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How to Build a Notion To Do List You’ll Actually Use | QueerEfficiency | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: How to Build a Notion To Do List You’ll Actually Use
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If you've ever set up a task management system and then failed
to use it, you are not alone.
I cannot I cannot tell you how many different systems
I've tried over the years.
Today we're starting a three part series where I'll show you the exact
notion, task management system that I use and the one that finally stuck.
I will also reveal a couple of unique task management principles that I
developed that changed everything for me.
So if you are ready to finally take control of your task
list, let's get started.
All right.
So as I mentioned in the intro, this is a three part series where I'm gonna
cover this setup of the task management system that you see on the screen.
This is my live system, the one that I use day in and day out.
It's kind of a mess, and I let it become kind of a mess so I could clean it
up for you to show you how it works.
And then we're gonna go through and we're gonna build it from scratch.
So I'm gonna give you a short tour and then I'll walk you through
how to build each part of it.
If you don't wanna be bothered building it yourself, I'd recommend that you
stick around for the tour and then you can go download the finished cleaned
up version that we're gonna build by going to queer efficiency.com/to do.
That's one word, t-o-d-o.
You can grab the free version.
There's also the pro version that you can grab from me
As a reminder, some notion automations require a paid plan, but if you
get the pro version from me, that will come with it and you don't
have to worry about a paid plan.
Everything will be baked in for you.
So let's look at this now.
This is my live system.
There's stuff everywhere, but what I'm gonna do is walk you through
basically how I would sit at my computer and process this list.
As I said, this is quite a long list of items.
Obviously, I'm not gonna do all this stuff today but I wanted to show you how quickly
I'd be able to get through my task list.
Now I let it get pretty messy.
I'm missing some tags and I'm missing some areas.
I'll talk about those in just a second.
So I'm gonna go through and I'll add all of that, but once I have my context,
which will only take a couple minutes to add, then zipping through the task
list to decide what to do today or not today, which is one of my little unique
principles I mentioned zipping through my task list becomes quite effortless.
My method involves two key steps.
The first is categorize, and then the second is sort.
So in categorize, I mentioned already we have areas and tags.
I've gone through a whole bunch of different systems.
I've played around with getting things done.
I've played around with PARA, things like that, and what I found is they all kind
of converge around a couple similar ideas.
the first is to categorize your tasks into an overall area.
The major areas for most people would be things like personal and work.
those are the major domains that most folks have in their life.
Now, I also have queer efficiency, so that's another domain or
area that I have in my life.
I have a coworker who works in the theater as a side project, and theater
would be a whole thing for him.
It's pretty unlikely that you have a task that falls into more than
one of those areas simultaneously.
This helps you quickly sort things.
So If you need to contextualize, like you've sat at your desk for
work and now you wanna see all of your tasks for work, you can do
that really quickly at a glance.
So that's area, it's a major life area, and typically tasks
only fall into one of those.
then I recommend that you add tags.
This is context.
It's things that allow you to describe or find things Later on, this is
something notion is really great at, and you can sort things and
filter things by context or by tag.
And you can see that I have a bunch of tags here Let me click into
this dropdown and you can see I have a number of tags listed here.
And this thing grows all the time.
The tag list gets bigger and bigger, and as I find things need to be combined or
separated, I'll adjust the tags as I go.
Items in your task list can fall into multiple tags.
I find that most of mine typically fall just into one, but
they could fall into multiple.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fast forward this really fast.
I am gonna go through and I'm gonna categorize all the items in my list,
and then I'll talk to you quickly and show you the second step in
the method, which is to sort them.
All right, I've got all the items grouped into their individual areas,
and then I'm gonna go through and add some context when necessary.
Not every item needs a tag and some of mine in my list
definitely won't need them.
So I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna put those in really quickly.
Okay, I've got all my items categorized now that need context.
I will say that I find for me that I tend not to use the context so much
for queer efficiency or for work.
