Transcription
Despite having zero technical background, I've noticed the best AI users aren't necessarily the engineers. Instead, they're professionals who have created systems that encourage regular use of AI tools. And since prompting is currently still the main way most people interact with AI, they found ways to make prompting so easy that it becomes automatic in their daily work.
In this video, I'll show you how to build a simple prompts database in Notion that will not only save you hours each week but, more importantly, will also give you a sustainable system to keep up with AI. Let's get started.
Before we begin building, let me quickly show you what the end result looks like. Let's say I come across this potentially useful prompt online, but I don't want this interrupting my workflow. So, I would just simply select the entire prompt, copy it, open up my prompts database, click the new prompt button, give this a meaningful name, make copy concise and clear, and paste this down here. Press escape to exit so I can go back to what I was doing before.
Now, doing one of my weekly review sessions, I can revisit these prompts I've saved throughout the week, test them to see if they're actually applicable to my needs, and if yes, I can add tags to ensure I can easily find them when needed. To make things easier for you, I've added a link in the description to this partial template for you to duplicate it. Don't worry, I've done most of the heavy lifting, and you can ignore the FA you see on screen here. It's just there to remind me this is the follow-along version.
All right, now we can click anywhere below the quick links section and type `/callout` to make a callout box. Enter. We're going to name this "Quick Actions," and I'm going to bold this like so. And I'm going to press enter. Three hyphens, one, two, three, to create a line. And I'm going to change the icon here, make this blue, and we're going to choose the target icon right there. We're going to drag this up above the quick links section like so. And with this highlighted or selected, rather, I'm going to press Command or Control D to make a duplicate. I'm going to drag this all the way to the right here, and I'm going to name this "Pinned." I'm going to bold the text here, and I am going to choose a pinned icon like so. Now I'm going to drag the quick link callout box below the quick actions one, so that the pinned box has a separate column to the right here.
Next, we're going to scroll down a little bit, and we're going to type "## " to create a header 2. "Ops Center." Blue. You can choose whatever color you want. Press enter. Again, three hyphens, one, two, three. We're going to come back up and we're going to create a button that you saw in action earlier. Forward slash button. Enter. Name this "New Prompt." We're going to change this to the plus icon, but I want this to be gray to add some contrast like so. So when the button is clicked, we're going to do something. And that thing we're going to do, we're going to add the new action, "Add page to." We're going to select this database down here. All right, you should see YT for me is FA, so don't get confused. You're going to select the FA, you, the prompts database only selection. So again, make sure this section matches this. All right, that's very important. The new prompt template should populate automatically because I created that for you as well. "Why message an angel?" Edit property. We're going to select "Type," and all new prompts should be marked as "Capture." You'll see why later. And finally, the "Add action" here, we're going to open that new page. Saved. Select page. We're going to select the page added, and we're going to open that in side peek.
Let's quickly recap what we just did. We created a new button that when clicked adds a page to our raw prompts database table using the template that I've provided. The type will automatically update to captured, and we're going to open that newly created page in side peek view. So let's click done and test this out. We're going to click the button. We're going to name this "Prompt to Save the World," and we see that indeed the type property has been automatically updated to the captured status. We'll go over the page content later, but for now, we're going to click into the raw prompts database table view, and you'll see that in addition to some examples I prepared ahead of time, that yes, indeed, our prompt to save the world has been successfully captured.
