How to Use Time Blocking in Notion

I. Introduction (0:00-0:53)

• Brief overview of the topic of the video: creating custom time tags with KaTeX and using them for time blocking in Notion
• Preview of the sections to come

II. Custom Time Tags With KaTeX (0:53-2:54)

• Step-by-step explanation on how to create custom time tags using KaTeX in Notion
• How these custom tags can be used to display time in a more visually pleasing way
• Demonstration of how to implement these tags in a time blocking template

III. Single Day Time Blocking (2:54-6:08)

• Discussion on how to use the custom time tags for single day time blocking in Notion
• Step-by-step instructions on how to set up a single day time blocking template using the custom tags
• Examples of how this template can be used in different scenarios

IV. Multi-day Time Blocking (6:08-9:45)

• Discussion on how to expand the single day time blocking template to cover multiple days
• How to adjust the template to cover a full week or multiple weeks
• Demonstration of how to use the template for different scheduling needs

V. Ways to use the Time Table (9:45-11:32)

• Discussion of different ways the time blocking template can be used for personal and professional tasks
• Examples of how this template can be used for different purposes, such as project management, daily planning, and goal setting.

VI. Outro (11:32)

• Recap of key points covered in the video
• Encouragement for viewers to try out the custom time tags and time blocking template for themselves
• Reminder of links to resources mentioned in the video.

‍

I want to show you how to implement time blocking inside of Notion. Time blocking is a time management approach that prompts you to divide your tasks into blocks of time in the day. Unlike my other videos, this is not going to be a database. We are actually going to create this time blocking template inside the body of the page with template buttons.

With that being said, I am going to implement this page inside of a 2021 planner. That planner is available to duplicate down below. It just has all of the dates for this year already pre-filled inside of a database. What we're going to do is put this time blocking template inside of this database so that any particular day that you want to implement time blocking you can. And we'll also look at how to style a page so that we can time block for multiple days, not just one day.

Let's just get right into it. If you're curious on how I set up my 2021 planner with all the dates already pre-filled, there will be a link down below if you guys want to check that out. But let's just go right into the main part of this database and create a template. I've already created a new timetable template. We're just going to go ahead and edit it.

Off-camera, I pre-filled all of my times so I have everything from 5 a.m to 12 a.m here. You can see that I've divided it up a little bit so it's easier to look at. I have sort of the early morning here, and then the mid-morning, the afternoon in green, the evening in blue and later at night in purple.

I also designed these times in the way of inline equations or K texts. This is a functionality in Notion that allows you to not only create math equations but also design your text in particular ways, with different color schemes and different stylings. Let me show you how I've designed these times in particular.

Actually, let's create a template. Let's go for slash template button. So, let's just say new time and I do want to zoom in a little bit so you can see it better. And I'm going to duplicate what I have up here and that's just going dollar sign dollar sign and what I like to do is just go uh ellipses so three dots and then two dollar signs at the end. And this will trigger an inline equation from here. What I have is backslash text color and in brackets the color of the bullet point that I want. Let's say in this instance I want teal and I want it to be a bullet point. So I'm going backslash bullet. There's a plane going by, I live very close to an airport so I have to constantly wait for these planes to go by.

Okay, next I'm going to go backslash text and put in the text I want after this bullet point, which in this case may be like 12 30 a.m. I'm gonna press close. And now every time I press this button a new time will show up, and I can go in and I can adjust what I need to adjust. You'll notice that after clicking on this template all of the duplicated fields have shown up below the template button. If you don't want that to be the case, I don't usually, I want it to all appear above. You'll notice all of these blank boxes below.

I want to get rid of all of these all the way up to my template button.If I go to press this button now, all the times will appear above the button.Quick tip: If you want to highlight an entire block and duplicate it, go to that block, press escape on your keyboard, it will highlight the entire block, and then go command d to duplicate.

I'm going to duplicate this and drag it over next to time, and I'm going to rename it to event. Make this bold as well. I'm just going to highlight all of these times here with that template button, and I'm going to drag it underneath time so this column here. And then I'm going to drag this column over. Maybe give event a background color of red.

And then below this, we're going to create another template button so forward slash template button and in here, let's say the name is add new block. Time let's just leave it like that for now. What I'm going to do is go forward to do create a to-do box here and say new block. From here, what I want to do is just return or enter and then tab over, I want this to be a nested block.

