10 step beginners guide to Notion - Simple to follow masterclass!

Hi, welcome! My name is Rosanna, or R. I'm a project manager, content creator, and healthy productivity fanatic. And in today's video, I'm going to give you an easy-to-follow and simple 10-step master class for Notion.

I know a lot of people start using Notion and then they kind of turn away because it's quite overwhelming for beginners. The onboarding of the tool takes too long, or it is too complicated. And a lot of other Notion tutorials jump right into the features of the tool without kind of explaining the basic UI. In today's master class, I can hopefully walk you through 10 easy steps so it doesn't feel overwhelming anymore, and you can start using the power of Notion to organize your daily life.

There's actually a lot of features that I'm not covering today for the sake of keeping this video simple. If there are features from Notion that you are curious about and I'm not covering today's video, or you're maybe not a full beginner and you're watching this video looking for some information that I'm not sharing, feel free to let me know in the comments down below because I'd be more than happy to make another video to explain even more features.

Also, if you're looking for a video specifically on how to make aesthetically pleasing Notion pages, I recommend watching this video that I made a while back. I've also linked it in the description box down below where I go over all of my tips on how to make pretty Notion pages. But without further ado, let's actually jump into step one.

This might sound like a little bit of a silly step, but obviously, you're going to start on the Notion website and you're going to have to make an account. However, I would actually say there is a step before that, and that is deciding for yourself where you are going to be using Notion. I highly recommend starting with either the desktop version, meaning that it's an app that you download as like a program on your computer, or using the browser version. And I think I would recommend specifically the browser version because then you don't have to install anything on your PC just yet. You can just navigate to the website and you can start using it right away.

There is also a mobile app for Notion. So if you only have a phone or a tablet, you can actually use that too. However, I have found myself that Notion is not the most intuitive to use on a mobile device. And considering that Notion is not the easiest to onboard, I wouldn't recommend jumping into the mobile version of the tool right away because it's just going to make that experience of onboarding less smooth. And if you can use the browser version, then just use the browser version. Obviously, not everyone might have access to a computer, so if a tablet is your only option, then feel free to use your tablet. I think using Notion on phone and setting up a dashboard on your phone just in the mobile app, I personally wouldn't recommend using Notion if that's your sole device that you're going to use it on because you're never going to get the full power of the tool of like making beautiful dashboards and stuff just from using the mobile app. We're going to start by going to the browser because that's where we're actually going to be starting our Notion journey. Basically, if you've decided which app you're going to use or which version of Notion you're going to use, you've already completed step one. So good job for you, you're already step one into this master class.

Step two is actually making your account. So if you want to create a brand new Notion account, you're going to click on "Get Notion for free." Then it takes you to this page where you can actually use different things to log into a Notion account or create a Notion account. The first one is Google. This is the one that I use. The second one is Apple. So if you want to log in with your Apple ID, you can also do that. The third one is Single Sign-On, which won't work unless you actually have a team or organization that is already paying for a Notion subscription for you, or like they have a Notion subscription for you and they have sent you login information or like you have it linked to your computer as an account because the whole idea of single sign-on is that you don't have to log in. You click that, you enter it once, and then it will recognize your computer as, "Oh, that's that person," and then it will log in for you automatically. This is not the most relevant one if you're watching this tutorial, I guess, because most likely you're an individual who actually wants to create their own Notion account. The same goes for your work email. That's only relevant if your work or your team already has Notion and has linked a specific email address for you. So in this case, I would say either pick Google or Apple. And as soon as you click it, it's going to give you a popup that allows you to log in with your respective Google or Apple account, which then allows you to immediately start using Notion.

Then, as soon as you log in, Notion is actually going to give you a prompt to ask you how you plan on using Notion, whether you're going to collaborate with a team, whether you're going to use it as your individual space. Unfortunately, I can't show you this because, like I said, I already have a Notion account, and that prompt only shows the very first time that you log in. However, that prompt will kind of determine which pages it will populate for you by default. I wouldn't worry too much about it though, because this honestly is something that I would say is not very useful. It's like a nice introduction to the tool, but I'm never going to be using these default pages. I would highly recommend setting up your own Notion and like figuring out how you want to use it instead of using their default-made pages. And that actually means that you've already completed step three of this master class without worrying too much. So congratulations! You've actually made it into Notion. You've completed the first three steps of this tutorial successfully.

Now, the question is, what can you find where? And this is where we're going to go over the entire UI of Notion. So fright not, it might be a lot of information. Step four is an extensive one. To compensate for how small step one to three were, I'm going to walk you through it step by step, and I'm going to explain where you can find all the important things for you to get started with Notion. We're going to start with the bar on the right-hand side, and there's actually kind of a lot to go over in this bar. So we're going to start with the fact that if you click over here, it allows you to actually navigate to all of your account settings and the settings that you have set up for Notion. So if you want to change how it looks, if you want to change like the appearance to dark mode, if you want to change your account settings, anything that comes down to the settings of your Notion can be found right at the top over here. You can also see this is my account that I'm currently using. You can also add multiple Notion accounts to one browser or to one version of the app. So if you're a person who also uses Notion for work and you have like a private Notion versus a work Notion, you can add all of them in one go and you can change between those accounts over here.