I tend to find that it's mostly for personal, but that doesn't
necessarily apply to everyone.
I will say that my coworker I was talking to today was talking
about his system and he has things for finance and for operations.
he has different contexts for work, and so you can categorize things
any way that makes sense to you.
The point is just that you do it enough so that it becomes useful.
Okay, so that's the first part of the system.
It's pretty simple, categorizing items that are on your task list.
Now, the second item is, the strategy that really changes things for me,
and I'm gonna help you build this, it allows you to effortlessly answer
the question today or not today.
That's the only question you really need to be thinking about.
And then there's a couple sub questions from each one.
If you answer today, you'll go back through those items and decide, am I gonna
do this today, or is this a maybe item?
If you answer not today, then the question you ask is, do
I care when this comes back?
If yes, then I will use my snooze column.
And if no, then I'll just hit my later button and those function differently.
the later button snooze is an item and it will show back up in this
system, which again, I'm gonna show you how to build all this.
Hitting later and what will eventually be relabeled to not today.
I'm actually gonna change that.
In fact, let me do that really quickly
because that wording is better and I will say, this property should be snooze.
When I click, not today, there's a formula behind it that randomly
assigns it to between one and seven days to show back up in my list.
That is one of the most helpful things that I have ever built
into a task management system.
Basically shoos it away with the reassurance that it will come
back, and I can always go look to find it in the snoozed view
here so I can quickly dismiss it.
But if I know I need it either in a couple days or if I need to see it
again on a specific day, I have this fancy column set up that has these
options that I can quickly choose from.
So I can tell it, I wanna see this on Monday, and it will
always pick the following day.
It's not gonna pick today.
So for instance, today is Wednesday.
If I choose this now, it will schedule it out for the next seven days from today.
Or if I know, oh, I need this to come back in three days, just having the flexibility
to quickly pick those options that makes all the difference in sorting your work.
So let's go through this.
I'm not gonna refill the propane, but that's something
I might wanna do this weekend.
So let me change that to Saturday and you'll see it immediately disappears.
And then what happens?
Is it pops into the snooze view and you'll see that it assigned October 4th.
Today is the first, October 4th is Saturday, and then the system will bring
it back into the main view that day.
setting up the spool on my 3D printer.
Don't know, not today.
I'm not refinishing those tables.
I'm not building a grocery manager.
I am not gonna do battery testing.
This is gonna happen on Monday.
This is where this is helpful.
Again, I can pick a day.
I know that I'm gonna be emailing her on Monday.
This item is a resource, so this is a document I found online, and this is
one other thing I will say that's a little bit of a unique twist in this
system is that I have a quick method for assigning this as a resource if I
come into the status and hit resource.
What that does is it shoos the item out of my list, but then it
lives in the tags view permanently.
So I can go back and reference it or I can search for it.
So if I'm looking for all those software items, I can see all these things
on software that I'm looking for.
So it's a quick filing system.
If I need to shoo it away, I set it to resource this I've actually
completed so I can hit done on that.
This is a resource.
These are not today.
I'm not gonna do those now.
I don't even remember what this means.
So now I have the option here to hit canceled.
Sometimes that's handy, but this one, I don't need to really keep it so I
can just delete it outta the system.
So already ordered the pink dice.
This I might work on this weekend, so I'm gonna have that comeback on Friday.
Already paid the Old Navy card.
And then these are all work tasks.
So what I have built is a button that allows me to snooze
all of my work tasks in bulk.
So this is handy on a Saturday or a Sunday when you're working on your stuff.
I don't need to see any of those.
So I can just have them all snooze and they'll all come back on Monday.
Not doing this, not working on that.
Not this, this is already in progress, but it's gonna just
as a reminder and then I have.
A number of queer efficiency tasks.
So I know I'm not doing this today.
Not today, this is today.
This I finished.
This would be tomorrow, uh, it would be Thursday.
