Simple Note Taking System in Notion (Beginner's Tutorial)

In this video, I'm going to show you how to make a very simple note-taking system in Notion. First, we're going to start with an actual database for capturing these notes. So, we can just call this, let's do a new database, and let's call this notes. That's very creative. Yes, okay. In here, this is where all of our notes will go. Now, it's not going to look very clean if we have this sitting on our dashboard. The idea here is we want a place where the notes can be stored. So, that will be this database, and then a place where we can easily take the notes. Now, luckily, Notion has this amazing thing called a button. If you haven't used it before, it will change your life. That's maybe a big statement, but it's very good. So, we're going to click here, and as you can see, they've slightly changed the UI here. It looks very nice. So, what we want to do here is change some settings. When this button is clicked, then we want it to do this. So, we're going to add an action here. Now, the action that we want is to add a page to. Now, just to explain, these items here, so if I add new, what I'm doing is I'm adding a page or an item into this database. It might get a bit confusing, but that's what it means by page. So, now we want to select where do we want this page to be added. So, we're going to select the database. Now, the database I've called here notes. So, I'm just going to click it and select I want it to be added to notes. Now, what we can do is add properties and a bunch of settings to this as well if we want, but we can skip this step for now, and what we want to do is add another step. So, after we've added the page to, what we want to do is open up that page. That way, when you hit add new button, it doesn't just add a page here, but we can actually open up that page and start taking notes. So, we're going to see open, and we want to select the page, and the page that we want added is the new page added because we want to open up that new page. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult to take a note opening up another page, and then here you can select if you want it side peak, center peak, or full page. Personally, I prefer center peak, but you know you can change it to whatever you want. Then, we are going to click here and type in new note. You can also click here to add an icon or an emoji. There we go. Click done. So, now here we have the new note button. So, if I click on this random note, and then click away, as you can see random note has been added here. Now, I want to delete all of these notes here, and what I could do is click on these six dots, and then click on delete, but that's going to take a while because there's a few of them. So, what we can do is just hover here, and as you can see these little boxes come up. So, I can tick in multiple at the same time, and then click on delete. Now, this is a very basic note-taking system. If you haven't seen my headquarters template, it is a lot more complex, and there's a lot more things involved in it, but for this tutorial for Notion beginners, I want to make something fairly easy, but one thing I want to introduce into this note-taking system is either tags or relations. So, here you can see by default a tag gets created in a new database, but I'll just click on delete, so you can see how to make it in case you don't have one. So, we'll click on the plus here, and then we're going to scroll down, and you can click on select, you can click on multi-select, or as I was mentioning before, you can do relation. So, there's a bunch of different ways to do this, and they all have their pros and cons, but for this we are going to do a multi-select. So, we'll click on that, and then just say type. So, let's add some types here. For notes, you might be taking notes about your business, you might be taking notes about your education, you might be taking notes about your job, or let's say fitness. So, we have a few different options here, and as you can see, because it's multi-select, you can add multiple in here. So, you might have something that somehow relates to job and fitness. Let's say you think of a note like, oh it would be good to run to work, this is relating to job and fitness. So, what we'll do now is actually separate these. So, this table, we're going to call all here. This will be all of your notes. Now, what we're going to do is right click here, and then click on duplicate. Now, this one will just be, let's say, fitness, and then we can change the icon to something fitness related. There we go. So, what we want now on this tab is to only see stuff that has the type of fitness. So, we don't want to see stuff job, education, or business. We just want stuff that's fitness, or fitness and job, fitness and education, blah, blah, blah. As long as fitness is involved, we want to see it here. So, we're going to click on filter, then we are going to click on type, and we want to say fitness. So, if fitness is involved, we want it to show up here. Now, what we're going to do is duplicate this and do it for the others. Duplicate. Now, luckily, because we duplicated this, the filter actually gets duplicated as well. So, if you click on all here, you can see that there is no filter here showing up. Click on fitness here, you can see that filter is written in blue. Click on fitness again to duplicate here, and you can see that filter is in blue. That means that it's activated. There is a filter here. So, if we click on this and let's change this to job, and then here we can change untick fitness and tick in job, and then we should probably change the icon briefcase. Now, we'll do the same thing. Duplicate. Change the filter. Now, as you can see, it's coming up with one more here. There is too many things in this row. So, what we can do is go up to the top here, click on the three dots, and just do full width. And now we can see all of them. So, here we have all, which is everything we get added, whether it has a type or not. That will go in here. Then in fitness, we're only seeing fitness stuff. Then under the job, we have stuff only relating to jobs. So, if the type is job, and as you can see, we can have two. If it's job and business, it's showing up here. Job and business showing up here. Now, obviously, when you download this, you can change this to however you want, or if you're following along, you can do fitness, job, business, education, do whatever you want. I realized that this icon is wrong, so I should change this. So, how are we going to implement this? Well, this button here, we're going to want to have that on our actual page that we're using, our dashboard. So, we're going to drag this onto our dashboard. So, this is just a fake dashboard here, just a calendar. But basically, you're going to want this at the top or on the side, somewhere where you can easily access it. The point here is we're not trying to jump from page to page to page. It gets very cognitively overwhelming. You get distracted. We just want an easy place to quickly add a new note. Hence, in my headquarters template, the new note and all of that stuff is at the top, easy to access, but it doesn't take up a lot of actual space in the dashboard. An issue that I see, and I've talked about this in other videos, is people having widgets and a bunch of buttons for a bunch of stuff that they never actually use taking up space in their dashboard. You only want buttons and stuff that's easily accessible if you actually use it often. If you don't use it often, then don't have it wasting your precious space in your dashboard. Don't distract yourself. So, you'll have your button integrated into your dashboard, then you'll have this in your separate page. So, once it's downloaded, all you have to do is drag this button onto the other page. If you have your dashboard in your side menu, which you definitely should have if it's your dashboard, the main thing you use, then all you have to do is go to these six dots, click that, and now you can drag it, and now you will drag and drop it into here, and it will appear at the bottom of that page, and then you can just drag it to the top or wherever you want to place it. Then, this note-taking page, that can sit at the bottom. It doesn't have to be a main part of your page. Further away down the page, it doesn't have to be at the top because you're not going to be accessing this page every two minutes, so we don't want it cluttering our space and taking up cognitive bandwidth, but we still want to have it accessible where we can see all of these notes. Now, there's a bunch of other things that we could add to this note-taking system if we wanted, such as if we click on plus here, we could add an archiving system. So, we could do that with select, we could do that with text, we could do that with multi-select, we could do that with status, we could do that with checkbox, we could do that with a relation. There's a bunch of different ways you can do this stuff. Again, in my headquarters template, I have a really good system for archiving. It does help. If you want a more in-depth explanation of how to use all of these different properties in Notion, then let me know. If not, then have a look at my headquarters template. I think you'd absolutely love it. It is my all-in-one system for tasks, projects, resources, notes, built into a super smart intuitive Notion template. Thank you so much for watching and subscribe.