this to this and this and this this video is like  a part two i already filmed my notion tour video  

which i will link up here or in the description  box but i basically walked you through my entire  

notion workspace showed you all of my pages  and how i use all of them to stay organized  

but now i'm going to show you how i actually set  everything up i learned a lot of little tips and  

tricks along the way that i wanted to share with  you guys today i spent a few hours every day for  

about a week setting up all the pages using them  making little adjustments as i went along there's  

definitely a learning curve but i wouldn't  be too intimidated by it either because it is  

pretty straightforward to learn so here are my top  tips that i found to be super helpful when i was  

setting up my notion and trying to get it to look  all aesthetic i think if something looks good then  

i'm more likely to actually use it so let's start  with the basics so when you create your notion you  

can just sign up with a google account and notion  has a bunch of templates that are pre-made already  

but i kind of wanted to start from scratch that  way i could really learn the ropes and customize  

everything to fit my needs i did spend a lot  of time in the beginning just gathering a lot  

of inspo like on pinterest that's where i get most  of my inspo and i made a list of all the different  

types of pages that i wanted like an agenda a  content planner a journal a goals page so one  

of the first things that i always like to do when  i'm setting up my pages is to change up the font  

depending on the look and feel that i want for the  pages and to do that all you have to do is just  

click the three dots in the top right corner and  choose between the default serif or mono fonts i  

usually use default and serif and while i'm here i  also usually like to toggle on small text and full  

width that way i can see more on one page and then  something else that i always like to do especially  

on my dashboard is to add icons to my main  pages and you can do that by opening up a page  

click add icon at the top and choosing an emoji  but i noticed that notion doesn't actually have  

all of the emojis for example if i search in boba  the boba emoji doesn't show up but if that happens  

just go to link open up the emoji shortcut by  pressing command control space find your emoji and  

hit submit there's also this website notion.vip  that has a ton of clean minimalistic black and  

white icons you can just copy the link of any icon  and paste it in you can also just upload your own  

icons if you have any saved on your computer and  icons can even be animated gifs which is pretty  

cool i don't use a lot of gifs though because  i tend to get distracted by them really easily  

but there is this website icons8 that has a lot  of free animated icons the way that i've gotten  

them to work though is by downloading the gif and  uploading it rather than just copying the link  

and it doesn't have a transparent background  either which kind of sucks but it looks good  

on your dashboard at least so that's a cool way  to make your notion look more dynamic so i also  

want to share some keyboard shortcuts as well i  think keyboard shortcuts are so much faster than  

clicking around and i think more people should  utilize keyboard shortcuts there's a whole list  

of them on this webpage here i'll leave a link in  the description box but i'm just going to share  

the ones that i use the most and just fyi i use a  macbook my computer is really heating up right now  

so after i learned all the basics i remember the  first thing i really wanted to learn was how to  

apply a background color to the entire row i was  just trying to highlight text and add a background  

color but that only applied it to the highlighted  text so i realized you can click the six dots on  

the left side go down to color choose what colored  background you want and then that applies it to  

the entire row you could even click the six  dots and just start typing so maybe i want to  

turn it purple arrow down and then it changes the  background color or the fastest way i think is to  

just place your cursor at the start or end of a  block and then type backslash and the color you  

want go down and hit enter also if you just apply  the color to a text block and you want to format  

another text block in the same way just select it  and press command shift h to copy the formatting  

it's also right here and that's how i learned to  do that now when it comes to duplicating blocks  

i used to just click the six dots on the side and  click duplicate but i've found it easier to just  

hold down the option key click and drag i tend  to do this the most often for my agenda like if i  

need to copy a task onto another day or this would  also be super helpful if you're still setting up  

your agenda since it'll have multiples of the same  types of blocks or this even works if you want to  

duplicate a link to an entire page and if you want  to rename a page quickly without having to open it  

up first and waiting for it to load just click  the six dots to highlight the entire row press  

command shift r and then you can edit the name a  lot faster so i create a lot of bulleted lists but  

instead of typing out like backslash bulleted list  you can just hit the dash key and it'll turn into  

a bulleted list automatically this is something  that's so minor but so huge and like helpful to  

me and then in some pages like my goals page i did  this thing where i made each header italicized as  

you can see so i did that by selecting the  text and pressing command shift e and this  

is a shortcut to turn text into an equation but  it also works on regular words to make it just  

look a little fancy the only thing is if you want  to apply this to two or more words it doesn't  

really work because it removes the space between  them but you can select each word individually  

and then apply the shortcut and that will maintain  the space between the words and then you can add a  

background color or change the text color too so  next up i want to show you how to create columns  

i love creating columns i feel like it's usually a  more efficient way to use your space on your page  

so to create a column you just need to create  your blocks so i like to add some kind of text  

to them to make it easier for me to like see the  blocks because if not they're like invisible so  

once we have our blocks i'll grab one by the  six dots drag it to the end of another block  

until that blue vertical line shows up and then  release and now you've got your columns and you  

can add as many columns as you want i mean i  haven't added more than like five columns but  

you can try it and let me know how many you're  able to make i don't know what the maximum is  

so i did this when i was creating my agenda so i  created all the headings for each day of the week  

i just dragged each of them and created columns  that way and then i even used a little shortcut  

that we learned earlier to turn the text into  that fancy font and then added a background color  