Then right underneath, we have the search bar, or like the search function in Notion. As you can see, there's currently not much in this Notion. So if I start searching, it's probably not going to find that much information. If I go to my actual Notion, however, if you're ever interested in how that is set up, feel free to check out my full Notion tour on my YouTube channel. It's also linked in the description box down below. But basically, this allows you to search everything in your Notion. It allows you to search any page, any database, anything you've ever made in that specific Notion. It allows you to search it. The downside of the search feature, however, is that you need to know the exact title or the exact name of something that you gave to it. So you can't like really contextually search. I know that Notion AI is actually a lot better than the default search feature in Notion. So before, you had to actually know exactly what you were looking for. If you are using Notion AI, which is a pro feature, you can use like a limited amount of it for free, but then you have to start paying per month. But Notion AI can actually contextually search in your notes. So you can like search for something that is written somewhere on the page rather than the exact title of the card. But that's something I feel like that that gets very close to the advanced features, which I don't want to touch upon too much in this video. But I felt like for the searching, it is good to know for you. As soon as you start using Notion, a lot of people get confused about the search functionality not finding what they want. It's not like a Google search. It's really like specifically searching for entries of data in your databases.

Then we have the Home tab, which is actually a relatively new feature in Notion. And to be honest, I don't think I'm going to go over this tab too much for today because you're not going to be using this until you've set up your Notion completely and properly and you know how you want to work with it. I don't even use the homepage because most people have their home dashboard built already. And the homepage is such a new feature that only works properly if you actually use the Notion calendar, if you have your databases set up correctly. So it's a nice feature, I think it has a lot of potential, but it's personally, in my opinion, not quite there where it should be. And also, I very rarely click it, and I am an everyday Notion user.

The next one is your Inbox, which basically will show everything that is assigned to you in a database. Again, this is a feature that is mostly relevant if you're working in Notion with your team. I actually work in Notion for my work as well, which actually shows me all of the cards or all of the tasks that have been assigned to me, for instance. However, if you're going to use Notion just by yourself, I don't actually expect a lot of things to show up in your inbox because you're the only person working in your Notion. So you're probably not going to use the "common" feature or the "assign to person" feature, which are like all things that are super valuable if you're working in Notion for a team. And then it will show up in your inbox if someone makes a new comment on a page or anything. So it's basically your notification center. But I personally, even as a person who works in a team in Notion, very rarely use my inbox, to be honest.

Then right below that, you can now only see "Private," but there can actually be three categories here. And I can show you which one. If you add one to your favorites, you can actually see that it creates another category at the top. Favorites will always be sitting all the way at the top. These are basically all of your pages that are living in your Notion space. You can also create pages within pages. So as you can see, in the "Personal Home," there's already a "Movie List," "Recipes," and "Yearly Goals" and "Travel Plans." And you can extend that by clicking on the little arrow right next to the page name. If I make this a favorite, you can see that the list of favorites will just continue to get longer. And if I don't want it as a favorite anymore, you just click on the little three dots right next to it, which allows you to add something to favorites or not. Favorites is a great way for you to easily be able to access pages that might be a little bit deeper into your Notion, but that you still use on a day-to-day basis. It is very easy if you have a bunch of Notion pages to just allow yourself maybe like a quick access bar to five of them by just favoriting their page because the favorites will always show up at the top.

There is a third category which can be in between Favorites and Private, and that is your Shared Pages. Shared pages are basically all the pages that you've either shared with a specific account or pages that you've made public on the web. They will show up in your Shared Pages section, which is always good for you to know because that means that anything that you put on those pages will be public to whoever you shared it with. So it's good to keep an eye out on what information you put on those pages. Again, I feel like as a single Notion user, you're probably not going to have that many shared pages. But even if you collaborate on a Notion page just with a friend, it will show up in your shared section.

Then under Private, you have all of your pages that you've created in your Notion pages, which are just all the pages in your private space. It kind of speaks for itself. Underneath, we have a quick link to Notion Calendar. I'm not going to do a deep dive into Notion Calendar today. However, if you're interested, I could make a video on how I use Notion Calendar specifically, how I set it up, what my recommendations would be. So let me know in the comments down below if that's something that you're interested in.

Below that, we have Templates. And Templates is actually kind of a nice feature, especially if you're just getting started with Notion, to kind of explore possibilities and options. It basically is a full template library where Notion has pre-selected a bunch of templates that they think are good templates to use. You can search for templates, and as soon as you want to add one, you can just click it. It will load the template. You can actually see what it looks like, a more detailed description. And then if you view the template, it will actually open it up in the place where the person is selling the template. So this person is actually giving away the template for free. This website that this person is using is called Gumroad. And this website is actually the website that I also use to sell my Notion templates. I have a couple of Notion templates that are actually completely free. They are all linked in my description box down below. They are not endorsed by Notion themselves. So there is like a selection of templates from people that will show up within the Notion app. But there is so many templates out there for free made by creators that you can find through YouTube or through Gumroad itself because Gumroad also has a homepage where you can explore templates. So if you're ever feeling overwhelmed with Notion and you just want to get started with a template that someone else already made, it's actually incredibly easy to download them and just add them to your own home.

So once you're back in Notion, you actually have two more things. One is the Trash. This includes all the pages that you've ever deleted. If I click on it, it doesn't show anything because within this Notion space, I haven't actually deleted anything. But we can maybe delete a page simply to show you what happens. I just deleted a page. If I click on the Trash now, it actually opens up the bin, which shows that I deleted "Quick Notes." I can restore the page or I can delete it from trash forever. Actually, the trash will hold pages that were deleted in the past 30 days. Anything before that will be deleted permanently. If you have a Pro version of Notion, this time is extended, I believe, from the top of my head, to 90 days, which means that you are actually in fact able to store pages in your trash for longer, which is easier to recover them if you ever make any mistakes.

And then there's a quick link to Help and Support in case you ever have any questions specifically for Notion. If something's wrong with your account, if something's not working, you can quickly click here and you can find help in documentation or message support. Then all the way at the bottom, you can actually invite members to your Notion plan, which is something you can only do if you have a premium or a pro version, or you can upgrade your plan to a premium or pro version all from the bar at the left-hand side.

