Master Notion: Build a Simple To-Do List for Assisted Living
Feb 03, 2025
Starting with a tool like Notion can feel both exciting and overwhelming. You open it up, and there’s a big, blank canvas staring at you. Where do you even begin? Don’t worry—you’re not alone, and I’ve got you covered.
Let’s start small by creating a simple to-do list in Notion. It’s the perfect way to get organized while learning how the platform works. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a functional, personalized to-do list to help you tackle tasks and keep your assisted living business running smoothly.
Check out the video, too:
Why Use Notion for Your To-Do Lists?
Notion is more than just a digital notebook—it’s like a personal assistant for your brain. It’s highly customizable, which means you can create tools that work exactly the way you want. From managing tasks to tracking goals, Notion has you covered.
The best part? Starting with a simple to-do list introduces you to its features without feeling overwhelming.
Step 1: Set Up Your To-Do List Page
Follow these steps to get started:
1. Open a New Page
- In Notion’s sidebar, click the New Page button.
- A blank page will appear, ready for your creativity!
2. Name Your Page
- Click where it says “Untitled” and type something like To-Do List or Daily Tasks.
3. Explore the Sidebar
- Notice that your page is now listed in the sidebar. You can keep it visible or hide it for a clutter-free workspace.
Step 2: Add To-Do Items
Now, let’s start building your list:
-
Type a Forward Slash ( / )
- A menu will pop up. Select To-Do List from the options.
-
Create Your First Task
- A checkbox will appear. Type your task, like:
- “Create a to-do list in Notion.”
- A checkbox will appear. Type your task, like:
-
Add More Tasks
- Hit Enter to add the next task. Repeat until your list is ready.
When you finish a task, just click the checkbox to mark it as done. It’s super satisfying!
Step 3: Stay Organized
If your to-do list grows too long, you’ll want to keep it tidy:
- Use an Archive Page: Move completed tasks to a separate “Archive” page. This keeps your main list clean while saving a record of what you’ve accomplished.
- Delete Completed Items: If you don’t need to keep them, delete tasks after checking them off.
Extra Features to Explore
Once you’ve mastered the basics, Notion offers advanced features to take your to-do list to the next level:
- Templates: Use pre-made to-do list templates to save time.
- Tags: Add labels to categorize tasks (e.g., High Priority or Personal).
- Databases: Turn your to-do list into a dynamic system with filters and sorting options.
How This Helps Your Assisted Living Business
Running an assisted living facility means juggling a lot—resident care, licensing, payroll, and more. A Notion to-do list keeps everything in one place, so nothing slips through the cracks.
Start small by tracking daily tasks, then expand to include long-term goals, staff schedules, and compliance deadlines. It’s like having a personal assistant for your business!
Final Thoughts
A simple to-do list in Notion is the first step toward mastering this powerful tool. It’s easy to set up, fun to use, and endlessly customizable.
Remember: Start small, stay consistent, and build from there. Soon, you’ll be using Notion not just for to-do lists but for managing your entire assisted living business.
Ready to tackle your tasks and take charge of your day? Open Notion and give it a try—you’ve got this! 🚀
Download our Business Plan Checklist to ensure you have a comprehensive plan in place to help you launch your assisted living business.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
so you've set up a notion account and but you feel overwhelmed with everything that you are looking at and everything that you can do in notion i get it i've been there i've got a solution for you to help you make a simple to-do list that will help keep you on track while you are learning the ins and outs of notion and help you get things done we're gonna get into that in today's video hi everybody i'm brandon gustafson i own and operate two assisted living facilities and i created this channel to
00:00:26
help people just like you learn the ins and outs of investing in assisted living welcome to assisted living investing [Music] in our last video we talked about how to set up a free account with notion how you can go about doing that and get started with notion and in today's video we're going to get into how to create a basic to-do list in notion so you can just get started notion has a ton of options in here and i'm going to get into them a little bit as i go in and do this tutorial for you
00:01:05
but it can just feel overwhelming as you get started but there's a simple way to do it we're going to get into that in our in our tutorial for today on how to create a basic to-do list okay so welcome to the tutorial of how to create a basic to-do list in notion there is so much that you can do in notion and it can feel really overwhelming especially if you're new to notion and just getting started so i'm going to try to give you some of the basic things that you can do in notion
00:01:32
just so you can get started and start feeling productive and not feel overwhelmed by this big blank canvas that is going to allow you to do some pretty incredible things but in the beginning it's overwhelming so now now that you've created your free notion account um and you are logged in and you're ready to go um what you're going to do is you're going to open up what they call a page so if you are in there and it's brand new you just go down here and click new page it's going to open it
00:01:58
up and it's going to look like this it's going to be blank canvas like i said so it's going to be just brand new so on this page on your new page what we're going to do um is you're going to have a spot where you can put a title to it so it's right here this section is grayed out it says untitled um let's go ahead and click that and we're just going to type in to-do list right here that's all we're gonna do we now have our to-do list um this is our page for it and then if i go
00:02:28
over here to it you'll see it's now created that right there and it calls it to-do list so i can see that um over in my my left hand column over there i have mine hidden you can actually keep that pulled out if you click on this lock it into place or if you click on this closed sidebar it will just put it over there and then if you hover over it will bring it back out which is kind of a cool feature with notion keeps it looking clean and and basic for you um which is really nice so um now that you've kind of got that
00:02:59
in here you've named your page you're seeing a lot of different options in here right so these are some of the database options i'm going to get into that in a future video i'll link that up above for you but you can create tables or boards lists calendars galleries a timeline like there's a lot of tables and databases you can do and if you're familiar with databases you're going to absolutely love this if you're new to it don't get overwhelmed i'm going to show you a
00:03:25