I'm gonna backspace because I don't want it to be a to-do list and then just enter down one more time. Now, if I go up to these six dots, it will highlight all of its nested blocks as well, and I just want to change the background color to gray. You'll see now that this block of color is flush with each block of time, this is flush with an entire hour time from 5:30 to 6:30. Of course, you can arrange your times in different ways, you can have four blocks of time equal one hour, you can do 15-minute intervals, you can do hour intervals, you can do whatever you'd like. So every single time I press this template button, a new block will appear above it. If I want to drag these blocks out for more time, maybe this block of time here I want it to be from 8 am to 10:30 am, I can just press enter a couple times and it will extend. I can also change the color of this block to maybe pink.

You can start creating kind of like a little color scheme. Me personally, I like doing color schemes that aren't necessarily dependent on difficulty or priority. I like doing it by type, so I might have green blocks be writing articles, blue blocks be for managing emails or admin something like that. If I click on any day within my planner now, I have the option to create a new timetable.

And I can go ahead and plan for April 24th. Let's go over to the original daily document page and create something that is a little bit more complex. Where we can plan for multiple days right down here at the bottom of the 2021 planner. We're going to create a almost like a weekly or really I want to create a three-day planner. So we're just going to go ahead and make three different columns in addition to this time column, but you can always add more columns if you want to do that. And again, let's just drag all of these time blocks underneath of the time column, duplicate this one more time so this will be for tomorrow, and then another one for the next day, adjust this a couple notches, bring this.

Into the center here now what I want to do is replace some of these headers. So the first one I want to be at today. So that's just the at symbol and today. And that'll give me a date. So let's do at tomorrow and then when we're done with the three days we can delete every one of these columns and start over for the next week or the next three days. However many uh intervals of days you want to use here.

And let's get started making those templates so do what we did before and just go forward slash template template button. But before we configure it let's configure it outside of the template let's go forward slash to do. New block enter tab, just delete that and then enter again. Highlight this gray and slide it right into this configuration.

So I want to do a little bit more with this. Really it depends on your screen size like if this is useful or not because as you create more columns these blocks become narrower and narrower and that can be kind of annoying because if I were to go and type in some description of a task. It will automatically wrap that text. So a way to get around this it's a little bit of a hacky work around but what I'm going to do is create a toggle I'm going to go forward slash toggle and I'm actually just going to enter an emoji here.

And inside of this clipboard we're going to put in any sort of extra information we want for this block a description, a list of subtasks. So I can go forward slash code. What I want to do is create a code box so capture a code snippet is the description of this inside of here. We can start writing some descriptions. And the reason why I'm using this is because if I go to these three dots here where it says wrap code I'm going to make sure that's turned off which it should be automatically and then I can just write as much as I want and it will extend horizontally instead of vertically. This is really helpful so let's just keep that there and that'll be our time block for our weekly view or our next three days view.

So add new time block add new time block and let's just duplicate this another two times again. We're going to make sure that there are no empty blocks below this button so that each new block adds to the top of the button. And to extend it another amount of hours I can just keep pressing that enter button within the nested blocks. Let's say there's an instance where maybe this block here on tuesday I actually want to work on this today as well. I can go up to this parent block here that says new block and command d to duplicate and then just drag it over to today.

What I can also do is nest time blocks I thought this was really interesting like let's say for this block here under today I duplicate it and it's actually going to be a part of this task over here the second gray task under tuesday or rather let's do the one.

Tomorrow, we have a task that relates to product review. I am going to nest it under this gray block. You will have to take a look at what time it associates and maybe adjust accordingly. You can also press the plus button next to this green block and the yellow block will extend. So, you can really have fun with this.

When you're done with the three days or the week that you have set up in order to quickly delete everything, I recommend doing is pressing shift and going down to the last block and clicking it. You can delete an entire row by clicking on the parent in the first block, shift down to the last, and then just adjusting these dates to Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday when those days come around.

Let me know in the comments what you guys use time blocking for. I'm curious if you already use something like this inside of Notion or outside of Notion and why or why not. Also, as always, there will be links down below to duplicate this template or to simply just take a look at what we made here. There will also be a Discord link in the description if you have any more specific questions you want to ask me about Notion.

That's about it, so I will see you guys the rest of the week on Twitter and next week with a new video. I'll see you then.

‍