Notes and summaries (no comments please)

[MuadDib]

I'll be using this journal as a database of my notes that I can link to in other parts of the site.

 

Edited November 22, 2021 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• PPV Intro
  • What Pillars Pipelines and Vaults actually mean and how they relate to each other
  • Diagram showing how they relate and how to get into the system for beginners
• System Design
  • Systems thinking is the ability to look comprehensively at how various systems interact with each other and the larger systems they are a part of.
  • When you take a holistic view you can see how properties emerge or arise from the interplay amongst the system that doesn't exist in individual components. This is what makes having a comprehensive LOS in notion so powerful.
  • When you have a comprehensively integrated system-level approach to structuring your life, new capabilities and insights emerge, faster ways of doing things arise, knowledge is present when needed. All of these pieces complement each other when they're interconnected as opposed to when they are managed separately and each piece was fragmented.
  • The first few videos in this series give an intro and overview of what systems thinking is and how we are applying it with Notion
• Top-Level Dashboards

2:46 3 Objectives of PPV System

1. Focus

• So when we sit down to do the work we have the ability to focus on what matters
• Difficult to achieve but a well-designed system can help to do this

2. Alignment

• We want the things we do day by day and hour by hour to be directly aligned with our high-level aspirations.
• It's more important to do the right things inefficiently than the wrong things efficiently.
• Alignment ensures that we are doing the right things every day to move our lives forward and become the people we want to be in work, family, mental clarity, creativity and creative output.
• It's so easy to make a list of goals or aspirations and then be pulled away from them by life each day as we become reactive.

3. Knowledge

• Resurfacing at the right time and place.
• Capturing the information in this fire hose of media we live in and storing it in a very safe and organized and accessible way.
• Aggregates them into topic categories where the best thinking, ideas into the knowledge vault.
• This information arises automatically at the right time and place because the system knows what, when and where it matters.

 

5:16 Structural Design of PPV System

5:17 [image]

• This shows the relationships between Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults
• Each Cylinder is a separate Database in the System

 

Pipelines:

• Pipelines describe the action in our life. Things that go through a process flow with various stages of progress and then ultimately completion.
• This would relate to a system such as GTD (Getting things done) and covers the scope of it.
• Databases include:
  • Action Items (tasks)
  • Projects
  • Goal Outcomes
  • Value Goals

 

Vaults:

• Vaults is about knowledge management either personal or business context covering the scope of something like Para? Or building a second brain
• Databases include:
  • Tools & Skills
  • Notes & Ideas
  • Courses & Training
  • Media
  • Knowledge
• The system organizes information that we deem valuable enough to capture and makes it very accessible.

 

Pillars:

• Have a different organizational structure to pipelines and vaults.
• They are horizontal organizational categories across all pipelines and vaults.
• They break your life into segments such that everything you do will fall into one of these segments, with the goal of simply categorising the spectrum of your life.
• Categories include:
• Growth
  • Health and fitness
  • Mental Clarity
• Home Life
  • Family
  • Friends
  • Social Life
• Personal Finances
• Business
• Marketing
• Sales
• Product Design
• Product Development
• Customer Operations

 

Cycles:

• The one element outside of the system is the reviews because they are time-based and are not organized by pillars.
• Periodic review cycles:
  • Weekly
  • Monthly
  • Quarterly
  • Annual
• Ensures things are on track and observes where shortcomings are to pull things back in line.
• This is a very important balancing process to keep the system on track and going in the right direction so we don’t drift away from our goals and aspirations.
• Daily tracking tracks the most important habits and routines that we are improving and implementing into our lives. What we track we can improve. The simple act of observing them dramatically increases the odds of them progressing forward.

 

10:24 Top Level Dashboards:

• The three mega dashboards of the system are the command centre, the action zone and the alignment zone.
• These dashboards grant a small look into the window of the system.

 

10:20 Command Centre Dashboard Intro

10:25 [image]

Command Centre:

• Top-level Dashboard for the entire system
• Focus and alignment are the goals
  • Action Zone
    • All about FOCUS
    • Daily view of what we are doing hour to hour
  • Alignment Zone
    • Ensures the things we are doing day to day are aligned with our high-level aspirations the project, goal, and guiding principle levels.
    • If you can do this then the things that you need to get done will happen because you will steadily be moving forward in the direction you have designed for yourself.
• Three pillar categories Growth, Home/Life, Business
  • Within each of these groupings, we can see the individual pillars
• Growth:
  • Health and fitness
  • Mental Clarity | Spirituality
  • Mind Expansion | Learning
• Home/Life:
  • Family
  • Home & Household
  • Personal Admin & Finance
• Business:
  • Biz Team & Admin
  • Client Operations
  • Content Creation
  • Product Development

 

• You can create whatever pillars are relevant to you.
• Every single one of these is a dashboard and will link you to a sub-dashboard into that section of your life with everything organised in a clear and transparent way that will bring insight into what is moving forward and what isn't.
• All of the knowledge, wisdom, ideas and insight that you've captured from other sources will also resurface into each of these categories.

 

• Databases:
  • Pillars
  • Pipelines
  • Vaults
  • Cycles and Reviews

 

13:53 Alignment Zone Dashboard Intro

13:58 [image]

• Alignment zone is how we align our high-level aspirations with our daily & hourly actions
• Start with our Guiding Principles:
  • Define what is meaningful in life, what we value
• We define our Pillars
• The categorizations we've talked about as well as pillar support  which are the things that help us to implement and achieve what matters within each pillar
  • Section where we design habits & routines, Knowledge Vault for Pillars, Mindset, Health & Fitness
• We then set our Goals
• Our high-level goals and then the measurable, quantifiable steps towards accomplishing those goals in Goal Outcomes
• We then break our goal outcomes into individual Projects (or we define habits & Routines) that will help us achieve them
• Finally the projects breakdown into tasks (Action Items)

 

15:24 Action Zone Dashboard Intro

15:26 [image]

• This is for running our lives day to day.
• Today Toggle:
  • To-Do List for the day
  • Everything is organized by Do Date (spread out across the calendar below) and the priority.
  • Each day has its own task list defined by the Do Dates.
  • Having tasks organized by each day allows us to have a series of short achievable task lists to do each day rather than a never-ending burden of To-Do's.
  • The night before you set the priority list for the current day.
• Active Projects:
  • Projects we have defined as active for this time period laid out here.
  • Within each project, we can see all the tasks in order that we need to achieve.
  • We turn a few of them on active and the rest are queued up to be addressed in the future.
• Goal Outcomes:
  • Contains all Projects.

