The Ultimate FAQ for Ultimate Brain

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.

There’s also a bundled edition that fully integrates the two templates (and gets you a great discount vs. buying both separately).

If you’ve purchase either template in the past, you’ll be able to buy the other at the discounted bundle pricing from a special link inside our Circle community!

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!).

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

The short answer is: no! Every feature of Ultimate Brain works on the free Personal Plan. Notion’s pricing plans are mostly about team usage, and all features are available on all plans.

However, there are some limitations of the free plan to be aware of:

• You can upload files up to 5MB in size

• You can only have five guests in your workspace (guests are people who have access only to specific pages)

• There’s no version history (so you can’t recover an older version of your page)

And that’s it! If any of the above are not an issue for you, then it’s completely fine to stay on the free Personal Plan.

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.

Absolutely. However, because this is a Notion template, you’re literally copying it into your own workspace.

This means that updates won’t automatically apply to your version of Ultimate Brain. For that reason, each update includes a detailed video upgrade guide which will show you exactly how to make any changes I’ve made to the template.

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.

When you buy Ultimate Brain, you’ll be automatically added to an exclusive Circle community where you’ll find tutorials and documentation. You’ll also be able to ask questions, make suggestions, and interact with me and other people using Ultimate Brain.

30-day refunds are available, minus PayPal fees if PayPal is used for payment.

Please read the details here as PayPal makes this complicated.

I’ve worked incredibly hard to make Ultimate Brain the absolute best productivity system/second-brain for Notion. I also do my best to answer support requests in a timely manner – so please, reach out if you’re stuck!

However, if you’re still not satisfied after asking for support, I’ll happily refund your money within 30 days of purchase. You can simply reply to the email confirmation you get after purchase to request one.

Important note: Full refunds are available only if you use Gumroad’s default payment gateway. If you choose to pay with PayPal, note that PayPal does not refund the seller’s fee they take when product refunds are sent.

Therefore, if you use PayPal and request a refund, I can only refund the amount you paid minus the PayPal fee.

Many other template makers simply do not offer refunds on their products, since they cannot be “returned” and access cannot be revoked. I believe in offering refunds, but I can’t take an actual loss in income from them.

Therefore, if you would like the option of a 100% full refund, you must use Gumroad’s payment option when purchasing instead of PayPal.

Yes, but you should understand Notion’s limitations before doing so.

Ultimate Brain is primarily intended for personal productivity. That’s how I’m marketing it, and its design is entirely built around allowing you to create your own all-in-one second brain in Notion.

You can use it with a team, however, it will be very difficult to use it for both team and personal purposes unless you’re ok with your team potentially seeing your personal tasks/notes.

One of Notion’s main limitations at this point in time is that we can’t restrict access to a databases based on filter criteria.

This means you can’t set up a permission like, “Only let my editor see database rows assigned to them.”

You can set up a filtered view that only shows these rows, but you can’t actually prevent them from seeing other rows unless you edit the permission settings of individual pages.

Currently, you must set permissions for people/groups at the database level, or the individual page level.

This means anyone with permission to see a database could simply make a new Linked View of that database, which would have no filters by default. This would let them see every row (except those with individually-set restricted permissions).

Ultimate Brain uses central “main” databases: Tasks, Projects, Notes, etc.

In most parts of the system you’ll actually use, you’ll see filtered views of these databases – e.g. a view of the Tasks database only showing the Tasks that are associated with a specific Project (you’d see this in the Project’s page).

But since it uses these main databases, you’d have to give your team access to the whole database in order to let them work with it.

Upshot: Currently, using one copy of Ultimate Brain for personal + team uses means your team will be able to see your personal tasks/notes/etc.

Notion may roll out an update in the future which would allow for true permissions to be set at the filtered-view level, which would fix this issue. But for now, you’ll need to either:

• Accept this privacy compromise

• Use separate copies of Ultimate Brain for personal and team uses.

Yes – all digital products sold to EU customers are required to include a VAT charge, and Gumroad (my payment processor) automatically calculates this charge.