Then, like I said, there is a bunch of default pages that Notion makes for you. But I have to admit, if I were you, I would just delete all of these. I don't think I would ever use the default Notion pages. I would very much make my own and just start fresh. Make sure there's nothing in here. And then, as soon as you've deleted them all, it says "Add a page." But you can also hover over the little title and then click "Add a page." So let's actually start there because now we have a blank space. And this is what usually people get to in Notion. The first four steps, most people get through, and then they're here, and they see a fully blank and empty page, and they get incredibly overwhelmed because there is so much places to start and no one knows where to. And actually, here I'm going to tell you something that might sound a little bit silly, but we're already at step six. So you've made it through the first half of this tutorial. So you can do this!

Please, before you actually start making something in Notion, think about your page structure. Think about how you want to build up your Notion. Questions that can help you with this are: Do you want a homepage or a dashboard? Like, is that something that you eventually want to have as a page where you can have like a quick glance over the information living in your Notion? Or do you just want to have a list of quick pages, kind of like a notebook where it doesn't really matter, you know, where you can find the information? Then, do you think that you're going to be using subcategories within your Notion? Like, I use my life areas as subcategories. So I have kind of a space within my Notion that goes for my content creation, and I have a space that is for my work, and I have a space that's for my relationship and my friends, and I have a space that's for my experiences. So like, think about what kind of structure you want to set up in your Notion. And I highly recommend doing this before even setting up anything in your Notion itself because knowing the structure is going to vastly help you in figuring out how you want to design your Notion pages or like which pages you want to create in the first place.

To explain this best, I just quickly opened my own Notion because I think it is the easiest to kind of like show you the visual while explaining my thought process. But if you start building your Notion and you start moving around information, it's very easy to kind of get lost, break your databases, forget what the things that you wanted to set up. So coming up with kind of like, almost a tree structure of, you have your dashboard, which is going to be like your main page, and from there, you want to be able to access next pages. This is my dashboard. I have a section for experiences, and under experiences, that's kind of like the bucket where I have everything related to my reading, my like the things that I'm watching on TV, the things that I'm doing for crafting, all of my concerts, all of my trips. So I, what I did, is I wrote out a list of all the things that I wanted to register in Notion, and then I tried to see if I could categorize those into like easier-to-follow categorizations. And then those categorizations show up on my homepage. And by thinking about this before you start building your pages, you're going to allow yourself a much easier building process because you can basically set up the skeleton or like the structure of your Notion before you even start adding information to it. So you can like create a space where you know your tasks are going to live, and you can create a space where maybe your university notes are going to live. And you can decide, do you want to have all your notes in one big database and have like everything living in the same space, or do you want to separate maybe your notes for your work versus your university? Basically, what is your strategy for storing information? And I think this is the part that a lot of people skip over when they start using Notion, and that's exactly the part that makes it extremely overwhelming to start using the tool, is because it gives you a blank space. So it is up to you to decide that structure that you would like for you to fit with your brain because that's like the greatest power of Notion is because it's so flexible. You get to set it up in a way that works for your brain specifically. It is tailored to the way that you think. So just kind of come up with how do you already compartmentalize things in your head and translate that into a system that will work on paper.

I hope that makes sense. I hope that this like showing you guys how I've set it up of like my career, my content creation, my finances, kind of like separating it like that, and then also within, for example, experiences, showing you that it's split up into even like more smaller pieces. I hope that that kind of illustrates what I mean with how do you put things in your mental buckets and like translate that to Notion. Because that on its own, you don't even have to understand databases. You don't have to understand any of the Notion features for you to be able to think about what you would like to register in Notion. Just opening Notion for the sake of wanting a note-taking app, I don't think is the most useful. Like, you have to realize that Notion is a tool to help you, but just like any other tool that exists out there, it helps you, it doesn't like magically solve any problem that you have. You still have to put in some work yourself of coming up with a system for like to use that tool, basically.

However, that is step six. So if you know what you want to do and you can just write this out on a little piece of paper, you can just, you can even if you wanted to, let that be like your very first page. So you're going to have a homepage, and within the homepage, you would like a task page, and you would like a travel page, and you would like a university page, and you would maybe like a bucket list. Within the bucket list, you would like to have a "to be read" bucket list, and also a "to do" like experiences you want to go have, like a travel bucket list that you can then also like, that's the magic of Notion. Is if you save something in one space, that doesn't mean you can only view it in that one space. So you can basically like create a little presentation or like projection of something that lives in one space into another. So what you could do is within your bucket list, you could make a bucket list for travel, but then you can also show that over here, like on your travel page, you can see that same bucket list view, even though you actually added it in this space. It's basically kind of like showing a copy of a page in your notebook in a different place. And I think this is something that is so wildly impressive about Notion is that you can actually show things in multiple spaces, which allows you to also be flexible with your structure. I think this is my biggest challenge when it comes to things like bullet journaling. Is you write something on one page, but then what if what if you want that same information to show up in a later place? You have to manually write it out again. If you change it in one place, it won't change in the other, which is again where Notion is magic. If you actually link it in the right way, and I'll show you in this video how to do that. If you change the information in the source, it will actually change in that view as well, which makes it super easy for you to kind of just figure out a way that works for your brain to display information. So maybe this could even be your very first Notion page, just a simple structure of your Notion. That's step six. If you've completed that, you are ready to actually start building your Notion. So let's get on to step seven.

For the sake of this video, I'm going to assume that you want some sort of a homepage or a dashboard because I think most people want that, and it's just nice for me to explain it in this video too. However, before we start building that homepage, I would like to go over some very, very nice settings for pages because I feel like this is something that if you're a first-time Notion user, you might not know, but it's going to make a huge difference on how your page looks. So what we're going to do is we're going to navigate to the top right corner. There's three little dots, and if you click that, it actually opens the menu with all of the settings for this specific page. The very first setting that you can change is the font. Mind you, this font can be changed per page. So it's not like if you set up serif, it will be like that for your entire Notion. You can change per page. So you can even have different looking pages across your entire Notion space. However, my preferred one is serif at the moment. When I started using Notion, I loved using mono, and I even have pages with the default font, but I prefer to go for serif for my home homepage.