 

17:42 Closing Thoughts

• There's lots of nuance, empowering features and interconnectivity built-in.
• Information is automated to bring clarity and alert you when you're going off track.
• Allows you to focus only on the things that matter now, with only the information you need to do the things you're focused on.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• August Bradley has been optimizing businesses for decades and has never seen a platform as comprehensive and capable as Notion for productivity.
• Power comes from its flexibility, accessibility on top of its database functionality as part of the No-code software movement that is taking control of business operations.
• You can custom develop functionality to the point of creating your own applications.

0:55 No-Code Software Development

• These platforms are modular and endlessly customizable without the user writing a single line of code.
• The catch is they require a high degree of systems thinking which is not the way most people approach the world.
• Following videos will briefly cover Systems thinking and Systems thinking for Notion and personal productivity.

2:00 How Notion is Different

• When implemented properly you will be able to work with enhanced organization, clarity and focus serving as the backbone for small businesses, family, creative pursuits and side hustles as well as being an integrated single-source hub for all these parts of your life together.
• Notion cross-references shared data, tasks, calendar events, resources, team notes and any other digital asset.
• Eliminates the redundancy of maintaining overlapping information across different locations.
• All this matters because we don't rise to the highest level of ourselves that we can imagine, we fall to the level of our systems.
• If you want to operate at a higher level you need higher standards and better systems with greater structural integrity to hold you up.
• Structural integrity is a matter of system design.
• Doing more and performing at higher levels increases your structural load.
• Notion provides that integrity when shaped with the right methods and processes.
• Many of us use multiple task, knowledge and time management apps separately, but these functions are enhanced when they're all combined into one system and can interact with each other.
• It can be easier and more fun to learn Notion with an already functional system that you can customize as you see fit along the way.

4:14 This Notion Productivity Series

• This series will cover Augusts' personal system designed to be a LOS.
• This platform has boosted the speed of implementation and transparency across goals, project information and action.

5:12 Notion Evolution

• While Notion still has its limitations, in the aggregate it is more powerful than anything August has seen.
• What Notion saves you in time overall dwarfs the extra seconds it can sometimes take to open.
• Notion has allowed August to see the forest and the trees together with regards to goal alignment from an annual to a daily level.

5:54 My Notion Experiences

• You will need to go through a process of trial and error, exerting time and effort up front, but this process will force you to think about how you want to work and will reveal so much about what makes you MOST effective.
• You must step back and study your workflow, review your systems and think about how they can be enhanced.
• Learning the tool forces you to make your life and business BETTER.
• August has a roadmap laid out in this series to introduce the power of Notion and the system he has taught to business owners to enhance their lives and companies.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• Systems thinking will magnify your ability to create, solve problems and contribute more to any effort.
• It will enable you to do just about any complex work better and will empower you to build a LOS for yourself.
• Crucially, systems thinking enables you to see causal relationships that others are missing and you will bring new ideas and powerful insights to any discussion.
• This video is an introduction, intended to provide a working understanding of systems thinking.
• The next video will focus on applying it more specifically to designing a productivity system for personal and small business use.
• Notion is the best software August has ever seen for non-coders to design a personal life enhancement system and to streamline small business operations, but using Notion without a strong sense of systems thinking will limit how far you can take the platform.

 

1:00 What is Systems Thinking

• Systems thinking is a holistic approach to looking at the world that is often in direct contrast to the standard way people tend to look at issues. It's not the way we are taught in school or at work, it's an unconventional thought process.
• Systems thinking starts with the recognition that all systems are part of larger systems and every system is defined by its function in the larger system.
• A car is not defined by its components (engine, tyres, doors, seats etc.) but by what it does within the larger transportation system. i.e. it gets you from point A to point B with a certain speed, comfort level, carrying capacity etc.
• A car is compared with other systems (bus, train, aeroplane) by how they each fit into the larger transportation system.
• A system divided into its component parts cannot function; its worthwhile properties (functions) derive from the interactions of its parts
• Analytical or deconstructionist thinking is the more common approach in our society.
• In analytical thinking, you study the various component parts once you know each you integrate them into an understanding of how the whole works
• If you apply analytics (the study of parts) to a system, the system loses its essential properties and so do its parts. You lose your understanding of its function and how it fits into a larger system.
• Broken into parts the thing of interest in your system does not exist, the only way to understand a thing of any complexity is to look at it in its entirety and see how it functions within the greater systems.
• Systems thinking is a way of looking at a series of ecosystems orbiting and interacting with one another over time.
• With this approach, you look for patterns, rather than identifying individual elements. When you see the world this way, endless new insights reveal themselves and you can better design ways in which you interact with the world.
• You'll likely find similar repeating patterns at various detail levels within the system. Both micro and macro and across disciplines; essentially fractal patterns.

 

3:14 Traditional Thinking

• To clarify how rare systems thinking is in modern society we'll cover the standard approaches to problem-solving.
• The more common approaches go by terms such as linear thinking, analytical thinking, scientific thinking or mechanical thinking; the unifying element among them is the application of a set of simplifying assumptions to make the issue more manageable.
• These reductionist approaches break everything down into parts and then extrapolate out to an understanding of the whole presuming that the functionality is the sum of the parts.
• These simplifying assumptions often poorly model the world leaving us with the same old obvious explanations, starting with limited frameworks, we end up with limited solutions.
• The value of systems thinking is that it reveals properties and causal relationships in systems that do not exist in their components alone. It looks at the qualities of the fully-functioning system beyond the sum of its parts.

 

4:10 Emergence

• The phenomenon of new qualities forming beyond the core properties or parts is called emergence.
• Emergence occurs when an entity is determined to have properties its parts do not have on their own these properties emerge only when the parts interact within a wider whole. Consciousness and life itself are examples of emergence but it happens at all levels, big and small, profound and mundane. Water is made up of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms, but neither of these components have the quality of wetness. Wetness emerges only when the two parts interact as a whole.
• The ability to recognize emergence is a cornerstone element of systems thinking.
• Ultimately the ability to design for emergence is a superpower that will be explored in this series.
• Merely recognising it provides powerful insights and a starting place to better understand essential causal relationships.
• This is how systems thinking helps us see what others are missing and enables us to contribute important ideas to any conversation.

 

5:18 6 Steps To Do Systems Thinking

1. Define the inputs, outputs and movements:

• Determine what is moving around inside the system, what's entering from outside of it and ultimately exiting it.
• What are the entry and exit points?
• What path do they take, how quickly do they move, is that pace steady or inconsistent? Are there bottlenecks? What happens to the build-up at the bottlenecks?

