Notes and summaries (no comments please)

[MuadDib]

 

 

0:00 Intro

• This is the most common question August gets
  • How do you handle reoccurring tasks in Notion?
• The project database video and the goals database video now have a slight improvement to be added that helps us to eliminate a step after implementing templates.
• Notion does not currently have a feature to help with reoccurring tasks, but there are methods around it.
• In this system every task has a Do-Date, this makes it much easier to deal with reoccurring tasks.
• 2:16 enter the action zone (interface with the Task Database)

 

3:14 Recurring Tasks Method #1

• How to make reoccurring tasks? Here we can clearly see what we are doing each day.
• Create a new task, set the Do-Date
• You can then see the task in your calendar.
• When the task enters your daily task list, instead of checking it off as done, you simply reschedule it.
• This method works really well when it's a simple task that doesn't take too long.
• If you have a task that takes a long time, and you have to see it coming in order to know how much time you have for other tasks on that day, then you can use method#2

 

5:14 Recurring Tasks Method #2

• Go to the calendar view, create a new task
• Duplicate it, remove the copy text and set the date for the next interval
• Very simple and foolproof method to see reoccurring tasks well in advance

 

7:37 Self-Referencing Database Filter

• When you go to the alignment zone to access projects and goal outcomes, under projects there is now a gallery view.
• If you open a project and look at the self-referencing databases (database filters to itself) 8:10
• The problem is when you create a new project from a template it would have the tables automatically imported, but you couldn't select the self-referencing filter automatically, you had to complete the page and edit the filters later.
  • 9:15 Now you can select the filter to contain the template itself.
• This is particularly important when you have teams using the template, it's hard to explain this to people every time.

 

10:58 Closing Thoughts

• These were only some small improvements, but they add up to a much more streamlined workflow and a better functioning system.
• The next video will be back to our regular series of building out this comprehensive system.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This concept of the weekly and monthly review is going to take all the content of the previous episodes and tie them together.
• This is essential for keeping the system on track and is for many people one of the hardest things to do, but once you get into the rhythm and see what it enables you'll find it's something not to be missed.
• The behaviors you do around the system are as much a part of it as the internal workings.
• You need to design your personal behavior to be part of the same interrelated system.

 

0:30 Role of Weekly Reviews

• The weekly review is a tactical implementation, whereas the monthly review is much more strategic.
• Month to month you are doing a strategic assessment of how your aspirations are aligning with the broad strategic game plan.
• Week to week you are trusting that your monthly game plan is the right one, removing the burden of it, freeing you up to put a tactical game plan in play for the upcoming week.
• At the same time you are documenting what you learned, the disappointments, and the achievements of the last week, so those roll up in the monthly, quarterly and annual reviews making them very visible to you at higher level reviews.
• Having a tactical plan for a week means that the active tasks queued up in your action items database will be the right ones and you can trust that by doing the things that feed into your daily window will be keeping you on track to your higher aspirations.
• When you look at all the very specific things to get done you can ask what can get done this week, what is dependant on something else? How can you get as far through that tactical plan as possible?
• The weekly review is the protocol that sets it all up.
• This is one of the hardest things for people to implement and make part of their routine and it's important to reiterate how essential this part of the system is.
• If parts of the system are experiencing friction, or are breaking down, catching it week-to-week and bringing it back in line means there's no big deal. Things are easy to fix and you don't lose any momentum.
• August schedules this for every Friday.
  • If Monday comes around and he hasn't done his week end review, then the rule is he MUST absolutely do it before any other tasks on Monday morning.
  • Commit to a time that works for you.
• 4:50 back in the command center, looking at the flowchart we can see how the review cycles line up with pillar to pipeline pyramid.
  • Weekly reviews primarily align with projects
  • Monthly reviews align with goal outcomes and vision goals and making sure they're aligned with the right projects.
• 5:49 There has been one addition to the organizational structure of the system. There is now a folder for cycles and reviews.
• Primarily these are accessed through the alignment zone.
  • If you are new to the series look at the alignment zone principles.

