MuadDib

I had a false positive cancer diagnosis when I was younger and I have some trauma around that whole experience as well. When I go for yearly checkups I remind myself that death is a gift and my anxiety about it drops away. The body is just a makeshift shelter from eternity and infinity.

oh, Cal Newports stuff is quite good for time management, organization and deep work related stuff. https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/

darknet diaries is a fun time https://darknetdiaries.com/ also, bump ... I'd like some more recommendations.

99 Thieving I bought almost all of Eben Pagans programs a few years back but didn't get into them because I had a strong adverse reaction to some of the techniques and mindsets he adopts. It is quality information overall though, and I can't fault him for his accuracy. I will now go through them slowly and pick out all the information I need to start a business successfully. Starting a business: Leading You, Me and We Neurolinguistic Programming GURU Master class Master your Time How To Be An Entrepreneur How To Build A Profitable Business How To Build A Virtual Business IGNITION Presentations that Pay Traffic School Turning your Talent Into Income Growing A Business: Advanced Learning and Teaching Technologies Accelerate Altitude Business Growth Mentors Inner Circle Wake Up Productive (business growth) Building a Digital Product Business: GURU Blueprint GURU Boot camp GURU Home study Course How To Create An Information Product That Sells Itself Product Plan Traffic Intensive Training Marketing: Copywriting Blueprints Internet Marketing 101 Marketing Master Plan Marketing Implementation Boot camp Modern Marketing Mastery Money Psychology Print Persuasion Master class Online Relationship Marketing Money and Wealth Master Your Money Money Making Blueprint Self-Made WEALTH Successful Living: Master map of success Mind Control Patterns of Personality Clear Communication Connected How to Be Creative and Innovative Power of Persuasion Seeds of Your Success Wake Up Productive Standard Training Virtual CEO Course Fuck ethics, wage slavery is sum bullshiiiiit man.

Thanks for posting this! When I read it I went outside the other night and took this picture of it from my house in nature by a mountain. I was listening to these narcissistic vibes...

0:00 Intro The last two videos covered different kinds of inputs into our knowledge management system, books and media more broadly. This video looks at the notes and ideas vault which is designed for capturing our own ideas, thoughts and inspirations. It's possible a piece of media could spark a thought that you might find valuable later and you'd enter it here. If the thought came up during your consumption of a video/article that you thought was worth capturing then you'd ideally put that thought into the capture of that video/article. If you're working in a team, this is where everyone would enter their thoughts and ideas The design of this aims to enable quick and easy capture of ideas and other parts of the system that we'll cover in the next 2 videos are about how to extract and have the information that we capture in this vault resurface at the right time and place. This largely happens in the Knowledge Lab, but in other instances like team profiles. Firstly we'll cover how to set up the notes and ideas vault and then how to set up quick capture mechanisms in the right contextual locations so when notes and ideas come to you, they can be entered quickly and efficiently. 3:06 Database Setup 2:35 Looking at the command centre we enter the mind expansion dashboard The past 2 videos covered The Library, Media Vault and The Academy which is where we capture books, media and course information respectively. Today we are looking at the Notes & Ideas database which lives in the Vaults section of the PPV organizational structure. This is a particularly interesting vault for the capture of our own thoughts and ideas or ideas from media that we might not want to capture entirely. The notes and ideas you create will be given a title and elaborated upon in the workspace 3:50 One of the best things about Notion is the capability of the workspace inside the note when compared to other apps You can capture anything from quick thoughts to paragraphs, tables, organization of data etc. Keeping Notes Narrow in Scope The idea of the notes contained within this database is that they're individual, self-contained nuggets These are not fully-fledged explorations of broad ideas, they are tightly confined in scope The idea is to have all these pieces attach to bigger ideas in the Knowledge Lab or potential sources of information Sources of information will typically only be linked if that source was the inspiration for the idea One note could be linked to several knowledge lab topics (through a relational link), each entry in the Knowledge lab is a broad topic that you build up from many different sources. As you're thinking about notes, keep them narrow in scope and modular, even if some notes are similar. When creating a new note we will out the properties 6:35S Status: Active The default status for new notes, there is an Archived option for when things are no longer relevant. 7:10 Enabling Filtered Views Filtered by active status If you're working in a team it's important to have notes filtered by Contains "Me", not your full name option. "me" means that anyone who is logged in and viewing this database will have new notes assigned to their name 8:00 If you're using your own solo system you don't need this, or the created by property The category property could be useful for both individuals and teams. In the team implementation, each category would be a department e.g. Sales, Marketing, HR, Admin A view can then be created for each category for the entire team to see as they go in This category setting allows you to have dashboards elsewhere where only the relevant notes and ideas for that section are being seen. Sort is typically done by last edited, but the creation date is also useful Filtered is by active and within a week or so 12:25 Quick Entry Setup There are 2 important aspects to a notes and ideas database, one being quick and easy input and the other is that it resurfaces at the right time and place. The latter will be explored in the coming videos. To establish quick entry we have a point in the mind expansion dashboard. This dashboard is set as one of the favourites There is also a quick entry point on the command centre 13:20 Toggle for the notes and ideas inbox Another one is in the Action Zone 14:30 Toggle for the notes and idea inbox Sort and filter 16:20 This works really well on mobile 17:04 Closing Thoughts What's really interesting is how we make these quickly entered notes and ideas resurface at the right time and place contextually. In most cases, this is done in the knowledge lab Sometimes you want the to resurface in the context of teams Notes and ideas are all about quick entry and capture, and then availability later on which is what this system hopes to achieve.

0:00 Intro This episode continues the exploration of the knowledge management section. This module can stand on its own or plug into the entire LOS. It has a systems thinking approach to capturing, processing, and formatting knowledge that's easy for us to use in our projects, tasks, habits, creating content, thinking, awareness and understanding in various contexts. The overview of the knowledge management system covered the series of databases called vaults within the PPV organizational structure. The previous video covered the book vault in-depth, this video covers the media vault in depth. The media vault is where we capture all other forms of media. Articles, newsletters, blogs magazines, podcasts, videos, and any kind of multimedia presentations It collects all of them and organizes and sorts so that views can be created for each individual type if needed. We will also briefly touch on the Training Vault This is for courses and training programs you might take, it's structurally different in terms of fields and databases, which is why it's separate from the media vault. You could merge it but this can create a lot of redundant fields and properties. We will look at how we capture and input information into the media vault then how we organize it and make the information we capture there available widely to other parts of the system. 2:40 On the mind expansion dashboard we are continuing our exploration of the knowledge sources midsection, specifically the media vault and the Academy. Both of which are in the Vaults section of the PPV organizational structure. After the Vaults section is complete there will be a video covering the high-level organizational structure of the PPV system and how it's used organizationally and conceptually to frame and guide the design of the entire system. 3:50 Training/Course Vault Courses can be incredible if you find good ones, but it's important not to go through them on autopilot and deliberately extract as much information as you can from it while you're focused on it so that later you can quickly and easily scan and review what you went through to pull out the most valuable elements. A good set of notes from a course can be really helpful for someone who didn't put in the time or the effort to do it. Notes allow you to do spaced repetition on the high-quality information allowing you to internalize it and learn it and really understand it. When you need to review it for something relevant later on, it's easily accessible in a very digestible form. Courses are lined up via status 6:05 When you sit down to do a course you have everything you've ever considered as interesting available and sorted ready to make a choice. Completed courses will have extensive notes inside of them with added media such as clippings, slides, diagrams mixed with other notes. In many ways, the information can become more valuable than the original course because you've digested and prioritized what resonated with you what was most relevant for your objectives and you've extracted the highlights that you can easily skim to remind yourself. We can apply the same hierarchical highlighting to these notes as discussed in the book notes area. Within courses, you can create extensive organizational structures for the different weeks and segments of the course. For large courses with an extraordinary amount of information covering a lot of different topics relevant to the focus of the course, you can create a whole dashboard of subpages and databases within the course workspace (each record in the database) so that it's extremely organized. If you wanted to go into section 4 of module B in an 8-week course, you can very quickly and easily access it. It's recommended that when you take a large course that you spend some time laying out an organizational structure to capture everything you can. Shorter courses can be covered the same way you cover books. You can change the way you do things depending on the scope and depth of the course. 9:19 Media Vault DB Structure This is something that everyone should be implementing in one way or another because we are all encountering a flood of information online. If you are not documenting and capturing it, it floats in and fades away. The time spent consuming it is usually just wasted. If you don't make an effort to read deliberately and capture information so it's accessible later, you miss so much of what you engage with and you waste so much time and mental energy. 10:06 Status board view Organized by status tags: Maybe later To Do On It Now Just Saving Completed Archive Master table view 10:35 Organized sorting primarily by status and secondarily by priority and thirdly by future value (for completed articles). August has taken to using Notion as his read later app over Pocket and Instapaper as he found it was really difficult to highlight and get the highlights to transfer in a smooth automated way. The versions of pocket and instapaper that allow you to do extensive highlighting and notetaking are expensive. Notion gives you the ability to do all your 'read later' capture in one place along with all it's other capabilities. No need to worry about transfers and movement between apps. Beyond what Pocket and Instapaper can do, Notion allows you to structure a heirarchy and priority level of what you're going to read in what order using a status On it now What you're presently engaged with To do Something you intend to do but definitely want to do Maybe later Something you want to get to if you have a chance Completed Just Saving Capturing it, not going to read but want it around just in case Generally this is the only thing August uses Evernote for He doesn't like cluttering the Notion database with an endless flood of maybe's kinda sorta probably nots. Things are only brought in to Notion if its something relevant to a project or habits, goals, pillars, or it's something that he's just curious about and engaged with so it will be relevant to some interest or activity. Evernote is August's endless, bottomless shoebox. Everything in Notion is more curated and has some specific value. Archive For things that have been completed, but don't have any intended use in the future. Sharing Used for articles that have been refined/modified and shared commonly, for example with consulting clients. Secondary sorting by priority 15:10 Completed items have a future value rank and are sorted secondarily by it. It doesn't necessarily mean the article is high quality, it means that you are likely to find value in it in the future. Tags for media type Articles Podcast Video 17:30 Hierarchical Highlighting Within articles, as your read them you want to highlight and take good notes. The Notion web clipper will capture the title, link and 95% of the time it will capture the whole article. The article will usually be nicely formatted allowing you to quickly make a TOC by using '/toc' The hierarchical highlighting that is done is the same as in the book vault A color gradient of Yellow, Orange, Red, and Pink Yellow is used for mildly interesting highlights Orange is the default color Red and Pink are used for important items This gives you various levels of review options depending on how quickly you want to go through the content later. You can add notes using the comment feature This becomes valuable when discussing things with a team using the '@' function. 20:35 You can apply a callout to make notes more visible This hierarchy of notation is so much better than Ever note, it gives so much more nuance. This is one of the reasons Notion is so good to use as a life operating system. Systems that are designed for specific platforms can leverage them and function so much better overall. If you highlight all the articles you read, which can be done very quickly especially if you are doing your read later in Notion itself it's an incredibly valuable resource to return to. You want to have views for 'to-do' and a view for 'completed' articles. 23:05 Capture with the Web Clipper Have the chrome extension for Notion installed Select the vault you wish to save it to You can immediately open it in Notion online which is just as good as Notion on desktop, unlike Evernote. Add a '/toc' Add tags If it pertains to a knowledge lab item, link to it. The web clipper works very well for videos as well 25:50 Enter fields and take notes on the video as you watch it. 28:40 Closing By capturing and organizing information properly in a consistent systematic way, it becomes a very valuable resource to draw on when we put it into the next level of absorption and refinement in the Knowledge lab. The next video covers the knowledge lab.