So, yeah, tomorrow.
Either way works.
So would this, I might have gotten two of those, but that's okay.
I'm gonna mark that there.
And then that's not until January.
So I could really come in here and I could snooze this way out by picking.
A snooze date.
Now I don't have this shown here apparently, so I wanna come in
here and I can set this manually.
This is something that I can build into a better view.
Um, but I can set that to come back January 1st, 'cause I
know I don't need it right now.
And there we go.
It was very fast.
I was able to get through all of those and explain them to you in under five minutes.
And now I have just this item.
If I had any others that were under here for today, I could quickly choose
maybe to drop them down if I knew I wasn't gonna work on them today.
One last thing in this view, I have this done section and I know that these are
done and I like to keep them consolidated until I'm ready to not see them anymore.
So once these are done, I can hit archive and they'll all go away.
Now they don't get deleted.
They just get filtered out so I don't have to look at them anymore.
So that is my task management system in a nutshell.
And we're gonna start work on building this exact, well, this very similar, more
cleaned up and refined system right now.
All righty, so I'm in a blank document in Notion called Task Manager.
Again, remember.
You can get the final versions of these by going to queer efficiency.com/to
do if you just wanna download it.
If you don't feel like building this yourself, but if you'd like to build
it yourself, then stick with me 'cause we're gonna go through all this and you
can pick up some notion skills as we go.
So the first thing I know I'm gonna need to do, we need this to be full screen.
I can already tell just by where this is positioned that there are these columns
and so I need this to be full screen.
And then I know that I'm gonna have those buttons in those columns.
So as we looked at this one, I have this column here and then this column here.
Now I've learned that I actually like it better for a couple reasons
with the database on the left and those buttons on the right.
So we're gonna build it that way.
We're gonna type slash and then column and hit two columns, and then we'll
type slash and then database in line, and that will pull on the database.
And then I, for my sections like this, styling for them.
So I'm gonna enter
that title with spaces between if I have a space in the words.
So if I were to say new database, I would have one space between each
letter and then three between each word.
But in this case, I just wanna say actions.
Sometimes it's hard to type, then enter and then hyen inserts that line.
And then I typically like this.
This is minimal, but I typically like it to be gray.
It helps it kind of fade into the background a little more.
And then I'm gonna insert an empty button here.
It's not gonna do anything yet, but we'll say start today.
For now, we're just gonna leave it empty and I'm gonna give it the play icon.
And a green and just hit done and it's gonna yell at me.
That's okay.
We're not gonna build that just yet, but this button will allow
us to un snooze all of our items.
That's how that works in the background.
You can do it manually by clicking this button, or if you're up on the pro version
or have a paid plan and you wanna set this up, you can build an automation
on the database that runs daily and does it for you, which we will do.
So I'm gonna drag this column pretty tight, so it's tiny and
I have more space over here.
And then I'm gonna copy this and then I'm going to come to the title
and enter and then paste that in.
And it's okay.
It didn't paste into the column, so I'm gonna drag it into the
column so that way it lives there.
And then I'll just say database.
And then I wanna give the actual database itself a name.
So we're gonna say task manager database.
This is a best practice of mine.
I always like to put the word database on databases because if I left it as
task manager and it matches the title of the page, which it does in this
case, it's sometimes hard to spot when you're selecting it for other
integrations and things like that.
So I'm gonna leave database there, but then I'm gonna hide this title
'cause we don't need to see it.
So now we're gonna set up the properties.
The first one, I'm gonna change it, and rather than calling it
task, I'm gonna call it item.
The reason for that is you saw that I have resources that come in here.
They're not just tasks, they're not just work to do.
Sometimes it's just things to remember.
So I'm gonna call it item.
And then we need a few other of the properties that we talked about.
So the first one we'll create is a single select.
This is for our areas.
And then I like to use the folder icon, which I actually
can see right here for that.
