What is all the commotion about Notion and how do you create a template within the Notion application? Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you just that. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress,
Notion
and without question, Notion has gotten an awful lot of attention over the past year.
Now, if you haven't tried out Notion, I encourage you to do so. Notion advertises itself as being a bit of a, all in one productivity system, and here you can see I've opened up their template gallery. They've got a notes and document section here. They've got a knowledge base section here.
They also tote themselves as being an excellent project management tool, and even a light database, or spreadsheet tool, and I'm just sort of sifting through a couple of their examples here, which are all editable.
These are all templates, or you can start from scratch. Now I think Notion can be an excellent personal, or team note-taking tool. I also think it's gonna function as a fantastic knowledge base. I'm not exactly sold how great it is as a project management tool, or a light database, or a spreadsheet,
Templates
But today we're gonna take a look at how we can use it to create templates.
So let me get over to my team home screen here, and of course, one of the great things about Notion is that you can edit absolutely anything on your page. If I want to change the cover here, I'm just a click away. If I want to change the title of this team homepage, I can do so.
So here I've got a very, very simple template. I've got some basic information about the company here, and Notion works under the premise of subpages. I can always go back to the high level here. I've got an office calendar, actually a pretty powerful calendar here within Notion, but you always have this breadcrumb trail up at the top of the screen.
But what I want to focus on is a section I've created called "Meetings," and you can see here I've got a couple of meeting agendas for upcoming meetings. Let's say that I would like my team to follow a standard format.
So what I've created is a "Create a Meeting Agenda" button, and this is a template I'm gonna show you how to use. We're using the meeting agenda as our example, but you can create a template for absolutely anything within Notion. So let's quickly first take a look at this example.
Let's say I want people to create their own agenda and follow a few different guidelines immediately, right? I have a certain way that I want the team to conduct their meetings. I also want to give them a few reference tools as they're planning ahead. So with just a single click, it's going to create this meeting agenda here. Like I said, I've got some checklisted items—here are some things I want them to always do—and here they can quickly type in that we're going to talk about a new product at that meeting, and we're also going to talk about late payments from customers. Whatever it is. If I just hit enter, I get a nice new checklist here. I can keep adding to this meeting agenda.
You can edit almost anything in this list here. Maybe one of the first things I'll want my team to do is to add a date or maybe to add what we are talking about in this particular agenda. I'm just gonna add a date in this particular case.
But the other great thing is that you can have subpages within subpages. So here I've got a section called "Follow-Up." Perhaps as we're going through this particular meeting, right? As we're going through these agenda items, we've got some action items. Well, to keep it nice and clean and separate from this page, I can click on "Action Items," and you can list them out here. I can keep that on a separate page.
Let's go back to the meeting agenda. I've got another one called "Remaining Questions." Maybe there are some things that we don't have assigned, but we've got some questions from this meeting. I can keep that nice and clean and separate on another page.
Last but not least, you can add links to any page within Notion. Maybe for some new members of my team who aren't exactly sure why we're using this format, or how they can make their meetings more effective, I've got some live links here down below to some articles I think will be helpful to them.
Now if I go back to my team home, this is my top level. You can see here is the meeting agenda that we just created, so now the entire team can have access to it. I can share it. I can add more notes or add more details to this as well.
But how exactly did I create this template button? Well, let's do this together. I'm gonna use the "Operations" section here just for our example, and all you need to do is hit this plus button here. This plus button is going to allow you to add a variety of things, and if you haven't toyed with Notion, if you haven't tested it out, this may feel a little overwhelming, but this is the full list of all the types of content you can add to a Notion page.
Now we want to go all the way down to the bottom here, and select "Template Button." But just before I do so, I forgot something. I wanted to actually change the template for this new example, so I'm gonna go into this meeting agenda here because we had to use this as our template, and just so we can identify it easily, I'm going to call it "Template." There we go. Okay, so now we've got this. It's got all the action items, everything that I want to see here. The reason why I came in here is I wanted to remove a little date field that I had, and I didn't want that in my new template button or my template agenda.
So let's go back to the team home, and again we're gonna hit the plus button, and we're gonna scroll all the way down to this list, and select "Template Button." Now here, this may sound or look a little intimidating, but all you need to do is first, start off by selecting the button name. That's what I suggest. What are you going to do? And let's say we said "create" last time. Let's say "Add a Meeting Agenda" in this case. Where'd my cursor go? "Add Meeting Agenda." That's what we're gonna call this button.
And down below, what they'll usually do is input what was above, or in this case, they've just input like a to-do list. But we don't want that. So I'm gonna select this option here, the little six dots, and we can say "Delete." So now we've got a blank space here where we can drop in a block or drop in another page. So let's go all the way over here to the left-hand side, and under "Team Home," this is where I have my meeting agendas, and here you can see the templated one, right? This is the one that we just renamed. I'm just gonna click and drag, and I'm gonna drop it right here.
Okay, I'm gonna drop it right here. So when we click this button, we are going to create this meeting agenda. I can click anywhere that I want outside. Now, I could add more things if I wanted to. I'm gonna hit the close button here.
Okay, so now we've got this button. It's gonna function essentially the same as what we did here, but I just created this one so you could see how it was done. So when I select it, when I click this option, it's just like we saw before: here is this new meeting agenda template. And now I can come in here and say this is our "Sales Meeting for Q2," let's say that's what we're gonna call it. And again, I can go in and add the action items that I want, the things that we want to talk about. I can review some of the things here if I want to get some hints on how to run a more effective meeting.
And when I go back to the team home, there is my new meeting agenda, which I can reference, pull up, and use. And again, I can use this template over and over again. Make sure that other people within my team are using it.
And that's just one example. In this case, a meeting agenda example, but you could use this for a calendar. You could use it for a to-do list. If you want someone, you know, under "Office Health and Benefits," to submit a particular form, or to answer a certain set of questions, you could create a template button for that as well. This was just a sliver of some of the functionality here within Notion, but again, if you haven't tested or tried out Notion, I would encourage you to do so and explore. There are many different templates to help you get started.
Now, I'd love to hear from you next. Are you already a Notion user, and if so, what are you using Notion for? I would love to know how you are using Notion, and what you think Notion is best suited for. Be sure to leave your answer in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Give this video a thumbs up, and don't forget to leave me a comment down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