0:00 Intro This video will cover the book vaults We've now moved passed the pillars and pipelines sections of the PPV organizational structure and we are now diving deep into the Vaults section This is where we do knowledge management and store all the ideas and information that we turn into knowledge that we can use and apply to our projects, growth, and life in general. The last video provided an overview of the knowledge management system across the board giving a surface-level introduction to each of the components and a little bit about how they work together. The next videos will go deeper into each section starting with the book vault. Books are long-form media that take a lot of effort to consume and capture, but out of that effort, we get a lot more in return. In addition to the organizational structure of capturing information from books, the book vault will also be used to line up the books we want to read are actively reading creating a great queue. After you've read a book it creates a finished section with a complete archive of all the books you've ever read and all the information and knowledge you've extracted from them. 2:55 Database Setup Starting in the command center we open up the mind expansion dashboard which houses all these knowledge management systems. Under the knowledge sources section, the Library is where the book vault lives. The master table view is used most frequently because it presents all the information sorted and organized effectively. Fields 3:20 There is a relation to a database of influencers that august finds influential in the fields that he works in. Status and priority fields are used to sort 4:00 4:44 Print vs. eBook/Kindle vs. Audio Books The format is chosen based on the importance of the book's content Audiobooks can be sped through to get a quick overview of the contents of a book, but the cost is that you don't absorb the information as deeply as say reading a hardcopy or a kindle version of a book. It's easier to take high-quality notes from books that you read. When the book matters a lot, read it and highlight it Kindle books are easier to highlight and manage than paperback books It is now possible to integrate highlights from kindle with your notion system using the beta version of an app from Readwise which will be covered later. The idea of taking notes, summarizing, and highlighting lets you extract the maximum amount of value both in the moment you are doing it and also later on when you review it (allowing for spaced repetition) Prioritize how important a book is and based on that decide whether you are going to sit down and read it or listen to it in audio format. Even among those you sit down and read there are different levels of emphasis in terms of extracting information. Ones that you simply highlight, and then for really important books you can create chapter summaries. 8:26 Book Note-taking System At the end of every chapter create your own synthesized summary of the information you have just covered Even if you are just highlighting there is a system of progressive highlighting that August uses that has been optimized for Notion Progressive summarizing from building a second brain was optimized for Evernote Notion gives you quick access to a lot more colors. Orange is a mid-level highlight Ctr+Shift+H does an automatic highlight in the last remembered highlight color When something is particularly important red is used, yellow is a lower level emphasis relative to orange. This is a three-tier hierarchy of highlighting that August has found to be optimal. This gives a lot more nuance than the 2 tiered system from the second brain crowd. The list of completed books becomes an absolute goldmine. There are tags for various categories of books as well to help sort and filter. 13:08 New Book Capture & Entry Keep a wishlist of books that might be interesting to get on Amazon In Chrome, there is a plugin for the Notion web clipper Open the book you're interested in and open the clipper Open the page in Notion (this is the primary advantage of the Notion web clipper). Clean up the title from the Amazon format. Embed a link to the cover image Give it a status Give it a priority Give it a purpose Select a format After you read the book you assign the value rating 16:58 Vault Views Master table Progress Board Based on status Bookshelf Gallery view Bookshelf - To read Books finished 17:33 Closing Summary You could combine the book vault with the media vault, but August considers books to be very special and valuable and prefers to have them in a distinct group You can set up different filters to create the different categories if you prefer There are also different database properties and fields for books than for other media so it does have some logic to it. Next, we will cover the media vault and how we capture articles, videos, and podcasts This is similar to books but there some nuances and differences that will be covered The training academy will be covered in the next video as well This covers course information that is a little bit more different in terms of the information you're extracting. If the course is big it will be a lot more elaborate and you want to extract much more from it. Here you will be able to create a much more elaborate structure in terms of your note-taking. After that, we will get into the knowledge lab where all the information aggregates and all the information becomes much more usable in a much more comprehensive way across different topics. We'll look at how to capture notes and ideas quickly and have them reappear in the right context.

0:00 Intro This video will give an overview of knowledge management and how it's integrated into the entire system. Everything we've done to this point has focused largely on project and task management. The project management systems are the most dynamic and complex with action items moving through them They encompass largely the pipeline's section of the PPV organizational system The knowledge management system resides entirely in the Vaults The primary function of the Vaults is to capture information and turn it into actionable knowledge that informs and fuels the various action-oriented pipelines like tasks, projects, and goals. It stands as an independent resource that can be drawn on and it's a growing living organism that culminates, aggregates, and synthesizes information becoming more valuable over time. You are creating a series of vaults that become gold mines of informational resources, thoughts, ideas, and your best thinking across the topics that matter the most to you. After the overview, there will be a series of videos that goes deeper into each section The books vault The media vault Training and academy vault Knowledge lab This is the ultimate culmination of where all this information and ideas flow into Notes and ideas database that leverages the best functionality of Notion and applies systems thinking approach to integrating notes and ideas collection with all these other vaults. Most of what is available are individual silos of information, but there isn't a dynamic flow between these silos in a systemic framework that allows each to enhance the others. Here we will see a real systems thinking approach to knowledge capture, organization, and growth into final actionable form. 2:50 starting from the command center we move into the Mind Expansion area There are three categories on this dashboard The top 2 are inputs: Notes and Ideas These are your own thoughts ideas, extracts from conversations, this would be the inbox for a team if you have one. Knowledge sources Are books, media vault, and academy courses/training Knowledge creation and Aggregation The top 2 flow into this category and the knowledge lab itself Each of these is a vault on its own and exist in their own categories This video will cover the middle section first, then the knowledge lab, and finally will cover the Thought inbox section 4:20 Book Vault Quick Summary (Full Video Coming) The library is where books are stored and captured, it's also where the reading list is developed These are organized by status Reading, Next Read, To Read, Paused, Might read, Finished Finished becomes a gold mine of information and knowledge because as you are reading you are taking notes and as we will see in the book vault video Augusts hierarchical highlighting system will be covered. One of two ways to capture content from books is to highlight and then have some form of hierarchical highlighting so you can put emphasis on the weights of different highlights. You need more than 2 levels; the progressive summarization method covered by the building a second brain crowd is too limited in Augusts opinion. The second way is to summarize in your own words; this is much more effective at allowing you to internalize knowledge more and commit it to memory, but it takes more time. With books, August will make a judgment as to how important the book is before selecting a summarization method and format to cover the book; kindle, paperback, audiobook 6:40 Media Vault Summary (Full Video Coming) This is how you capture articles, podcasts and videos Tags for the medium (Article, Video, Podcast) Tags for status (To do, Maybe later, Done Tags for priority (1st to 5th) Everything that is being consumed is being organized in such a way that you can easily return to the information and remind yourself of what the value was in that piece of content You are setting up a learning system that is ongoing and a knowledge base that you can tap into very quickly and efficiently. 8:01 Training Course Vault Summary (Full Video Coming) This is for courses and instructional videos of any kind This can be very valuable, the right course can change your life Course organizers who do things well will distill information and create a program that will efficiently and effectively deliver them. For these, the notes would be very extensive, especially if it's a really big course You make a dashboard in the database fields that would open into subfields, pages, toggles, etc. Making good notes that you can repeatedly revisit and refresh in your mind will allow you to get so much more out of these courses especially since some of them are very expensive. 10:24 Notes & Ideas Vault Summary (Full Video Coming) You capture your own thoughts in the thoughts inbox in the Notes and Ideas database This is a database with various categories such as Teams for sales, marketing, HR, Admin, Customers, Vendors In a business setting each of these teams would have its own dashboard with a filtered stream of all the notes and ideas relevant to that team. If you are making a personal one it could be sorted by different interest activities such as sports and fitness, family, social life, etc. In any context in another part of your notion system, you could have a filtered view of all your notes and ideas relevant to that context. The key to an effective notes and ideas system is that they're easy to enter when you have a spontaneous thought/idea and then you want it to resurface at the right time in the right place. This will be covered in depth later on in this series and in this video There are relational links to the Knowledge Hub, Media Vault, Books These are the sources, if an idea comes from one of them you can note this as the source here and link it if it exists in the specific vault. Most importantly you are linking to the knowledge hub which we will cover in a moment. These can be filtered at 12:30 By status, created by, last edited And sorted 13:20 By creation date, last edited 13:40 Knowledge Lab Vault Summary (Full Video Coming) This is where the magic happens! You capture all this information in the personal inputs from all the different sources where notes are defined by the source The knowledge lab is different in that it is defined by the topic category These are areas that you are actively interested in and in some way building knowledge deliberately in these categories. Eg. Discipline, Fitness, Goal setting, Habits, and routines, Home creation, Marketing, Metacognition, personal finance, nutrition, and diet etc. These are all things that help to improve tasks and projects and helping to improve and grow as a person and helping to do business better. 15:20 within each topic there is a very organized collection of information, as you read books, articles, etc and enter things into the source vaults, the best pieces are pulled and pasted into the topic-specific category in the knowledge vault. You build out a central best thinking and insights center on each of the topics that your sources cover. These are also linked to other knowledge lab entries. You can create a hierarchy of information within these pages based on heading structures and create a table of contents automatically from that. 16:35 17:15 Integration of Notes/Ideas with Knowledge Lab There is a filter of all the notes and ideas for the specific entry in the knowledge lab, coming from the notes and ideas database. This is how these notes arise at the right place and time, Many systems with notes and ideas will add a time counter for review after a specific period of time eg. 30, 90days, etc. This is completely arbitrary and the odds of the notes popping up at the right time are almost zero plus it takes extra time to review notes like this. Now, what happens is when you choose to enter a topic that you need to use the notes will resurface automatically in the proper context. If you hold Alt you can drag a link to that page into the body of text 20:00 There are more ways to use this when working across teams for example, this will be covered at the end of this series. 21:13 Quick Capture of Notes & Ideas This is largely an entry database here, you aren't usually going to access or create notes here unless you are remembering them and you want to go back to them For the most part, you access this information in the knowledge lab or in the team member directory if you're part of a team, or on any specialty dashboards for specialty sections of your life which is when you use the tagging system. 22:00 at the command center there is a notes and ideas link for entries 22:30 In the Action zone there is also a link to the notes and ideas inbox to quickly edit, recall or create entries (filtered by recent creation date) The key is that you link a note to a knowledge lab idea or a category If you just want to capture something quickly here you can but if you want to access it later then it should be linked Notes here can also result in the creation of a new knowledge hub topic or category if you think of something important that you can't link to anything This is an entire module that plugs into the pillars and pipelines section. The next videos will go into each section in more depth giving you instruction on how to build them and get the most functionality out of them. What's critical about this is that they all work together, especially your own note-taking and ideas capturing information from other sources like articles, courses, and books, and your own spontaneous ideas being quickly entered and flowing with everything into these topic categories which become super hubs of the things that are most valuable to you. The process of using this system makes you internalize information better, connect dots across the board and it's incredibly powerful to have all this information coming in and being organized so efficiently. The process of curating information and then organizing and synthesizing it makes you smarter. This is why they are called vaults, they store valuable private things securely.

