How To Use Views Effectively
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Co-x3 Toolbox
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How To Use Views Effectively

Now that you've set up your template package, how can you manage your databases and enter content effectively?

What are linked views?

Views are different ways to filter, sort, and visualize your database content, from any page.

If you imagine your original table as a house, storing the contents inside, then different views would be different windows on the side of the house enabling you to look in. Each window can also have different tinting or distortion on the glass, changing the way the data looks.

Different type of views

You can choose from Tables, Lists, Boards, Gallery, Calendar views.

View my recommendations

Tables

  • Pros: Easy data entry and manipulation
  • Cons: Not visually appealing

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Lists

  • Pros: Display content in a beautiful manner
  • Cons: Can only show simple data

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Boards

  • Pros: Useful for scheduling, categorization, or pipeline manipulation
  • Cons: Often gets chaotic if there is too much content

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Gallery

  • Pros: Really robust, I like to use this in a variety of scenarios
  • Cons: Takes up a lot of space

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Calendar

  • Pros: Easily see all your obligations based on time-based properties
  • Cons: Can get hard to read when you have too much data

Notion has an awesome official guide to the different types of views available, so if you want to brush up on your basic knowledge regarding this, check that link out! Once you're comfortable creating your linked views, keep reading on to check out the advanced ways you can use views.

Distinguishing a view from the original database

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Views have this arrow, and original databases do not.

Filters

The best thing about having many different linked views is that you can have different filters on different pages. For example, when you are managing your week, you may want to see a weekly view of your daily quests.

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But when you are working on your day to day, you only want to see today!

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Sorting

You may want to sort differently depending on what you're using the linked view for. For example, you might have a master table that's showing many people's records, sorted by some metric.

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There would be situations where you would want to sort by metrics that are personally meaningful to you. Above, we are sorting by who is the highest level Below, we are sorting by who has the most gold

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Properties

Something really cool is that you can also choose to showcase which properties you want to show in your views that matter specifically to you. In both examples above, I am ONLY showing 4 properties, but the original database has 10+.

What kind of views are already built for you?

Within our system, you can find all the views that have been pre-built for your convenience.

Make Life Simple - Everything you need to execute on your day

Daily Planning - Everything you need to plan for your day

Alignment - Get a bird's eye view of everything that you care about.

Review Cycles - Meaningfully reflect on your progress at different periods of time.

Convenience Store - Easily get to the systems that you need on the go.

Fantasy World - Gamification is most fun when you're fully immersed into your own adventure!

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Build your own dashboard

We've included convenient views inside the backend to copy and paste anywhere! Take the views to any dashboard you want to personalize the system for yourself.

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Hacks to save you time ⏱

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I visually demonstrate all of the below hacks in this video, so check it out!

Duplicating a view

If you copy a link from the original database over to a notion page, you will not copy over the views (including filters, sorting, and properties) that you have built on the original. You can only 'duplicate' views when copying linked views with ctrl/cmd + c

Drag content from view to view to add custom properties

Filters enforce any content within the view to have those specific parameters. So for example, if you had a view that specified that the status must be complete, whenever you create a new entry or drag an existing entry into that database that custom property will be applied automatically.

Mobile readability

If you open a linked view as a page, and favourite that linked view, you will be able to see that linked view in isolation in your sidebar. This is extremely useful when you are using your mobile and want to access specific databases within your comprehensive dashboards quickly.

I highly, highly recommend using list and gallery views for your mobile browsing experience.

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TIP: When you are using a particular view on your mobile device, whenever you revisit the same page, it will go back to the most recently used for that device only. Meaning that the default view on your desktop will not be changed, so you can easily always have the best view option available for the device you are using. I covered this in our Friday Livestream 👇 Advanced Filters For Meaningful Dashboards