 What is up guys? Carmen Medic here and welcome back to another dose. Coming to the channel, hi, my name is Nasser and I'm now a fourth year medical student studying at King's College London. In today's video, I'm going to be showing and explaining to you all the different ways in which I use Notion in order to stay as productive and efficient as possible in my day-to-day life, my medical school life, and also my YouTube workflow. It personally helps organize pretty much everything in my life. So when Notion reached out to me and said that they wanted to sponsor one of my videos, it was honestly a no-brainer. I use Notion every single day. I find it extremely useful and I think it will as well. If you want to download Notion for yourself, it's completely free. I'll leave a link in the description down below. So thank you to Notion for sponsoring this video and let's get right into it. So this over here is Notion. This is what it looks like. I've got all these different sections over here on the left, each one of which has many different sections underneath it as well. And I have some of those sections favorited up here for easy access when I want them. So within each one of these sections, you know, I've taken the time to put this banner at the top, put little emojis everywhere, use different colors, because I find that the more friendly, good-looking and easy something is to use, the more likely I am to use it. I have my Notion split up into three main dashboards. We've got More Life, which is sort of my administrative dashboard, my medical school one, which keeps track of anything and everything to do with medical school. And then I've got my YouTube dashboard as well, which has just made my life of making, tracking and progressing my videos so much easier, particularly through this can board idea over here, which I'll go into a lot more detail with later on in the video. And then lastly, I've got this really advanced to-do list tracker, which I've named Work Harder in order to always remind myself to work harder. Now this to-do list tracker is so powerful and is so useful as a productivity tool that I think this is where I want to start my Notion tour. If you want to skip ahead to my YouTube, to my medical school or to my Life Administrative Dashboards, I'll leave timestamps for the video down over here and also in the description down below. All right, so Work Harder is a to-do list tracker on steroids. Full credit for how I set this up in Notion goes to a man named Kay. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I'll leave a link to the video in the description down below, which is a tutorial on how to set this up for yourself. I'm going to show you how I use it and how it works. So it's based upon this productivity system that was devised by David Allen in a book called Get Things Done, which is sort of this like pinnacle of productivity books and this sort of efficiency productivity world that I find myself in. And basically what David says is that for your to-do list, you need to have five main sections. We've got Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect and Engage. So that's what this system is sort of built around. So up here, I've got my inbox. Your inbox is dedicated to any and all thoughts that you have that come up throughout the day. So let's say I'm on the train, I'm walking around, I'm sitting in a class, and I suddenly remember that I need to do something. I will immediately open up Notion on my phone or on my iPad or on my laptop, depending on where I am, and I will instantly put it into this inbox. So now let me show you how this to-do list tracker works by inserting a bunch of tasks here, and then we can work through it together. So this might be a typical day of tasks that I will have written down in my Notion inbox, these ideas that I will have captured and written down physically somewhere. Now when I'm commuting home on the train or on the bus, or I finally get to my desk and I sit down on my computer, I can now take these tasks and add metadata to them in order to more efficiently and easily organize them. So for example, you can see these columns that I have here on the right. The first one is context. So for each one of these tasks, I can give some context to what this task is. The first one is review the side effects of SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So this is something to do with medical school. So for example, this has to do with medical school. I can do this task on my desk. I can do this using my laptop. And this is a relatively low energy task. Follow up email for GP placement. This is again to do with medical school. I can do this on my desk, pretty low energy and I need my laptop or my phone. For example, something like this that I feel very, very strongly about liking, commenting and subscribing on this video. This is a pretty high energy task. It's pretty, pretty important. You have to focus your energy a lot and make sure you get it done. And I can also use my phone or my laptop in order to do this, right? Check this out. As soon as this video is over. Alright, so now that I've gone through and added some context to each of these tasks, let's say I find myself on the train or on the bus on my phone and I want to know what tasks can I do on my phone right now? I can go to context, I can add a filter and I can say context contains phone. And then it'll change this table to show me all of the types of tasks I can do on my phone. Similarly, I can do this for when I'm on my desk or when I'm with my parents or when I'm with Alexia or whatever, I can organize my tasks in this very easy way to glance what I can do at different times of the day in different places and on what devices. On top of that, I can add here a due date. So for example, let's say review the side effects of SSRIs. This isn't exactly urgent. I can definitely do this today. Let's put the due date as today or let's do tomorrow actually follow up this GP, see that tomorrow 20 past med questions. I want to do this today. I want to do this now. So let's say ASAP definitely liking subscribing commenting on this video I want to do right now call my mom and dad. That's something that I want to do tomorrow. So let me add that to tomorrow and I don't know find a new audio book. It's not exactly