2. Distinguish linear from circular:

• Evaluate what functions in the system are linear and what parts of the process are circular
• You'll find the fundamental parts of systems tend to be circular.
• This part helps you weed out a lot of the linear elements that are not essential and helps you determine what are the critical parts of the system. It will also help you identify patterns.

3. Look for patterns:

• Patterns exist all throughout systems and are central to their function. Systems facilitate and perpetuate patterns of activity and behaviour.
• Define the patterns, describe them, visualize them, write them down, map them out. Flowcharts are a great tool for this.
  • Whimsical and mural(?) Are Augusts favourite flowchart tools.
• Once you notice a pattern in one area of a system, look for echoes of it in other areas of the system and related systems. Look for it in both small and large clusters of participating elements. Zoom out to a wider perspective and then zoom in tighter. Looking for the same pattern to repeat itself at varying levels
• These patterns are fractals and you will find them everywhere

4. Find the feedback loops:

• Can you see feedback loops in the system's patterns?
• A pattern is a repeating design of some sort it could be over space or time or both
• A feedback loop is a self magnifying or self-diminishing pattern over time with each iteration is either increasing or decreasing in magnitude, perpetually and systematically.
• The results of the previous cycle pour greater resources and momentum into the beginning of the next cycle
• Amazons famous flywheel business model is a feedback loop
• Anything with exponential growth has a feedback loop at work (it can work in reverse too)
• Once you see feedback loops you will see causality everything has cause and effect and these are typically buried inside patterns and feedback loops

5. Understand the balancing properties:

• Any system that sustains itself over a long duration will have balancing properties that will prevent the feedback loops and anomalies from pressuring its boundaries.
• Balancing properties help to maintain equilibrium
• Ask what guardrails, constraints or counter-forces serve to keep things on track and how surprises are dealt with
• Without balancing elements a system will likely be short-lived; look for these countermeasures in a system to evaluate its sustainability

6. Study your systems interaction with other systems:

• All systems are part of larger systems and every system is defined by its function within a larger system
• Ask what larger systems the system you are studying is a part of
• Define the inputs, outputs and movements of the larger system
• Look for patterns in the bigger system
• Find feedback loops
• Understand the balancing properties
• Study its interaction with yet larger systems and apply the process again

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• Notion is the best platform August has seen for non-coders to build personal LOS's and small business owners to create business operation systems.
• To use Notion most effectively you must shape it into a coherent system.
• Previous Gen software and productivity tools came with a system structure built into the platform.
• In Notion you have the freedom to design your own. This is its greatest power and greatest source of frustration for new users.
• You not only need to learn the software but also master system design, if you take the time to solve this piece of the implementation puzzle, the rest will fall into place and you will have more control over your world.
• This video and the previous aim to set a systems foundation; a systems approach is essential to setting up Notion to be more than a one off-page, table or wiki.

 

1:24 Notion Systems Thinking

• Systems thinking is not the mere act of trying to assemble a system or to simply learn or analyse one. It's a philosophy on how to do those things and more, emphasizing what you prioritize and what you value most in the system.
• This video leads up to a key insight that makes systems thinking lethal in Notion, but to bring clarity to that point we need to work up to it.
• Systems thinking for Notion means we need a clear picture of what we want to accomplish. This can change over time, but from the outset, we must define our goals and desired outcomes. E.g. Save time, organize and capture complex information, make elements within your workflow more transparent, or for prioritization.
• Know from the outset what you are aiming for, all subsequent choices trade-offs are weighed against these priorities.
• In the context of Notion platform design, recognize the central tenet of systems thinking: all systems are part of larger systems and every system is defined by its function in the larger system.
• We are going to be looking at the system we are designing and how it interacts within a larger universe of activity.

 

2:44 Step-By-Step Approach

• Define the inputs, outputs and movements.
  • Look at these elements in your current workflow, because we want to port them into Notion
  • What will be flowing into your Notion system and processes and what will be exiting at various stages throughout?
  • How will the information enter? where will you be collecting it from? what's the most efficient way to routinely bring data into your tables or pages?
  • When Notion releases the much anticipated API and Zapier integrations, we'll have more options but for now, you need to think about how to efficiently enter information into your system manually. Write this out and optimize your thinking.
  • What triggers and responses will be activated throughout, and at what touchpoints will you actively engage with that information stream?
  • Where are the likely bottlenecks? - they will most certainly be you or a member of your team. Anticipate these points and design for that.
  • What happens to the backup pools that accumulate at the bottlenecks?
  • Design for items awaiting action to pool up in an organized, prioritized manner that makes it easier to process and dig out.
  • When things go sideways or derail, how does the system pause or reset?
  • The point of these questions is to connect systems thinking with the design work we will be doing in Notion. These questions frame a system thinking approach.
• Look for reoccurring patterns.
  • Reflect on the circular patterns in your life and work that you hope to enhance with Notion. What are you doing over and over again? What do you want to do less of, and more of? What are your most frequent accomplishments/disappointments?
  • You are figuring out what Notion can help you improve and you are gaining clarity on the elements of your personal system that must be fluid and dynamic in the Notion implementation.
  • At the very least make lists of these by category, a Notion kanban board would work well for this, or a page, or Trello, or flowcharts in whimsical/mural.

 

5:20 Power Looping

• Find and cultivate feedback loops and design your Notion system to facilitate them.
• A feedback loop is a self magnifying/diminishing pattern over time. The results of the previous cycle pour greater resources and momentum into the beginning of the next cycle.
• They can build you up to be the best in the world at something, or they can break you down.
• What behaviours or activities will steadily get you closer to your goals? Doing something steadily, even just a little bit every day will have compounding effects.
• Routine efforts will increase their effect at an increasing rate, putting you on an exponential growth and improvement curve.
• How can your Notion system shape your activities to generate these compounding results?
• How can the steady accumulation of knowledge in your system fuel your life and growth?
• Combining complementary pieces of knowledge creates something more powerful together than the sum of their parts.
• Creativity is less about novel ideas and more about combining disparate ideas into new combinations.
• How can your Notion system facilitate the discovery of complementary ideas from diverse fields and sources, and surface them at the right place/time?

 

6:47 Design for Emergence

• A well-designed system will create emergence in your life and business.
• Everything in life and business is cause and effect.
• Causal relationships embedded inside of feedback loops are massively powerful.
• What you do week after week, month after month and year after year is what matters.
• Any system that perpetually shapes the activities and behaviours necessary for you to become the person you want to be, will deliver emergence in your life.
• You will see qualities form that you never anticipated, if you remain on the course you won't even recognise who you become.
• Notion gives you the design control to shape such a system to uniquely fit how your mind works. But you have to know how to design the process flow and how to build emergence into your LOS through compounding causes and effects.
• Just like putting money aside increases value over time at an increasing rate, the same occurs with your activities and behaviours, but only if you implement them steadily and consistently.
• A well-designed Notion system will shape the path and provide the clarity to guide such behaviours. Doing the same for the collection and distillation of knowledge, content creation, personal finances, skills development or anything that matters to you.

