how to use notion 💻💡 notion setup tutorial free template!

hello my sweet potatoes it's michelle and today i'm going to show you how to take your notion from 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 before you put anything on a page or you can tap the three dots to the top right of a database click templates and edit existing ones or add a new one at the top it'll remind you that you're editing a template in a database now you can format how you

want the template to look so if i were to recreate my project template i would put youtube project template add my goal and turn it into a call out you can change this emoji as well but i like the light bulb make sections for my title ideas thumbnail ideas research and notes my toggles for my script my b-roll list my editing checklist and my publishing checklist then i'll go back to the page click the button to bring up the new template that i just made and now it's ready for you to use i've also done

this for my journal when i'm creating new entries and even my recipes page to jot down the ingredients and instructions the next thing about databases is that you can create linked databases i like briefly touched on this on my last video but to go a little more in depth i have this one main database which is my project tracker and this is a table that contains all of my video ideas this is the first database that i created on this page and then i created this content calendar which is linked to the first table and

you know that it's linked because there's this little arrow at the front here and i just created this calendar because it's easier for me to visualize when things are going live so whatever i do on this calendar like if i add a new project it'll show up in the table and vice versa and to create a linked database just type backslash linked linked database and then find the database that you want to link to so you can type in search and make sure it's the right one create a calendar view then you can delete the

other views if you know you don't want it and i like to go to properties add the platform and status and that's it so sometimes it is handy to have two different views of the same information and linked databases are the best way to do that so those are all the tips that i wanted to share i hope you guys found it helpful these are the ones that i used a lot when i was setting up my pages and ones that i thought would be the most helpful for you guys so if you have any

others that i didn't mention leave a comment below and let's share the knowledge and if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up subscribe share and turn on my bell notification and i will see you guys in my next video bye