Setting Up Notion: Life OS and Command Center

To set up a productive Notion workspace, start with a blank page, build databases, and create a dashboard with task and note views.

### Building a Notion Command Center for Beginners
* 📊 Start by creating a blank **Notion page** named "**Life OS**" with a **dashboard** and two essential databases: "**Tasks**" and "**Notes**".
* 🗃 The "Tasks" database includes properties for task name, due date, and completion status, with tasks **sorted by due date**.
* 📝 The "Notes" database includes properties for **note type**, **creation time**, and **last updated time**, with notes sorted by **date descending**.
* 🖥 The "Command Center" page combines views of the "Tasks" and "Notes" databases, with sections for **"Upcoming Tasks"** and **"Recent Notes"**.
* 📅 The "Upcoming Tasks" view shows tasks **due in the next 7 days**, the "Inbox" view shows tasks **without a due date**, and the "All Tasks" view displays **all tasks**.
* 📝 The "Recent Notes" view shows notes sorted by **last updated time**, with properties for **note type** and **creation date**.
* 📄 Templates can be used to quickly create new notes with predefined structures, such as **key takeaways and action items**.
* 🗓 A bonus tip introduces a "**Calendar View**" for tasks, providing a **visual representation** of upcoming to-dos.

to help you get started in Notion without losing your mind, we'll begin with a completely blank Notion page. In just 12 minutes or so, you'll have your very own life OS home screen up and running. It comes with one essential dashboard to help beginners get started. This dashboard is powered by two extremely simple databases. To prove to you, this is literally how I started using Notion years ago. This is my current life OS home screen. As you can see, it's basically set up the same way. So let's get started. First, we give this blank page a name. Name: Life OS. And we choose an icon. I like to use the Yin Yang icon here. We press enter. We press # twice, space for heading two. Dashboard / Blue. You can choose whatever color you want. I'll choose blue background here. Enter and triple hyphen 1 2 3 to add a divider. I just think that looks super clean. Then double hashtag again 1 2. We choose. We type a database here. For / Gray. Gray background and triple hyphen.

again 1 2 3. Now, the most common advice you'll hear from experienced users is that databases are the cornerstone of productive Notion setups. So, we're going to first build out our databases, then come back to the dashboard. Pages. Go ahead and type in for SLT and select the table view under database here. And then we're going to actually select the data source and select a new database. We're going to name this task database. And because I don't want a table taking up half my screen, I'm going to choose this button here. And I'm going to turn this into a page so I can now click into the task database and work on this in a clean page. I'm going to choose an icon. And let's choose a check mark here, like so. And this is going to be task. This property, I'm going to change this property from multi-select to date because we want tasks are attached to due dates. I like to select the month, date, year because I was, unfortunately, brought up in the US and

time format 24 hours, and this is going to be renamed to do date. Like so, let's decrease the size here a little bit, and the final property we're going to add is a checkbox because we want to check tasks that have already been completed. And I'm, we're going to rename this. Oops, sorry, clicked too fast there. To done. And pro tip with checkbox properties, you can actually just hide the property name. I'm going to drag this to the left here so I can like click this. Like so, right? Oops. And I'm going to change this table name to all tasks. And I will select a bullet point drop-down menu. Like so, so it looks a little bit cleaner. Let's add some tasks just for placeholder purposes. First is watch Appo Vision Pro review you. And number two is sell kidneys to afford it. Due date, let's say for the sake of argument, today is when I'll watch a review. Tomorrow or in 2 days, I will sell my kidney. Oops, there we go.

let's actually clear this up. Next, we're going to book a flight to San Francisco to complain to Tim Cook directly. And as you can see, this has wrapped columns turned on. So I'm just going to go to the three buttons here, click, uh, layout, and toggle off wrap all columns. I just think this looks cleaner. I'm going to choose a due date here to be two weeks from now. And since this is a task database, we're going to add a sort by due date ascending so that the next due task is shown up top. And if you're using Notion yourself, you will not see this save for everyone option, so you can choose to ignore it for this entire tutorial. And now, if I choose to add a new task, uh, like and comment on Jeff's video and set that due to today, you'll see that it automatically jumps up top. And that's it. We're done with the task database. Now we can either click the Life OS button here to go back a page, or I recommend getting used to keyboard shortcuts as soon as possible.

