Custom Lenses: Turn Any YouTube Video Into Notion-Ready Action Items

7 min read · June 12, 2026

A default video summary answers "what's in this?" A custom lens answers a much more useful question: "what do I, specifically, need to do with this?" That distinction matters most for the videos you watch for work — vendor demos, conference talks, tutorials — where the real output you want isn't a recap, it's a checklist.

Here's how to build a custom lens that does exactly that, and how to get the result into Notion without copying and pasting anything.

What a Custom Lens Actually Does

Focal's built-in lenses re-evaluate a video's base summary through a fixed perspective — no fluff, just the steps, deep understanding. A custom lens works the same way, except you write the criteria yourself. Instead of "is this video good," you're asking "extract the specific thing I came here for," and the same underlying summary gets re-read through that lens without re-analyzing the whole video from scratch.

That's the part worth underlining: switching lenses doesn't mean waiting for the video to be processed again. You get a fresh, targeted read on a result Focal already has.

Building an Action Items Lens

For action items specifically, the goal is to filter out everything that isn't a concrete next step — opinions, background, tangents — and surface only what you could put directly on a to-do list. A few principles that make a custom lens like this work well:

• Be specific about format, not just content. A lens that says "extract action items" works. A lens that says "extract action items as imperative, one-sentence tasks, each tied to a timestamp" works better — you'll get something usable without editing.
• Tell it what to exclude. If you only want concrete tasks (not vague advice like "think about your strategy more"), say so explicitly. Lenses follow stated criteria harshly when you ask them to.
• Add a parameter if your action items are context-specific. A lens can accept a short input — "What are you working on?" — so the same lens adapts its filtering to a specific project instead of being generic every time.

Run a video through that lens and the result isn't a summary anymore — it's a list. Each item ties back to a timestamp, so if a task needs more context, you jump straight to the moment it came from instead of re-watching the whole video.

Connecting Notion

Extracting action items is only half the workflow — the other half is not having to manually move them anywhere. Focal's Notion integration connects your workspace once, and from there you can:

1. Push any individual summary into Notion with one click, landing as a structured page in the workspace target you choose.
2. Turn on auto-push by verdict, so every video that comes back as Watch or Skim gets pushed automatically — no manual export, no remembering to do it later.
3. Combine this with a custom action-items lens, so what lands in Notion isn't a generic summary — it's already the filtered checklist you asked for.

The combination is the point: a lens decides what gets extracted, and the Notion connection decides where it ends up — automatically, every time, without you doing the connecting work twice.

A Practical Setup

If you watch a steady stream of work-adjacent content — team standups recorded as video, conference talks, internal training — here's a setup that removes nearly all the manual overhead:

• Create a custom lens called something like "Action Items," with criteria that extract concrete, timestamped tasks only.
• Connect Notion and set a target page or database for incoming summaries.
• Turn on auto-push for Watch and Skim verdicts.
• From here, every relevant video you analyze quietly becomes a checklist in Notion, with zero copy-paste.

A summary tells you what a video said. A lens tells you what it means for what you're actually doing. Connected to Notion, that turns watching video — usually a passive, hard-to-act-on activity — into something that directly feeds your actual workflow.