I was lost⊠but then I found⊠a way to organize Before I organized my own story in Notion, I practiced organizing an already established story.
A while ago, I was rewatching an old guilty-pleasure show of mine (and maybe yours) â Lost. I made my wife watch it several years ago and while doing so she understandably felt⊠lost. Itâs a complicated and convoluted show, I admit. Iâve watched the whole show several times and even after this last run, I still didnât fully understand the timeline of events in the show.
So what better way to get some clarity than to organize it in Notion?
My Lost Timeline Dashboard in Notion Check out my Lost timeline dashboard for yourself.
How the timeline is structured The key to having interconnectivity in Notion is to create databases. Whenever I make a dashboard in Notion with different interconnected databases, I try to make a database for every kind of variable that I can think of that would need multiple values encapsulated in it.
An examples of how to structure Notion databases if you were building a dashboard for a collection of cooking recipes. The Proteins, Cuisines, and Cooking Styles Databases are all tied by relations to the Recipes database. These are the variables that I came up with for creating a fictional timeline:
Events Locations Characters Groups Episodes (Chapters) Eras (optional) Months (optional) Events Database The main database of this whole thing is the Events database. This is where the controlling values are located and where all the other databases relate to.
In the database, I created an integer property for the year, a selection property for the month, and another integer property for the date.
The Events database's properties of Year, Month, and Date. Now, in Notion there is a Date property available â so why didnât I just consolidate these different properties into that? The reason is lots of events in this timeline had no discernible date â they either happened in the general time in a month or even in an indeterminate time in a year. Having these properties separated out released me from having to choose a specific date for an event if I couldnât find what it was.
Now, this is where we get into âdynamic interconnectivityâ with our timeline: I made relation properties to the Locations, Episodes, Characters, and Groups databases so I could tie the When, Where, and Who parts of the story to these specific events in this Events database.
The Events database's relations to the Locations, Episodes, Characters, and Groups databases. The last property I made was a function property for aesthetics. This grabs the day, month, and year properties I mentioned earlier and aggregates them into a simple line of text that I could use to display the full date of an event. This works great with linked instances of this database thatâll be made in the pages for Characters, Locations, and Groups.
The function property in Notion allows you to manipulate different properties in a database together using formulas. Locations, Characters, and Groups databases These are pretty simple databases. I just created a name and a selection property for organizing.
A gallery view of the Characters database. The real meat of information for these three databases would come from the relations they had to the Events database. The content in each location, character, and group is the linked instance of the Events database that only shows events that are relevant to that record.
The dynamic content in a character's page from the Character database. You can place linked instances of other databases on this page and create templates for the Character page with the database automatically filtered to show records where said Character is marked as a relation. Episodes Database Since this was a TV show, I broke it down by episodes instead of chapters â but itâs as easy as just changing the name of the database to use it for chapters of a book. If youâve watched Lost, youâll know that each episode is structured to focus on one main character so I created a relation property relating to the Characters database.
Then I just made a selection property for the seasons (or if this was a book series, itâd be books) to organize them for different filtered views I would have in the database.
Gallery view of the Episodes database. Months and Eras These two databases werenât needed for making the Lost dashboard since Lost took place in the real world, but for my story, O Burning Star, I created custom Months and Eras.
If your story is set in a totally original world set apart from the real one, itâs probably not going to follow the Gregorian calendar of our world. It might have more or less than twelve months in its year and the months might have different names than ours. With this database, I could create custom months, set their order with the Order integer property, and create a relation property to the Events database so I could use them to help sort events.
Months database â available in the Fictional Story Timeline template . Another thing with fantasy worlds is Eras or you can call them Ages if youâre writing something like the Lord of the Rings. Eras can be the large groups of years that are a secondary ordering variable for a history timeline. The count of years can start over when a new era begins. Like in the Lord of the Rings, a new age would mark the start of a new counting of years starting with a Year 0. Like the Months database, you can set the Order integer property to help sort the Events database even further.
Eras database â available in the Fictional History Timeline template . The Benefits of my Timeline Using this kind of structure for my own story, Iâm able to keep better track of what is going on in it.
If I need to remember what events a character experiences, I can just look at their page from the Characters database and see a linked instance of the Events database that is automatically filtered to show events related to that character. And if I feel like I need to add an event to a character, I can just add it to that linked instance and itâs added dynamically to the Events database.
Making edits to any linked instance of a database changes the source database and also every other linked instance anywhere else. By tying chapters to specific events, I can make sure coinciding events that happen in the story happen in the right span of time. And if I ever need to make a change or move an event back, with the sorting capabilities that I made for the database, itâll automatically shift the timeline in every instance that I have in notes of my characters, locations, and groups.
Ready to try it out?
Notion is a pretty powerful, yet simple platform to create dashboards and systems like this. Itâs why it is now my favorite app right now for organizing pretty much anything in my life and work I can think of.
Oh yeah, Notion is also free to use