urgent. We'll put it for Monday. Anything that I want to do urgently, I can tick as ASAP in this column. So this also would be here, for example, and then at the end of this table, I need to assign these tasks to a project in my notion dashboard. So I have three main projects. We've got life administrative project, medical school and YouTube. This one over here review the side effects of SSRIs is medical school. Once I assign it to medical school, it disappears from my inbox. So the very important thing about this is that I've captured all of my ideas that I want in my inbox. I've clarified what they are given them some context at you day, etc. And now I'm organizing them. I'm moving them to the place that they need to be. If I go through for this again, this one as well is medical school. This one here, for example, is a YouTube related project. This here is YouTube as well. So now if we scroll down a little bit further on my dashboard, you can see I have a couple of different headings. So the do now area is for tasks that I have selected the ASAP tick box. So these are tasks that I want to do right now, and they will appear over here. If I decide for some reason that I don't need to do them right now, they are not an ASAP task, I can deselect this checkbox and it'll automatically disappear from this area. That's what's so beautiful about this to do list is that it's really variable, it's adaptive, and it changes as I change and as I update different tasks. If we move down a little bit, we get to the do soon area. Now do soon, I've set this table up so that it only shows me tasks here that are due within the next week within the next seven days. So for example, call mom and dad if I decide to change this to the week after more than seven days from now, it'll automatically disappear from this area. And so this is really useful on the weekends when I sit down on my computer and I look at sort of what are the tasks that I need to do over the next week? Do I have an essay due? Do I have some emails to write? Do I have to prepare for a test? What's coming up in the next week? And then if we scroll a little bit further down, I have my medical school, my life admin and my YouTube areas. Now these three areas hold all of the tasks relevant to that project, regardless of whether they are due now or due soon. And as I work through these tasks, I can check them off and complete them as done. Once I've clicked that done checkbox, it disappears from this project area and it moves down into the completed section. If you're wondering how I'm a full time medical student, I have this YouTube channel have a bunch of other things going on in my life. This is how I organize those things. This is how I'm able to keep on top of and track everything that I'm doing. I find this to do this track are so useful. It's completely changed how I think about my tasks and how I complete tasks throughout the day. I'd highly recommend you guys try it out for yourself and implement it into your own life. All right, so now that I'm finished focusing on how I can be as efficient and organized as possible, we can move on to some of the more relaxed things that I have in my Notion dashboard. And I think I'm going to start off with more life. Within Notion, you're sort of dealing in things called blocks. So if I highlight this over here, you'll see that this is one block. This big long title inbox is one block. And with all these blocks, you can sort of move them around to wherever you want. That doesn't look good. Let's put it back where it was. And that way you get a much more customizable workspace, which is something that I really take advantage of as you'll see. So more life, what you guys see here at the top is sort of the basic or beginner version of a to-do list tracker. It's the one that I used before I implemented this work harder one over here. I actually really like this one because I think it's so simple, neat and organized. I've got this template built in over here so that every time I click this plus, it automatically generates a new block that is a to-do list and it's highlighted in a color coordinated fashion for medical school, YouTube or life administrative tasks. So this is also something great about Notion. You can implement these different types of tools that you just can't really find anywhere else. So for example, if you hit the slash button here, you get sort of this long, long list of different types of things you can put here. And throughout this video, I'm going to show you a bunch of different ones that I used. So let's say that I wanted to create a page here. I can right click page and then it opens up this new linked page to that place that I just was. For example, let's call this make and drink more coffee. I'm going to add a little bit of an emoji just to make it a little bit neater and nicer. And then if we go back to more life, you can see here that I've made a link to make and drink more coffee. And if I click on it, it takes us to that page that we were just on. So similar to my previous to-do list throughout the day, I would sort of come up with tasks that I want to do over here. And then when I come back and sit down on my computer, I can move these around and put them in their correct places. I can organize them to where they need to be according to whether they need to be done now, soon, or later. And if I ever want to add another to-do list, I just click this plus and it automatically creates this to-do list with the green highlighted thing. It's amazing. So yeah, a much simpler to-do list tracker than the one I showed you before, but I think it also has its place and it is quite useful as well. And then underneath that to-do list I have over here sort of anything that I just want to keep track of over long periods of time. I've got them broadly split up into experience, consume, and miscellaneous. Under experience, I've got a list of restaurants that I either have been to already or I want to go to in the future. Big shout out to Alexia for coming up with the vast majority of these recommendations. This is like her go-to thing. I've also got the same thing for bars here in London that I want to go to, a list of movies that I've watched or want to watch in the future. And again, this can be organized in a much nicer and neater way, sort of how