Transcription
You know, very few times I have the feeling that Notion just released a feature, and my brain struggles to comprehend how much this is going to affect everything that I do in my business in Notion. This is one of those releases. I am a little bit nervous because I don't know if I'm going to be able to cover it properly, but I'm going to do my best.
Notion has just released an improvement on automations that is going to change a lot of things. I don't like to say "change the game," but it's going to change a lot of things. So in this video, I'm going to cover what changed, and mostly, what I care about is how I can actually start implementing it. So many more things have been unlocked that I can now do that before I couldn't.
Let's get into the video.
Okay, so first of all, what are the changes? Well, here we have one database to test things out, and if we start a new automation, we can see that this is already new. Before, this was so ugly and so difficult to use, but now I really like how this looks.
So, now we have this cool view, and now let's find out another new thing that we can do. Right now, if we click on "new action," we have many new options. We have "send mail to," which we will cover in one of the use cases, "define variables," which we will also cover in one of the use cases, and what really unlocks a lot of things, which is not visible here.
So, what is it? Well, now we can do formulas to edit properties. So far, this may not seem like a big deal, but wait for it. For example, if we want to edit the property date, we have here a custom formula. Now we can make a formula over here.
How can we use it? For example, for a date property, the biggest limitation that automations had in the past was that we were not able to modify a date property inside of an automation to be any date other than today—the date when the automation was triggered. Now this changes. Now we can use relative dates in automations.
So, for example, here I can use the "date add" function. Now, two days. So whenever this triggers, this date is going to be two days in the future. This is going to trigger whenever the status is "in progress," for example, just for the sake of testing.
So, whenever I move this—today is October 18, by the way—whenever I move this to "in progress," the date is going to be two days from now. So relative dates are unlocked, but so many more things are unlocked because we now have formulas in automations.
But now it starts the moment in which we have to talk seriously. If you want to be able to build your business inside of Notion, you have to take the time to learn formulas. I have videos about formulas on this channel, but now that formulas are kind of intertwined with automations, it is even more vital. You can ask me in the comments, and I will try to help you out, but yeah, now it's much more important.
Okay, so we have seen what's new, but we haven't seen how I am implementing it. So I'm going to show you right now with the aim that this will give you ideas on how you can use it as well.
The first example I'm going to build together with you, and the other ones I'm just going to show you because the principles are kind of the same.
So imagine that all your client projects follow the same set of steps, or every project that you do follows the same set of steps. The idea will be that all the tasks that are related to that project are created automatically, and ideally, those tasks have to be done by a certain date relative to the project start date. This way, we can create the timeline of the whole project by default, and now automatically. This was not possible before.
So let's see how we can build that.
Right now, we have these two databases: projects and tasks. What I want is that whenever a project goes to, let's say, "in progress," all the different tasks are created with a date relative to the project starting date.
Let's build that automation. New automation, and now the trigger is whenever the status is "in progress." Now we want to add a page to the tasks database. Here we also have the formula, so we can even reference whatever property from the project itself. But remember, this is a task that we are creating in another database.
So the task can be, I don't know, "create plan for project," like whatever. Now the due date can be a custom formula, and let's see how we build it.
So what I want is "date add" because my aim is that I'm going to take the start of the project and make this task due two days from that date, from that relative date. So the starting date of this "date add" function comes from the trigger page's date.
As you can see, after the dot, we can see all the properties from the project dates. Okay, now comma two and days. And now we don't have to forget to link this task to the project trigger page—the page that triggered the automation, which is the project itself.
Okay, I'm going to leave it there. Let's see what this does.
So let's see this website redesign. Okay, I have the task here. Cool. So if I move it to "in progress," a new task should appear here: "create plan for project," and the date is May 12th because this date is May 10th.
So if we continue with this automation with all the different tasks that should be created, then we are going to have a whole timeline relative to the starting date of the project itself. Cool. So this is use case number one.
Now, how else am I using this? One problem that I have always had was in my YouTube videos workflow. I was very forgetful of changing the right statuses for the videos as I was progressing with the video.
