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Ultimate Brain for Notion — Tasks, notes, projects, and PARA organization all in Notion
Ultimate Brain is a complete second brain template for Notion. It’s the productivity system I’ve always wanted, combining notes, tasks, projects, and goals, along with advanced features: recurring tasks, GTD, Tiago Forte’s PARA organization system, and more.
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Hey all! 😁
I'm Thomas Frank, and I'm a YouTuber and Notion creator. I'm pumped to share my template, Ultimate Brain, with you. (Thanks so much for hunting it, @benln !)
I've been using Notion daily since 2018, and since then I've wanted to create a truly all-in-one system for my personal productivity within it. I wanted a place to track my tasks and projects, take notes, clip web pages and highlights. and plan my day.
Ultimate Brain is that system. It's a template that you can drop into your Notion workspace to create a complete productivity system.
My team and I launched Ultimate Brain in April of this year; since then, we've sold over 7,500 copies, made several tweaks and updates, and answered over 830 threads in our support community.
I'm confident Ultimate Brain is the best productivity template you'll find for Notion, and here are a few reasons why:
🦸♂️ Active Support - Highlighting this first! Ultimate Brain comes with an active support community led up by the absolutely fantastic @aantoszek , who does a fantastic job of answering every question in detail.
📚 Comprehensive Beginner's Tutorial - Including written guides, an interactive demo version of the template with tons of example content, and over 6 hours of video tutorials. The videos cover everything from how to get started, to how you can deeply customize the template and add to it.
📄 Update Guides - when Notion releases new features, we make detailed, step-by-step update guides that show you exactly how you can upgrade your template to include them.
🗃 P.A.R.A. Organization (12:55 in the video) - I'm a big fan of @fortelabs PARA system, so it's deeply integrated into Ultimate Brain.
✅ GTD Dashboard (27:37 in the video) - Ultimate Brain supports a complete GTD workflow ➡ Inbox, Next Actions, Calendar, Snoozed Tasks, Someday/Maybe List, etc.
However... the GTD features are completely optional - you're not forced to use them. You can practice GTD, or follow a more traditional (and simple) productivity workflow.
📅 Recurring Tasks (32:50 in the video) - Ultimate Brain has an extremely robust recurring tasks system, allowing for complex intervals: End of the Month, Last Workday of the Month, Mon/Wed/Fri, etc. @yomartholomew spent two full months developing the most monstrous Notion formula I've ever seen in order to make it all work seamlessly.
Our docs even have a guide showing you how to automate your recurring tasks - for free - using Make.com.
🥅 Quick Capture Dashboard (03:12 in the video) - an always-clean page that lets you quickly capture notes and tasks.
🧹 Auto-Cleanup Features - one problem with task and note apps is that we often capture and schedule too much, and then end up with tons of overdue tasks and irrelevant notes.
I know I deal with this messiness myself, despite my best efforts to do weekly reviews. So I built in auto-cleanup features to help with this problem.
- Cold Tasks (25:50 in the video): Tasks that are more than 2 weeks overdue and non-high-priority go to a safe "cold tasks" page and disappear from your normal due lists (this is also easily customized).
- Fleeting Notes (35:02 in the video): Ultimate Brain has a special area for notes that are "fleeting", i.e. only relevant for a short period of time. After a month, they go to your safe Archive and don't crowd your inbox or other folders.
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There are a lot of other features I could list, but I'll wrap up this comment by mentioning that Ultimate Brain has a no-questions-asked refund policy.
I set out to create a world-class customer experience with this template, including active support, multi-modal tutorials, and help docs. I believe a great refund policy is part of that experience as well. If you try it out and decide it's not for you, we'll refund you. Just like that.
If you have questions, I'll be here (along with some of my team) to answer all of them!
P.S. - I'm always happy to answer questions and nerd out about the biz/marketing side of selling Notion templates as well. Don't hesitate to comment here or reach out on Twitter 😊
@benln @aantoszek @fortelabs @yomartholomew @tomfrankly Super resourceful. Congratulations on the launch!
I have been a productivity junkie for many years and I recently dumped all of my tools for Notion. Thomas Frank is the ultimate expert when it comes to Notion so I am biased towards everything he creates. His videos and templates have been very helpful and instrumental in my success with notion which I use for everything personal and professional. I just love it so much.
@threehourcoffee Thanks, Marie! Yep, making UB optimized for mobile was one of our most important goals! This is so often overlooked when building Notion systems.
Congrats to you and the team on this launch!! I LOVE my Ultimate Brain and the CREATIVE Companion add on and integration. Well done and I hope others love it as much as I do! Cheers!!
So, I've been looking literally years for something that would implement a GTD-based workflow in a way I could live with.
