August I really appreciate the quality and depth of this video series. I started about a week ago really trying to get my mind around notion and figuring out what organization system works for me. As the saying goes: “when the student is ready ...the teacher will appear”
One of the most striking things about this series is that I had already developed so many of these systems myself. I used google sheets for a daily tracker. I did weekly reviews. But this system brings everything together in a holistic and comprehensive way. This whole system is game changer for sure
+1 on the "Do Date" vs "Due Date" mindset. I'm shifting over to it. Can't disagree with August's reasoning: 'Do Date bc if you wait until it's actually Due to get started, then you're up against the wall.' Might explain why so many projects tend to be late.
@@augustbradley Agree - it makes so much sense and very much replicates how I used Todoist. I call it the DoIt Date - just to avoid the confusion though.
As always, your system blows my mind. The difference with other systems is that it is *complete* and uses Notion to cover all the bases with its incredible database design. Two small tweaks I added to my daily template: 1. Gratitude: I add that as a property so that I can review my gratitude at the end of the week/month and in general have a structured place to easily go back and look at what I am grateful for (I can imagine myself printing the list at the end of the year and reading it with my family, for example). 2. In the "not to do" bullet, I added a toggle that pulls the "improvements" fields from the database from the last few days so that I can quickly glance and see what I should not be doing today. This is the same method you use in your review cycles templates. Thanks again - I am very grateful for you sharing all this knowledge, it's really making a big difference in my life!
Well stated Dan! I do the same with Gratitude on the weekly and monthly level, just not at the daily level Good approach. Outstanding idea on pulling the improvements field into the Not To Do toggle -- LOVE that!
Hi, you could use following formula to calculate sleep time in 12h format without to put 13:00 if you go sleep at 1am : "Bed Time" and "Wake Up Time" fields must bee in decimals , if you want 24h format, then replace 12 for 24, time after 12 resets so, if you go sleep 12:30 you should input 00:30 actually 0,5 if(and(prop("Bed Time") < prop("Wake Up Time"), prop("Bed Time") < 12), prop("Wake Up Time") - prop("Bed Time"), 12 - prop("Bed Time") + prop("Wake Up Time")) btw, you are good inspiration. I'm nearly done with my version of your system. Thanks
So, I have ADHD, and some useful advice I have come across in terms of habit building/tracking is to only look at two weeks at a time, and to track quantity, not chains. This helps with some of the mental and cognitive blocks that those of us with ADHD can struggle with when trying to build habits. I love the idea of using your tracking style with Notion because I can take this same exact system, and just apply a slightly different view+filter (eg. viewing the past two weeks) to adjust for my own needs. It's very flexible!
As someone with ADHD this series is so helpful. Actually found it via your system system video. Studying management undergrad been really eyeopening seeing how all the theories can be related to my day to day life
My INTJ brain is so horny right now. Thanks so much August, amazing work!! This channel will blow up in no time. One humble suggestion: change your video thumbnails. Include an image of yourself in them. This makes them prettier, more engaging and will help you build your personal brand!
Thanks so much Alex! On the thumbnail covers, what would make them better? I thought they were good but several people have told me what you are saying so I'm clearly missing something, How do I improve them? Advice welcome.
I second this! Include your face in the thumbnail. Also, add the number sequence to the title of the video and thumbnail. Example "9 of 28". Adding this to the thumbnail would convey mastery as well. That coupled with the psychological effect of the length of these videos would help in my opinion.
@@no.daveed Great thoughts, thank you! New cover thumbnail style is in development. There is a playlist with them all in sequence, but I hear you on numbering them. Thanks!
Definitely agree with these ideas - including your face in the thumbnail cover to make your brand tied to you and immediately recognisable, as well as numbering the video in the series.
.@@augustbradley The numbering is a great idea. But the overall "problem" with the thumbnails is that they look old, dated, and just clunky. I do not have a problem with them. They work just fine. However, they look as if out of the 1970s or something. The stark colors and square fonts and huge icon make it look old. What you do NOT want to do, is try to make them cool to appeal to the teeny-boppers. Really, nothing turns most serious viewers off is a "game" feeling. Or maybe worse, the feel of a high school kid who does not know about a thing but is willing to gift us with his useless opinion. Anything that feels like you are doing it because everyone else is will undermine your credibility. I'd far rather have clunky that tells me I can trust you than fancy and looking like the latest and greatest thing that the whole crowd is doing. OH! and don't even THINK of overlaying music. Musical tastes are personal and almost no one will like what you think is the best music ever written. The other thing that people do that is distracting is to play with the mouse. It drives me nuts to be watching the screen while a presenter clicks here and there so fast that I can't follow. Bottom line: you score about 9.5 the way you are doing things now. Change it up a bit if you feel so inclined, but don't do what others do, because you are much better than almost all of them already. There is not much you can do better but a whole lot you can do worse. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Almost as profound as: "You get what you measure." :) Last thought: next time you talk about habit tracking you might point out how much it simplifies the whole time management process. Yesterday I was looking at my "today" table view and there were WAY too many things to do. That was because I had things that should have been habits as "actions". Yeah, they are actions but the way to view them is as check off items in a habit table. If they are in the action view they are in the way. All I need to know about "exercise" is that I need to do it and that I did it. I don't need or want all of the fields that are useful for "real" action items. Hope some of that helps. Love your work. I'm still slogging but getting pay-off now. It takes time but it is worth it.
Yet another super-awesome video! I find that your videos are just the right length for me to assimilate your excellent ideas and concepts. So many people post RUclips videos of Notion systems that use a multitude of disparate tables and no relational links, and I feel that they are missing the whole point of getting the best from Notion. I believe that multiple links between tables are the key to any powerful Notion system. In summary, Notion is a real gamechanger, however your implementation of Notion is a true lifechanger! Keep up you super-awesome work, and I very much look forward to your next presentation in this excellent series.
Thank you Stephen! It's funny, I always sit down intending to make the video about 10 minutes, but in the end there's just too much info to share so I let it go to whatever the topic seems to want the length to be. But I try to keep it dense with info, no wasted time. Really happy you like the format and the approach. You're absolutely right, the real power of Notion is creating interconnecting systems, beyond stand alone tables/pages/ wikis. This is a fundamentally different kind of software than any of the productivity tools that have some before it, we are witnessing a tech paradigm shift here. Notion lets you create your own software tool.
Thanks for the great video! Really helps me get set up: For anyone looking to calculate the sleep time if they don't have a fancy tracker and just want to subtract the times of ToSleep and WakeUp, here's how I did it: (prop("ToSleep (hr)") - 12 - prop("WakeUp (hr)")) * -1 As August said, with ToSleep, use 13 for 1am, 14 for 2am and so on.
Hey thanks a lot! I was struggling to find a formula that would automatize calculating the Total Sleep Hours, and you helped a lot! :D You can now check off your list your daily "Be a good person" goal ;D
@@JGLU100 Hey, glad I could help! Just if you are curious, I sat down yesterday and played with the formulas a little. With the formula below, you can enter 1am as 1am. :) if(and(empty(prop("ToSleep Hr")), empty(prop("WakeUp Hr"))) == true, 0, if(prop("ToSleep (hr)") >= 8, prop("ToSleep (hr)") - 12 - prop("WakeUp (hr)") * -1, prop("WakeUp (hr)") - prop("ToSleep (hr)"))) Here an explanation of the formula: if(and(empty(prop("ToSleep Hr")), empty(prop("WakeUp Hr"))) == true this part checks whether the ToSleep Hr and WakeUp Hr have been filled out and , 0 outputs 0 if not. Otherwise , if(prop("ToSleep (hr)") >= 8 it will check if ToSleep (hr) (this is the calculated ToSleep field with a decimal as hours and minutes have been combined) is bigger than or equal to 8 (because who goes to bed before 8, right?) if it is bigger , prop("ToSleep (hr)") - 12 - prop("WakeUp (hr)") * -1, it will use the formula I already published in my initial comment. If not, it will just prop("WakeUp (hr)") - prop("ToSleep (hr)"))) subtract the WakeUp time from the ToSleep time, resulting in an accurate result if you enter 1am as 1. :) I am just a fan of optimization. Maybe too much for some of us here, I just like to have formulas do the actual work for me. Note: If you actually do go to bed before 8pm sometimes, you can change the 8 in ", if(prop("ToSleep (hr)") >= 8" to something more realistic. Keep in mind that something like "4" would keep you from entering 4am as your ToSleep Time. :) A lot of text, but I wanted to update anyone looking for a workaround.
I mentioned this in another of your videos, but you can still use the Date field for the sleep cycle. The workaround I used was set the date/time field for Bedtime and Waketime, then I have a formula with: if(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "M/D/YYYY") == formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "M/D/YYYY"), divide(subtract(add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "mm"))), add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "mm")))), 60), divide(add(subtract(multiply(24, 60), add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "mm")))), add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "mm")))), 60)) Pretty much this is just calculating the time from the date and cross checks if the date is the same, if it's the same, then it will calculate based on adding the two time conversions instead of subtracting them like it would normally. Hope this is helpful.
