Notion Hacks: Marie Poulin Coaches Tiago Forte - Bilingual Subtitles
Because this is a long document.
Thousands of words.
You encounter quite large documents.
Oh, this is a baby duck.
Oh, this small?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh.
So then where would you start?
So what you just did is you generated a template?
Dang it.
That's OK.
Option creates a duplicate.
Yes.
Oh my gosh.
Ridiculous.
These little tips and tricks I just...
Thank so much time.
How exciting have things to teach you, Tiago?
So much.
I'm realizing how...
just how much I don't know.
I'm here.
with a long long-awaited guest.
It's Marie Poulin, a celebrity and experts in the Notion world.
Notion is becoming kind of this ever-rising star in the world of not just knowledge management but just productivity apps.
I have questions about Notion.
I use it.
I've actually used it for years, but I don't feel like I've really discovered how to use it to its full potential.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
was definitely a big influence when I was first trying to make sense of my
notion of workspace and so it really helped me implement some structure in my
own space and so I've been you know greatly influenced by your work so I'm excited to see how I can hopefully contribute back.
Here we have the real life this is not a demo this is not a you know fake model this is the literal
document that I have open as I'm teaching my online course to hundreds of people at a time.
So high stakes, a lot of pressure, I'm nervous, and it's basically a run of show.
It's everything that has to happen,
everything that I have to say, everything that my team who is sort of behind the scenes enabling everything needs to know.
I'm constantly caught in this tension between having a single authoritative document,
which makes me not want to change anything,
and be like, this like the canon, this is the source, it's like, you know, the Bible, it doesn't change for all time.
And then the other side of that coin, which is it's constantly changing.
Everyone has improvements, this needs to change, this needs this needs to should be shorter.
That should be longer.
I have ideas.
But then the more changes we make, the less authoritative or reliable it seems.
I a lot of people think of notion as folders on their their filing system, right?
Where data only lives in one place.
But we know part of the beauty of notion is being able to access the same data in multiple places and in
different ways in different contexts.
There are kind of different paradigms that it's hard to wrap your brain around what's possible if you don't really know what you don't know.
Love it.
So let's check out your...
your parent page of that.
You've got your live session speaker notes.
Okay, great.
So let's make a database on this page.
And you can call the live session speaker notes.
In line, yeah.
Sure.
We can transform it all later if we need to.
So it's...
I love and there's no risk to my choices.
I think that's another thing people miss is it's so easy to make changes in Notion.
But if you don't know how, it can be kind of stressful.
But all of this is seconds to transform.
So let's call this live sessions or live session speaker notes.
We can do a database with the same.
would drag all of those pages into your database.
Oh, just like this?
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't know you could make that box.
Yep.
And make sure it's a solid blue line there.
There you go.
Great.
Why don't we add a couple properties here that might be useful for you?
I probably date created.
I would include created time for sure.
We'll just add a few that are going to be created by less edited time.
You can always rename those if you want to and not but those are sort of notions automated timestamps.
So when you say automated there's if I understand there's some properties that
are sort of pre-provided that update up like by themselves or you can create manual but then you have to fill them in.
Exactly so you can't actually change these time properties.
That's good that's a good thing.
You can decide to use tags or not.
I know if you necessarily want to or need to maybe you're saying hey let's connect this to version.
Yeah, this is actually the in a way the version cohort cohort 15.
Yeah, of cohort, I'm going to say V15.
Oops.
Grab the little circle in the bottom right of that and you can drag that down and apply that efficiency.
Awesome.
And you can do things like,
you know, double click on There you go, just like condense it, and you might decide you don't need to see this all the time.
Right?
There's, I don't always need to see all the data all the time.
So if you want to really clean view of these speaker notes,
you might want to hide all of those and just have your list here.
And then when you open the document, that's when you start to see a little bit more of that data.
Maybe you don't need to see the created time,
but the last edited time is a good one to have so we can kind of go through and, you know, let's always hide that.
Any other properties that you
useful in the context now that you're seeing these in a database and thinking
about how these change over time resources that might need to be included or things like that.