 

8:35 Balancing the Machine

• You will try to build these in from the start, but in reality, the work never ends to identify breakdowns or pressure pushing the system out of sync. You will perpetually shape these balancing properties as you operate within the system.
• You need to look for ways to find guardrails and counter pressures and bring them into your system to bring it into equilibrium.
• The most consistently powerful balancing elements are routine reviews such as weekly, monthly, quarterly or even annual reviews.
• Recognising the importance of balancing properties will help you organize and stick to your periodic reviews. You make them part of your system, so you do them no matter what else is going on. Without balancing measures any system is operating on borrowed time.
• Other balancing properties will be discussed as we move into specific Notion system implementations.
• We need to be aware of how our Notion systems interact with other systems. Looping us back to the first step in systems thinking identifying entry points and exit points. How will data or activity handoffs be made into and out of each integrated or overlapping system?
• How will patterns and feedback loops overlap and magnify across the systems?
  • You will see patterns in one system echoed and patterned across other systems.
  • The feedback loops will magnify across them in turn.
  • All systems are part of larger systems and every system is defined by its function in the larger system.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• In this section, August will give an overview of his LOS which functions as a central engine for his life and business operations.
• He took the best practices he has seen and combined some new elements to create the system that works optimally for him.
• He has taught this system to many people one on one, received feedback and further refined it.
• Take what works for you and customize and modify it for your own unique needs and way of thinking.
• Some of these dashboards are available as templates to download.
• This video will give a birds-eye view of key areas of the system to give an overall glance at how they fit together.
• A series of videos will then go into more detail about each section.

 

01:24 Overall Objectives

• The objectives of this Notion system are Transparency, Prioritization and Focus; every system should have its objectives specified from the outset.
  • Transparency: Revealing where everything in your world stands, what's progressing as planned and what's stuck.
  • Prioritization: Centres on what matters most in what order.
  • Focus: So when you sit down to work, you have everything needed for that effort and nothing else distracting.
  • The system is also designed to be quick to interact with and function well on mobile.

 

• The top-level dashboard Command Centre
• 02:18 [image]
• This contains what is essential and avoids clutter/overload. It contains the most important parts of the system and shapes the process for getting the most important things done.
• This is organized into 4 sections:
• Focus
  • Includes the most important parts of the system and shapes the process for getting the most important things done consistently.
  • Makes things happen and aligns where your time is spent with your ultimate objectives
• Growth
  • The growth area focuses on personal enhancement
  • This video will focus on the Focus and growth areas.
• Business
• Home/Life

 

03:12 Organizational Structure: PPV (Pillars, Pipelines & Vaults System)

• Looking at the side menu we can see the organizational structure (PPV)
• 3:11 [image]
• The PPV framework provides an organized home for all elements in a Notion system, other organizational systems like PARA were designed for a pre-Notion world. Notion brings a range of capabilities that have never been seen before in a single platform. So it needed a new system that could accommodate its scope.
• A separate video will cover PPV in more depth but here is a quick look at how PPV works:
  • You create 4 top-level folders for Dashboards, Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults.
  • Dashboards: for conveniently organized pages for creating the most important and most used elements from the different Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults. The organizational structure itself exists within the PPV's
  •  4:07 [image]
• Pillars: These are the support beams that hold the roof up and support your life and aspirations.
  •  4:23 [image]
  • Inside the Pillars folder, we have the Pillars database which is where you define your actual pillars.
  • Also inside this folder are pages and databases that directly support your Pillars on an ongoing basis; regular routine elements that enable and empower your Pillars
  • The Pillars database is quite small but the format helps to organize it and create the database relations that roll things up into it.
  •  4:49 [image]
  • August has organized his by Type Biz, Personal, Biz & Personal for example
  • The other elements of the Pillars folder are pages and databases that directly support your pillars on a regular basis.
• Pipelines:  In the pipelines folder we have the databases that track Actions and Progress (all databases)
  • Everything in Pipelines is in MOTION and is moving through stages of progress. This is where the action happens and is tracked with clarity; focusing you in on what matters most at any given moment.
  •  5:27 [image]
  • The Action Items Database is the task database with daily actions organized and prioritized.
  • The other pipeline databases build up from there (covered later).
• Vaults: Where we have knowledge management
  • These are the resources that we draw from to execute on our pillars and pipelines.
  • This is the collection and organization of information and learning.
  • Our private collections of info need to be easily captured and stored in protected vaults.
  •  6:00 [image]

• The command centre also contains a weather widget, along with a keyboard shortcuts toggle to make moving through the system quicker.
• There is also a flowchart that covers the entire system (a future video will cover how to make your own)
•  6:40 [image]

 

06:51 Focus Zones

• In the command centre, the number 1 position is the >>Action Zone<< which is ground zero of making things happen and the most frequented dashboard.
• 7:03 [image]
  • Tasks are organized here based on what needs to get done today, tomorrow, this week etc.
  • The Action Items database (top Pipeline) is referenced in the Today- Action Items toggle, with tasks prioritized and sorted to rank in the order of priority.
  • The Daily Tracking database is also referenced here to measure how closely repetitive actions are moving towards the important pillars and goal outcomes. Every morning he fills out the first bunch of info for daily tracking and has a simplified view in the Today - Action Items toggle.
  •  8:22 [image]
  • Importantly, August uses a Do-Date; every single task in his action items database has one or is a dependant task of a task with a Do-Date (system of Dependent tasks discussed later)
  •  8:57 [image]
  • Each time he sets up a task he has to think about the Project, Pillar, Goal Outcome that it is connected to, otherwise, the task shouldn't be created (unless it is quick) or a new project, pillar, goal needs to be defined. If it's something in the production pipeline then it is linked there too.
  •  11:13 [image]
  • The daily tracking database is linked below that (covered in depth later)
  • The Waiting On toggle contains action items that are dependent on other people or dependent on other items (different database views used) such as Dependent Actions
  • Dependent Actions are the only items without a Do Date. All dependent items have a + sign in front and is linked to the task it is following, as well as the task that follows it. You can see the end of the sequence when there is no Next in Line task. This is a pretty advanced use case. Don't worry about it when you are just beginning. But this illustrates how Notion can be more powerful than dedicated To-Do apps.
  • 15:48 [image]
  • Below that is the calendar view which is a very dynamic feature and is much more functional than a kanban view. Especially on mobile. Leverage the date function!
  •  17:40 [image]
  • Below the calendar is an assortment of gallery views  Active Projects, Goal Outcomes (with progress bars) etc.
  •  18:15 [image]