We're now going to press Command and Control Enter to expand the raw database to full screen, and you see that I've already prepared two views for you: "Active" and "All." The only difference being that in the active view, I've set the filter to "Type is not Archived." Speaking of properties, let's go through some of these. We're going to skip the "Type" property for now. For "Use Case," this is pretty self-explanatory. We're simply tagging the prompt with the category of task it's supposed to help with: copywriting, business operations, or let's say, data analysis. "Output Format" tells us whether the result is in text, image, or video format. For the "App" property, we should only add a selection if the prompt works in a specific app. So, in this case, these three are all empty because these three text-to-text prompts work across ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, so they're not bound to a specific app. In contrast, I've only used this text-to-image prompt in Midjourney, so I know it works well on that platform specifically. And it's always helpful to include an example image output in another property so you know what to expect. And I know what you're thinking right now, Jeff, you look so much better in real life as opposed to what's being represented here in this image. I don't disagree, but I'm a very humble person, so I like to, you know, tone things down a little. Last but not least, and this applies to all Notion databases, by the way, you should always create a "Last Edited Time" and "Created Time" property because this helps with sorting. For example, here you can see that I've already added a sort that says "Last Edited Time Descending," so the most recently added prompts are always shown at the very top.
Now that we're familiar with the raw database table, we're going to click the breadcrumbs up here to go back up a page. And under "Quick Actions," click anywhere to the right of the button like this. Press enter to create a new line, and we're going to type `/table view` enter. And we're going to click "Link to existing database" and we're going to link to our prompts database that we went through just now, like so. We're going to select that, and we're going to select the "All" view right here. And under "Layout," I'm going to change the layout to a list. We're going to toggle off the database title like so. Go back under "Properties." We're going to show the "Type" property only, so you see "Capture," the "Captured" property show up. Go back, and under "Filter," I'm going to select "Type equals to Captured" like so. All right, and I'm going to click "Save for everyone." If you don't see this, don't worry, I'm using the team space version. If you're using the personal version of Notion, you should not see this. And we're going to click back like so.
Next, right-click on the "All" view, rename, and we're going to change this to "Inbox," and we're going to change the icon to a tray like so. And now everything we see here are prompts we've captured but have not tested and organized yet. But another way, if we were to change the capture type to, let's say, for example, "Personal," it disappears from the inbox view, right? I'm going to press Command and Control Z to bring that back first. Now, instead of going through all that again, we're simply going to select the inbox view we created, Command and Control C to make a copy, head on over to the "Pinned" callout box, Command and Control V to paste the inbox view we just created, and once this actually loads, we're going to change this. We're going to rename this to "Essentials," we're going to change the icon to a wand, and under "Properties," instead of showing "Type," we are going to show the "Use Case." Give me a second. Use case, like so. Go back, and under "Filter," instead of filing for "Captured," we're actually going to select "All" only. Okay, so "Type equals All." And once that is done, I'm going to save for everyone, and you should be left with something like this.
Now, watch what happens when I change the type property from "Capture" to "All." We see that the prompt has shifted from the inbox view to the essentials view, right? At this point, many of you have probably already realized what's going on. The type property represents the area of my life the prompt is relevant for. Is it relevant for my personal life, my business, the workplace, or all of the above? And since the "All" prompts are used most frequently, I like to keep them pinned on the right here with a use case tag visible for easy reference. Pro tip: You can select the "New Prompt" button here, press Command and Control C, and paste that anywhere in your workspace to make the capture step more seamless. For example, in my command center, right under the "Quick Capture" section here, I have a "New Prompt" button so that I don't have to navigate away when I come across a prompt I want to capture. I'm actually in the middle of creating an entire course that teaches you how to create your own command center, so I'll leave a link to the waitlist down below.
Moving down to the "Ops Center," we're going to type `/table view`. We're going to choose "Link to existing database" and we're going to choose the database only table and we're going to select the "All" view. All right, and under this "All" view, under "Layout," we're going to just toggle off the database title for now. That's it. Go back, and right-click the "All" view. We're going to make a duplicate and we're going to name this "Personal." We're going to change the icon here to a smiley face, smile, because it's our personal stuff. There we go. And we're going to change the layout to gallery, and we're going to change the card preview to "None," card size "Small." We're going to go back. We're going to add a property. We're going to make the app property visible only. You'll see why in a bit. And we're going to go down to "Group" and we're going to group by "Use Case" like so. Go back again, and finally, under "Filter," we're going to choose "Type equals to Personal," right? Because this is the personal view, we're only going to filter for personal related prompts. And don't worry about this being empty for now. And we're going to, I'm just going to move this view to the left like so.
