Notion's New Automations Feature is a Game-Changer

notion is really up in their automations game and this week they just launched a brand new feature called database automations which lets you do some really cool stuff such as doing native time tracking directly inside a notion that's right we are hopping directly into examples so in this database I've got a little automation that will create a timestamp in this completed date property anytime my status on a task goes from in progress to complete and then I'm going to be able to see how long the task took which might be nice for some time tracking purposes let me show you how it works if I alt click this little status property I'm going to set this to done and then a couple of seconds I'll have my timestamp popping into completed like that and we can see that this task took 2 hours and 42 minutes and zero seconds but automations get a whole lot cooler than that my friends what about creating default tasks whenever I create a brand new project inside a project database such as a Content projects area where I might have YouTube videos I'm working on well if I go ahead and add a brand new project I'm going to see all these default tasks popping in in just a second and not only do I have these default tasks but I have assignees for those tasks automatically set and if I go into any of these projects I'll be able to see all of those tasks directly in them I've got my assignee set up so this automation is allowing us to do a lot of really cool things directly inside of notion Auto magically now Notions database automations feature is essentially an if this then that style automation feature where something is going to happen inside of your notion workspace maybe you create a new page or you edit a property of an existing page and that is going to trigger one or more actions that are going to automatically take place so let's just Dive Right into this feature and I'll show you exactly what we're working with here and then we are going to get right into some examples so you can see exactly how to build some useful automations yourself so right here at the top of our databases feature we now have this little lightning icon and I can click that to open this little automations menu if I open a new automation I've got a few different options here I can can name my automation I can say that it's four pages inside this entire database or I can limit the automation to just one view of the database but the real magic happens in the trigger in the action sections so first and foremost I have a couple of different triggers that I can set up for each automation the first one is Page added so basically anytime a new page is added to this database it's going to trigger the automation or I can use the property edited trigger and there are all kinds of different properties that can work with this a lot of them are just going to trigger anytime any edit happens so if I typed one letter in the name property that would be a trigger some of them have some additional options that we can set like multi selects and select properties and Status properties for those we can get a bit more granular and Trigger only when a specific choice is edited or selected so those are triggers and then we have a few different action steps that we can do here we can add new pages to this database or to any other database where we have edit access success we can edit pages in an existing database later on in the video I'm going to show you why at least right now I don't think you should be playing with this particular feature of database automations at least with important databases it's easy to mess things up so check the timestamps if you are curious about that we can send a helpful slack notifications to our connected slack workspace or we can edit additional properties of the same page that triggered the automation so I want to jump right into examples and we're going to start building some useful automations that you might actually want to use yourself today so you can see exactly how this works now while I'm navigating over to the little worksheet that I've created here I will note a couple of different things number one I have turned this into a template it is in the description down below so you will be able to duplicate this into your workspace and at least try the automations out but number two on a related note this is one of notion's first mostly paid features so if you're on a paid notion account you'll be able to create edit delete and use automations if you're on a free notion account the only thing you can currently do is use automations that come with notion templates or delete them now uh fear not there is still the notion API with tons of apps out there like pipedream and make. com and zapier so we can still build basically any of these automations just in a bit more roundabout way for free but if you are on a paid notion account maybe you're working with a team and you've upgraded you are going to be able to build these directly inside of notion itself and I'm anticipating over the next coming months we are going to see additional features added to these database automations so let's dive directly into our first example here I want to have a little date completed automation for tasks in this simple tasks database so essentially what would happen here is when I switch my status to done the completed date property is going to get a date and time stamp and then I've got a little formula here that I've written up and it's basically going to calculate the number of days between the completed timestamp and the due time stamp now this would be useful because you might not know this but humans in general are quite bad at estimating how long things are going to take in fact I made a whole video about this over my main Channel I will link that in the description down below but one