[Music] foreign need some help huh you look like you could use some no no I'm fine my this is all temporary it doesn't look very temporary no see I am going to use notion and once I get that started this is all gonna go away there's not gonna be any more clutter and how's that going for you foreign [Music] if you clicked on this video I'm assuming your notion Journey has looked a little something like this wow so many pretty workspaces to take inspiration from okay this is a little bit harder than I thought all right let's go back to the basics okay this is still confusing hey it's Wesley Anna welcome back to the channel or welcome if you're new here you may or may not already know me from my very intense notion organizing videos and as much as I would love to sit down and teach you step by step on how to get to that level this shit's hard okay it took me two years of tinkering and experimenting to get my notion to where it is today so instead of throwing you off the deep end I thought we could take a step back or many steps back and start from the beginning because if you're a beginner there's no worse way to start off your notion Journey than by throwing your laptop out the window out of frustration now what exactly is notion in the first place at its core it's really just a very flexible productivity and note-taking app with a lot of really great database functions so think Excel meets Evernote meets a wussy wig webpage Builder and the reason it's so hard to get started or really wrap your head around the whole idea of notion in the first place is because of its flexibility we're mostly used to productivity apps that have some semblance of structure think Asana or click up or todoist which all have very strict parameters that limit what you can do so you're really only focusing on the content and not so much the structure of the system itself so then why use notion in the first place if it brings all this complexity to the table so notion is really best reserved for situations where you want to create your own Wiki or dashboard and essentially build your own content first website so you could do this with school with work if you run a small business those are all great opportunities to use no now because of how customizable notion is it is very easy to spend more time working on it than in it like this was literally me at the end of 2021 for three weeks of my life I'm not kidding not to say that Aesthetics aren't important but they don't matter if the thing that you're working on doesn't actually work for you on a day-to-day basis it's like trying to drive a Ferrari with the engine missing and that is why we are going to take this handy dandy tool here set it to 10 minutes and show you how you can get off the ground without spending weeks setting up your first notion do as I say not as I do when you first open notion you're gonna get a blank page with a title and then a couple different options to get started we're just going to start with an empty page okay so timer started and we can call this Wesley's dashboard foreign let's add a little bit of fun stuff there are some different like icons you can use emojis you can also add in your custom icons I'm just going to go through and add this looks good enough to me you can also add a cover to your pages so if you click on cover you just click change cover here there's different preset graphics and colors you can use you can upload your own image link to an image on the web or you can use unsplash so I think I'm actually going to use my own image from my notion Library foreign I'm gonna spend all of my time trying to make this look nice even though I said I wasn't going to again do as I say and not as I do you can see I've added this picture and I want to move it so you can click reposition and drag this around which is really nice I think this is pretty cute so we're gonna go with this um next when you click into this notion page you're going to see two different icons here this plus is to create a block so text database image anything can be created with a plus sign you can also use a slush and then these little buttons I guess they're called buttons dots whatever um they give you different options to kind of like delete duplicate whatever you can also use this to move it around eventually once we have more blocks so first I like putting a quote at the top for inspiration so I'm gonna do a call out which is this little gray box and you can see it's just automatically giving me space to put in more commands here before we go too far I want to go into here and make this small text and make this full width just some different options for your page here on the side um okay so we're gonna go back into here and I'm going to create a database and I want that database to be a gallery view we're going to make that new and I'm going to call this my notebook so any type of pages or collections if you do bullet journaling this could be like [Music] Fitness recipes [Music] reading list goals wish list you get the idea just like anything that you want to make notes on make a page for we're going to put that in here and I think I'm also going to put an image here let's see um put this girl I like her so we can also add an image I just copied and pasted that now you can actually put these side by side into columns I don't know I can't ever do this this is so hard for me um no that is incorrect foreign there we go and now if you want to let's see let me delete this you can go through and make this any different size you want I'm going to have it take up most of this page make this girl a little bit bigger and now I'm probably going to create a navigation here let's see we're going to create a header so let's go for like an H2 navigation and you can create a page as well so I'm gonna make a page like work um it's a little faster School finances habits and we can create like a journal I'm not actually going to go through and you know make all of these but just kind of showing you the different options okay turn to a page inside Wesley Wesley's dashboard so that's just kind of a quick way to do that um we can also go through and create like different icons for these to make it look a little nicer okay so now you can see whatever type of area of life you want to