I automated my life with Notion AI

Hey guys, hope you are well. I previously made a video on how to set up AI task scheduling that would automatically pull in all of your tasks from Notion and put them onto your calendar, and it was a little bit complicated to set up. You were integrating a lot of different APIs and you had to have a three-way sync between different calendar apps in order to get it to work. Basically it was quite complicated to set up.

There's now a far more simple and far more elegant solution that anyone can set up in about 20 minutes or half an hour. So this is a tool called Amie. I'll put a link down below that has quickly become my favorite calendar app of all time. It integrates with Spotify so you'll see some things like it shows you what you were listening to at a particular time. It syncs over your sleep tracking from Apple Health. I'll put a screenshot up. It shows me all of my sleep times. It shows me all of my workouts and my mindful minutes and just kind of embeds them on the calendar by syncing with Apple Health. So it's kind of like it mixes social and work together. So it's actually my favorite app at the moment. But they also have released AI task scheduling and they have an integration with Notion, so I'll show you how to set up in a moment.

The other thing that I would mention is I've kind of cleared out a lot of my Notion system compared to what it used to be. I've gone from having about 50 different databases to having about 10. And the reason that I did that is I just found that I was adding so much complexity into the system, having all of these different databases and systems, that it almost became like a full-time — not full-time, but required a lot of effort to kind of maintain the system. And of course if you're building a productivity system the idea is that the system helps you, not that you're pulled away into maintaining things and making sure that everything's working in order.

So I'm going to build from scratch as well a task management system that covers about 80% of what I currently do in terms of the Notion system, and we'll really keep it quite simple. I'm focused quite a lot on my life at the moment on just reducing complexity and really having simple but effective solutions.

We'll make a database. We'll make an inline database and we're going tasks. Okay that is now here and then we'll turn it into a tasks database. And we just create these fields. I only work from my Notion database for giving tasks to other people. I generally like to use Asana. Due date and status.

And then we're going to come in and put in two columns. So on the left hand side we'll have tasks and then on the right hand side I'm going to make another database. We'll do a gallery database, new gallery, and we'll call this projects. And then we'll make a relation so that these two databases can communicate with each other.

In my last video that I made I gave away a Notion template. You can, if you want to, just download that and use that for your project template. And now we will come in and we will just assign tasks. So task one, task two, task three. Yeah, good starting point. I think that's all we really need at this stage.

Now if we come over into Amie — I'm not actually sure how to say it properly — so this is the interface. So the first thing that we can do is come down into General and I can set my preferred working times. So the way that I kind of structure my day at the moment is in the morning, so from 6:00 a.m. until 1, I just have a kind of morning period for myself. I'm doing a lot of walking at the moment. At the moment I go walking on the beach every single morning listening to an audiobook or a podcast and I find it's a really good way to start the day.

Then from 1 p.m. until 2:00 p.m. I've just focused on one task that for me is really important to do. So at the moment that's often YouTube videos or updating version three of the course. I'm launching something new but we'll talk about that very soon. And then I have my focus period which is from 2:00 p.m. until 7, but I would actually reduce that down to be honest. And then in the evenings I just have my free time. I go for dinner, I see friends, I go and do some activity, whatever it is. So I have these three different kind of time blocks throughout my day.

You can set it up however you want. If you make a new preferred time you literally just tell it what you want to do. Set up a time window from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday to Thursday and it will take a minute to go through. And then we can choose how long I want the default duration of my events to be. So an event would be a task basically, or an actual event. It's a fully functional calendar app as well but it just allows you to manage all of your to-dos from there.

Then we have something called lists and lists are basically like different categories. By the way you can also have your email synced over here as well. So I don't use this as my primary email app. I still use Superhuman. But the clever thing that I have kind of found is if I manage all of my emails from Superhuman I can easily archive and unsubscribe from things and anything that's left in my inbox it means it's something that needs attention, right, it needs me to take action on it. I can just set this list to AI schedule so everything that comes into my email inbox that doesn't get archived and it's like an open email will automatically be synced over onto my calendar to give me time to deal with it.

Then I have a category for YouTube and I have a category for Notion tasks. I'll go over in a minute how that's kind of structured. In fact, so every single week I do a weekly review and in that weekly review I establish my priorities for the upcoming week. What is it that I want to get done. And that is then — so these are the 20 tasks that I want to get done this week. Today is an automatically made thing by them which is your today task. It's like an automatically generated list. And so from here I can assign my Notion tasks. I put in my focus period so from my 2 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. window all of my focus tasks will be automatically scheduled in that period.