Then I highly recommend to use "Small Text." This basically makes that everything in your Notion is a little bit smaller by default. The text is quite large, but if you're using a computer monitor, you don't really need that large text. I even prefer it on a mobile device. The smaller text just looks a little bit better. But if you feel like that's too small, you can always turn it off here, and then the text on the page itself will get a little bit bigger again. Something that I also recommend turning on is using "Full Width." So I'll show you what happens if I turn that off and I add a database to my page. What you can see is that it only uses like the middle column of the page. It like only keeps that table in the middle, which is like actually weird because you have the whole page, but it only uses the middle part. What you can do if you do "Full Width," as you can see, it extends to the full width of your monitor. I highly recommend doing that for everything unless you're working on a mobile device. Then I would recommend just turning this off because that actually allows you to prevent making pages that are going to get like really wide and awkward on your mobile device. But if you're working on a computer, I highly recommend going in here and turning "Full Width" on.

Then something else, you have a new feature called "Table of Contents." I actually prefer to turn this off in the beginning because it can get like a little bit overwhelming or cluttery on your page if it turns on. If you want to have it on, it basically means that on the side here, it will give you like a little kind of easy-to-navigate bar if you're using headings in your text. But again, you don't need to know this if you're just getting started with Notion. So I just say turn it off and don't let yourself be bothered by that until you feel comfortable using Notion.

Then the next thing that I would highly recommend customizing is going into "Customize Page" and then turn off the "Top Level Page Discussions" because if you're not working in a team, you are not going to need this. This literally allows you to talk, like have comments on a page with people working on that page. If you're by yourself, you're never going to use this. I also prefer to actually turn "Backlinks" off because it clutters your page and it makes it look a little bit messy. And I turn "Page Comments" to "Minimal." This kind of takes away a lot of the visual clutter on your Notion page. I also cover this in my like "How to Make Notion Pages Aesthetically Pleasing" video, but this just makes it easier to look at your Notion page. Unfortunately, you have to change these settings for every single page that you make in Notion. It doesn't like by default save these settings. I wish there was a way to just change this for all of your Notion pages that you create to change the default, but you can't. But I still recommend changing this because it makes such a cleaner overview. I know that you can't really see the changes right now, but as soon as you start working your your Notion, if you don't turn that off, it's going to give you like all of these popups or like things that you can see on your pages that you just don't really need.

So now that we've covered all the page settings, it's actually time to start building. And I'm going to start by the thing that has been here all this time, and that's the "Untitled." Let's actually give our homepage a name. So this is now our Notion homepage. Then there's a couple of things that you can do to already make it look like, you know, those pretty Notion pages, those that you've seen maybe in templates and you're like, "Wow, I wish I could build that." There's two things that are going to make it really easy to already make it look pretty. The first one is adding an icon. If you click on that, there's actually a couple of things you can do. You can pick any emoji from the emoji database. You can actually pick Notion icons. I actually really like to use Notion icons because they still look like a visual indicator, but at the same time, they're not too cluttered. I think if you use emojis, it can really quickly get super cluttery on your dashboard or in your Notion space. But let's actually search for a heart because I feel like home is where the heart is, so we naturally have to have a heart.

Then you can also click on "Add a Cover," which will add that beautiful cover at the top. And then there is a couple of things you can do for the cover. You can actually change the cover, or you can reposition it. If you click "Reposition," you can basically change what part of the image is shown as the cover. Then you can save it. And if you want to change it again, you have a couple of options. There is a default gallery in Notion, which to be honest, I never use. I don't think I've ever used it. Then you can upload your own file. So you can just go into your computer and find any picture that you have saved, and then you can upload it. However, I actually made the mistake when I started building my Notion pages to download every image that I wanted to have in my Notion and then I uploaded it. But that isn't really necessary. You can just add any link. So if you go on Google and you find an image that you like, you can just right-click on it and say "Copy link to picture," and then you can paste it in here, and it will literally just add the picture that you just found. You can also use Unsplash, which is like an online library, and I very often just use Unsplash, to be honest. Like for simple pages, I just search for "plant," immediately looks quite clean, I like it. That's it.

Also, I just realized for the icon one, I also forgot that you can add a custom one. So you can either upload a file. Again, you have to save it to your computer, and then you can just upload anything that you have. Or just like with the cover, you can add a link over here. This actually allows GIF links to be added, so you can have like a little animated page icon if you want. I think that looks super cute, specifically for your home dashboards.

So now that your homepage is actually kind of looking or starting to look pretty, it is time to go over everything that you can add to a page. Notion gives you a couple of things by default at the bottom here, but that's definitely not everything that you can add. And also, I never use these buttons because there is actually two ways that you can do this that are far easier and show you all of the options. You can either hover over this little plus button here, which will give you the entire list, or you can type a slash, and that will also give you the entire list. I would highly recommend teaching yourself to start using the slash right from the get-go because that makes it a ton easier to just navigate while you're building your pages.

Then we have so many what Notion calls "blocks" that you can use to build up your page. So there is text, that kind of speaks for itself, it's just plain text. You can add a page, which is what you can do to add like a link to a new page in your notebook. You can kind of see it as you would add a a physical paper page into your notebook. So if I click this, it creates a new page. As you can see, it is the kind of the URL to this page is "homepage" and "Untitled." Let's call this "Test." Then it becomes "Homepage Test." And if we go here, then you can see that "Test" page. I'm going to click this and delete it for now because that was just a test to show you guys. But that's what a page means, and then you just get a new page that you can start decorating. So that's basically that tree structure that we did in the beginning. If you have your homepage and you want a subpage in it, that's it, you can do it.