 

• After the Action Items dashboard is the Pillar => Pipeline Pyramid
  •  19:21 [image]
  • This is what links daily activities to the bigger vision. The top point is narrow, with more focus and the base is broader with the larger number of items going on Action Items.
  • Guiding Principles: define who we are and the direction we want to move into, what we value and what matters to us. The overarching personal theme, fuel, My Why, Life Compass; each informs the next.
  • Following that is the Pillar Pipeline Pyramid
    • Annual reviews
    • Quarterly and monthly reviews
    • Milestone (separate databases for accomplishments and disappointments) You can roll these up into the quarterly and annual reviews making it really easy to see what is accumulating in the aggregate in terms of accomplishments and disappointments.
    • Pillars (links to pillars database)  with everything that connects the pillars to the things beneath and above it. Eg. Goal outcomes 21:17 [image]
    • Goal Pipeline
    • Value Goals: tied to the pillars, (but not visible in this view). These are our aspirations. Things we hope for in a very touchy-feely way. We then connect these to goal outcomes.
    • Goal Outcomes: value goals are directly linked to these (and vice-versa) and are tangible, measurable incarnations of those values.
    •  21:28 [image]
    • Projects after that are assigned to quarters, due dates as well as the Goal Outcomes, Pillars, and Action Items (below) 22:36 [image]
    • The base of the pyramid is the Action Items delivering day by day, inch by inch towards the bigger goals higher up.
• Back in the command centre in the Focus section we then have the Week/Month/Quarter Review 23:30
  • At the beginning of each week, he will define an Objective, Focus. At the end of the week, he will rate the effectiveness, what he is grateful for, accomplishments, disappointments, improvements etc. With an entire template below that to fill in.
  • 23:59 [image]
  • There will also be an entire template to work through at the end of the week.
  • There are a lot of rollups that go into a completed week:
  •  24:27 [image]
  • Days of the week, improvements (from each day), workouts, sleep time, weight tracking, Output percentages. An entire video will cover how these work.
  • Monthly reviews are similar
  • Quarterly reviews track very carefully what is aiming to be achieved and this links it all to the pyramid.
  •  24:59 [image]

 

25:15 Growth Zones

• Back in the command centre under the Growth section, we have
  • Mindset and identity sculpting.
  • This is directly building the pillars, building the kind of person he aspires to be and helping to become better at what he does.
  • Each day he spends some time on one or two sections in this. An entire video will be dedicated to this. 25:49 [image]
• Fitness:
  • All workouts are tracked
• Habits and routines:
  • 26:03 [image]
  • This isn't visited very often, it's reviewed in the monthly review.
  • Here the habits are listed that are really important to shaping the pillars and are deliberately worked on, defined and planned. Frequency, time of day, why it's being done etc. and they are linked to pillars or related goal outcomes.
• Mind expansion:
  • 26:36 [image]
  • This is a nice organization of the Vaults folder.
  • The Library has books 26:41 [image] the books are organized and notes are entered as he reads them (27:00 for template example)
  • Media vault 27:08 [image]
    • This is where he keeps articles/podcasts/videos that are relevant to things he is working on.
  • Courses trainings
  • Research Workspaces (in action Studio) 
    • 28:00 [image]
    • These are projects that are broader than a single item or specific piece of media that has been saved.
    • These aggregate different learnings across books, media content, training courses, conversations that support multiple projects or really long term projects.
    • They are linked to projects, action items, pillars, tagged for areas they're focused on etc.

 

28:50 Biz & Content Production

• The business section and home/life section will be covered in greater depth in later videos.
• The categories are pretty self-explanatory.
• Biz Overview
• Client operations
• Sales & Marketing
• Content Production Machine
  • 29:03 [image] quick glance
• Industry Players
• It takes a while to build up a system like this and you do it step by step.
• If you're just starting out it's useful to lay out the command centre dashboard and simply build one page at a time.
• By laying it out you know what you're building towards, and you'll know how each one will ultimately be connected to the rest.
• If you're going to do your tasks in Notion it's a good place to start building your task database and your Action Zone.
• Then build the pillar to pipeline pyramid so you link your tasks to your goals, goal outcomes, value goals, pillars, compasses
• Then establish your weekly and monthly reviews.
• Then build in your mindset
• Then build in your business
• Then build in your home/life
• The series of videos following this one will dive into each section in more detail.

[MuadDib]

 

 

0:00 Intro

• The last video covered an overview of August's LOS in Notion.  The following videos will start to go through each section and flesh them out in more detail.
• This video will cover the basics of how to build a Command Centre dashboard.
• This is a pretty simple page and will also be a good opportunity for learning how to use Notion.
• The basic functionality of Notion will be covered here and will be covered more slowly and is a good place to start for absolute beginners.
• The command centre is the main page to access the rest of the system.
• Aim to keep it as simple as possible, while giving you quick access to the most important areas, while organizing everything.
• August has Focus, Growth, Business and Home/Life as his main groupings on this page.
• 1:52 [image]
• Everything in this section is either text, headings or links with one weather widget embed.
• (2:45) Go to the new page, give it a title, add an icon and cover

 

3:40 Create Headings

• (3:30) Create each of the subcategory headings
  •  2 methods to create headings, either enter text and adjust by using 'Turn into', or type' /h1' and select Heading 1 and enter the title.
  • Adjust the text colour.
  • Drag Headings into position side-by-side, using the indicators.

 

5:30 Create Layout

• (5:25) Change page layout to 'full width'
• (5:45) Change the background colour of headings
• (6:18) Switch between Dark/Light mode using settings or by using the keyboard shortcut 'Ctr+Shift+L'
• Try to use colour to guide, it's especially useful on a big dashboard such as the command centre.
• If you don't have a system at all yet, then creating the command centre is a really good way to start to lay out a general structure for the system you want.
  • Type out all the sections you would like to ultimately have under each heading.
  • You can then build them out one-by-one
  • (7:50) Example

 

8:28 Create Linked Pages

• Essentially all we have in the final Command Centre is a page of headings and links to either pages or databases.
• Usually, you are linking to pages because dashboards are pages with collections of various types of content.
• (9:25) Turn the subheading you want to work on into a page.

 

9:50 Create Linked Databases

• Turn the subheading into a page, open it and then select 'Database' from the bottom menu on the page.
• When you create Pages and Databases in a page like this, they are embedded within this 'Command Centre' Page, which may or may not be what you want in the end.

