Notion Bullet Journal for Chronic Illness (Beginner Tutorial)
Are you curious about Notion, but feel too overwhelmed or daunted to use it yourself? Well by the end of this video you'll know the basics of how to use Notion and how to set up your own customized bullet journal workspace that is designed for someone with chronic illness and or mental illness.
Watch the video below or read on for the transcript. (Although I highly recommend watching the video since most of it is a screen-share tutorial.)
For the best advice on getting unstuck, being productive, and living your best life with chronic and mental illness, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified every Tuesday when I release a video.
I've been obsessed with Notion ever since I started using it, but there was a huge learning curve. Figuring out how to use it (and how to use it to meet my specific needs) was a hurdle, but I'm so glad I stuck with it. And that's why I'm making this video for you today, to hopefully make it so much easier for you to overcome that same hurdle and build a Notion workspace that not only delights you, but is easy and helpful for you to use and maintain.
If you watched my video last week, you know that I use a bullet journal style setup inside my Notion workspace to keep track of everything in my life. In that video I gave you a digital flip through of that workspace, and today I'm going to show you how to make one inside Notion yourself.
First, before we get into that, I want you to understand the basics of how to use Notion, so let's get to it.
So welcome back inside Notion. We're going to start off with a basic tutorial about how to navigate around Notion. So first of all let's take a look at the sidebar on the left of the Notion workspace. So up here you have where you can navigate between your different accounts. This is my Accountability Muse account. I have one with my dance teaching partner for Nerdy West Coast Swing, and then this is my personal one.
Because I spend most of my time inside my Accountability Muse business that's actually where my bullet journal lives. It just makes things easier. (I keep things like recipes inside my personal Notion workspace.)
But anyways, what's really nice about the way Notion is laid out is you have this navigation sidebar. You can make any page inside your Notion a favorite so it's easy to find.
So one thing to differentiate when you are signing up for Notion for the first time is whether or not you're ever going to be wanting to share parts of your Notion workspace with a business partner or colleagues for example. If so, you want to sign up for a business plan. But then if you want it to be free, you then after the 14-day trial just switch it back to personal and you'll still have this distinction between workspace and private. And what's nice about that is when you're with colleagues inside your Notion, the stuff that everybody can access is under workspace but anything under private nobody else who's an admin or a colleague inside this Notion workspace will be able to see your private pages, which is really nice.
If you sign up for Notion and you go straight to a personal plan, you're not going to have a workspace and private, it's just gonna all be private because they assume that you're not gonna be collaborating with anybody. So just want to make that distinction really quickly.
Now I'm gonna make this hide so that way we can just work inside here. This is inside a page in Notion. Here is where you can have the title of your page. You can add an icon, you can add a cover, you can add comments. You can even go up here and change the font. You can make the text small, you can make the page full width, you can lock the page so things can't be edited, you can add it to favorites, you can copy the link (so you can link to this page from other pages) and so on and so forth.
So now I want to talk about down here. When you first make a page inside Notion you have one crucial choice to make, and that's whether you want that page to be more like a dashboard and have lots of different pages and databases and things all stuffed into that one page, or if you want the page itself to only be some form of database. And this is where you make that crucial decision. If I were to click table, board, list, calendar, or gallery - these are all forms of databases, and that would turn this page called "Notion Bullet Journal by Cassie Winter" into solely a database. That's really important. You can't undo that decision.
So for today's purposes, I want this page to be a page with pages in it, so I'm just going to click "empty." And then now I can put as much stuff in it as I want.
One of the things that I really love about Notion is the slash commands. So as you can see it says "Type '/' for commands" so I'm going to hit slash and then you get a list of all of the different types of blocks you can have. It's really handy. So you can make: text, page, to-do list, you can have three different heading styles, you can do a bulleted list, number list, toggle list, quote, divider, link to page call out (I really enjoy callouts for ideas that I want to be really obvious when I'm looking at a page). You can mention a person if you're collaborating with somebody inside the workspace. You can link to another page that exists somewhere else. You can make a date reminder. Emojis are great. You can even do math inside Notion. I know nothing about that. There are explanations elsewhere on the interwebs. And then you can put an inline database, which is different from having made this entire page a database.
All right, so now that you have a basic understanding of how to use Notion. Comment below and let me know which aspect or tip was your favorite.
So for our purposes today, we are going to make three pages.
We're gonna make a page. We're gonna call this one "Daily Agenda" and we're gonna make it a table. And then if you go up here you can navigate back to where we just were: so we're in the Daily Agenda, we're gonna go back here. And see, there's a page: "Daily Agenda."
