in this video I'm gonna show you how I capture all my thoughts using only notion and apple shortcut and how you can do it too hi I'm Victor and welcome to my very first YouTube video we've all been in that situation you're outside somewhere maybe you're on your way home maybe you're in the gym between two sets and suddenly a thought arises you remember you have to call your mom or something important from work that slipped your mind before just popped right up now as good as our brain is in having these thoughts it's just as bad in remembering them so what do you do no problem you'll just write it down nowadays every one of us has one or another note-taking app on their phone be it Apple notes notion OneNote or any other one out there you take out your phone you unlock your phone you open your note-taking app you go to the right place inside of that app and you start writing down your thoughts if you're capturing your thoughts like this you are already pretty good going but in a lot of cases this process does not go as smoothly as we wish for sometimes there will be notifications on your phone on and as you pull out your phone you get distracted and you just lose that thought on other occasions the note-taking app will just take forever to load which again causes you to forget that thought in even other cases there's just not the right place inside of your app to write this thing down that you're just thinking of that's why I'm gonna show you how you can create a simple shortcut that will enable you to capture all these thoughts with as much as the Press of one button on your Apple left side right into so this is basically my second brain I try to capture everything in here but today we'll only look into one particular section which is my task manager and we see on this left hand side the inbox that is basically the table that we're gonna focus on today so the inbox is the place where I try to capture all of these thoughts that I mentioned earlier from here on I then later categorize these thoughts but today we will look into the capture ring so how do we now create a shortcut that enables us to basically insert data into this inbox without opening the notion app so in order to do that there are a couple of preparations we have to do within Notions the first one would be that we have to create an integration so let's jump right over to this website over here so on notion.so my Integrations when you're logged in you will see all your Integrations but for the purposes of this video we'll create one together so let's jump into this by creating a new integration and it asks us for a name let's call this one YouTube demo integration you can call it whatever you want you could also upload a little image if you would like to as a logo I'll skip that for now but as we submit we successfully created an integration and we are shown a secret so what does this integration actually do per se every page a notion that we have and especially like this database is you can imagine that they're protected by a wall which is basically the notion application and no application from outside can access this database with this integration we basically build a door and the secret is a key so another application for example Apple shortcut can now use this key to access our database and insert data or readout data whatever you want to do so reveal this secret over here and copy it and I highly recommend to put this down in some kind of notepad so we can access it later I'll use my little text file over here let's just copy that down here all right now as we have created this integration so we basically built this store we need to implement this door into our database so let's jump to the database main page what we see right here this is a view of the database the database main Pages look like this in Notebook so make sure that you are on the main page of the database and most of the time you also have to refresh this page once so hold command and let's refresh this once and now over the three dots we can go to add connections and if we scroll down here we will find the YouTube demo integration that we just created let's add this to this database confirm or write our connection our door is basically implemented so other applications with the key with the secret that we just saved we can access our database now all right next thing we need is the database ID in order to get the database ID we go over these three dots here again we copy this link and we'll go into our text file again and paste it so in this link it starts with wwwynnotion.so and after the first slash the chain of numbers and letters that we have here that is our database ID so we can delete everything including the question mark behind it and everything up until the slab and this is our database ID all right now we have as if the secret and the database ID we have added the connection to our database page and with this we are basically done from an ocean perspective now let's jump right into Apple shortcuts and build our automation now we are in apple shortcuts and you already see some of the shortcuts that I have created but for the purposes of this video we'll create one shortcut together let's do that by clicking on the little plus icon over here so the basic structure how shortcuts are organized is that in this editor view you now see on the right hand side over here different suggestions of apps and scripts that you can use by dragging and dropping them into the editor View and then creating a chain of executions basically so once the shortcut is triggered all the elements within this automation will be executed from top to bottom but let's just dive right into it and learn as we go so I always recommend to start off by giving the shortcut a name I would call this one YouTube demo capture shortcut and the first thing that our shortcut should do is give the user us basically the option to input some kind of thought so we will go here and type in in the search bar and ask and it will suggest us ask for input just drag and drop it into the editor View and now there's some