And now, after reading Building a Second Brain, I realized that that was the missing modern-digital-age organizational component for the "Reference" area of GTD.
I've tried Evernote, Google Keep, Nirvana, Todoist, ClickUp, and plain Notion, and a couple of others. They all either lacked:
1. the features I needed, or
2. the flexibility I needed
When I found Thomas' Ultimate Brain template, I was initially skeptical, because I'd tried out Notion, and found it clunky and unwieldy. I loved its configurability, and pretty rock-solid syncing and eventual-consistency support. But I didn't want to climb the learning curve of trying to build my own acceptable GTD system out of it.
ENTER ULTIMATE BRAIN.
Thomas has put SO MUCH THOUGHT AND WORK into this template.
He REALLY UNDERSTANDS how GTD and BASB work in practice, and has implemented the workflows in a very knowledgable and effective way.
And most importantly, when GTD/BASB DON'T work or may have holes/oversights, and you need to be provided the flexibility you need to actually do what you really need to do..
But what really sold me is the documentation and support. EVERY FEATURE has context-specific in-app documentation, separate docs in the support site, and a detailed, very professional and polished video explaining everything about it.
Is it perfect? Hell no, if you are the type of person to use a system like this, you're a perfectionist and nothing will ever make you completely happy.
Is Notion still clunky? Yeah, although they are executing pretty well, and it's "good enough" for me to deal with the warts.
But those cons don't matter much because Ultimate Brain as implemented as a Notion template:
1. HAS THE FEATURES I NEED
2. HAS THE FLEXIBILITY I NEED
(see what I did there?)
So, I'm a happy paying subscriber, and looking forward to seeing how it works out for me going forward.
Great job, Thomas! Good luck on the launch!
Congrats to the entire team! You can tell all the effort you put into building not only the template but the documentation and resources around it 🙌
@leanzubrezki Thank you, Leandro! Always good seeing you here 🙌 We're all huge fans of your work 🎉
Been recommending this template to most clients and leads. Top-tier work! Congrats on the launch 🔥
@temirlan Thanks, Tem! Always appreciate your support. Good luck with HiveMind! 🐝
Thanks to his amazing YouTube videos, most people know how much Thomas knows about Notion.
What a lot of people don't realize is how comprehensive, hard-working and thorough he is. In every interaction I've had with him, I've been blown away by the level of effort and excellence he puts into things. On top of this incredible ethic, he's also just a good dude (see the support services that come with this product).
I cannot endorse Thomas, his team, and his work product highly enough.
@andrewbarry5 thank you so much Andrew! And thank you for being a huge influential figure on my path to finally launching my own products. I'm not sure if I told you, but Creator's Companion (my first product) was inspired by everything I learned in your course creator's fellowship. I intended to create a course (which is why I joined), but ended up making a product instead!
@tomfrankly that's very kind of you to say my friend, and sounds like you made a wise choice back then!
@sobedominik Thanks, Dominik! We absolutely love HelpKit - it helped us build a comprehensive help center very quickly. What a terrific product.
Thank you so much for your support here 🙌
Awesome! Another On Deck fellow with an awesome and very useful product!
@tomfrankly I love the whole idea of this, my team lives in Notion.
If we’re already using Notion heavily can we still use your Ultimate Brain in our workflow?
@andrew_fiebert thanks so much Andrew!
Ultimate Brain is a template that's focused on personal productivity, so you won't find team-specific features built in right away. You can absolutely add them, though.
I'll share what we do though; I use a copy of Ultimate Brain for myself, and then we've got a more custom team area in our Notion that everyone uses for team projects.
One day, I'd love to totally merge them - but we've found (from very extensive testing) that Notion's current permissions tools make it difficult to use the same set of databases for both personal and team use.
This isn't an Ultimte Brain limitation, it's a Notion one. But I'm hoping that we'll see some new permissions features in the near future that will fix this! The main thing we're waiting for is the ability to set database permission based on a linked view of a database - i.e. "Teammate A has access to this filtered view of the database, but not the whole database".
Hope that makes sense!
Simply the best template and accompanying tutorials on the market for both personal and business use! You can see author's deep and practical understanding of Notion and that he actually uses it on regular basis for few years.
Love this template pack so much- really happy to have stumbled across it a few months ago! Of all the Notion templates I've purchased, I definitely use and love this one the most so far- and that's saying a lot! I tend to buy the packs and stop using the majority of them because they don't make sense for my workflow. The videos are also super helpful in explaining how to use everything- esp if you're not a Notion pro yet. Super comprehensive and perfect for managing my days/notes/business/life.
@rachel_barno thanks so much Rachel! We definitely went hard on the tutorial videos 😁
I have been following Thomas' work for years now (website content plus videos). All I can say about his work is that he NEVER disappoints. Can't really wait to use this second brain Notion template.
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