today I'll be taking you through how I use notion to essentially manage and organize my entire life as a software engineer and programmer if you're an OG on this channel you might remember that some of the earliest videos that actually led to my channel blowing up in the first place were my previous notion videos so when notion reached out to me to sponsor a video for me I was absolutely thrilled so today we'll be going through over all the ways in which I personally use notion every single day to organize my life as a software engineer very excited to share all this to you in case you don't know what notion is it's essentially this all-in-one productivity tools platform to organize nodes to keep track of projects I'll be using it for various things in my life for I think like two or three years now I was just designed in such a way that actually encourages and complements the right ways of learning remembering and organizing stuff which as you know is really important to me the plan for this video is as follows first we'll discuss exactly why you should have a system to manage your life in the first place including why I have personally chosen to use notion of this then we'll dive into the specific ways in which I personally use notion every single day specifically number one on how I plan projects using notion number two how I take notes using notion and three how I track my learning using notion and number four how I expand my knowledge using notion and lastly if you watch till the end we'll also leave a couple of templates down below so that if you want to use notion in the exact same way as I do and follow the same processes as I do without having to create all these things from scratch you can literally just copy paste the exact same templates that I use but make sure you actually watch this video all the way through because just copying the templates without actually knowing how to use notion properly is not going to be very effective there's certain ways in which notion is designed to be used in a way and certain ways in which I really utilize notion to complement as I said the right ways of learning and the right ways of retaining information is you need my name is Thomas I'm an ex-economic graduate where instead of going into work into finance and economics like most of my peers I taught myself to code and became a software engineer instead on this channel I just want to essentially share all the lessons that I learned throughout my own Journey because if all these lessons helped me they might just help some of you too okay so first of all why do we need a system like this anyway what's the point we basically live in an age of information Overlord people who achieve certain things are very willing to share essentially everything that they have learned but the problem here is that unless you actually figure out how to organize this information as effectively as possible all this information is essentially useless it's only when you are able to transform that information into action and then the action the results that things actually start to happen so that is why it's super important to have a system where you can store information like the most important information to you and to your goals in such a way that you can then access the information data because if you try just try to maintain any in your brain that sort of doesn't work because your brain is really not designed to be like a store of information so if you just jump in the notion right here when you get started you get created essentially your own notion workspace that's what they're called and in here you can create all these different sections so if you just for example create an example section right here and it's going to start off as like a notion page that's what we call this like an example page and you there's a couple of templates that you can choose from that will go over in a second but if you just started as an empty page this is just like um let's say you want to make notes about like python python no what you can then do is write something here like let's say four loops and then in a normal note taking system what you do is just under here maybe you like bold this like you can obviously do all these basic things even then here write like how to implement the for Loop but basically notion is a lot more powerful than a normal note taking system because well you can do is if you clap click in here you have a lot of different options that you can actually do with this piece of text like you can turn it into a heading if you want it to be bolded you can make this into a bulleted list and like in here then you're going to make this like a sub bullet or something like this but like the thing I like to use the most is like use these toggles if you're writing a bunch of notes on python here you don't have to have all of your notes open at the same time you can keep them inside of these toggles and let's say you have actually let me just show you a proper example that I've been doing here like for example for example these are my notes in graphs there's a lot of different topics around graphs that I've been looking into for example breakfast search is implementation B go and there's like all these questions that will go over in more detail in a second I can keep all these notes inside of these toggles which keeps the whole page a lot cleaner and I can like have this like snapshot view of all the topics that I'm covering in this page of notes without having to look at all the blocks of text that you would normally have in like a notebook or like a normal note-taking app you can also turn this into a page so essentially this turns your notes into this hierarchical relationship of different nodes and then these four Loop is now essentially its own page and if you go to the top you can see this whole hierarchy or pages that you're currently inside of let's say this some note that you've done in a different section of your notes and work space before that's related to python you just go on link and then you can go link to page and let's say I want to link it to for example this book notes page in here rather than me having to sort of recreate the same page again it's sort of like do not repeat yourself principle of programming in a way the other cool thing you can do is not just for text you can also add images like if you go embed it's going to allow you to embed images for example this is one of my thumbnails for one of my videos I think and as programmers another great thing they have is this code Snippets you can just like slash code and then you can write code and you can choose the language in here python let's say we wanna hello World though is especially useful for your programming notes because you can actually write code Snippets with like highlighting and like all of that which also adds a lot of color to your notes compared to what you might have in a regular not thinking system another great thing about notion are these templates where you go down here and click on template there's a lot of different like pre-made templates that you can choose from for example if you're going to use this template and then you it's going to be added to your workspace and you can just edit it as you like and then obviously a lot of people have created their own templates like me for example I've created my own template which again will be linked down below but now if we go into specifically how I use notion to first of all track my learnings and to take notes if you've seen my previous notion videos you've probably already seen my open source computer size degree template which is one of the templates that's down below in the description that you can just go and copy if you want essentially there's a bunch of computer science courses that I found online that I've compiled by the work that's been done by these open source University who have essentially compiled like a full online computer science degree from free slash very cheap online courses I've got this not started in progress and completed and so I can keep track of which courses I am currently doing and inside of here if we go inside I I've then made notes from that course so all my notes from all my courses for this rookie are accessible in this one dashboard and then for any other programming notes that