way you can get better at these time estimates and hence become more productive is tracking the actual completion date and then comparing that against your planned due date for your tasks and when you have a little completion Gap property like this you'll be able to see oh I did this 17 days after I thought I was going to get done maybe I should revise my estimates in the future so how would you create an automation like this feel free to pause the video and picture Jeopardy music in your head if you want to think through it but I'm going to Dive Right In basically I'd click this little automations area right here little um nothing icon once more I'll go to new automation this time I'm actually going to name my automation so I can easily identify it as we're creating more and more we're going to have a nice directory of them so I'm going to call this uh let's just say a date completed that's pretty descriptive and I'm going to have this trigger for All Views in this entire task stay database so I'm going to go ahead and leave this here at task and all I need to do is set a trigger and an action so for my trigger I'm going to add a trigger and I'm going to say when the status property is edited to the complete group and notice that status properties have both these hard-coded groups to do in progress and done along with these editable properties within those groups so I've done in progress not started by default I'm going to check the complete group here so basically when status is set to the complete group or any option within it I'm going to go to my completed date property here and I'm going to select this now Dynamic value so right here launch the date property has two different Dynamic values that we can set it has now which is going to include the date and the time it has today which is just going to include the date and then it has pick a date which would be like a hard coded date personally I'm having trouble seeing a whole lot of usefulness and putting a specifically hard-coded date here so right now I think the most useful thing to do is to use either now or today and I'm hoping in the future we are going to get Dynamic date references like maybe I could put a date in a formula and choose that date that would be pretty cool but for now I'm going to go with now and I will hit create so now to demo this if I go ahead and set molon from in progress to done then in a couple of seconds we're going to get the now stamp popping up and completed and we can see the completion Gap is three days now this is powered by a notion formula and if you are curious we have an entire formula reference guide over on my website you can go to thomasjfrank. com and the learn notion menu there is a whole notion formulas link and we'll also have that in the description down below so check that out if you do want to learn how to write notion formulas like this one but for now we are going to move on to our second example and that is going to be the time tracking example that I showed in the intro of this video so here we're doing something a little bit different instead of just automating to a single date property we're going to automate to two different date properties when we change our status property to in progress indicating that we are starting the task we're going to automate the started date property and then by contrast when we go from in progress to done we are going to automate the completed property and then we're using the same concept we are writing a formula that's going to show us the task duration and I have put the task duration in this format powered by a pretty complex looking formula because this actually will allow us to sort by the duration even though what it's outputting here is what's called a string value which is basically just a piece of text instead of a number and the reason that we're doing that is right now notion formulas don't have like a Time object that's super useful so we can either output a number of seconds which would get really large and be hard to kind of parse or we could do this so to set this up we're going to go ahead and create two different automations and because I might not always want to be doing time tracking I'm going to demonstrate how we can build these automations so they only run if we create these edits inside of this little time tracker view of this tasks database so once again we'll head over to that little lightning icon there we're going to hit new automation I'm going to call this one time tracking and I'm going to go start because we're making two of them and then I'm going to change the four pages in setting from tasks to specifically this time tracker review and then once again we're going to do basically the same thing we did before so I'm going to set the status this time I'm going to filter it just in progress as the trigger and then I'm going to set my started property to now as the action and then to complete this we're going to make one more automation we'll call this one time tracking completed once again I'm going to set that to Time Tracker and we're going to do basically the same thing this time I'm going to set status to complete as the trigger and I'm going to set the action to the completed property getting a now timestamp so now we have two different automations that are going to kind of work in Tandem and I've already got started time stamps here I can actually start this one if you want to see how that works and cool Pro tip here if you are rendering a status property as a check box you can actually hold option or alt on Windows and click the check box now and that will show you all the options which is pretty cool and wasn't available at launch so I'm going to set that one to in progress and then that's going to pop in our started value in a couple of seconds here and then for uh check house for vampires I started that at 4 15.