so command or control left bracket to go back a page. And we're going to not now start building our next not taking database. So for slash table same exact process as before select a table View new database. We're going to name this notes database. And so last time we're going to click this and turn into a page to have notion the notes database rather be in a standalone page add an icon. And I like to choose one of the writing icons here like so. And when it comes to properties we're going to rename this to note. We're going to change this to date actually. And you'll see why in a little bit like so full date month date year and 24hour let's decrease the size of this a little bit. And then we here we're going to add uh Select Property type. And we're going to tr we're going to type note type. And we'll come back to this in a little bit. We're going to add the fourth property is created time. So you know when the note was created let's

choose the exact same time format, and we're going to add a last updated time. So, how recently the note was updated, we're going to change that, and there you go. You might be confused as to why there's another date property here. For example, if I had a one-on-one meeting with my manager, I'm going to start the note today, but the meeting is for tomorrow, so the created time wouldn't accurately reflect that. I personally have three categories of notes. The first note type is when a meeting occurs or a presentation happens, and you're taking down notes summarizing your learnings and findings. The second type of notes, for example, let's say my friend tells me about his trip to Iceland. I'm like, Oh, think about traveling to Iceland. Sounds like a beautiful place to go. And let's say this is happening next week in the future. This would count as a thought for me. Like thoughts, right? No meeting happened, no presentation occurred. It was just me thinking by myself, Oh, I should do something. Or this was

interesting. And the third category of notes is if I clipped uh a YouTube video or online article. For example, intro to uh AI by Google. And let's say this happens 2 weeks from now. I would categorize this as research. And you could change the colors of all these notes by clicking through button here. Let's say notes is uh blue, thoughts is yellow, and research we can let it remain gray. And finally, let's change the view name to all notes. And similar to last time, let's select the bullet point one. And we can sort by date uh descending this time so that the most recent note recent notes are are shown up top. Save for everyone or just save if you're using notion by yourself. Now that we have these two databases. Let's build out our first dashboard. So for slash page this time instead of a table enter. And we're going to name this Command Center. Let's select an icon. Let's do the activity icon right like so. And this is a personal preference but whenever I create a new page. I like to press enter.

SL BREC. Chrome to show the current page location then enter again hyphen hyphen hyphen to add a divider line. I just think this looks super clean. Then uh top right we're going to choose as three dots and we're going to actually turn this page to full width to give us more space to work with. Uh hashtag hashtag or yeah pound sign pound sign space for heading to and we're going to choose uh weekly task view here for SL blue again. Uh hyphen hyphen hyphen we can select these two elements command D to copy and paste move the newly created elements to the right here like so drop it and we're going to move the divider line back up here. We're going to change this to notes view. This next part is what makes notion so powerful. We will now create views of the two databases we just created so that we can see our tasks and notes in a single location. This is why this is called the command center starting with the weekly view section for SLT. We're still going to select the table view.

under databases. But unlike last time, we're going to select the task database we built earlier in this video. And we're going to choose to copy an existing view, all tasks. Now, before we do anything else, you want to actually left-click on all tasks and make a duplicate view so you have the all tasks view still there. And then we're going to play around with this new view. We're going to rename this to upcoming. I want to see the upcoming tasks in the next seven days. We're going to change the icon here to an i icon. And then we're going to select the filter to done is unchecked so that all uncompleted tasks will be visible, right? We're going to save this. And we're going to add another filter because I want the upcoming 7-day tasks to be visible only. So we're going to choose the due date, go in start date is on or before drop-down menu one week from now so all tasks between today and the next week will be shown. We're going to save for everyone and

