Complete Goals Faster with this Notion Priority Tracker

I. IntroductionA. Explanation of the topic (Notion Priority Tracker)B. Purpose of the video

II. How does this work?A. Explanation of the concept of priority trackingB. Benefits of using a priority trackerC. Overview of how the Notion Priority Tracker works

III. How to Build the Notion Priority TrackerA. Step by step instructions on how to set up the trackerB. Tips and tricks for customizing the tracker to fit your needsC. Demonstration of how to use the tracker

IV. OutroA. Recap of the key points covered in the videoB. Encouragement to try out the Notion Priority TrackerC. Additional resources or next steps for those interested in learning more.

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Hey there guys, how's it going? My name is Carter Surach and in today's video I'm going to show you how to improve your prioritization using Notion.

This system is pretty easy to set up. It's pretty simple, but it's very effective. If you've ever had a list of 10, 20, maybe even 30 to-dos and you've just kind of wondered like where do I start with this thing, trust me, I've been there too and I've tried lots of different things.

If I hit new and I add something in here and I would say the difficulty is easy and that is going to get a 0.5 score and that belongs at the bottom of this list. So let's just mark it as very easy and as you can see that gets moved to the top of the list.

Now we're going to copy this and we're going to set this formula up to work for all of these different values: low, medium, high, very high and epic. What I'm really interested in is helping you guys reach your big ambitious goals or even just your small sprint goals that you might have for yourself. So this is really going to work for anybody who has any sort of goal, no matter what time span you're looking at because you can always rethink this and rethink exactly what you're prioritizing for.

There's going to be two parts of this video. First, I'm going to show you how this thing works. I'm going to give you an example of how it works in action and just give you an idea of why this is so powerful. And then right after that, I'm going to show you from A to Z exactly how to build it. You're also going to learn some valuable things along the way while you're building this. You're going to learn a lot more about formulas.

If you just want to take advantage of this Notion tutorial and you don't really want to learn the building part of this, that's fine. I'm going to have a template in the description as well. So just click the link down there and that'll take you to a place where you can enter your email and then it will email you over a link to the template.

Without further ado, let's get into showing you how this thing is going to work.

All right here we go guys, this is the priority tracker that I've been hyping up. We have a goal of saving time. That is something that's very important to note because you have to set your intention with this as well for whatever your current life goal is to be saving time. It could be making more money, it could be improving your family life, it could really be anything. But I'm going to keep it at saving time.

Now, what this is doing is it's sorting these actions based on a ratio. This ratio score right here between impact score and difficulty score. And if you take a look on impact, very high equals a 40 on this score. If I went to epic it would be a 50 impact score. So what this is doing is it's taking 40 and it's dividing it by 10.

So the higher the ratio here, the more impactful this will be, the more of a low-hanging fruit it will be towards your saving time goal. So for this particular goal, I'm going to have to map my impact and my difficulty to saving time. I'm going to give it some bullet points here:

• Impact: Doing something once then not having to do it again (i.e automate cutting something out to get more time back).
• Impact: Hiring someone to help you get some time

Get some time back.

Or it could be something like are you learning a new skill or are you improving on your skill so that you can get it done faster and that would be like accelerating right so you're going to want to think of your tasks through this angle and then you're also going to want to reverse this as well reverse this theory because if you're automating, eliminating, delegating or accelerating your impact is going to be like epic if you're doing all of these things, especially if your goal is saving time.

But if you think about the inverse of these things, what is the inverse of automating? Well, having to do something over and over and over again. So, this would be the anti-automate and if you're anti-automate, you're going to be a low impact which right there it changed the order of this task. Now, what's anti-eliminate? I would say adding to the things that are taking up your time. Again, if you're starting to see this in the actions you're going to want to mark them with a lower impact score. Hiring someone to help you get some time back. What is the opposite of that? Doing something yourself, that's the anti-eliminate. Now, what's the opposite of improving the speed of a skill or process? I would say not doing, okay, so or doing too much of the same thing. I hope that this has clarified a little bit how you can think about this sorting database.

Okay, so when we're thinking about our impact we have to think about our goal. So, what is our goal? Our goal is saving time. So, if our goal is saving time, these are some things that we know we want to look out for. We want to look out for something that's doing something once then not having to do it again. That would be like hiring the laundry company and we also want to look out for the opposite of that so having to do something over and over and over again which would be more like doing your laundry and as you can see this list does the perfect job of differentiating hiring a laundry company and doing the laundry. What's at the top of the list? Hiring the laundry company. What's at the bottom? Doing the laundry. What's our goal? Saving time, you know doing something once not having to do it again. Cutting something out to get more time cutting out laundry, adding to the things that are taking up your time. I would say that this is only going to take up your time once and it's a very easy call to make.

