3 Ways to Create a To-Do List in Notion (Managing Tasks with Linked Databases)

Welcome back to another video today. I want to talk to you all about my favorite productivity tool, Notion. Now, I’ve used a lot of different productivity tools, everything from Trello to Asana, to just a pen and paper, and while I still do love a pen and paper every once in a while, I rely solely on an app called Notion to run my business life and my personal life. Today, I’m specifically going to be talking about to-do lists in Notion and how you can create three different types of to-do lists or three different styles of to-do lists, depending on how tech savvy you are, how advanced you are of a Notion user.

We’re going to start from something really, really basic, and then move up to something a little more advanced as we go.

Before we dive into today’s video. I wanted to tell you about a recent video, I made all about my Notion content calendar set up. If you’re an advanced user, it’s definitely something you can create yourself. It’s pretty cool how I have everything set up and interconnected. And if you’re just starting out and you want to just take all my templates and use them for yourself, you can join my membership, the Creator Club.

I’ll add a link around this video, and to that other video. So, you can go check it out and to the Creator Club membership. If you want to learn more about it.

I think one of my favorite things about Notion is that when you open a new page in Notion, it’s completely blank and you can do whatever you want with it. You can write on it just like you would a Google Doc, or you can fill it in with tables and make it more of a complex system.

The first type of to-do list we’re going to set up, it’s just a really basic Monday through Friday checklist where you can move different tasks around, add them really easily to your schedule and check them off as you complete them.

I’m going to start first by just typing out Monday through Friday.
Next, I’m dragging them all side by side so I can create this really nice Monday through Friday view. And actually, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to create this as a full width page. So that way I have a much wider space to work with. Then, just because I like color I’m going to go ahead and turn all of these a different color. So, it’s kind of more fun to look at. You can customize any text in Notion by highlighting it and then clicking on these little dots next to it. And then for these ones, I’m going to turn them into an H 3. So, they’re just a little bit bigger and they stand out on the page.

Now, we get to add our checklist items. So, I’m going to go ahead and add in a checklist, and I’ll show you how easy it is to add new items to your to-do list and to drag them between different days.
I’ll use the forward slash to open up the command’s menu, and then I’m going to start typing to-do, to get those checkboxes, to pop up.

Now you can start adding in your to-do list items and I’ll show you how easy it is to drag them from one day to the next. Another cool thing you could do is break these down into business and personal tasks if you want it to. You can create a header for business, a header for personal, and then just drag the checklist items under each one.

Now, if I like this layout, I’m going to select it, copy it and paste it under each day so that I have them all looking the same. There you have it as super simple Notion to-do list. The only downside to this type of to-do list is that it doesn’t let you take advantage of Notion databases, which allow you to check items off your list and move them to a different list or filter them by certain properties. I’m going to show you that type of to-do list in just a second.

To create a to-do list, using a database inside of Notion. I’m going to enter down a few lines below my earlier one, hit that forward slash and start typing table.
Then, I’m going to choose inline at table as my option. And I’m going to name this table To-Do List.

Now, you can see that each item in this to-do list is actually its own page inside of Notion that you can open separately.
You can type in your to-do list items, just like we did the first time around.

As I opened one of these items, I can see that I have the option to add properties.

The first thing I’m going to do is create a property for personal and business tasks. So, I can separate them out if I want to.
I’m going to create a new property, call it, type that I’m going to have it be a select property. And then for my options, I’m going to add personal and I’m going to add business. And then I’m going to select which one fits for each one of these tasks. So, email Kim is going to be a business task. This is personal, this is personal.

And this one is business. You can also add a ton of different properties. If you had a team, you could create a, person property and assign it to somebody on your team and create a date property if there’s a specific to do list item that has a deadline. You can add files and media. If you wanted to upload a photo.

You could create a checkbox property. So, I’m going to do a checkbox property here and call this one Done. And that way I can check off the item on my to-do list when it’s done. And I’m also able to rearrange these just by simply clicking and dragging them around. I’m going to remove this default tags property. Cause I just don’t need it right now. And maybe I’ll go ahead and add the deadline like we talked about. So, I’m going to have a date property, call this deadline, and then I could come in here and select a due date. And I can also create a reminder if I want to.
Okay. Now let’s add a deadline for some of these items.

Another thing I want to add is a priority. So, I’m going to create a new property and call it priority. And then I’m going to have this also be a select property and I’m going to have a high, medium and then a low. And I’m going to drag this up here. I want that to be the first one I see. And then I am going to sort these by priority. This to-do list could be done as is, but I want to show you a few ways to make it even more custom and to create different views based on the data that you want to look at.

Come up here to the top and choose, add a view, and I’m going to create a Kanban board, sort of like a Trello board. Right now, it’s sorting by personal and business tasks. I actually want to change this to group by priority and that way I can now see my high priority, then medium and my low priority tasks all in one place. And then if I want to, I can drag these around as they become more or less important.

As your to do the list gets longer it’s going to be kind of frustrating. If all of the items that you’ve done are still hanging around on your to-do list. So, what I’m going to show you next is how to filter out all of your completed items. So, you no longer have to see them cluttering your view.

We’re going to click on filter over here on the right under those three dots. We’re going to add a filter. And I am going to say when done is unchecked and that way it’s only showing me items that I have, unchecked and it’s ignoring everything else,
But say, I want to still see some of those items that I’ve recently completed. I don’t want them to disappear altogether. In case I accidentally checked one off. This is where linked databases come in. I’m going to hit that forward slash button and type in linked database. And then I am going to pull in my to-do list.

As you can see, that’s basically just made a copy of the first database. The only difference is it’s back to the original view that we had set up. I can even turn this one back to the original default view as well, just by clicking this button over here.

What I want to do with this second to-do list here is show recently completed items. But first I have to know which items have been edited recently. So, I’m going to click into any one of these items and I’m going to add a new property and this property is going to be one of their advanced properties.

I’m going to say last edited time. And I’m going to call that here. Last edit. Come back to my to-do list. Now I’m going to come over here and filter and select where done is checked off and where last edited. That is let’s see here is with then that’s. What I want to do is within the past week. Now, what I’m going to do is create headers for both of these databases. So, I know which one is which. So, I’m going to go over here and hit H2 and call this to-do list. And I am going to color this in blue. Then, I’m going to create a, another one. And I actually want this to go all the way across for now.

I’m going to create another one H2 and call this recently completed. And we’re going to color this one blue as well. And then what am I doing? I’m going to drag this so that it falls right next to the other one. And I want recently completed to be a, to be a little bit smaller than my main to-do list.

This top one is my main to-do list. So, I’m going to drag this under that first header. And the second one is my recently completed to-do list. And then I have to go back for this and go back to that view we created where I filtered out. So now I can see these are my these are all my to-do list items that have yet to be completed.

These are my recently completed. I’ve got my little done check box here. I’ve got all the items that I need. I’m actually going, pull this done one over to the beginning and move this over. See how flexible this is? And then say I accidentally, I checked that by accident. All I do is uncheck these and they’re going to disappear from this one and pop back over to this database here.

And then if I check items off, they’re going to fall under the recently completed items on the right. But this is just a nice way to have a quick list to show you, know, what are those recently completed tasks in case you accidentally, checked one off or in case you want to click into any these tasks to learn more about them.

Because filtering in Notion is so, so powerful. I highly recommend you create one Notion database for all of your task items. And then you use filters and linked databases to show different versions of that based on what you want to look at.

If you’re interested in learning more about Notion and you want to see more videos like this one, let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you. Also, don’t forget to subscribe, so you don’t miss any more videos from this channel.

Thanks so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.