basic way to create an advanced to-do list using a simple table that's going to make it really easy for you so make sure you keep an eye out for that video as well but as you get into here you can also you'll notice up here you can start empty with an icon you can start an empty brand new page you can look at different templates so i'm going to go over this in a future video as well that i'll link above but you can get information on different templates and and use some of the other
00:03:52
things that people have created they put them out there free templates and you can do that and you can also import data into this which is also really nice for us we're just going to click enter and it's going to give us this brand new page and what we've got you have this little icon here it has this little six six dots there where you can use that to drag it around click it and drag it to move it over put it wherever and then it says type the slash for the commands so what that means is if i click on
00:04:26
slash then it's going to give me options for the different types of blocks that i can put in that's what notion calls these different things so there's text you can see right here text a page to-do list heading tables bullet points you can do a numbered list toggle list which is really i use toggle lists all the time to collapse things up and down um do like a quote you can put in lines um linking to pages inside of your notion call out like that i'm not going to go through all these but there's just a ton
00:04:58
of stuff in here that you can do as you're looking into this embed types of links and things like that just a ton of information that you can put in here it's really cool for us we are creating the basic to-do list so what we're going to do is uh you can type in that slash and then go and find it here in the list or you can just start typing the one that you want and for us we want to do list so we start typing in to do and then if you just hit enter you've got yourself a little box
00:05:28
that says to do now you've got your your first to-do item on your to-do list and for this we're gonna type in here our first to-do item is create a to-do list notion and then if i'm ready to do my next to-do list i just hit enter and i can type in my next to-do list i could you know let's just call this next item and then i can do item uh number three you just type in exactly what you want it to be and then just hit enter and do what you what you need it to be and uh just type that in there you go so now
00:06:10
you've got this nice to-do list um what is can feel a little overwhelming is if you have a ton of stuff i'm going to get into this in the next video on how to create this little more dynamic be a little more advanced but if you just need to get started this is the best way to do it but you could get to the point where you have a ton of to-do items on here and when you're done with it you just simply click it and you can see it kind of grays it out and puts a line through it and and does that but it
00:06:34
keeps it here in a list so it's really nice you can very easily see these are the ones that are done that's great and you know i could make this drag this up here now this is the top of my to-do list and now i know which ones i need to do so you can do that but if you want to keep it clean this is a tip that i found that i really enjoyed doing so i'm just going to hit enter a couple of times here and create a new one and i'm going to do another slash and i'm going to do a page
00:07:00
right here and i'm going to call this page archive okay and up here you can actually see those breadcrumbs for you so if i click back up here and click on to do list now on my to-do list i have this archive and what i would do is i can just go in and select those two that i've completed take them drag them down into archive and they're gone they're off my to-do list now which is great and if i click into archive i can see they're on there so if i needed to keep track of what was happening i can still
00:07:29
find them that's a really good way to keep it clean another option for you to do is i'm just going to undo that action that's not going to work okay another thing that you could do you know let's say i got these these two items done what i could do now is i click on that six dot menu there and it gives me a few options on here so if i wanted to duplicate it and make the exact same one again i could do that but if i want to get rid of it i can just hit delete there or i can hit the backspace or
00:08:00
delete key on my keyboard and it takes it away so those are a couple ways that you can keep your to-do list clean if you're like me and like to have things organized and and have everything you know in its place and things like that using that archive page to drop things that are completed in there or just deleting them off once they're done is extremely helpful so those are a few really good options and tips on how you can keep your to-do list nice and clean and and keep it organized so that
00:08:29
you can get things done and know what has been done and what still needs to be done and just make progress on it which is how you can be effective and efficient in the work that you're doing so just highly encourage you to to do that type of work so that's the overview of how to create that basic to-do list in notion to start digitizing things for you you might like to use the bullet journal you might love just like being able to write things down for me i have a ton of to-do list items and i've found that
00:09:00
tracking those things in notion helps me out a ton so that's the the overview of how to create a really basic to-do list in notion and help you be productive i hope that tutorial was was useful to you i hope you learned a lot and how to kind of create that basic to-do list and help you stay on track stay on task with the different things that you need to do in notion comment down below like the video if if this was helpful to you and if you need help in learning how to get in there and really create something
00:09:30
a little bit more dynamic in fact in my next video i'm going to show you how to create a more advanced to-do list using a database feature within notion and give you a brief overview of how that will work so that you can create something where it will automatically take things out or you can use filters in there in that database to create something that that works for you so we'll get into that in in our next video to learn more about investing in assisted living make sure you visit me on assistedlivinginvesting.net we'd love
00:09:58
to see you over on the website i've got free resources over there a blog and you can set up a free consulting call with me so make sure you follow me over there and and connect with me on other social media platforms as well love to have a conversation with you and help you along on your journey to be a successful business owner and owner of an assisted living facility and remember it doesn't take a lot just a little bit just keep making progress one step at a time just those baby steps it makes such a huge
00:10:24
difference keep going you can do this if you do it every single day i promise you you will be successful thanks for watching and have a great day [Music]
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