For example, the statuses that I have here are these ones, and what I tend to do is that the videos were staying in this status till the very end until they are published. So all these statuses I was not using, and it was very difficult for my team to actually know what was going on with each of the videos.
So now what I have done is, first, whenever I move the video to this particular status, all the tasks that I need to do are created automatically relative to the release date. The automation is this one over here. When the status is this and there are no subtasks, then all these tasks are created.
This is the formula that I'm using for the date because what I want is that it doesn't matter which day of the week I'm releasing a video. What I want is to script that video the previous Thursday and to record it the previous Friday.
So, for example, all these four videos are going to be scripted on Thursday and recorded on Friday. I want those tasks to be created on those dates, and I am doing that with this very formula.
But now this doesn't end here. Here in the tasks database, since all these tasks are created with the same name every time I have created these automations, whenever that task is set to "in progress" and it contains "script," it means that the scripting is in progress.
Then here we are using the variables for the first time because what I want is that the YouTube video, which is the parent of the task, moves to the scripting status.
Think about this: whenever one particular task starts to be in progress, the video itself is going to change its status to scripting, and we are doing it with the variable.
So first, what we have is to set up the variable. I called it "video," and then this is an edit pages step. In here, we are able to select the output of this one, and the output of this one is the trigger page, which is the task and the YouTube video that is linked to it.
So this is outputting the video, and now we are editing the video and changing the status to scripting. This before was also not possible to do, and now we can test it.
So the status is this one, and if I put this in "in progress," now the status is going to change to scripting. There you go.
Now I have the same automations that whenever the scripting is done, the video moves to "ready to film," and whenever the recording has been finished, the video goes to "ready to edit."
Okay, now let's talk about lead management. I don't know about you, but I like to write in my CRM when I have to follow up with a potential lead because this may lead to a new sale.
So here I have a property that is "next follow-up," but what happened to me was that I was actually forgetting about following up because this data was in the CRM and not in my task database. So yes, I was not doing a very good job, but now we can automate it.
So the idea is that whenever I set up a follow-up date, a task is going to be created, assigned to the person who wrote this follow-up date, and it's going to be due on that follow-up date.
How have I done it here? In the CRM database, I have this automation right now. When the next follow-up is edited, I'm going to create a new task with "follow up with," and this is a formula. You can see it: "follow up with" plus trigger page project, which is the name of the client.
So this is going to be "follow up with Daniel," and now the due date is this one: trigger page's "next follow-up." So I'm just taking the next follow-up property from the client or lead and then assigning whoever triggered the automation and the client that triggered the page.
So now let's see it in action. When the next follow-up date is next Monday, for example, I go here to the tasks area of this particular client, and there is "follow up with Daniel," lead as I need myself because I triggered it, status and due date next Monday.
So this task is going to appear in my personal dashboard, and I am not going to forget to do it.
Another super good use case: let's say that we have a project, and we want to assign, let's say, a developer or a project lead or whatever position to that particular project.
Okay, so we will create the actual person property, and the developer is going to be this guy, and the strategist is going to be this guy. So let's say that we want to create a status and assign it to whoever is the developer. I mean, from this view, it's pretty clear who is the developer, so I could just do it manually, right?
But if we think of this at scale, we have multiple kinds of projects, and we are creating the task from any other place in Notion, the information of who the developer is is not so clear.
So we can build an automation that whenever a position property—this is a property inside of the task database—is set to "service specialist," then the assignee of the task is going to come from the client project itself.
This is the formula that I'm using: trigger page's "client project." So this references the client project itself. Now, where you're seeing the map function, then current dot and all this map current is allowing us to access every property inside of the client project itself.
If I delete this, we can see here all the different properties of the client project itself. The first, because I just want to take the first developer that is there, because without this, it is not going to work.
Because it's not going to take it as a person property and save. So now whenever I create one task and I assign it because this came from another automation, and I assign it to the service specialist, this is now assigned to this guy.
So now you can also think of other use cases for this. So let's say that we have a status that is "to review," and we have here who is the reviewer of the project.