The next we'll do a multi-select, because this is the tags property,
and we can choose if we want more than one, and we'll search for
tag and we'll give it that icon.
The next property that we need is we need a status property and we know
from what we saw before that we have a few additional statuses to add.
So we're gonna edit this and we'll choose under the in progress.
We know that we need a maybe status and we're gonna update in progress to today.
And then under done, we need to have a couple things here.
We need archived.
We need canceled and canceled.
Can be one Ls or two.
I typically spell it with one.
And then resource.
Those are where those go.
So we'll put done up top archived, resourcing, canceled,
so we'll change archived to gray.
Resource to brown and canceled to red.
And then for maybe, I guess we can give it purple just to make it a little different.
And I think I'm gonna put today next, so that way this is the order they
show up in when we group things.
And just to reiterate, the difference between done and archived done allows
me to keep things kind of held in a view so I can continue to see them until I'm
ready to banish them to the back end of my system and not see them anymore.
That's when I would change them to archived.
I know a lot of folks love to delete emails.
I do not recommend that you do that.
This is a tangent.
I'm gonna get on my little, here's my little soapbox.
I'm gonna step on it.
if people are still using the delete button in your email,
you should stop for anything.
There's no reason to delete email.
There's so much storage space.
Unless you genuinely are outta storage space, which most people are not.
Use the archive button.
You can reference things and they still get out of your face anyway.
Okay, I'm gonna put my little soapbox back down.
Okay.
I stepped down.
Everything is fine.
I definitely recommend that folks do not delete things, but rather archive
them when you no longer wanna see them.
So that's what the difference is there.
Then what I wanna add, this is just a little handy thing.
I like to have a created time property, which we're gonna hide,
and this helps when we add our all items view, which is where you'll be
able to see everything unfiltered.
All right, so that's everything for the main database to begin with.
We have many other things to add, but this is a pretty good starting point.
so the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate this view, and I'm
gonna make this because it's, there's no filters on it, there's no grouping on it.
And the only thing I'm gonna say is to sort by.
Created time descending.
So the most recent item that I created will show up at the top.
This way, I have an unfiltered view, which I'm renaming and I'm
gonna add the infinity symbol.
This is what I do for my systems.
Now I have an unfiltered view, so if I archive something and I need
to quickly get it back, I can just pop over to the unfiltered view.
it might make more sense in this view, honestly.
Let's change this a little bit.
Let's add a last edited time, and we can have both show here, but.
I'm not gonna sort by creative time.
I'm gonna sort descending by last edited time.
So whatever items I most recently edited, those will show up at the top instead.
Okay, we're gonna leave those properties on and unfiltered, but back on our
main table view, we don't need to see them anymore, so I'm gonna hide them.
So I'm gonna just add a few sample items just to get this started.
So we'll say buy milk.
When I enter an item, I hit enter and then I can hit shift, enter
on my keyboard to add a new item.
I will add mop floors,
I'll add file paperwork.
I'll add meal prep.
And I'll add f.
And I'll add purchase office supplies.
Okay, so let's go through here and let's set up some categorization and
then we're gonna create our views.
Which are very straightforward.
So let's add some areas.
we're gonna do personal, and we're gonna do work.
And then I'm gonna edit these colors for me.
It's like subjects, it's school where science is red.
And if science isn't read for you, you're wrong.
And math.
Is either black or blue.
I'll accept either.
And then English is either or.
I would typically say English is black and math is
blue.
Why?
I couldn't tell you,
but if you disagree with me you're wrong.
Social studies is green, obviously.
So you can set these to whatever color you'd like, but I typically do
blue for personal, just 'cause that's my color, and then green for work.
If you have any other areas, you could obviously add them here.
So buy milk, personal mo floors, personal file paperwork, work, meal prep,
personal purchase, office supplies, work.
And then if I wanted to add any tags, let's say I could do household.
And these I like to set to the default.