A "To-Do List," which just creates a very simple little tick box. This is not what I use to make my task list because I actually use the database feature in Notion. But if you just want simple, quick to-do lists, this is by far the easiest way to do so. Then there's headings. This is very similar to any other text program you've ever used, like Word or anything. You have a big heading, a little smaller heading, and a little little smaller heading. That will actually create like that little table of contents. So Notion will recognize these as headings instead of just regular text.

Then they actually added not too long ago, a very simple table. So this is not a database, but just a simple table. You can actually compare it to a Word table. It just gives you like that visual of the columns and the lines, but it doesn't come with any of the very fancy database features. This is actually quite nice if you just want to have like a simple table overview in your text.

Then there's a bullet list, a numbered list, and a toggle list. These all kind of speak for themselves. But specifically, the toggle list is very nice if you want to have like long lists in your Notion, but you want to prevent your pages from getting cluttered. You can just make a toggle list that you can open and close whenever you need it.

Then you can add a quote. This is just like a little design thingy, which allows you to put some emphasis on a certain part of the text. I really like to do this to make my Notion pages pretty. There is a divider, which is actually a really nice, simple, light gray line that allows you to just kind of create that little divider between parts of your Notion pages. A lot of these features are also just kind of like, try them out for yourself and see if you like the aesthetic of it. I know that not everyone likes the aesthetic of the dividers because it looks too corporate. I actually really like like the simplicity of the dividers, but it's just up to you and what you think looks pretty. So I also highly recommend just looking at a bunch of Notion templates from other people, watch their videos, see how they use the tool, and take inspiration from that.

Then you can actually link to another page. So let's say you have created that "Test" page from earlier, but you want to create a link. So let's actually, I'm going to show you this because it's a bit hard to explain. This is "Test One," and then I'm going to actually create a page which is "Test Two." Let's say that on page for "Test One," I want to refer to "Test Two." Like, I want a quick, easy link to that one. Then I can just go here and I can say "Link to Page," and I can also link back to the homepage, but I can also link back to "Test Two." And now from the page of "Test One," I can quickly click to "Test Two." Also here, you can see on this page, I haven't turned back links and comments off. So this is what the little things that I showed you earlier that you can turn off by going here, "Customize Page," and then turning all of this off. Because now you don't see it anymore.

And then the last one is actually a callout. This is a very nice title, which allows you to kind of like create a more emphasized block. You can actually give it a little icon that you can change. You can type something. The nice thing is you can actually format the text in here. So you can make it like bold and italic, and you can also click on the block and then say "Color," and you can actually change the color of the heading to kind of match your theme. I know a lot of people use these things to make their Notion pages look really, really pretty.

Then there's also Notion AI. Like I said, you can kind of experiment with Notion AI, but I feel like it's one of the more advanced features, and it's also a pro feature. So I'm not going to go into depth about Notion AI in this video. Let me know in the comments down below if you're interested in knowing more about Notion AI. I still have a lot of exploring with Notion AI to do, so maybe that could be an interesting path to go down to kind of explore it and record the process of it.

Then there's also a bunch of media blocks. So you can add an image, you can add a web bookmark, you can add a video from YouTube or Vimeo, you can add audio from SoundCloud or Spotify, you can add code. So if you're a programmer, you can actually save your code in Notion with the right format as well. Or you can upload any file, like a PDF or a Word document, into your Notion as well. Those are all the basic building blocks.

Then we also have a couple of advanced building blocks. You can make a table of contents. This only works if you have the heading feature on. So if you actually use the headings to create a setup for your page. There is an equation block, which allows you to add more complex equations as text. Then there is a button, which actually allows you to click a button and then set up what the button does within your Notion. That is again a feature that I probably won't go into in this video because that feels like a little bit more expert feature. I think databases on their own are already complicated enough for a beginner tutorial. However, I do want to mention that it's there, and if you want to look up a tutorial for it, I do think buttons are an extremely useful feature in Notion. There's a breadcrumb, which basically adds that URL that you can see at the top here, anywhere in your page. There's a synced block, which basically allows you to maybe have like a block of text and then create a view. Like I said earlier, remember when I mentioned that you can create kind of like a copied view, but then if you change the original, it also changes the copied view? That is a synced block. You can also have toggle headings, so basically you have a heading that you can open and close with text underneath. And you can create columns, which is super nice if you want to figure out a layout for your page. Kind of similar with the setup of your Notion page, I would highly recommend sketching out a little layout of your Notion page before you actually start building it. So kind of come up with how many columns you want to use. For a PC, I recommend maximum of three, maybe four if you're really ambitious. And if you're using a mobile device, I wouldn't go above two columns per page because Notion and columns is fantastic until you start using it across devices, and then it can become really messy. And then there is also even more like complicated code blocks, which I have never used because I'm not a programmer, but I feel like everyone who uses Notion to store their code will actually be familiar with what this means.

Then there is a couple of blocks that are more like inline blocks. So you can mention another page, but within a text. So also, what is very nice, it kind of like shows you what it looks like if you hover over it, so that it kind of gives you that idea of like, "Oh, okay, so that's what it will look like when I use it in my page." There's a date or a reminder. You can actually use emojis, or you can use an inline equation. I have to be honest, I've never used any of these, so I don't feel like they're very super important for a beginner tutorial.

Then there's a bunch of embeds. So you can use Google Drive to embed. You can just embed basically any standard URL. You can embed tweets, Google Maps, things. There is a lot of apps in here that allow you to put embeds into it. So kind of explore that for yourself. I've never used many more than just Drive and Tweets, but it's good to know that it's there, and it's a very nice feature that Notion like allows you to have so many things from your ecosystem come together in a Notion page.