These are super awesome, I've adopted the "do date" form of mentality with my work and thinking about the minimum I can complete to push myself along and I've accomplished way more than I have recently than I have in awhile. Your videos are awesome and I hope you can continue to make more!
That's Awesome! I love hearing that these videos and the system are helping people, thank you for sharing this feedback. Its particularly great to hear you're seeing results already. I will definitely continue, lots more to come.
Thanks Karla! I love Mexico 🙂 Awesome to hear this was helpful. Lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
August, thank you so much for your videos! I've been searching for exactly what you're building and can't wait for more content to come out. I struggle with adding too many active projects at once and getting overwhelmed from balancing routines, long term important projects, and urgent important projects. Too many plates spinning. Can you make a video in the future of how you build out new goals, projects and actions and how you prioritize everything? That would be incredibly helpful. Thanks again!
Great to hear that this is valuable to you Shelby! Hearing this really motivates me. Your struggle is a common one, but it is solvable. I will be doing videos soon on project planning and prioritizing. If my upcoming videos don't fully address it, please post follow-up questions. I used to have the same problem, and this system fixed it for me. Lots more to come.
Just wanted to say a big thanks for your super helpful tip in this video about using Shift and the Scroll wheel to navigate horizontally in a table. This will make my life SO much easier!
I love the fact that you've put so much time, effort and intentional thought into this system. It has a massive appeal - especially as it pertains to something you've eluded to so many times through many of the videos I've watched thus far, which is setting the "system" up properly upfront. I would be curious, and interested in maybe having a short video series of you walking through the actual step-by-step setup of each part, and then using all of the phenomenal content you've already created to go into greater depth of each of the sections. I'm finding it a considerable distraction to follow what each episode talks about, without having the ability to work alongside with a hands on approach. Maybe this already exists somewhere, and I'm struggling to quickly and easily identify where to begin with the actual creation component. The theory of the system you've created is absolutely priceless.
This is a great treasure trove for me. Thank you for elaborating every little detail. I’ll subscribe your newsletter too. You have much insights to provide and I need more.
**Video Summary** 0:00 Intro This video will cover daily tracking which is one of the most important things you can start doing to achieve what matters to you in your life. The last 2 videos covered building a task database in Notion, it's really important to deliver on your projects, by completing the step by step components of projects, goal outcomes, and pillars in your life. The other half of your daily focus is what you track in the daily tracking database.
0:48 Importance of Daily Tracking You are what you do every day. If you are a writer, business owner, aspiring for health, you need to service those things in some way every single day. A giant effort on an inconsistent basis is far less effective compared to a small effort on a daily basis. When you define what matters most to you in the pillars, goal outcomes, and value goals you get there by setting daily rituals and routines that move you towards it every single day. What get's measured gets done. You need to establish the routine and track it because that will ensure you do it. In a way this gamifies things, this is one of your scoreboards to look at every day. There are many daily activities that are important to track like sleep, resting HR, fitness, etc. In the next video when we look at the daily Action Zone dashboard we'll see how this database rolls up into that in a really elegant way.
3:07 Design & Layout of Tracking Database This database is best viewed in the Table view. August tends to view the stats for the past 30 days with the rolling averages tracked along the bottom. You should decide what matters most to you in your life and then what metric will you use to indicate whether you're moving towards it or away from it. What will ensure that you're doing the activities and paying attention to the activities that matter for you? Everyone should track sleep, fitness, nutrition; nobody is unaffected by these. Beyond that, you can choose your own. August has his database set up to be optimized for exporting into graphing applications and he tracks many things. The title is the date Then there is a link to the week database so he can do a rollup of all the data within the days of that week so when he sits down to do his weekly review the aggregate for any columns he chooses will be visible. The weekly reviews then roll up in the monthly reviews automatically. There is a formula that calculates the day. Data is typically entered into this database in the Action Zone Dashboard which is filtered by day. By creating a new page in the same day it will automatically enter the date and calculate the day. This setup is designed to be very quick to enter data because to a large degree many of these things need to be manually entered. Once we have the API and Zapier integrations it will speed things up a lot. There is a field to rate Diet (1-5) To sleep time is calculated along with awake times based on inputs and the total sleep time is calculated. There is weight tracking. Finally, there are habit tracking checkboxes which are built into the daily tracking Meditation B.Plnr Mindset Viz Workout Sched.Tom. There is a field to rate the percentage on schedule Then a field to rate the percentage output compared to the planned activities Then there is a field to enter improvements; these roll up to the weekly review automatically and there is a picture of the entire week, same thing happens at the monthly level.
(11:40) Fast Data Entry Method Shows how data is entered quickly into each day. Day and date are automatically entered Then the week is selected (new weeks are created after each weekly review) The key to entering sleep time quickly is to have a field for hours and one for minutes with a formula that calculates the time in hrs. It's also very difficult to graph times when they are in the time format. If you go to bed after 1 am enter it as 13, 14, 15, etc and it will graph nicely. There are many other data points that are put in after that. The last thing left is the Planning Reviews column which is for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews. Tracking data like this and periodically reviewing it will change your life. Victory or failure lives in your day-to-day actions, you are what you do every day.
Phenomenal, August. You pack the lessons and utility from so many productivity books and resources into easy and actionable frameworks. (I recognize ideas from GTD, Atomic Habits and Triggers among others). I can't wait to have this all set up myself. A sincere and deep thank you for this series!
Best super deep approach on tracking life. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you so much for sharing this. You have just saved me so much time in having all of this already designed.
August thanks a lot one more time for your time and for the quality of your explains. With your videos I am learning new ways to control and structure Notion. Looking forward to the next video! Best regards from Kuwait
Thanks Paco, I greatly appreciate your posting your feedback and always enjoy your comments! I'm really happy that this has been of value to you. Lots more to come! If you know any other Notion users or are a part of any online Notion communities, please help spread the word about this series. Thank you!
Thank you again August, you have made habit tracking achievable and meaningful, so that you are not guessing, it is completely transparent, and you are accountable. This is key to changing habits, and it is our habits that make us who we are. You get good at whatever you practice consistently. I am making my way through your video series and thinking very deeply about how this will apply for me.
I found it very convenient and compact to make the evening tracking in board view. Check the items on finger tip. (No need to scroll left and right on mobile)
August, thank you for all you are doing here! I have been following along and attempting to replicate much of this. I think I found a small improvement to remove a couple fields and avoid having to do math on the fly. Total Sleep Calc = 12 - prop("Sleep Start Time (Calculated)") + prop("Awake Time Calculated"). Seems to work so far, what do you think?
Great solution Paul! I don't personally calculate sleep at all, I enter the data measured of actual sleep time from my sleep tracker device (an Oura Ring). But for those who don't use a sleep tracker, this is a great solution. Thanks for sharing!
Your notion system here it´s amazing, and I´m a content producer too, so Your system fits me 80% at least, I will study all your videos to learn it. Thanks a lot!!
Thanks Miguel! Awesome to hear this was helpful. The next video is on my Content Production system. Then lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
Hey August! Thank you so much, your content is truly life-changing. One things I have struggled with is the formula that gets a percentage from your total week workouts to your weekly review. I would like to understand how that system works to follow my general Succsess in my daily check boxes, but I'm a little lost. Thank you so much for everything you do here
This is what he answered in the comments below: "If you create the new task by hitting the "New" button from a filtered view, all the fields that the view is filtering for will be entered automatically. So if you create the new task from a view filtered for "Today", then the current date will automatically be entered in the new task. Same for any database field."
Another Masterclass, this series is absolute gold and appreciate the effort that must goes in to it, thanks August. Habit/Ritual Tracking Database = yet another App replaced by notion! Have fully embraced the PPV methodology now...discovered just at the right time when I was about to rebuild my productivity system as PARA 😅 Looking forward to your morning rituals video, will kinda be like finding out what superman has for his breakfast!
Awesome! I'm glad you're finding it valuable. The full stack of databases is stored on the "Command Center" top-level dashboard, but it doesn't really matter where you put them. Just have a logical place where you stack the full collection of primary databases together. I like to organize them by toggles, under pillars or pipelines or vaults, as relevant. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the enlightening video! Probably one thing I would do for my db (in future) is to log the time as 0620 or 2230. As I'm pretty lazy to separate them and i'm used to a 24hr setup. And of coz another issue comes with this is... Then i need to convert them from text to number in the calculation. :p
I'm watching this video again (you're probably tired of hearing how super clear, super helpful your videos are but I'll write it again : thanks fo your super clear & helpful videos !!!), and I do have a question for you August : what would happen if for some reason or another you no longer wanted to track an habit ? Would you still keep the column for it in your daily tracking DB and just hide it from view, would you start another daily tracking DB ? I'd probably keep it and hide it so as to be able to go back to it later should I need it (though I'd worry that the number of columns in my DB would increase over the quarters / years as new things are being tracked and older ones are no longer tracked but kept for reference), but I'm curious as to how you'd deal with this. Also, if I understood correctly, you manually enter the percentage at the far right column : are those related to the habits that you track or the items you planned to do that day or both ? I have a column that automatically calculates the percentage of tracked habits that I do each day, but I don't think there's a way to automate things when it comes to the tasks I scheduled for a day, or is there ?. Oh, I also wonder about how you rate your diet : do you track it on a separate app and imput the data in Notion afterwards ? Because I for one would never be able to rate if my diet was 1.7 or 2.5, maybe I could figure out a couple of criterions to quickly rate it 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, but no way would I be able to be as specific as 1.7 or 2.8.... Thanks in advance for your feedback ! (and another huge thank you for the mouse shift + scrolling tip , it's a life changer !!)