so now i'm going to show you how i created some  of my widgets so let's first start with my weather  

widget i went to weatherwidget.io set my location  went to themes and i chose the beige theme they  

have lots of themes already pre-made and then i  chose a font that i liked chose animated icons and  

then clicked get code copied it to my clipboard  and then went to this other website called  

option.co so you do need to create an account on  the site it's free and you can use your google  

account again but on here you'll need to create  an embed you can name it paste the code that we  

just copied and click generate url so now you have  this url that you can paste into your notion page  

create embed and now you have a weather widget and  you can drag the corner to play with the size and  

the look as well but just be careful because i  think you'll only get three free uses to create  

an embed on action and then you would need to pay  for the subscription in order to create more so  

on my agenda page i like having this little mini  calendar it helps me visualize where in the month  

we are i mentioned it in my previous video but i  made this by using the website indify.com and they  

have some nice widgets for like google calendar  quotes a countdown and i use their google calendar  

widget and you can choose whichever calendar  to show in the widget most people use this to  

actually show their calendar and all their events  but i literally just wanted a plain clean calendar  

with nothing on it so in my actual google calendar  i literally created a new calendar named it notion  

and it's completely blank i don't even use it  it's just for the widget so on indify i select  

that calendar and you can customize the look of  the widget as well but once i had it to my liking  

i just copied the link at the bottom and then  pasted url but now it's embedded on the page so  

now i want to show you how to create templates  templates are really convenient if you need to  

quickly create some sort of layout repeatedly  so in my agenda i created this new week template  

button at the top i just type backslash button  create a new template button and this whole block  

that just popped up is where you configure what  your button does so you can rename it so i named  

mine new week and then the template at the bottom  is what you'll see when you click the button so  

you can add whatever you want here so i wanted to  automatically create a new weekly thread for me  

so when i click this button i want to see all of  this instead of having to copy and paste my spread  

each week which would make the columns disappear  anyway which i mentioned in my last video which is  

annoying so i'm going to show you how i formatted  my template button so right now it has a to-do  

list but i don't want that so i'm just going  to delete it and start typing the days of the  

week the only thing is you can't create columns  inside this template block see if i try to drag  

this block to create a column it won't let me so  actually what you need to do is create the layout  

inside a new page drag and drop the page into  this template block and then turn the page into  

text so here i'll show you so first let's create  a new page we'll just call it a new week open the  

page turn on full width and now i'm going to  type the days again select all the blocks and  

add a background color then drag to create your  columns then i'm going to select all the text  

and turn it into an equation to change up the font  i'm also going to add in my mini calendar so embed  

paste link and drag it before monday and now i'm  gonna finish up formatting the days so i like to  

add a to-do list under each day as well as a  divider to separate my top priority tasks for  

the day those go on top of the divider and then  other miscellaneous tasks go below it and then  

i'm going to select and copy paste it under each  day i'm not sure why there's a space above it but  

we can just delete all of those and there we have  it our weekly layout is pretty much done so now  

let's go back to the main page click the gear icon  to configure the button again and drop this page  

into the template now just turn it into text and  voila all the columns are still there your button  

is formatted and your weekly spread is ready so  i'm just going to delete this text at the top  

because we don't need it anymore and instead i'm  going to create a format for the week and date so  

i'll turn this into heading 2 add in a week number  colon month number dash number and then turn these  

into inline codes so that i can remember to  change these according to whatever week or  

month or day we're on and ta-da my button is now  fully configured so let's test it so i'm going to  

close this click the button and there we have it  our weekly spread is ready to be filled in just  

change the header and you're good to go and then  some people also asked about my archive i have  

an archive on a couple of my pages i do have one  for my agenda down here but it's literally just  

a page that i named archive so notion actually has  free templates and their weekly agenda template  

also features an archive so i kind of took the  idea from there but in order to create an archive  

i just created a page named it archive changed  the icon and you know whenever one week ends  

i have to create a new spread for the upcoming  week so let's say this was last week turn the  

old week's header into a toggle drag everything  into the toggle and then drag the toggle into the  

archive and if i open the archive i can see all  of my previous weeks and i like having the toggle  

because i can open or close each week rather than  just having all the days listed out because then  

that would make a really long page so i like being  able to collapse all of them the only thing is  

my columns disappear so when we drag the week into  the column all the columns just disappear but i  

honestly don't mind it because i don't really  check my archive a lot like the archive is for  

very rare occasions when i might need to look back  at a certain date for a certain task and i haven't  

really had to do that yet but i'm just trying  to make it easy for future michelle in case i do  

ever need to do that but yeah i've tried different  things to try and keep the columns i've googled it  

but i haven't been able to find a solution so i've  kind of just settled with the fact that it's not  

possible at this time at least but if anyone knows  of a way please let me know in the comments so in  

my content planner i wanted to go over editing  templates in databases so databases are anything  

like tables lists boards any calendars that you  have you can add templates in these databases as  

well so let's say i want to add a new video idea  i'll click new maybe it's a thrift haul i'll open  

it as a new page and add a new project template  this particular project template is something that  

i created myself but i did take a lot of inspo  from thomas frank and i'll link his video in  

the description box but this is how i plan out my  videos but yeah you can create your own templates  

in databases as well just like how we created the  template button you can create a new template here