Transcription
In this video, I'm gonna show you how I capture all my thoughts using only Notion and Apple Shortcut, and how you can do it too. Hi, I'm Victor, and welcome to my very first YouTube video.
We've all been in that situation: you're outside somewhere, maybe you're on your way home, maybe you're in the gym between two sets, and suddenly a thought arises. You remember you have to call your mom, or something important from work that slipped your mind before, just popped right up. Now, as good as our brain is in having these thoughts, it's just as bad in remembering them. So what do you do?
No problem, you'll just write it down. Nowadays, every one of us has one or another note-taking app on their phone—be it Apple Notes, Notion, OneNote, or any other one out there. You take out your phone, you unlock your phone, you open your note-taking app, you go to the right place inside of that app, and you start writing down your thoughts. If you're capturing your thoughts like this, you are already pretty good going. But in a lot of cases, this process does not go as smoothly as we wish for. Sometimes there will be notifications on your phone, and as you pull out your phone, you get distracted and you just lose that thought. On other occasions, the note-taking app will just take forever to load, which again causes you to forget that thought. In even other cases, there's just not the right place inside of your app to write this thing down that you're just thinking of. That's why I'm gonna show you how you can create a simple shortcut that will enable you to capture all these thoughts with as much as the press of one button on your Apple device, right into Notion.
So this is basically my second brain. I try to capture everything in here, but today we'll only look into one particular section, which is my task manager. And we see on this left-hand side the inbox—that is basically the table that we're gonna focus on today. So the inbox is the place where I try to capture all of these thoughts that I mentioned earlier. From here on, I then later categorize these thoughts, but today we will look into the capture mechanism. So how do we now create a shortcut that enables us to basically insert data into this inbox without opening the Notion app?
In order to do that, there are a couple of preparations we have to do within Notion. The first one would be that we have to create an integration. So let's jump right over to this website over here: notion.so/myIntegrations. When you're logged in, you will see all your integrations, but for the purposes of this video, we'll create one together. So let's jump into this by creating a new integration, and it asks us for a name. Let's call this one YouTube Demo Integration. You can call it whatever you want; you could also upload a little image if you would like to, as a logo. I'll skip that for now, but as we submit, we successfully created an integration, and we are shown a secret.
So what does this integration actually do? Per se, every page in Notion that we have, and especially like this database, is, you can imagine, that they're protected by a wall, which is basically the Notion application, and no application from outside can access this database. With this integration, we basically build a door, and the secret is a key. So another application, for example, Apple Shortcut, can now use this key to access our database and insert data or read out data, whatever you want to do. So reveal this secret over here and copy it, and I highly recommend to put this down in some kind of notepad so we can access it later. I'll use my little text file over here. Let's just copy that down here. All right. Now, as we have created this integration, so we basically built this door, we need to implement this door into our database. So let's jump to the database main page. What we see right here—this is a view of the database—the database main pages look like this in Notion. So make sure that you are on the main page of the database, and most of the time you also have to refresh this page once. So hold command and let's refresh this once. And now, over the three dots, we can go to Add connections, and if we scroll down here, we will find the YouTube Demo Integration that we just created. Let's add this to this database. Confirm. Our connection—our door—is basically implemented. So other applications with the key, with the secret that we just saved, we can access our database now. All right.
Next thing we need is the database ID. In order to get the database ID, we go over these three dots here again. We copy this link, and we'll go into our text file again and paste it. So in this link, it starts with www.notion.so, and after the first slash, the chain of numbers and letters that we have here—that is our database ID. So we can delete everything including the question mark behind it and everything up until the slash, and this is our database ID. All right. Now we have, as if, the secret and the database ID. We have added the connection to our database page, and with this we are basically done from a Notion perspective. Now let's jump right into Apple Shortcuts and build our automation.