 

10:36 Organize Sidebar

• August prefers to have links to pages and databases which are organized/housed elsewhere in the system on his dashboards.
• The organizational system of dashboards, pillars, pipelines and vaults exists on the sidebar and pages are grouped into each of those.
• (11:35) Example 'Daily tracking' database is something that directly supports the pillars, so that is where he would house it while linking it back to the Command Centre dashboard.
• (12:00) Links are created to those organized pages/databases after they have been organized.
• The key to remember is that there is only one place where a page/database is housed but you can create a link to them from anywhere.

 

14:47 Toggles

• Using keyboard shortcuts and commands is highly recommended, Notion's help centre has a list for you to pick and choose your favourites.
• Create a toggle on your command centre to house them.
• Type '/toggle' and you will create a toggle list.
  • Open the toggle and you can paste anything you want in there.
  • Drag into position using the indicators
  • Link to keyboard shortcuts page:
  •  https://www.notion.so/Learn-the-shortcuts-66e28cec810548c3a4061513126766b0
• Notions help wiki has a dedicated page for every single one of these functions (toggle, pages, databases, linking etc.) it's really clear and in-depth.

 

Create your dashboard with organizational headings and sub-headings specific to your needs.
The next video will briefly cover installing a weather widget.
The video after that will take an in-depth look at constructing a task database.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video will briefly cover how to embed a widget, specifically a weather widget into a page on your Notion setup.

0:39 Get Weather Widget

• Visit the meteoblue weather widget page
• Configure the widget as you'd like

1:41 Find Link in Code

• If you look inside the HTML code for an embed for a link in the src="URL"
• Copy that URL

2:37 Embed in Notion

• Type '/embed' in Notion and enter the link.

3:26 Other Widgets

• You can do the same thing with widgets for:
  • Quote of the day
  • News Headlines
  • Any other informational widget you can think of

August likes to have dynamic elements that provide useful information without any effort in his dashboards.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• Continuing the series that shows you how to build a comprehensive Notion LOS that helps you determine what you need to do each day and links that to your ambitions, aspiration and goals with every aspect of the pipelines, goals and processes integrated.
• This video will be a deep dive into the task database which is a really essential component of the system.
• This is a component that isn't typically looked at directly, rather sections of it are accessed in dashboards such as the Action Zone.
• This video will cover how the database is structured and set up, with a  later video covering how the Action Zone dashboard is set up and uses the functionality of the task database.

 

1:08 Why Notion for Tasks

• Sometimes you hear criticisms that Notion is not good a task management and that specialized 'To-Do' apps like Todist are a lot better
• August completely disagrees and thinks this might be a factor in why people don't have a Notion setup that's properly set up to manage tasks.
• August used Todoist before moving into Notion and he loved it, it is a well-designed app but it's limited.  For example, it doesn't allow for the creation of dependent tasks or allow for a comprehensively integrated system between different workspaces and apps or collaboration platforms.
• Beyond that, Notion is the best platform he's ever seen for connecting your high-level aspirations and defining pillars to your goal outcomes, projects and day-to-day activities.
• When you work in this way you feel like you can see everything, how it's all connected from the bottom up to the top down.
• If August doesn't have an action item (or several) linked to a goal, he knows it's stalled and it's not moving; no other platform provides such transparency.
• The other major criticism is that Notion is slow, it's true that it's a little laggy, but what you save in the back-end dwarfs the few seconds you spend waiting for it to open.
  • Quick capture in notion is not difficult if you have your databases and dashboards set up correctly.
• This video will cover how to create a task database that's connected up and down to everything.

 

4:34 Prioritized Calendar View

• The calendar view of the task database gives a broad overview of everything to be completed and provides a good introduction.
• (4:48) to see a calendar view of the task database.
• Tasks are organized by priorities and date. 'Do-Date' first and foremost.
• August calls this an Actions items database, rather than a tasks database; the vocabulary you put around your system matters a lot. He tends to use very action-oriented words.
• 6:07 [image] Looking at the structure of a task.
• (7:15) August uses priorities and scheduled tags to organize tasks that may have a scheduled time.
• Priority tags list:
  • Immediate - to be done immediately, can't be missed
  • Quick - a task that takes less than 5 minutes to complete
  • Scheduled - a task that has a specific time
  • 1st Priority
  • 2nd Priority
  • 3rd Priority
  • 4th Priority
  • Errand - something to do
  • Remember - a simple reminder

 

• You have to be careful not to have too many tasks piling onto one day. This is why it's important to assign a Do-Date.
• If they start piling up, then the action item becomes a 'to schedule' item. You still end up taking action on every item scheduled for the day, but that action becomes rescheduling.
• August approaches this by laying out the following day's schedule the night before.
• In many cases, he will also lay out blocks in the Calendar (usually in Google calendar)
• The calendar view gives a very nice overview of what's coming up. It's preferred to Kanban boards which have the problems of not working well on mobile, and manual manipulations required to maintain everything.
• There is automation built into the calendar by the nature of time rolling forward towards Do-dates.
• The other aspect of Augusts' philosophy on the task database is that it's not an end in and of itself, it's a means to an end. He isn't trying to make this the slickest and sophisticated design imaginable in notion; many people put a lot of clever design elements into their task databases in Notion.
• He's more concerned with how elegantly it interacts with, streamlines and facilitates the overall system.
• (14:12) You can create various types of views for databases in Notion as shown here.

 

14:21 Under the Hood Look at the Database Setup & Structure

• The table view is what we use to build it and see what is happening under the hood.
• The table depicted is filtered by everything that is not done and has been assigned to August.
• Every item in this database has a Do-Date except dependent tasks which only become active after the task it's dependent upon is completed.
• There are many systems that have complex formulas to calculate the priorities of tasks to be done. This can be cool, but that level of complexity is unnecessary because what you're dealing with is a long to-do list of items without any broader logic or understanding of how they fit into your life.
• (19:55) everything is sorted primarily by Do-Date and then by Priority.
• Almost all the items have a Pillar assigned (an entire video will be dedicated to pillars) These are the structures that hold your world up and are the aspirations that you're driving towards. Assigning a pillar lets you know that this task is driving towards something that you know matters in your life.
• If he can't find a pillar to assign a task to then he has to really contemplate if it's something he should really be doing, or if he needs to create a new pillar.
• He also asks if there is a goal outcome or project that each task work towards. Separate databases exist for each and separate videos will be done on each of those.
• 23:00 [image] when a task is created it is assigned a Do-Date first, then when it is being looked at the night before, it will be given a priority.
• Following and next in line are how dependent tasks are set up. (the next video covers this)
• There is a place for Notes
• Clients if it's for a client it can be selected
• Due Date is a place for firm dates that things need to be completed by
• Projects  - looking up into the projects that need to be completed
• Pillars - Is this task helping to deliver on one of the pillars?
• Goal Outcomes - for tangible, measurable goal outcomes that are hoped to be achieved.
• Production Pipeline - for tasks relating to content production
• Done Checkbox
• Waiting Checkbox - if it can't be moved forward on

 

The structure is not very fancy, other than the fact that it relies heavily on relations to other databases.

