Creating a Personal Dashboard in Notion

Well, hello there and welcome back to Thomas Frank Explains. In this video, you're going to learn how to create your own personal dashboard inside of Notion. Now, a personal dashboard is basically your home base inside of Notion, which can give you quick access to lots of other useful areas, such as your task manager, your note-taking system, your project manager, or you can even embed linked database views right inside of your dashboard, so you can do things from a single centralized page, like add tasks to your inbox, add notes to your note inbox, et cetera. So in this video, you're going to learn exactly how to build this. example dashboard right here. And if you saw my last video on block basics, which was part of the Notion Fundamentals course here on YouTube and over on my website as well, you will know that this new personal dashboard is the example that we're using to illustrate a lot of the concepts that we are talking about and teaching inside of Notion Fundamentals. So I wanted to make this video because... Personally, my own learning style is such that if there's a project that we're going through very slowly in a course to explain lots of different concepts, sometimes I want to be able to go and do the project right away, even if I don't fully understand everything that's going on. And actually, in education research and cognitive science, there is a concept called backfilling. Where you go through a project, where you kind of get outside of your comfort zone, you accomplish something where you're kind of a little bit fuzzy or vague on some of the concepts, but in doing so, you have reached outside of your comfort zone, you've grabbed a handhold, and that's actually gonna help you to more quickly backfill the required knowledge to become a true expert. So this video, this tutorial is that concept in action. We are going to completely build this personal dashboard, which you'll then be able to build for yourself if you want. And then if you want to, you can watch the rest of the videos in Notion Fundamentals as they come out, and you're gonna be able to get deep into the details of how every single thing is working. So the inspiration for this personal dashboard here is actually my own personal dashboard, which we'll look at right here. And this is basically where I start whenever I come into Notion. I've got links to my tasks, all my views from ultimate tasks, my today, tomorrow, next seven days. I've got links to my note inbox, my habit tracker, and some specific notes that I'm revisiting very often, like the Barbell Academy Principles notes. It's a course I'm taking right now. ODCC was a course I just finished. I've got some content that I'm working on, projects and quick links. So I use a very link heavy philosophy when I'm building my personal dashboard. I want to just kind of use this as a jumping off point to get to certain places inside my workspace. But there's another personal dashboard philosophy that a lot of people use and that you might wanna use as well. And that, is the use of embedded and linked databases to be able to actually do some work on your personal dashboard. So here on the example one that we're going to build, we actually have a toggle here with an inbox where you can add new tasks to your task manager. And we also have the pretty much the same thing here for your note taking inbox. If you want to add some notes to your inbox, you can do it right from the dashboard. So you're going to learn in this tutorial how to build this from scratch exactly. And as a bonus, I'm going to show you near the end of the tutorial how to add this little weather widget, which is something that comes from a third party tool called Indify, which is free. So I'll show you that near the end. But first, we have to actually get this page built. So I need myself a blank page to start from. And I would actually like to have that page inside of the content project here in Notion for this very video. So you're going to get a quick sneak peek at Creators Companion, which is the system that we use at my company to manage all of our content projects across all. of our different channels, but which is also a template that I currently have in beta. You can see the sales page link down below. There are still a few spots open as of me recording this video, and then we are gonna be closing them and reopening at full price in early October. Anyway, I'm gonna go over to my Thomas Frank Explains page right here and find this in progress project, which is going to be how to create a personal dashboard in Notion under ready to record. And then within here, I've got a little example area with this personal dashboard blank page. So let's get this shindig on the road. And the first thing that I want to do is actually go up here and make this a full width page. Once that's done, I need to add my headings. So I'm going to do H2 for tasks. I'm going to do another H2 for notes. I'm going to do one for web links. one for reference and that is gonna be about it. Now, one thing that I like to do with my headings is give them backgrounds. So I'm gonna do slash gray to get gray background and do the same thing for all these. And I also like to use emoji to make my headings a little bit more visually distinctive. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that as well. All right, so the next thing I'm gonna do is actually start creating my multi-column layout. So I know what notes to be to the right of tasks. I'm gonna go ahead and have web links underneath tasks and then reference underneath notes. And then if we look back at our personal dashboard, we actually had this pretty sweet picture of Bruce Lee. So I'm going to go ahead and do and view original here. So I can actually open the original photo here in Amazon AWS, which is where Notion stores things just so I can copy it to my clipboard. And then we can go with our control back bracket to the one. building and go ahead and just paste that photo right there. I'm gonna drag that to the right to get our final column. I'm gonna resize that slightly. And really, I just want his picture here so I can also add my favorite quote of all time, "'Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, "'and add what is specifically your own.'" By Bruce Lee. This is something I think about pretty much every day whenever I'm learning things or when I'm getting suggested to try new things, when people are telling me to try new tools or I'm reading self-improvement material. I'm always keeping this quote in mind. I'm going to adapt. The things that are good, things that don't necessarily fit my own life, fit my own needs, I'm going to reject, and I'm going to tweak things, remix things, try things out, and add what is specifically my own. And I would recommend keeping that in mind when creating this dashboard or creating basically anything based off a tutorial, because the thing that I'm creating here is what works for me. And there may be some tweaks that you could actually add to it to make it even better for you. So now what I want to start doing is building out the content underneath these headings. And the first thing that I want to do is actually add horizontal rules. So pro tip, instead of typing slash and then typing divider, which does work, you can simply type three dashes to get a horizontal rule. visually separates the content underneath the heading from the heading itself, which I like. And the next thing that I wanna do is actually build up the tasks section. So what I'm gonna do is go over to ultimate tasks. Now this is a completely free task management template and system that I have over my website. You can check this out if you want. I think it is the best task management system for