Thanks Sandrine! For habits no longer being tracked, I would usually not keep a column I'm not tracking anymore. Perhaps I would keep it if I had a lot of historical data that was of interest or if I thought I might come back to it later, but usually not. The percentages art thee right pertain to what I planned to spend ,my time on and what I planned to accomplish (finish). For diet I'm just make a subjective estimate -- yeah, the precision is a bit misleading, just making a judgement call :)
One tip for faster data entry is to set your filter in your action zone to only show the week you're working on, as well as the day. This way it will auto assign the correct week as well as the date when you create a new entry.
Thanks Chris! Though the Week property is not a date field, it's a relational link to the Weeks database. That would not work for a relational DB link. Good thought if not using a DB relation.
Excellent Candice, it's great to hear that. It will change your life. You are what you do every day. Habits will shape who you are. If you want to dive deeper into this check out the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Thank you as ever :) I am using your template and I would love to see a video demonstrating how you manage this template - how do U automate generating new pages for entry (each month ? Some months are shorter than others) Where & how do U archive old data ? How do you transition from one month to the next ?
This video shows how I use the template. it's; not automated, but the manual layout is very fast. Hit the blue "New" button to create new pages, link it to the week and month through relational database links. Hope that helps!
@@augustbradley All your videos and templates are excellent. Thank you! A A bit more detail in videos like this on how to use your templates would be really helpful. Like Karo, I'm struggling to make full use of them but can see how powerful they could be
@@tgallagher9560 Thanks Tara! Working on a course that will make it simpler and more clear to get going with the system. Hoping to launch in a month or two.
Ey, I'm watching your video and, in case you don't think it's useful, just stopped it when the bell appeared and I subscribed. : ) Huge thanks for the video!!
Having finished the video: Thank you deeply. You transmit such serenity and calmness, and this is so helpfull... My God, I wish I had these tools when I was in the University. I have a nice app which tracks my day: Year in pixels, and gives graphics, and you can enter feelings or achievements like tags, and the calendar is, as the name exposes, a coloured square, according to a grade of satisfaction. This could be implemented in a calendar here with more data than just "a feeling" (because I use to put "sad face" when I didn't work any hour, although it might have been a happy day for me), and something automatic, and get the year in pixels nicely! :D I'll try to make it work. I'll late, as I'm a Notion beginner. So, thank you very, very much for the hard work, the effort and the knowledge you so generously spread. :)
I really appreciate your videos and it looks like it can help me a lot if I set this up. I am new to Notion, downloaded it just a few days ago. And setting this up seems really complicated. Hope I can figure it out. Not gonna give up. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. :)
It takes effort to make big change in life. The easy looking shortcuts don't lead anywhere. Building structural systems is the most consistently effective path, so well worth the effort.
Thanks Sergey! Great to hear this was helpful. Lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
Hey @August Bradley every time you mention, you will do a video on this later. Please include a RUclips pop-up on the top right. This will help your viewers and also help you get more traffic to your videos. Just a suggestion, otherwise your content is amazing. Really hoping to change my 2021 to make it better.
Hey August, Thanks so much for these videos, these are by far the best videos I've seen on notion. I did have a quick question: How do you calculate the on-schedule, and output percentages? Are these just educated guesses, or are they calculated in some way?
Great concept! I am just wondering if there is any possibility with this template to schedule your daily habits/routine into your daily actions? Since it takes time to realize these habits, I'd find it helpful to see them scheduled along with my other project to-dos, to be sure to allocate enough time to everything. Thanks!
Hey August - It was super exciting on discovering your series and Notion in general. I was using about a month when one day I logged in and my goals databases had just disappeared. Not visible in trash, nowhere. Very disheartening and I'm now trying to decide wether to build again or look elsewhere. I'm seeing a LOT of similar stories on Reddit... Have you any thoughts on this or similar experiences that you've managed to overcome through some system of backups? Thanks! H
If you create the new task by hitting the "New" button from a filtered view, all the fields that the view is filtering for will be entered automatically. So if you create the new task from a view filtered for "Today", then the current date will automatically be entered in the new task. Same for any database field.
Does anyone know if the rows are supposed to auto generate with each new day? Or do you create the days in bulk and filter down to less than or equal to today. I can't figure out how to have a new row created with each new day. Am using the template from the website.
(1) Love this content. I've been making my way through ALL your videos, and I can't understate how much value I'm getting. It's unbelievable. (2) So I've started daily tracking. I LOVE this. It gives me a lot of motivation and momentum to keep up with various things. QUESTION. So I noticed you track when you go to sleep and when you wake up. But what about naps? Most weekends I take long Saturday or Sunday naps. Do you factor that in?
Hello August, thanks a lot for this great system! I would like to hear your opinion about the Oura Ring and the problem of self-fulfilling prophecies. How do you escape the results of the ring dictating your mood for the day? If you wake up, actually feeling good, but the ring shows some bad scores: Do you have advice on how to not let the data points influence your mood?
I didn't quite understand the purpose of the "Improvements" property. Is it the improvements you achieved on that day (e.g., "I didn't eat any fast food, yay") or improvements I want to achieve later (like tomorrow) based on today's experiences (e.g., "Don't eat junk food as I'll get more hungry.")?
August, how do you treat the weeks where there is a crossover between two months? Take Week 40 (28th Sep - 4th Oct) as an example. Monday 28th, Tuesday 29th, and Wednesday 30th are the final three days of September and fall within Week 40. However, the remaining four days of Week 40, Thursday 1st, Friday 2nd, Saturday 3rd, and Sunday 4th, all fall within October. The problem is that because we are rolling up the data from the Daily Tracking DB to the Weeks DB, and subsequently, we roll up the weekly data into the Months DB. We only want the first three days to roll up to September, and the remaining four days to roll up to October to avoid duplication or distorted information. I'd love to hear how you deal with this, August?
I'm not sure if this was covered in another video, but how do you organize all the databases that you have? I have seen some that have one central place that kinda house their databases on one page, and others have their databases for each aspect of their life in the dashboard for that particular scope of their life. The reason I ask, is that I seem to feel overwhelm of creating the same kinds of databases for different aspects of my life. I work as a life insurance agent and I am starting a digital marketing agency, but there would be overlap of some of the databases like tasks and daily tracking, but not others like how i deal with or need to view my clients for each. And there are different "daily habits" I would like to track, for each aspect, so is there also therein lies the same question, do I need to make a daily tracker for each thing to have one tracker to keep me on point for each one?
Hi August, I've started following this amazing series and am currently trying to implement this system within my own Notion life OS. However, I am not sure how to gain access to your notion templates, I have subscribed to your newsletter and received the first issue last but was still unable to find a link to the templates as suggested by the link in your description. I must say that I am both astonished by this amazing way of thinking and thankful that you decided to share it with us.
Thanks Gurpreet! Really appreciate that. The Template automation only works for the link under the videos here on RUclips. If you subscribed from another source, then you can try it again with this link: www.mindandmachine.io/notion-templates . Or email me directly at the address here: moretimeperday.com/contact
@@augustbradley Have you considered to keep the formula just to copy-paste its result in the title? The time saving become significant if the operation is done for multiples titles.
I am really enjoying this series and I have subscribed to Newsletter and Channel. It may be covered later--How best to implement your templates? In particular the Life-Data & Habit Tracking template. I used duplicate to copy into my Notion, but the Open (1st column) is April 11 -15. How can I get next 90 days into the table without opening each page and renaming?
Hi Darryl, the data in there now is just a sample so you can see how the table looks/works. Delete those entries and add your own data daily. The ideas is you add each day as it occurs, one day at a time starting today. Here's my video explaining how that database works: ruclips.net/video/9qLdGOLs7u4/видео.html -- hope that helps!
@@DarylJames Yes, here is an explanation of connecting databases through "Relations". This is from Notion's support/instruction Wiki (which is fantastic for learning an aspect of Notion) - www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79
Really appreciate your videos! I'm going through all your videos and implementing the system. This is something that I have been searching for years! I'm curious to know how you track the process or success rate of your Habits & Routines? For example, if one of your Habits & Routines is meditation, and you check the Meditation box in your Daily Tracking DB, how would you track % of days that you successfully checked that box in the Habits & Routines DB? Rollup won't work very well, since you have to link the Habit & Routines DB to every single page in the Daily Tracking DB in order to perform the rollup. Or is this something you only check manually?
If I have a changeable habits plans,how do I do to reach this? I want to use relations as tags when the date I done and use formula to calculate how many time I had done. Is it a good idea?
