Thomas Frank – Ultimate Brain in Notion

Ultimate Brain brings tasks, projects, notes, and goals seamlessly together in Notion – creating a truly all-in-one second brain

One Place for Everything.

Tired of cobbling together multiple apps to form your “second brain”? Me too. Ultimate Brain lets you capture and organize everything inside of Notion – turning it into a truly all-in-one workspace

Ultimate Brain comes with the most advanced version of the Ultimate Tasks template built-in, letting you create sub-tasks, recurring tasks, priority levels – and even do advanced GTD®-style processing.

The Notes dashboard lets you capture notes, favorite them, and organize them easily.

You can also create Projects, which can collect both tasks and notes – giving you a single dashboard where you can see everything related to your project.

Best of all, everything can be seamlessly organized using the P.A.R.A. organization method made famous by Tiago Forte and his Building a Second Brain course.

Capture Anything Instantly

Your second brain should make it easy and fast to capture anything, no matter where you are.

Ultimate Brain does that.

The built-in Quick Capture view lets you capture tasks and notes, then intelligently sends them off to a Process dashboard, keeping itself clean and minimalistic.

You can even capture Fleeting Notes, which archive themselves after a month

Plan Your Day Without Stress

The My Day dashboard lets you create a clear, clutter-free plan for your day.

It also emphasizes self-care, which is easy to forget when you’re focused on work.

There’s even a Daily Journal area where can write morning pages and review how your day went.

Manage Your Projects

Using Notion’s database magic, Ultimate Brain turns every project into a hub where you can manage tasks and notes related to that project.

No more jumping back and forth between a project management app and a note-taking app. It’s all here, all in one place.

You can even pull in other notes from around your workspace using Ultimate Brain’s unique “Pulls” feature – check out the Interior Design notes I’ve pulled in this example screenshot.

Cut Out the Clutter (Automatically)

A second brain only works if you trust it and want to use it – and you’ll only want to use it if you can keep the clutter and bloat to a minimum.

Ultimate Brain comes with a smart Archive where anything can be sent. If something isn’t relevant to you, archive it – it’ll stay out of your hair, but be safely in the Archive if you ever need it again.

You’ll even find a few automatic archiving features – such as Fleeting Notes and Cold Tasks.

Built-In P.A.R.A. Organization

Organize everything in your life with Tiago Forte’s P.A.R.A. method – Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Built right into Ultimate Brain.

Tiago Forte’s well-known Building a Second Brain course organizes everything in your second brain using four categories:

1. Projects – multiple tasks linked to a goal
2. Areas – spheres of activity with a standard to be maintained
3. Resources – topics or themes of ongoing interest
4. Archive – inactive or no-longer-relevant items

Ultimate Brain is built to support P.A.R.A. organization right out of the box – and even improves on the method.

Using Notion’s database magic, Areas can contain both Projects and Resources, creating hyper-useful dashboards for each main area of your life.

Of course, you’re free to create Projects and Resources outside of your Areas as well.

Goals, Books, Recipes, & More

Stay on top of your goals and milestones. Collect recipes and filter by meal time. Track the books you read and take notes. And lots more…

Frequently Asked Questions:

How is Ultimate Brain different from Creator’s Companion?

Ultimate Brain is a complete productivity system for Notion. It is a general tool that combines notes, tools, project, and goals, helping you to plan and organize your life. It’s also focused primarily on personal productivity.

Creator’s Companion is a template that completely replicates the advanced content planning system my team and I use for planning, researching, scripting, and project-managing all of my content across YouTube, blogs, and social media. It is a template specifically made for content creators, and contains many features and workflows intended to assist the content-creation workflow – Channel pages, idea capture & validation, a Sponsor tracker, etc.

How is Ultimate Brain different from Ultimate Tasks?

Simply put: Ultimate Tasks is a standalone task manager for Notion. Ultimate Brain is a complete productivity system for Notion with all of the features from Ultimate Tasks + many more.

Ultimate Tasks is a free task + project manager template I’ve offered since 2020. It is included inside of Ultimate Brain, supercharged with additional features:

Advanced GTD®-style task processing and Smart Lists (Do Next, Delegated, Snoozed, & Someday)
Integration with Notes – especially in Projects, where you can see tasks and notes related to your project all in one place
Ultimate Brain’s task manager contains all the latest features from Ultimate Tasks, including our advanced recurring task features (which can be automated!).

Can I transfer my tasks from Ultimate Tasks to Ultimate Brain?

Yep, and pretty easily! Our support community contains a tutorial showing the exact, step-by-step process.

Do I need to be on a paid Notion plan to use Ultimate Brain?

Nope! Everything in Ultimate Brain will work flawlessly on Notion’s free plan.

What is a Notion template?

In Notion, any page can be made publicly available on the internet. It can also be set up so that others can duplicate it – i.e. add a copy of it into their own workspace.

Ultimate Brain is an expansive template which contains multiple pages and databases.

When you duplicate Ultimate Brain into your own workspace, you’ll have an exact copy of it that you can then start using.

Can I make changes to Ultimate Brain?

Absolutely! Ultimate Brain is a Notion template, which means it becomes yours the moment you add it to your workspace. From then on, you can make any tweaks that you want. (Just please don’t share it with others, as it’s a paid template and part of my livelihood!)

However, be aware that making changes to the template may make it harder for you to integrate any updates that I make to the template down the road. I create detailed upgrade guides for all changes, but they can only show how to make those changes from a common starting point.

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