Utilizing Timelines for Projects in Notion

I. IntroductionA. Start of video

II. Timeline Layout for ProjectsA. Overview of timeline layoutB. Demonstration of timeline layout in action

III. Creating Timeline ViewsA. Steps for creating timeline viewsB. Tips for organizing timeline views

IV. Timelines in Action ZoneA. Description of Action ZoneB. Use of timeline views in Action Zone

V. Closing ThoughtsA. Recap of key pointsB. Preview of future contentC. Thank you and closing remarks

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Hi everyone, welcome back to our ongoing series on how to create a life operating system in Notion. Today, we're going to look at timelines. Timelines is a relatively new feature in Notion, but one that can really take certain types of databases to the next level. It gives you a visual overview that lets you interpret and understand what's going on much better than any other view we have previously had. When Notion adds a new database view, that's a really significant feature upgrade, so we definitely want to take full advantage of it.

In this video, I'm going to show you the primary way that I apply timeline views in pillars pipelines in vaults, and that's specifically for projects. There are a few other areas where I do it as well, but this is the big one where you get the most value out of the timelines feature. This video nicely follows the last two. The second to last one was about the annual review, all about laying out your game plan for the upcoming year. So now, in the timeline view, we can really chunk it out and space it out and see how we're going to implement over the first quarter, over the first six months, and over the year.

The previous video was about habits and routines, so that's a parallel track. And, how to get things done between projects and habits and routines, you can completely change your life. So, if you can execute on those two parallel tracks, you've got the game figured out. I'm going to add this functionality to the projects database that's embedded in my action zone template. The action zone is one of the premium templates I have included in my free template pack, which you can get anytime you subscribe to my free newsletter. It's going to be pre-built for you to use out of the box when you duplicate my action zone template, which is the whole daily focus implementation dashboard to the whole pillars pipelines and vault system.

Just to avoid any confusion, the action zone is one dashboard within the larger pillars pipelines and vault system. There is also the master PPV template, which is part of a paid course and that's going to be available to anyone who wants to go through the more intensive training program of the Notion PPV course, which is going to relaunch again in a couple months. The link for that is below as well. So, with that, let's dive in. We're starting in the command center and jumping straight into the alignment zone, which is where I typically do my project planning. I typically do my project execution and task management in the action zone, that's for daily focus. But, in the alignment zone, I line up longer term planning, including project planning.

This should be familiar to any of you who have been following the series here on how to implement the pillars pipelines and vaults Notion system. If this is new to you, there's a video entirely on this dashboard called the alignment zone. Just look for the alignment zone video previously in this series. And, there's also a video on each and every one of these toggles within the alignment zone. We're jumping down to where we execute our projects and we've got, in this one toggle view, two different views of the same database. Both of these are the projects database, but we've got our board view by future, next up, on hold, active. And, this is how we line up what we're working on. This is filtered only by private is not checked. I do private because a lot of my projects are private.

The speaker is working on a number of private projects, but is sharing a sample of them in this public broadcast. They have a larger list of projects, but are only showing a selection in this public broadcast. The projects are organized and managed using a board, with different statuses for each project. Only the statuses that are visible in the board are shown in the speaker's list, with the rest being stacked elsewhere. The speaker has chosen to use the timeline view to plan out their projects, as it provides more actionable and useful information than the gallery view they were previously using. In the timeline view, the speaker lines up their work projects in one sequence and their personal projects in another. The timeline shows the start point and anticipated end point for each project, allowing the speaker to plan for when they will have more free time in the future. They can also add future projects to the timeline as they complete their current ones. The timeline can be viewed in different time frames, such as quarterly or annually. The speaker can also choose which date property the timeline is generated from if they have multiple date properties for their projects.