So, that's the next thing that I want to get into difficulty. So, with difficulty, I could think of this as time-consuming, energy monopolizing. So, some things are more energy-monopolizing, you know they're going to require more willpower, they're going to require more brainpower. These are the things that are going to be mentally and physically taxing to you. So, here's what you're thinking of when you're marking the difficulty of a task. Is it time-consuming? Is it energy monopolizing? Does it require more willpower? More brain power, etc. And I just want to repeat once more you're going to want to think of this through the lens of your goal. So, whatever your goal is, think about how you can be impactful towards that goal and what the difficulty vector looks like for that goal and then that's how you go about filling this thing out.

If I hit "New" and I add something in here, every time I add something like "Take the dog for a walk," and then you know I go to "Impact," it's from a time perspective it's definitely low. And I would say the difficulty is easy, and that is going to get a 0.5 score and that belongs at the bottom of this list.

Now, if I did something like hire someone to walk the dog, I could move that up the list. So, we could move it to something like very high impact because it's gonna save you over you know probably hundreds of trips in the future, hundreds of time sucks in the future. So then you can go and mark the difficulty, how hard is this to do? I would say it's probably ranging from very easy to easy. So let's just mark it as very easy, and as you can see that gets moved to the top of the list, hiring the laundry company, hiring someone to walk the dog, hiring a personal trainer so you don't have to, you know, plan your workouts and stuff like that.

And I would say it's okay to have some ones on your list, you want to try to limit the ones as much as possible, but it's not okay to have point fives on your list and actually be doing these things. These things should be archived, okay these things should be removed from your list altogether. So if I was looking at this list right now, I would just want to remove these things from the list, and I would try to think of actions that would save time to put at the top of the list. And the further up this goes, the more important it's going to be.

All right, now I'm going to show you guys how to build this priority tracker. So, what you're going to do is you're going to create a new table, you can create a full page table by just creating a page and then going and clicking table, and then following along from here. Or, you can create an inline table if you're just going to practice this one time and you don't want to link this anywhere later. But if you want to put this on your home page or whatever, I recommend just creating that page table and then hitting create linked database and then selecting your database here and just putting the priority tracker wherever you want it in your account.

In this video, I'm just going to use an inline database. And if you want to learn more about databases and why I would use an inline versus a full page, I have a great tutorial on it, I think it's the best tutorial on youtube, and I don't say that with any overconfidence, I've just been told that by a lot of people. It's the best databases tutorial on youtube for notion, so definitely check that out if you haven't seen it already.

And I'm going to call this the priority tracker. This first column here, we're going to call task or action, whatever it is that you want to call it. And here we're going to hit select and we're going to change this one to impact so this is going to be where we derive our impact score from. And then we're also going to create another property called it's going to be select, we're going to call it difficulty. Next, we're going to create another property and this one's going to be a checkbox property, we're going to name it done question mark.

You're just getting the checkbox so you don't have to see the name of it because it's pretty self-explanatory what this is.

And now we're going to add to our impact and difficulty columns so you can add as many as you want but I would say it's good to have the same amount of each for impact. If we have five words to use to rank our tasks it's good to have five words on difficulty as well so that you can get a more even ratio. So for impact I'm going to put low, medium, high, and very high. And then you could put epic as well that just transcends all the others. So these are going to be the things that are like very important right.

And then on difficulty we're going to do very easy, easy, medium, hard and very hard. Okay, so now we've got one, two, three, four, five and we've got one, two, three, four, five.

I like to change the colors of these, you guys don't have to do this but I like to kind of start with maybe a red. So now that these are in here we have to assign a score to them and you can add a few sample tasks too. So let's just do task task 1 and task 2. I recommend adding five total in here so one, two, three, four, five and then you can assign impact to each of these.

This is going to help us diagnose if our formula is working and we want to remember this goal up here guys remember that we don't want to lose sight of this throughout this entire process when we're entering our tasks especially. And when we're kind of filling this out next you want to add a formula column so I'm going to go to property type we're going to go to formula under advanced and you're going to give this a name of impact score.

Then you're going to go to property type formula this one's going to be difficulty score. And finally we're going to have this last one called ratio and you could call it priority ratio because this is really the number that we're going to sort by when it comes down to it.

So for impact score actually you're going to want to come down here add a code block. This is the easiest way to do it, you don't have to do it this way but I like to just code in the code block instead of using this small type of formula for the entire thing.

So for impact we're going to put, well what we're trying to do with this impact column here is we're trying to map it to low, medium, high, very high and epic so we're trying to assign a number to each of these. So what I do is I say if and then I go parentheses and I start typing prop because that stands for property and you're going to see all of your properties pop up here you're going to see impact click on impact. Okay and it's going to insert it just how it needs to be if property is impact and it's equal to low. I just put two equal signs there and we're going to put quotation marks around low and then we're going to put a comma and we're going to put what we want this to equal so 10 and then we're going to put another comma and a zero and then we're going to close that off okay.

