Create Your First Flow
Say you stumble upon a really cool web page about accelarated learning, and you'd like to save it to Notion so you don't lose it.
This is a job for a Flow!
Flows are preset workflows for capturing information, including:
Web data – URLs, page titles, full articles, metadata
Notion property values – icons, page covers, tags, Relations, dates, and more
Page content – nearly any web data can be capture to a Notion page.
With Flows, you can ensure whatever you're capturing goes to the right place, right away.
For capturing our article on accelarated learning, perhaps we set up a Flow that:
Captures to your Notes database in Notion
Grabs the article's title, URL, and cover image
Applies your Learning tag page, so you see the article in the filtered notes view on that page in your note-taking system.
In fact, let's do just that!
Tip: If you don't already have a note-taking system, you can use my free Ultimate Notes template, which ready for this tutorial right out of the box.
If you're already using Ultimate Brain, you've already got the most advanced version this same note-taking system (along with extra features).
Create Your First Flow
Click + Flow to create your first Flow. You can also hit + Folder if you'd like to create a folder for it first.
A Flow creation modal will appear, here you can set the following:
Set an Icon
Name the Flow
Set the Flow type (leave this as destination for now. View Capture Modes for more info.)
Choose the folder. If no other Folders exist, the only option will be No Folder.
Give your Flow a name, as well as an icon if you wish. The book icon is a good choice. But you do you. Click Create Flow when you are done.
Choose a Database
Next, choose a Notion database. This will be your capture destination.
Remember that Flylighter needs access to a Notion database before you'll see it in the list of choices. If the database you want doesn't show up, you can manually give Flylighter permission to access it by going to the database in Notion, hitting the ••• menu in the top-right corner, and then clicking Flylighter in the Add Connections sub-menu.
Once you've chosen your database, all of the database's visible properties will show up in the Flow editor. Let's do a brief overview of the Flow Editor:
Page Icon - This is the page icon to be captured, by default it's automatically filled with the side icon. You can click it to open the data picker and choose a different icon.
Page Cover Image * Same as the page icon, but page cover image instead.
Currently selected Database/Destination
A database property - Shows the property name, and the value to be captured.
The Data Picker & Configuration button * Well go over this more in depth soon.
The Capture Button - This will capture the current page to the database.
Add Web Data
When you're capturing to a database, you can set three types of values in Notion database properties:
Web data – e.g. actual data from the web page you're visiting, like the title, URL, etc.
Existing/new property options – e.g. options in a Select, Multi-Select, or Relation property. You can choose existing values or create new ones (in the latter case, some properties require your database to be unlocked).
Text, numbers, checkbox states, dates – in certain property types, you can simply type or set your own custom values manually.
Let's start by adding some web data to your first capture. Typically, you'll want to use web data – usually the web page's title – when capturing that page.
By default, Flylighter will autofill the icon, cover image, title, and url.
On each property, you can click the ⋮⋮ grab handle icon to open up the Data Picker.
The Data Picker is a powerful tool that lets you fill the selected property with web data from the current page. (Technically, it's a suite of plugins – but we'll dig into those later!)
Try clicking on the globe icon for the Name property – this is pulled from your Notion database, so if you renamed it to something else (e.g. "Title"), it'll be labeled accordingly.
Next, pick the value in the Title section. This should be the title of the web page.
Note how the icon lets you know that value has been Saved. It's now set to auto-fill, which means it'll automatically grab the title of the web page the next time you run this Flow.
Also note the blue border on the ⋮⋮ icon; this lets you know that the property has an auto-fill setting applied.
If your Notion database also has a URL property, I'd recommend doing the same for it – that way, your Flow will auto-fill the URL of the web page you're capturing.
Tip: Head to the Auto-Filling Flows page to learn more about how you can set rule for auto-filling properties with web data! Title and URL properties set themselves to auto-fill by default.
Set Existing Property Options
Some Notion properties will also have a small 🔽 icon, which will let you set existing options from those properties – such as an option in a Select property, or a page in a Relation property.
You can also create new options in these properties right from Flylighter! Just start typing to bring up that option in supported properties.
Note: For some property type, like Select and Multi-Select, your database needs to be unlocked before you'll be able to create new options. Learn how to unlock a Notion database here.
Here, I'm selecting the Growth page inside a Relation property called Area, which I use effectively as a tagging system. These terms come from the PARA Method.
You can also see the option to set this property to Auto fill exact value. Anytime I run this Flow in the future, my Growth page will be set in this Relation property.
Finally, note how I've also added the Article option in Type, which is a Select-type property.
Other property types will give you other options. In Text properties, you can simply type whatever you want (or use the Data Picker to grab dynamic data). Checkbox properties have a toggle you can set.
Set the Page Cover and Icon
You can also set the Cover Image and Icon in the Notion page that will be created from your Flow.
Next to the Destination Database, you'll see the Icon and Cover options with previews. These work similarly to the Notion properties below them; click them to open the Data Picker, and you'll see several options:
Icon: In the Web Data plugin, you can choose the site's favicon. You can also use the arrows to navigate over to the Feather Icon and Emoji sections if you prefer those instead.
Cover: If the page contains a featured image, cover image, or social media image, you'll see it here.
Icon and Cover values automatically set themselves to auto-fill with Data Type. This means you'll be able to automatically capture each web page's favicon and featured/social media image, if they exist.
Capture the Page
Once you've set your properties the way you want them, you can hit Capture to run your Flow and capture the current page to Notion.
Hit Open in Notion if you'd like to see your shiny, newly-captured page.
At this point, your Flow is also set up and can be re-used at any time. Any value you've set to auto-fill will do so on each new capture – and you'll still be able to set additional values that may be unique on a per-capture basis.
Build Additional Flows
Keep in mind that you can do a lot more with Flows. Here are a few more example Flows you could build:
Inbox Flow – use Flylighter's Instant Capture feature and a keyboard shortcut to instantly capture a page to your notes inbox in Notion, without any tags. You can even set this to capture full article text.
Research Flow – open a Flow that allows you to select your tag on-the-fly, then open the Content Editor where you can capture highlights and add annotations to them.
Recipe Flow – use Flylighter's Element Selector or Advanced Data plugins to select the recipe element at the bottom of your favorite cooking blog, and skip the 50,000-word story about how grandma used to make this recipe for me back when we lived in Ottumwa, Iowa. Back then, my grandfather worked at the cement plant, and he'd come back from a long day at the plant hungrier than a 2-ton bull hippopotamus. I think it was the summer of 1962 when she managed to grow a particularly big tomato crop, and so we spent a whole day in the garden harvesting....
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