0:00 Intro Comments on the previous video noted some different ways of doing rollups and relations that August avoided, but there were legitimate counterpoints made to some of those methods and they may be useful to some people so they will be covered in this extra video. These are different ways of doing things that have some benefits and costs associated with them. These alternatives tend to be a little bit more advanced, but if you followed everything in the last video this won't be too hard and you can decide how you wish to implement things in your own system. The third of the three examples given today will contradict what was said in the previous video; that you cannot do a rollup of a rollup. There is a way of working around it in some circumstances. Especially with regards to numbers. 2:10 New Task & Project Views in Alignment Zone All of the examples will be covered in the alignment zone area The default view for the action items in the alignment zone has been changed to the calendar view The list view is nice to work with when it is just for one day in the Action zone, but when it gets to a whole week, things get messy. The default view for projects has been adjusted to a double view The top-level view is just a gallery of all the active projects sorted by task progress bar with the smallest tile sizes. Under that is a board view based on status. 4:32 Automated Progress Bar The first of the advanced features to be covered is the automated progress bar. There are rollups of completed, active, and total actions which come from the action items database. 5:18 The formula uses the values from completed actions and total actions. 6:30 Since this is all automated all you have to do is enter a project and manage the actions at the bottom of the page. 7:00 Pros and cons of this: It's nice to have everything automated Tasks are not all equal, and this assigns equal weight to all of them It's not an accurate measurement of the percent of the project that is completed, it's a measurement of the percent of tasks completed. The manual approach of giving a subjective assessment gives a more accurate assessment of how close you are to finishing the project overall. You often have to add tasks as you go, so the total number of tasks in the project is rarely the total number that will be in there at the end. When a project nears completion it becomes a prompt for you to check if more tasks need to be added. Example adding new tasks 9:10 There is value in both methods, the manual way allows you to get a better sense of how close a project actually is to being completed, and the automated way gives you more triggers to manage a project as you progress. 10:52 Automated Completion Checkbox Another approach that there is an alternative for is the active checkbox. This was added so that we could roll up to the higher level a count of total projects (Project Count) in the Goal Outcomes. In the same way, we do this for Remaining Actions at the projects level We are now going to automate the project count, the only way to roll it up is by a checkbox Previously there was a manual checkbox, but a lot of people found it more useful to have this as an if-then formula. 11:56 We then roll up the formula for the total active projects tied to each goal outcome. There aren't really any major positives and negatives using this method but you can keep the table simpler by hiding the checkbox field, however, switching projects to active status takes 2 clicks instead of just one. This isn't really an issue in the projects level, but in the case of tasks, which are much more voluminous it matters. August has left it as a manual checkbox in the tasks database, but at the projects level, it is automated. 14:48 Rolling Up Rollups You cannot do a rollup of a rollup, but there is a workaround in some circumstances especially with regards to numbers which a lot of rollups encompass. Looking at the weekly reviews in the review cycles section of the alignment zone 15:28 From the relation to the daily tracking we can bring in rollups of all the various daily numbers, but these numbers cannot be rolled up to the monthly review; we had to summarize them. In some cases summarizing is better, for example with regards to the improvements. In other cases making a mirror of a value, such as an average, and then rolling that up can be more useful. 17:30 17:50: Add a property, and choose a formula Title it and add the formula (18:35) Round it if needed (19:00) Now we have created a mirror that rounds up this formula, when we go into the monthly reviews and we add a rollup property with the weekly relation set, we can choose the mirrored value 20:15 This value itself can then be averaged, or have some other calculation performed, to give a value for the monthly level which is useful. The problem is this cannot be done for text easily. It would be nice to roll things up from the action items, to the projects to the goal outcomes databases. 21:35 In the Goal Outcomes, for example, one of the rollups is the pillars The goal outcomes are connected to the value goals and since the value goals are already connected to the pillars above these are rolling up with them automatically. It would be nice if these pillars could roll down to projects for example The problem is that it will come through as a link which is completely useless The tradeoff of this is that you are adding more fields and that's why it was avoided earlier. This can be very cumbersome and unnecessary in some instances, for example bringing daily values up to the monthly or yearly level. The vaults section will be covered next, this section has been changed a lot since the original overview video.

0:00 Intro This video covers an intro to some of the basic functionality of relations and rollups before moving into some system updates related to those. The beginning is for people who are not familiar with relations and rollups (rollups being dependent on relations). Generally considered an advanced feature but it's not that complicated. After this video, which is the second of two system updates we will move into the vaults section. 1:54 Database Relations Create a new page Create a table view (database) Create a relation field (by default new fields are text fields) We want to connect entries in this database with specific entries in another Entries/records are the horizontal lines in the table view of a database, or any entry when opened Record is the traditional term used when people talk about databases. Fields/properties are the columns across the top You define a property as the relation property You then select a database to relate to You will then have the option to link any entry from this database to any entry in the other database. This is very straightforward and easily understood. 5:49 Database Rollups Rollups are the logical extension to take relations even further Once you have the relation connection setup you can make it so that any data in any of the fields of the connected database can be brought into this database. Click in any cell under the rollup property you create, and select the relevant relation (you might have more than one.) Then you select which other property from that database you want to bring into this one. In the last video, we saw how to connect the content items moving through the content pipeline to action items, there was a rollup attached that we can use as an exemplar. Several content items are connected as a relation to this one task 8:25 Each of these is a separate piece of content in the content pipeline that is being worked on in this one sitting of content creation on the present days task list The next action dates and statuses for each are automatically visible here The same thing is visible from the other end 9:25 The do date of the action item is set up as a rollup from this view. This allows you to make sure that the next action item for the content in this database is the same as the do-date of the task in the action items database. 10:24 System Updates: New Rollups Implemented Moving back into the Action Zone we can see that the goal outcomes have now been made into rollups in this database. This is done by creating a project relation, so each action item that is part of a project will have the project listed here. Previously the Goal outcome was a relation, making a direct connection between the action items database to the goal outcomes database. Since we are already connecting the action items with projects, and the projects are already linked to the goal outcomes database, we can just make a rollup to eliminate a step. The pillars relation has been removed from the action items database They are still important and every action item is in service of a pillar, but this is simply too far removed to make it useful, and adding a pillar to so many action items is very cumbersome. In the goal outcomes database, the pillars connection is now a rollup and unfortunately, you cannot make a rollup of a rollup. Moving into the alignment zone 13:20 Value goals are now a rollup into projects (DB) symbolizes a direct relation to a database (Rollup) signifies a rollup, meaning it comes through another direct relation (DB) In the projects database, the connection to goal outcomes is a relation, and the connection to value goals is a rollup property that comes through the goal outcome relation. Similarly, there is a rollup for pillars in the goal outcomes database. Every value goal has a pillar assigned, set up as a (DR) When connecting the goal outcomes to the value goals the pillars will automatically come with it as a property through the pillar (Rollup) This not only saves an entry step but also ensures that everything is correct and consistent. These exemplify one of the powerful features of rollups, but there are 2 more. One is to have many relational links and bring in many items rolled up with it In this instance when the item you are bringing in is a number you can apply mathematical formulas to it. Looking at the cycle reviews we can see an example of this 16:10 Looking at the monthly review for the month of April there are a lot of database fields that are completely filled out. Because of rollups and relations at the end of the month, 90% of this is already filled in. As each weekly review is completed it is attached to the month that it happens in. Accomplishments and disappointments are also attached to a month Because the weeks are populated all the rollups associated with the weeks are completely filled out as well. Weekly effectiveness Weekly focus priority Weekly Gratefulness Improvements The learnings from each month then roll up to a year, rollups of a rollup cannot be done in notion so the weekly improvements cannot be rolled up into a year. All of this is rolling up automatically because there is one relational link to the week 19:45 Example of how math can be applied to the rollups Looking at a weekly review There is a relational link to the daily tracking database Every day some data will be entered for that day, weight tracking, sleep, health, and fitness, etc. Eg workout percentage calculation 20:40 Eg average sleep time 21:40 More calculation options as these are numbers rather than checkboxes All of this information is brought in automatically as each day is linked to the week through a relation and then the relevant rollups can be brought into the week. In the projects database, there is now an actions remaining column 24:50 This column will measure for each project how many actions are queued up to execute that project. This is set up as a rollup where the action items is the relational link to the task database. For each action item, it will look at the checkbox property Calculation will be performed by the number of unchecked checkboxes If you open up the project's entry you will still see all the tasks as covered in the video on projects 26:00 In the table view, this is really clean and simple In the goal outcomes database, there is a project count 27:00 Measuring the number of projects that need to be completed for each goal outcome Some of the goal outcomes are advanced by habits and routines so they won't have project counts. In your monthly reviews, you check goal outcomes to ensure that they either have projects or habits and routines linked to them to advance them forward. Rollups make things easier and faster and eliminates redundancy keeping things accurate. Next videos will explore the vaults Media Vault Book Vault Knowledge lab (ties several vaults together)

Intro 0:00 This video will catch you up on some of the changes August has made to the system. The second part of this video will cover an element of the last video in more depth Several people have asked for more detail on how content moving through the content production pipeline is connected to the Action Items database. Channel News Thanks to subs for surpassing 5 k mark Info on some collaborations August is active on Twitter which allows for more organic and free form conversations Left Nav. Bar Update 3:35 Cycles and reviews folder added These were previously in some of the other folders but it was getting a little bit too cluttered. Daily tracking Weeks Months Quarters Accomplishments Disappointments Separator line In Development Experimental templates Public Public templates Projects Toggle In the Action Zone projects have been added to the toggle line up 5:35 Small change but has turned out to be very effective This gives a line-up of the active projects This is the same as the project line-up at the bottom, however jumping in and out of projects is how August likes to manage any of the action items that are tied to them, rather than engage with them in the Today line-up. He prefers jumping into a project and working with the whole line-up of tasks for that project 6:50 how to implement this quickly. Create a duplicate and then create a toggle to drag it into. Recurring Task Marker 7:15 Just as a '+' sign is used to indicate dependent tasks recurring tasks have an "*" symbol added This is an indication that this task is not to be checked off as done, but simply has to be moved to next do-date The next video will be an introduction to the function of database relations and rollups and in the process cover, several additions to the system since the videos on those different sections were completed (as opposed to covering the updates in this video). Task/Content Tracking 9:05 Diving back into the content production machine and opening the production pipeline kanban board. Jumping into one of the content items you will see it is not linked to an action item. 9:50 click on the action item, type on some part of the name if it doesn't exist just create a new page for it. Add some of the few required elements for it; status, do-date, priority, etc. The do-date is automatically rolled up into the AI: Do Date rollup section on the page. We can see if the next action do date is aligned with the do date of the task If it's not we simply change it by clicking on the action item itself, changing it to the date you want, and then return to the content item and they'll align. You don't have to go over to the action zone or the task database, you simply click on the action item link in the content page relations. If you're in the action item view, perhaps in the daily action zone you will also see a relation on that end showing you the content that is connected. There is a rollup of the next action item date and the status for that piece of content. From the content, we added the relational connection between the 2 databases so this is automatically connected. From either view, you see the date of the other 12:40 If we were to move to the Action Zone and we see the action item there we could access the direct relational link to the content item there. We could add an item here and then link it to a content item that exits or create a new one. It is an extra step, but it's worth it for the functionality and perspective it provides. The next video will give an intro to relations and rollups and show a few more updates to the system.