Then, as you might have noticed, I very specifically skipped the part that says "Databases." Because databases are going to be our next step. Step eight is understanding databases and how they work, but they require a little bit more explanation than just any of the other blocks. So I felt like it might be nice to make that a separate step. So step seven is just the regular building blocks for Notion. And if you've gotten this far in the video, you have actually made it all the way through step seven, and I'm very proud of you. If this video has been helpful so far, please toss it a cheeky like. Thank you so much. And then it is time for step eight, the databases.

So now it is actually time to go to step eight, which is a deep dive into databases. And with deep dive, I want to preface this by saying that I'm not going to do an extremely deep dive into all the features of the databases in Notion because one, that would be a video on its own because it's a huge topic and it's like one of the main features of Notion. And also, I feel like I'm not familiar with every single thing you can do in a database. So I wouldn't necessarily be the right person to tell you everything. However, I feel like I can give you a nice starting point for you to kind of start building your Notion pages and actually give you the things that you need to know to just make like the most basic databases and just start using Notion to register the things that you want to know. So I'm actually going to show you guys on the homepage, and we're going to start with one very important detail, which I feel like is immediately something that is good to know when you start thinking about your structure for your Notion pages. So we're going to start with the slash and then we're going to start.

To navigate to the database section, there are actually a couple of different views. We have a table view, a board view, a gallery view, a list view, a calendar view, and a timeline view. What is good to know is that you can change this view later down the line. You don't have to immediately pick the right view. My recommendation would actually be to always start with a table because a table is just the easiest way to add all the data that you want to have in there. And then from there, you can actually start viewing the database in different formats like a board or a gallery, etc.

There are exceptions to this, so please feel free to experiment with this. For instance, if you like specifically want to make a board, it doesn't make a lot of sense to make a table first and then turn it into a board. But for most things, I always start with a table because it's the most like clean way to start with your database, and then from there, you can use different views.

Then there are also two different types of databases when you add them. One is called an inline, and one is a full page. And I'll show you the difference. I'm going to start with an inline, which means that it adds a database table on the page that you're currently working on. However, if I actually start typing "database" and I start creating a database as a full page, it creates a brand new page, which is going to be like the only thing living on this page is going to be the database. You can also not add like anything else on this page. There's no way that you can later on like add maybe like pictures or anything. This page is solely a database page. And this is something that when I started out with Notion, wasn't always clear to me. And I have some pages that are like database pages, and I have some pages where there's like a database living in the page.

So why is this important? Because I have a couple of recommendations. I would actually argue that all of your core databases, so like maybe your task database or maybe your notes database, so like the things that you're going to have a lot of information in, like the things that are going to be the main features of your Notion, I would recommend actually making all of them a page database. That way, it is the cleanest view of that database, and you can always find the source of that database easily. Because as I will show you later down the line, you might actually start creating like views of that database across your Notion, and then it can become a little bit iffy of finding what the actual source, like what the core database is. So it is nice for yourself to just start it as a page. Because that way, you can make it very clear that this is the source of the database. You can, of course, if you have like a page where you just want to add like a simple database view, you can of course just insert a database like this as well. However, I try to always make it a page, and then later I can actually create link views of that database page, so I can view that database on other places in my Notion.

So for now, I'm just going to use the database within the page so that you can actually see how I build up that database. So firstly, you're going to give your database a title. And this is actually one that also I recommend thinking about how you want to name it. So for instance, if you want to make a task database, but you already know that for every year you want to start a new task database, just name it like "Task 2024". Because this name is going to be used every single time you want to reference this database. So it's going to make it a lot easier for yourself if you give it a name that you can remember or like that makes sense for your thought process. Just giving it like a random database name because you're like, "I don't really care about the name." You're going to see this name across your Notion. So just name it something that makes sense for you.

And then we actually get to the actual database functionality. So like I said, I'm not going to walk you through every single thing that you can add into a database. I'm just going to walk you through like the basics of how to use databases, what kind of properties you can use, and what I would recommend starting with. So actually, when you have the title of your database, there is the table view, and you can see a plus next to it. This is what I talked about earlier, that the fact that you can for every database, you can add different views, or like you can have the same database display that information in different ways. So for now, we have a table, but I can also click "Board", and what it will now do is actually everything that you can add in this table will also show up in the board view. We can also make a list view if you want it. So this way, it is really easy for you to just display everything in different views. And that's why I said, just start with the table because the table is going to be the cleanest way to enter the data, and you can always add views later.

I'll show you later down the line how you can actually view a board view of this table somewhere else in like a different place in your Notion. But for now, this is how to add different views to your pages. Something that I really like to do is I like to rename them. So that for instance, if the table is only showing like the coming month, or the table is actually showing all tasks, the board is going to only show coming month. Then I like to change those. And I also like to change the icon because I think it just looks a little bit better if you have like icons next to it. It just makes it, it looks a little bit cleaner. So for "All Tasks", we're just going to add a little check. So that is the "All Tasks", and that is the "Coming Month". I'm actually going to get rid of the list view because I don't think it's super useful for now. As you can see, these small little things actually make your Notion look a lot better. So actually spend the time changing these little things. Just do it every single time that you create a page or that you set up something, because it's going to make a huge difference in how your Notion is going to feel like when you're using it.