Notion, at least the best that I've seen. And what I actually wanna do is take these views here and create links. to them from our little personal dashboard that we're creating. So I'm gonna go into the today link here, and this is the today page where we see tasks that are due today. And I'm just gonna hit control L and then go back to our personal dashboard, which I wanna actually favorite now. So to the top here, and we should give it an icon while we're thinking about it. Maybe we're gonna give it this cool little nerd face. And if I just Hit Control V to paste this. I can create either a mention to this page or a link to this page. Now when we're creating a personal dashboard, I would highly recommend hitting link because if we hit link, what we are going to get is an actual link to page block. And the difference between a page mention inside of Notion and a link to page block is that when you use the link to page block, if you come over here and look at the sidebar, we actually get a link. to that page in the sidebar. So one of the most important and most useful aspects of a personal dashboard, I think, is to favorite it and have it at the top of your favorites bar here in Notion so you can toggle it open and have really quick sidebar access to all of your most important pages within your Notion workspace. If you don't want something to be in the sidebar, if you want it to be simply on the dashboard itself, well, that's pretty easy. All you need to do is go ahead and delete this here and then we can simply Paste our link and make it a mention now if it's a mention it's going to be slightly smaller The arrow here is gonna be slightly smaller as well And you will notice that if we toggle this open no pages are listed inside So there's a difference between mentions and page links and I would really like it to be a page link So I do get that cool little sidebar link Alright, so we're gonna do the same with all the other pages that I want linked here So I at least want tomorrow and next seven days. So I'm gonna go into tomorrow grab that Go back and then I can switch over to my next seven days grab that as well And while we're building out our tasks section, one other thing that I want there is going to be a habit tracker. And this is yet another template that I've built. It's free, you can check it out and link in description down below to go and copy that and head back to our personal dashboard and add that to the bottom of our list of tasks. So now I have really quick access to my today, tomorrow, next seven days tasks views along with my habit tracker, but I want to make this dashboard a little bit more interactive. So I want to have an actual embedded view of my inbox so I can quickly add inbox tasks directly from the dashboard. So if I hit plus here, I can start typing linked database. And if I click this, I can actually start searching for database inside of my workspace to create a linked view of it. So if I search for PD, all tasks, This is a sample all tasks database, and this would literally embed that database here. And if I were to click here, I would actually see the original database itself. So from there, I could go in here and I could start adding filters and sorts to make this a pseudo inbox view. But that is a duplication of effort that I don't actually wanna go through because there is a much, much smarter way to do this. which is going to be going over to our inbox and actually duplicate that view that's already there with his existing filters and sorts and simply bring it over to our personal dashboard. So I'm going to click today because I happen to know there is a quick link to inbox from the today view in ultimate tasks. And all I need to do is go ahead and well, first I'm going to unchange this name because I want it to be all tasks. I just need a unique name to get to it. I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this view right here. And now I have a basically exact copy of this link to database, which has the complex filters and sorts that enable this to work really well as an inbox. And all I need to do is basically get it highlight, do a cut operation. Come back to our personal dashboard and paste it. And there it is. Now, because this is a personal dashboard with many different columns, I'm going to want the list view, which is much better when it comes to responsive or pretty narrow columns to be our default. So I'm going to go ahead and drag that to the top and make sure we're always looking at it. And last but not least, I'm going to hit plus here, type a little arrow bracket here to get a toggle. And I'm going to get an inbox emoji. like so. And then type inbox. So I'm going to have this in the toggle because this will often have quite a few tasks in it. And I want it to be hidden by default. One last thing that I do here is go to the little three dots. And I'm going to check the properties to see how many tasks we're loading on first page load. Right now we're loading 50. And I actually would like it to load just 10. Because really what I'm going to be doing with this is looking at anything due today. which is going to be sorted to the top that's in the inbox. But also I want it just as a really quick way to add a new task. If I'm on the dashboard, I don't want to see 50 different tasks. If there do happen to be that many in there, if we really want to see it, we can simply just go to the inbox itself. So that is our tasks area finished. And now let's go ahead and create our notes area. And guess what? I have yet another free template, which we are going to use to add some links to our note taking system and an embedded note taking database. So if you haven't seen it before, I do have, if we go over to my Thomas Frank's Notion templates and go to my note taking system, I've got a note taking system template for Notion. Again, this is free. I'm gonna come to the demo version of it. And I wanna go ahead and grab number one, the link to the note taking system itself. So control L, go back to my personal dashboard and we're gonna create ourselves a page link. Bada boom. And the last thing that I want to do with the note taking system here is actually go into it and I want this inbox to be on my personal dashboard. So just like with tasks, I can add a note to the desk to the inbox without having to go to the note taking system itself. We want to make this personal dashboard a multifunctional place in our Notion workspace. Now, there's a difference between this And the task inbox, which is that I can't simply duplicate this because if you'll notice there is not a little arrow here, which means that this is not actually a linked database view. This is just a plain old database inside of notion, which means. Then if I copy it, I'm going to be creating an actual copy of the database. And if I add pages to that copy, they're not going to show up here. I want them to show up here. So I need to actually create a linked database and you're going to get to see an example of that. So I'm going to go ahead and give this a unique name first. Again, I'm a template creator. I've got many copies of this demo inbox that are just like, you know, backup copies, things I've been building in the past. So I'm going to call it PD demo inbox for now for personal dashboard. And I'm going to go ahead and go create a linked database. So we just need to go back. Hit plus type linked database. And again, this is creating basically a window to that exact database in a different page of our Notion workspace. And the nice thing about linked databases is not only do they let you see a database from a different location, but they also let you create unique sorts, filters, and views from that linked database. So let's go ahead and type PD demo inbox. There it is. And now