Now we're gonna hit plus, and we're gonna add another page. "Weekly Agenda." And again we're gonna make this: table. And then we're gonna go back here, and we're gonna add yet one more page. Excellent.
This is kind of where dashboards come into play. So you can see that this page kind of looks like a really baby form of a dashboard, because it has links to three different pages. You can get really fancy, like I have a dashboard for my entire business. So this is my dashboard where I can do: administration, branding, all my links, resources for clients, classes I've taken, all my content research. Whoopi. So this is a very fancy schmancy dashboard, this is an itty bitty baby dashboard (but it serves our purposes today).
All right, we are going to start with our Daily Agenda. (And I am going to be referring over to my other screen so I am making sure that I am doing this correctly, because I'm basically going to build out my Daily Agenda again from scratch with you right now.)
So to make my life easier I'm going to add a really obvious icon to each one of these to make relating them easier later (so I'm not accidentally creating relations with my existing agenda).
So now let's start by going into the Daily Agenda and building that out. So when you first create a simple table style database inside Notion this is what you get: three different entries, you get three columns, and then an ability to add infinite more columns and infinite more rows.
We're going to start out by changing the types of columns these are. So "Name" is going to be "Day" (and all I'm doing to do this is I'm clicking on it, and then it gives you a whole bunch of options). So the second one is going to be a date, and we're going to change the property to an actual date.
Now we're going to make a "Week" field, however this is where we're going to have our first relation to one of the other databases that we created (the Weekly Agenda). So we're going to go here and scroll down to relation and as it says, "Allow pages in this database to reference pages in another." Then we go ahead and click it, and then we click here to select a database, and we type in the name of what we're looking for. And as you can see this is my actual Weekly Agenda, the one that I use, but we want to use the template one and that's why the icon was helpful. (Icons are really helpful to distinguish between pages inside Notion.) So we're going to click this one, and then "Create relation." And now you can see there's a little arrow that points up to the right, and that indicates that this column is a relation, whereas here you have a little calendar that indicates this one's a calendar one, and then this one has little "Az" which indicates it's a text field.
So now we're going to add another column, and this one is going to be the checkbox for our morning review like I shared with you in my flip through last week.
So I like using emojis. So all I do to do that (and I'm on a Windows machine by the way) I click the Windows key (which I believe is the command key on Apple) and then semicolon, and then you get inside the emoji. And I'm going to type "sun" because I want two suns on either side, and that indicates my morning review. Now we're going to go down here to "Text" and "Checkbox." Yeah!
And now we're going to do that again and we're going to do this for priorities. So I like having a checkbox emoji for "Priority 1," and again this is a checkbox.
Now we go down here and we scroll to the right so we can see more. and then this next field is going to be a text field so I can actually write down what that first priority is of the day. And I like having a little note emoji to help me really make it easy which one is the one that I write in, which is the checkbox. So now I'm going to go ahead and speed through and add priorities two and three. So now we have all of our priorities.
Now I actually want to show you a different way that you can add properties in a database. So let's scroll back to the left and click this "Open" on this very first field. And now we're going to click "Open as a page" and that's just going to make it full screen so it's easier for you to see and follow along with me.
So now you can see these are all the properties we've added. In this view they have now become rows, but in the previous one (in the table form) these were the columns. There was a date column, a weekly column, morning review column, etc. and so forth.
Now this is where you can start rearranging things. So whenever you want to move something around in Notion, you hover over the left and you'll get all of these dots. You click and you drag. So I want this "Priority 1" to be there, there, and now it actually matches what it was in the table before. (I don't know why Notion shifts it around afterwards, doesn't make sense to me. Maybe that'll get fixed in the future.)
But I want to show you how to add the remaining properties from here instead of in the database view. They will show up in the database view when we add them here, this is just a different way to add them.
So we click "Add property." And now we want to do the evening review. So I like having a crescent moon be the indicator of my evening review, and again this is a checkbox.
And now, like I shared in my flip through, we're gonna add a mood, so (and I like having just a really simple face emoji to indicate the mood) and then this one is going to be a multi-select. And so using a multi-select means you can have a whole bunch of existing moods that you like that as you add them they just get added to the list of things you can choose from. So right now it's empty, but if I wanted to have like, let's say a really silly day, I would type any amount of emojis or text that I wanted and then you can hit "Create." And now, just for example, if we go back and we open up a different day in this database, the mood is empty, but if we click on it see that silly one is there. So that's how I was able to add all of those moods like I showed in my flip through last week. And if you ever want to delete one that you accidentally added, and you see this "X" and you can click it.