Then kind of moving on, all the way to the right-hand side, we can see a couple of things. There is one button called "Filter". This filter will allow you to basically filter on anything that you have set up as a database property. Then there is "Sort", which will basically allow you to sort the information in your database, if you sort it alphabetically or by date or anything. Then there is one that is called "Automations", which I am not going to go into in this video because I feel like that's definitely a more advanced feature. There is a "Search" button, which allows you to search just within this database. So kind of like what we have here with the search, but then across your entire Notion. This allows you to search within your database. And then there's a little context menu, which allows you to change a bunch of settings from this database. So you can change the default layout, you can change it to a board, a timeline, a gallery. Like I said, you always have power over how you view your databases. You can say if you want to see the vertical lines, if you want to wrap the columns, if you click on a page that you create, how you want that to open. So if you want it to like slide in from the side, if you want it to open like a little center popup, or if you want it to open like a full page. This is also where you can actually filter and sort. So the two quick buttons that you can see here show up here as well. You can also decide which properties are actually visible. So you can have properties, which are basically like the tags or the name or the date or like any column that you add. You can also have them but hide them. So you can like create a really clean overview of your database, even though you register far more that you just don't have to see at like a first glance of your database.

Then you can also group information. This is very useful, not specifically in a database view, but if you want to kind of like, let's say you give, you store all of your tasks, and you give them a tag for your study, and some for like your household chores, and you quickly want to see all of the tasks that are related to your study bundled together, you can group, group them. So you can group this overview. Then again, "Automations", I'm not going to get into right now. Also, this "Customize Task 2024" is a brand new feature of Notion, which allows you to do even more customization. It's fantastic, but I'm not going to get into it too much because one, I don't know too much about it because it only recently released, and two, I also feel like it is a little bit more specific. So I think you're going to do just fine by just knowing the top of these.

Then you can also "Lock the database", which allows you to, well, literally lock it, meaning that you can no longer change it. You can unlock it at any time. You can "Copy the link to All Tasks", which means that you can copy a link to this specific view. You can also "Duplicate All Tasks", which means that you're going to duplicate this database. Or you can "Delete All Tasks", which means that you're going to delete this specific view. You're not going to delete the entire database, you're just going to delete the view. So just keep that in mind.

And then there is a blue button that says "New", which basically allows you to add a line into the database. You can also click here. So there's no necessary need to click over here. You can also set up templates, but I'm not sure if I'm going to show you that. That depends on how long this video is going to be. Let me know in the comments down below if you'd like to know how you can make task templates. I do feel like it's one of those features in Notion that is going to enhance your Notion experience a lot. But at the same time, I also feel like this video is already covering so much information that I don't want it to become an information dump.

So now that we've covered all the buttons surrounding a database, let's actually take a look at the properties. So like I said, you can fully customize which properties you want to have in a database, and Notion has a lot of options. So I'm just going to show you the full list. I'm going to, as per usual, ignore the AI part because I feel like that's a little bit more specific. As a property, you can have text, you can have numbers, you can have a drop-down list that allows you to select one, you can have a drop-down list that allows you to select multiple, you can have a status, which is like the formal property in Notion that will also help you creating like those Kanban boards and stuff. You can have a date property, you can have a person, which I feel like is only relevant if you have multiple people working in your teams. Otherwise, this is not too relevant. You can have files and media, which allows you to actually add specific files and media to your database. You can have a checkbox feature, you can have a URL or like a link feature, you can have an email or a phone. You can have a formula, which is the part where my Notion knowledge lacks terribly. I am not the best with Notion formulas. I can highly recommend watching Thomas Frank's deep dive into Notion formulas because I am not the best resource when it comes to that. You can have relations, which is actually an incredibly useful feature where you can have like one database relating to another database in your Notion. So you can have like things from one database showing up in your other, not Notion databases. Again, I feel like that might be a better one for like a deep dive into Notion. Let me know in the comments down below if that's something you're interested in. You can have a rollup. You can show when that database entry was created, who it was created by, when it was last edited, and who edited it last.

Then there's also the "Button" feature. So the button feature that you can, you can actually add a button on your page. You can also add a button into a database, which is extremely useful. And there is an "Idea" one, which actually, if you add it, it automatically populates that line of your Notion with a unique ID. This is incredibly useful if you plan on storing huge amounts of data in your, in your Notion. Then that ID will, for instance, allow you to quickly search or find specific subsets of your data.

You'll notice me saying the word "data" a lot, and I think obviously we're talking about databases. So in that sense, it makes sense. But in general, the Notion and like the whole philosophy of Notion is very much built upon the fact that you use databases. You can use Notion without ever touching a database. That's like an absolute option. However, if you want to get the full power out of Notion, you're going to have to familiarize yourself with databases and also the concept of database thinking, like the logic behind how to store your information in a database. That's not something that I can teach you in a Notion tutorial or like a beginner's tutorial. But there is plenty of videos out there that kind of walk you through the philosophy of how to use a database and like smart decisions that you can make with that, which I highly recommend watching if this is the part of Notion that overwhelms you.

Then another thing that is good to know is that you can actually delete all of these columns apart from the very first column. As you can see, there is no way for me to actually delete this. That's because the, the philosophy of Notion and databases is that every entry into a database is also a page. I know that sounds a little bit confusing, so I'm going to show you what I mean by that. This is "Test One", and this is "Test Two". As you can see, I've just made two database entries. Maybe we can give it like a little date feature. So "Test One" is going to happen tomorrow, and "Test Two" is going to happen on Sunday. That's just putting it out there. So "Test One" is going to happen tomorrow, and "Test Two" is going to happen on Saturday. However, if you want to add details about this specific test, you have a couple of options. You can either add a text property, and then you can say, "This test is for Notion." "This test is for Notion AI", for instance. However, what you could also do is you could open up this as a page, and then you can actually see all the database properties, but it allows you to have a whole page where you can write things. And this to me, in the beginning, was extremely confusing because I didn't realize that every database entry would also be a page. This is also the strength of Notion because that you basically means that you can store information in layers. You can have your home dashboard, you can have a task database, and then you can have your subtasks living in here, and then you can have information about those subtasks within the subtasks. Which allows you to create an incredibly intricate and difficult information storing system which works for your brain. But again, I'm going to repeat this a couple of more times probably in this video, is you're going to have to figure out what works for your brain and what is like a setup that makes sense for you as like a thought path to follow whenever you're trying to find your information.