are not related to particular courses here if you go into my programming and computer science and then programming notes I've got a bunch of programming notes for a bunch of different topics like for example I'm building this whole data structures and algorithms like node repository from everything I'm learning about these topics for example right now doing stuff already do graphs and this is my notes on heaps again all of these are organized under these totals and the reason why I use this toggle so much is because the way your brain actually works most effectively is not by just writing summaries of what you're learning is by actually testing yourself and forcing your brain to think really hard about what you're doing so that is why when I go through these notes before opening any of these toggles I force myself to either ask the question or the prompt that I've written for myself or like at least think about like here we're talking about here before I open this implementation tab where I've written like a pseudocode version of how to actually Implement a heap I'm forcing my brain like I made a contract with myself that I need to think in my mind first how would I implement this before I'm allowed to actually open up the note and see how I've actually written my notes because that enforces my brain to retrieve the information out and I talk about this in a lot more detail in my other videos on this channel which I've linked Down Below in the description there's like pictures embedded like all of these I think some of these are from the algorithm specialization that I'm currently doing and for these data Direction algorithm is known you can see I've created this gallery view there's a lot of different views that you have like for example you can create a board as it shows up like this you can create a table like whatever makes sense for the particular sort of page that you're building and I do the same thing to track the rest of my coding courses as well I've got this board View and this default view where you can add all of these tags and for example if my Java programming course it's Javas we've got a Java tag and it's on the platform udemys and whatever other tags you might want to create on this like different types there's numbers selects like so many options in here that I can't even properly go through in this video both of these different views others different ways of viewing the same database so essentially if I move this from next to on hold it's also going to update on here so it's not like you need to update them separately or anything so whichever way you want to view the data you can just choose between them and switch between them on the fly as you want if you then go into how I track my coding projects using notion I essentially have a very similar view where you've got next up in Pro progress and complete it and inside of here we go I've created this template for a project we have a description we've got a link to mirror and a link to the GitHub and I do two list of the next things that I want to do with this project and I'm gonna have a lot more detail video on how I actually plan projects so we've got that video to look forward if it's just a small script or something like that I can do in one day I don't necessarily add it in here but anything bigger I like to keep in here the next interesting way in which I use notion is to expand my knowledge of what do I actually mean by this well if you're the type of person like me where you're learning a bunch of things all the time there's all this information that's coming here sort of what I mentioned at the beginning of the video so it's important that you've got some structured way in which you actually sort of extracting that information into this system rather than just trying to keep it all in your brain and of course a couple of ways in which I'm doing this first of all I just got this common programming notes section where based on the topic I've got these Pages where anything anytime I learn something about Java that I know I want to remember future I will add it to this Java node section that I'm building right now like for example oopm classes I just learned about polymorphism the other day related to Java so I've got these toggles where inside of it I've got the explanation and again I'm using the same principle of like for example before I open this static Fields toggle I'm forcing myself to like asking myself okay what are static Fields what does this mean like asking myself the question and trying to remember it as much as possible before I then sort of look at the answer so whenever I'm learning something around the programming that information is going directly into my notion in the relevant section over here and then even Beyond programming I do the same thing with like random things like for example if I'm watching a YouTube video about like airplanes or something like that I've created this knowledge Bank over here where essentially whenever I learn something interesting about anything I'm gonna add that information as a section inside a relevant section that I'm gonna create over here like for example I watch a video from Alex homozy about like the value equation like how you create value as an entrepreneur and I thought that was really interesting and something I want to remember in the future I just made these brief note for these I don't necessarily focus on making them very pretty like just the key takeaways like the key things I want to take out of that piece of content or that book or that video also do that but book notes and I do see my stuff for my YouTube videos whenever I have an idea I will just dump it into notion so that I know it's there so then I know I don't need to worry about forgetting that idea in the future so whatever you're trying to learn something like this is very very important and I'm also building this free film School template like I know some of you have been asking me about this because I mentioned this in a previous notion video basically now that I've got this YouTube and I've got my job I just haven't had the time to like really keep filling this out but again this is just an example of like I'm building this like whole repository of knowledge relating to filmmaking specifically and because again of the way notion is able to organize these pages and like you can just have such Dynamic notes notion is such a great way for you to essentially make these like repositories of this information related to whatever you want to learn again a similar example with data structures and algorithms right here based on the topics I've got like an outer page and then inside of it is hierarchical relationships of toggles and headings and a bunch of other stuff so that in a nutshell is how I personally use notion as a programmer as a software engineer as a YouTuber and as a complete nerd who just wants to learn about a bunch of things and make sure I actually remember them if you would like to check out notion they have a completely free plan which honestly has like 90 of the things that you would ever want then if you want to use some of the more advanced features like for example if you want to use it for collaboration which is also really great for they've got team plans and a bunch of other different plants that you can check out so definitely go check out notion Down Below in the description and do check out my templates the way that works is for example if you click on one of my templates you'll open it up and then in the top right hand corner you can click on duplicate which will then add that same template to your own notion workspace as a duplicate so that you can then modify and I do encourage you to modify for your own needs and what makes most sense for you and how you want user deals so that you can create your own personal dashboard using notion so that's the video and if you'd like to check out my previous notion videos which were immensely popular in the early days of my channel I've got this one which goes into detail about this particular template and how I track my online computer science degree using notion or if you'd like an even more detailed account of how I use notion to take notes I've got this video right here so check out those videos next and with that I will see you in the next video thank you