And if you did this correctly you should see the impact score here is 10. Now we're going to copy this and we're going to set this formula up to work for all of these different values low, medium, high, very high and epic.

Now, we're going to copy this and we're going to set this formula up to work for all of these different values: low, medium, high, very high, and epic. So, I'm going to copy this command, c, hit done and we're going to pull our attention down to this code block here.

And I'm just going to paste that in here. Now I'm going to get rid of this parentheses and this 0 because those are actually meant for the end of this entire formula so you'll see what I mean in a moment. We now have to define the rest of these values for impact. So, I'm going to copy this, I'm going to paste it, and now we're saying if property of impact is medium, okay if it's medium, now we're going to be a notch up we're going to go to 20.

Okay, so this is just giving this a set of instructions to fill this out properly. All right, so I'm going to copy this one and we're going to go again, we're going to paste it and we're going to go hi, 30. Copy paste, very high, 40. It's simple guys you can do this for as many as you want. If you want to have 10 impact rankings you could, if you want some more nuance in your scores and some more specific prioritization you can do that. Epic go into 50. And then here's where we have to enter zero so this is saying if low 10 if medium 20 if high 30 if very high 40 if epic 50 if not one of these it's zero that's what this is saying. So if you haven't filled it out yet we're gonna leave this as zero and then you have to close this off.

So we have to look and see how many parentheses are opened up here, we have one, two, three, four, five so I'm gonna go one, two, three, four, five then we're going to copy this, highlight it, hit command c and go up to the impact score and now we're just going to get rid of that old property and we're going to paste and we're going to hit done. Now it says 10 20 30 40 50 because it's low, medium, high, very high, and epic.

Now the difficulty score is going to be very easy because it's the same exact thing. All we have to do is switch out some names here. So, I'm going to copy this command c and then I'm going to enter and I'm going to paste that now. I'm going to enter the word exactly how it's written here. If it's not written exactly how it is here this won't work, but I'm going to write difficulty perfect. Now I'm going to go very easy, easy, and let's actually copy this, paste it for all of these because we still have prop impact in there.

But if I paste it for all of these now, I can just get rid of vary on that one of course, I have to change it to 20 30 40 50 or 0 1 2 3 4 5 and then on this, I'm also going to have to go medium hard, and very hard. Okay, and I'm basing that on the property difficulty right there, and then the value of each of these so very easy is a 10 because low is a 10. That's the lowest ranking on impact and that's the lowest ranking on very easy.

So now if I copy this command c and I paste it here, hit done.

Now it's 10 to 10, 20 to 20, 30 to 30, and this is the easiest part actually this formula right here, the priority ratio. Now that we have these we can hit impact score.

Then we're going to do a slash to divide and difficulty score and what's going to do is it's going to divide the impact score by the difficulty score. So now it's a one to one on all of these.

But now let's say task number four the impact was epic, so it's the highest that it can possibly be, and the difficulty was very easy, the lowest it could possibly be. That would mean that this has a score of five. And as you can see this is still at the bottom, but this should actually be at the top of your list.

So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this right here, we're going to go to sort, add a sort, and we're going to go to priority ratio descending. And now it's going to rank these in descending order. So if we have a 5 that's the most important thing.

And remember, guys, the impact should map to what is impactful towards your ultimate goal. In my case, in this example, I had saving time as my ultimate goal and these were the impactful things and the opposite of the impactful thing if you remember early in this video. So the most impactful it can be, in the most of these things that it can do, the higher it will be on your impact score. It will be an epic if it has all of these things and it does them all really well.

Now, if you look at these anti-automate, anti-eliminate, anti-delegate, anti-accelerate, those are going to be very low impact. So keep that in mind and then when you're thinking about difficulty think about how time consuming, how energy monopolizing it is, which means like how much willpower or brain power does it take. And if it doesn't have a lot of these qualities, then it's going to be more towards the very easy side. If it does have a lot of these qualities, it's going to be considered very hard. So just keep that in mind.

And that's pretty much how you set this up. You can also set up a filter here if you want to get rid of tasks that are checked off. So let's say we've completed this task now, or let's say we've completed these tasks, and we want to have them disappear. Well, we can hit filter, add a filter, add filter again, and then it'll say where you're going to click and you're going to hit done is unchecked. And that's just going to show you only the unchecked items. If you want to see the other ones again, you can create an archive view. Hit create, and this one's going to have everything in it because we haven't set that filter up on this view. But if you want to go back to your main view, just go back to this table here that we first created.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that video. If you did please leave a like, it helps the channel out so much. And also, if you have a question just feel free to comment below. I usually get to about 90 of those and I get there pretty quick to make sure that I can help you out with whatever problem you're facing.

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