August, First off, thanks for such a great series. I was just getting into notion and found your channel. You have helped me to take it farther than just a simple todo list that I was building. I do have a question. In the Daily tracker there is a relation to a weeks DB which I can guess also connected the quarters and months. I have tried to build DB for these and am not getting them to connect correctly. I am sure I am missing something on how you have these arrays setup to support the inter connections. If you covered this in one of the videos, can you point me to it. If not and its not to complicated to explain in text I would appreciate any help you can give. Be well and thank you.
Thanks! Great to hear this has been helpful and that you're making good progress. The feature your describing that enables one database to "link" to another is called "relations" in a database. It's very powerful and at the heart of a lot of how this system works. How to use this feature is described here: www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79 Hope that helps!
Thank you August for this and all the other videos! Quick question - how does this table "Daily Habit Tracker" relate to your "Habits Table" under Pipeline. This seems to be something you fill in each day to track the habits. Is the Habits table just a manual list of the habits? Do you link them in any way?
Thanks Georgina! They are of course related, many of the daily tracking items are tracking habits or routines defined in the Habits & Routines DB. I cover the later a bit in the Alignment Zone video (ruclips.net/video/lM1xmu4JMB8/видео.html) -- it's just a simple list of what I intend to do for each, defining and being intentional about each habit and routine. Will do more on habits and routines after the core system is presented.
Hi August, thank you so much for your videos. I have been using your system since the new year in 2021 and at this point have 2.25 years worth of data in my daily tracking database. I was wondering if you ever archive or delete old daily tracking data to speed up your databases? Thank you!
I am so happy to hear it has been valuable for you, Adrienne! I have never had a need to delete or archive, but you can certainly delete or archive old ones if you wish - just make it from date a year or two ago.
One more question im only around #10-#12 in the playlist so you might have done this already but having action items incorporated into your weekly database as presented here in the daily tracking. wouldn't that be nice or simply too much information?
@@150tproductivity4 Yeah, I see as I go further into the video series, he shows these dashboards and I just have to pause the video and create it myself. I kind of like that he does that rather than just handing us everything because it forces me to think through how I want it to look and work for me.
I love this and I am trying to adopt your system August. Thanks very much for sharing such valuable and transformational content. I love your idea and the notion functionality of making days as pages. That way a day does not have a temporal concept but can contain other metadata that I can analyze for productivity reasons. One of the challenges I am having though in having days, since I relate tasks and other things to days, is that the search tab in notion becomes so slow that I have stopped using it. Have you any ideas where I can continue to use days as pages, capture metadata, but have a faster way of relating tasks to days, eg automating it through formulas, eg if do date = 3/9/2021, then notion automatically relates it to the day page named "2021-03-09" for example. Thanks
Hi August, first of all thank you for sharing this useful information. I was wondering how did you manage to 'auto-fill' the date when you add a new entry?
Thanks Aloys! I usually add new task entries from the "Today" filtered view on the Action Zone dashboard. Whenever you add a new entry from a filtered view the elements you are filtering by are automatically applied to the new entry. So if I am looking at a view filtered for today, it will automatically add today;s date in the new entry, Same for tomorrow or any other filed that is filtered by, Hope that helps!
@@augustbradley That is helpful, but what about the Week DB link, every week start you create a new week? then filter the daily by today and the active week?
@@PopyMartins Yes, the last step in my weekly review (at the end of each week) is to create the new week in the Weeks Database. Inside each week, view the Action Items (Tasks) DB filtered by that week. Super powerful to do it this way. I will demonstrate when I do the Weekly review video very soon.
Hey August, Great system. Wanted to know the filter you use for the 30 day averages. Whenever I create a new record, date is prefilled for the past month
I'm not sure which view you are referring to, but for past 30 days the filter should be: Do Date is on or after one month ago. But I don't create new tasks in that view, create new tasks in Action Zone or in Project workspaces. It will assign the date based on the filter in the view you are creating it from.
This is simply ridiculous! I understand the beauty of this notion database. But if you are tracking your life in this way you need a chill pill once a day (and track that of course)
Good Day Sir... I recently started working with Notion and find your vids and thought process to be concise and logical, as intended. I recently wrote a wonderful dialogue in Notion. then went on, knowing my article was safe and I could go back to it. Only to find that I actually cannot find it! Woe is me! I used the Search feature, with the article title to no avail! I don't believe there is a need to Save. May I ask.... What is my solution? Thanks in anticipation of your response.
Hey August quick question would it be a bad idea to incorporate actions along with self-growth habits for the check-off in daily tracking? Like I really want to but I also know it's important to keep things simple. Just want your opinion
Nice work. One thing I cannot estimate is for example: If I feel sick and need to pause everything, let's say that I go to surgery and I stay 1 week, how is the administration of this? Or if there is fever and risk of a day (calm, it’s not coronavirus: D), what will the spreadsheet look like? Habit Tracker you can ignore and add a 'SICK' column that you will understand, but what about the tasks? I thought about putting 'late', 'in process', 'complete'. This makes it easier to manage.
If you miss a day or so you can always have some blanks, don't beat yourself up over that. If you are able to enter the data but are having an unusual day, one approach is to have a "Notes" text column where you can enter notes to explain any unusual circumstances that may have influenced the numbers. Odd or unusual days don't matter much, it's the overall trend that you should focus on.
An approach would be to create a category for the “day type” and set the task list to filter for “normal day” only, so any new entries would automatically be assigned the "normal" operating-mode. Then when you get out of operating-mode it would be easy to change it a separate view
August
I really appreciate the quality and depth of this video series.
I started about a week ago really trying to get my mind around notion and figuring out what organization system works for me.
As the saying goes: “when the student is ready ...the teacher will appear”
You're on the right path Craig! I really appreciate your feedback here, thank you. More to come.
Ahhh is that quote from the Kyabalin? I recognize it from there!
if the student is fully ready, The teacher will dissappear.
If anybody couldn't read the "ToSleep Calc." formula. It's case and space sensitive!:
prop(ToSleep Hr.") + round(10 * prop("ToSleep Min.") / 60) / 10
Thank you! 😁
im getting errors can you help
@@rickmens6110 What's the issue?
@@rickmens6110 You're probably missing another quotation for (ToSleep Hr.")
One of the most striking things about this series is that I had already developed so many of these systems myself. I used google sheets for a daily tracker. I did weekly reviews. But this system brings everything together in a holistic and comprehensive way. This whole system is game changer for sure
+1 on the "Do Date" vs "Due Date" mindset. I'm shifting over to it. Can't disagree with August's reasoning: 'Do Date bc if you wait until it's actually Due to get started, then you're up against the wall.' Might explain why so many projects tend to be late.
Right on! Mindset and framing matter a lot. Simple naming/phrasing can change a perspective and better enable one's ability to execute. Thanks Walter!
@@augustbradley Agree - it makes so much sense and very much replicates how I used Todoist. I call it the DoIt Date - just to avoid the confusion though.
I agree as well. It's a huge weight off my mind to think of doing and not racing against deadlines.
@@KaraMonroe Yes Kara, I came to Notion from ToDoist -- good observation :) And DoIt Date sounds great!
As always, your system blows my mind. The difference with other systems is that it is *complete* and uses Notion to cover all the bases with its incredible database design.
Two small tweaks I added to my daily template:
1. Gratitude: I add that as a property so that I can review my gratitude at the end of the week/month and in general have a structured place to easily go back and look at what I am grateful for (I can imagine myself printing the list at the end of the year and reading it with my family, for example).
2. In the "not to do" bullet, I added a toggle that pulls the "improvements" fields from the database from the last few days so that I can quickly glance and see what I should not be doing today. This is the same method you use in your review cycles templates.
Thanks again - I am very grateful for you sharing all this knowledge, it's really making a big difference in my life!
Well stated Dan! I do the same with Gratitude on the weekly and monthly level, just not at the daily level Good approach. Outstanding idea on pulling the improvements field into the Not To Do toggle -- LOVE that!
Thanks so much for sharing your tips Dan. Resonates with me.
Hi Dan, I don't full understand your suggestions, but am interested in implementing them. Could you share a screenshot?
Hi, you could use following formula to calculate sleep time in 12h format without to put 13:00 if you go sleep at 1am : "Bed Time" and "Wake Up Time" fields must bee in decimals , if you want 24h format, then replace 12 for 24, time after 12 resets so, if you go sleep 12:30 you should input 00:30 actually 0,5
if(and(prop("Bed Time") < prop("Wake Up Time"), prop("Bed Time") < 12), prop("Wake Up Time") - prop("Bed Time"), 12 - prop("Bed Time") + prop("Wake Up Time"))
btw, you are good inspiration. I'm nearly done with my version of your system.
Thanks
Dude that code saved me I have been trying to figure it out for so long
Very good thanks
So, I have ADHD, and some useful advice I have come across in terms of habit building/tracking is to only look at two weeks at a time, and to track quantity, not chains. This helps with some of the mental and cognitive blocks that those of us with ADHD can struggle with when trying to build habits.