that I've got that created, I can go ahead and get rid of our unique name and make it demo inbox once again, just needed to have a unique name so I could search for it very easily. And all I need to do is replicate the filters and sorts that I had over here in the demo inbox itself. So if we look at it, they're pretty simple. We have where status is not empty or URL is not empty. So we'll add those. And then we have a sort where updated is descending. So let's go ahead and add those to our little embedded version here, our linked version by going first to filters, we're going to add a filter for status is not empty. And this just ensures a default status is always applied to every new note that is created. And then we're going to also add or where URL is not empty. And the reason that we do this is that notions web clipper, if you use it to clip something into a database here, it will not respect forcing functions, which is what this is here where I think we have where status is not empty, that would force a status tag in that select property, the notion web clipper doesn't respect that it's kind of a bug. So we have an or property because we know that the notion web clipper is going to add a URL, which is going to be the URL of whatever page you clipped. So we've got those two there. And then we're going to go here one Once again, click sort, and we are going to sort by updated and descending. You could also do create it if you want to, but I prefer to see the note that has been changed most recently at the top, even if it has been created a long time ago. So I know what I've been working on. And I just realized that this is a table view, but what I'd really What I actually want this to be is a list view just like this inbox view here. So here I'm going to show you a weird Notion trick that doctors don't want you to know. Maybe they want you to know, I don't know. Weird Notion trick that helps us get around a little bit of a limitation in the Notion product itself. And that is the fact that I cannot duplicate this view if I have not added another view. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to add a view and we're going to call it dummy. And literally the only reason we have created this view is to get access to this little drop down list, which gives us access to all of our views and gets us access to this three dot button on the original table view, which I can then click and hit duplicate on. So this now gets me a duplicate version of the view that we've already used to create filters and sorts. And I can go ahead and change that to, sorry, not a board view, a list view. So there it is, what we could also do is simply change table to list view. and we still have our filters and we still have our sorts. So that is a trick for creating duplicates of views that you've already done a lot of hard work to create filters and sorts on. You just need to create a dummy view. And then once it's created, we can go ahead and delete it. And in this case, because we just changed the original view to a list view, I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of this copy as well. Just wanted to let you see that trick for both of its intended uses. So we'll go ahead and remove that. And now we have our demo inbox linked database, along with our link to the note-taking system itself. Now let's fill out this little web links area. And this is gonna be a very simple part of the tutorial. All I'm going to do is simply click plus here and I'm going to paste a URL, which gives us a couple of different options. We can either dismiss it, which will just leave the URL on screen here. We can create an embed, which will actually embed the page itself, or we can create a bookmark, which is exactly what I want to do here. So this is just an area which would have very quick access to websites that I'm often using. So I kind of want that one as well. And I also would love to have my community page. So I'm going to go ahead and type community.thomasjfrank.com, which is the circle community. that we are using for the Creators Companion tutorial where people can get support and things like that. So I'm gonna go ahead and have that on my dashboard as well. All right, so moving on to the reference area. For me, this is just an area of my dashboard where I put links to pages that I'm visiting quite often. They might be pages for projects, they might be places where I'm brain dumping, like trying to make a gigantic video that's gonna take months. I wanna have really quick access to all that kind of stuff. So I'm gonna put it in my reference area or maybe I'm gonna favorite it and put it on my favorites bar. But the nice thing, again, is that if you use Use the reference area and we use link to page blocks. We are going to have, you can actually see right here, all of these links to pages. So for example, I've got my Notion Fundamentals, a public supplemental database here where everyone can come in and get their supplemental materials for Notion Fundamentals. Boom, it's right there linked right underneath my personal dashboard. That is why this is so powerful. So let's go ahead and create ourselves a personal dashboard by getting some pages underneath reference. And actually, the first one that I want to create is a brand new page, which I'm going to call quotes. I personally like having a page in my workspace where I can just record quotes that I think are cool. So let's go ahead and paste some. quotes in here. And if I have new quotes that I come across when I'm reading or doing online research, I can easily come into my personal dashboard from my favorites bar here and add a quote, which is pretty sweet. I also want to have a couple of links here. So let's go back to ultimate tasks. And let's just say I want to have a really quick link to this website redesign project that I'm working on. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab that with Ctrl L, go back to our personal dashboard. And once again, you know the drill. paste that and create a link to page so it is in my sidebar. So at this point, our little personal dashboard is coming together quite nicely, and it's looking very similar to what we had in the intro to the video, but we are missing a few things. We are missing this little weather widget, which is coming, but we are also missing these little areas at the top of the dashboard, which I think you are going to want to include specifically and especially this little quick links bar here. So let's get these things added and then we're going to go work on the weather widget. So first and foremost, I want a quick links bar. So what is a quick links bar? Well, it is simply a toggle. that has a table of contents widget in it. And the reason you would want this is that if you are looking at your personal dashboard on your phone, all of this is gonna collapse down to a single column. And that means if you have a lot of content underneath each of these headings, you're gonna have to scroll a lot looking for the thing you're trying to find. But if you've got a quick links bar like this, you can easily click this little thing. And you'll note that here it just highlights it in blue because it's already on the screen. But if you were using your phone, it would also zoom you straight down to this section, which is very handy for using Notion on your mobile device, whether it's an iPhone or an Android phone. To give you another quick sneak peek at Creator's Companion, this is something we have built onto every single view. If you're on ideas, you open on-page navigation, you have... all this kind of stuff. If you're on validation, open on page navigation, you have access to every single one of these subheadings because I wanted to design this around mobile usage. And that is also the