Now that we've got the personal view set up, we can easily right-click and make a duplicate of this. Name this "My Business." Let's change this to a laptop. And we're going to just change the filter from "Personal" to "My Business." Right? Deselect "Personal," choose "My Business," and move this to the left here. And we're going to make, right-click again, make another duplicate of this to "Workplace," and we're going to change the icon here to a briefcase, and we're going to change the filter from "My Business" to "Workplace" like so.
Now, all that's set up. Imagine I were processing the captured prompts up here. I'm going to change the type from "Capture" to "Workplace," and aha, the prompt shows up, right? And let's say I change this from "Capture" to "Business." Under "Business," we can now see multiple prompts, grouped by use case. Pro tip: The reason I kept the "All" view under "Ops Center" is we can quickly search for any prompt by clicking the magnifying glass icon and typing a keyword like so.
All right, now let's see this database in action. I come across this prompt online that analyzes data sets. All I do is I simply highlight the prompt, make a copy of this, go to my prompts database, click "New Prompt." I'm just going to give this a name: "Analyze Data Sets." The use case is "Data Analysis." The output format is "Text." The app's going to be empty. I haven't tested it yet. Under the prompt, I'm just going to paste without formatting like so. And under "Source," I want to know where I found this, right? I go back to the email, scroll down, and oops, the source here is from Analytical, so I'm just going to copy here. And if I wanted to, I can just make a copy of the URL of the email and paste it here for good measure. And that's it for the capture step.
During a weekly review session, I would come back to this page to test out the prompt. And let's say I want to make some adjustments. Before I do anything, I would make a duplicate of the prompt, move the original down to "Previous Iterations" so I have a copy of the original. And let's say I realize, for this prompt, it's missing a persona: "Act as a senior data analyst, for example, blah blah blah." And I believe this paragraph is unnecessary. Delete it. And now I have the latest iteration of a prompt that I know that works. Under "Helpful Hints," I would add some tips to remind myself. For example, "This works best in Claude with .CSV files." So up, and up here, I'm going to change the app to "Claude," and I'm going to change the type to "My Business." So now, the next time I need a prompt to analyze data sets, I know exactly where to find it.
By the way, I want to give a huge shout out to Hunter Bom's video. I was inspired by his choice to use a code box to store prompts. For example, what he does is, for example, `/code`. This is a code box. And let's say I paste a prompt like so. A huge advantage to using a code box is there's this copy button here. You can easily use to copy and paste the prompts into AI tools. I personally still prefer using a normal callout box because if there are like placeholder variables, for example, "insert data set," I can select this, press Command and Control E to visually differentiate it from the rest of a prompt, right? So that if I were to copy this into an AI tool like Claude, I'm visually reminded that I need to change this part of the prompt. And you can't do that in a code box. Personal preference.
The second example I want to give is grouping similar tasks together. For example, in this page, if I scroll down, you'll see that there are two prompts in a single page. The reason being they perform similar tasks. One is a basic name generator: "I give you an ID or message, and you reply me with a list of catchy names." The second is a domain name generator: "I tell you what my company or idea does, and you give me a list of domain names according to my prompt." Right? So bucketing similar prompts like this in a single page just helps keep our database more streamlined and organized.
Back in the main prompts database page, if you click into the "External Prompt Libraries," you'll see that I've included a few links to public prompt libraries. Some are from big tech companies, and some are user-generated. You can browse these if you're looking for inspiration. The "Archived Prompts" page is exactly as it sounds. If you change the type of a prompt to "Archived," it will appear on this page.
I know that was a lot of information. Let me know if you have any questions down in the comments. If you want to build your own command center in Notion, join the waitlist for my course. See you all on the next video. In the meantime, have a great one.