Maybe a URL if you're linking to a keynote file or something like that.
That would be really useful.
Status I think would be a great one especially as your documents get outdated or whatnot.
Person properties could be helpful if you want to say instructor,
Music person and I would make sure to name those those properties so you know
Notional name it person by default and so you might go in and say instructor and that may not be useful if it's always
you That's the instructor, but if you are thinking about in the future Some of these sessions aren't always going to be led by you.
It'd be good to be able to assign those Often I look at the zoom recording of the last time I did it and I could put it right there
Like one thing that might make sense to do is build the beefier version of this document first,
and then we can strip it out into just the speaker notes and have a separate database for that.
So let's just open up one of these, right, so status is not started, is that true?
It's kind of like phases, there's...
planning, and then actual preparation, delivery, and then finished, let's say, four.
Yeah, let's add a few of those.
And then so the Zoom recording is the Zoom recording for this event or the last event.
The last event.
So that might be interesting to include in our template then for these live sessions is maybe the templates can always include a little
embed area so that you can go and watch the past session.
Oh, so I don't even have to go somewhere else.
Exactly.
I mean that would be ideal is like what is everything that you.
to run one of these sessions, could we have one place for you to look?
I think this dashboard could become the place where if there's always resources that you're referencing,
like let's start adding them lower on the page if we need to.
We adding those as headings just so we don't forget.
So there could be like a start here almost.
There could be like top or resources.
And then there could be like last cohort, everything from the previous cohort.
Absolutely.
And I turn those into headings.
Headings.
Yeah.
Yep.
And then we can make a little table of contents at the top and that way we can kind of see what we're working on.
Oh, I don't know about table of contents.
like TOC.
Yes.
Yeah, perfect.
And if we want to, we don't necessarily want to see all the speaker notes.
We only want to see the current cohort, right?
So we can say maybe only show me anything from V15.
And that will only ever show that.
And then also, if you add something in this view, it will inherit that tag.
So that's another way to just always keep like a really tidy view.
So what are some of the other things that you would...
need to pull in, you've got your resources, cohorts, there's gonna be links.
I would look at the live session agenda for last time.
I would look at the recording, what actually happened.
And then finally, the feedback.
What did people say?
What did they like?
What did they not like?
What did they make?
Right, and you were saying you don't necessarily have a place that you're collecting some of that currently?
Not a single place.
These are all repositories of information.
Google Drive folder over here, a a hosting platform we use, it's spread out, basically.
I would make a URL.
And then I would name that feedback or, you know, Google Drive or whatever it that the place that you send that.
And then of course, there's an aspect of who owns this document too, right?
So are you expected to update this?
Is someone on your team going to go back and update the recording?
And you can see how over time you're going to probably start to generate these SOPs where someone's job is to go back and make sure to update those links to keep those files up to date.
So like responsible person, basically.
Yeah, so would I do a person and then title like responsible?
Over time,
depending on who's kind of helping you with this,
you might want to make a page where anyone can go in and see only the things that they are responsible for.
So I don't want to see all the data, but they can just see everything's already pre-filtered to that team member.
Oh speaker notes.
What are some of the resources and where are you currently keeping them?
I've never known notes.
Those are probably the usual suspects.
Could we grab a couple example URLs of maybe resources that you typically would share and then we'll put them in one of your docs.
Yeah, let's look in another one of these worksheet six.
This is an example.
We had to scroll through that document to find.
A worksheet for this session,
but it would be great if you had whether it's a file property or file attachments You could see here all the six files that we reference when we are running this live session Yes,
I'd probably add that as a fun.
It seems like a file property and then you can name it worksheet.
I think yeah So there's one and then if there's multiple you should be able to attach all of those worksheets there
There's a AI summarization property that maybe we could see.
What happen if we added this property?
It can summarize your document.
So you've got a course that you're teaching.
I'm a fan of AI and I'm a fan of even bigger fan of summarization.
It's an AI summary.
You can see it's a newish property.