case for our personal dashboard. So just add a table of contents, link to a toggle, and then I'm gonna go ahead and give it an emoji. Let's type in nav to get this little compass, type this, and then I'm gonna go with on, or I'm gonna go with quick links. Type this, I'm gonna go with quick links. Go slash, let's do a green background. There it is. So keep that toggle most of the time, but when you want quick access to a heading, boom, open it up and you can get to it. Next up, I want a callout block, which is simply a fancy bordered background colored block where I can add something that's going to stick out a little bit. And I just want this little reminder. at the top of my personal dashboard, remember the regrets of the 100-year-olds. There's this great video on YouTube. It's got hundreds of millions of views or something like that, where these people who are over 100 years old are talking about their regrets in life. And for the most part, a lot of them regret working too much, skipping family functions, not seeing friends enough, not exercising, not getting outside. So I want this at the top of my dashboard. Work hard, stay focused, but quit at a reasonable time. Spend time with your friends and your family today. Go outside, don't skip your workouts. Don't optimize your life. by sitting in front of a computer all day for more sitting in front of a computer all day. You know, you gotta work hard, but you also have to have a balanced life. So I want that there. And you know what I also want, just to show you something cool? I also want a synced block because if I drag this into a synced block like so, and then get rid of this whole line here, I can actually copy this synced block and whatever's inside of it. And I can go say over to, how about my quotes page? And I can... Simply paste it and now I have a synced version of this block in this location. I can actually click here to show you the multiple locations and in this location. And if I make a change here. and go back to the original location, we are going to see that change reflected. So that is a pretty cool thing you can use throughout your workspace. I'm just going to use that as a demonstration. And the last thing we wanna create here is a daily tasks list. This is basically like a pad of sticky notes on your desk, where you can just like make some check boxes for what you have to do today. And I personally find this useful because I don't always wanna go into my inbox or my actual task management system to write things like. go to the store or workout, things like that. I like to plan my day and checklists sometimes. So inside this toggle, I'm gonna type slash and I'm going to actually create a gallery, which is simply a different view type for a database than a list or table like you've seen before. I'm gonna go ahead and call this daily tasks. I am going to delete these sample cards. And then this one, we're just going to name the date. And I'm gonna create a little checklist for myself. Oh, I already did that one. Sweet. I also wanna add a property here called archive. I'm gonna make that a checklist property and I'm gonna go ahead and give this a filter. to ensure that archived daily task lists are not showing. I'm going to come here into the three dot and go to properties. I'm going to change this to also only show 10 on first load. And I want to make sure the card size is small. So I'm going to go ahead and give this a name, daily tasks. How about an emoji? Because I simply like emojis. And I think we can go with maybe a blue checkbox this time. Make you bold. And if If we look at our original personal dashboard that I intro'd the video with, we now have pretty much the exact same thing except for our cool little weather widget. So let me now show you exactly how to get that on your dashboard. And in fact, any page in Notion if you want. So if we go over to this site called Indefi.co, I'll have Tony put that on screen as text, we can actually create little widgets for our Notion workspace. And there are quite a few different choices. There's a life progress bar, quote bar, all kinds of stuff that you can explore. But we're going to create a weather widget. So if you come in here and create widget, we're going to have a few different options and I'm going to go ahead and just set my location to Denver and I'm going to go for two days. I want to see what the weather is today and tomorrow. That's probably all I really care about. There are some other things you can do, but I actually like these default settings. I'm going to go ahead and make this a little bit. Yeah, we're going to try for, well, my screen is actually very zoomed in for this tutorial. So I'm going to keep it at two columns. And all we need to do is copy this URL down here. Once we have changed all of our settings, come back to our personal dashboard, click plus to get a little thing here. And all I'm going to do is paste this, but this time, instead of creating a bookmark, I'm going to hit create embed. So what we are doing is essentially embedding a webpage, but this is a very tiny webpage that only It shows our little weather information here. I can change the width to make it a little bit better looking in this column. I can change the height too if I want. And that is our completed personal dashboard. As always, with everything that I create in tutorials, there is going to be a downloadable template version of this personal dashboard that you can go ahead and duplicate into your own workspace and use to your heart's content, though it's going to have links to some public template pages. So you're gonna wanna delete those links and replace them with your own. pages from your own copy of whatever templates that you are using. So, you know, use it as a starting point, but it's probably not gonna be completely useful right off the bat since again, we're linking to public pages. Hopefully you found this useful. Again, this is going to be the example project that we're using for the entirety of Notion Fundamentals, which if you don't know is my complete free and comprehensive beginner's course. for people who wanna learn Notion. If you wanna become familiar with all the basics, everything that the app has to offer, and you wanna become proficient with basically every feature, Notion Fundamentals is going to teach you all of that and has... written versions for every lesson, along with the video version and tons of supplemental materials, not just things like this personal dashboard, but there's also like an entire listing of every block that Notion has in lesson three and all kinds of cool stuff like that. So if you wanna find that, you can go over to thomasjfrank.com slash fundamentals. I will also have a link in the description down below to my template page where you can get access, free access to the ultimate tasks template that I talked about, the note-taking template, the habit tracking template. The only paid template that I sell is the... creator's companion template at this point in time. So if you are a creator, you may wanna check that out, but everything else is completely free and is quite advanced and pretty comprehensive. So check that out. If you have questions, leave them down in the comment section down below, or go ahead and follow me on Twitter. I'm pretty active over there. I do my best to answer every tweet that I get with questions. So let me know what is on your mind, what you got stuck on, what you would like to add, and what you need to get some tips on, and I'll see you over there. Thanks as always for watching. Hopefully you learned something here. Hit that like button for the algorithm if you did. and subscribe if you want more tutorials on this channel. That's about it. So I will see you in the next one. Stay cute.