 

7:27 Database Organization

• Under insight are toggles for each of the review cycles.
• The current week always has two arrows pointing in to make identification easy.
• 8:20 Weekly Database Fields
  • Essentially you will go through a checklist.
  • The database fields will give a clear image of the week. Things aren't vague anymore.
  • A big part of doing weekly reviews effectively is to keep them short (20mins max) so you do them consistently.
  • You do this by designing for maximum efficiency
    • No duplication between weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews.
    • Every element of each is only done once in that segment.
    • Weekly you are aligning the daily actions consistent with the projects that have been prioritized.
    • Monthly reviews will look at projects being aligned with goal outcomes
    • Quarterly reviews look at value goals being aligned with goal outcomes
  • Sometimes you will be doing a weekly and monthly review back to back and you don't want to be doing the same things over and over.
• Another way to keep it short is to have rollups 11:00
  • When you do the daily tracking and you add a new day, you link it to the week using the relational link
  • This enables the rollups to bring the data in from each day into the weekly review.
• When creating a new week, 2 things are entered so that daily tracking can be tagged to it.
• An objective and a focus are set 13:10
• 14:00 What gets entered at the end of the week
  • Accomplishments is a database that is added to each week.
  • Similarly for disappointments enter the lessons you learned.
• 16:00 populate the weekly template.
• 16:20 filters and sorts for action items
  • This makes it very easy to look at all the things you accomplished at the end of the week.
• After that, the template goes through reviews of the Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults which is a theme carried throughout each review cycle.

 

17:59 Pillar Review

• First, we go through the pillars which are the high-level zones of your life that need maintenance and need to be kept on track on a weekly level. We are not managing the pillars database, it's just a general category of the high-level visions and values of your life.
  • The quarterly reviews will allow us to consider any refinements to the actual pillars themselves.
• A quick review of your guiding principles. (see alignment zone video)
• Add accomplishments and disappointments
• Noteworthy highs - anything that was a good part of the week.
• Lows / Struggles
• What I learned - quick question, it's not something to spend lots of time on.

 

21:54 Pipeline Review

• Here we process everything that is moving and has action steps involved.
• Email
• Calendar
• Pipeline databases 23:30
  • Review and update, production pipeline, content machine, waiting on action items
  • Toggles with database views that keep things efficient
  • 25:35 Project review, toggle for projects and quarters
    • Quick and effective review of each project, ensuring there is at least one action item lined up for each.
    • 27:00 feature to show action items remaining for each project.
  • Planning done, enter daily tracking 29:00
  • Add next week

 

29:55 Vault Review

• The vaults are all about cleanup and maintenance.
• Desktop and downloads
• Transfer high-value notes and clippings
  • Toggles for media vault and knowledge lab
• 32:00 books and kindle
  • Toggle for book vault
• 33:00 Paper processing

 

33:40 Closing Thoughts

• It's not very complicated and when you do it, it will put organization and clarity into your life and relieve the burden and worry of things piling up.
• It will make you more effective every single day if you just take 20-30 minutes each week to review it thoroughly.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• The last video covered weekly reviews which are largely about aligning your projects with your tasks.
• At the monthly review level, we are thinking much more strategically, about where we want to go, how to get there, and the best set of projects to undertake while maintaining our pillars.
• Productivity and efficiency are great, but they're not the priority, you need to be working on the RIGHT things at any given time. It's better to do the right things inefficiently than the other way around.

 

1:26 Role of Monthly Reviews

• The first objective of the monthly review is to ensure that we know where we want to go and what the right actions will be.
• On the monthly review, we queue up the right projects so that on the weekly basis we can just trust they're the right things and organize our tasks.
• Everything we've covered in the previous videos; the weekly, monthly, and quarterly review items are being pulled together with regards to how we structure the system to bring transparency, clarity, precision, and guidance on how to execute on the things that matter to us in life is bubbling up into these review cycles and being monitored, maintained and directed.

 

3:05 how monthly and quarterly reviews are executed.

• Looking at the system flowchart in the command center we see the stack of core databases; Action items, Projects, Goal Outcomes, Vision Goals, Pillars aligned with our cycle databases; Daily tracking, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual review.
• Monthly reviews largely align with our Goal Outcomes, making sure we're on track to achieve them.
  • The key to achieving the goal outcomes is having the right projects lined up and activating them at the right time.
  • Monthly reviews are largely about aligning goal outcomes with projects.