we're going to make sure the sort due date is still ascending, so the next task will be shown first. So let's say cell kidney that's due 2 days from now. If I were to select 3 weeks from now, it disappears, right? Comment Z. We bring it back. So that's how this works. To clean this up a little bit, we can actually click filter to get rid of all the filter and stored options. Options. And we're going to click the three dots here and hide the database title. Now we can toggle between the upcoming view and the all task view. The third and final view we're going to build is something called the inbox view, and it's very important for task management. And this is how it works. Let's first go to the all task view. Again, we're going to left-click three dots and make another duplicate of the all task view. We're going to name this inbox, and we're going to select the mailbox icon like so. And the only filter option here will be the due date.

is going to be empty. Is empty now. The way this works is you can quickly capture any ideas or tasks you have in here without assigning a due date, because sometimes you don't know when the task has to be due, and you can find them all here the second you add a due date. So let's go through an example: uh, rehearse for next presentation. The due date is empty right now, but if I select it next week, it disappears. And if we go to upcoming, it shows up: rehearse for next presentation. Right? So let's go, uh, let's actually command Z, go back to the inbox view. So all tasks without a due date will be shown here. We can click the three dots and hi the database title. And I like to move the inbox view. Oops, to the middle here. So now you have three views: upcoming, inbox, and all task. Moving over to the notes view, this is going to be super simple compared to what we did with tasks for slash table. We're going to select the table view under database and

we're going to select the notes database we just created, and we're going to copy an existing view. All notes, and if you remember, this is sorted by the date descending. So first, let's hide this database title to make it cleaner. And we're going to click on all notes here, and we're going to make a duplicate view again. And we're going to change this. We're going to rename this to recent notes. So recently updated notes. I'm going to choose an icon. So clock. Let's choose a clock, something like this, maybe. And instead of sort by due date, sort by date descending, we're going to sort by last updated time descending. Say for everyone here. So let's say this meeting my manager is happening tomorrow, but if I just change this to even though the date is still scheduled for tomorrow, but because the last updated time was just now a couple seconds ago, it's going to jump to the top. And speaking of this, looks a little bit messy. So I'm just going to actually click the three dots.

here and we're going to choose properties and we're going to deselect these two to keep this view cleaner. This does not mean we're deleting the column, but rather just hiding them. So click and click. So now within the notes view, if you click on the filter option to get rid of the sort options, we see the note title, the note date, and the note type, and we can even tidy this up a little bit more. As you use Notion more and more, you'll figure out what other sections you want to add to your command center. For example, for me, I have the exact same upcoming weekly task view here, right? But I have other sections as well. Let me know in the comments if you want an entire video on this HQ/Command Center of mine. In the meantime, let's move on to a must-know feature all beginners should use: templates. For example, in your notes view, if you click here or click the new button here, you'll be greeted with an empty page. Team meeting and you have to populate everything yourself. The date, oh it's on

okay, not Saturday. Monday. The note type is going to be notes, and it's going to be key takeaways. Blah blah blah, one, two, three. Um, notes. And then you have to do this again, again, every single time. A much more efficient way is to first let's exit out by pressing escape, clicking the drop-down menu here next to the new button, and choose new templates. And we're going to press command control enter to expand this to full screen. Click the three dots, and we're going to click full width. And let's title this oops, new notes. New note. Choose a meaningful icon. Let's say something related to writing again, like a pencil. I like to have the note type moved up below the date, and we can actually choose the date to dynamically reflect the date you create the note. So today. And I like to hide the creative time and and, uh, last updated time. Uh, last edited time rather to keep this clean and with then the page content itself. Um, hashtag heading to key takeaways. I like to use this the purple

color let's switch it up right now. Three hyphens. I'm going to select this like I did before. Command and control D to make a copy of this. Move this to the right. And this is going to be, oops, this is going to be titled action items. I'm going to move this up top. And down here, heading to again notes. And we're going to have gray hyphen. And we're going to have one bullet point one here. We're going to have a number here because there's one, two, three takeaways. And for Action items, I'm going to have a check box. Back in our Command Center view, we can select the drop down menu and choose this new note template we just created to be the default for all views within notes database. Escape. And now whenever you press the new button, a new note will be generated with our template. The three section headers are automatically populated and we can start taking notes. Uh, Jeff's intro to notion video. This is going to be a research note type.