It's very simple, and part of its power is that it's simple.

The following video will cover setting up dependent tasks, then how to do daily tracking, then putting the daily tracking database and the action items databases together into the daily action zone dashboard.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video is a quick follow-up to the previous video which was about task databases.
• This entire series dives into individual components of a comprehensive integrated Notion LOS
• This video will cover dependent tasks which is one of Notion's strengths when compared to task management apps.
• In August's system, each item in the tasks (Action Items) database has a Do-date with the exception of dependent tasks because they follow other tasks that do have a Do-Date.

 

0:51 Dependent Task Overview

• You can have one dependent task, or a string of them sequentially linked.
• As the first item is completed it gets checked off and the dependent task moves up with a Do-Date and is the head of the chain until you reach the end of it.
• (1:41) this is the database, not a dashboard. This is not where you typically interact with it, it's usually interacted within the daily action zone dashboard.
• There is a 'dependent tasks' view of the database which is a view that is filtered to only show items that have the following field is not empty; meaning they are following something.
• Looking at the first item you can see the following and next inline fields. This means this particular action item follows the action item in the following field and precedes the action item in the next-in-line field.

 

5:17 How the Dependent Task System Works

• There is a little '+' symbol added to the start of action items that have tasks following it. When a task is completed the following task is opened and assigned a Do-Date.
• (5:42) The first action items in a chain are not visible in this view because they are not following anything, but if we select the first items in a chain we can see they have a link to the first item in the chain that has a Do-Date assigned.
• The problem with having every item have a Do-Date and not setting up these chains is if the first one gets bumped then you have to reschedule all of them and it becomes hard to keep track of what is dependent on what. You cannot do this in most To-Do apps. Only the most complex apps for organizations have this functionality.

 

7:30 How to Set Up the System

• It's not immediately obvious how to set this up.
• Changing to the view of the master table filtered for tasks today.
• (7:40) Three tasks are batched together with the same priority rating.
• These tasks are sequential, setting them up as a chain of dependent tasks can be done by opening the second task up.
  • (8:18) add a property and change the property type to relation.
  • Set up the relational database link to the same database you're in.
    • Not only can you set up relational links to other databases, but you can set them up to the database you're in.
    • When you do this you get a different option than when you set up a link for a separate database to either create a new property (sync both ways) or use the same property (no syncing). The difference is, one will set up 2 fields and one will only set up one field.
    • If you set up one field, it's just like linking to another database; you will choose a task elsewhere in the same task database and link to it, and both tasks will have 1 field and each will link to the other. That's not what we want in this case.
    • We want to create a new property (additional field) and sync both ways. What will happen is one of them will be the following field and the other will be the next in line field.
  • (10:46) Property will be the first field you added, and it adds the second property.
    • Rename the first to 'following'
    • Rename the second to 'next in line'
    • Choose the item you want to follow (can use the search function to find it), if you then go to that item you will see in the second field that it will automatically enter the reverse.
    • You can repeat this for the other tasks in the chain.
  • Changing the view to only show items with the following field not empty will show you the dependent tasks. It will list the tasks backward, so you need to manually sort them in this view.
• This can be organized in the dashboard for how everything is viewed and how you can immediately see what the sequences are.
• This Notion action item database isn't particularly fancy in how it works. It's elegant with how it interacts with the system. You will really see it when we start looking at the whole dashboard for the Action Zone and how we start rolling up the pillars-pipelines pyramid to see how everything interconnects and how you get a view and understanding with an internal comprehension of everything in the chain.
• The next video will cover daily tracking which is the next component of daily tracking.
• Then will look at the Action Zone dashboard where you will put the tracking and the Actions items database all together in terms of how you execute your tasks minute by minute, hours, and days.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video will cover daily tracking which is one of the most important things you can start doing to achieve what matters to you in your life.
• The last 2 videos covered building a task database in Notion, it's really important to deliver on your projects, by completing the step by step components of projects, goal outcomes, and pillars in your life.
• The other half of your daily focus is what you track in the daily tracking database.

 

0:48 Importance of Daily Tracking

• You are what you do every day. If you are a writer, business owner, aspiring for health, you need to service those things in some way every single day.
• A giant effort on an inconsistent basis is far less effective compared to a small effort on a daily basis.
• When you define what matters most to you in the pillars, goal outcomes, and value goals you get there by setting daily rituals and routines that move you towards it every single day.
• What get's measured gets done. You need to establish the routine and track it because that will ensure you do it.
• In a way this gamifies things, this is one of your scoreboards to look at every day.
• There are many daily activities that are important to track like sleep, resting HR, fitness, etc.
• In the next video when we look at the daily Action Zone dashboard we'll see how this database rolls up into that in a really elegant way.

 

3:07 Design & Layout of Tracking Database

• This database is best viewed in the Table view.
• August tends to view the stats for the past 30 days with the rolling averages tracked along the bottom.
• You should decide what matters most to you in your life and then what metric will you use to indicate whether you're moving towards it or away from it. What will ensure that you're doing the activities and paying attention to the activities that matter for you?
• Everyone should track sleep, fitness, nutrition; nobody is unaffected by these. Beyond that, you can choose your own.
• August has his database set up to be optimized for exporting into graphing applications and he tracks many things.
• The title is the date
• Then there is a link to the week database so he can do a rollup of all the data within the days of that week so when he sits down to do his weekly review the aggregate for any columns he chooses will be visible.
• The weekly reviews then roll up in the monthly reviews automatically.
• There is a formula that calculates the day.
• Data is typically entered into this database in the Action Zone Dashboard which is filtered by day.
  • By creating a new page in the same day it will automatically enter the date and calculate the day.
• This setup is designed to be very quick to enter data because to a large degree many of these things need to be manually entered.
  • Once we have the API and Zapier integrations it will speed things up a lot.
• There is a field to rate Diet (1-5)
• To sleep time is calculated along with awake times based on inputs and the total sleep time is calculated.
• There is weight tracking.
• Finally, there are habit tracking checkboxes which are built into the daily tracking
  • Meditation
  • B.Plnr
  • Mindset
  • Viz
  • Workout
  • Sched.Tom.
• There is a field to rate the percentage on schedule
• Then a field to rate the percentage output compared to the planned activities
• Then there is a field to enter improvements; these roll up to the weekly review automatically and there is a picture of the entire week, same thing happens at the monthly level.