So in this video, you're going to learn exactly how to build this. example dashboard right here. And if you saw my last video on block basics, which was part of the Notion Fundamentals course here on YouTube and over on my website as well, you will know that this new personal dashboard is the example that we're using to illustrate a lot of the concepts that we are talking about and teaching inside of Notion Fundamentals. So I wanted to make this video because... Personally, my own learning style is such that if there's a project that we're going through very slowly in a course to explain lots of different concepts, sometimes I want to be able to go and do the project right away, even if I don't fully understand everything that's going on.

And actually, in education research and cognitive science, there is a concept called backfilling. Where you go through a project, where you kind of get outside of your comfort zone, you accomplish something where you're kind of a little bit fuzzy or vague on some of the concepts, but in doing so, you have reached outside of your comfort zone, you've grabbed a handhold, and that's actually gonna help you to more quickly backfill the required knowledge to become a true expert. So this video, this tutorial is that concept in action. We are going to completely build this personal dashboard, which you'll then be able to build for yourself if you want.

And then if you want to, you can watch the rest of the videos in Notion Fundamentals as they come out, and you're gonna be able to get deep into the details of how every single thing is working. So the inspiration for this personal dashboard here is actually my own personal dashboard, which we'll look at right here. And this is basically where I start whenever I come into Notion. I've got links to my tasks, all my views from ultimate tasks, my today, tomorrow, next seven days. I've got links to my note inbox, my habit tracker, and some specific notes that I'm revisiting very often, like the Barbell Academy Principles notes.

It's a course I'm taking right now. ODCC was a course I just finished. I've got some content that I'm working on, projects and quick links. So I use a very link heavy philosophy when I'm building my personal dashboard.

I want to just kind of use this as a jumping off point to get to certain places inside my workspace. But there's another personal dashboard philosophy that a lot of people use and that you might wanna use as well. And that, is the use of embedded and linked databases to be able to actually do some work on your personal dashboard. So here on the example one that we're going to build, we actually have a toggle here with an inbox where you can add new tasks to your task manager. And we also have the pretty much the same thing here for your note taking inbox.

If you want to add some notes to your inbox, you can do it right from the dashboard. So you're going to learn in this tutorial how to build this from scratch exactly. And as a bonus, I'm going to show you near the end of the tutorial how to add this little weather widget, which is something that comes from a third party tool called Indify, which is free. So I'll show you that near the end. But first, we have to actually get this page built.

So I need myself a blank page to start from. And I would actually like to have that page inside of the content project here in Notion for this very video. So you're going to get a quick sneak peek at Creators Companion, which is the system that we use at my company to manage all of our content projects across all.

of our different channels, but which is also a template that I currently have in beta. You can see the sales page link down below. There are still a few spots open as of me recording this video, and then we are gonna be closing them and reopening at full price in early October.

Anyway, I'm gonna go over to my Thomas Frank Explains page right here and find this in progress project, which is going to be how to create a personal dashboard in Notion under ready to record. And then within here, I've got a little example area with this personal dashboard blank page. So let's get this shindig on the road. And the first thing that I want to do is actually go up here and make this a full width page. Once that's done, I need to add my headings.

So I'm going to do H2 for tasks. I'm going to do another H2 for notes. I'm going to do one for web links.

one for reference and that is gonna be about it. Now, one thing that I like to do with my headings is give them backgrounds. So I'm gonna do slash gray to get gray background and do the same thing for all these.

And I also like to use emoji to make my headings a little bit more visually distinctive. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that as well. All right, so the next thing I'm gonna do is actually start creating my multi-column layout. So I know what notes to be to the right of tasks. I'm gonna go ahead and have web links underneath tasks and then reference underneath notes.

And then if we look back at our personal dashboard, we actually had this pretty sweet picture of Bruce Lee. So I'm going to go ahead and do and view original here. So I can actually open the original photo here in Amazon AWS, which is where Notion stores things just so I can copy it to my clipboard.

And then we can go with our control back bracket to the one. building and go ahead and just paste that photo right there. I'm gonna drag that to the right to get our final column. I'm gonna resize that slightly.