And you can say fill with summary auto update on page edits.
So time I edit page, it updates the summary.
Yes.
Wow.
Let's see what happens.
Cool.
Okay, that's interesting.
So it's not like it's actually summarizing the content, but it's saying this is what this document is for, it's kind of kind of interesting.
Especially in shared environments, so often you find a document and all you want to know is just what am I looking at.
And can take you minutes and minutes and of just like puttering around and just poking at things before you finally realize,
oh that's what it is, this isn't relevant to me.
So I think we could put a database together of some of your most used resources and we could even connect them to certain sessions,
right?
If wanted to create a relation between those two and say in live session one.
These are like all the blog posts that we tend to reference.
These are all the circle posts.
I'm just doing inline database and we'll do kind of what we did before.
We can either drag these in and you can in the future just replace those with actual.
So, let's change this to type, okay, and we'll actually just include your list here,
you know, blog, circle, Twitter, that sort of thing, and so you'll want to go through and we'll just say resources.
I'm sure you've got a ton of resources you know that you can move to from other places in your account
and so that way if you are going throughout your other notion pages and such and you're like oh those
are great in-class resources you can highlight them move to send them into this database and then we
can include this database as a linked database anywhere else you want to reference them
then we can start to filter them as well to say what if we only want to show resources from express
or from distill or from different
We could create a relation between these two if you think it makes sense to do that and you can choose not to so you can
Do one-way relations if you want or two-way relations.
So I could filter the speaker notes by the resource Exactly.
It's really wild to wrap your head Well,
you can see how it gets infinitely complex right and you're like well should I connect those pieces like it starts?
to get kind of messy and if you don't know what you're doing or how the data
interacts you can see why people get really tripped up with notion at
least it starts to get overwhelming so it does require a lot of forethought of like
what am I trying to do how do I interact with this data almost like
a mantra repeat what am I trying to accomplish what am I trying to accomplish
like again and again and again and even just teach you your team.
Hey, if you've got resources that we've mentioned over and over again, drop them in the in-class resources.
Let's get in the habit of having those quickly available.
How would I link those to?
Get a URL set up there.
And that's going to be the habit you're going to get into is like new blog post.
And I'm just adding this here.
So you can select these in the future, but here you would probably want to put the actual title of the blog post here, right?
Let's go, you know, title of post.
And while we're here, why don't we just set up that relation to your live session, speaker notes.
And we can do a two-way relation.
If it's too much data, you don't feel like it's necessary.
Sometimes having more properties ends up being now you're just doing data input and categorization, which is not always helpful, right?
Sometimes it does help you, but you don't want to overdo it.
So let's say we're, we're attaching that to live session one.
Maybe you mentioned that in in three different sessions, right?
Maybe one like keeps coming up.
And you can say, I can see all the places that that's been referenced.
So now Notion knows that there is a relationship between this resource, this blog post, and those specific last sessions.
Exactly.
So if I click back on Express, you can see the title of the post is there.
And then I think we can start moving assembling a template for these.
Like, actually think each of these is kind of a template, right?
You one, if these are the things that you run over and again, there's always an express template, there's always a distill template.
So I think what we could do is actually copy the content of these into a template here.
So we'll make one for each of those different sections.
Maybe I'll have you do that to get you
into habit of creating a new template and so let's call this one you know live session
express we know that we want everything from this as a starting point right so I
think we can actually highlight everything in the body of this copy it
and we're gonna copy it into that template so open up I was just the one select all.
Yep, should be able to do a quick.
And then copy and then hide this.
Where does the template go once it's been created?
The bottom right or the arrow when you right here yes so click on this so what you just did is you generated a
template dang it that's okay but like this is such a it's such a common
mistake there's so many UI pieces right so interesting so clicking on it it's
thinking oh you want to create a new live session I did click new so
that's understandable so click on the three dots beside on the right edit this
template so that's where you can always go back to edit your template.
Let's paste this in there.
So what we can do, it pasted the page, but you can go back and you can turn that into text.