I've done my books. So if we look at my books over here, I've converted sort of the list that I would normally have like you've seen here in restaurants and I've turned it into this Kanban board. So with this board over here I've got different columns for the different types of books that I have or for what status these books are in. So here on the left I've got recommendations that I've gotten from other people. Here I've got my list books that I've personally looked up and researched and I want to read and then I have in progress books that I'm currently reading right now. So if we go to the books app on my phone and we go to library, you can see that Getting Things Done by David Allen, which was the inspiration for that work harder to do list that you saw earlier and then also Fire on the Horizon and Becoming Michelle Obama. These are all books that I'm currently reading right now. So they go in the in progress section and then once I finish reading a book I can just simply move it over to the finished section and this is a really nice way to keep track of sort of all of the books that I've read, what I'm currently working through and this list of recommendations is perfect because when I finish a book and I run out of things to read on my commutes, I can easily refer to this list and I know what books I want to read in the future. So yeah I find this incredibly helpful. I also think it's kind of cool to see the different books that I've read. I didn't actually start enjoying reading until quite late in my life so that's why this list isn't very extensive but it's something that I definitely really enjoy right now. The pros of having a board like this instead of sort of just a normal list that you might keep in your notes app or in one of the many other note-taking apps that are out there is that one this helps organize your information in a very clear way and then two at a glance you can see all the different meta data about the information that's in front of you. So like yes all these books could be on a list that said done or not done but then you wouldn't have sort of which recommendations that I hear from other people versus which ones that I come up with myself, which ones are my currently reading and obviously these are sort of the headings that are important for me but for you they'll be completely different and maybe you don't want to have a list of books you want to have a list of all the different I don't know Pokemon that you like and the different types of Pokemon or maybe the different stocks that you want to invest in. Like you can literally do anything you want whatever your passion is whatever your hobby is you can use these tools that are in Notion to organize it in a way that works for you. I've also got the same thing for podcasts over here celebrities that I've met countries that I've traveled to where I organize all of this different information and you know before I had everything right over here in Notion I used to have it scattered all over my laptop in different apps and different word documents and different everything and it was just hard to sort of see this information at a glance and when I needed this information it was difficult for me to get but now that it's here and I know exactly where it is it's just instantly accessible. You know some things that I've been tracking for the longest time I think this gym I've been using since 2016 I've got it split up in sort of the different muscle groups that I want to work on different days and I've even been tracking my weight for a long time as well. Yeah since 2017 not every single day but every now and again when I go to the gym I'll write down my weight so it's really interesting to see these things that I've kept track of for long periods of time that I can always refer to easily and quickly at a glance in the future. I've even got my favorite quotes from songs some lyrics and some writing that I've done myself as well. I said at the beginning of this video and I'll say it again I just feel that notion is such a great way to organize your life and then down over here I've got a calendar the way that I inserted this was I went to one of those little blocks that I've been talking about this whole time you just click slash calendar in line and it'll insert it for you. Now the reason that it's very empty is because I purposefully want to keep this calendar as sparse as possible. I only put in here very big and important upcoming deadlines for example if I have a test if I'm taking vacation or holiday if I have an essay do you want a certain date that's kind of what I want to put here I already have a full calendar app for sort of my day-to-day activities and here I just want to see the really important things that are coming up and thankfully in the month of November I have none of those great all right so that's pretty much everything in my more live section my more like dashboard here on notion I actually really really like it I think it's aesthetically pleasing and it helps me organize my data quite well the next place that I want to tackle is medical school now medical school I've got this lovely little banner up here at the top that's me in a couple of years from now and then down here I have just just everything organized so nicely let me walk you through it so here at the top I have these different pages which are links to other pages that I can click on and they have information that I kind of want to review on a regular basis so as far this is a method of communication and handing over important information to your seniors so this is something that I do quite often I'll tell my senior about a patient that I saw you know I want to have this quickly accessible so I can make sure that I do it right and get very good at it the news chart this is how we keep track of observations for patients on the wards something that are I need to be very very familiar with and a bunch of other pages over here for my usm at least studying that I did over the summer this is every single subject in my fat fat first aid book and for each one of these I just have tons and tons of questions that I wrote for myself and each one of these has an answer hidden underneath the toggle so for example what can panic disorder be treated with I click this toggle and I'll see peroxitine