Notis Second Brain System – Notis

The Notis Second Brain System is a comprehensive productivity template designed to help you manage every aspect of your life in Notion with the help of Notis.

We will walk you through each database available in the Notis Second Brain System, explaining their purpose and providing examples of how to use them effectively.

Areas

Areas represent the different aspects of your life that you organize your time around. Think about how you split your time during your week and weekend.

Areas are part of my life that I organise my time around...you are likely to have different areas in your life that you share your time during the week and the weekend between.

For example, you might have Areas like "Personal," "Work," or specific work stream. These categories help you sort your entire databases quickly and efficiently.

Here’s how my own Areas database looks like.

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Use the same areas for timeboxing your week in your agenda. I have a dedicated calendar in Notion called “Timeboxing” where I lock my week per area based on the time I want to ideally allocate to each work stream. This easily ensures you spend enough time in each area you prioritize your life around.

Projects

Projects are collections of tasks. As rule of thumb, projects require more than a day to complete. They serve as a valuable abstraction for attaching notes, documents, tasks, and reminders to track progress over time. Unlike Areas, they have a begining and end and you’ll want to track progress to make sure you stay on track with your objectives.

Creating projects is a valuable abstraction for attaching notes, documents, tasks, and reminders to track their progress over time.

For example, you might create a project called "Launch on Product Hunt" and link it to the "Notis" Area. Within this project, you can create tasks like "Brainstorm hook for Product Hunt" and track their progress.

This is what my project database looks at the moment.

Tasks & Reminders

Tasks are small chunks of work that you can complete in a day. The Tasks & Reminders database helps you stay on top of your daily activities and priorities.

If you need more than one day to complete a task, it’s more likely to be a project

For example, you might create a task like "Post the video about the Notis second-brain system" and assign it to the "Personal" Area with a specific due date. You can also use the calendar view to drag and drop tasks to schedule them.

By default, you’ll see your tasks with a due date on the calendar view and your inbox (your tasks without a due date) organised by area. Notion makes it very easy to change this and create views that match your specific workflow.

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Download Notion Calendar to view your tasks alongside your calendars and allow for easy time-boxing and updating.

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You can easily organise your week by drag and dropping your tasks from the right side (inbox) to the left side to schedule when you’ll work on them during the week.

Notes & Documents

Notes & Documents are everything that you write yourself. This database helps you organize your thoughts, ideas, and longer-form content.

Notes are things that you write. And things that you write yourself...If you write a quick note for you, it's just like a document that you don't spend much time doing it. But if you write a full presentation and a full document and spend a lot of time, it's the same thing."

For example, you might create a document titled "How to manage your anxiety at the dentist!" and link it to your "Personal" Area. This could be a quick note or a more detailed document depending on your needs.

By default, your notes are organized by area, but you can easily modify the view to organize them by project.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are for storing content created by others that you want to save for future reference. This can include web articles, quotes from books, or any other external content.

"Bookmarks are things that other wrote. So it can be website content that you captured to remember a new tool that you discovered might be a quote from a book, might be anything that someone else wrote."

For example, you might save an article titled "Drills, needles, and pain, oh my! Coping with dental anxiety - Harvard Health" to your Bookmarks database and link it to your "Personal" Area.

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I recommend that you install the Notion Web Clipper to easily capture web pages directly from Chrome on your desktop and to use the Notion extension that comes with their app on mobile.

Meeting Minutes

Meeting Minutes is a database for storing notes and summaries from your meetings, helping you keep track of discussions, decisions, and action items.

One of my favourite use cases is to ask Notis, right after I’ve hung up a call that was transcribed by Granola, to send me a draft for a follow-up email based on my last meeting with the other attendee's tasks and to add mine directly to my own tasks database.

For example, you might have an entry titled "Notis Orientation between Florian Pariset and Chaimaa" that includes attendees, key discussion points, and next steps from the meeting.

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Use voice notes to have Notis transcribe face-to-face meeting and Granola.ai for online meeting. When installing Granola, configure the Notion extension to use this database instead than the template provided by the developer", this way all your meetings transcripts end in the same place and can be used with Notis.

Features & Bugs

Features & Bugs is a database designed for product managers and developers to track feature requests and bug reports.

"I used to dread reporting bugs — Notis has made it, by far, the path of least resistance to write precise bug reports"

For example, you might create an entry to track a new feature idea or report a bug you've discovered in an application you're developing.

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Add your own bug report standard format to the description of the database. You can push things further by having GitHub synchronize your issues in this database so your team stays perfectly in sync.

Contacts & CRM

Contacts & CRM helps you manage your sales process or manage your contacts to give useful context for Notis. This is meant to be a very simple start point that you can modify to fit the place contacts or CRM has in your life. This database is particularly useful when you connect entries to the Meeting Minutes, Notes & Documents and your Tasks database.

Having my contacts in my second brain allows me to quickly ask Notis what my follow-up task is with my leads and easily ask questions about our previous meetings. It basically offers me a consolidated context by contact across my second brain.

For example, you might store contact information, interaction history, and notes about follow-ups with clients, colleagues, or friends.

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Ever handed out business cards at meetings and conventions? Snap a picture and send it to Notis for it to extract all the relevant info and save it in your contacts database. How cool is that?!

Troubleshooting

I can’t access the template

You can manually duplicate it from there: https://mindtheflo.notion.site/notis-second-brain-system