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Category: Productivity Tips
Tags: AIAutomationIntegrationNotionProductivity
Entities: AnthropicChatGPTClaudeMCPModel Context ProtocolNodeJSNotionWhisper Flow
00:00
I'm going to be honest with you. I also missed this update at first, but it's going to change everything.
Here's what I'm talking about. As you can see, I have an empty calendar on my right and I have a ton of tasks my to-do list.
And now I'm going to ask Claude to help me
00:16
plan my week. And what's going to happen is Claude will now figure out my priorities that I've uh, you know, written down elsewhere in notion.
It will then start uh figure out what open tasks I have and then it will schedule them for me based on my priorities. And you can see it will start to fill up here, right?
We have now our start our
00:31
morning routine. That's a great start.
We have to sometimes refresh an ocean counter to actually pull in these events. But you can see how it now starts these time blocks, right?
That get added to my calendar as Claude is planning. So that means right that AI has now access to take actions in my notion.
It can now anything that I have
00:48
in there, it can read databases and then based on what I tell it to do, right, it will do these actions for me rather than just, you know, giving me recommendations on what I should do. Yep, you saw that right.
A normal AI tool just helped me plan my week in notion. It added tasks, found my
01:04
priorities and all the relevant information and then it went ahead and scheduled when I should be working on them and didn't just tell me these things, right? It went into notion and it made these changes.
It can add more tasks for me, right? It can help me journal and then write out these things and can do pretty much anything in notion that I also otherwise could do.
01:22
All based on a super simple prompt. And now you can set this up for free within five minutes and without knowing anything about coding or how to integrate with AI.
Let's get started. Before we dive into the details, here's a quick look at how this works.
It all
01:38
starts with your normal notion system, right? Your data in notion that already lives in pages, in databases, basically whatever system you have.
And then we add a cool new layer to it and that is notion's MCP. Now MCP stands for model context protocol and it's basically a
01:55
way that allows AI tools like claude right the chatbt alternative uh from anthropic to access a tool and take actions there as you might know right notion has an API so we can automate a bunch of things like you know creating tasks reading out information doing
02:11
actions but until now basically that meant right us writing an automation you have a lot of videos on my channel about it but with this new MCP we can tell a chatbot like claw 2. Well, please go ahead and take these actions for us.
And that means we're no longer limited,
02:26
right, to this old AI workflow where we, you know, take a screenshot of our notion data and send it to Claude and tell us, you know, based on these things, please help me prioritize my week or, you know, give me feedback on XY Z. No, we can just tell look at the things in notion and then take the actions there, right?
Draft a document,
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uh, edit something or in this case, plan my week and set do dates, right? Due dates for all my tasks.
So what do we need for the setup? Well, besides of course notion and literally any kind of data in notion, we need claude which is the chatbot developed by entropic which
02:57
is the uh you know competitor to chatbt. Chatbt can't do this right now but I'll keep a blog post linked in the description and if that changes right I'll update this for now.
You need to go to claude and you need to download the desktop app. A free account is generally enough to make this work but you will
03:13
see probably better results on the paid one just because your context window and you know your usage is higher. But again, you can get started with this for free.
Next, you also need NodeJS to actually run MCP, right? This notion model context protocol because it's kind of its own server that will run locally
03:28
on your machine. You don't need to understand anything about this, right?
All you need to do is to go to a link in the description of this video and then depending on your system, right? Uh you need to click uh you pick this installer, right?
Go through the uh instructions there and have it installed on your machine. Claude will do all the heavy lifting for you, right?
You just need to have it installed. So, go there,
03:45
install it, and then you're good to go. Step number three is to create a custom integration for notion.
Basically, we need to make sure that Claude is allowed to access pages in notion. And the easiest way to do so is to go to uh notion.so/ profile/ integrations.
Again, link for that below in the description.
04:01
And here you are able to create uh an API at home. What you want to do is you want to make sure you're logged in with the right account and then you can click on new integration.
It will then ask you to, you know, to give it a name and to pick the workspace where you want to install this and then you can click on save. After that what you will see is you will get um a page like this one
04:17
here MCP matias the one that I have here and most important uh are two things here capabilities this is where you set what it can do right so if you just want to test you know how AI can retrieve information from your notion workspace but you don't want it to make any changes well you can simply untick these
04:33
two elements right and it can simply read content but for the full capabilities you want to have all three checked and then you want to get your secret right which is a token up here you're going to click on show and then on copy And then you need to copy it in a safe place because we're going to need this in a second. Now the last thing
04:49
that we need to get in order to put everything together is actually the well notion MCP right this middle part that allows claude our AI to talk to our notion system. And we can download this with just a simple snippet from uh the official GitHub repo.
Again, no need to
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work with GitHub. You can just follow the link in the description and then do exactly what I do.