have in here we can create that under the notebook area under the navigation you can kind of decide what works best for you um I'm also going to get rid of this name because I don't like it when it says the gallery names I think this looks a little nicer and let's create a weekly to do area so we can have our tasks on our dashboard um I created a little line there just by pressing the dash a couple times you can also create it as a block now we're going to go through and do a heading for like Monday if you do a colon you can search for emojis so I'm going to get the little clock emoji and we're gonna have events here and reminders and then I'm gonna add a to-do list so to do to do to do and if we want to make this look a little nicer we can add a background so now I'm going to take this whole block section and I'm going to copy that and paste it and I'm gonna go over here and we're gonna just make our columns this way so I'm going to do maybe four on each side you actually need to come up here I'll create this as Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and I'm just doing command C command V just typical shortcuts on a computer Saturday Sunday and then I ordered this and add another image let's see let's add this girl again because I like her there we go it's nice so now you have your weekly to do calendar that you can just kind of clear and we do every week so if you have events like Sarah's birthday just to remind yourself and for reminders subscribe to Leslie Anna's YouTube all right so then going down here I'm going to create us a calendar as well so we're gonna go here and there's actually a database calendar view already can do a new database ready to go so calendar anytime you want to add an event Sarah's birthday easy [Music] and there you go I mean that was pretty fast setting this up I didn't have to go through a bunch of crazy tutorials and templates um you know I think it looks pretty nice for what it is without getting too carried away yeah so from here I would say you should just go and add in some templates you can find all the templates on the side here that people have created for notion um probably Google some as well but they already have like a reading lesson here habit tracker travel planner all this stuff is kind of already done for you so I would honestly suggest creating Pages based off of those to start and then kind of tweaking them as time goes on to fit your needs now I'm just going to end with a couple tips that could help make your notion Journey a little less stressful starting with number one you should pick a base structure that works for you so that can be anything from para to getting things done he uses edelkasen system if you take a lot of notes or you could even just take your bullet journal and apply that digitally but starting with a system is going to be a lot easier to build from than trying to create something from scratch and number two I really really highly suggest starting simple and building complexity over time I think a lot of people get wrapped up in trying to create their entire system all at once and that is where they get overwhelmed or they make mistakes or they abandon it completely after spending weeks setting it up because they realize that they either didn't need that complexity or they're building pages that they actually weren't going to use in the future so starting with just the basics and the core which could be your task management your note-taking journaling whatever really is important to you on a day-to-day basis start there and add all of the pool widgets and fun graphics and crazy pages and all this functionality later on as you need it and going off of this I think templates are really great place to start of course building your own custom structure is always going to be better especially at the beginning of the process when you're not really sure what you need I do think it's better to go in and take what has already been created rather than Reinventing the wheel now number three listen to me we are not going to import all of our information into notion at once so when you start building your notion you're going to have this temptation to take everything from all these other apps and try and retrofit it and that is a huge mistake because not everything is going to be fit for notion of course you can build out your book trackers and your fitness trackers and your calendars there's going to be ways to do everything but it might not necessarily fit your workflow so for example I still track a lot of my bookmarks in Evernote I do all of my journaling in either day one or on a physical journal and if I had gone through at the beginning and moved all of these onto notion and spent weeks doing that and then realized that I didn't like that in the first place then I would have just wasted all this time and gone back to what I was doing before so make sure you start with using the system first and seeing what is actually working for you before you go and import a bunch of data from other places cases or you could also do what is recommended in building a second brain which is to just archive all of your old data have it available for you but start fresh in notion and finally my last tip which is the most important one is to begin with the end in mind ask yourself what are you trying to accomplish by using this app and what is your goal you're never going to have a perfect organization system and going into this with the hope that you're going to be building your dream notion that is a command center for your entire life is not going to negate the fact that our time on Earth is limited and no matter how efficient or productive your work systems are there will always be more to do within your lifetime than you are physically capable of so know what your priorities are build your notion around that and get on with actually living your life now I know notion can be a little bit overwhelming in the beginning so if you do want to kick start I finally have my entire notion system in a template of available for download you can check it out in the description box below This is highly requested so I'm hoping it'll help out some of you and if you want to learn more about how I use notion myself you can check out this video next [Music]