I'm done checking the house for vampires only found one vampire he was pretty cool didn't have to fight him off so I'm just going to go ahead and set that one to done and in a couple of seconds we'll have a completed time stamp and we'll be able to see our task duration which was two hours and two minutes and here's a fun thing I can actually sort this view here by my task duration property and as you can see this little string format allows us to actually get that in the correct sorted order so now I can see how long are certain tasks taking me and that might help me to be more productive in the future either delegating things or getting things off my plate that I'm not very good at so that is one of the uses of time tracking example number three that we're going to go over and I always do threes in weird ways usually I do it like this sometimes I do it like this there's all kinds of different three ways anyway we're gonna do a little slack notification example here uh so basically this is a feature that will send a helpful notification to slack when something happens in our notion database and here I actually want to do two different triggers that are both going to trigger the exact same action because remember earlier we had a page added trigger and we also have a page edited trigger well here maybe I want to get a slack notification when a new task is created and then I want to get notifications as it goes through its different stages like in progress and done so to do that I'm going to head back over to my handy dandy lightning bolt once again I'll click new automation uh this one I'm just going to call slack notification uh and I will keep it tasks wide so we're always going to get notifications and here we can actually set up two different triggers so I'm going to first do the page added trigger it's very simple and then I can go to the plus icon here and I can add another one and I'm going to say when the status is updated to either in progress or complete but not not or not not started I don't care about that uh I'm going to have that trigger as well so when either of these triggers I want to actually get a slack notification so you can see here send slack notification is a default option and if you have your slack account configured you're going to see not only DMS for yourself but also different slack channels so I've got a nice little notion testing uh channel right there I'm going to set that as my channel and I'm going to hit create and now if we create new tasks or move tasks to different statuses we'll get notifications so I'm going to go ahead and create one right here once again this time I need to check the house for zombies they're always coming in through the basement windows and I've sent my mom a birthday card so I'm gonna move my mom's birthday card task over there in fact today literally is my mom's birthday so that's not just a made-up task I actually did do that and I'm going to go over to my Slack and in a couple of minutes we are going to see those notifications coming in now one thing that I have noticed is the slack notification system is not the fastest thing in the world in fact if you build an automation like this using pipedream or make. com those notifications will come in quite a bit faster depending on how you set things up um through this default system usually it takes two to three minutes so we're going to come back to this slack space in just a couple of minutes and I'm going to move right on to example number four and then we'll come back and we'll see those tasks in slack so example number four I think is the coolest one um for a long time in notion we have wanted this feature both me and a lot of people who have emailed into me where when we create a project we get a list of default tasks in that project because a lot of projects in our lives have the same kind of tasks inside of them like when I make a video there's got to be a research process we gotta validate the topic I gotta film it like I'm doing right now we have to edit it all that good stuff and we might want to have those tasks automatically populate in we've had workarounds for that for a long time a couple of months ago notion's button feature allowed us to actually click a button and generate those tasks now we can do it in a completely automated way where as you saw in the intro when I create a new project in this content projects database we're going to get all those default tasks and Associate them with the project automatically so I'm gonna build that and this one is actually going to be a bit of a lengthier build process because I'm going to have many different actions for a single different trigger so I'm going to go to the lightning bolt once again and actually I want to scroll up just a little bit so you can see a bit better I'll do a new Automation and this time first we'll give it a name let's just say default projects or default tasks for content everything is content now uh and the trigger is just going to be page added to this database but now for Action we can do add page two which is something we haven't done before and when we click add page two notice that we can choose the database that we're in but we can also choose any other database that we have edit access to now uh put a pin in this in your head because later on I'm going to explain to you why this can be dangerous if you're not being careful especially when it comes to the edit pages in another database action but at least for adding new pages it's not too dangerous just keep that in mind for a little bit later so for now I'm actually going to choose our tasks database because what I want to happen is when a new content project comes into the content projects database we get those automatic tasks so selecting tasks there I now have the do this add page to tasks and now I can actually set default values for the properties in that database so I'm going to name a task here let's just say do topic validation and uh this is a little Pro tip for YouTubers out there validate your topics before you go and spend 30 or 40 hours making a video because sometimes you will mark up the wrong tree like I've done many times and realize there was a a way you could kind of massage the topic or tie it to something else more interesting and get way more views so seriously do that if you are a YouTuber but we can also edit additional properties here so I'm gonna go with my uh let's just hear assignee property right there and I'm going to assign this one to me by default and then the other one perhaps the most important one for this example is going to be our content relation and if you're unfamiliar with notion databases essentially there is a tool called relations where you can relate one database to another and you can have like a row and a database that's