Intro 0:00 We are going to be looking at the content creation pipeline. This is not only an example of how to do any kind of content creation, but also how to do any kind of specialized, routine operational projects that are too small to be full projects in your project's database, and/or are too specialized but are more than tasks and have their own needs in terms of database tags, templates, workspace areas. It's an example of how to do any kind of specialty pipeline/ mini project series that happens on a regular basis; there are many potential applications of this across business or personal use. This creates a clean look onto that unique operation pipeline especially when there is a high volume of them. You can think of it more broadly if content creation isn't what you need, but you have other kinds of routine operations in place. This is also highly connected to the tasks database; anything going through a content creation pipeline is linked through a relation to the tasks database, but they're not actually in the tasks database themselves, they're in their own specialty database: The content creation pipeline. 2:00 Stating from the command center under Business the content production machine dashboard can be accessed. This is called the content production machine because it is designed to do very high volumes of content production across different mediums written text, video production, audio … it could be anything you create like painting/poetry etc. it doesn’t necessarily have to be artistic, it could be marketing materials, web development. Anything that is a pipeline of creation of any kind. 2:50 in the navigation system on the side panel the content production machine is under dashboards and the database itself is under pipelines s the production pipeline. Production pipeline = name of the database Content Production Machine = name of the dashboard This dashboard pulls its information entirely from the production pipeline database; it's the only database it looks at. Almost everything in it is a different view or slice from that database. There are a few exceptions in the form of scratchpad lists for idea generation and note-taking. Scratchpads 4:00 The four areas at the top are quick scratch pads In the example here the Notion Series was initially mapped out to be a 25-30 video series Shows how the ideas are roughly mapped out There is a place for Video ideas, Newsletter series, and Blog/Article Ideas Each of which is planned out to develop stories/sequential release of information for bigger pictures over time. Content Ideas toggle 6:00 This is a list of content ideas Everything entered into the database here has a status and for items in this toggle it is set to 'potential Idea' The status sequence is from latest in the sequence to earliest Ready to post is the end before the item is actually published/completed Post-Production is 2nd last Production Writing Next up Scheduled = it has a date when it's planned to enter the system but is not quite up to the 'next up' level. Potential idea = maybe; hasn't been decided Anytime August has an idea of something that might be a good newsletter, article, video etc. it is entered and labeled with this which is what the content ideas view is all about. Idea Generation Resources Not individual ideas but hubs of ideas e.g. certain websites have lots of ideas He might list something as a source to go to look at and review to look for individual ideas; this view also filters for such items It's really helpful to capture ideas for content creation when you have them because it's so easy to forget them. He will open his phone and throw them in here with a potential tag. If something strikes him as a really good idea he will give it a Next up tag immediately, or something more urgent. In production 9:10 This view shows just the items that are in production. This means an item is either in the writing, production, post-production or Ready to Post. This isn't actually used that often because the next toggle is really valuable Production pipeline 9:40 This is the kanban board of this production pipeline. There aren't a lot of kanban boards in August system mainly because when dealing with action items and things with due dates, the kanban board doesn't work, you can't set by do-dates, you have to set by either single or multi-select. You also cant use formulas to sort the Kanban board. August prefers to have the items in his task management to flow in automatically without a lot of manual manipulation. This is done by managing items by Do-Date. In the production pipeline, however, it is very valuable to see where everything is at different stages. This view shows items earliest in the process to latest. 10:30 Scheduled > Next Up > Writing > Production > Post-Production > Ready to Post Next up 12:50 Shows a list of items that are queued for next up These are the same items we see on the next up stage of the kanban board in the previous toggle. This allows you to evaluate the sequence of the next up items. Ready to Post 13:42 These items are also in the production pipeline at the end. It's nice to give them their own view as they can bunch up and it can be difficult to sort them out. Posted Archive 14:51 Once items are published it is valuable to have an archive of everything published either individually or as a collaboration. There is a designation for what channel the items go to Tags for youtube, medium, blog etc. There is a designation for content type; Tags for Notion series, mind and machine etc. There is a Next Action Date which is the date that he intends to take the next action on this piece of content. There is an action item relation that links the item to the master tasks database. The next action date will be the same as the do-date in the action items database. The 2 will move in parallel. Additional tip 17:35 The benefit of adding the extra step is it enables this entire system that is only about mapping the content flow. This clean view is very valuable when producing many different items and not have each of them be a task or a project, but to be linked with each next step of an item moving through the pipeline. There is a link to the posted content and if there is written content it is included here. There is an owner assignment in case a stage of production is handed off to somebody else. Specialty Pipelines Filtered Views Next Action Calendar 19:35 This maps out, by date every next action for every piece of content that is in the pipeline. Next dates are planned out about 2 weeks in advance. Publishing Calendar 20:45 This calendar has the same items, but sorted by the date they're intended to be published rather than the planned dates for next steps. Usually August will start with the planned publication date and then work backward to figure out when tasks need to be completed by. Items can be easily moved and shuffled around in the calendar views. Clicking on the titles takes you from the embedded view to the database itself. Sometimes work will be done in the database itself rather than in one of its views. The embedded view shows only one month, the advantage of going to the database itself is you can scroll through an infinite timeline. If you are working through 2 different months it can be hard to see how a project is being planned. This also allows you to see how consistent and prolific you have been. There are also views for The pipeline board, Potential Idea Board, Master Table 24:10 This entire system is even more powerful when working with a team The ability to assign different owners as it's going through the pipeline gives you enormous control and overview as a head. It also works very well on a small scale (the template is already prebuilt for you if you want it). Content Templates 25:35 August has templates for his Notion Series, M&M episodes, Newsletter, Vid+ Blog Each of these has their own structure and capabilities Example Notion series 26:05 Links to YT Channel and Blog Keywords Title scratchpad Link to task database Action items view in template Filtered to just the items relevant to this piece of content. Sometimes there is just one action item, but if it's a complex piece of content there will be many steps making this much more valuable. Once it's posted a certain amount of promotion needs to be done. This video is also an important marker in this entire series, we have just finished part of a long section on pipelines. Pipelines are all about actions moving through various stages to get things done in the PPV system. We have now covered a wide range of pipelines in the system. Next, we will be looking at vaults These are about knowledge management and learning where knowledge is aggregated and accumulated giving you insights and building resources for you to draw upon. The next video will cover some small updates and tweaks to the system before we move deeply into knowledge management. At that point, we will move into an overview of the PPV system which should hopefully make a lot more sense after having gone deeply into each of the components allowing you to follow along with a more comprehensive explanation. (after we finish the section of the vault).