I love the idea of using your tracking style with Notion because I can take this same exact system, and just apply a slightly different view+filter (eg. viewing the past two weeks) to adjust for my own needs. It's very flexible!
That's great feedback Ian, thanks for sharing it. Yes, we can easily modify the view to adjust for this insight. Super helpful.
As someone with ADHD this series is so helpful. Actually found it via your system system video. Studying management undergrad been really eyeopening seeing how all the theories can be related to my day to day life
It's vital that your productivity system guru is clearly a guy who experimented with lsd in college. This guy is a hero.
No LSD, I'm high on life 😎. And no guru, just a teacher! Glad you found it valuable. Thanks Marshall!
So excited for the Vault and Pipeline breakdown of how each folder within is organized!!!
Excellent Karamjot! Vaults are coming soon.
My INTJ brain is so horny right now. Thanks so much August, amazing work!! This channel will blow up in no time.
One humble suggestion: change your video thumbnails. Include an image of yourself in them. This makes them prettier, more engaging and will help you build your personal brand!
Thanks so much Alex! On the thumbnail covers, what would make them better? I thought they were good but several people have told me what you are saying so I'm clearly missing something, How do I improve them? Advice welcome.
I second this! Include your face in the thumbnail. Also, add the number sequence to the title of the video and thumbnail. Example "9 of 28". Adding this to the thumbnail would convey mastery as well. That coupled with the psychological effect of the length of these videos would help in my opinion.
@@no.daveed Great thoughts, thank you! New cover thumbnail style is in development. There is a playlist with them all in sequence, but I hear you on numbering them. Thanks!
Definitely agree with these ideas - including your face in the thumbnail cover to make your brand tied to you and immediately recognisable, as well as numbering the video in the series.
.@@augustbradley The numbering is a great idea. But the overall "problem" with the thumbnails is that they look old, dated, and just clunky. I do not have a problem with them. They work just fine. However, they look as if out of the 1970s or something. The stark colors and square fonts and huge icon make it look old. What you do NOT want to do, is try to make them cool to appeal to the teeny-boppers. Really, nothing turns most serious viewers off is a "game" feeling. Or maybe worse, the feel of a high school kid who does not know about a thing but is willing to gift us with his useless opinion. Anything that feels like you are doing it because everyone else is will undermine your credibility. I'd far rather have clunky that tells me I can trust you than fancy and looking like the latest and greatest thing that the whole crowd is doing.
OH! and don't even THINK of overlaying music. Musical tastes are personal and almost no one will like what you think is the best music ever written. The other thing that people do that is distracting is to play with the mouse. It drives me nuts to be watching the screen while a presenter clicks here and there so fast that I can't follow.
Bottom line: you score about 9.5 the way you are doing things now. Change it up a bit if you feel so inclined, but don't do what others do, because you are much better than almost all of them already. There is not much you can do better but a whole lot you can do worse. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Almost as profound as: "You get what you measure." :)
Last thought: next time you talk about habit tracking you might point out how much it simplifies the whole time management process. Yesterday I was looking at my "today" table view and there were WAY too many things to do. That was because I had things that should have been habits as "actions". Yeah, they are actions but the way to view them is as check off items in a habit table. If they are in the action view they are in the way. All I need to know about "exercise" is that I need to do it and that I did it. I don't need or want all of the fields that are useful for "real" action items.
Hope some of that helps. Love your work. I'm still slogging but getting pay-off now. It takes time but it is worth it.
Yet another super-awesome video!
I find that your videos are just the right length for me to assimilate your excellent ideas and concepts.
So many people post RUclips videos of Notion systems that use a multitude of disparate tables and no relational links, and I feel that they are missing the whole point of getting the best from Notion.
I believe that multiple links between tables are the key to any powerful Notion system.
In summary, Notion is a real gamechanger, however your implementation of Notion is a true lifechanger!
Keep up you super-awesome work, and I very much look forward to your next presentation in this excellent series.
Thank you Stephen! It's funny, I always sit down intending to make the video about 10 minutes, but in the end there's just too much info to share so I let it go to whatever the topic seems to want the length to be. But I try to keep it dense with info, no wasted time. Really happy you like the format and the approach.
You're absolutely right, the real power of Notion is creating interconnecting systems, beyond stand alone tables/pages/ wikis. This is a fundamentally different kind of software than any of the productivity tools that have some before it, we are witnessing a tech paradigm shift here. Notion lets you create your own software tool.
Thanks for the great video! Really helps me get set up:
For anyone looking to calculate the sleep time if they don't have a fancy tracker and just want to subtract the times of ToSleep and WakeUp, here's how I did it:
(prop("ToSleep (hr)") - 12 - prop("WakeUp (hr)")) * -1
As August said, with ToSleep, use 13 for 1am, 14 for 2am and so on.
Hey thanks a lot! I was struggling to find a formula that would automatize calculating the Total Sleep Hours, and you helped a lot! :D
You can now check off your list your daily "Be a good person" goal ;D
@@JGLU100 Hey, glad I could help! Just if you are curious, I sat down yesterday and played with the formulas a little. With the formula below, you can enter 1am as 1am. :)
if(and(empty(prop("ToSleep Hr")), empty(prop("WakeUp Hr"))) == true, 0, if(prop("ToSleep (hr)") >= 8, prop("ToSleep (hr)") - 12 - prop("WakeUp (hr)") * -1, prop("WakeUp (hr)") - prop("ToSleep (hr)")))
Here an explanation of the formula:
if(and(empty(prop("ToSleep Hr")), empty(prop("WakeUp Hr"))) == true
this part checks whether the ToSleep Hr and WakeUp Hr have been filled out and
, 0
outputs 0 if not. Otherwise
, if(prop("ToSleep (hr)") >= 8
it will check if ToSleep (hr) (this is the calculated ToSleep field with a decimal as hours and minutes have been combined) is bigger than or equal to 8 (because who goes to bed before 8, right?)
if it is bigger
, prop("ToSleep (hr)") - 12 - prop("WakeUp (hr)") * -1,
it will use the formula I already published in my initial comment. If not, it will just
prop("WakeUp (hr)") - prop("ToSleep (hr)")))
subtract the WakeUp time from the ToSleep time, resulting in an accurate result if you enter 1am as 1. :)
I am just a fan of optimization. Maybe too much for some of us here, I just like to have formulas do the actual work for me.
Note: If you actually do go to bed before 8pm sometimes, you can change the 8 in ", if(prop("ToSleep (hr)") >= 8" to something more realistic. Keep in mind that something like "4" would keep you from entering 4am as your ToSleep Time. :)
A lot of text, but I wanted to update anyone looking for a workaround.
Pleasantly surprised that you have this entire series for free here... Many thanks 🙏 Keep doing this amazing service 👍
Thanks Vinod! Lots more to come.
I mentioned this in another of your videos, but you can still use the Date field for the sleep cycle. The workaround I used was set the date/time field for Bedtime and Waketime, then I have a formula with:
if(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "M/D/YYYY") == formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "M/D/YYYY"), divide(subtract(add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "mm"))), add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "mm")))), 60), divide(add(subtract(multiply(24, 60), add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Bedtime"), "mm")))), add(multiply(toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "HH")), 60), toNumber(formatDate(prop("Waketime"), "mm")))), 60))
Pretty much this is just calculating the time from the date and cross checks if the date is the same, if it's the same, then it will calculate based on adding the two time conversions instead of subtracting them like it would normally. Hope this is helpful.
That's awesome Bradford, thank you!
I like this. How would I make the Sleep time round instead of it being "8.1666666"
Thanks man! I find it useful for tracking hours of other activities as well. Very useful.
These are super awesome, I've adopted the "do date" form of mentality with my work and thinking about the minimum I can complete to push myself along and I've accomplished way more than I have recently than I have in awhile. Your videos are awesome and I hope you can continue to make more!
That's Awesome! I love hearing that these videos and the system are helping people, thank you for sharing this feedback. Its particularly great to hear you're seeing results already. I will definitely continue, lots more to come.
Hi August! TERRIFIC organization, productivity and mindset system! I'm so impressed and inspired to apply this right now! Greetings from Mexico!
Thanks Karla! I love Mexico 🙂 Awesome to hear this was helpful. Lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
You are a great teacher August. One of the best in my books. Thank you.
August, thank you so much for your videos! I've been searching for exactly what you're building and can't wait for more content to come out.
I struggle with adding too many active projects at once and getting overwhelmed from balancing routines, long term important projects, and urgent important projects. Too many plates spinning.
Can you make a video in the future of how you build out new goals, projects and actions and how you prioritize everything? That would be incredibly helpful. Thanks again!
Great to hear that this is valuable to you Shelby! Hearing this really motivates me. Your struggle is a common one, but it is solvable. I will be doing videos soon on project planning and prioritizing. If my upcoming videos don't fully address it, please post follow-up questions. I used to have the same problem, and this system fixed it for me. Lots more to come.
I am just wondering when August is going to take down these videos because they're an absolute GOLD MINE!!!
Just wanted to say a big thanks for your super helpful tip in this video about using Shift and the Scroll wheel to navigate horizontally in a table.
