🎬 Oscars 2022: a Notion Template

After the great feedback I got last year, I’m back with the 2022 version of my popular Oscars Tracker Notion Template, following the announcement of all the nominees this week:

Even though I'm calling this a template, since anyone can duplicate it into your own Notion system, this works more as a guide than a template, since all the content is already there ready to be used.

I've been using Notion for a while now to track all my content consumption, like movies I've watched, tv-series I'm currently watching, books I'm reading or want to read, music I want to listen to, even video games I'm playing. Especially now having a weekly newsletter where I share music recommendations (learn more about it), it's very important for me to have all this content centered in one place.

So here are a few screenshots explaining the basics of the template.

« 1 » This is the home page, where you'll get a quick explanation of how the system works, and links to the specific pages for the different pages:

« 2 » When you click on "Nominees", you'll access the database with all the films nominated in all the categories, organized alphabetically by title. Here you're able to quickly mark a film as "watched" and give a rating from 1 to 5 stars:

« 3 » Each film is its own clickable page where you can go a little further, adding a date when you watched (optional), watch the trailer, find a link to learn more about the specific film, as well as a dedicated space for you to write down a few personal comments:

« 4 » Back to the home page, clicking on "Watchlist" will bring you to a side-by-side view for a quick glance of the films that you've already seen and what's still on your watchlist. Once you mark a film as "watched", it automatically moves to the proper column, changing its view to the film poster instead of just the title:

« 5 » Back to the home page, clicking on "Favorites" you can access a separate page with all your Favorite Films, which means the ones that you rated as 3 stars or more. That way you can look back and remember your favorite films from the award season!

« 6 » And finally, as a bonus, I created a “Ballot” page, where you can simply mark your bets for the films you think will win and you want to win on each category, so you get ready to enjoy the big night!

If you download and use this template, please share your thoughts and any feedback with me through the comments section below, on Twitter, or by sending me an email.

And if you love music, like me, consider subscribing to Shuffle Sundays, my weekly Newsletter with personal recommendations to help you find your next obsession. All directly to your inbox for you to consume at your own pace. Click here to learn more!

How I use Notion to Curate Content for my Newsletter

I've been using Notion to collect and curate most of the content I've been sharing in my weekly newsletter, and I'm finally in a comfortable place with my workflow. Thought I'd share here in case it may inspire someone to do something similar. My workflow basically happens in 4 steps:

1: Daily Journal

My daily journal pages are directly connected to my content databases, through the use of relations, and every day I am tracking the things I'm watching, listening to, reading, or playing. Note that I use one separate database for each type of media. Some people prefer one database for all, it's just a personal preference here.

2: Recent Content

About once a week I visit a dashboard I call "Recent Content", which shows me all the content I consumed within the past month, all contained in toggles organized by type of content. It serves two purposes: a reminder of things I consumed, and a chance to mark the content as "to share", meaning that it's something I may want to share in a future issue of the newsletter.

3: Content to Share

Similar to the one above, "Content to Share" is another dashboard that shows me content I consumed organized in categories, but this time filtered to show me only content that I previously marked as "to share" and have not yet shared in any issue before. Being able to look at all the content in a visual way, on one single page, allows me to notice possible themes, ideas, connections, that otherwise may not happen.

4: The Newsletter Template

Inside my newsletter dashboard, I have a database that stores all the ideas, upcoming issues, and the archive. As part of my housekeeping routine, the day after I publish the latest issue, I go back to its page and make sure I link all the content shared in the respective fields, again through the use of relations, since all my content databases are also related to my newsletter database. This not only makes it easier for me to remember what I shared on past issues but also ensures that this content won't be visible on the "Content to Share" dashboard.

I hope this was helpful! Let me know if you have any questions or even ideas on how to improve the system!

🎞 Oscars 2021: a Notion Template

After the great feedback I had on the template I created to keep track of all the Golden Globes nominees, I got excited to work on a similar page, this time focused on the Oscars 2021:

Even though I'm calling this a template, since anyone can duplicate it into your own Notion system, this works more as a guide than a template, since all the content is already there ready to be used.

I've been using Notion for a while now to track all my content consumption, like movies I've watched, tv-series I'm currently watching, books I'm reading or want to read, music I want to listen to, even video games I'm playing. Especially now having a weekly newsletter where I share recommendations (learn more about it), it's very important for me to have all this content centered in one place.

So here are a few screenshots explaining the basics of the template.

« 1 » This is the home page, where you'll get a quick explanation of how the system works, and links to the specific pages for the different pages:

« 2 » When you click on "Nominees", you'll access the database with all the films nominated in all the categories, organized alphabetically by title. Here you're able to quickly mark a film as "watched" and give a rating from 1 to 5 stars:

« 3 » Each film is its own clickable page where you can go a little further, adding a date when you watched (optional), watch the trailer, find a link to learn more about the specific film, as well as a dedicated space for you to write down a few personal comments:

« 4 » Back to the home page, clicking on "Watchlist" will bring you to a side-by-side view for a quick glance of the films that you've already seen and what's still on your watchlist. Once you mark a film as "watched", it automatically moves to the proper column, changing its view to the film poster instead of just the title:

« 5 » Back to the home page, clicking on "Favorites" you can access a separate page with all your Favorite Films, which means the ones that you rated as 3 stars or more. That way you can look back and remember your favorite films from the award season!

« 6 » And finally, as a bonus, I created a “Ballot” page, where you can simply mark your bets for the films you think will will on each category, so you get ready to enjoy the big night!

If you download and use this template, please share your thoughts and any feedback with me through the comments section below, on Twitter, or by sending me an email.