So now that I've actually covered the basic settings of Notion databases, and again, I highly recommend that you just kind of just play around with this and see how it all works. Because literally with Notion, the best way to explore things and learn things is just to play around. Give yourself a little playground page in your Notion, and just know that whatever you're going to add there, you're going to delete later. But that way, you can just play around and figure out how things work.

But now that you know a little bit about this, I promised that I would show you how to view this specific database, let's say on your homepage. So you have the database living here. You can't delete this. If you delete this page, then it will actually get rid of your database. So you're going to have to make maybe like a little storage on your home screen where you have all the core databases. Then let's say on your homepage, you actually want to see a calendar view of when you're going to run some tasks, and you want to pull that information from that database. So what you're going to do is you're going to do slash, and you're going to type "linked". It's going to give you this option, which is called "Linked view of database", which literally means that you're going to have a view of an existing database, and that it's going to be linked. So whenever you change something in this view or in the source view, it's going to update in both. And this, in my personal opinion, is one of the best features of Notion because that allows you to not just have something sitting on one page, but view it in different places.

So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to grab this "Tasks 2024" one. And then there's a couple of things we can do. The first thing I always like to do is I like to hide the database title. I don't need to know that it's that database, I know that already. Or maybe on my homepage, I'm actually going to make a little heading, which is going to be "Planner". "Task Planner". There we go. And then I have the database underneath. However, for this specific database, I would actually like to see when I'm going to be running these tests in a calendar. So I'm going to go here, and then I'm going to click "Layout", and I'm going to click "Calendar". And as you can see, it's now going to make a calendar which says "Upcoming Month". And you can see that "Test One" is scheduled over here, and "Test Two" is scheduled over here. That database is still living over here. So if we add "Test Number Three" over here, which is going to happen like on the 30th, and "Test Number Four" is actually going to happen on the 31st, but they're, we're going to add an end date to this one. This is only going to end on August 3rd. There we go. So you can see that both of dates are shown in here. As soon as we go back to our homepage, you can immediately see that "Test Three" and "Test Four" also show up. And "Test Four" actually goes across multiple days because it has an end date assigned to it.

So like I said, source database, linked view of the database. We can even add something over here. This is, this can be like "Test Zero". Maybe the status, we haven't really set anything for this. That's a property, um, for the text, we can say, "This is the ground zero test". There we go. And then you can see "Test Zero" shows up here. And if we go here, "Test Zero" shows up here as well. Again, linked views works really, really nicely because then you can just have one source of your information and display that information differently across your pages. You could even add a filter to say that you only want to see "This Week", for instance, so that it will filter out anything else. And then you could even change, if you go into your calendar view, you can actually change the calendar view to a week as well, and then you can only see this week. If you also want to see other properties, so maybe like you want to see the description, you can go in here, you can go into your properties, and you can actually show the text. Now you can see this is a test for Notion, and this is a test for Notion AI.

So this is just literally me showcasing whatever I've explained just now by actually clicking on the button, setting up the filter, showing and hiding properties. But I hope that this makes sense. Let me know in the comments down below if there's anything that you still don't understand. If there's anything that you would like to know more in depth, I can always make like a little follow-up tutorial on in a short or something. But I hope this covers like the basic stuff that you need to know about databases.

Now that you know everything about databases, we've actually arrived at step number nine of the 10-step master class, and that is actually to build your very first version of your Notion layout. I would highly recommend to do this before you start like actually adding data into your databases. So just make the skeleton, just build the structure, build the layout of your pages. Don't add any tasks, don't add like anything to your databases like your books or your studies or your courses. Just build the basic structure before you start to populate. The reason for this is because probably in the process of building, you're going to realize that some things work, and some things don't work, and that's completely fine. However, if you already add a bunch of data in there and you start creating linked views and you start building everything up, it becomes more and more and more complex to move your data around. Trust me when I say this because I actually had a great Notion setup, and then I decided to literally throw everything upside down and completely change the way that I was using my Notion. And the painful thing about this was that I actually realized that I had to combine databases, move data manually, and I spent forever trying to get my Notion in the way that I wanted it to because I just decided to do a huge overhaul midway through my Notion setup. If you think about this upfront and you experiment with like the layout and where you want your pages before you add a lot of data and linked views to it, it's going to save your, you're going to save yourself so much time.

As soon as you've done that and you're happy with the layout of your Notion, you are actually ready for step 10, and that is starting to use your Notion. I can highly recommend whenever you start with using your Notion, give yourself like a grace period of three months to get used to your setup. Don't immediately feel like you need to change things because it doesn't work in week one. Some things also just kind of need to settle and you need to get used to it. However, schedule a little moment for yourself after three months where you can review your current Notion setup and figure out if there's anything that you're missing, anything that you'd like to change, or anything that you're like particularly happy with that you might want to capitalize on by implementing it throughout the rest of your Notion. Maybe a specific field, maybe a specific setup. It's always good to learn from yourself because in the end, like I said, I mentioned that I would repeat this, but in the end, Notion is supposed to represent your brain and your brain only. So if you change career, if you change study, if you change lifestyle, probably your Notion is going to change with that, and that is completely fine.

That was my 10-step master class for Notion for beginners. I know this was a long video, so if you made it all the way to this point in the video, a huge applause for yourself. I'm very proud of you for getting through these 10 steps. Thank you so much for watching. If this video was helpful to you, please toss it a cheeky like. If you're interested in my Notion tour, I recommend watching this video. And if you're interested in aesthetic Notion setups, I recommend watching this video. And if you're not subscribed to my channel, feel free to check it out. I do a bunch of Notion and productivity related things over there. And if you like what you see, don't forget to hit that subscribe button, notification bell. And with all of that being said, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one. Bye everyone.