This will make my life SO much easier!
I know, right! Little things like that make such a big different in actual use. Thanks for mentioning that Stephen.
I love the fact that you've put so much time, effort and intentional thought into this system. It has a massive appeal - especially as it pertains to something you've eluded to so many times through many of the videos I've watched thus far, which is setting the "system" up properly upfront. I would be curious, and interested in maybe having a short video series of you walking through the actual step-by-step setup of each part, and then using all of the phenomenal content you've already created to go into greater depth of each of the sections. I'm finding it a considerable distraction to follow what each episode talks about, without having the ability to work alongside with a hands on approach.
Maybe this already exists somewhere, and I'm struggling to quickly and easily identify where to begin with the actual creation component. The theory of the system you've created is absolutely priceless.
This man is a genius
Agreed ☑️
Now this is HUGE! Thank you so much August for sharing this for free
This is a great treasure trove for me. Thank you for elaborating every little detail. I’ll subscribe your newsletter too. You have much insights to provide and I need more.
**Video Summary**
0:00 Intro
This video will cover daily tracking which is one of the most important things you can start doing to achieve what matters to you in your life.
The last 2 videos covered building a task database in Notion, it's really important to deliver on your projects, by completing the step by step components of projects, goal outcomes, and pillars in your life.
The other half of your daily focus is what you track in the daily tracking database.
0:48 Importance of Daily Tracking
You are what you do every day. If you are a writer, business owner, aspiring for health, you need to service those things in some way every single day.
A giant effort on an inconsistent basis is far less effective compared to a small effort on a daily basis.
When you define what matters most to you in the pillars, goal outcomes, and value goals you get there by setting daily rituals and routines that move you towards it every single day.
What get's measured gets done. You need to establish the routine and track it because that will ensure you do it.
In a way this gamifies things, this is one of your scoreboards to look at every day.
There are many daily activities that are important to track like sleep, resting HR, fitness, etc.
In the next video when we look at the daily Action Zone dashboard we'll see how this database rolls up into that in a really elegant way.
3:07 Design & Layout of Tracking Database
This database is best viewed in the Table view.
August tends to view the stats for the past 30 days with the rolling averages tracked along the bottom.
You should decide what matters most to you in your life and then what metric will you use to indicate whether you're moving towards it or away from it. What will ensure that you're doing the activities and paying attention to the activities that matter for you?
Everyone should track sleep, fitness, nutrition; nobody is unaffected by these. Beyond that, you can choose your own.
August has his database set up to be optimized for exporting into graphing applications and he tracks many things.
The title is the date
Then there is a link to the week database so he can do a rollup of all the data within the days of that week so when he sits down to do his weekly review the aggregate for any columns he chooses will be visible.
The weekly reviews then roll up in the monthly reviews automatically.
There is a formula that calculates the day.
Data is typically entered into this database in the Action Zone Dashboard which is filtered by day.
By creating a new page in the same day it will automatically enter the date and calculate the day.
This setup is designed to be very quick to enter data because to a large degree many of these things need to be manually entered.
Once we have the API and Zapier integrations it will speed things up a lot.
There is a field to rate Diet (1-5)
To sleep time is calculated along with awake times based on inputs and the total sleep time is calculated.
There is weight tracking.
Finally, there are habit tracking checkboxes which are built into the daily tracking
Meditation
B.Plnr
Mindset
Viz
Workout
Sched.Tom.
There is a field to rate the percentage on schedule
Then a field to rate the percentage output compared to the planned activities
Then there is a field to enter improvements; these roll up to the weekly review automatically and there is a picture of the entire week, same thing happens at the monthly level.
(11:40) Fast Data Entry Method
Shows how data is entered quickly into each day.
Day and date are automatically entered
Then the week is selected (new weeks are created after each weekly review)
The key to entering sleep time quickly is to have a field for hours and one for minutes with a formula that calculates the time in hrs. It's also very difficult to graph times when they are in the time format. If you go to bed after 1 am enter it as 13, 14, 15, etc and it will graph nicely.
There are many other data points that are put in after that.
The last thing left is the Planning Reviews column which is for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews.
Tracking data like this and periodically reviewing it will change your life.
Victory or failure lives in your day-to-day actions, you are what you do every day.
Thanks Marc!
Phenomenal, August. You pack the lessons and utility from so many productivity books and resources into easy and actionable frameworks. (I recognize ideas from GTD, Atomic Habits and Triggers among others). I can't wait to have this all set up myself. A sincere and deep thank you for this series!
So many influences to tie together! Thanks Nikolaj. And then put them into a real software system. Onward!
The horizontal shift scroll tip was worth the price of admission all by itself!
Best super deep approach on tracking life. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you so much for sharing this. You have just saved me so much time in having all of this already designed.
Glad it was helpful Aster!
Why don't more people know about this?! This is great. You're awesome. Thank you.
August thanks a lot one more time for your time and for the quality of your explains. With your videos I am learning new ways to control and structure Notion. Looking forward to the next video! Best regards from Kuwait
Thanks Paco, I greatly appreciate your posting your feedback and always enjoy your comments! I'm really happy that this has been of value to you. Lots more to come! If you know any other Notion users or are a part of any online Notion communities, please help spread the word about this series. Thank you!
Again, another video that makes me want it all NOW! Such a great system!
Thanks Karlie, lots more coming!
Thank you again August, you have made habit tracking achievable and meaningful, so that you are not guessing, it is completely transparent, and you are accountable. This is key to changing habits, and it is our habits that make us who we are. You get good at whatever you practice consistently. I am making my way through your video series and thinking very deeply about how this will apply for me.
I found it very convenient and compact to make the evening tracking in board view. Check the items on finger tip. (No need to scroll left and right on mobile)
August, thank you for all you are doing here! I have been following along and attempting to replicate much of this. I think I found a small improvement to remove a couple fields and avoid having to do math on the fly. Total Sleep Calc = 12 - prop("Sleep Start Time (Calculated)") + prop("Awake Time Calculated"). Seems to work so far, what do you think?
Great solution Paul! I don't personally calculate sleep at all, I enter the data measured of actual sleep time from my sleep tracker device (an Oura Ring). But for those who don't use a sleep tracker, this is a great solution. Thanks for sharing!
The equation doesn't hold up if you go to sleep at 4 PM and wake up at 9 PM. The Total Sleep Calc should be 5 but you get 17.
Truly amazing and generous work August! This is a brilliant system and your videos are executed with perfection. Thank you
Thank you so much for these videos and templates! You've changed my organisation life!
Another great video. Many thanks for sharing your system with us. I really appreciate the quality of this video series.
Thanks Aliosman! Really appreciate this feedback.
Your notion system here it´s amazing, and I´m a content producer too, so Your system fits me 80% at least, I will study all your videos to learn it. Thanks a lot!!
Thanks Miguel! Awesome to hear this was helpful. The next video is on my Content Production system. Then lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
This is very helpful. Thanks! Looking forward to how the daily records are summarized in the weekly, monthly, and annual reviews.
Hey August! Thank you so much, your content is truly life-changing. One things I have struggled with is the formula that gets a percentage from your total week workouts to your weekly review. I would like to understand how that system works to follow my general Succsess in my daily check boxes, but I'm a little lost. Thank you so much for everything you do here
Timestamps Index
0:00 Intro
1:22 Importance of Daily Tracking
3:41 Design & Layout of Tracking Database
7:27 Fast Data Entry Method
When I click New, today's date is not automatically filled in. How can I fix this? Thanks
This is what he answered in the comments below: "If you create the new task by hitting the "New" button from a filtered view, all the fields that the view is filtering for will be entered automatically. So if you create the new task from a view filtered for "Today", then the current date will automatically be entered in the new task. Same for any database field."
Another Masterclass, this series is absolute gold and appreciate the effort that must goes in to it, thanks August. Habit/Ritual Tracking Database = yet another App replaced by notion! Have fully embraced the PPV methodology now...discovered just at the right time when I was about to rebuild my productivity system as PARA 😅 Looking forward to your morning rituals video, will kinda be like finding out what superman has for his breakfast!
Thanks Stuart! Means a lot to me to hear this. Very happy that it's been valuable to you. Also glad to have saved you from PARA 😁. Lots more to come!
I'm loving the content! Where is the original "weeks " DB stored and how are you creating it?
Awesome! I'm glad you're finding it valuable. The full stack of databases is stored on the "Command Center" top-level dashboard, but it doesn't really matter where you put them. Just have a logical place where you stack the full collection of primary databases together. I like to organize them by toggles, under pillars or pipelines or vaults, as relevant. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the enlightening video! Probably one thing I would do for my db (in future) is to log the time as 0620 or 2230. As I'm pretty lazy to separate them and i'm used to a 24hr setup. And of coz another issue comes with this is... Then i need to convert them from text to number in the calculation. :p
FYI to get the day of week name = formatDate(prop("Date"), "dddd") incase it went fast
thank you so much it helps a lot, from Tokyo in 2024🙏
I'm watching this video again (you're probably tired of hearing how super clear, super helpful your videos are but I'll write it again : thanks fo your super clear & helpful videos !!!), and I do have a question for you August : what would happen if for some reason or another you no longer wanted to track an habit ? Would you still keep the column for it in your daily tracking DB and just hide it from view, would you start another daily tracking DB ? I'd probably keep it and hide it so as to be able to go back to it later should I need it (though I'd worry that the number of columns in my DB would increase over the quarters / years as new things are being tracked and older ones are no longer tracked but kept for reference), but I'm curious as to how you'd deal with this.