0:00 Intro The last video covered weekly reviews which are largely about aligning your projects with your tasks. At the monthly review level, we are thinking much more strategically, about where we want to go, how to get there, and the best set of projects to undertake while maintaining our pillars. Productivity and efficiency are great, but they're not the priority, you need to be working on the RIGHT things at any given time. It's better to do the right things inefficiently than the other way around. 1:26 Role of Monthly Reviews The first objective of the monthly review is to ensure that we know where we want to go and what the right actions will be. On the monthly review, we queue up the right projects so that on the weekly basis we can just trust they're the right things and organize our tasks. Everything we've covered in the previous videos; the weekly, monthly, and quarterly review items are being pulled together with regards to how we structure the system to bring transparency, clarity, precision, and guidance on how to execute on the things that matter to us in life is bubbling up into these review cycles and being monitored, maintained and directed. 3:05 how monthly and quarterly reviews are executed. Looking at the system flowchart in the command center we see the stack of core databases; Action items, Projects, Goal Outcomes, Vision Goals, Pillars aligned with our cycle databases; Daily tracking, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual review. Monthly reviews largely align with our Goal Outcomes, making sure we're on track to achieve them. The key to achieving the goal outcomes is having the right projects lined up and activating them at the right time. Monthly reviews are largely about aligning goal outcomes with projects. Cycle reviews are accessed in the alignment zone (full video covering this has been done). The guiding principles are the guiding elements the core values and vision you have for your life and who you are/want to become In the review cycles toggle Daily insights are daily tracking entries Weekly insights are where weekly reviews are done Quarterly and monthly reviews are where quarterly and monthly reviews are done (covered in this video) Annual section for annual views Gallery view because it's sometimes nice to reflect on each month and each week. August uses an image to highlight something memorable from each week or month, it's easy to forget what we have done as the past weeks and months become a blur. If you don't note progress it's easy to forget it and feel like you're not moving anywhere. For the current month/week he uses a default image of an airplane taking off. The quarterly reviews are done very quickly and could be skipped and done in the monthly reviews. For August the Quarterly reviews save time because he is taking a few things from the monthly reviews and doing them every third month; effectively shortening the other 2 monthly reviews. 6:30 Monthly Database Fields Looking at the April review which is unfinished to allow for this demonstration. This has the daily tracking rolled up into it to illustrate its value. This is very similar to the weekly review conceptually, it's just done at a higher more strategic level of assessment. To create any new month we enter: A Theme Date (end-date) Answer one question: To make awesome? What would make this month awesome if achieved? At the end of the month, all the other fields are filled out Each time a weekly review is completed it is tagged to the month the week is a part of. Anytime an accomplishment or disappointment is added to their respective databases since those databases are tagged to the month they all automatically roll up into the monthly review. Everything in the bottom half are roll-ups of information from the weeks and since the weeks are tagged to the month it can be seen here. All the weekly effectiveness ratings are here giving you a sense of how effective the month was. The weekly focus priorities allow you to see what you broadly spent the month focusing on. The weekly gratefulness automatically are all visible allowing you to see all the things you've been grateful for this month! Notion has a great instructional wiki on how to do rollups and there is a video covering it as well. Quick demo 9:40 10:50 Action items filtered for the entire month It's almost impossible to remember what you did over an entire month and to have everything visible under a single click toggle can be quite satisfying. Checkboxes: Entered the database fields above Remember gratitude, and wins for the month (summary of the accomplishments). Review accomplishments and disappointments. In the weekly review, we enter these while they are fresh within the week, now at the monthly level, they are reviewed as you move into the next section. Assessment: Breakthroughs Activities Discoveries Improvements This section should only take a few minutes maximum, just listing things off the top of your head. 13:16 Pillar Review In the monthly review, we are actually reviewing and refining the pillars themselves. A toggle allows us to do this quickly and efficiently on the same page. The alignment zone video is a good place to start to get a sense of pillars, pipelines, and vaults. There is also a video specifically on pillars. You review whether these are still the pillars of your life, are these the things that still matter to you? Do you still want to continually maintain and keep these in order? Then we have habits and routines, these are the pillar supports Toggle gives easy access to this as well. Any changes we want to make can be done here as well. This is just a quick review that allows us to make any tweaks and ensure these are properly set up. Review performance in daily tracking We just look at the patterns over time When we take this to the next level this information is exported and graphed using a spreadsheet tool. For the sake of trends, we can just glance at this information to see trends. You may have to make changes to some habits and routines to better deliver the results you want. Review workouts and make adjustments as needed Review and refine the mindset and identity sculpting ritual Links to a page that links to a whole process that August goes through as part of his morning start-up routine. August goes through a morning routine to shape how he sees himself and what he believes he can accomplish and what's realistic, teaching himself to reach further and push harder with absolute confidence. This is the time to review those elements. If he sees something that can be improved during his morning routine, he will make small fixes there as well; it's not essential to wait until the monthly review. 16:45 Pipeline Review This is where motion and action happens within the notion databases. Most importantly (this is a central priority of the monthly review) is the goals, assessing reviewing, and updating value goals and goal outcomes. Essentially our value goals are our aspirations and goal outcomes are our measurable, quantifiable objectives we have set out that we are tracking to get t us to our value goals; the two are always linked. Mark and complete any goals that have been finished. Update goal timelines Are they set for the right dates and quarters? Are there any new goals you want to add? In order to do this there is a toggle that gives us our value goals and our goal outcomes. This step of alignment (making sure our value goals and goal outcomes are properly linked through relations, making sure the value goals we have are still our priorities with the correct status etc. ) is all done now. In the last video we saw how the projects had a project count with how many tasks were in queue for that project. Goal outcomes don't necessarily have projects, they can have a habit and routine linked to it to advance it. We now have a counter to show how many projects are queued up to deliver on the goal outcome. Anything with a zero needs to have a habit and routine set up to advance it. In the same way, we dove into the projects in the weekly review to make sure they had tasks properly lined up, each of the goal outcomes that are project driven is opened to ensure they have projects lined up. We look at all the active goal outcomes to ensure their project systems are lined up. 20:10 template for goal outcomes. Why this Goal Outcome? How will you achieve this? Steps: Then there is a database view of the projects that will get us there. We make sure the ones that we want to be working on over the next month have an 'in progress' status. This is the time we make sure we have activated the right projects at the right time. We do this for each of the goal outcomes. Having just done a reassessment of goals we need to look at projects again. There is a toggle to review projects 20:40 Review/Update "Status" setting Update Goals Timelines (Dates & Quarters) Update the outcome/goal for each project Prioritize Projects This is done weekly, so it's not essential but it's nice to take a glance here given we've just done an assessment of the goals. Almost everything is being done right here in the same page, no other platform allows us to do this. Notion is unique in the ability to deliver the entire database functionality in a simple toggle under each relevant checkbox in the checklist for the reviews. Finally action items You probably won't do much here at the monthly level in terms of updating your action items. But given that we have just reviewed the goal outcomes and projects anything that needs to be changed with regards to the action items can be done here too. 22:02 Vault Review This is mostly about cleaning and tidying up our information and knowledge management. Media processing Importing book notes to Book Vault There is a toggle to add things here. Transfer relevant high-value Evernote clips to Media Vault and/or Knowledge Lab August uses Evernote to pile in the information that might become relevant at some point, when it does it is pulled into the Notion Vaults. To make this easier there are toggles to the media vault and the Knowledge lab. Empty trash on Workstation Bookkeeping Looking at your books can also reveal a lot about how your month went. August uses Xero and Hubdoc to do bookkeeping. It's worth it to set up some sort of financial management or overview system to keep track of your personal and/or business financials. 24:26 Quarterly Reviews Every third month we have a quarterly review and this is just done to take the burden of some review tasks off of two out of every three months. These are things that would need to be done every month if you didn't do a quarterly review. Quarterly reviews are the shortest to go through. Quarterlies are important to August because he thinks of his business cycles on a quarterly basis. The book The 12 week year is recommended and promotes the idea of thinking of your annual breaks as quarterly breaks. Most people and businesses think of the end of a year as the time to evaluate performance and resolutions, but a year is very long. You can feel you have so much time that you don't get started on anything with any urgency. Think of the end of each quarter as the end of a year where you strive to really have certain things achieved or have made significant progress towards. If you think of what you want to achieve in the next 3 months as opposed to the next 12 you get more done because you have more urgency. Glance at accomplishments/disappointments Very easy to do because they are rolled up into the top of the review page Ask (with respect to the last 12 week year): What's Working? What's not working? Changes to Plan or Approach? You can spend as much time as you want on this. By prompting the question, things will bubble up that wouldn't otherwise if you didn't ask the question. Process 26:50 Here we review the quarters and ask if we're on track. There is a toggle where we can see project counts, just like in the goal outcomes database and projects database. Every time August sets up a project he has a quarter that he wants to finish it by, with a review date that he wants to have made significant progress by. Review/Update Quarter assignments for Goal Outcomes and Projects Toggle to show Goal Outcomes and Projects Ensure that the numbers that have been put in are realistic and viable, if they're not we need to reflect on what's going wrong and preventing us from getting where we want to go in the timeline we had anticipated. Review Pillars and their relation to Value Goals Toggle to show both Checking the alignment between the two as we are potentially tweaking either along the way. All of the Value Goals are in service of one of the Pillar zones. Ideas Any new creative or intriguing ideas you have floating around in your head. You can then ask yourself where you want to put anything you list here. Someday/Maybe Items Sometimes we make projects that are Someday/Maybe items and in your weekly and monthly project reviews we filter them out because they aren't actionable, they are hypothetical and not necessarily going to happen at all. We have a toggle to pull up a view filtered to show status as 'someday/maybe' In the quarterly review, you ask whether you want to move these into a queue to take action on. 29:57 Closing Thoughts If you do this every month and every quarter you will understand where you are going with much more depth and clarity. The things you are doing on a regular basis will be the right things, the things that matter and are going to get you where you want to go. This comes back to the old Eisenhower matrix which distinguishes between the things that are urgent and the things that are important. So often the urgent things that have hard, fast deadlines week to week are not the things that are going to change your life and take you to the next level. They keep you on the same treadmill. If you spend 100% of your time simply reacting to these short-term urgent needs you are going to neglect and never get to the high-level important needs that do have the ability to change your life and opportunities. By doing a monthly and quarterly review you are identifying the big things that are going to change the game for you and ensure you carve out time to do them.

0:00 Intro This concept of the weekly and monthly review is going to take all the content of the previous episodes and tie them together. This is essential for keeping the system on track and is for many people one of the hardest things to do, but once you get into the rhythm and see what it enables you'll find it's something not to be missed. The behaviors you do around the system are as much a part of it as the internal workings. You need to design your personal behavior to be part of the same interrelated system. 0:30 Role of Weekly Reviews The weekly review is a tactical implementation, whereas the monthly review is much more strategic. Month to month you are doing a strategic assessment of how your aspirations are aligning with the broad strategic game plan. Week to week you are trusting that your monthly game plan is the right one, removing the burden of it, freeing you up to put a tactical game plan in play for the upcoming week. At the same time you are documenting what you learned, the disappointments, and the achievements of the last week, so those roll up in the monthly, quarterly and annual reviews making them very visible to you at higher level reviews. Having a tactical plan for a week means that the active tasks queued up in your action items database will be the right ones and you can trust that by doing the things that feed into your daily window will be keeping you on track to your higher aspirations. When you look at all the very specific things to get done you can ask what can get done this week, what is dependant on something else? How can you get as far through that tactical plan as possible? The weekly review is the protocol that sets it all up. This is one of the hardest things for people to implement and make part of their routine and it's important to reiterate how essential this part of the system is. If parts of the system are experiencing friction, or are breaking down, catching it week-to-week and bringing it back in line means there's no big deal. Things are easy to fix and you don't lose any momentum. August schedules this for every Friday. If Monday comes around and he hasn't done his week end review, then the rule is he MUST absolutely do it before any other tasks on Monday morning. Commit to a time that works for you. 4:50 back in the command center, looking at the flowchart we can see how the review cycles line up with pillar to pipeline pyramid. Weekly reviews primarily align with projects Monthly reviews align with goal outcomes and vision goals and making sure they're aligned with the right projects. 5:49 There has been one addition to the organizational structure of the system. There is now a folder for cycles and reviews. Primarily these are accessed through the alignment zone. If you are new to the series look at the alignment zone principles. 7:27 Database Organization Under insight are toggles for each of the review cycles. The current week always has two arrows pointing in to make identification easy. 8:20 Weekly Database Fields Essentially you will go through a checklist. The database fields will give a clear image of the week. Things aren't vague anymore. A big part of doing weekly reviews effectively is to keep them short (20mins max) so you do them consistently. You do this by designing for maximum efficiency No duplication between weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews. Every element of each is only done once in that segment. Weekly you are aligning the daily actions consistent with the projects that have been prioritized. Monthly reviews will look at projects being aligned with goal outcomes Quarterly reviews look at value goals being aligned with goal outcomes Sometimes you will be doing a weekly and monthly review back to back and you don't want to be doing the same things over and over. Another way to keep it short is to have rollups 11:00 When you do the daily tracking and you add a new day, you link it to the week using the relational link This enables the rollups to bring the data in from each day into the weekly review. When creating a new week, 2 things are entered so that daily tracking can be tagged to it. An objective and a focus are set 13:10 14:00 What gets entered at the end of the week Accomplishments is a database that is added to each week. Similarly for disappointments enter the lessons you learned. 16:00 populate the weekly template. 16:20 filters and sorts for action items This makes it very easy to look at all the things you accomplished at the end of the week. After that, the template goes through reviews of the Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults which is a theme carried throughout each review cycle. 17:59 Pillar Review First, we go through the pillars which are the high-level zones of your life that need maintenance and need to be kept on track on a weekly level. We are not managing the pillars database, it's just a general category of the high-level visions and values of your life. The quarterly reviews will allow us to consider any refinements to the actual pillars themselves. A quick review of your guiding principles. (see alignment zone video) Add accomplishments and disappointments Noteworthy highs - anything that was a good part of the week. Lows / Struggles What I learned - quick question, it's not something to spend lots of time on. 21:54 Pipeline Review Here we process everything that is moving and has action steps involved. Email Calendar Pipeline databases 23:30 Review and update, production pipeline, content machine, waiting on action items Toggles with database views that keep things efficient 25:35 Project review, toggle for projects and quarters Quick and effective review of each project, ensuring there is at least one action item lined up for each. 27:00 feature to show action items remaining for each project. Planning done, enter daily tracking 29:00 Add next week 29:55 Vault Review The vaults are all about cleanup and maintenance. Desktop and downloads Transfer high-value notes and clippings Toggles for media vault and knowledge lab 32:00 books and kindle Toggle for book vault 33:00 Paper processing 33:40 Closing Thoughts It's not very complicated and when you do it, it will put organization and clarity into your life and relieve the burden and worry of things piling up. It will make you more effective every single day if you just take 20-30 minutes each week to review it thoroughly.

