The only productivity app I kept...

Hey there, my gorgeous friends on the internet. In the last couple of years, I really tried to get into notetaking and productivity apps, but none of them really stuck with me. I tried notes on MacBook and iPhone, then ended up switching over to Obsidian on Arch Linux, and I kind of had the same experience everywhere where it just felt too manual for me. I had to create those pages myself, create those tables and charts, and it just ended up taking so much time that I kept thinking to myself, hey, I I should rather focus on actually building my project out. I feel like I'm wasting too much time here. Another thing I was facing that was really difficult with Obsidian is kind of keeping all the relevant data I need in one place from tracking my YouTube analytics to tracking uh GitHub issues and other bits of data across multiple devices as well. And in the last couple of weeks, I tried out notion. And my god, there's some really cool stuff that you can do with it. I want to share with you a couple of different ways I use notion uh to analyze my data uh to even create API endpoints that you can consume in your front-end applications. It's going to be really cool. So, let's have a look. So, one big change since the notion 3.0 release is that they introduced agents. So you can essentially talk to the notion AI to create these pages for you and uh create charts and tables and analyze the data that you have. Uh and you can also add integrations which I'll show you in just a second. Uh but one place where I use it like we are launching the new platform now. I know it's been a while. Uh but I'm still building it. I want to make sure it's it's perfect uh as perfect as I can get it. Uh but from my previous platform, I essentially imported all uh all the users here. Uh and you can do this with a CSV. Uh you if you have a database with your users, you probably are able to export it as a CSV regardless of the provider that you're using. But I basically imported it here. So I have all the different users here. And then I can simply open up uh the AI here. And as you can see, it actually targets uh this user uh database uh that notion creates for you. And then I can ask it any question. Maybe I want to uh see how many users I have per country, for example. And I've done just that. And have a look if I click here. It's going to prepare the chart for me. And look at that. I get a really nice visual of where all the people that join my course platform are from. So US is the biggest one at 24.2%. 2% uh and then the UK etc etc and then you can just use the data that you have here to identify trends maybe and see which kind of demographic you should uh target for example so I asked it hey could you tell me uh kind of organize the data by purchases by country uh so I did that and have a look at this I created the chart for me and it says again that the US is the biggest one here at 25.1 1% and then the UK and then Germany. So I can use this to actually maybe focus my advertising towards these specific countries uh rather than focusing on the little ones here. Sorry guys, but yeah, you can do a bunch more pretty much anything that you can imagine. So I also did one for marketing subscriptions. See how many people opted into getting emails and how many not. Uh I also tried to do a course distribution to see uh how many people bought one course versus two to three to four to five courses and you get a really nice visual. If you are interested in creating this yourself, you simply create a new page here. You go to database or you can ask the AI to make a database for you. I'll go to empty database and I'll go to settings here and I can simply uh connect a data source if I want. So I'll say add data source. Again, you can do build with AI or you can import a CSV yourself. Another thing I use it for is to essentially identify trends uh for YouTube and see kind of what kind of videos I should focus on and what are people interested in. Uh so I did the same. I went to YouTube and they have this feature where you can export uh basically 2025 as a CSV and you get the the video, you get the duration, the estimated revenue, you got the impression clickthrough rate. Uh, so that's what I used it for here. I wanted to see key metrics and I could analyze really easily to see what I'm going to focus on in 2026. So, one of them is going to be a CTR gallery. I kind of wanted to see which videos did the best, had the highest click-through rate to get a general feel of what people are interested in. And did these cards and as you can see, we have the title and the ID there and the views. And it says, oh, the React Nex.js JS uh tutorial seem to have the highest click-through rate, but it seems like another React video had really high click-through rate. Uh React again, okay, that's crazy. So, React videos seem to do really, really well compared to if I go down here, look, it's like CSS animations and just like basic JavaScript tutorials people didn't seem to care about too much. I also generated the chart to see kind of which video did the best in terms of revenue because on YouTube there are certain topics uh that will just generate more revenue compared to other ones. Uh so if we look here uh seems like the design videos uh tend to generate the most revenue and that's probably the least ones I make of but web design tutorial five important tips that has the highest RPM basically uh web designer here tips uh and then paying people $5 on Fiverr. Those videos always uh tend to do pretty great in terms of uh ad revenue and the worst ones. Let's have a look down here. Looks like advertisers don't really care about people using Neo Vim too much. And the nice thing about having these analytics on YouTube is that I can simply ask it to come up with video ideas and then I can create my own video pipeline and kind of pick and choose the ones I like and actually create a video around it. So based on those video analytics, I just asked, hey, create me some video ideas based on the highest click-through rate and what people are interested in. And it created these so high potential video ideas. Uh so self-hosting ideas here, Arch Linux ideas, um and then editor as well, animations and kind of what works and what doesn't work. It also found that the 15 to 20 minute videos seem to do the best for me. Uh and also easy quick wins that I could try out. So I basically take this and create a video pipeline here. And I just told it, hey, create me a tracker