And really, I just want his picture here so I can also add my favorite quote of all time, "'Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, "'and add what is specifically your own.'" By Bruce Lee. This is something I think about pretty much every day whenever I'm learning things or when I'm getting suggested to try new things, when people are telling me to try new tools or I'm reading self-improvement material. I'm always keeping this quote in mind. I'm going to adapt. The things that are good, things that don't necessarily fit my own life, fit my own needs, I'm going to reject, and I'm going to tweak things, remix things, try things out, and add what is specifically my own. And I would recommend keeping that in mind when creating this dashboard or creating basically anything based off a tutorial, because the thing that I'm creating here is what works for me. And there may be some tweaks that you could actually add to it to make it even better for you. So now what I want to start doing is building out the content underneath these headings. And the first thing that I want to do is actually add horizontal rules. So pro tip, instead of typing slash and then typing divider, which does work, you can simply type three dashes to get a horizontal rule. visually separates the content underneath the heading from the heading itself, which I like. And the next thing that I wanna do is actually build up the tasks section. So what I'm gonna do is go over to ultimate tasks. Now this is a completely free task management template and system that I have over my website. You can check this out if you want. I think it is the best task management system for Notion, at least the best that I've seen. And what I actually wanna do is take these views here and create links. to them from our little personal dashboard that we're creating. So I'm gonna go into the today link here, and this is the today page where we see tasks that are due today. And I'm just gonna hit control L and then go back to our personal dashboard, which I wanna actually favorite now. So to the top here, and we should give it an icon while we're thinking about it. Maybe we're gonna give it this cool little nerd face. And if I just Hit Control V to paste this. I can create either a mention to this page or a link to this page. Now when we're creating a personal dashboard, I would highly recommend hitting link because if we hit link, what we are going to get is an actual link to page block. And the difference between a page mention inside of Notion and a link to page block is that when you use the link to page block, if you come over here and look at the sidebar, we actually get a link. to that page in the sidebar. So one of the most important and most useful aspects of a personal dashboard, I think, is to favorite it and have it at the top of your favorites bar here in Notion so you can toggle it open and have really quick sidebar access to all of your most important pages within your Notion workspace. If you don't want something to be in the sidebar, if you want it to be simply on the dashboard itself, well, that's pretty easy. All you need to do is go ahead and delete this here and then we can simply Paste our link and make it a mention now if it's a mention it's going to be slightly smaller The arrow here is gonna be slightly smaller as well And you will notice that if we toggle this open no pages are listed inside So there's a difference between mentions and page links and I would really like it to be a page link So I do get that cool little sidebar link Alright, so we're gonna do the same with all the other pages that I want linked here So I at least want tomorrow and next seven days. So I'm gonna go into tomorrow grab that Go back and then I can switch over to my next seven days grab that as well And while we're building out our tasks section, one other thing that I want there is going to be a habit tracker. And this is yet another template that I've built. It's free, you can check it out and link in description down below to go and copy that and head back to our personal dashboard and add that to the bottom of our list of tasks. So now I have really quick access to my today, tomorrow, next seven days tasks views along with my habit tracker, but I want to make this dashboard a little bit more interactive. So I want to have an actual embedded view of my inbox so I can quickly add inbox tasks directly from the dashboard. So if I hit plus here, I can start typing linked database. And if I click this, I can actually start searching for database inside of my workspace to create a linked view of it. So if I search for PD, all tasks, This is a sample all tasks database, and this would literally embed that database here. And if I were to click here, I would actually see the original database itself. So from there, I could go in here and I could start adding filters and sorts to make this a pseudo inbox view. But that is a duplication of effort that I don't actually wanna go through because there is a much, much smarter way to do this. which is going to be going over to our inbox and actually duplicate that view that's already there with his existing filters and sorts and simply bring it over to our personal dashboard. So I'm going to click today because I happen to know there is a quick link to inbox from the today view in ultimate tasks. And all I need to do is go ahead and well, first I'm going to unchange this name because I want it to be all tasks. I just need a unique name to get to it. I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this view right here. And now I have a basically exact copy of this link to database, which has the complex filters and sorts that enable this to work really well as an inbox. And all I need to do is basically get it highlight, do a cut operation. Come back to our personal dashboard and paste it. And there it is. Now, because this is a personal dashboard with many different columns, I'm going to want the list view, which is much better when it comes to responsive or pretty narrow columns to be our default. So I'm going to go ahead and drag that to the top and make sure we're always looking at it. And last but not least, I'm going to hit plus here, type a little arrow bracket here to get a toggle. And I'm going to get an inbox emoji. like so. And then type inbox. So I'm going to have this in the toggle because this will often have quite a few tasks in it. And I want it to be hidden by default. One last thing that I do here is go to the little three dots. And I'm going to check the properties to see how many tasks we're loading on first page load. Right now we're loading 50. And I actually would like it to load just 10. Because really what I'm going to be doing with this is looking at anything due today. which is going to be sorted to the top that's in the inbox. But also I want it just as a really quick way to add a new task. If I'm on the dashboard, I don't want to see 50 different tasks. If there do happen to be that many in there, if we really want to see it, we can simply just go to the inbox itself. So that is our tasks area finished. And now let's go ahead and create our notes area. And guess what? I have yet another free template, which we are going to use to add some links to our note taking system and an embedded note taking database. So if you haven't seen it before, I do have, if we go over to my Thomas Frank's Notion templates and go to my note taking system, I've got a note taking system template for Notion. Again, this is free. I'm gonna come to the demo version of it. And I wanna go ahead and grab number one, the link to the note taking system itself. So control L, go back to my personal dashboard and we're gonna create ourselves a page link. Bada boom. And the last thing that I want to do with the note taking system here is actually go into it and I want this inbox to be on my personal dashboard. So just like with tasks, I can add a note to the desk to the inbox without having to go to the note taking system itself. We want to make this personal dashboard a multifunctional place in our Notion workspace. Now, there's a difference between this And the task inbox, which is that I can't simply duplicate this because if you'll notice there is not a little arrow here, which means that this is not actually a linked database view. This is just a plain old database inside