And you can also edit the title of them after they've been made, and what color they are. So maybe silly should be purple, because why not? And then once you have more things in this list, you can click and drag them to reorder them. I wish they automatically alphabetized, but they do not at this time.
Now we're going to add the energy field. And this one, instead of being a multi-select, is going to be a single select. So this is how you distinguish between how many things you can actually have showing up in this property. And we want it to only be one thing, and we're going to make five different versions: one that's one battery, one that's two batteries… And see how it's either one or the other, whereas if we were in the mood one (here's an example, create) you could have two showing, but in here it's a single select so whichever one you select is the only one that's selected. And so now you can select how much energy you have on that day.
I'm actually feeling pretty good today, so we're just going to pretend that I'm logging it: got three batteries today.
So next I like having a little journal section so if there's more that I want to add to kind of describe my mood and energy for that day I can. So "Mood/ Energy Notes" and we're just going to leave it as text, so hit enter. And now this is where I can add in notes like I showed you last week.
And then we would add the symptom tracker (and I'll probably eventually do a symptom tracker video in the future) but the way I would do it is I would go back here to this dashboard. I would add another page, call it "Symptom Tracker" make this one a database as well. Let's add an icon (let's once again make it paper clips). So this is your full symptom tracker database.
And when we're in here, we would go down here, "Symptom Tracker" and make it a relation again like we did with the weekly view, and then relate it to the symptom tracker. And that's how you get that.
Now we're gonna move on to the really fun formula, the effectiveness formula that my boyfriend actually helped me develop and I love it. The first thing we need to do is to create a counting formula, so that this database knows how many of these checkboxes have been checked, from zero to all five of them, and that involves doing a formula. And I'm just gonna give it to you, and it's really important that you have the exact same names of these properties for the formula to work and you'll see why in a second. So we're going to add a property, I'm going to call it "# Completed" and we're going to make it a formula. But now we have to click in here, and this is where you can add your formula. So formulas in Notion are incredibly robust and powerful. I am by no means an expert, but there's lots of resources online and on YouTube, and in your locally sourced neighborhood software developer (like my boyfriend 🤣). So this is the formula:
if(prop("☀ Review ☀"), 1, 0) + if(prop("✅ Priority 1 ✅"), 1, 0) + if(prop("✅ Priority 2 ✅"), 1, 0) + if(prop("✅ Priority 3 ✅"), 1, 0) + if(prop("🌙 Review 🌙"), 1, 0)
And it's basically a really fancy "if this, then..." property. And then once you've put it in here, you click "Done" and then you can see it says "0." Now if I click one of these, oh it says "1." If I click another one, it says "2," and it doesn't matter which ones are clicked, it's just the total ratio.
Now we're going to actually be able to do the effectiveness tracker and call it "Effectiveness," and this is also going to be a formula. And just like with the last formula, I am going to just give it to you in the description below, because I don't expect you to do this yourself.
if(prop("# Completed") == 0, "😭😭😭", if(prop("# Completed") == 1, "😑😑😑", if(prop("# Completed") == 2, "🙄🙄🙄", if(prop("# Completed") == 3, "😮😮😮", if(prop("# Completed") == 4, "😎😎😎", if(prop("# Completed") == 5, "🎉🤩🤩🤩🎉", ""))))))
Paste the formula, and this is where you can change what emojis you want. So it's really easy, you just swap out the emojis inside these quotes if you want it to spit out a different result for however many you've clicked. So "Done."
See how it's "0" so it's very sad. Now if I click one of them, it's a little less sad. If I click two of them, it's a little less sad. Click another one - and then all five are now clicked, yay party!
So again those two really important formulas will be in the description box below, and it's really important that you use the same exact (including the emojis) titles for these properties. But if you wanted to edit how these things are called, again you just click into here and this is where the properties are named inside these quotes, so you can see "# Completed" that's really important. And that's referencing the number "# Completed" formula. And then inside this one, this one is like oh look morning review, "Priority 1" and it's really important to have the exact same characters all the way across inside these property quotes so that way the formula knows what it's actually referencing.
So that is the database portion like I talked about in the flip through. And now I'm going to show you how to do templates.
Okay, so we're gonna go back up here. We are in this single untitled day right now. We're gonna go back to the full table, and we're gonna go over here to the arrow next to "New." Click that, and then we're going to click "+ New template" and just so it's easy for you to see, I'm going to click "Open as page" so it's taking up the whole screen.