where I can go from idea uh to published. And it did just that for me. And I can even use the AI to move these if I want to. Uh so if I go here, let's say I want to do the accessibility tricks, I can just say move the accessibility uh tricks to planned. There we go. Look at that. It moved the accessibility one over to my planned one. One thing I really wanted to streamline for 2026 is the way I learn things. I'm really, really bad at this. I usually get excited about a topic like C++ and then I go down this big rabbit hole of of like learning about pointers, how the compiler works and then I look at the time and the whole year is gone and I haven't even done my project. So what I did was ask the AI here to create me a learning tracker and also add the best resources to learn these specific topics. So 3JS is something I'm really want to get into in 2026. Kubernetes, I want to make a tutorial on that. I know a lot of people have been asking for effect. Yes. So that's on the list as well. Uh but what's really cool is that it created notes for each of them with all the best resources to find these. So if I open up learn uh sorry C++ here as you can see the best resources are learn CPP uh CPP preference etc. And it even pulls I think YouTube videos here. So in effect yes there's Matt PCO here uh and the GitHub pages and everything like that. So, super cool that I didn't have to do any of these manually and it just pulled all of this information here together. So, I said I'm going to release the course platform this year, but I'm going to delay it because I want to add more content to it and I want to make it perfect. Uh, but this is what I use other note-taking apps for to kind of track all the different issues I have. But the problem was that was really complicated to sync the open issues, what's closed, where to assign these. Uh, and it's actually so easy to do here. Let me show you. So, as you can see, I have five issues here that are currently open. And it just automatically syncs it for me here. As you can see, those are the five issues. They're all open. Uh, we have the issue number, when they were created, and when they're going to be closed as well. H. And I also signed priority and status. And you can do this super easily. You can come here and you can add another column to if you want. So that's what I did here. I said add another column to the course platform issues and um on low, medium and high priority. Those should be like the three options you can choose from. And it did it automatically for me. As you can see these two are in progress and it syncs as well. So if I come here and create a new issue, let me just show you how this works. I say test. I say create. There it is. And if I go back here, it's going to sync. And look at that. It's fetching it. And boom, there it is. Test. And I can come here and also close this issue. There we go. Closed. And that should update as well. It's going to sync in just a second. H. But what's really cool is there we go. Closed. And it says the closed date as well. So you can simply come here and ask questions about it. When was what was the last uh closed issue? So there we go. The last closed issue was test uh which was closed today at 1:33 UTC. So really cool how you can organize and you can even create like charts and uh maybe different pages to organize these closed ones and visualize them in different ways. Uh how can you make these? Look how simple this is. I create a new page. I go down here. I add slash type in GitHub and look at that sync databases. Click on that and it's initially it's going to open up to sign in with GitHub. But once you do that, look at that. There's all my different repositories. So I can connect one here. Let's do uh let's do the same one tstack developed by AD issues. I click on that. It's syncing and boom, there it is. It's pulling in all the data for me. How cool is that? That's as simple as it gets. So, that's how I mainly use it for work. I barely create new pages or type anything out myself anymore. I just use the AI features to kind of handle all of that for me. Now, I tried to do something fun as well to see how far I can push this. And I recently got into Riftbound, which is a a League of Legends card game. I wanted to see if it could create a database for me with all the different cards. and basically have a way for me to track which cards I own and which I don't and also expose that to a REST API to build my own application on top of it uh with React. So I'm essentially using it as a database uh to synchronize update and then kind of having a front-end application to share with that with everyone else. So let me show you. So, I basically asked Notion AI to generate me a database with all the Riftbound cards with their images as well, their names, their domains, energy, etc. And look at that, it did it. It's like 400 or 500 cards here. And this is ready to go. I can expose this as a REST API right now if I wanted to. Um, and what's really nice is that you can pick between the models now. So, I can do Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, GPD 5.2. So they have the latest models uh so you can try out and see kind of what works for you. But once you have this, what you can do is go here to the three dots up at the top and you can go to connections and you can activate this and expose it as a connection. And now if you go to your developer settings, you can get the API key and this is now exposed for you to consume it. So how cool is this? Check it out. I have a visual with all the cool cards that I own. I can even update the quantity if I wanted to and filter it out with my search. and I can share this with anyone that I want. So yeah, there we go. That's a couple of ways I use notion here for my productivity and for my work. And I want to thank them as well for giving me a premium account. Thank you so much. I've been enjoying the models. Uh and you can try out notion as well for free. I'll leave a link in the description. Uh I was thinking about this word here and in my mind I read it as furry but it's fury. I was I was a bit scared. But let let me know uh what do you like to use for your productivity and uh note-taking apps. I'm curious to hear what's your experience and I'll catch you in the next one where we are going to gut Arch Linux and try out WSL on Windows and see how that works. And then we're going to do the Mac Mini as well. So that's going to be exciting. Drop a subscribe to stay tuned and I'll catch you in the next