 

• Cycle reviews are accessed in the alignment zone (full video covering this has been done).
• The guiding principles are the guiding elements the core values and vision you have for your life and who you are/want to become
• In the review cycles toggle
  • Daily insights are daily tracking entries
  • Weekly insights are where weekly reviews are done
  • Quarterly and monthly reviews are where quarterly and monthly reviews are done (covered in this video)
  • Annual section for annual views
  • Gallery view because it's sometimes nice to reflect on each month and each week.
    • August uses an image to highlight something memorable from each week or month, it's easy to forget what we have done as the past weeks and months become a blur.
    • If you don't note progress it's easy to forget it and feel like you're not moving anywhere.
    • For the current month/week he uses a default image of an airplane taking off.
• The quarterly reviews are done very quickly and could be skipped and done in the monthly reviews.
• For August the Quarterly reviews save time because he is taking a few things from the monthly reviews and doing them every third month; effectively shortening the other 2 monthly reviews.

 

6:30 Monthly Database Fields

• Looking at the April review which is unfinished to allow for this demonstration.
• This has the daily tracking rolled up into it to illustrate its value.
• This is very similar to the weekly review conceptually, it's just done at a higher more strategic level of assessment.
• To create any new month we enter:
  • A Theme
  • Date (end-date)
  • Answer one question: To make awesome?
    • What would make this month awesome if achieved?
• At the end of the month, all the other fields are filled out
• Each time a weekly review is completed it is tagged to the month the week is a part of.
• Anytime an accomplishment or disappointment is added to their respective databases since those databases are tagged to the month they all automatically roll up into the monthly review.
• Everything in the bottom half are roll-ups of information from the weeks and since the weeks are tagged to the month it can be seen here.
  • All the weekly effectiveness ratings are here giving you a sense of how effective the month was.
  • The weekly focus priorities allow you to see what you broadly spent the month focusing on.
  • The weekly gratefulness automatically are all visible allowing you to see all the things you've been grateful for this month!
  • Notion has a great instructional wiki on how to do rollups and there is a video covering it as well.
    • Quick demo 9:40
• 10:50 Action items filtered for the entire month
  • It's almost impossible to remember what you did over an entire month and to have everything visible under a single click toggle can be quite satisfying.
• Checkboxes:
  • Entered the database fields above
    • Remember gratitude, and wins for the month (summary of the accomplishments).
  • Review accomplishments and disappointments.
  • In the weekly review, we enter these while they are fresh within the week, now at the monthly level, they are reviewed as you move into the next section.
• Assessment:
  • Breakthroughs
  • Activities
  • Discoveries
  • Improvements
  • This section should only take a few minutes maximum, just listing things off the top of your head.

 

13:16 Pillar Review

• In the monthly review, we are actually reviewing and refining the pillars themselves.
• A toggle allows us to do this quickly and efficiently on the same page.
  • The alignment zone video is a good place to start to get a sense of pillars, pipelines, and vaults.
  • There is also a video specifically on pillars.
  • You review whether these are still the pillars of your life, are these the things that still matter to you? Do you still want to continually maintain and keep these in order?
  • Then we have habits and routines, these are the pillar supports
    • Toggle gives easy access to this as well.
    • Any changes we want to make can be done here as well.
    • This is just a quick review that allows us to make any tweaks and ensure these are properly set up.
• Review performance in daily tracking
  • We just look at the patterns over time
  • When we take this to the next level this information is exported and graphed using a spreadsheet tool.
  • For the sake of trends, we can just glance at this information to see trends. You may have to make changes to some habits and routines to better deliver the results you want.
• Review workouts and make adjustments as needed
• Review and refine the mindset and identity sculpting ritual
  • Links to a page that links to a whole process that August goes through as part of his morning start-up routine.
  • August goes through a morning routine to shape how he sees himself and what he believes he can accomplish and what's realistic, teaching himself to reach further and push harder with absolute confidence.
  • This is the time to review those elements.
  • If he sees something that can be improved during his morning routine, he will make small fixes there as well; it's not essential to wait until the monthly review.

 