of notion, which means. Then if I copy it, I'm going to be creating an actual copy of the database. And if I add pages to that copy, they're not going to show up here. I want them to show up here. So I need to actually create a linked database and you're going to get to see an example of that. So I'm going to go ahead and give this a unique name first. Again, I'm a template creator. I've got many copies of this demo inbox that are just like, you know, backup copies, things I've been building in the past. So I'm going to call it PD demo inbox for now for personal dashboard. And I'm going to go ahead and go create a linked database. So we just need to go back. Hit plus type linked database. And again, this is creating basically a window to that exact database in a different page of our Notion workspace. And the nice thing about linked databases is not only do they let you see a database from a different location, but they also let you create unique sorts, filters, and views from that linked database. So let's go ahead and type PD demo inbox. There it is. And now that I've got that created, I can go ahead and get rid of our unique name and make it demo inbox once again, just needed to have a unique name so I could search for it very easily. And all I need to do is replicate the filters and sorts that I had over here in the demo inbox itself. So if we look at it, they're pretty simple. We have where status is not empty or URL is not empty. So we'll add those. And then we have a sort where updated is descending. So let's go ahead and add those to our little embedded version here, our linked version by going first to filters, we're going to add a filter for status is not empty. And this just ensures a default status is always applied to every new note that is created. And then we're going to also add or where URL is not empty. And the reason that we do this is that notions web clipper, if you use it to clip something into a database here, it will not respect forcing functions, which is what this is here where I think we have where status is not empty, that would force a status tag in that select property, the notion web clipper doesn't respect that it's kind of a bug. So we have an or property because we know that the notion web clipper is going to add a URL, which is going to be the URL of whatever page you clipped. So we've got those two there. And then we're going to go here one Once again, click sort, and we are going to sort by updated and descending. You could also do create it if you want to, but I prefer to see the note that has been changed most recently at the top, even if it has been created a long time ago. So I know what I've been working on. And I just realized that this is a table view, but what I'd really What I actually want this to be is a list view just like this inbox view here. So here I'm going to show you a weird Notion trick that doctors don't want you to know. Maybe they want you to know, I don't know. Weird Notion trick that helps us get around a little bit of a limitation in the Notion product itself. And that is the fact that I cannot duplicate this view if I have not added another view. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to add a view and we're going to call it dummy. And literally the only reason we have created this view is to get access to this little drop down list, which gives us access to all of our views and gets us access to this three dot button on the original table view, which I can then click and hit duplicate on. So this now gets me a duplicate version of the view that we've already used to create filters and sorts. And I can go ahead and change that to, sorry, not a board view, a list view. So there it is, what we could also do is simply change table to list view. and we still have our filters and we still have our sorts. So that is a trick for creating duplicates of views that you've already done a lot of hard work to create filters and sorts on. You just need to create a dummy view. And then once it's created, we can go ahead and delete it. And in this case, because we just changed the original view to a list view, I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of this copy as well. Just wanted to let you see that trick for both of its intended uses. So we'll go ahead and remove that. And now we have our demo inbox linked database, along with our link to the note-taking system itself. Now let's fill out this little web links area. And this is gonna be a very simple part of the tutorial. All I'm going to do is simply click plus here and I'm going to paste a URL, which gives us a couple of different options. We can either dismiss it, which will just leave the URL on screen here. We can create an embed, which will actually embed the page itself, or we can create a bookmark, which is exactly what I want to do here. So this is just an area which would have very quick access to websites that I'm often using. So I kind of want that one as well. And I also would love to have my community page. So I'm going to go ahead and type community.thomasjfrank.com, which is the circle community. that we are using for the Creators Companion tutorial where people can get support and things like that. So I'm gonna go ahead and have that on my dashboard as well. All right, so moving on to the reference area. For me, this is just an area of my dashboard where I put links to pages that I'm visiting quite often. They might be pages for projects, they might be places where I'm brain dumping, like trying to make a gigantic video that's gonna take months. I wanna have really quick access to all that kind of stuff. So I'm gonna put it in my reference area or maybe I'm gonna favorite it and put it on my favorites bar. But the nice thing, again, is that if you use Use the reference area and we use link to page blocks. We are going to have, you can actually see right here, all of these links to pages. So for example, I've got my Notion Fundamentals, a public supplemental database here where everyone can come in and get their supplemental materials for Notion Fundamentals. Boom, it's right there linked right underneath my personal dashboard. That is why this is so powerful. So let's go ahead and create ourselves a personal dashboard by getting some pages underneath reference. And actually, the first one that I want to create is a brand new page, which I'm going to call quotes. I personally like having a page in my workspace where I can just record quotes that I think are cool. So let's go ahead and paste some. quotes in here. And if I have new quotes that I come across when I'm reading or doing online research, I can easily come into my personal dashboard from my favorites bar here and add a quote, which is pretty sweet. I also want to have a couple of links here. So let's go back to ultimate tasks. And let's just say I want to have a really quick link to this website redesign project that I'm working on. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab that with Ctrl L, go back to our personal dashboard. And once again, you know the drill. paste that and create a link to page so it is in my sidebar. So at this point, our little personal dashboard is coming together quite nicely, and it's looking very similar to what we had in the intro to the video, but we are missing a few things. We are missing this little weather widget, which is coming, but we are also missing these little areas at the top of the dashboard, which I think you are going to want to include specifically and especially this little quick links bar here. So let's get these things added and then we're going to go work on the weather widget. So first and foremost, I want a quick links bar. So what is a quick links bar? Well, it is simply a toggle. that has a table of contents widget in it. And the reason you would want this is that if you are looking at your personal dashboard on your phone, all of this is gonna collapse down to a single column. And that means if you have a lot of content underneath each of these headings, you're gonna have to scroll a lot looking for the thing you're trying to find. But if you've got a quick links bar like this, you can easily click this little thing. And you'll note that here it just highlights it in blue because it's already on the screen. But if you were using your phone, it would also zoom you straight down to this section, which