If you love movies, like me, consider subscribing to Shuffle Sundays, my weekly Newsletter with personal recommendations of things to watch, read, listen to, and even play. All directly to your inbox for you to consume at your own pace. Click here to learn more!

This is a labor of love (for Movies and for Notion), but you can always Buy Me A Coffee if you want to support my work 🤗

300 Days of Writing

Today, February 24th, 2021, marks the 300th day in a row that I wrote as a daily habit. Even though it's not one full year yet, this number feels like a huge milestone for any daily habit. I don't think I've done anything consistently like this before, and I must say that it feels great!

(using Notion as my Daily Journal entries since May of 2020)

Last year, a couple of months into the pandemic, I decided to be a bit more serious about my daily habits and created a whole system around the things I wanted to do more. One of those things was writing, as you can imagine by the title of this post.

I've never considered myself a good writer, maybe because I never had any proper training in writing, but it's been something that I've gotten more comfortable doing and started enjoying more over the past decade or so, first in Portuguese, and now mostly in English. In the beginning, I used to blog a lot about the movies I was watching, in the form of critics/reviews, which is something I've been wanting to get back to it for a while now. More recently, my writing has shifted into sharing some of my photographic experiences here on this website, combined with a newsletter I used to have with updates on my career, and more recently, I started writing "Shuffle Sundays", my weekly newsletter with curated content. One of the reasons I've been keeping up with shipping the newsletter week after week is directly related to having built this daily writing habit over the past 300 days.

My journey began with writing "morning pages", a concept explored by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way. She recommends people to pick up a notebook and write 10 pages every single day, without worrying about the content. Simply writing whatever comes to mind. I did that for a little while, but even though I was enjoying the experience of slowing down and use an actual pen and paper, I noticed that that wasn't really part of my routine, so I decided to explore other ways of bringing the habit closer to my lifestyle.

Then I read the book Tiny Habits, by BJ Fogg, and found the piece I was missing on my puzzle, which was to think about ways to make the habit more interesting and appealing to get done day after day, and also coming up with an amount that was easy enough to keep up with while making sure it was still going to give me a sense of accomplishment.

For me that translated into using a journaling template I created in my Notion system, establishing that every morning I would open up the designated daily page (previously created), put a timer on for 5 minutes, and simply start writing anything that was on my mind. It automatically turned into a mix of journaling prompts (How are you feeling today?) with descriptions of what I was up to in terms of tasks and events. The key things here are knowing exactly the tools I am going to be using, and having a north start regarding what am I writing about, in case I don't feel "inspired" to write that specific day.

(a page of my Journal template, in Notion)

When I decided to start this, my main goal (if I can call it that) was simply to get more comfortable with writing as an everyday activity, with the hopes that whenever I wanted to work on a piece of content, I wasn't going to struggle so much with starting. And I'm happy to say that that was exactly what started to happen! Nowadays, when I sit down to work on a piece of content, like this one, of a new issue of my newsletter, I'm not scared to look at the empty document in front of me anymore, as I know that all I have to do is to just start writing whatever is on my mind and the ideas will start to flow naturally.

Golden Globes 2021: a Notion Template

I've been wanting to write about Notion for a long time, but I never thought that my first time mentioning the app was going to be by sharing one of my own templates! So without further ado, click on the link below to download the template for free!

Even though I'm calling this a template, since anyone can duplicate it into your own Notion system, this works more as a guide than a template, since all the content is already there ready to be used.

I've been using Notion for a while now to track all my content consumption, like movies I've watched, tv-series I'm currently watching, books I'm reading or want to read, music I'm want to listen to, even video games I'm playing. Especially now having a weekly newsletter where I share recommendations (learn more about it), it's very important for me to have all this content centered in one place.

A few days ago I had an idea to build a page (and database) containing all the films and tv series nominated for the 2021 Golden Globes, and after, in a way that it was easy for me to not only filter through the different categories, but also have an easy way to track which of those movies (or series) I had already seen and what was still on my watchlist.

As I started to put all the work in, I got so excited with what that simple idea was turning into, that I knew I had to share it with more people, after all, I couldn't be the only person excited about Notion and Movies with the same intensity, right?

So here are a few screenshots explaining the basics of the template.

« 1 » This is the home page, where you'll get a quick explanation of how the system works, and links to the specific pages for Film and TV Series:

« 2 » When you click on "Film Nominees", you'll access the database with all the films nominated in all the categories, organized alphabetically by title. Here you're able to quickly mark a film as "watched" and give a rating from 1 to 5 stars:

« 3 » Each film is its own clickable page where you can go a little further, adding a date when you watched (optional), watch the trailer, find a link to learn more about the specific film, as well as a dedicated space for you to write down a few personal comments:

« 4 » Back to the home page, clicking on "Film Watchlist" will bring you to a side by side view for a quick glance of the films that you've already seen and what's still on your watchlist. Once you mark a film as "watched", it automatically moves to the proper column, changing its view to the film poster instead of just the title:

« 5 » And finally, as a bonus, you can access a separate page will all your Favorite Films, which means the ones that you rated as 3 stars or more. That way you can look back and remember your favorite films from the award season!

All of the pages under TV Series works exactly the same, but with related content to the TV categories.

If you download and use this template, please share your thoughts and any feedback with me through the comments section below, on Twitter, or by sending me an email.

If you love movies, like me, consider subscribing to Shuffle Sundays, my weekly Newsletter with personal recommendations of things to watch, read, listen to, and even play. All directly to your inbox for you to consume at your own pace. Click here to learn more!

This is a labor of love (for Movies and for Notion), but you can always Buy Me A Coffee if you want to support my work 🤗