0:00 Intro This is the most common question August gets How do you handle reoccurring tasks in Notion? The project database video and the goals database video now have a slight improvement to be added that helps us to eliminate a step after implementing templates. Notion does not currently have a feature to help with reoccurring tasks, but there are methods around it. In this system every task has a Do-Date, this makes it much easier to deal with reoccurring tasks. 2:16 enter the action zone (interface with the Task Database) 3:14 Recurring Tasks Method #1 How to make reoccurring tasks? Here we can clearly see what we are doing each day. Create a new task, set the Do-Date You can then see the task in your calendar. When the task enters your daily task list, instead of checking it off as done, you simply reschedule it. This method works really well when it's a simple task that doesn't take too long. If you have a task that takes a long time, and you have to see it coming in order to know how much time you have for other tasks on that day, then you can use method#2 5:14 Recurring Tasks Method #2 Go to the calendar view, create a new task Duplicate it, remove the copy text and set the date for the next interval Very simple and foolproof method to see reoccurring tasks well in advance 7:37 Self-Referencing Database Filter When you go to the alignment zone to access projects and goal outcomes, under projects there is now a gallery view. If you open a project and look at the self-referencing databases (database filters to itself) 8:10 The problem is when you create a new project from a template it would have the tables automatically imported, but you couldn't select the self-referencing filter automatically, you had to complete the page and edit the filters later. 9:15 Now you can select the filter to contain the template itself. This is particularly important when you have teams using the template, it's hard to explain this to people every time. 10:58 Closing Thoughts These were only some small improvements, but they add up to a much more streamlined workflow and a better functioning system. The next video will be back to our regular series of building out this comprehensive system.

0:00 Intro This video will cover the pillars of the system. Moving up the pillar/pipeline pyramid is the core concept of the alignment zone. This is the dashboard in the system which aligns the high-level aspirations and identity elements of who you are and who you want to be with the low-level daily actions that you carry out hour to hour. 0:59 Alignment Across System Pillars are towards the very top of the pillar to pipeline pyramid which is the alignment structure. Everything flows from the pillars to the goals, projects, tasks. You need to have the right pillars in place because everything you do is in service of one. You need this intentionality in order to be very deliberate in your understanding of what you are working towards. The cycle reviews will tie everything together and are critical for the whole system. 1:50 Pillars This video will cover the life pillars, pillars database, and pillar support 2:10 View of the pillars database filtered by everything that has an active status. Types: Growth Things like learning, health, and fitness Business Things like client execution, branding and audience, admin Home/Life Home, family, personal admin The pillars are all about keeping the lights on, the roof up and your world in order. 4:00 The three types correspond to the columns on the command center. These are the structural elements of your life that keep things together and everything in the system will correspond to one or more of them. Projects, habits, and routines are all linked to this database. There aren't any workspaces for each of the pillars as there were for the goals and projects, but you could do it. There are set up as a database so everything under them can be linked through a database relation and the alignment is clear and explicit. As you add a habit or project you have to ask which pillar it is serving. It's essential that it serves at least one. How do you determine what your pillars are? It's really simple, these are largely the things that are already happening in your life. You need to break down your life into segments that have logical groupings. Things like home, family, personal admin, learning, health, and fitness, etc. You don't want too many or too few - max 15. Think about who you want to become as well. Do you want to leave your job and start a business, or a new hobby, or something else? Ongoing aspects of your life that need to be addressed and maintained in a perpetual way, they can go on for years or until the end of your life. 8:50 Pillar Support Things that are not feeding into the goals and projects so much, but are maintaining and enhancing these areas of importance. Habits and Routines Important because it makes it very explicit, deliberate, and intentional in defining the habits and routines you want in your life to shape yourself and the person you want to be. Frequency, Time of day, Relation to pillars, goal outcome (if applicable) Mindset A later video will cover this, it's fundamental to becoming the person you need to become to achieve the goals you have in life. You are not a fixed entity; you are continually evolving. It's best to take deliberate control of this process. Health and Fitness A lot of the pillar support happens in the daily tracking database. This is such a fundamental part of pillar support that there should be a link to it here. 13:50 Closing Thoughts Pillars are not complicated but they are essential to the alignment and structure of the entire system. The previous videos covered goals, projects, and the entire alignment zone.

0:00 Intro This episode will cover goals, specifically the 2 goals databases, how they relate to each other, and how they fit in the middle of the alignment zone. 0:24 Goal Alignment It's very important that your system has the high and low levels very clearly interlinked and aligned. At the same time, you need to have clear prioritizations in terms of what matters most in terms of the goals you are pursuing and how to measure and evaluate whether you're progressing on them. The way you accomplish your goals is to establish projects which move you towards your goals. Projects are made up of tasks which are the individual units of work that advance you towards completing the projects. Goals are in service of your values and your aspirations and the things you want to become in your life. 2:18 View of the alignment zone dashboard. The previous video covered the project's database. 3:00 In the goal pipeline are the toggles for the 2 goals databases covered briefly in the alignment zone dashboard. Value goals These represent things you value, that you want or hope for that are important to you but are not really measurable. August found that if you just start to list your goals they usually don't come out as things that are very measurable and if they're too specific, they feel very transactional and cold. e.g. I want a thriving business. Goal Outcomes These are the very specific things that are measurable and trackable. As you evaluate whether you are moving toward or away from your goals, you know whether you've accomplished them because they are specific, measurable, and quantifiable. Eg. I want to create and launch 3 products for my business. A relation between each goal outcome and value goal is created. Having this 2 step process makes the goals more meaningful and engaging while also creating actionable outcomes. Value goals might have multiple goal outcomes that are added constantly as each is achieved. They will last much longer until you no longer value them. Goal outcomes check off to a different status once completed. The system OKR (Outcomes and Key Results) works quite similarly to this, you can change your terminology as you please. 8:55 Database Setups Since the goal outcomes are measurable we have a progress bar similar to the one seen in the projects database. If you just make a subjective judgment on the progress of many goals that might be difficult to quantify you can keep a reasonable eye on what's getting done. These metrics are only applicable to goal outcomes with the status 'underway ' 10:00 Each goal outcome has a status (as do the value goals) Underway Paused For goal outcomes that started, but were stopped. Waiting For goal outcomes that are waiting to be started when you have the time. You can assess when to change the status of these in the cycle reviews. Off Track Complete 11:30 Goal outcomes have a Term to help sort by grouping. 3 months 3-6 months 6-12 months Over a year They are also assigned downwards to projects, in most cases. Sometimes you just have a series of tasks or a habit. In most cases, you achieve a goal outcome by coming up with a project and working on them. In some instances, you just have a series of tasks or a habit (e.g. august wants to read and summarize 20 leading books in his field, the daily reading hour is a habit in his habits database) Every single goal outcome must have a project or a habit/routine. 12:50 peek into habits database. 13:45 Value Goals Workspaces Example: building extraordinary knowledge in field Status Priority Challenges (what you might need to overcome to complete it) Category Goal Outcomes 14:40 Workspace Questions Why this value goal? How will you achieve this? Create the goal outcomes that are going to get you there. The workspaces in value goals aren't used very often in comparison to the projects. 15:51 Goal Outcomes Workspaces The workspaces in the goal outcomes are used quite frequently sometimes. Often you will have many projects to get to a specific goal outcome. You don't want all the knowledge in a project to be locked away when the project is completed. The pertinent knowledge which may be valuable across multiple projects should be aggregated in the goal outcome workspace. 16:20 e.g. Create and launch 3 products. Questions: Why this goal outcome? How will you achieve this? Steps: Projects A table to help us see which projects will help us achieve the goal outcome. Each project is linked to action items which are all linked to tasks. Each project can easily be clicked into to check the tasks that need to be done with some additional info. 19:00 This entire space is created using a template The template includes filtering by goal outcome 19:30 20:11 Closing Thoughts This is all about being very specific and deliberate, making sure the tasks that you're doing day-to-day are connected to the higher-level aspirations of your life. This is the mid-level connective tissue. After looking at the project's database in the previous video, the goals in this video the next will look at the pillars and the pillar supports, then the cycle reviews will come after that. By having the databases in this pyramid hierarchy it's very easy to do a periodic assessment to keep things on track.

0:00 Intro This video will cover projects, specifically the projects database. Previously the tasks database was covered and tasks are very closely intertwined with projects. This video shows the early stages of projects and task databases and the power Notion relationships between databases Today we will be covering an advanced case showing you how to take a project's database to full potential with much more sophisticated implementation to enhance the performance, management, and capabilities of you + a team. This is part of the Alignment Zone Dashboard. This video gives an overview of how tasks, projects, goals, and pillars all fit into a hierarchy underneath the guiding principles of the alignment zone pillar to pipeline pyramid. This is something you can't get outside of Notion. There are currently no videos on project management databases in Notion anywhere else on the internet, so this is an important one to cover in detail. 02:40 Alignment Zone Access This is where you interact with everything above the task level (accesses through the Action Zone). Projects - pillars and guiding principles. 3:01 Primary Table Overview The project's database is interacted with under a toggle in the execution pipeline segment of the page. The view is filtered to show all projects that are not completed. The view is sorted first by status: In progress On hold Next up Future Someday/Maybe Then sorted by quarter. The purpose of these fields as a database is to enable quarterly reviews inside them. Of the active projects, there are priority ratings assigned. There is a progress bar that is assigned a formula for a subjective score out of 20 because in many cases it's hard to track the exact amount of progress made on a project. This is useful for the weekly reviews so you have at a glance a sense of what the progress is on each. Every project is assigned at least one goal outcome. This is important to ensure that each project is in service of one of the top-level goal outcomes designated. The next video will cover the goal outcomes database and the recent alignment zone video gave an overview of how it works. Every project is assigned a pillar as well The video covering the pillars database will be covered after the goals databases. Every active project must have at least one action item assigned otherwise it's stuck. These projects are Augusts' internal projects, either for his company, life, family, etc. to his company and team. These are not client projects; those are stored separately in the client database. The tasks in the tasks database are shared between the client projects and internal projects He considers each client a project unto itself and in the client database, each entry is a workspace for that client. There are sub workspaces within that that are shared and collaborated on with the client. Keeping the projects internal makes them much more manageable as opposed to having an unruly list. 9:00 Project Workspaces and Task Management Each of these entries is the primary workspace for that project. 9:17 Example to find and hire a video editor Status Quarter Priority Review date Must always have one for any active projects Important because when you do your weekly/monthly reviews you will review the projects You are expecting to have significant progress by this date and if you don't then it's a red flag. When you look at a date that has passed during a review you give it more attention and scrutiny. Action Items Every time a task is created in the tasks database you tag a project it's related to (create a relation to it) Goal Outcomes Pillars Etc. 11:35 Database Templates At the bottom is the template that August has created for all his project workspaces. This is the page area for each entry First, there is a question asking why this project is being done to force reflection. The Pillars, Goal Outcome, and Action items databases are embedded. There is a place for thoughts Tasks to be added can be jotted down here and dragged into the database window The action items are listed and filtered by project sorted by status 14:40 Example for creating a new website project 16:00 Demo Project Go through each tag on the top and enter the tags on the fields The template can then be selected to populate the page with the unfiltered databases To filter simply select the top option for each project. Every time you use the template the filters for each database will be the preset conditions. Utilize the workspace within the project database for each of the project pages as a collaborative/creative aggregation of thoughts and ideas 19:33 To create a database template Select the dropdown menu under New and create a new template. More information can be found on the Notion wiki A database template is different from a page template. There has never been a project management platform that can do all these things this easily with this much flexibility. The next video will cover the goals databases How they align with other aspects of the pillar-pipeline pyramid Just like the projects have workspaces within each project page, each goal outcome has a workspace for working on it across many projects. Finally the extremely important cycle reviews. The goal is to cover tasks, projects, goals, and pillars first so that when we get to the cycle reviews you have seen in detail how all of these workspaces and levels of execution work together and independently. The reviews are all about aligning them and making sure they're all on track.