Right? You want to scroll down here uh on this uh readme and you want to scroll down until you get to the point where it tells you to add MCP config and this is the snippet that you want to copy.
So here just click on copy and then we can actually
05:21
add it to claude and make sure everything works smoothly together in your claude desktop app. You want to launch that right and then uh you need to click uh to the top on claude and then here on settings and then on the settings page I'm just going to pull up here right you're going to go to the developer sessions.
Now, if you haven't
05:37
done anything yet, there will be like a get started and an edit config option. In my case, since I've already added something here, right, I can already see that.
But in your case, you just click on edit config. Now, the second you do this, it will open in your um finder on Mac or otherwise in the file extension thing for Windows um the claw
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configuration file and then you want to rightclick this say open with and just pick text edit app. Right?
If you're familiar with uh you can also use any other text visual studio, but text edit app is totally fine. Now if you open this you will see an empty thing right for me I have already the server in here
06:11
but what you will see is just like two empty uh curly curly brackets that's all you have so you can simply then delete this and paste in the uh MCP data that you just copied from GitHub. So I'm just going to go through this right I go to GitHub I go here I
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will copy this go back paste this and you can just save this by pressing command S. Now there's one more step that you need to do.
You see here where it says uh you know for your uh open API and headers authorization bearer and then NTN now NTN and then these stars
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this is the placeholder for your notion API key. So the API key that you copied and saved somewhere hopefully you're going to go in and add it here and it will be something like ntn right underscore and then you know some uh long string uh of information and after you've pasted this you can press command
07:00
s again to save it and then you've done all the setup that you need to do. So, I'm just going to paste my key in here, right?
I'm going to refresh this after this video so you can't access my notion. But that's pretty much all you have here.
And after that, we press save. We can close this.
We can close this. And then you need to restart claw
07:17
once. Otherwise, it won't be able to process the changes, right?
So, you want to just close uh the desktop app and relaunch it. Now that claud is ready, we only need to give it access to the specific parts of notion because just creating this access token is not enough to give it access to specific parts of our workspace.
In notion, we want to go
07:33
to the database or the page or the area, right, where we want to collaborate with AI. And then we need to click on the three dots on the top right corner.
Scroll down to where it says connections. And then here, make sure that the name of our token, right, in my case, it's called MCP Matias, whatever you have named your integration, right?
You need to search for that in here and
07:49
then add it to this page. And that way it can access the information here for trial.
Right? I would recommend to not give it access to your whole workspace.
Right? That very very important.
you will give AI command right and will start executing and doing things. So just like you know you wouldn't give an intern access to all of your system on
08:05
day one and just tell it to well make the changes that you think are necessary you shouldn't give notion air give cloud access to all of your notion work. So best to set up a new page right test this with a specific database and then roll it out to the rest of your system.
for the setup that I showed you at the beginning of the video. All that we need
08:21
is basically a task it is right with information about the task that I have and then if you want to add more value to it right not just you know have generic task but also tell claude okay what's important for you well then I would recommend that you create also a second page which might be a priority journal right where you sort of list out
08:36
the things that currently matter because then claude can always review your priorities right it can then help you schedule things and then you can have an introspection session later in the week maybe on the weekend and tell well this went well I got these things done Right, these things didn't go so well. Please,
08:52
I need next week I need to do XY Z. Help me update my priority journal.
And now you're in the situation, right, where you tell AI about your week and the things that you did and to ask it to please update my priority journal. Then it will write that information down for you.
You can then on another day ask it,
09:07
okay, let's let's have a look at what my current priorities are and schedule, right? And you create this loop of feedback for AI and it taking actions, right, for you, which is absolutely insane.
But enough said, let's test this again in action, right? We have our setup ready.
And now what I'm going to first thing that I'm going to do is you know ask lot uh can you access my notion
09:25
via the MCP and it will go off and if you've set everything up correctly right it should respond with yes I have access now if there are any issues with that right it might be either because you don't you haven't restarted clot after you edit the the file or because you
09:41
have the you know any issue with your token that's typically the two things but then we can now just give it a task right so you know please tell me which of my tasks I was planning on doing on Monday 2nd June 2025, right?
09:59
And the more context you give it, right, of course, the easier it is for to retrieve the right things. In this case, right, it will go in and will search for things and you will see that um on at the first step, right, it what it tried to do, right, was to just search for Monday, second June, and it didn't find anything.