related to one or more rows in another database that's how we get projects related to tasks I have a whole notion databases tutorial video which I will link in the description down below and there's a whole section about relations in that video if you want to learn more but essentially here we actually have have this little Dynamic value called this page and this page refers to the page that actually triggered this automation so if I click this page whenever I create a new page in the content projects database that's going to be the page that becomes the relation value set for the new page I'm creating in tasks so bada bing bada boom we've got a new page that's going to be created in tasks for that do topic validation but of course I'm not going to create this we actually are creating multiple different tasks so I'm going to have my editor go into fast forward mode while I create five basically identical versions of what I just did so we get six tasks every time we create a new project okay and as you can see even though that was fast forwarded that process took a little bit of time so I am hoping that in this little three dot menu in the future uh right next to delete we get a duplicate option so we can at least kind of like make a template for uh a one trigger to many uh action automation here and then we could just sort of make that a lot faster of a process but for now does take a little bit but once it's done you don't have to do it anymore which is pretty cool so I'll hit save here and now we can actually demo this uh and one thing you will notice is I have set a Content template or a database template as the default here so if I edit this you can actually see we've got a list of tasks in there it is filtered and sorted and it's going to bring up all the tasks that are related to that content project when I create a new one so first and foremost I'm going to go ahead and delete these ones out of here because I don't really need them anymore and I'm going to go ahead and make a new page and in just a second we should see those default tasks automatically pop in awesome and one little Pro tip I'll give you here uh these actually tend to pop in in almost reverse order so I found that for whatever reason the last one comes in first or maybe there's some other weird sorting Quirk but to get around that I have added a sorting criteria where the first criteria is due in ascending order so when I go and set due dates those will actually be in the correct order but because we don't have due dates it's actually going to defer to the second sort criteria and that's creative time in ascending order and that gets us the correct order that we actually specified inside of the Automation and just like before we can go into that page and we see all the same default tasks inside of the project which is super useful because inside of the project is probably we're going to be doing most of your work okay we put a pin in something earlier and that was the slack notifications so I'm going to go back to slack and there is send mom birthday card in progress crossed out and there's done and we have this new page check the house for zombies There's also this helpful open in notion button so if you're working with a team team and you're creating new tasks and you want to make it easy for your team to get to those tasks inside a notion from slack this would be a pretty cool automation to set up all right now we are transitioning over Into the Danger Zone and I'm hoping that Tony can get some sort of like copyright free Kenny Loggins reference in here such a good song anyway I want to talk about the final action that you have access to in this feature which I think is potentially useful but also potentially dangerous and I think it is important for me to put this section in the video that action is the edit pages in action so I'm going to go into this automation here and I'm going to show you what I mean so I've got a couple of automations already set up for this trigger DB database that I have here and I also have a Target DB right here so basically when something happens in this database existing pages are going to be edited in this other database now one thing to note is to build automations in notion you have to have full access permissions to the database where you are building the automation however if you're building an automation that has an action that edits a different database you only need edit access to that Target database so do keep that in mind but mostly keep what I'm about to show you in mind if I set the status of this trigger row to trigger filtered you're going to see some little uh text popping in here and it's only going to edit the rows that have been checked off here if I set this to trigger all you're going to see the same thing happen but you're going to see it happen to all rows in the database and you can see why this might be problematic because if you accidentally or maybe somebody on your team accidentally sets up an automation that doesn't have a filter set up you could accidentally edit the properties of every single row in a database and imagine doing that in a database that is like a production database one that you work in every single day that has hundreds or even thousands of rows so when using the edit pages in action I'm going to show you in a second be careful with it especially because you can do this almost by default you see this little nuke my data checkbox that I have here if I go into my automations area I create a brand new Automation and I say where nuke my data is edited for some reason check boxes don't actually give you the option for checked or unchecked it's just edited which I guess kind of makes sense it's Boolean and I do the action of edit pages in I choose the tasks or the target database database and I don't do anything else else then look at what the settings are by default there are no filters we could set up filters but by default there are no filters which means it's going to do uh the action to all pages in Target database and notice the default action name is set to Untitled so if I create this note that I have all these nice little titles here maybe this is my blog database and I click nuke my data then in a couple of seconds I'm going to lose all of those titles and I think that is a dangerous thing now you can go into page history and you can roll back a database but there are some problems there if this happens and you don't catch it for 10 minutes and somebody else is working inside one of those pages and they're making edits you could lose data there so I almost want to say for now don't use edit pages in or at the very least if you're working with a team make sure you educate them on how this feature works and probably ask them not to use the feature unless they are