16:45 Pipeline Review

• This is where motion and action happens within the notion databases.
• Most importantly (this is a central priority of the monthly review) is the goals, assessing reviewing, and updating value goals and goal outcomes.
• Essentially our value goals are our aspirations and goal outcomes are our measurable, quantifiable objectives we have set out that we are tracking to get t us to our value goals; the two are always linked.
• Mark and complete any goals that have been finished.
• Update goal timelines
  • Are they set for the right dates and quarters?
  • Are there any new goals you want to add?
    • In order to do this there is a toggle that gives us our value goals and our goal outcomes.
    • This step of alignment (making sure our value goals and goal outcomes are properly linked through relations, making sure the value goals we have are still our priorities with the correct status etc. ) is all done now.
    • In the last video we saw how the projects had a project count with how many tasks were in queue for that project.
    • Goal outcomes don't necessarily have projects, they can have a habit and routine linked to it to advance it. We now have a counter to show how many projects are queued up to deliver on the goal outcome. Anything with a zero needs to have a habit and routine set up to advance it.
• In the same way, we dove into the projects in the weekly review to make sure they had tasks properly lined up, each of the goal outcomes that are project driven is opened to ensure they have projects lined up.
  • We look at all the active goal outcomes to ensure their project systems are lined up.
  • 20:10 template for goal outcomes.
    • Why this Goal Outcome?
    • How will you achieve this? Steps:
    • Then there is a database view of the projects that will get us there.
    • We make sure the ones that we want to be working on over the next month have an 'in progress' status.
    • This is the time we make sure we have activated the right projects at the right time.
    • We do this for each of the goal outcomes.
• Having just done a reassessment of goals we need to look at projects again.
• There is a toggle to review projects 20:40
  • Review/Update "Status" setting
  • Update Goals Timelines (Dates & Quarters)
  • Update the outcome/goal for each project
  • Prioritize Projects
    • This is done weekly, so it's not essential but it's nice to take a glance here given we've just done an assessment of the goals.
    • Almost everything is being done right here in the same page, no other platform allows us to do this. Notion is unique in the ability to deliver the entire database functionality in a simple toggle under each relevant checkbox in the checklist for the reviews.
  • Finally action items
    • You probably won't do much here at the monthly level in terms of updating your action items.
    • But given that we have just reviewed the goal outcomes and projects anything that needs to be changed with regards to the action items can be done here too.

 

22:02 Vault Review

• This is mostly about cleaning and tidying up our information and knowledge management.
• Media processing
  • Importing book notes to Book Vault
  • There is a toggle to add things here.
• Transfer relevant high-value Evernote clips to Media Vault and/or Knowledge Lab
  • August uses Evernote to pile in the information that might become relevant at some point, when it does it is pulled into the Notion Vaults.
  • To make this easier there are toggles to the media vault and the Knowledge lab.
• Empty trash on Workstation
• Bookkeeping
  • Looking at your books can also reveal a lot about how your month went.
  • August uses Xero and Hubdoc to do bookkeeping.
  • It's worth it to set up some sort of financial management or overview system to keep track of your personal and/or business financials.

 

 

24:26 Quarterly Reviews

• Every third month we have a quarterly review and this is just done to take the burden of some review tasks off of two out of every three months.
• These are things that would need to be done every month if you didn't do a quarterly review.
• Quarterly reviews are the shortest to go through.
• Quarterlies are important to August because he thinks of his business cycles on a quarterly basis.
  • The book The 12 week year is recommended and promotes the idea of thinking of your annual breaks as quarterly breaks.
  • Most people and businesses think of the end of a year as the time to evaluate performance and resolutions, but a year is very long. You can feel you have so much time that you don't get started on anything with any urgency.
  • Think of the end of each quarter as the end of a year where you strive to really have certain things achieved or have made significant progress towards.
  • If you think of what you want to achieve in the next 3 months as opposed to the next 12 you get more done because you have more urgency.
• Glance at accomplishments/disappointments
  • Very easy to do because they are rolled up into the top of the review page
• Ask (with respect to the last 12 week year):
  • What's Working?
  • What's not working?
  • Changes to Plan or Approach?
• You can spend as much time as you want on this.
• By prompting the question, things will bubble up that wouldn't otherwise if you didn't ask the question.

 

Process 26:50

• Here we review the quarters and ask if we're on track.
• There is a toggle where we can see project counts, just like in the goal outcomes database and projects database.
• Every time August sets up a project he has a quarter that he wants to finish it by, with a review date that he wants to have made significant progress by.
• Review/Update Quarter assignments for Goal Outcomes and Projects
  • Toggle to show Goal Outcomes and Projects
  • Ensure that the numbers that have been put in are realistic and viable, if they're not we need to reflect on what's going wrong and preventing us from getting where we want to go in the timeline we had anticipated.
• Review Pillars and their relation to Value Goals
  • Toggle to show both
  • Checking the alignment between the two as we are potentially tweaking either along the way.
  • All of the Value Goals are in service of one of the Pillar zones.
• Ideas
  • Any new creative or intriguing ideas you have floating around in your head.
  • You can then ask yourself where you want to put anything you list here.
• Someday/Maybe Items
  • Sometimes we make projects that are Someday/Maybe items and in your weekly and monthly project reviews we filter them out because they aren't actionable, they are hypothetical and not necessarily going to happen at all.
  • We have a toggle to pull up a view filtered to show status as 'someday/maybe'
  • In the quarterly review, you ask whether you want to move these into a queue to take action on.