So what it will then do right
10:14
is it will try to figure out okay what are the things like how can I find it the right information in this mute champion right it doesn't have any prior knowledge of the system so it then searches just for a task database it finds a task database and now that it has a task database now it is able to figure out okay which are actually the
10:31
tasks uh for you know that thing and this is a good example right where you can just give it more context and if you start regularly chatting with that right makes probably sense to set up just your general instructions for this so it knows all these things by default but you with you know just a bit of thought it figured out okay you know these are
10:46
my tasks that I have planned for the week and if you just look back at oops um what my task list says here right planned for Monday those are the things start morning workout right um my presentation and so on and so on and now I can tell it you know um I don't know uh can you add three more tasks for
11:04
Monday make up something but right of course that wouldn't be my usual thing right I would tell it okay I have to also do these things please please schedule them but you It will go ahead now and it will create these tasks for me and they will start popping up here on the side in my planned section. Well,
11:20
okay. Try that new coffee shop downtown, right?
That's a that's a great suggestion. I definitely will take it up on that.
Let's see what else uh it it comes up with. Take sunset photos at the park.
Also nice idea. And then probably like a third one later on.
So, this is the basic flow, right, of um the way
11:35
that AI can now actually take actions in your notion workspace. If you're curious about how you could leverage these kind of workflows for your team or company, well, you know where to find me.
Just send me a message link for that down below in the description. And now the world really is yours.
Let's just say uh
11:51
I will ask it to actually create a new database for me, right? Um uh please create a new database uh for me to track um you know movies I should watch.
uh you know add the typical properties that
12:08
you'd expect from a movie tracker. Then um research the um 10 best movies of the last year and add them to this uh database.
Right? So otherwise you would
12:26
do take these actions, right? You would probably figure out okay what is a plug-in for like quick capture notion.
You would uh write all these things down. But again, now you can just use natural language to tell your assistant to do these things for you.
Of course, this is not perfect, right? It is limited to the capabilities of the notion API.
And the notion API can do a
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lot, but it can't do everything. Most notably, what it can't do, by the way, that's a that's a good thing.
Um, whenever you use something for the first time, it will ask whether this is an okay command. I will say yes, this is fine.
Please go ahead and do this. But basically um what you can't do yet with
12:59
the API for example is create linked view use right and as you know any good notion system doesn't just use database it will use linked use at some point so you can't just ask it to you know create a second brain uh system for me right it will be able to create a database it will be able to create relations and entries in there and even some sort of
13:15
you know like placeholder dashboards but it won't be able to create a whole system just yet. So I'm not out of a job as a notion consultant but uh this is getting really really cool what we can So, we see we have our movies to watch database while I'm talking and it's starting to add some elements to it, right?
Anova. Okay, here's the director.
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There's the genre, right? Um, there's okay, we have the rating on there.
Okay, that looks good, right? The notes and so on and so on.
That's pretty nice. And, right, we could now work with these things, right?
We can can take actions here or we can keep telling to please, you know, update this based on my
13:47
preferences. And just to wrap up this demo, right, um, in order to actually have these tasks then show up in your notion calendar, what you want to do is on your task database, right, create a calendar database.
And this calendar database, make sure that you show the entries. Personally, in these systems, when I, you know, schedule my tasks, I
14:03
prefer to have two date properties, an option, a due date, right, which is the deadline by when I have to do something. And then the do date is when I plan on doing it because that way, right, I can separate the my planning from, you know, the rest of the system.
And then uh once you've created this right you can just click on open calendar and this will
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overlay it with your notion calendar for this cool time blocking uh event that you saw in the beginning could even take it one step further right you can with claude connect actually your Google calendar so it can read your events and it can actually schedule these things in around your existing commitments right absolutely insane what's possible with this plus right remember the priority
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journal as this quick way right to give it some structure on what matters you because of course right if you just tell it to you know look at my tasks and plan my week oh that's not enough context as Always context is king with AI. So the more information you can give AI as to what matters to you and what you prioritize well the better the output of
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the system will be. And now I have one last cherry on top of all of this which has nothing to do actually with you know specifically claude and the notion MCP but is my preferred way of working with AI because you could of course say well okay but I still have to type right I could also go to notion to do these actions.
Well yes unless what if you
15:09
could just talk to it right? One of my favorite new apps is called Whisper Flow and just allows you to, you know, um, easily do dictation anywhere in your system.
So, I've actually stopped writing with AI, right? I've never written as much as for this video in the past weeks and months.
All I do is press a hotkey on my computer and I just start
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uh, you know, speaking instructions. So, for example, hey Claude, please uh, check all tasks on my to-do list off and set them to complete or done as the status.
And then in a second, right, it just puts these things in. So now if you're really at a level, right, where you just
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start talking with the system and we'll take these actions for you, right? Really this assistant level that AI has promised to us in the beginning, right?
We now really can see how it starts to come together. And there you have it.
Now you have unlimited AI support directly in Notion. That's absolutely
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insane. But of course, this is only as good as your current Notion setup.
So if you don't have a good way yet to manage your projects in Notion, well, don't worry. I've got you covered.
Here's a video that will walk you through everything you need to go from an empty page to a proper project management
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system in Notion.