All right, here we go. We are going to call this template (it's now untitled) we're going to call it Monday. We're going to start with Monday X/X. We can add an icon. So every Monday, let's say every Monday is a little stressful. (This is just me having fun.) You can make it whatever icon you want. You can always change it later. But this is so every template spits out the same icon.
And now here is where the fun begins. This down here is a page, so like back here this like mini-dashboard, this is a page and this is a whole bunch of stuff, and I could even go down here, "hello, this is my YouTube video," I can add pictures, I can add all sorts of stuff, right?
When we are inside one of the pages in our daily agenda, it's a page, you can add as much as you want, and you can do that inside templates as well.
So to go back to the template we were editing, go back to this arrow and now you can see the Monday one is here, and you click these three dots, click "Edit" and we're back here inside the template that we're making.
Now you decide everything that is important for you to have on your Monday planner. So first of all, I like being able to actually see my symptom tracker in the calendar view, so the way I would do that is I use toggles to make inline databases small if I don't want to see them the whole time. So we're going to start by adding a toggle, so slash command, I hit a slash. Type "toggle" and then I can click toggle, or I can hit enter because it's highlighted. And I'm going to call this "Symptom Tracker."
I'm also gonna make it pink. So you can do colors in slash commands too. Pink. And you can either make the text pink or the background (like a highlighter behind the text) pink. I'm gonna make the text pink.
So now what we're going to do is we are going to link to the symptom tracker itself. Even though it's here, and whatever thing is associated with today and the symptom tracker will pop up here, I also like being able to see it in calendar view.
So we click here, we've opened up the toggle, but right now it's empty. So click here, hit slash, and you type in "link." This is where you can link to another page, but you can also link to a database. So we're going to click that, and then we type in "symp" and then here's the symptom tracker one with the paper clip, so this is the one we want. Tada! And look, here's a view of that database. And you can also add a calendar view if you want, but now look, you can hide it with the little toggles, weeee! So great. So that's how I do that.
And that's also how I was able to link my personal tasks, my Accountability Muse tasks, and my Nerdy West Coast Swing tasks inside my flip through that I showed you last time.
Now, I like adding tasks that I do every single Monday. So I'm going to hit slash and "t" "o" and then that highlights the to-do list option, and now I have a to-do. So every Monday morning I fill the cat water, and that's a pink situation. Hit enter and look, I've got another to-do list. What else do I do on Mondays? I wash towels. (This can be whatever you want.) This is how you can do repetitive tasks that you just set it and forget it in your templates, and you make it associated with the specific day - you never have to worry about it again. So wash towels, let's make that pink. I always do social posts for my Accountability Muse business. Yellow. Tada!
And so you can do that, and then I like to also do repetitive appointments. So inside my group coaching membership I have office hours every Monday at 6:30PM Pacific. So I hit enter again. I'm going to hit backspace, and that's going to turn this back into text instead of a to-do list checkbox. I'm going to hit slash yellow, but I like making my events instead of my tasks yellow background, and then I say "6:30PM Accountability Muse Membership - Coaching Call." Tada! And then that appointment is now on every Monday in the template.
And then I like having a divider. Oh isn't that isn't that easy and fun?!
And then below the divider I like adding toggles with references to the Daily Agenda, the Weekly Agenda, and the Monthly Agenda. I'm going to plow through that because it's very similar to how I created the symptom tracker toggle.
So there we have all of our agendas. I'm gonna show you how to adjust the views really quickly. So what you can do is go here (and this works in any database) you can add a view. We're going to name it "This Week" and you can see you can have the view as a table, a board, a calendar (so this is what I use to look at my symptom tracker, for example), a list, or a gallery. And I like having it be a gallery so it's really easy to just get a quick glance of what I'm looking at. So I'm gonna hit "Gallery" and hit "Create" and so now instead of the table view we have these cards.
And then if you hit these little three dots here you can change the properties of what you're seeing. So click "Properties" and you can make the card preview the page content, or for my dailies I like it being the page cover. So if we were to open this one and add a cover, and now it's this color, go out here you can now see that.
And then for the Weekly Agenda I like having it by a month so I can see all the weeks in one month at once. "Gallery," "Create." And this one for my properties I like having the page content as the preview, because then (and my templates for my Weekly and Monthly Agendas are really boring) we open it, and I basically have a whole bunch of to-do's. So like, let's say in this particular week I want to be focusing on producing my new YouTube video. Yeah. So that's one of my priorities for the whole week, and now if we exit out of this you can see that right here. So that's how I was able to have a glance of what's on my Weekly Agenda when I'm inside a given day, I can look and I can see what all of my priorities are for each week.