So whenever I modify the status, the assignee is going to be the reviewer of the project. Or better yet, remember that in another automation, we were creating all the tasks of a project automatically with the due date relative to the starting date and everything?
We can also implement this. So if when we are going to be triggering that automation, we also have who is the developer and the strategist, all these tasks that we create automatically can also be assigned to who is the developer and who is the strategist.
Because in the automation, we can say, "Okay, this is the service specialist, so I'm going to send it to this person," and all the tasks are going to be created automatically with the right dates and assigned to the right person relative to the information that we have in the project.
This was not possible, and this is going to unlock so many things in my system and in my client system. I am so excited to start implementing this in all my clients' portals.
Now, another use case: let's say that we have a project, and we have multiple tasks over here. I would want to keep everything clean whenever I finish a project.
So let's say that this project has finished. I would want that whenever this is done, all these tasks are also done. So they are not here as "not started" because nobody's going to take care of them, and they're just going to be there forever.
So in the project database, I have created this automation over here. Whenever the status is set to "done" or "canceled," again, define the variable trigger page tasks. This is the project, and these are all tasks that are linked to that project.
Now we edit the task and set the status to "done." So now whenever I complete this, all these tasks are going to be completed. There you go.
And now the final use case: there is one new feature that we have not mentioned yet. So we are back to a leads database where we have the process of our lead.
What I was doing before was triggering automations from Notion and using third-party tools to then send them an email about something. Because what I want, for example, is that whenever I onboard them into one of my services, they receive an email with the onboarding instructions and so on.
But now we can do this from Notion. The only thing that we need is an email property. This only works with email properties; it doesn't work with text properties. But as long as we have the email, this is what we can do.
We can come to the automation, create a new automation, and when the status is whatever you see fit—so in my case, it is "core offer workshop." This is a workshop that is always the same payment, so I have the same Stripe link all the time.
So I want to send them an email so they can pay for the workshop. So whenever the status is that, now I'm going to send a mail to—before, I had to connect this to my Gmail.
So just click on "add the Gmail account," and do it. So far, it only works with Gmail. I think they are working on supporting Microsoft IMAP, etc.
Now in the "to" section, here we can already see the client email. This is the email property that I told you about. So in the "to," I'm going to select client email, and now the subject is "here's to pay for your workshop."
Now we can write the message over here. If we want to use variables from the client to do something like, "Hey, client name," we can do it with a formula like this: "Hi space" and now plus "trigger page dot."
Yeah, I'm calling my client project, and now I have to format this as text and now plus open quotes and continue writing and blah blah blah.
Okay, same with display name. So all of these we can replace, and we can modify.
Okay, so create, and let's regret. So this guy has the email over here. So whenever the "core offer workshop" status is changed, now I'm going to check my email, and there is the automation.
It took two minutes to come, just so you can also know it. And here it is with my name because this is the name, and now there is one limitation over here because I was testing.
There's one thing that this cannot do, which is automations cannot be triggered by other automations. Let me explain.
So if you have a recurring template that is created every time, and you want to modify the due date, for example, that is relative to something or whatever other than today, it is not possible because an automation cannot trigger an automation.
I tried to generate all my recurring tasks and have a relative date to today. So let's say that I created on Monday, and the due date is on Friday. It's still not possible.
So yes, automations kind of trigger automations, but man, other than that, this is unlocking so many new things, so many new workflows.
And like, I don't know. I don't know what's next. Well, yes, I do know what's next, and it's even bigger than this. But this is amazing. I love what Notion is doing to the tool.
And well, if you are an entrepreneur like me, a business owner, a service-based business owner, and you want to be surrounded by other service-based business owners that want to systemize and automate the whole fulfilling, the whole sales process, and everything, so you can delegate it and spend time on the things that actually matter to you, either in your business or your personal life, I am running a community where we are all doing that together.
We have templates, we have copy-paste automations, we have everything that you need to get that, plus my personal support. So you can find a link to our community in the description of this video, and I will be so happy to see you there if this resonates.
And well, that is it for the video, guys. And as always, as Proxima.