This is the intro paragraph, probably best to leave to the end ... you need to figure out a hook. What was the theme I was going for ... more of a the humble filter is a core building block of Notion's capability.
[TODO: You need an intro]Getting Overwhelmed is Easy when starting out with NotionThis is the sidenote.
It doesn't have to be. If you approach working with Notion as a series of building blocks, what you'll find is that what look like some really complicated setups in Notion are a core set of patterns repeated. So, let's start to demystify what those patterns are and see if we can apply them incrementally.
Starting with a .txt file 'todo.txt'
Let's start with the most simplest of things. A plain old text file and in that text file each line simply represents an action that we have determined we'd like to take. [Keep in mind, there are sum people who believe that, because you can only really be working on one thing at at time, that something like this is really all you need. I'll set that idea aside for just a minute and return to it later].
Setting up the initial text file is pretty straightforward - just give it a name and start listing out the actions that you want to take. The first challenge we'll figure out is that as we complete items ... they'll still be showing in our list .. we can fix this by creating a prefix like DONE or filling in an imaginary checkbox. So far so good ... but we can already see how this is going to get a little bit tedious - as we complete things off of our list, we'll likely want to either cut and paste them to a different section of the file, maybe underneath a line called done or something similar.
This is the first building block
Categorizing an action by either done or not done. It is kind of a binary, yes or no type thing so a check box which is either checked or not is easily the most simplest. Creating something like this in Notion is pretty much as trivial as doing it within a text file. The below video walks through it ... [TODO create a video]
The advantage you gain here is that you now no longer need to be copy and pasting to move things around - you can simply use a filter. This is 100% not something that is unique to Notion, by the way, however, I think that remember that so much of the more complex layouts that are used in Notion are based on this simple, straightforward building block is useful because there are so many things that you can achieve with it. For example, you aren't limited to just a binary category of done or not; you could categorize things David Allen style into something like @errands or @phonecalls and you would be able to immediately see what your next action was within those contexts. We'll cover ways those could be used in the next post.