 

29:57 Closing Thoughts

• If you do this every month and every quarter you will understand where you are going with much more depth and clarity.
• The things you are doing on a regular basis will be the right things, the things that matter and are going to get you where you want to go.
• This comes back to the old Eisenhower matrix which distinguishes between the things that are urgent and the things that are important.
• So often the urgent things that have hard, fast deadlines week to week are not the things that are going to change your life and take you to the next level. They keep you on the same treadmill.
• If you spend 100% of your time simply reacting to these short-term urgent needs you are going to neglect and never get to the high-level important needs that do have the ability to change your life and opportunities.
• By doing a monthly and quarterly review you are identifying the big things that are going to change the game for you and ensure you carve out time to do them.

[MuadDib]

 

Intro 0:00

• We are going to be looking at the content creation pipeline.
• This is not only an example of how to do any kind of content creation, but also how to do any kind of specialized, routine operational projects that are too small to be full projects in your project's database, and/or are too specialized but are more than tasks and have their own needs in terms of database tags, templates, workspace areas.
  • It's an example of how to do any kind of specialty pipeline/ mini project series that happens on a regular basis; there are many potential applications of this across business or personal use.
  • This creates a clean look onto that unique operation pipeline especially when there is a high volume of them.
  • You can think of it more broadly if content creation isn't what you need, but you have other kinds of routine operations in place.
  • This is also highly connected to the tasks database; anything going through a content creation pipeline is linked through a relation to the tasks database, but they're not actually in the tasks database themselves, they're in their own specialty database: The content creation pipeline.

2:00

• Stating from the command center under Business the content production machine dashboard can be accessed.
• This is called the content production machine because it is designed to do very high volumes of content production across different mediums written text, video production, audio … it could be anything you create like painting/poetry etc. it doesn’t necessarily have to be artistic, it could be marketing materials, web development.
• Anything that is a pipeline of creation of any kind.
  • 2:50 in the navigation system on the side panel the content production machine is under dashboards and the database itself is under pipelines s the production pipeline.
  • Production pipeline = name of the database
  • Content Production Machine = name of the dashboard
  • This dashboard pulls its information entirely from the production pipeline database; it's the only database it looks at. Almost everything in it is a different view or slice from that database.
  • There are a few exceptions in the form of scratchpad lists for idea generation and note-taking.
  • Scratchpads 4:00
  • The four areas at the top are quick scratch pads
  • In the example here the Notion Series was initially mapped out to be a 25-30 video series
  • Shows how the ideas are roughly mapped out
  • There is a place for Video ideas, Newsletter series, and Blog/Article Ideas
  • Each of which is planned out to develop stories/sequential release of information for bigger pictures over time.
• Content Ideas toggle 6:00
  • This is a list of content ideas
  • Everything entered into the database here has a status and for items in this toggle it is set to 'potential Idea'
  • The status sequence is from latest in the sequence to earliest
    • Ready to post is the end before the item is actually published/completed
    • Post-Production is 2nd last
    • Production
    • Writing
    • Next up
    • Scheduled = it has a date when it's planned to enter the system but is not quite up to the 'next up' level.
    • Potential idea = maybe; hasn't been decided
      • Anytime August has an idea of something that might be a good newsletter, article, video etc. it is entered and labeled with this which is what the content ideas view is all about.
    • Idea Generation Resources
      • Not individual ideas but hubs of ideas e.g. certain websites have lots of ideas
      • He might list something as a source to go to look at and review to look for individual ideas; this view also filters for such items
    • It's really helpful to capture ideas for content creation when you have them because it's so easy to forget them.
      • He will open his phone and throw them in here with a potential tag.
      • If something strikes him as a really good idea he will give it a Next up tag immediately, or something more urgent.