To-do, you can establish a break between to-do. You turn on AI scheduling here and everything is put onto your calendar automatically.

And then if we go on to integration, so these are the integrations that are available on the desktop app. So we've got Zoom, Spotify, Notion. If you use any of these tools as well you can integrate them as well. And like I said on the mobile app it also integrates with Apple Health so all of your workouts are automatically synced over onto your calendar. If you do any meditation, if you track that, it will be synced over as well under mindful minutes. If you do a meeting, if you're wearing an Apple Watch or a Whoop, it will actually tell you your heart rate variability during that meeting so you can see if it was a stressful meeting or not. So yeah, really great tool.

So we come over into Integrations and from your workspace you will just come and select your tasks, your tasks database, and then you can select which list you want to sync that over to. Like I said earlier, so I would sync over into Notion tasks. Undone status would be not started. Done status would be done. And this has a two-way sync by the way. So if you schedule a time in Notion it will automatically add onto your calendar at that time, or if Amie handles the scheduling for you it will update that time in Notion as well. So you can filter only to have items that are assigned to you if you're working with your team in Notion. Personally I'm not.

And then status — this wording I think was kind of done incorrectly. It will only filter ones that don't match this status. So as I mentioned every single week I go through and I schedule my tasks that I want to complete this week. So I have hundreds of tasks, perhaps maybe like 200, that are in idea or someday maybe, and I don't want to overflow my calendar with all of those tasks that are like ideas or upcoming tasks. I only want a short list of like 20 tasks that I can just go through over the coming week. So I only want to sync tasks in not started. So every single week I go through, I check my ideas and my someday maybe tasks, I add in any new tasks, and if I want to accomplish them this week I put them as not started status which means that they'll be synced over. And then I can do sync changes to Amie. And then you would just press Start syncing. It will bring them over automatically and it will literally fill out your calendar exactly like mine looks at the moment.

And when you complete a task I can just come here I can mark it as done and that will then sync back over to Notion that the task has been completed. You can also kind of manage from here and you can do things like add in sub to-dos. You can do time tracking. If I don't want a task to be auto scheduled I can just disable it. If I set a hard deadline for the task it will follow that deadline. I can set how long the task is going to take so it needs to look for an open space on my calendar that matches that period.

They also have prioritization as well. So if I just press here once it will mark it as a priority and it will prioritize scheduling that on my calendar. If I hold it down it will mark a super priority and that will get pushed up to the top of my list. Now they've done really interesting things with prioritization here. You can only have a maximum of three tasks in super priority at any time, which is a really good idea, but you can have kind of as many as you want just as a priority task. So I don't use it too often to be honest, but of course if you want to you can.

And honestly to have a really effective Notion system, if you want 80% effectiveness in something that we've built in less than 20 minutes, the other thing that I would do is a weekly review. And I would make a database. I'll give away my weekly review template some other time. And so you would go through every single week and schedule what are all the tasks that you want to get done for the upcoming week.

And honestly the only other thing — so you now have a notes inbox, you have a weekly review. You can make a template for a weekly review. I'll go through my one at another time. And that would be when you go through all of your outstanding projects that you have going on, you assign tasks to them. And so basically very little of my time now is actually spent operating from within Notion. The only time that I'm working from within Notion is if I'm taking a note, which I normally do from my phone. I have a shortcut here that automatically makes them. And then I go every week I analyze what needs to be accomplished this week and that is all handled within Notion. I assign the tasks and then everything is automatically synced over onto my calendar.

So this is now my execution zone. The UX here is just great. UI is really nice, really clean to work with. All of your tasks are here. You can also change the view so instead of a split view I can only view my tasks so it's just a list of tasks, or you can view it just as a calendar where the calendar takes up the whole view. They have meeting scheduling as well. You can meet with people in your team. You can share your available slots. This is, if you can't tell already, probably my favorite app at the moment. And if they were looking for investors I would be very keen to do it.

Here you can see all the songs that you were listening to at a particular time. I know if I was listening to Spotify generally I was in a focus zone. I was being very productive and getting things done. Yeah, strongly encourage you to try it out. What used to be so kind of complex to set up with AI task scheduling is now so simple to do and you can just sync over all of your tasks in a couple of clicks from Notion, have them put on your calendar, and all you need to worry about is execution. So yeah, really really great.