 

(11:40) Fast Data Entry Method

• Shows how data is entered quickly into each day.
  • Day and date are automatically entered
  • Then the week is selected (new weeks are created after each weekly review)
  • The key to entering sleep time quickly is to have a field for hours and one for minutes with a formula that calculates the time in hrs. It's also very difficult to graph times when they are in the time format. If you go to bed after 1 am enter it as 13, 14, 15, etc and it will graph nicely.
  • There are many other data points that are put in after that.
• The last thing left is the Planning Reviews column which is for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews.
• Tracking data like this and periodically reviewing it will change your life.
• Victory or failure lives in your day-to-day actions, you are what you do every day.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video covers the daily action zone dashboard which is a particularly important part of the system.
• This is the dashboard August spends more time in than any other, opens most frequently, starts and ends his day with, etc.
• This is where the day-to-day, minute-to-minute actions are taken to move you towards your goals.
• The last 2 videos covered daily tracking, and prior to that was the master task database, and these all roll up into this dashboard.
• These are the most critical elements at the top of the page that drive the daily behaviors.
• To give context, ensure you have seen the video covering the birds-eye view of the system and the PPV structure. (a later video will cover this in more detail)
• The last 2 videos, this one, and the next few all fall under the 'pipelines' category. These are the action areas, where behaviors, tasks, and projects all move forward incrementally.
• Separate other parts of the Notion system are organized into pillars; these are the structures that hold your life and your aspirations up.
• Then there are the Vaults which are about storage and information management, resources that support the pipelines, and the pillars.
• After each section has been covered there will be an overview of the PPV system in more detail, with a deep dive into how Notion explicitly executes each category.
• Today we are bringing Tasks and Daily tracking into a dashboard and linking that to the structure above.
• The following videos will begin to cover projects and various other types of action pipelines.
• After that, we will move into pillars and various knowledge management vaults.

 

3:04 Action Zone Overview

3:13 [image]

• Everything at the top of the page is in collapsable toggles.
  • A lot of thought was put into what goes at the top level without any scrolling down the page.
  • These toggles organize what matters most day-to-day, minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour.
  • Today - Action items is what's open most of the day
    • Tomorrow and upcoming week have similar views
  • Waiting on are tasks that are dependent on somebody else or other tasks.
  • 5:00 [image] The  Not-To-Do list is a quick but important list to define.

 

5:32 Today in Action
5:40 [image]  Today - Action Items

• The top has an embedded view of the Action Items database
• Filtered to show anything on or before Today and Is Not done and Waiting on Is Not done and Owner is me. 6:15 [image].
• Sorted by priority
• Every action item has a Do-Date or is dependent on another task.
• Addressing a task might mean rescheduling it, but generally the night before he will lay out what will be done the next day. Anything that doesn't fit into the day will be rescheduled to a different day.
• The intention is that this is an achievable priority list that let's you know what to do as you sit down. There is no slack time figuring it out.
• Multiple items never have the same priority unless they are being batched together.
• The database embed also has a 'completed today' view that enables review of what has been checked off. It's easy to feel like you got nothing done, but if you take a glance at this view it can feel quite good.
• There is a 'next in line' property to indicate whether a task is dependent or not, you can then open it, activate it with a do date and check off the current task as done.
• There is a 'Production pipeline' property that links tasks to their workspaces.
• If you want to see how each item links up with the pyramid above this level in terms of life pillars and goals, it's covered a little bit in the tasks database video and a lot more in the pillars-pipeline pyramid video.
• This lays everything out in a very actionable way.

 

13:55 The previous video covered the Daily tracking dashboard, now in Daily Action Zone, there is one small slice of the daily tracking database. Filtered by date is today.

• It starts only with habit tracking after all the initial data has been entered in the morning.
• Some habits which will be covered in a later video include (plan to do these sequentially):
• Meditation
• Bullet planner
• Mindset
• Visualization
• Workout
• Schedule Tomorrow
  • This includes scrolling down to the calendar view to see all the tasks that need to be done.
• After scheduling there is a rating for diet over the day.
• Percentage on schedule.
• Percentage output relative to intended output.
• Improvements

19:13 Tomorrow & Upcoming Week

• 19:30 the other toggles for 'tomorrow' and 'upcoming week' are the same with slightly different Filters.

19:56 Waiting-On

• Items checked as waiting on are filtered into this view.
• These items are reviewed in the weekly review so nothing slips through the cracks.
  • If somebody takes too long then a do date is assigned to follow up.
• There is also a view here for 'Dependent Actions'. This shows the action items that do not have Do-Dates assigned meaning they will kick in when the preceding tasks are completed. This was covered in depth 2 videos ago.

 

23:39 Organizing What's to Come

• The calendar view is very powerful to allow you to get a sense of what is coming up and how to begin organizing things loosely.
• This is much more valuable than the KanBan view you often see for 'Today', 'Tomorrow', 'Upcoming' etc. It's not as elegant
• The items on particular days are to be scheduled on those days, they are not to-do lists for those days.
• The problem with the Kanban view in Notion is that it can only sort items by single or multi-select. It means you can't have it sorted by date.
• It's critical that you don't let your tasks on any single day get out of control. There is only so much you can do in a day and you need to be realistic about what you can accomplish.
• In your weekly review, you will make sure that anything with a hard deadline will be prioritized in the near future. Don't let any day get huge.

 

28:13 Rolling Up to Clients Projects & Goals

Less active, but still important are the 2 sections at the bottom of the dashboard

• Client Operations
• Active projects
• Goal Outcomes

 

This dashboard essentially takes everything we've covered in the previous videos and integrates them into a streamlined focus zone.

• It's pretty rare that each of those databases is accessed in full.
• The objective of this dashboard is to focus on what matters, eliminate everything else from the view.
• If you execute these things every day, you will discover the entire secret to generating results in your life.
• When you get into the rhythm of executing tasks every day for weeks or months, you will not be able to believe the number of things you will be able to get done.
• Next, we are going to look at how the daily action zone branches off into other areas and workspaces, up and down the pyramid.

[MuadDib]

 

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.

[MuadDib]

 

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.

[MuadDib]

 

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.

[MuadDib]

 

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.

[MuadDib]

 

 

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.

[MuadDib]

 

 

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.

[MuadDib]

 

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.

[MuadDib]

 

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.