun.
You can kind of drag them around.
So what I want to put on here are books that it's a priority for me to finish it this
year.
It's probably not related to specific videos I want to make.
I'll do that in a separate tab.
It's just books I really want to read.
Okay.
Do I have a to read thing on the storygraph yet?
Okay.
I think I might actually go run around my flat and write things down as I
go.
I'm attached to too many things to bring you to the bookcase.
I'll be right back.
Longbourn.
I'm currently reading at the moment,
so we'll make sure finished that.
I'm reading Six of Yeah.
Six of Crows.
The Fifth Season, Chaos Walking
trilogy.
Let's finish another trilogy this year.
Okay? I think I might leave it at this for now,
but we should add a nice cover to it.
Notion Icons.
Okay,
so for this Mm.
Okay.
I'll do the target for now.
Icon.
Not that link.
Nice.
There's a lot of nice space ones.
Do I kind of like that.
What?
That looks like it's flipping someone off.
That's kind of nice.
Maybe I'll removed the icon.
I'm not into it looking good so far.
Well,
we might come back to this.
OK, so now I want to set up a page for notes for fiction books.
I don't really take notes.
If I read it for a video,
I think I usually just take notes in the video doc. For book clubs I'm using,
Of course,
my very own Book Club Journal,
which I'm sure if you've been watching my recent videos,
you will have seen by now.
It does have a section on notes.
So I wrote some essays,
tips,
tricks in the beginning and then the journal itself,
which I've actually started filling out now,
which is so exciting using a fountain pen to do.
And that works really nicely on the paper guides you through like some stats thoughts of before you're
reading it as you're reading it themes.
And then there's like a page to take notes and stuff like that.
That kind of reading will be documented in here,
but I think maybe if I'm reading nonfiction on my own,
I might want to take notes in here.
So we're going to add a new page.
I want to call this Reading Notes.
Oh,
traditional Dutch painting.
Lovely.
I am a sucker for these Met
museum...
I'm going to unsplash.
So maybe look up.... how about
paper.
Boring. Some library action.
I'll stick with this.
This seems this seems nice.
And then let's get an icon as well.
A book.
Boring light bulb.
It's all very on the nose,
you know.
Let's do speech bubble for now.
Beautiful.
Now we're going to actually add a table and you get to see what that looks like.
Great.
So here we'll do title and then the notes will go in here.
So let's say if I'm reading The Uninhabitable Earth
and I'll say non-fiction
which I can then turn blue.
And environment,
environment,
which I can turn green,
of course.
Put that there and then if you go into it,
then you could,
like,
put your notes there.
I know you can set up that it does this for every page that
you open,
but I haven't figured that out yet.
Beautiful.
So I can start taking notes here.
These are my notes.
Sometimes they are bullet points.
Beautiful.
I won't do my rating.
I don't know if we're writing in there.
I think I'm fine without oh,
I can put this as a full page as well.
If I prefer full width.
Do I like that?
I will keep it like this.
Beautiful.
Okay, that's there.
Now,
then,
let's do Reading for YouTube.
Okay.
I think I'll just fill in some of these.
So Dutch literature in translation.
Okay,
I went on a press trip actually related to Dutch literature,
which is very fun as a Dutch person to be on a press trip about Dutch literature,
But yeah,
I was thinking about doing the video.
So The Discomfort of
Evening,
Winter in Wartime, okay
that's good for now.
I'm gonna change the cover.
I want to upload onto my own photos,
choose an image.
Okay,
You know what?
Well, I like that.
Okay, that's nice.
Let's do that.
Obviously,
have some more work to do.
Some more cute icons to find.
And I think I'm gonna make this reading page.
Actually,
let's spice this up a little bit.
I got this nice photo that I took in Scotland,
so I'll put that there is some text so I can maybe do planning.
What colour should we do?
Maybe I'll do a nice purple.
I can put that.
They're so reading priorities can be here
Reading for YouTube's there.
Top 10 Booklist is there as well.
Book Club. Looking for a quote...
Okay,
I'm gonna take a quote from the book club journal because we put a bunch of quotes in
there at the bottom,
but also between different things.
I'll do some Emily Dickinson.
I feel like that probably needs to have no punctuation.
Beautiful.
That's not quite it,
but we'll get there. So hilariously.
Right after I stopped recording,
I got another burst of inspiration.
I continued editing the page,
and I thought I'd put everything next to each other just so I can see it all
in one go.
And then I went to look for inspiration images,
so I usually always go for Pride and Prejudice.
2005
My favourite film.
It can be quite hard to find good acreenshots of films are always quite low quality.
I ended up finding a few that I liked.
Then I also search for Jane Eyre couldn't find anything I quite liked.
Then I looked for things like greenhouses,
dried flowers,
the wildflower fields and I got some things I was very
into.
And then finally,
I also,
um,
usually also search for things like Countryside, Scotland.
And then,
in the end,
I found this beautiful painting that I'm guessing was the inspiration for one of the
scenes in the Pride and Prejudice movie,
where they're sitting on the roots of this gorgeous tree.
And I basically made a Photoshop file so I could resize them to be exactly the same.
Size is just much easier when you put them into Notion you have to do any
weird resizing.
You can also just do this in Canva
if you like,
so that I found my final images,
and I think it looks beautiful.
I also tried at the serif font,
which I might be switching my whole Notion to.
I'm still not sure.
And then,
actually, a little bit more recently,
I decided to kind of go for,
wider pages, make everything a bit bigger,
Um,
and so this is the final look. Quote at the top. I've bookmarked
this page as well,
so it's easier for me to get to,
so I use it more often.
I updated a lot of my list pages as well,
so I don't have all these lists next to each other anymore.
They just below each other.
It just felt a lot more calm.
So, yeah,
that is the final look.
So thanks for joining me for setting up my reading notion.
I hope that was helpful.
If you didn't know notion yet.
Maybe that was a fun introduction.
Maybe you've got some ideas for how you want to set up your own.
If that's something you'd like to do and I'll talk to you soon,
Doei!