settings that we can configure we can edit if it should ask for a text number URL whatsoever we will stick with text because thoughts can be any kind of format so this is fine and we can also insert a little prompt so what should the question actually be that is asked while showing this text field how about what would you like to capture all right so now we have asked the user for us to input some kind of thought now we've written some text and we hit on send so the next step would be that we put the thought that we have in some kind of a structure so that the notion application would understand it we cannot just send the text that we just entered to the notion application because it would not know how to process it and what to do with it the rules of like how the data has to be structured in order for the notion application to processes in the way that we need it to all these rules are very well documented on this website over here this is the notion API documentation and especially the page focused on working with databases here you find everything about how to insert update or delete or like get data from your databases but we will not go into too much detail in here because I don't want this video to be too technical but I'll link this page down below in the description all right so let's jump back to our shortcut in order to put that thought now into a structure that we needed to we will create a little text file so just drag and drop text from the right hand side into the editor View and I already created a little snippet that I will obviously they put in the description down below as well so you don't have to worry about it and this snippet is basically the structure that you need if you want to insert something into the database with just a simple text title so what we need to do is just replace the database ID filler over here with the database that we already copied down here there we go and the content needs to be edited as well so instead of putting in the this filler we will actually need to put in the input that we got from the first element of the shortcut so what we can do here is just start typing provided input click on it and now there is a little link connecting these two elements this means that the text that we put in the initial check sphere is now used in the middle text file afterwards all right now we have prepared this structure so we can send this now to the notion application so what we would need to do is create a little URL element just drag and drop this here again all right and the URL we need to send the data to is this one that I already prepared over here let me just insert it I'll also put this information in the description so this is the URL that we actually need to send the data to this is the notion API and basically so the next step would be the actual sending of the data for that we use the element get contents of URL let's put that down below here and a shortcuts automatically created this little link here showing us that he will use the URL that we just entered for this element but for this we have to do some additional configuration so click on show more and the first thing is that we are supposed to choose the method so there are different methods in these API requests but what we want to do is we want to send data and insert it into the database so that is basically the post method as we click the post method we see that there is an element which is called request body so instead of using Json we will use a file format and we will choose our text file over here all right we still need to verify ourselves for this we use headers so we need to add three headers in our request the first one being the authorization then we also need the content type and the notion version for the values the first one would be Bearer space and then the secret that we copied over here copy that I can and paste it here all right and so the display in apple shortcuts is a bit confusing here it just shows better but actually the whole string is in here so just click into it and use your arrows to jump further in the string and then you'll see your sacred appear so please make sure if you try this out yourself that your secret is correctly inserted in this field all right now the next value would be applications with Json and the last one would be 2022 06 28 all right and with this we are basically done we now ask the user for some kind of input we restructure that input in a way so the notion application would actually understand it and then we send that data structure to the notion API endpoint verifying ourselves with our secret to insert the data into the database the next step is the most fun step which is basically just trying it out so what we'll do is we'll put this on the one side and then we'll get our database on the other side and if I play press play here on the first execution it will still ask me for some permissions but you'll see as we go so let's hit play it asks us what would you like to capture will don't forget to comment you can also add some emojis if you'd like to that is off totally up to you done and now as I mentioned the Privacy alerts and it basically asks us is this shortcut actually allowed to send a request to API dot.com and we'll just allow it and as we allow it we see that it is still processing up here and there we go the new entry to our database we see here some kind of response code on the left hand side don't need to go too much into this we can try this out again you know he won't ask us for any permission please give me some feedback on this first video a very long thought over here done and now we see that it immediately will enter this into the database all right now you're all set up to never let a thought slip your mind again if you enjoyed this video please make sure to leave a like or comment down below since this is my very first YouTube video any kind of feedback is really much appreciated and would help me a lot to get going on this channel and if there's anything else you would like to share feel free to reach out see you in the next video