is very handy for using Notion on your mobile device, whether it's an iPhone or an Android phone. To give you another quick sneak peek at Creator's Companion, this is something we have built onto every single view. If you're on ideas, you open on-page navigation, you have... all this kind of stuff. If you're on validation, open on page navigation, you have access to every single one of these subheadings because I wanted to design this around mobile usage. And that is also the case for our personal dashboard. So just add a table of contents, link to a toggle, and then I'm gonna go ahead and give it an emoji. Let's type in nav to get this little compass, type this, and then I'm gonna go with on, or I'm gonna go with quick links. Type this, I'm gonna go with quick links. Go slash, let's do a green background. There it is. So keep that toggle most of the time, but when you want quick access to a heading, boom, open it up and you can get to it. Next up, I want a callout block, which is simply a fancy bordered background colored block where I can add something that's going to stick out a little bit. And I just want this little reminder. at the top of my personal dashboard, remember the regrets of the 100-year-olds. There's this great video on YouTube. It's got hundreds of millions of views or something like that, where these people who are over 100 years old are talking about their regrets in life. And for the most part, a lot of them regret working too much, skipping family functions, not seeing friends enough, not exercising, not getting outside. So I want this at the top of my dashboard. Work hard, stay focused, but quit at a reasonable time. Spend time with your friends and your family today. Go outside, don't skip your workouts. Don't optimize your life. by sitting in front of a computer all day for more sitting in front of a computer all day. You know, you gotta work hard, but you also have to have a balanced life. So I want that there. And you know what I also want, just to show you something cool? I also want a synced block because if I drag this into a synced block like so, and then get rid of this whole line here, I can actually copy this synced block and whatever's inside of it. And I can go say over to, how about my quotes page? And I can... Simply paste it and now I have a synced version of this block in this location. I can actually click here to show you the multiple locations and in this location. And if I make a change here. and go back to the original location, we are going to see that change reflected. So that is a pretty cool thing you can use throughout your workspace. I'm just going to use that as a demonstration. And the last thing we wanna create here is a daily tasks list. This is basically like a pad of sticky notes on your desk, where you can just like make some check boxes for what you have to do today. And I personally find this useful because I don't always wanna go into my inbox or my actual task management system to write things like. go to the store or workout, things like that. I like to plan my day and checklists sometimes. So inside this toggle, I'm gonna type slash and I'm going to actually create a gallery, which is simply a different view type for a database than a list or table like you've seen before. I'm gonna go ahead and call this daily tasks. I am going to delete these sample cards. And then this one, we're just going to name the date. And I'm gonna create a little checklist for myself. Oh, I already did that one. Sweet. I also wanna add a property here called archive. I'm gonna make that a checklist property and I'm gonna go ahead and give this a filter. to ensure that archived daily task lists are not showing. I'm going to come here into the three dot and go to properties. I'm going to change this to also only show 10 on first load. And I want to make sure the card size is small. So I'm going to go ahead and give this a name, daily tasks. How about an emoji? Because I simply like emojis. And I think we can go with maybe a blue checkbox this time. Make you bold. And if If we look at our original personal dashboard that I intro'd the video with, we now have pretty much the exact same thing except for our cool little weather widget. So let me now show you exactly how to get that on your dashboard. And in fact, any page in Notion if you want. So if we go over to this site called Indefi.co, I'll have Tony put that on screen as text, we can actually create little widgets for our Notion workspace. And there are quite a few different choices. There's a life progress bar, quote bar, all kinds of stuff that you can explore. But we're going to create a weather widget. So if you come in here and create widget, we're going to have a few different options and I'm going to go ahead and just set my location to Denver and I'm going to go for two days. I want to see what the weather is today and tomorrow. That's probably all I really care about. There are some other things you can do, but I actually like these default settings. I'm going to go ahead and make this a little bit. Yeah, we're going to try for, well, my screen is actually very zoomed in for this tutorial. So I'm going to keep it at two columns. And all we need to do is copy this URL down here. Once we have changed all of our settings, come back to our personal dashboard, click plus to get a little thing here. And all I'm going to do is paste this, but this time, instead of creating a bookmark, I'm going to hit create embed. So what we are doing is essentially embedding a webpage, but this is a very tiny webpage that only It shows our little weather information here. I can change the width to make it a little bit better looking in this column. I can change the height too if I want. And that is our completed personal dashboard. As always, with everything that I create in tutorials, there is going to be a downloadable template version of this personal dashboard that you can go ahead and duplicate into your own workspace and use to your heart's content, though it's going to have links to some public template pages. So you're gonna wanna delete those links and replace them with your own. pages from your own copy of whatever templates that you are using. So, you know, use it as a starting point, but it's probably not gonna be completely useful right off the bat since again, we're linking to public pages. Hopefully you found this useful. Again, this is going to be the example project that we're using for the entirety of Notion Fundamentals, which if you don't know is my complete free and comprehensive beginner's course. for people who wanna learn Notion. If you wanna become familiar with all the basics, everything that the app has to offer, and you wanna become proficient with basically every feature, Notion Fundamentals is going to teach you all of that and has... written versions for every lesson, along with the video version and tons of supplemental materials, not just things like this personal dashboard, but there's also like an entire listing of every block that Notion has in lesson three and all kinds of cool stuff like that. So if you wanna find that, you can go over to thomasjfrank.com slash fundamentals. I will also have a link in the description down below to my template page where you can get access, free access to the ultimate tasks template that I talked about, the note-taking template, the habit tracking template. The only paid template that I sell is the... creator's companion template at this point in time. So if you are a creator, you may wanna check that out, but everything else is completely free and is quite advanced and pretty comprehensive. So check that out. If you have questions, leave them down in the comment section down below, or go ahead and follow me on Twitter. I'm pretty active over there. I do my best to answer every tweet that I get with questions. So let me know what is on your mind, what you got stuck on, what you would like to add, and what you need to get some tips on, and I'll see you over there. Thanks as always for watching. Hopefully you learned something here. Hit that like button for the algorithm if you did. and subscribe if you want more tutorials on this channel. That's about it. So I will see you in the next one. Stay cute.

Transcript for:Creating a Personal Dashboard in Notion

Transcript for:
Creating a Personal Dashboard in Notion