However! If you have a business with a valid VAT number, you can get that VAT charge refunded after purchase. See this Gumroad support article for details.

Try checking your Spam folder. If it doesn’t arrive within 24 hours of your purchase, check whether your payment method has correctly processed - if it did, then please reach out to us, it might be an issue on our end!

We have a detailed link where you can learn all of the core principles and mechanisms that power Ultimate Brain. We also have a detailed Support Center that features a lot of in-depth articles.

While there are a few methodologies that helped us structure the template (mostly GTD and PARA), Ultimate Brain doesn’t follow one specific methodology, rather taking inspiration when it’s needed. For example, we’ve built a dedicated set of dashboard specifically designed for GTD-style task processing. But, at the same time, you can also process your tasks in a more traditional, general way.

It’s definitely possible to tweak the template so that it works in tune with one specific methodology.

Follow this guide.

If you already have an account in Circle, follow this link. If you don’t have one yet - you’ll find an invitation link in the purchase confirmation email.

All the core databases that power UB are locked by default, to prevent accidental edits. However, if you’re sure you want to modify a property (for example, add more option to a Status), you’ll have to unlock the core database.

Sadly, Notion does not currently offer an offline mode. While sometimes it may open a few pages that were previously cached (stored in the browser’s local storage), it will not load all your content without an internet connection. Offline mode has been requested for a long time, yet we’re still waiting on Notion to release it.

That’s because the ✅ Tasks & Events section at the top of My Day is a regular text block, rather than a database. Because of that, it is not connected to other parts of UB. You can treat that section as a whiteboard or a sticky note to quickly jot down things that you’d like to do today, without having to add & categorize them in the main task manager.

We're currently working on detailed integration guides for Ultimate Brain, but Google Calendar is turning out to be particularly tricky, with recurring events & invitations, specifically.

Notion announced a new feature, Synced Databases, that will bring us a native Google Cal integration sometime soon, but it’s hard to predict when that exactly will come.

There are a bunch of third-party solutions for doing this, however we do not recommend any particular one, as handing over your personal data to a third-party tool may be a potential privacy risk.

We’ve decided to not support times in recurring tasks out of the box. One reason is that times aren't used in any of the views, and generally don't seem to be a fully fleshed-out feature in Notion itself.

Regardless, Next Due isn't the issue here; the complication comes from the Make scenario. If one wanted to use times, they'd need to customize the Make automation to pull the time from the original Due date and use it alongside the Next Due date value in the final step. If they wanted to have some tasks have times and some tasks not have times, there would need to be a more complex Make scenario setup to check for a time before deciding what format to use when setting the final value.

We'll try our best figuring out a workable solution to this in the future, but we don't unfortunately have one yet.

If you want to make a backup within Notion, navigate to the top-level page of the template called 🧠 Ultimate Brain for Notion, right click it on the sidebar, and press Duplicate.

If you’re worried about losing access to your Notion account, you may make a new one with a different email/password combination, and then invite your second account to the top-level 🧠 Ultimate Brain for Notion page.

Exporting data off of Notion is also possible - here’s their guide on how to do that.

All of the six core databases that run all the Linked Views in UB are located in the 🔦 Archive, where they’re hidden in a toggle called The Brain.

You need to select the core database as the destination for clips to get added to the system. For example, if you want to save a note, you’ll have to choose 🗒 All Notes [UB] as the destination.

In most Linked Views that make up Ultimate Brain, there are default filters in place. For example, all of the ✅ Tasks specifically look for entries that have the Priority and Kanban Status properties filled out:

You can’t really solve this with Notion’s default Web Clipper, as it doesn’t allow to pre-specify properties while saving.

It is achievable, however, with Save to Notion - an unofficial extension that does allow that. In this example, you’ll have to set all your saved tasks to contain a Priority and a Kanban Status.

Read this article from our support centre.

There are also a bunch of general usage tips that can make your Notion faster, and we’ve made a video about that.

Refer to this detailed guide for best practices & tips.

Here’s the link to sign up!

Read our article on Getting The Best Support.

Please send us an email to alex@collegeinfogeek.com, we’re all ears!