which is an ssri that we talked about before conveniently and how I introduce these toggles is again you go to a new block you hit slash and then you write toggle and so I'll write out the question for example let's say what is the powerhouse of the cell everyone should be able to answer this and then I'll write the answer my to a conjure up and then I can hide the answer my to conjure up beneath this toggle and in this way this is sort of a way for me to have flashcards within notion I can easily and quickly test my knowledge for these different sections speaking of testing my knowledge for different sections let's try something out over here something that I will get right on camera musculoskeletal and dermatology the median nerve supplies what parts of the hand okay this is pretty easy and the palm first digit second digit and then half of the third digit armor aspect of the palm first second and half of the third digit see I'm actually a medical student if you ever doubted that I was a medical student there you go so anyways this is where I keep track of all of my flashcard toggle things for my studying at medical school I'm currently going through the ones that I need to do for UK medical schools on past med and so I just completed the pediatrics block I've got tons of questions over here and tables and whatever yeah you can even hide tables behind these toggles really really useful feature and yeah like I said now I'm doing psychiatry so I've got a bunch of different questions over here I've also got notes for my quality improvement project each one of the meetings that I have I create a new page for and I type in my notes over there here on the right I have a to-do list of sort of general things that I want to achieve general things that I want to get good at so for example review of the neuro exam abdominal exams this is a mental state exam which I've done quite a few times now on the psychiatric placement so I've checked it off as done on my to-do list and then every now and again I will just delete them as necessary to free up space over here down here I've got this sort of gallery display which again I introduced by clicking slash and then gallery I think it's called yeah gallery in line you click it and it'll open it up for you but basically what I've got here is all the different blocks that I'm going to have over years four and five of medical school I just finished pediatrics I'm currently on psychiatry next I'm doing where to mess and critical care then absent gynae long-term conditions acute care but the cool thing is is that within each one of these galleries look at how much information I have here okay I click on pediatrics and then I've just got all this information here and each one of these has more pages that I can click into and it just gets deeper and deeper and deeper if there's anything that I access quite often I can save it to my favorites over here so I can access it at a glance for example those past med notes that I just talked about I can click here and it'll automatically take me to that page so if I click back to pediatrics over here and I open it as a full page you can see I've got my lectures most of which I write out as notes on my ipad so I don't really store them over here I've got different clinical skills templates over here I've got a breakdown of the different types of tasks I need to complete from my portfolio so for example I need to submit a daily log every single day of every single week I've got reflections to write in sort of these different areas over here and I've ticked them off as completed as I finish them and as you can see I'm done I'm 100% complete on this part of my portfolio different clinical skills that I need to do and then other over here this is the schedule that I had this was very very useful because I could quickly look at it at a glance and know where I'm supposed to be every single week and then down here every single clinic that I sat in I've got notes for the patients that I saw that I've typed out on my ipad I don't want to go through everything because it's going to get boring but the point is that I've just got a wealth of information over here all very neatly organized and sorted in a way that's easily accessible and aesthetic for me I've got a whole list of notes over here that I can easily access at a glance from my phone when I'm in the hospital on the train on the bus wherever all right so that's my medical school dashboard at a glance I think now let's move on to my youtube dashboard probably something that you guys will find quite interesting a little bit above behind the scenes as to how it is that I make these videos organize them come up with my ideas and things like that here I've got the banner which is the intro that you guys see in a lot of my videos cheeky little film camera over here and then I've generally got this put up into projects on the left and miscellaneous on the right so some things that I think you guys might find interesting is collaborations with companies so this again I've got set up as a Kanban board I've got companies that I want to work with people that I'm either talking to working with currently over here notion as an example and then here I've got companies that I have worked with in the past and I've completed sponsorships with them ones for which I'm awaiting payment from and so again without sort of a Kanban board like this to easily organize in my head who I've worked with who I'm waiting for payment from who I've completed sponsorships with it honestly just becomes so muddled and complicated and confusing and because I'm a full-time medical student I need this to be as easy and simple as possible I've already got tons of work to do I've got tons of hours to spend in the hospital I need my extracurriculars to be just simple fast efficient and easy and so having an app like Notion and using these different tools and displays and views really helps me in my workflow and keeps me organized I've also got my pinned comments over here every single pinned comment you've ever seen on any one of my videos I've got stored over here I write out in this app first and then I copy paste it into YouTube it's really cool to look back through this sometimes and see all the different pinned comments that I write I've got some things that I'm