 

In production 9:10

• This view shows just the items that are in production.
• This means an item is either in the writing, production, post-production or Ready to Post.
• This isn't actually used that often because the next toggle is really valuable

 

Production pipeline 9:40

• This is the kanban board of this production pipeline.
• There aren't a lot of kanban boards in August system mainly because when dealing with action items and things with due dates, the kanban board doesn't work, you can't set by do-dates, you have to set by either single or multi-select. You also cant use formulas to sort the Kanban board.
  • August prefers to have the items in his task management to flow in automatically without a lot of manual manipulation. This is done by managing items by Do-Date.
• In the production pipeline, however, it is very valuable to see where everything is at different stages.
• This view shows items earliest in the process to latest. 10:30
  • Scheduled > Next Up > Writing > Production > Post-Production > Ready to Post

 

Next up 12:50

• Shows a list of items that are queued for next up
• These are the same items we see on the next up stage of the kanban board in the previous toggle.
• This allows you to evaluate the sequence of the next up items.

 

Ready to Post 13:42

• These items are also in the production pipeline at the end.
• It's nice to give them their own view as they can bunch up and it can be difficult to sort them out.

 

Posted Archive 14:51

• Once items are published it is valuable to have an archive of everything published either individually or as a collaboration.
• There is a designation for what channel the items go to Tags for youtube, medium, blog etc.
• There is a designation for content type; Tags for Notion series, mind and machine etc.
• There is a Next Action Date which is the date that he intends to take the next action on this piece of content.
• There is an action item relation that links the item to the master tasks database.
  • The next action date will be the same as the do-date in the action items database.
  • The 2 will move in parallel.
  • Additional tip 17:35
  • The benefit of adding the extra step is it enables this entire system that is only about mapping the content flow.
  • This clean view is very valuable when producing many different items and not have each of them be a task or a project, but to be linked with each next step of an item moving through the pipeline.
• There is a link to the posted content and if there is written content it is included here.
• There is an owner assignment in case a stage of production is handed off to somebody else.

 

Specialty Pipelines

Filtered Views

Next Action Calendar 19:35

• This maps out, by date every next action for every piece of content that is in the pipeline.
• Next dates are planned out about 2 weeks in advance.

Publishing Calendar 20:45

• This calendar has the same items, but sorted by the date they're intended to be published rather than the planned dates for next steps.
• Usually August will start with the planned publication date and then work backward to figure out when tasks need to be completed by.
• Items can be easily moved and shuffled around in the calendar views.
• Clicking on the titles takes you from the embedded view to the database itself.
• Sometimes work will be done in the database itself rather than in one of its views.
• The embedded view shows only one month, the advantage of going to the database itself is you can scroll through an infinite timeline.
  • If you are working through 2 different months it can be hard to see how a project is being planned.
• This also allows you to see how consistent and prolific you have been.
• There are also views for The pipeline board, Potential Idea Board, Master Table 24:10
• This entire system is even more powerful when working with a team
  • The ability to assign different owners as it's going through the pipeline gives you enormous control and overview as a head.
• It also works very well on a small scale (the template is already prebuilt for you if you want it).

Content Templates 25:35

• August has templates for his Notion Series, M&M episodes, Newsletter, Vid+ Blog
  • Each of these has their own structure and capabilities
  • Example Notion series 26:05
    • Links to YT Channel and Blog
    • Keywords
    • Title scratchpad
    • Link to task database Action items view in template
      • Filtered to just the items relevant to this piece of content.
      • Sometimes there is just one action item, but if it's a complex piece of content there will be many steps making this much more valuable.
    • Once it's posted a certain amount of promotion needs to be done.

 

• This video is also an important marker in this entire series, we have just finished part of a long section on pipelines.
  • Pipelines are all about actions moving through various stages to get things done in the PPV system.
  • We have now covered a wide range of pipelines in the system.
• Next, we will be looking at vaults
  • These are about knowledge management and learning where knowledge is aggregated and accumulated giving you insights and building resources for you to draw upon.
• The next video will cover some small updates and tweaks to the system before we move deeply into knowledge management.
• At that point, we will move into an overview of the PPV system which should hopefully make a lot more sense after having gone deeply into each of the components allowing you to follow along with a more comprehensive explanation. (after we finish the section of the vault).

[MuadDib]

 

Intro 0:00

• This video will catch you up on some of the changes August has made to the system.
• The second part of this video will cover an element of the last video in more depth
• Several people have asked for more detail on how content moving through the content production pipeline is connected to the Action Items database.