Now we are in Apple Shortcuts, and you already see some of the shortcuts that I have created, but for the purposes of this video, we'll create one shortcut together. Let's do that by clicking on the little plus icon over here. So the basic structure, how shortcuts are organized, is that in this editor view you now see on the right-hand side over here different suggestions of apps and scripts that you can use by dragging and dropping them into the editor view and then creating a chain of executions basically. So once the shortcut is triggered, all the elements within this automation will be executed from top to bottom. But let's just dive right into it and learn as we go. So I always recommend to start off by giving the shortcut a name. I would call this one YouTube Demo Capture Shortcut. And the first thing that our shortcut should do is give the user—us—basically the option to input some kind of thought. So we will go here and type in in the search bar "ask," and it will suggest us "Ask for Input." Just drag and drop it into the editor view. And now there's some settings that we can configure. We can edit if it should ask for a text, number, URL, whatsoever. We will stick with text because thoughts can be any kind of format, so this is fine. And we can also insert a little prompt. So what should the question actually be that is asked while showing this text field? How about "What would you like to capture?" All right. So now we have asked the user for us to input some kind of thought. Now we've written some text, and we hit on send. So the next step would be that we put the thought that we have in some kind of a structure so that the Notion application would understand it. We cannot just send the text that we just entered to the Notion application because it would not know how to process it and what to do with it. The rules of, like, how the data has to be structured in order for the Notion application to process it in the way that we need it to—all these rules are very well documented on this website over here. This is the Notion API documentation, and especially the page focused on working with databases. Here you find everything about how to insert, update, or delete, or like get data from your databases. But we will not go into too much detail in here because I don't want this video to be too technical, but I'll link this page down below in the description. All right. So let's jump back to our shortcut. In order to put that thought now into a structure that we needed to, we will create a little text file. So just drag and drop "Text" from the right-hand side into the editor view. And I already created a little snippet that I will, obviously, put in the description down below as well, so you don't have to worry about it. And this snippet is basically the structure that you need if you want to insert something into the database with just a simple text title. So what we need to do is just replace the database ID filler over here with the database ID that we already copied down here. There we go. And the content needs to be edited as well. So instead of putting in this filler, we will actually need to put in the input that we got from the first element of the shortcut. So what we can do here is just start typing "Provided Input," click on it, and now there is a little link connecting these two elements. This means that the text that we put in the initial text field is now used in the middle text file afterwards. All right. Now we have prepared this structure, so we can send this now to the Notion application. So what we would need to do is create a little URL element. Just drag and drop this here again. All right. And the URL we need to send the data to is this one that I already prepared over here. Let me just insert it. I'll also put this information in the description. So this is the URL that we actually need to send the data to—this is the Notion API—and basically… So the next step would be the actual sending of the data. For that, we use the element "Get Contents of URL." Let's put that down below here, and Shortcuts automatically created this little link here showing us that it will use the URL that we just entered for this element. But for this, we have to do some additional configuration. So click on "Show More," and the first thing is that we are supposed to choose the method. So there are different methods in these API requests, but what we want to do is we want to send data and insert it into the database, so that is basically the POST method. As we click the POST method, we see that there is an element which is called "Request Body." So instead of using JSON, we will use a file format, and we will choose our text file over here. All right. We still need to verify ourselves. For this, we use headers. So we need to add three headers in our request: the first one being the Authorization; then we also need the Content-Type and the Notion Version. For the values, the first one would be "Bearer," space, and then the secret that we copied over here. Copy that, and paste it here. All right. And so the display in Apple Shortcuts is a bit confusing here; it just shows "Bearer," but actually the whole string is in here. So just click into it and use your arrows to jump further in the string, and then you'll see your secret appear. So please make sure if you try this out yourself that your secret is correctly inserted in this field. All right. Now the next value would be "application/json," and the last one would be "2022-06-28." All right. And with this, we are basically done. We now ask the user for some kind of input; we restructure that input in a way so the Notion application would actually understand it; and then we send that data structure to the Notion API endpoint, verifying ourselves with our secret to insert the data into the database.
The next step is the most fun step, which is basically just trying it out. So what we'll do is we'll put this on the one side, and then we'll get our database on the other side. And if I press play here on the first execution, it will still ask me for some permissions, but you'll see as we go. So let's hit play. It asks us, "What would you like to capture?" We'll—don't forget to comment. You can also add some emojis if you'd like to; that is totally up to you. Done. And now, as I mentioned, the privacy alerts, and it basically asks us, "Is this shortcut actually allowed to send a request to api.notion.com?" And we'll just allow it. And as we allow it, we see that it is still processing up here, and there we go—the new entry to our database. We see here some kind of response code on the left-hand side; don't need to go too much into this. We can try this out again; you know, it won't ask us for any permission. Please give me some feedback on this first video—a very long thought over here. Done. And now we see that it immediately will enter this into the database. All right.
Now you're all set up to never let a thought slip your mind again. If you enjoyed this video, please make sure to leave a like or comment down below. Since this is my very first YouTube video, any kind of feedback is really much appreciated and would help me a lot to get going on this channel. And if there's anything else you would like to share, feel free to reach out. See you in the next video.