Notion Basics: Pages, Databases, and Getting Started

continuing along here with Notion. We've just signed up, and this is the first page you see afterward. It doesn't really matter which one of these you choose, so pick whatever makes sense for you. You can tell it that you want to let it improve by sharing your workspace data to get better answers. I'm not going to do that, and I'm not going to agree to marketing communications. But you can choose whatever you'd like. When we go in here, it asks who else is on your team. I'm going to say nobody. You can also choose to let anyone with your URL join. I'm not going to do that. I can get the business plan free for 30 days and then pay $24 a month, or I can just stay on the free plan that gives me 1,000 blocks, basic forms, and basic sites. That's all I need. I can get the desktop app or skip for now. I'm going to go ahead and get it and let it download. "Start with a free setup session." Oh, this is nice. You can get a Notion expert on a call for 30 minutes to help you go through it. Maybe you want to take advantage of that. I'm not going to. So we're going to get our workspace set up. I'm going to keep setting it up on the web for now, then I might switch to the desktop version, because it is faster and nicer. But I want to show you some of the obvious things in Notion. First, it wants to start off with Notion AI, which I'm not very interested in. So I'm going to go over here and look at the sidebar. Oh, pardon me, it's telling me I can lock the sidebar. I can do that like this. Okay, so I lock the sidebar with a keyboard shortcut, and now we can see what we have over here: team spaces, agents, library, help, trash, notes. It's already a little overwhelming again. But really, here's the one thing you need to know about Notion. Everything is either a page or a database, or I guess an AI conversation. But apart from that, it's either a page or a database. A page is a document. It's something you write on. It's a note, something you can leave comments on, and it's like a Wikipedia page. I can type notes and additional information. This is a place for me to organize different information. It's just a page. You can think of it like a Word doc that lives in the cloud. It's nothing scary. You already know how to do this kind of stuff. It's obvious, right? This is the stuff for one-off meeting notes, a draft, places for Claude or whoever to leave you information. So I can add a new note. I can say I just want it to be a regular empty page. I can put in here, "Example: here I am leaving a note in Notion." This note can now be saved, shared, moved around, renamed, and stored in data. We're going to get to all of that. Now, the other thing we can do is create a database. To do this, I'm just going to go into a page and hit forward slash. We can see we can get headings, bullet lists, all the things we're used to. I can drop in media like images. But then under database, I can choose a table, a board, a gallery, a list, a feed, a dashboard, a calendar. There are different ways to add these. Let's start with something we all know really well, like a table view. In this database, I can name it. I can call it a record collection. The name of the first record is "Thriller." Maybe the next property I add is the artist. Oh, select type. Sorry, I need to select a type. It's a text type, and it's going to be artist. Under artist I could put Michael Jackson, and then I could have other things, like whether it's on vinyl or CD, whatever I need to build this record collection. So this could be Asia, it could be my Steely Dan, and we could keep adding rows just like we would in a spreadsheet. That's the ability to store data and to store pages. But I don't want to sit here creating these by hand. It probably hasn't taken you long to realize I'm not good at creating these, because what I want is to have Claude build them for me, so that eventually I have a working Notion database I can use to run my business. That's exactly what I plan on doing. Looking at my other Notion, the one I use for my real work, you can see I get my daily brief in here every single day. So instead of going to look in Claude, I just come here every day, look at it in a calendar view, and grab the daily brief I want. You can see it's been running for months. I come in, grab the brief, and read it. I also keep my CRM here, where I have backgrounds on all the people I'm meeting with: my CRM, some prospecting queues, the companies, the engagements, a database of local coaches. Pardon me, the engagement queue. You can see I also have a project management hub. This is where all my project management happens, and where I keep Claude's memory. We'll have videos on this, where his skills, short-term memory, and to-dos live, where I get reporting and open action items. I also get things like my company research queues, task trackers, and task logs from Claude. I'm a Vistage Chair, so I have things that are part of my Vistage practice: meeting with members, one-on-ones, and hosting meetings. I have marketing, which includes reading the business journal, LinkedIn, and Apollo, the things I do to stay on top of who's in the news and who's doing what, so when I'm out doing marketing I'm informed. And then, of course, I have my to-do lists and my weekly reviews, which are like my daily briefs rolled up. All of this lives inside my Notion in a simple, organized, easy-to-find way, so I don't have to dig through tons of Claude history just to figure out what's going on. What matters for the rest of this track is this: when Claude builds our systems, it's building a database where files, meeting notes, and everything we're having it do has a place to live that's easy to find, instead of being buried down in chats. The other thing it does is disconnect us from vendor lock-in. If I want to point ChatGPT at my Notion, it can. If I want to point Perplexity at my Notion, it can read it and use it. All that memory, all those histories, all that work stays in one place. So I want you to go open Notion, make a page, type in anything, and make one database with a couple of rows. Even if you mess it up, that's fine. We're going to delete it, because that's the whole assignment. After this, we're going to have Claude do the building. But I want you to have at least logged in, touched it, and played around. So: page or database, a note or a list of notes. That's it. Now, the next video is a fun one. We're going to connect Claude, and you're going to watch it build the first real thing while you sit there and do nothing. See you there.