And then I do a very similar thing for my Monthly Agenda. So really quickly let's go ahead and go back to this dashboard and just update the Weekly and Monthly Agenda databases so they look right. So we're going to name these "Week," and then this one is going to be "Date" We're going to make it a date. But what's really cool about the date field is you can have it either be a single day, or you can have a time window. So if we want this first week to be Sunday September 20th, we add an end date and the end is Saturday September 26th and click that, now you can see they're all highlighted. And we click out of here it gives you the whole range. Very handy.
And then you can see this. This is cool. We never added this in here, but because we created a relation from the Daily Agenda to this Weekly Agenda, this is already a two-way sync between the two databases. So we didn't have to make that. And I just like to simplify it, and so this relation will still be active but I'm gonna rename it "Days" so that way it's less for me to look at. So this is really simple.
Here, let's just say, "September 20th through September 26, 2020." So that way the page is named. So now let's go back inside our Daily Agenda, open this one, and now if we click here we can select this week. It's very handy. So if we go back inside the Weekly Agenda, you can now see look "Untitled." This is the entry that we just attached it to. Isn't that cool?
So now let's edit the properties inside the Monthly Agenda. So this will be "Month," "Date," and then we want to relate it to weeks because the days would probably be very overwhelming. So, "Weeks," "Relation," "Select database," "Weekly Agenda," click, "Create relation." Tada!
So now let's say this is September 2020. We'll make it September 1st, add an "End date," September 30th, click out. And now I can go in here and we can attach this week to it.
And then here let's add a task for the month: "Produce four YouTube videos." So now we have a template, we have all three of our databases. And if we go into our Daily Agenda, and we're just gonna hit new, and we're going to open it. Go ahead and "Open as page." So this is no longer - we're not inside the template, we are inside an actual page inside the database. We'll pretend it's Monday of this week. Monday 9/21. So we'll hit the date, 9/21. "Weekly," we're gonna attach it to this week. And by attaching it to this week, it is also attached to the month (because that week is attached to the month). We can write in our priorities.
And then down here, like I shared in the flip through, you can have all the templates you want. So I have a template for every day of the week. And for this purposes we're just going to click Monday. Tada! And now all of this is filled in because we made it inside a template, and that makes planning so much easier.
Really quick, the way you make another template is you go back here, click the arrow, you can either hit new template and start from scratch, or if you click these little buttons you can hit "Duplicate." And then let's say let's make this Tuesday. Tuesday. And change the icon to a star. And then you would just probably edit this stuff to be your Tuesday tasks, but you would leave the symptom tracker and all of the references to the databases down here, and you would just add your Tuesday to do's and your Tuesday appointments and so on and so forth.
And then, see if we go in here now there is now a Tuesday one. Another way to add is to just add straight from a template. So you go here and you would actually hit Tuesday. Boom! And now this has created a new page that already has the Tuesday stuff filled out. And so this could be like Tuesday 9/22. And if we click out of it there's now Tuesday 9/22.
And then the last thing I want to show you is how to filter, and this is usually good to at least start out by doing inside a template. So we're going to go ahead and edit the Monday template, because eventually you're going to have lots of days in your Daily Agenda. So you're going to hit this button, and you're going to filter it. "+ Add a filter," " + Add a filter" (not a filter group), and we're going to say we're going to filter it by weekly, because we want this to be this week, right? So weekly. And look, this is one of the weeks we made. Tada! And so now all of the days that are associated with that week are shown in this week view, and so all I would do is I would add a few more views (and again you can duplicate old views so it's really easy to just adjust the filter and the name of it instead of starting from scratch), but I could have this week, last week, and next week. And I can do a similar thing with the Weekly Agenda (I would just filter it to this month), and with the Monthly Agenda (you just filter it to this year, or you don't filter it at all because there are just less months to handle).
That's everything for this tutorial. I'm gonna send it back to full screen Cassie to wrap up for this week.
And there you have it. You now not only know the basics of how to use Notion, but you know how to set up your own bullet journal workspace inside Notion just like mine.
Are you excited, but kind of worried that you'd set it up and then not actually use it? Let alone consistently? I taught a Masterclass on what I consider to be the best weapon against procrastination that allows you to become a consistent action taker. This toolset would allow you to not only use your digital bullet journal consistently, it would allow you to tackle the tasks that you have inside that bullet journal consistently. I called this toolset "Butt in Chair Time" and you can get access to the replay for free by signing up here.
If you liked this video, hit that like button and be sure to share it with your friends.
I'll be back next week with another video. Talk to you then. Bye.
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