 

Channel News

• Thanks to subs for surpassing 5 k mark
• Info on some collaborations
• August is active on Twitter which allows for more organic and free form conversations

 

Left Nav. Bar Update 3:35

• Cycles and reviews folder added
• These were previously in some of the other folders but it was getting a little bit too cluttered.
  • Daily tracking
  • Weeks
  • Months
  • Quarters
  • Accomplishments
  • Disappointments
  • Separator line
• In Development
  • Experimental templates
• Public
  • Public templates

 

Projects Toggle

• In the Action Zone projects have been added to the toggle line up 5:35
• Small change but has turned out to be very effective
• This gives a line-up of the active projects
• This is the same as the project line-up at the bottom, however jumping in and out of projects is how August likes to manage any of the action items that are tied to them, rather than engage with them in the Today line-up.
• He prefers jumping into a project and working with the whole line-up of tasks for that project
• 6:50 how to implement this quickly. Create a duplicate and then create a toggle to drag it into.

 

Recurring Task Marker 7:15

• Just as a '+' sign is used to indicate dependent tasks recurring tasks have an "*" symbol added
• This is an indication that this task is not to be checked off as done, but simply has to be moved to next do-date
• The next video will be an introduction to the function of database relations and rollups and in the process cover, several additions to the system since the videos on those different sections were completed (as opposed to covering the updates in this video).

 

Task/Content Tracking 9:05

• Diving back into the content production machine and opening the production pipeline kanban board.
• Jumping into one of the content items you will see it is not linked to an action item.
• 9:50 click on the action item, type on some part of the name if it doesn't exist just create a new page for it.
  • Add some of the few required elements for it; status, do-date, priority, etc.
  • The do-date is automatically rolled up into the AI: Do Date rollup section on the page.
  • We can see if the next action do date is aligned with the do date of the task
  • If it's not we simply change it by clicking on the action item itself, changing it to the date you want, and then return to the content item and they'll align.
    • You don't have to go over to the action zone or the task database, you simply click on the action item link in the content page relations.
  • If you're in the action item view, perhaps in the daily action zone you will also see a relation on that end showing you the content that is connected.
    • There is a rollup of the next action item date and the status for that piece of content.
    • From the content, we added the relational connection between the 2 databases so this is automatically connected.
• From either view, you see the date of the other
• 12:40 If we were to move to the Action Zone and we see the action item there we could access the direct relational link to the content item there.
• We could add an item here and then link it to a content item that exits or create a new one.
• It is an extra step, but it's worth it for the functionality and perspective it provides.
• The next video will give an intro to relations and rollups and show a few more updates to the system.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video covers an intro to some of the basic functionality of relations and rollups before moving into some system updates related to those.
• The beginning is for people who are not familiar with relations and rollups (rollups being dependent on relations).
• Generally considered an advanced feature but it's not that complicated.
• After this video, which is the second of two system updates we will move into the vaults section.

 

1:54 Database Relations

• Create a new page
• Create a table view (database)
• Create a relation field (by default new fields are text fields)
  • We want to connect entries in this database with specific entries in another
• Entries/records are the horizontal lines in the table view of a database, or any entry when opened
  • Record is the traditional term used when people talk about databases.
• Fields/properties are the columns across the top
  • You define a property as the relation property
  • You then select a database to relate to
  • You will then have the option to link any entry from this database to any entry in the other database.
  • This is very straightforward and easily understood.

 

5:49 Database Rollups

• Rollups are the logical extension to take relations even further
• Once you have the relation connection setup you can make it so that any data in any of the fields of the connected database can be brought into this database.
• Click in any cell under the rollup property you create, and select the relevant relation (you might have more than one.)  Then you select which other property from that database you want to bring into this one.
• In the last video, we saw how to connect the content items moving through the content pipeline to action items, there was a rollup attached that we can use as an exemplar.
• Several content items are connected as a relation to this one task 8:25
• Each of these is a separate piece of content in the content pipeline that is being worked on in this one sitting of content creation on the present days task list
• The next action dates and statuses for each are automatically visible here
• The same thing is visible from the other end 9:25
• The do date of the action item is set up as a rollup from this view.
• This allows you to make sure that the next action item for the content in this database is the same as the do-date of the task in the action items database.