Also, if I understood correctly, you manually enter the percentage at the far right column : are those related to the habits that you track or the items you planned to do that day or both ? I have a column that automatically calculates the percentage of tracked habits that I do each day, but I don't think there's a way to automate things when it comes to the tasks I scheduled for a day, or is there ?.
Oh, I also wonder about how you rate your diet : do you track it on a separate app and imput the data in Notion afterwards ? Because I for one would never be able to rate if my diet was 1.7 or 2.5, maybe I could figure out a couple of criterions to quickly rate it 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, but no way would I be able to be as specific as 1.7 or 2.8....
Thanks in advance for your feedback ! (and another huge thank you for the mouse shift + scrolling tip , it's a life changer !!)
Thanks Sandrine! For habits no longer being tracked, I would
usually not keep a column I'm not tracking anymore. Perhaps I would
keep it if I had a lot of historical data that was of interest or if I thought I might come back to it later, but usually not.
The percentages art thee right pertain to what I planned to spend ,my time on and what I planned to accomplish (finish). For diet I'm just make a subjective estimate -- yeah, the precision is a bit misleading, just making a judgement call :)
One tip for faster data entry is to set your filter in your action zone to only show the week you're working on, as well as the day. This way it will auto assign the correct week as well as the date when you create a new entry.
Thanks Chris! Though the Week property is not a date field, it's a relational link to the Weeks database. That would not work for a relational DB link. Good thought if not using a DB relation.
This video made me so excited! I can't wait to start tracking my habits!
Excellent Candice, it's great to hear that. It will change your life. You are what you do every day. Habits will shape who you are. If you want to dive deeper into this check out the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
@@augustbradley Atomic Habits is such a great read ! Changed lots in my life !
Pretty cool, was looking for this exactly!
Man, what a game changer...
August, Thank you for your informative sessions. Where can I find the "Daily Tracking" table? I don't see it in the downloaded templates.
Life-Data & Habit Tracking (Template)
Thank you as ever :) I am using your template and I would love to see a video demonstrating how you manage this template - how do U automate generating new pages for entry (each month ? Some months are shorter than others) Where & how do U archive old data ? How do you transition from one month to the next ?
This video shows how I use the template. it's; not automated, but the manual layout is very fast. Hit the blue "New" button to create new pages, link it to the week and month through relational database links. Hope that helps!
@@augustbradley All your videos and templates are excellent. Thank you! A A bit more detail in videos like this on how to use your templates would be really helpful. Like Karo, I'm struggling to make full use of them but can see how powerful they could be
@@tgallagher9560 Thanks Tara! Working on a course that will make it simpler and more clear to get going with the system. Hoping to launch in a month or two.
This is amazing! Many thanks for sharing the template.
Ey, I'm watching your video and, in case you don't think it's useful, just stopped it when the bell appeared and I subscribed. : ) Huge thanks for the video!!
Having finished the video: Thank you deeply. You transmit such serenity and calmness, and this is so helpfull... My God, I wish I had these tools when I was in the University.
I have a nice app which tracks my day: Year in pixels, and gives graphics, and you can enter feelings or achievements like tags, and the calendar is, as the name exposes, a coloured square, according to a grade of satisfaction. This could be implemented in a calendar here with more data than just "a feeling" (because I use to put "sad face" when I didn't work any hour, although it might have been a happy day for me), and something automatic, and get the year in pixels nicely! :D I'll try to make it work. I'll late, as I'm a Notion beginner.
So, thank you very, very much for the hard work, the effort and the knowledge you so generously spread. :)
I too really wish I had this at University! Thanks so much for your thoughtful and supportive feedback Ana.
@@augustbradley Thank you, August. :__)
I really appreciate your videos and it looks like it can help me a lot if I set this up. I am new to Notion, downloaded it just a few days ago. And setting this up seems really complicated. Hope I can figure it out. Not gonna give up. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. :)
It takes effort to make big change in life. The easy looking shortcuts don't lead anywhere. Building structural systems is the most consistently effective path, so well worth the effort.
This is awesome!
Thanks Sergey! Great to hear this was helpful. Lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
How does this guy only have 1.7k likes!?
Hey @August Bradley every time you mention, you will do a video on this later. Please include a RUclips pop-up on the top right. This will help your viewers and also help you get more traffic to your videos.
Just a suggestion, otherwise your content is amazing. Really hoping to change my 2021 to make it better.
Way ahead any other youtube content, thank you sensei
Thank you IZI! Really means a lot to me to hear you're finding this valuable.
Hey August,
Thanks so much for these videos, these are by far the best videos I've seen on notion.
I did have a quick question:
How do you calculate the on-schedule, and output percentages? Are these just educated guesses, or are they calculated in some way?
Great concept! I am just wondering if there is any possibility with this template to schedule your daily habits/routine into your daily actions? Since it takes time to realize these habits, I'd find it helpful to see them scheduled along with my other project to-dos, to be sure to allocate enough time to everything. Thanks!
I wonder if this info can be automated from Oura ring directly into Notion?
Hey August - It was super exciting on discovering your series and Notion in general. I was using about a month when one day I logged in and my goals databases had just disappeared. Not visible in trash, nowhere. Very disheartening and I'm now trying to decide wether to build again or look elsewhere. I'm seeing a LOT of similar stories on Reddit... Have you any thoughts on this or similar experiences that you've managed to overcome through some system of backups?
Thanks!
H
Hello, I have question about Weekly Habits.
What if I workout for exp. 3 days a week how will I make that in this database?
Hey August, thanks for another great video. I’m a bit confused on how you get the dates to be automatically filled
If you create the new task by hitting the "New" button from a filtered view, all the fields that the view is filtering for will be entered automatically. So if you create the new task from a view filtered for "Today", then the current date will automatically be entered in the new task. Same for any database field.
@@augustbradley Thank you August!!
Does anyone know if the rows are supposed to auto generate with each new day? Or do you create the days in bulk and filter down to less than or equal to today.
I can't figure out how to have a new row created with each new day. Am using the template from the website.
Hey! Did you find out how to do this?
(1) Love this content. I've been making my way through ALL your videos, and I can't understate how much value I'm getting. It's unbelievable.
(2) So I've started daily tracking. I LOVE this. It gives me a lot of motivation and momentum to keep up with various things. QUESTION. So I noticed you track when you go to sleep and when you wake up. But what about naps? Most weekends I take long Saturday or Sunday naps. Do you factor that in?
Hello August, thanks a lot for this great system! I would like to hear your opinion about the Oura Ring and the problem of self-fulfilling prophecies. How do you escape the results of the ring dictating your mood for the day? If you wake up, actually feeling good, but the ring shows some bad scores: Do you have advice on how to not let the data points influence your mood?
How did you set the fx when you enter the date its know what day it is?
Hello, big fan. Where do you house this DB? I've been sifting through your videos trying to find where you put it lol
The Daily Tracking DB is housed in the Pillar section of the LOS.
Auguest, fantastic videos! Thank you. Have you done a video talking about Reviews and how you approach that side?
Thanks Jonathan! The next two videos planned are Weekly Reviews then Monthly Reviews.
@@augustbradley Fantastic, again thank you for the videos :-)
I didn't quite understand the purpose of the "Improvements" property. Is it the improvements you achieved on that day (e.g., "I didn't eat any fast food, yay") or improvements I want to achieve later (like tomorrow) based on today's experiences (e.g., "Don't eat junk food as I'll get more hungry.")?
August, how do you treat the weeks where there is a crossover between two months?
Take Week 40 (28th Sep - 4th Oct) as an example.
Monday 28th, Tuesday 29th, and Wednesday 30th are the final three days of September and fall within Week 40.
However, the remaining four days of Week 40, Thursday 1st, Friday 2nd, Saturday 3rd, and Sunday 4th, all fall within October.
The problem is that because we are rolling up the data from the Daily Tracking DB to the Weeks DB, and subsequently, we roll up the weekly data into the Months DB.
We only want the first three days to roll up to September, and the remaining four days to roll up to October to avoid duplication or distorted information.
I'd love to hear how you deal with this, August?
I'm not sure if this was covered in another video, but how do you organize all the databases that you have? I have seen some that have one central place that kinda house their databases on one page, and others have their databases for each aspect of their life in the dashboard for that particular scope of their life. The reason I ask, is that I seem to feel overwhelm of creating the same kinds of databases for different aspects of my life. I work as a life insurance agent and I am starting a digital marketing agency, but there would be overlap of some of the databases like tasks and daily tracking, but not others like how i deal with or need to view my clients for each. And there are different "daily habits" I would like to track, for each aspect, so is there also therein lies the same question, do I need to make a daily tracker for each thing to have one tracker to keep me on point for each one?