I just like to not have them be super colorful in in this column because there's
a lot and trying to do any sort of system.
Uh, I didn't wanna be bothered, like trying to make them rainbow.
What a pain.
So I just make them all the default.
And then one other thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna edit the property and then
I'm gonna choose sort alphabetical so that these always show alphabetically
in the list when I have multiple.
So if I were to add.
Fitness, it'll pop in into the correct spot.
This actually set as the gray, so again, gotta remember to come back and hit
default just so they're all the same.
And then let's add maybe nutrition and see that popped in.
I wish that you could set a default color.
That's just not an option, but it's not that big of a deal to add properties.
Okay, so we can add probably nutrition here.
File paperwork.
probably doesn't need one meal prep would be nutrition, and then purchase office
supplies probably doesn't need one.
So now we have tags and areas set up and we're gonna add
views that show each of those.
So we'll start here
with our main view, and actually I'm gonna call this main
and I'll give that a list.
Icon then we're gonna duplicate this view, right click duplicate,
and we'll rename this to area.
And again, we'll use the folder icon for that.
And then we're gonna click here on the area Property and choose group.
So now all of my items will show grouped and I can see all my work
items and all my personal items.
We'll come back to Main.
Duplicate.
And we'll say tags and choose the tag icon.
And in this case, we'll choose group by tag.
And then the only other thing we really wanna do is set up our filters so that
it hides things when they're done.
So let's say we finished meal prep and we moved that to done.
What we wanna do in this case is filter that out so it goes away.
Now on the main view, what I like to do is group by status.
So, Let's say we're gonna do buy milk today.
I can put that there, and that way these things start popping in in a useful place.
So what we know is that we don't wanna see items that are marked as archived.
So let's say we filed our paperwork and we're done, and
we know that that's archived.
We don't wanna see this group.
Now, we could just hide the group.
But the best thing to do is add a filter and we're gonna just do an advanced
filter and say where status is not.
Archived resource or canceled.
I don't need to see any of those in this main view.
Everything else I can see, but that cool.
Same thing.
Now.
I probably could have done this filter before I created these
other views, but we're gonna do the exact same filter status.
And actually let me add this to an advanced filter.
'cause you never know.
I like to add it to an advanced filter typically.
'cause if you need to add more filter rules, which we are going to.
It's helpful to have them here as opposed to just in those little pills.
So we're gonna say status is not archive.
Resource canceled.
Now the tags view, we need to modify that a little.
So we're gonna do add to advance filter where status is not and we don't wanna
see archived and we don't wanna see canceled, but we do wanna see resource.
This one will allow those resource items to stay in our view.
So that way if we have some
fantastic, amazing online resource for work that we found, and it's.
Finance related.
I'm just making things up here.
Obviously you see that popped into the correct spot.
It's finance related.
We can set that to resource and it will go away out of our main views
where we're actually doing work.
but it will stay in our tags view and then everything stays in our unfiltered view.
So I can see that item is last.
And let's say I did, you know, I did archive an item, but I
wanna get it back more easily.
But I need to get it back for some reason.
I can go to unfiltered and change archive back to another status.
All right.
That's all I've got for you in this video.
This is the bare bones skeleton.
You can actually use this just as is if you wanted to do a basic system,
but we're gonna make this a lot fancier and more useful in the next video.
Remember, if you wanna download this, you can go to queer efficiency.com/todo.
That's queer efficiency.com/todo, and you can get everything there.
So if you'd like to do that head there.
in part two of my How to Build a Notion to-Do List Series.
We're gonna build the core pieces that allow you to very easily
answer that today or not today.
Question, we're gonna add the buttons to the database so that you're quickly able
to move things throughout your system without having to think too much about it.
and when we're done, you'll be able to process your list like I showed
you very, very quickly and end with a crystal clear plan for the day's work.
So if you're ready for that, I'll see you in part two, which
is on your screen right now.
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