you're watching this video right now. It's a nice video to learn from. Action items like and subscribe. So this dashboard is more than enough to get you started, but it wouldn't be a Jeff's video without a bonus tip. So back in your Life OS page, let's create a new page and title it tasks view. Wait, Jeff, we already have an upcoming tasks view in the command center. Yes, but I've only shown you one database format in this video so far, and that's the table format. Back in this newly created task view, we're going to do this. Let's add an icon. Let's use another check mark, not the exact same one as before, personal preference. Enter for / bread Chrome and hyphen hyen hyphen. And now we're going to give a heading to calendar view. And let's CH this blue hyphen hyphen hyphen for SLT table view database. And we're going to select the exact same task database as before, copy an existing view, all tasks except this time instead of

table under layout. We're going to choose the calendar view. Let's toggle off the database title again. Let's click X here. And now, oh, let's click Three Dots and make a full width so it's nice and big. Now, although this takes up more screen real estate, so you don't want this in your command center, this is a much more visual representation of your upcoming to-dos. And we can even go a step further, click Three Dots here, go to properties, and show whether, show the done check mark property by clicking the I icon here. And I actually don't want the task to disappear because I want to see which task have been completed in this calendar view. And I can even move the tasks to other dates like so as needed. Now back in our Command Center, we can create a new section, command D to make a copy of this section header. Name this quick links. Enter hyphen hyphen hyphen to add a divider and use the at button to refer to the task view we just created like so.

that we can quickly click in and view our task in calendar format without again cluttering up our main command center page. All right, hopefully it's clear to you now how most Notion setups are powered by databases. You take some time to build out a few core databases once, then you create dashboards and views tailored to your own individual needs. The possibilities are literally endless. I know I talk a bit fast, so if you have questions, leave them down below. Subscribe to see how I set up my Notion workspace. See you on the next video. In the meantime, have a great one.

How to Get Started with Notion (without losing your mind)

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Jeff Su

Setting Up Your Life OS Home Screen in Notion

Creating a blank Notion page for your Life OS home screen with a Yin Yang icon and a blue dashboard.

Setting up two essential databases, starting with the task database, including task, due date, and done properties.

Using the table view for the task database and customizing properties for efficient task management.

Setting Up a Task and Note Database in Notion

The tutorial covers setting up a task database with sorting by due date, and the option to add a new task that automatically moves to the top.

Then, it explains the process of creating a notes database with properties for note, date, note type, created time, and last updated time, as well as the different categories of notes.

Finally, it provides a rationale for having two date properties in the notes database.

A new page named Command Center is created with an icon and layout preferences for a cleaner look.

Two databases are set up for tasks and notes, with views created to see them in a single location.

The task view is customized to show upcoming tasks in the next seven days, with filters for uncompleted tasks and due dates.

Tasks can be organized in three main views: upcoming, all tasks, and inbox for tasks without a due date.

The inbox view allows for capturing tasks without a due date, and they disappear once a due date is assigned.

The notes view is kept simple, with two main views: all notes and recent notes, sorted by the last updated time to easily track the latest changes.

Efficient Note-Taking and Template Usage in Notion

Hiding columns in the notes view helps keep the display clean and organized.

Notion provides a more efficient way of creating new notes using templates, which can be customized with section headers and automatically populated with the chosen template.

Setting a default template for all views within a notes database streamlines the note-taking process and improves productivity.

Optimizing Your Notion Workspace for Task Management

Jeff provides a bonus tip for creating a new task view in Notion, using different database formats for visual representation of to-dos.

The calendar view offers a more visual representation of upcoming tasks and allows for the manipulation of task dates.

Creating a quick links section provides easy access to the task view without cluttering the main command center page.