In this tutorial I'm going to walk you through how to set up this custom
Notion project in your Notion workspace. So I'm going to walk through kind of
step-by-step how to duplicate the template and then I'll kind of walk you
through how the template works and some of the ways you can customize it for
your unique business. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and you can
grab the link to this in the description of this video so right below the video
there'll be a link right there you can click on it and you'll be taken to a
page that looks just like this. So this is the Notion project database and the
template that you can use for all projects and so what you want to do when
you first start is go up here to the top and there's a duplicate button when you
do hit this it's gonna ask you to sign in to Notion and then you'll have the
option to duplicate this entire template into your own Notion workspace.
So it is not possible for you to edit the template here but you are able to
duplicate it and pull it into your own Notion workspace. So let me go ahead and
jump over to my Notion site here. So I've got in now in my Notion app and looking
at the template this is the copy and so let's jump into this projects database
and you'll notice already there's a couple of views that have been
created for you and the best thing is to kind of use you know whatever your
personal style is. I'm gonna start with this status view it's kind of a Kanban
style board and it will allow us to kind of show sort of the process for all your
projects here. So what you can do here is go up to new this little drop-down and
you'll see there's even a new project template that's been created. If you
click on this a new document will be created and then a template will be
presented with problem, solution, rabbit holes, out-of-bounds, success criteria. So
this is using all of the shape up terminology here and has a little
description under each as to what you should use this section to cover. So now
that we're back here you can see I've got my new project. We have developed
this flow for projects we think it works really well. So if you have an idea you
just throw it into the ideas column. This is things that most likely you're
probably not actually going to implement or do for your business and so just
throw in all the ideas here and it's not going to be very complete it's just
going to be a couple bullets maybe a couple thoughts you can drag some
comments and ideas in there and then at some point you may say you know what
these two or three projects are worth taking the time to build out and shape
and write all the problem the solution and really break down and figure out
exactly what this project is going to include and that's where you can move it
to shaping and this is where you can focus on actually getting it shaped and
you may spend all that time shaping it get it shaped and leave it in this
shaped status. Now you may never actually start on it but you could have two or
three projects really well formulated in your mind you may end up going back and
doing a version two or a version three of this project on paper before you
actually are starting to do the work for it so this has been very helpful
especially if you're doing complex projects like an app development or
something where there's a lot of complexity to it you'll notice that
there is there's going to be a huge value add by you iterating on this in
kind of small steps so just putting it in here and then coming back and revising
it and and editing on paper before you start to actually do the work so you can
note it as started in progress and when you're done you can drop it down to this
hidden group which is the completed and also you may even take some of these
ideas and just drag them right over to rejected the cool thing is you can
always click on this and open it back up and grab that project and bring it back
in case you want to bring it back nothing's really ever deleted it's just
sort of hidden from view so that is the sort of status board way to look at the
at this and and as you know there's a lot of customization here as far as the
different fields and things that you can add and make visible so this is a very
high-level overview in this video but we could probably go into some more depth
and other videos as to the whole shaping process so this is not a shaping shape
tutorial this is just how to use this notion template so stay tuned for more
of those trainings to be on the site soon
So jumping over to the views again there's a great timeline view where you
can actually drop a start date and an end date for your project and of course
you can zoom out. I'll prefer this quarterly view and you can kind of
arrange this just however you want. Very very helpful and again if you click on
this you're just being brought to that pop-up where you can continue to edit
this document. So it's just looking at the exact same data but in a number of
different views. So if we click on this I'll take a second and just point out
that there is an appetite here there is a place if you track like 30 if you do
want to do a one week it tracks 30 hours and if you wanted to you could keep
track of your actual time here and it will do the math and tell you how much
time is remaining and if you had multiple people on your team you can
assign this to specific people in your Notion account. If you're doing work for
clients or for a section for a for a category or different parts of your
business you can add this filter and again you can continue to add properties
here as many as you want and really customize this to be to fit your unique
business. This is what we use for our development company and we're doing a
lot of client work and so this this works well for us. So the last view is
just the table view and again this is just kind of looking at it more of like
a spreadsheet view and just remember that you can go to properties and you
can adjust everything that you're seeing here to turn them on and off and these
are very custom. You're not deleting any of these properties you're just hiding
specific properties from view so you can kind of have a specific layout that will
help you kind of see things a little bit differently here. So remember there
are filters that you can be added so once you have you know hundreds of
projects or even another project you want to just filter down to a small
amount of projects use the filter and you can say things like you know if the
client is you know client one then show me all those projects and you can create
that as a view and then if you want to create another view for a different
client for example. So that is the Notion database and template you just want to
leave this somewhere in your workspace and you can reference it anywhere in
your Notion workspace. So highly recommend if you haven't checked out
ShapeUp that everything I'm showing you here will make a lot more sense if you
have kind of skimmed this book. So if you have any questions you guys know where
to find me and I'd be happy to answer those for you and help you get this
template set up in your workspace.