0:00 Intro This video will cover the alignment zone dashboard which is one of the two most important dashboards in the system. The other being the Action Zone dashboard. The design of the system is to emphasize focus and alignment Focus so that as you're working hour to hour you are dealing exclusively with what matters, this is what the action zone dashboard works with. Alignment is all about making sure that the task or action you're working on is the right thing to be focused on relative to your larger aspirations and goals. The whole purpose of the alignment zone is to ensure the tasks you've set as priorities are advancing the projects, goal outcomes, life pillars, and ultimately the guiding principles of your life. The other part of the alignment zone is the review sessions, these will be covered later. These are essential for making the alignment zone work. This video will be a big picture overview of the alignment zone with future videos going deeper into the various components that make it up. Weekly/Monthly review Projects Database Goals Database Pillars Database 2:25 [image] 2:40 Command Centre Update The focus zone was renamed the focus and alignment zone. 3:01 Overview At the bottom are quick links to various databases and dashboards under 'Execution Dashboards'. These are just quick links for ease of navigation. At the very bottom are the Action Items this is the task database. As we go up the pillar to pipeline pyramid we go through the execution pipelines, goal pipelines, Life pillars. The pillars are the narrowest items that everything below is in support of. They are also the fewest. The action items are the most numerous as they are the smallest units of work broken down. Projects are the next smallest units of work but are more consolidated than tasks and action items. The goal pipeline has two components The Goal Outcomes are the measurable results you want to achieve and complete. The value goals are softer and more aspirational. The Life Pillars are the ongoing elements that keep the roof up, lights on, and keep things functioning. If these collapse your life will be in chaos. Every one of the goals, projects, and by extension action items is in support of at least one of the pillars. Typically you will want to link them through relations. At the top of the Dashboard is the insight area which is the pinnacle of the self-reflection you do at the outset to understand who you are, where you want to go, and who you want to be. 5:40 Guiding Principles These are the results of a process you go through where you really reflect on what matters to you, what you want out of your life, what you want to become, what your aspirations are etc. You need to go through this reflection because this is the North Star that will guide everything else. If you don't have a very clear sense of what matters to you, what's important, what you want to achieve, and why you want to achieve it, then the system is operating without any direction. This is the result of a process, the way you get to this very clear, tightly articulated endpoint is by going through a reflection process. The system has to be aligned to your identity to be effective. If you haven't done any type of major self-assessment recently then before you build the system you go through this process. To give a sense of what you are trying to achieve with that process there are four elements the are the culmination of August's self-assessment process. At the top is the sharpest, most pointed, definite, at the bottom they are more abstract and foundational to who you believe you are and what matters to you. If any of the elements below speak to your authentic self, USE THEM! People will resonate with a lot of these items and that's ok. The guiding principles are colored in orange as are the life pillars, goal pipeline, and execution pipelines to denote the pyramid, with the other supporting elements colored in yellow. 7:40 Central elements Ultimately come to a single word which August refers to as the state of being, in his case the word is 'rising', to improve, climb and grow in his life and relationships and business through the process of focus and alignment. He has prioritized the areas of Family, business, and health in his life to achieve this state of being. For each of these areas, he has specified more precisely what he wants to improve in each area. 10:10 Drive and motivation What drives you? August's examples are Personal and Family, Deep satisfaction of creating something worthwhile, Thrill of discovery, curiosity, desire for elegant design, and intrinsic fit. 11:12 Purpose and Why Why do you do the things you do, what's the why and purpose behind your actions and aspirations? August's examples are personal and family, have an impact on others at scale through life-enhancing ideas and inspiring aesthetics, life experiences that touch the root of being. 12:33 Foundational Core This goes to the essence of who you see yourself as, it's the bottom and possibly the most important. You write out a few lines of what defines who you are. This changes periodically, perhaps once a year or so, part of your reviews will be checking in on these things. Augusts examples: Experience the deepest forms of life through the most capable mind and body I can create. Maximally love and support the people I'm closest to. Empower broader circles of people with as much impact as possible. Embrace, foster, and champion mindful, thoughtful, caring, and artistic values. Be courageous. Stay true. Create maximal value. Be useful. 15:24 Life Pillars The pillars are what everything is in support of, you want to have a fairly small, tightly defined group of them that covers everything in your life that's important and require ongoing maintainece and work. August has organized his by three categories, these are represented in the command center near the focus & alignment category: Growth Business Home/life A question that was commonly asked: If you are organizing by pillars, pipelines, and vaults why are they not sorted this way? PPV is about the assets and organizing the databases and pages in Notion. It's a practical implementation to keep the side dashboard organized. What matters are the life pillars and these are the three categories of them in August's system. The specifics of the pillars in August's system will be covered later, but the key takeaway is that everything is in support of the pillars and is in some way tagged in relation to them. 17:10 Pillar support These are the things in your system that are delivered on the pillars but are not tasks or projects ( these are pipelines). Not everything is in a pipeline and these are just the habits and routines that support the pillars. Health and fitness MindsetMindset and identity sculpting This is part of the morning routine when the Notion system is started up each day. This is a page that is a collection of things that inspire or provide wisdom from many pieces of wisdom to internalize. Remember Identity; about becoming the person who can achieve the goals you want to achieve. Goals You could add a nutrition database if you wanted to. 20:50 Goal Pipelines This is in the middle of the pyramid, there are 2 kinds of goals and a video will cover this in detail later. With the layout, you can open any 2 toggles and see how they connect and relate to one another Goal outcomes are what you need to track results and progress to hold yourself accountable or not. August found that if he simply started to think of goal outcomes it would feel very shallow and transactional. This is why he creates value goals first which are a little softer and more abstract. Value goals Example: I want to have a thriving business; this is quite abstract and difficult to define, but you nonetheless have a sense of what it means Every one of the goal outcomes has a value goal linked and vice versa. 23:13 Execution Pipelines These are on the bottom of the pyramid where you make things happen. The projects are designed to help us move towards our goal outcomes, every goal outcome must have a project or it's not progressing. In this table, you can see whether or not every goal outcome has projects laid out and connected with relations to tell you that it's moving forward. If you see one without any projects or tasks then you have a problem and it's clear you need to add projects or turn it to an inactive state. Each goal outcome has a status assigned 23:50 Underway These are the only ones you are monitoring and tracking. Not started If you think of an outcome you want to achieve, but you don't have the bandwidth to deal with it. Complete Archived Projects have statuses assigned as well 24:30 In Progress On-hold Waiting Someday/Maybe Complete In every case, a project is serving a goal outcome and every goal outcome needs a project assigned to it to move it forward. Projects attach to action items Every single project that is designated 'in progress' must have action items If you see an empty cell for action items for an 'in progress' project you know it's stalled. Action items do not all necessarily link to a project, goal outcome assigned. They are a bit more discretionary, but all of them are serving a pillar, but sometimes it's not worth the time to enter the tags into the database. Bigger tasks are assigned a pillar and a project so when you go to the projects page it will have all the tasks for it listed. 27:07 Review Cycles The cyles toggle at the top of the pyramid is the last important element of the page to cover Daily insight This is the daily tracking Weekly insight Weekly reviews Monthly insights Monthly reviews Quarterly insights Quarterly reviews Annual plan and insight Annual review You must have at least weekly and monthly reviews to make the system work. At the end of the week (Fri-Sun) you will do your reviews This process can be done quickly (under a half-hour). You check the projects, goal outcomes, pillars, and guiding principles also other things that need to be done on a weekly basis like pay bills, clean downloads folder, etc. There will be videos covering these in more depth. In the process of quarterly and annual reviews is assigning fields that you can track over time. There is no redundancy between the weekly, monthly, etc. reviews; they are unique processes. 31:06 Outro The 3 most important parts of the entire system are Action Zone Alignment Zone Review cycles The next videos in the series will cover the review cycles, projects database, goals databases, and the pillars section.

0:00 Intro This video will answer another relevant question from the community that wasn't covered in the previous Task Database video on do-date implementation. What happens if you have some downtime and you want to have some options to fill it with? 0:35 When & Why "Do Dates" 00:38 [image] question from a user, what do you do with tasks without a 'do-date'? If a task is important it should have a do date. When you assign a do date, it doesn't necessarily mean you will do the task at that point, but some action needs to be taken with it such as rescheduling. This ensures you never forget an important task. This comes down to how important a task is, if you think it's meaningful give it a do date. If you come to that do date and you don't have time for it again, and this keeps repeating you will eventually begin to question whether it’s important or not. The whole point of a do date is to ensure a task is put into your schedule and gets deliberate consideration at that date. Letting time pass helps you filter out what you deem important. 3:55 example in Notion Add a new item to the daily task list and pick a date you want to reconsider the task The problem of never putting a do date on new tasks can leave you with giant lists that become unwieldy and emotionally burdensome. They make you feel like you're failing and falling behind. You need to be screening your tasks and don't add anything that isn't moving towards your higher-level priorities. 6:32 Ongoing Low-Priority Task List To answer the question there are times when August will go to a list that is an ongoing low priority list, however, this happens rarely as the daily action items are scheduled with high priority, highly aligned tasks. Sometimes it's nice to have a 'soft list' for some people and there is one built into the system 7:10 Jumping into the Action Zone dashboard There is a toggle from an ongoing low priority list These are tasks that you want to do, but there's no point at which it would be too late to do it. For a reading list, August will primarily use pocket, but that can get quite long and if there is something on there that he wants to read in particular that might get buried, he'll put the item on this list. If this list gets too long it will be cut down to size during the weekly review. When he has spare time he almost always goes to his pocket list, watch later videos on YouTube or the books on his reading list. This list is a way to list the priority between those items and which to tend to first. If you are someone who has a lot of free time and your action items and task database aren't keeping you busy, or if you're scheduling some downtime. You could have toggles within toggles of your low priority list to generate a hierarchy of tasks to do at your discretion. This should be part of your weekly or monthly review. A fundamental principle of most systems from GTD to this one is that if you have things you want to do you need to input them very quickly and get them out of your head. You could use a 'to schedule' list as an inbox for a simple/quick inbox, or if it's something casual then you can put it into the ongoing low priority list. If something gets pushed down too much it's a good cue that it really should be deleted because it's not that important to you. Putting tasks on your to-do list forces you to consider them more deeply if they really aren't that important to you. Alternatively, you could be consistently being thrown off your task lists by other items and it will force you to consider the value of whatever it is you're being thrown off by and what it is you hope to accomplish. 13:36 Projects on "Hold" Projects are things you want to get to, but you don't necessarily want to fill your task database with too many do dates that you have to keep shuffling. You assign those tasks to a project and then put the project on hold until. The project's database will be covered in a few videos. There you will see that projects can be active, on hold, or something to consider in the future. The way you assign the project will have an impact on what gets actively scheduled into the task database, impacting the number of tasks you need to assign in your schedule. The following videos will continue on with the building of the system The alignment dashboard is the next most important dashboard in the system because it contains the pillar to pipeline pyramid, aligning everything from the daily actions up to the projects, goals, values, pillars, and aspirations you're working towards and the person you want to become. After that, we will cover the project's database.