So click on the block on the left-hand side and let's say turn into text.
Oh, interesting.
That's all there.
Now you can see it sort of puts it inside of a block.
Oh, I didn't know you could do that.
So anywhere you see a link,
you just turn it into from a page into text and it goes into that document,
gets the text or whatever the content is and replaces it.
Exactly.
Gosh, these little tips and tricks.
Thank you so much time.
Let's do the same thing with Distill.
So let's make a new template for Distill.
and capture.
No exciting how things to teach you, Tiago's.
So much.
I'm realizing how, just how much I don't know.
Um, and then how do I save the template just back?
Yep, once you've already created it, it's already saved.
I think we should actually duplicate these documents and just move them into their respective pages.
So I'm going to hold Option and drag these out to copy them.
Does that work with any element?
Yeah.
Option drag creates a duplicate.
Yes.
Oh my gosh.
ridiculous.
It's almost like you don't need copy and paste.
So now one by one you can say move two and move those into the appropriate template that you named.
So move two.
It's one of these the original and one the template.
Yeah so the database ones are the ones that have the lines.
So this is the template.
Yeah.
is it it?
Yeah let's check it out and see what happened and then do turn into text.
And I like to delete that first line.
Okay, we've got a bunch of templates so so what it seems like is this is going to be your ongoing
whenever there's new sessions,
this is where your new session gets generated,
you can change it up, you can make notes but you've always got the starting point of those templates.
I really like by the way how you didn't come in and just throw away everything that I had and like impose all these strict rules.
You basically looked for things I'm already doing and that are already working and just made them make more sense,
be applied more consistently and in some cases remove things that were just kind of unnecessary.
Absolutely like you know I have you been doing this.
notes.
Are you reading the script?
How does it work?
Because there's no point in trying to build a system that is going to make you feel more flustered and confused as soon as you open up this document.
So it's about just taking what you're doing and just turning it up to 11.
Marie, I want to talk a few minutes about our dear listeners or watchers.
If they saw something that they would like to play to themselves.
Any idea, principle.
So our course is called Notion Mastery.
We're trying to get people to be a little bit more capable of kind of self-diagnosing and understanding their own strengths,
understanding what's working, what's not working, and to ask the right questions.
In not only have I taken your course our entire team has, and we constantly reference it.
When we're having a like,
discussions or arguments about how something should be a notion,
the ultimate invocation is Will Marie in her chorus says this, and then it's like, Mike drop and we're like, okay, just do it though.
Well, my hope is that I'm saving people time with some of those best practices,
but also getting people to think about why do I want to do this?
You know, is this the best way to do this for me?
and the way that I work with my team.
Marie, thank you so much for being here.
It's been a real pleasure.
I've genuinely learned so much today.
Thank so much for having me.
Unlock More Features
Install the Trancy extension to unlock more features, including AI subtitles, AI word definitions, AI grammar analysis, AI speaking, etc.
Compatible with Major Video Platforms
Trancy not only provides bilingual subtitle support for platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Udemy, Disney+, TED, edX, Kehan, Coursera, but also offers AI word/sentence translation, full-text immersive translation, and other features for regular web pages. It is a true all-in-one language learning assistant.
Supports All Platform Browsers
Trancy supports all platform browsers, including iOS Safari browser extension.
Multiple Viewing Modes
Supports theater, reading, mixed, and other viewing modes for a comprehensive bilingual experience.
Multiple Practice Modes
Supports sentence dictation, oral evaluation, multiple-choice, dictation, and other practice modes.
AI Video Summary
Use OpenAI to summarize videos and quickly grasp key content.
AI Subtitles
Generate accurate and fast YouTube AI subtitles in just 3-5 minutes.
AI Word Definitions
Tap on words in the subtitles to look up definitions, with AI-powered definitions.
AI Grammar Analysis
Analyze sentence grammar to quickly understand sentence meanings and master difficult grammar points.
More Web Features
In addition to bilingual video subtitles, Trancy also provides word translation and full-text translation for web pages.