Hi August, I've started following this amazing series and am currently trying to implement this system within my own Notion life OS. However, I am not sure how to gain access to your notion templates, I have subscribed to your newsletter and received the first issue last but was still unable to find a link to the templates as suggested by the link in your description.
I must say that I am both astonished by this amazing way of thinking and thankful that you decided to share it with us.
Thanks Gurpreet! Really appreciate that. The Template automation only works for the link under the videos here on RUclips. If you subscribed from another source, then you can try it again with this link: www.mindandmachine.io/notion-templates . Or email me directly at the address here: moretimeperday.com/contact
Hello, I understand how your Day/Date work but how do you enter your Title? Do you type it out manually?
Yes have to type it manually. At first I tried to have a formula create it, but sadly formulas are not useable in the title field.
@@augustbradley Have you considered to keep the formula just to copy-paste its result in the title? The time saving become significant if the operation is done for multiples titles.
@@paoloap. It takes less time for me to type than it would to copy/paste. Though I do wish we could have formulas in the title cell!
I am really enjoying this series and I have subscribed to Newsletter and Channel. It may be covered later--How best to implement your templates? In particular the Life-Data & Habit Tracking template. I used duplicate to copy into my Notion, but the Open (1st column) is April 11 -15. How can I get next 90 days into the table without opening each page and renaming?
Hi Darryl, the data in there now is just a sample so you can see how the table looks/works. Delete those entries and add your own data daily. The ideas is you add each day as it occurs, one day at a time starting today. Here's my video explaining how that database works: ruclips.net/video/9qLdGOLs7u4/видео.html -- hope that helps!
@@augustbradley Thanks August. Also is there a video on how to hook/link the templates to my own projects and goals DB's?
@@DarylJames Yes, here is an explanation of connecting databases through "Relations". This is from Notion's support/instruction Wiki (which is fantastic for learning an aspect of Notion) - www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79
Really appreciate your videos! I'm going through all your videos and implementing the system. This is something that I have been searching for years!
I'm curious to know how you track the process or success rate of your Habits & Routines? For example, if one of your Habits & Routines is meditation, and you check the Meditation box in your Daily Tracking DB, how would you track % of days that you successfully checked that box in the Habits & Routines DB? Rollup won't work very well, since you have to link the Habit & Routines DB to every single page in the Daily Tracking DB in order to perform the rollup. Or is this something you only check manually?
If I have a changeable habits plans,how do I do to reach this?
I want to use relations as tags when the date I done and use formula to calculate how many time I had done.
Is it a good idea?
August, First off, thanks for such a great series. I was just getting into notion and found your channel. You have helped me to take it farther than just a simple todo list that I was building. I do have a question. In the Daily tracker there is a relation to a weeks DB which I can guess also connected the quarters and months. I have tried to build DB for these and am not getting them to connect correctly. I am sure I am missing something on how you have these arrays setup to support the inter connections. If you covered this in one of the videos, can you point me to it. If not and its not to complicated to explain in text I would appreciate any help you can give. Be well and thank you.
Thanks! Great to hear this has been helpful and that you're making good progress. The feature your describing that enables one database to "link" to another is called "relations" in a database. It's very powerful and at the heart of a lot of how this system works. How to use this feature is described here: www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79 Hope that helps!
August Bradley : Notion Productivity Thanks. The link to notion wiki was a big help. Have a great rest of your weekend.
Thank you August for this and all the other videos! Quick question - how does this table "Daily Habit Tracker" relate to your "Habits Table" under Pipeline. This seems to be something you fill in each day to track the habits. Is the Habits table just a manual list of the habits? Do you link them in any way?
Thanks Georgina! They are of course related, many of the daily tracking items are tracking habits or routines defined in the Habits & Routines DB. I cover the later a bit in the Alignment Zone video (ruclips.net/video/lM1xmu4JMB8/видео.html) -- it's just a simple list of what I intend to do for each, defining and being intentional about each habit and routine. Will do more on habits and routines after the core system is presented.
Hi August, thank you so much for your videos. I have been using your system since the new year in 2021 and at this point have 2.25 years worth of data in my daily tracking database. I was wondering if you ever archive or delete old daily tracking data to speed up your databases? Thank you!
I am so happy to hear it has been valuable for you, Adrienne! I have never had a need to delete or archive, but you can certainly delete or archive old ones if you wish - just make it from date a year or two ago.
One more question im only around #10-#12 in the playlist so you might have done this already but having action items incorporated into your weekly database as presented here in the daily tracking. wouldn't that be nice or simply too much information?
Thanks for the knowledge 🥰❤
Does the daily tracking link to the habits and routines database? For example, could you track your wake up routine or a bundle of routines?
The template that I imported, didn't come with a "Weeks DB" table. How can I build this?
Thanks for your help!
It comes With the template You Imported or find a reason why it didn't import it.
It will take you a day or two to just make that template.
Mine didn't have it either. I checked again with a new template and there is no Weeks DB. Not sure why it's missing.
@@1blenderman You should Create A week database yourself. Just takes 4 minutes to create and then you link it through relation
@@150tproductivity4 Yeah, I see as I go further into the video series, he shows these dashboards and I just have to pause the video and create it myself. I kind of like that he does that rather than just handing us everything because it forces me to think through how I want it to look and work for me.
I love this and I am trying to adopt your system August. Thanks very much for sharing such valuable and transformational content. I love your idea and the notion functionality of making days as pages. That way a day does not have a temporal concept but can contain other metadata that I can analyze for productivity reasons. One of the challenges I am having though in having days, since I relate tasks and other things to days, is that the search tab in notion becomes so slow that I have stopped using it. Have you any ideas where I can continue to use days as pages, capture metadata, but have a faster way of relating tasks to days, eg automating it through formulas, eg if do date = 3/9/2021, then notion automatically relates it to the day page named "2021-03-09" for example. Thanks
absolutely fantastic
Hi August, first of all thank you for sharing this useful information. I was wondering how did you manage to 'auto-fill' the date when you add a new entry?
Thanks Aloys! I usually add new task entries from the "Today" filtered view on the Action Zone dashboard. Whenever you add a new entry from a filtered view the elements you are filtering by are automatically applied to the new entry. So if I am looking at a view filtered for today, it will automatically add today;s date in the new entry, Same for tomorrow or any other filed that is filtered by, Hope that helps!
@@augustbradley That is helpful, but what about the Week DB link, every week start you create a new week? then filter the daily by today and the active week?
@@PopyMartins Yes, the last step in my weekly review (at the end of each week) is to create the new week in the Weeks Database. Inside each week, view the Action Items (Tasks) DB filtered by that week. Super powerful to do it this way. I will demonstrate when I do the Weekly review video very soon.
Awesome work!
How does it automatically add todays date when you add a new entry?
Came here to ask the same, pls someone help.
Time Stamp is 11:40
Hey August,
Great system. Wanted to know the filter you use for the 30 day averages. Whenever I create a new record, date is prefilled for the past month
I'm not sure which view you are referring to, but for past 30 days the filter should be: Do Date is on or after one month ago. But I don't create new tasks in that view, create new tasks in Action Zone or in Project workspaces. It will assign the date based on the filter in the view you are creating it from.
This is simply ridiculous! I understand the beauty of this notion database. But if you are tracking your life in this way you need a chill pill once a day (and track that of course)
Good Day Sir... I recently started working with Notion and find your vids and thought process to be concise and logical, as intended.
I recently wrote a wonderful dialogue in Notion. then went on, knowing my article was safe and I could go back to it. Only to find that I actually cannot find it! Woe is me!
I used the Search feature, with the article title to no avail! I don't believe there is a need to Save.
May I ask.... What is my solution? Thanks in anticipation of your response.
Hey August quick question would it be a bad idea to incorporate actions along with self-growth habits for the check-off in daily tracking? Like I really want to but I also know it's important to keep things simple. Just want your opinion
Would you share the formulas as I am not really good at those yet?
Hi Everyone,
I have just a question. How can you calculate (or is it an estimation?) On Schedule and Output? Best Regards from France.
Nice work.
One thing I cannot estimate is for example:
If I feel sick and need to pause everything, let's say that I go to surgery and I stay 1 week, how is the administration of this?
Or if there is fever and risk of a day (calm, it’s not coronavirus: D), what will the spreadsheet look like? Habit Tracker you can ignore and add a 'SICK' column that you will understand, but what about the tasks?
I thought about putting 'late', 'in process', 'complete'. This makes it easier to manage.
If you miss a day or so you can always have some blanks, don't beat yourself up over that. If you are able to enter the data but are having an unusual day, one approach is to have a "Notes" text column where you can enter notes to explain any unusual circumstances that may have influenced the numbers. Odd or unusual days don't matter much, it's the overall trend that you should focus on.
An approach would be to create a category for the “day type” and set the task list to filter for “normal day” only, so any new entries would automatically be assigned the "normal" operating-mode. Then when you get out of operating-mode it would be easy to change it a separate view