like the notion architect inside of your company another good thing to do would be to make sure that your databases have their permission set I think by default pretty much every member inside of your notion workspace is going to have full access I think I can even show that here so if I get a share um actually I'm on a private page maybe I have a shared page inside of this I do so if I go to this ultimate brain for notion automations template where we're testing some of our own automations through pipedream recently and I go to share here I can see that everyone in this team space has full access which means everyone in this team space would be able to create automations in a database and you know all the ones we've showed for the rest of this video have been pretty cool pretty harmless but if we are creating one that edits pages in another database you can have somebody accidentally set up a automation that does this so I think first and foremost ask your team not to touch that setting unless they really know what they're doing uh second most and second uh if I go back into I think it's just this automation here you would at least want to make sure that you set filter criteria so you know exactly what is going to be edited so if I said I want to only edit the rows where archived is checked now I'm working with a bit of a safer automation because now I have consciously set filter criteria to only affect the pages in The Target database that meet that filter criteria and in that case if I did for whatever reason want to Nuke my data it would only nuke the ones where this and this and this were checked okay rant over hopefully in the future we get like at least a warning pop up if there's no filters on that kind of an action so notion if you're watching this I think that should be added uh before I wrap this video up I do want to go over a couple of additional points that I think people are going to bring up so first and foremost this is a feature that is primarily for users on a paid notion account if you're on a paid account you can do everything I've shown in this video if you're on a free notion account you won't be able to create or edit automations but you will be able to duplicate templates that contain automations into your own workspace and then use those automations now if you want to get into notion automation this is not the only way to do it because notion has a free and public API and there are no code tools like pipedream and make. com and zapier which will allow you to basically make automations just like the ones we've shown in this video for free using those tools my personal favorite one is pipedream.

com I'm actually making a lot of shared workflows that basically set up some really cool stuff keep your eyes peeled for the next video you're actually going to be able to create tasks in notion using your voice even from an Apple Watch so there are ways to create automations just like this one even if you're on a free notion account it just involves using either the notion API or those no code tools which integrate with the notion API and if you are curious about learning the API yourself if you want to dig into some JavaScript code and go along the path that I've actually gone over in the last couple of years or actually actually just last year I've got a full two hour long notion API tutorial which will take you from Soup To Nuts basically everything you need to know to build a really cool example project learn a lot of code from a beginner level along the way and learn the ins and outs of the notion API I'll have that link in the description if you are curious the other big question I think that I'm going to get personally is hey Tom are you going to add these automations into your own templates for now we're going to focus on educating you the viewer on how to build these automations yourself first and foremost because these automations are off very personal you're going to want to edit them you're going to want to tailor them to your own workflows so shipping them in templates might not make sense but another reason is notion is likely going to be adding additional capabilities to this feature in the future and the fact that free notion users can't edit those automations means every time that happens we would have to ship a new version of our template and people would have to try to migrate all their data it would be a huge hassle so again for now we are going to try to just do tutorial videos and show people how to use these automations just like I've done in this video and in fact if you already are in our customer Community if you've bought one of our templates like ultimate brain or creators companion we already have a brand new tutorial in there showing you how to set up the time tracking example that I showed in this video but inside of ultimate brain where it will be a lot more useful so if you have one of my paid templates if you've got ultimate brain then you have access to that new series of videos with the first one that's live today that is going to be in the AI and automations chat space inside of our Circle community and if you don't already have ultimate brain well if you you want a complete all-in-one productivity system for notion that is what ultimate brain is it is the system that I wanted inside of notion ever since I started using it I wanted to be able to track my tasks and my projects I wanted to be able to take notes to take book notes even track my recipes for cooking and I wanted it all in one place and that is exactly what ultimate brain is architected to be it is the system that got me away from juggling multiple different productivity apps and got everything for managing my life essentially my second brain as it were inside an ocean so if you want to give it a try you can go over to thomasjfrank. com brain we have a full refund policy so if it's not for you then you can easily return it with no questions asked but I do think you are really going to like it especially given the fact that we have that customer Community where we're now doing events we actually just did a full event this morning showing people a sneak peek at that notion voice tasks automation I teased earlier giving them early access to it but we also have full and active support there I've got a team of notion certified X experts and every question gets answered in their support spaces so you will not be Flying Blind you will not be flying solo like you are with a lot of other notion templates out there we also have tons of getting started guides and video tutorials so it's really just a whole community that not only gives you these tools but also helps you to level up your notion game and get your questions answered and make sure that you do not get stuck so once again you can go over to Thomas jfrank.