0:00 Intro One of the biggest criticisms of Notion is that it's too slow to do quick entries of tasks, data, notes and that is the deal breaker for many people. This video addresses a good comment that August has seen, he plans to periodically do videos like this throughout this series. This video will cover entering information into Notion quickly because August believes it is a misguided criticism of the platform. The benefit of getting information into the Notion system makes it worth it to cover this topic. This is a good time to address this since we have just covered the Daily Action Zone and the Tasks Database. There is no system that can effectively align high level aspirations with hourly tasks to be completed, and it's worth it to sacrifice a few seconds here and there for the total net benefit of a system like this. However people may have niche needs and Notion may not be suitable because of that. 1:53 Relative Importance Notions backend is so powerful and efficient that trading a few seconds lost on data entry for the amount of time you save is easily worth it. Beyond the time savings on the backend, you also get the alignment of visions and aspirations with your day-to-day activities. You get synchronization between tasks, projects, and knowledge. Notion is the ideal balance between quick interaction and functionality, customization, and integration within one platform which gives you a lot of efficiencies. Everyone has their own system and priorities, some people may not be able to use Notion on a fast wifi network as August does and that may limit performance. To some degree quick entry is important, everyone needs to do it and your Notion system does need to be optimized to do it. 5:45 Optimizing Notion for Quick Entry In the Task Database overview, there was a brief segment on how individual tasks are entered into the database. If you open this up you will see a lot of alignment between the low-level day-to-day tasks. When you're entering a task you have to ask yourself, how big or structural a task is. Is this something that's a major building block towards one of my projects, pillars, content production pipeline? Or is it just something that needs to be entered quickly and done? Or is it something that's really big but you don't necessarily have time to enter all the fields right now? When you enter notion you can hit the 'new' button 6:50 to open a new entry. When you create a new task from the daily action zone view of the task database, the 'do-date' will automatically be set for today. A priority can be assigned if it is to be done today, or if it's to be rescheduled later but as an indication of the importance of the task. If you just need to get something in you can type it in and assign attributes later very quickly. If you need to do quick entries on mobile you can set up shortcuts on your phone to each section of the Notion system. 10:20 August opens to the daily tasks on mobile 95% of the time. After entering a task you can simply swipe the screen to return. If you are on a cellular network it might take a second or 2 longer, but it's always within a reasonable amount of time. If you open in different dashboards and pages all the time in Notion, it won't always be where you want it. What you can do is open Notion in your phone browser. Go to the dashboard you want At the bottom, hit the 'share - to' icon. Add to the home screen. (might be different for different mobiles, but there should be enough similarity to figure it out). You can title it whatever you want, but by default, it will add the title of the page as it is. The first time you open the page from this shortcut it will require you to log in. Anytime you hit this icon it's going to open this database From the daily action zone dashboard, if you enter a task quickly and forget about it, it will reappear the next day, based on the view setup to show tasks with a do-date on or before today. 15:53 Faster Lightning Entry If the above entry is not quick enough then you can apply David Allens principle of the inbox from his book getting things done. If you want an inbox in notion, you simply set up a Notion inbox database and have on your Smartphone that opens to it directly. If Notion itself is too slow for quick entry then you can use another app such as todoist, or things, etc. as your inbox for quick entries. If you are using an inbox you will have to go through and sort it at some point which requires an extra step of processing. These solutions allow you to leverage the full power of Notion while having an entry system that works for your needs.

0:00 Intro This video will cover the creation of a flow chart that will map or model the entire Notion system. We will be operating outside of Notion, but it's highly relevant to how we design and build our Notion system. We will be working in a tool called 'whimsical'. A flowchart will give you a detailed visualization of the entire system How information, data, and assets flow from one part to another How information and data enter and exit the system. The flowchart of the system used in these demonstrations will be covered. It will also serve as a roadmap for where we will go in future videos through different sections of the system. The flowchart can be accessed by subscribing to the newsletter 2:41 Why Flow Chart Once you get a sense of how Notion works, laying out a flowchart will help you to get a sense of how your system will get off the ground and how it will work. If you build the system first and try to figure this out as you go you will end up rebuilding, changing, and discarding work, creating a lot of redundancy. You need to understand what Notion can do before you map out the flowchart, otherwise, you won't have a good idea of what can be mapped and implemented. 3:54 Master Flow Chart of My Notion System 3:50 [image] an embedded whimsical flowchart of the system is on the command center dashboard. Alternative flowchart software is MIRO, it can also be embedded into Notion. The core functionality of the system is in red and in the center, many of these items have been covered already. Blue is health and fitness Green is business Purple is content production The red rectangle is the Action Zone Dashboard - The daily action zone dashboard. There is a big pipe going up to a stack of databases Rectangles represent dashboards for different functional areas Cylinders represent databases. Many of the dashboards circling the central dashboard have their own databases. The stack of databases at the top are the core databases of the system. They are ordered from bottom to top The bottom databases are the most central to fueling the daily actions Pillars are the elite, narrow structures of our life that are ongoing always and need to be maintained to keep the roof up on our world. The bottom contains the most numerous entries that comprise the bulk of tasks needed to achieve the high-level pillars. Directly above that is Projects, this is the next most numerous database. Above that are the goal outcomes; the measurable outcomes we are working towards. We develop projects to move us towards the completion of these goal outcomes. Above that, a database called vision goals (a future video will cover the difference between vision goals and goal outcomes) for now, think of them all as goals. Above that, we have pillars which is the most narrow set of goals. Above that we have the guiding principles, these are the values and identity elements of who you are and who you want to be. Parallel to that are the cycles, each of these is a database that has a very different function. You have a database for each cycle; daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual. None of them replicate the others so each is kept quite manageable and small. The act of sitting down for a weekly or monthly review is pretty quick. Daily tracking measures the metrics we've decided are important to quantify Weekly reviews focus largely on looking at projects and making sure the right tasks for the week are aligned and set up. Monthly reviews focus on looking at the goal outcomes, are the projects we're queuing up delivering on the goal outcomes. Vision goals tend to be reviewed on a quarterly basis because they don't change that frequently but you want to see if there are shifts in your priorities in life. Pillars and guiding principles tend to be annual things, they don't change very frequently at all. You can see how these are all linked up to one another on the flow chart. Ovals with light shade represent a data input point. The outskirts of many of the databases have one. The tasks that are created from projects are being created within the system. Some tasks are not delivering on projects and need their own data input point 'external to-do tasks'. The blue inputs on the right input into multiple databases, these measure health, and biometrics into the fitness database, as well as daily tracking. The green inputs come from accounting software The purple inputs come from content creation sources 'notion web clipper' and 'Evernote's. August brings information into Notion only when he is actively engaged with it, with a large legacy of information in Evernote. Looking at what's around August's Action Zone can help you think about what might be important to you and your system. Business Dashboard 2 linked databases for Sales and clients Content Production machine Production database Health & Fitness dashboard Fitness activity databases can have a nutrition database, meditation database, etc. Family Dashboard Keep track of activities, conversations, projects, ideas, etc that you have with members. Some projects will have family tags in the projects database for example. Each of these databases is also linked to project databases as well as task databases. Family database Social Dashboard Correspondence and club memberships inputs Mind Expansion dashboard Slightly different from the others, it's positioned below as a 'support' 3 key areas are the Media database and dashboard; cover articles, videos, podcasts that provide information useful for projects and tasks that are actively engaged with There is a dashboard and database for books. Courses and training. Active workspace database and in-action dashboard This is a creative studio where information comes from all these other areas and are organized by idea/theme. From here he will write articles, videos, books, courses, etc. This is the knowledge base for the application of knowledge rather than the aggregation and storage of knowledge resources. 25:30 the flowchart is divided into 2 halves with the core database structure described primarily in the top half and the core dashboard structure on the bottom. Another important dashboard that will be covered soon is the alignment dashboard which covers the core stack of action databases and the cycles and puts them in their hierarchical order to let you see the interconnectivity of all of them. Everything flows to the outputs on the right System outputs = Actions, Creative work, personal biz, and growth. You want to be keeping track of what's moving into and out of the system, what's moving within in, where the bottlenecks might be. If there are stock-ups, where do they accumulate, and how do you manage them? 29:00 Outro Laying things out graphically helps to communicate and have a deeper understanding of how everything works. This forces you to explicitly express your processes in a way that you may realize what your steps are, where they can be improved, how you might train new people to do the same, how to outsource your work, see redundancy and waste in your own system. You will become better at your processes when you understand them more fully and you'll be able to streamline them and make them much more efficient and effective.

0:00 Intro This is an update to show a modification to the Task Database. When we move onto the project database this change will have an important ramification. This modification was made to help manage projects from the projects database view. The previous videos covered the tasks database and the daily action zone where the task database is interacted with primarily. This will cover a change made to the task database that will have a minor impact on the daily action zone, but more significantly when looking at projects. 1:16 [image] daily action zone. Fundamentally we are adding a 'status' field to tasks in the task database. 1:16 System Change to Task Database 1:30 [image] task database with new field added. 1:40 [image] 'Status' allows us to choose whether a task is active, waiting, paused, next up, future. Assigning statues to tasks allows you to manage tasks without having to assign do dates to every specific one. This minimizes the number of tasks that have to be actively managed. The filter on the daily action zone filters for status 'active' in addition to the previous filters described. The waiting on view is no longer filtered by the checkbox waiting but by the status The dependent task view is filtered entirely by whether there is anything in the 'following' field. If a task is dependent and is set up to follow the normal protocol of following and preceding tasks, then its status is marked as active. You could have another status 'dependent' to assign to dependent tasks but that would require another step of assignment for these tasks. 7:01 Task Status Getting to Aid Managing Projects The do date calendar in the daily action zone is filtered to show active tasks. A new view has been added to the daily action zone called the non-active review. During your weekly review, you will now take a look at this and see if there is anything that needs to be switched to the 'active' status. The other time you would consider making a task active is when you are in the project view in the project database. 9:04 Closing Thoughts This has been a standard part of the business enterprise application of this system and it's still valuable for an individual. It gives more flexibility to load things you want to get to someday as tasks.