The text describes a Notion timeline feature in a software application. To use the feature, you need to choose a timeline dates property, which has a start and end date. You can easily adjust the dates by dragging and dropping the endpoints of the project listings. You can also apply filters or automate the sorting. To create a new timeline view, you need to click on the "add a view" button and choose the new timeline view. You can title the view and then set the timeline dates property, which will lay out the timeline for you. By default, it gives you a month view, but you can change it to a wider view. If you don't have the timeline view beginning and end date set properly, you can add a timeline dates property, which is a date property, and add an end date.

Each one add a start and end date. Just throw something in quick don't worry about it once you get to this view. You can adjust the end dates and drag them and resort them in any way you want. Now it did jumble them, it didn't come in with my nice custom arrangement so we could add a sort. We could sort by the timeline date to stack them all properly that way. And if you just wanted to have a work one then you could add a filter, type is business, and you've got the business stack. I like having all of mine here so we'll stack them all. If you want to manually reorganize any of them you can restack them. It'll ask if you want to remove sorting, go ahead and remove it if you don't want it. And then you can stack them any way you want.

In properties you can choose what you want to make visible. I've made it so my percentage task completed is visible. You could hide that if you don't want it. You could put the task progress bar in and then it'll show the progress bar but I want to keep it compact. The ones that go off the edge of the time range turn to a darker gray and that's not quite as nice to me. So I try to keep it compact and just use the percentage in this instance.

Now jumping into the action zone we have a projects toggle right here today. Toggle is our normal today toggle for our action items for today and our daily tracking and our habit tracking which has all been covered in previous videos if you're interested in that. We have videos on the action zone and on the action items database and on daily tracking. We have a projects toggle to view our projects which have historically been graphical cards to pop in to the active projects very easily. But I've now switched that to have my default view be the timeline view. So now as I'm working on my action items today, I can pop open my projects and see what's going on. I can see what's falling behind and I can see what we need to wrap up here pretty quickly. I get a really good sense of where I am with everything with my percentage indicator of percent of tasks completed. When it gets to be a high number like 90, it may be nearing completion or that may mean I need to add some new tasks to map out what needs to be done to get to the finish line. So if I pop into one of these, I can manage all the tasks here that are relevant for this project. But this new timeline view gives me a great overview of where I am and everything, which I never got with the gallery view. The gallery view looked nice, it was organized and gave me a nice progress bar indicator. But I get so much more information and just as clean, if not a cleaner view of what's happening across my projects with this timeline view. So I'm really happy about the timeline view being embedded here in the action zone just like it is in the alignment zone.

I've also been experimenting with how to apply timeline view with the due dates in the action zone and there are a lot of interesting ways to look at this. I go into this in more detail in the notion performance systems course that I teach at year 0 dot io. And then the third place I've been using the timeline view is in the content creation pipeline. Again, I go into more detail on that in my notion ppv course.

So there you go, timeline view in action in the pillars, pipelines, and vault system. It's a great new feature and I'm very excited that notion released this and I'll be using it quite a bit.

It's available in the Notion templates already. If you want to redownload my action zone template, but if you have your own system underway, just add a timeline view and organize it the way you want as I demonstrated. Put it to good use, it takes very little time to set this up.

I have another time-based planning tool that I'm going to introduce into one of our critical PPV dashboards coming up in the next video or two. That'll take this idea of project and task planning a little bit further, and then you'll be all queued up to implement at a higher level.

Then we'll get more into some of the more psychological aspects of improving yourself and improving your ability to execute through mindset and identity sculpting. I've been promising that for a long time, it's coming. The reason I've been delaying is because I've got a lot of follow-up with it. So once I get started, I want to have regular videos following up and going deeper and deeper into that stuff because there's a lot I plan to cover in that area over the next year.

If this is of interest, be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to get updates on future videos. Leave thoughts or questions below or join us at my new online community for a broader conversation at year 0.io. Hit like if you found this video valuable. I also write a newsletter called Mind and Machine on increasing human capability. I give away several of my best notion templates to anyone who subscribes to the newsletter.

The new timeline view has now been added to the action zone projects database in that template pack. The template and newsletter link is below in the show notes. Thanks for watching, lots more to come.

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