working on in the future over here stay subscribed and stay tuned for those and yeah just keep track of a bunch of different things that I need for my YouTube channel right over here on my computer and then if we scroll down over here we have what I've called the idea box with this nice little cloud emoji this is sort of the lifeblood it's at the core of me organizing and scripting my YouTube videos and my ideas and just improving my workflow when it comes to YouTube videos a big big shout to Ali Abdal who showed me this method of keeping track of videos he's a small up and coming YouTuber if you guys haven't heard about him or checked him out I'll leave a link to his videos in the description down below on the left column over here I have idea so each one of these is an idea that I've thought of for a potential YouTube video in the future the second it enters my head whether I'm on a run I'm on a bus I'm on clinical placement anywhere I will immediately write the idea down on my phone I don't want to forget these things even if they're bad ideas when I look at them sitting down on my desk later on I can build upon them and I can explore them and I can do research and I can make them into an actually good idea so I write down pretty much anything that I think of so I've got 46 ideas over here it's a pretty long list and then once I have an idea here that I start thinking about you know the cogs start turning and I'm like you know what maybe I can make this into a video I'll drag and drop it into the next step of the board so for example here if you take a look at some of these videos you'll know the types of things that are coming up soon on the channel and then once I choose one of these ideas it is the golden goose egg and I'm like okay this is what I'm going to work on it moves into the scripting section so for example for this notion tour before I filmed this video I wrote out a super detailed and long script of everything that I wanted to talk about everything that I wanted to show because I find that it makes for a better video when I actually set down and turn on my camera it helps me sort of keep my thoughts straight and remember to show everything that I wanted to show once the video has been scripted it is ready for recording and once I've recorded it I can move it from the scripted section to the recorded section which hopefully I will have done if I didn't forget to press record okay good so here these are videos that I've already recorded I've already filmed them they're stored somewhere on one of my million hard drives in my drawer and then from there I can choose which ones I want to edit and once they're edited they're ready to publish and once I've published them they are done so this here is sort of a list of the videos that I've done since I've started using this Kanban board method of displaying my YouTube video ideas and tracking my workflow from start to finish so again this method of organizing my YouTube space and videos has been so incredibly valuable for me and obviously if you don't make YouTube videos you know you can use this for anything in your life if you're writing an essay you're working on a project maybe you're building a business you're starting a side hustle with your friends whatever you can break down a huge huge project into these smaller simpler tasks and it really helps getting things done step by step and completing things and seeing the progress and moving them and of course if you click on each one of these things like I showed you before you can add so much information to them and something else that's cool about Notion let's say that I have a new video idea so I've got this new video idea over here so I click on it to open it and I sort of want to build out what this video is going to be about and so down here I've created a premade template also Ali Abdel showed me how to do this shout out one more time and so once I click on this video idea here it will automatically populate my page with the template that I had created from before so for example now I have an area to start thinking about the title for this video I can write down some ideas of what my thumbnail might look like I have my intro the body of my video sections one two and three and outro and then this checklist of things for publishing later on so look at how easy that is I think of an idea I put it into Notion I click one button it sets out this template for me and I can immediately start thinking and writing about what this video is going to look like in the future and that's really the beautiful thing about Notion it just helps improve my workflow helps make everything that I would normally do anyway more efficient helps me save time helps me organize my life and you know as someone who's consistently thinking about how I can organize my life make myself more efficient save more time do more things this is exactly what I need so yeah definitely very helpful I have a lot to say about this idea box but maybe I'll save that for a future video and alright guys I think that's everything that I wanted to show you in my Notion all my different dashboards over here I do have a couple more things over here but they're more of the same more pages and more things where I store different pieces of information honestly I'm just scratching the surface of this program it's so powerful and there's so many different views you can do there's so many different tasks you can like write code to change different things I'm a complete novice at Notion there's plenty of people who have made much more detailed videos about how you can use this app to its maximum potential I'm still learning and I keep adding things on every time I watch a new video so yeah I'm excited to see sort of how my Notion changes over the months to come the different things that I implement different views and boards that I use there's just so much more to learn please do visit the link in the description down below and download Notion for yourself try it out and see how it can improve your own productivity and how you can implement it into your life and your own routine thank you to Notion for sponsoring this video if you enjoyed it don't forget to leave a like and also subscribe to my channel to see more content from me in the future and I'll catch you in the next one peace