I use notion to organize my life I have a full-time job as a software engineer we recently had our baby girl I'm running this YouTube side hustle and working on many side projects that the people who follow me know about already I made a video about my notion setup last year and received some amazing comments also thousands of people downloaded my template which surprised me a little on the other hand what surprises me even more is when I talk to people at work primarily developers they're all like well I've heard about notion but I haven't really tried it yet ironically those same people keep saying I've been trying to start my side project for a while but I just can't find a time well I got you bro but why make another notion video two reasons notion released some interesting new features since then and I also updated and improved my dashboard so I want to show you some of the cool tricks I learned in this video I'll show you how you can make your notion setup more aesthetic things like widgets where to find a good ones Etc secondly I'll show you how you can combine notion databases templates filters and AI to win back some free time and get more work done and finally I'll show you how I use notion Q&A which I think will be the Game Changer in the future I just want to add that this setup is not following any particular methodology like para or second brain and I don't care this is what really works for me and moves me along daily so I want to share it with you as is even though maybe with the current algorithm I could get more clicks by making yet another one of those videos here's my actual workspace starting with a cover image I always like to use a gift which looks much more aesthetic typically you can find some cool ones on Pinterest and I left some links in the description what few people know is that you can do the same with the icon on the page some websites make animated icons for example there's this one called the Lord eons but any gift will work next I have my weather widget which helps me plan my commute mainly because I need to figure out my workout plan as well throughout the week and sometimes my commute is my workout for the day since a round trip downtown is like 11 to 12 km downhill and back back up and when it comes to widgets there's widget box indify Cairo and I also posted some cool ones on my Discord recently so you can check them out if you're a widget Enthusiast now let's unwrap my goals and projects section which is really the core of my productivity setup this right here is a card view of my Project's database on my dashboard I only show the ones that are marked as goals I find that having three goals at a time is my maximum capacity I like to track progress on my goals so if I click on this progress bar you can see that it's pulling from the tasks related to this project it filters only the completed tasks and calculates the percentage of the checked ones so if I open up my health and fitness goal you can see that I have 152 tasks in total and this is because every single day I have notion automatically create a workout task which is then related to the health and fitness goal and you can see that I hit my daily workout goal about 67% of the time this last 6 months one cool thing I learned is if you go to the top right corner and click customize page you can choose how to display play related items and this is Handy to have it set as minimal because then you can build a custom view below for example let's build a custom table for my one menu project because I totally did not delete the one I had just before I started recording the video so first I add a table View and I'm going to choose tasks then I'll hide the columns I don't need and I'm only left with the name and the type of the task then I'm going to filter by project and select one menu and then I'm going to filter based on the done property and show only those that are unchecked then I can hide the filters and rename the view to something like upcoming tasks and there we go I have a table of tasks I need to do for one menu and what's cool is when you create a view with a filter and add a new item it automatically fills out the task with the properties you have in the filter so this works well as an inbox for ideas for example let's say you have some great shower thoughts about your project you can open the page and start writing immediately the tasks will automatically be assigned to the right project notion does a lot of these little clever automatic things that add up to save a bunch of time and speaking of Saving Time my favorite feature is notion templates in my case I created several for the things I do most often some rep feating like the workout template let me show you inside of this template I have an AI block every day it'll give me a slightly different workout plan so I can hit different muscle groups Without Really overthinking another fun one is the meal prep which uses the same format but generates a healthy slightly different meal plan so it doesn't get repetitive and one more thing I like about notion templates is when you manually create a task you can enter the title and then select the template a notion is smart enough to keep your original title now let's talk about getting things done many people like to use a status field and make a more traditional Canon board but I like to think about it this way if it's on the calendar it's technically in progress and once it's done I can check it off from here and it's very satisfying every other task with no data signed is by definition to do or as I like to call it unfinished business this section is a table view showing uncompleted tasks and it's grouped by project so when planning my week I can plug things from there drag them into my planner schedule them for a given day or even multiple days now speaking of the calendar this view is very powerful but it only shows tasks by week or month and falls short when planning your day by hour and this is where notion calendar comes in which is a brand new app from notion it's a proper calendar and there are a few handy things it does that you can't do from notion number one it can show tasks events and items from multiple databases on the same view so if you have some calls or events outside of work you can plan your day holistically from here for example I have an entire workspace just for my family and seeing my family tasks here is very helpful all the tasks I create for my notion planner that have no designated time slot show up at the top and sometimes I don't have to plan every hour of my day but when I do it's so easy to schedule them like this secondly you can schedule meetings with other people and you can see the video conferencing links from here and it also shows up in the menu bar which is super convenient and you can also share your availability so people can book meetings I don't do this very often but last week I had a nice call that was very quick and easy to arrange so that's pretty much notion calendar and finally let's talk about notion Q&A it's a great implementation of AI and allows you to essentially dig up any information within any page in your workspace by simply asking a question for example I recently worked on a sponsored video with skillshare and it's even in a completely different workspace dedicated to my YouTube channel but even so I can open up my notion Q&A and ask where's the brief for my skillshare video and it immediately gives me the right page and a quick summary from there I can follow up with what are the general requirements of that campaign and it just magically finds this information and summarizes it right there this is a game changer when you use notion daily it saves so much time already but I think it's just the first dat ation of what a true digital assistant will do I created an ocean template with this exact dashboard and workflows that I showed you here so if you like this video check out the resources and links in the description make sure to like And subscribe and I'll see you in the next [Music] one