 

10:24 System Updates: New Rollups Implemented

• Moving back into the Action Zone we can see that the goal outcomes have now been made into rollups in this database.
• This is done by creating a project relation, so each action item that is part of a project will have the project listed here.
• Previously the Goal outcome was a relation, making a direct connection between the action items database to the goal outcomes database.
• Since we are already connecting the action items with projects, and the projects are already linked to the goal outcomes database, we can just make a rollup to eliminate a step.
• The pillars relation has been removed from the action items database
  • They are still important and every action item is in service of a pillar, but this is simply too far removed to make it useful, and adding a pillar to so many action items is very cumbersome.
  • In the goal outcomes database, the pillars connection is now a rollup and unfortunately, you cannot make a rollup of a rollup.

 

• Moving into the alignment zone 13:20
• Value goals are now a rollup into projects
• (DB) symbolizes a direct relation to a database (Rollup) signifies a rollup, meaning it comes through another direct relation (DB)
• In the projects database, the connection to goal outcomes is a relation, and the connection to value goals is a rollup property that comes through the goal outcome relation.
• Similarly, there is a rollup for pillars in the goal outcomes database.
• Every value goal has a pillar assigned, set up as a (DR)
• When connecting the goal outcomes to the value goals the pillars will automatically come with it as a property through the pillar (Rollup)
  • This not only saves an entry step but also ensures that everything is correct and consistent.

 

• These exemplify one of the powerful features of rollups, but there are 2 more.
• One is to have many relational links and bring in many items rolled up with it
• In this instance when the item you are bringing in is a number you can apply mathematical formulas to it.
• Looking at the cycle reviews we can see an example of this 16:10
• Looking at the monthly review for the month of April there are a lot of database fields that are completely filled out.
  • Because of rollups and relations at the end of the month, 90% of this is already filled in.
  • As each weekly review is completed it is attached to the month that it happens in.
  • Accomplishments and disappointments are also attached to a month
  • Because the weeks are populated all the rollups associated with the weeks are completely filled out as well.
    • Weekly effectiveness
    • Weekly focus priority
    • Weekly Gratefulness
    • Improvements

 

• The learnings from each month then roll up to a year, rollups of a rollup cannot be done in notion so the weekly improvements cannot be rolled up into a year.

 

• All of this is rolling up automatically because there is one relational link to the week
• 19:45 Example of how math can be applied to the rollups
• Looking at a weekly review
• There is a relational link to the daily tracking database
  • Every day some data will be entered for that day, weight tracking, sleep, health, and fitness, etc.
  • Eg workout percentage calculation 20:40
  • Eg average sleep time 21:40
  • More calculation options as these are numbers rather than checkboxes
  • All of this information is brought in automatically as each day is linked to the week through a relation and then the relevant rollups can be brought into the week.

 

• In the projects database, there is now an actions remaining column 24:50
  • This column will measure for each project how many actions are queued up to execute that project.
  • This is set up as a rollup where the action items is the relational link to the task database.
  • For each action item, it will look at the checkbox property
  • Calculation will be performed by the number of unchecked checkboxes
  • If you open up the project's entry you will still see all the tasks as covered in the video on projects 26:00
  • In the table view, this is really clean and simple

 

• In the goal outcomes database, there is a project count 27:00
  • Measuring the number of projects that need to be completed for each goal outcome
  • Some of the goal outcomes are advanced by habits and routines so they won't have project counts. In your monthly reviews, you check goal outcomes to ensure that they either have projects or habits and routines linked to them to advance them forward.
• Rollups make things easier and faster and eliminates redundancy keeping things accurate.
• Next videos will explore the vaults
  • Media Vault
  • Book Vault
  • Knowledge lab (ties several vaults together)

[MuadDib]

0:00 Intro

• Comments on the previous video noted some different ways of doing rollups and relations that August avoided, but there were legitimate counterpoints made to some of those methods and they may be useful to some people so they will be covered in this extra video.
• These are different ways of doing things that have some benefits and costs associated with them.
• These alternatives tend to be a little bit more advanced, but if you followed everything in the last video this won't be too hard and you can decide how you wish to implement things in your own system.
• The third of the three examples given today will contradict what was said in the previous video; that you cannot do a rollup of a rollup.
  • There is a way of working around it in some circumstances. Especially with regards to numbers.

 

2:10 New Task & Project Views in Alignment Zone

• All of the examples will be covered in the alignment zone area
• The default view for the action items in the alignment zone has been changed to the calendar view
• The list view is nice to work with when it is just for one day in the Action zone, but when it gets to a whole week, things get messy.
• The default view for projects has been adjusted to a double view
• The top-level view is just a gallery of all the active projects sorted by task progress bar with the smallest tile sizes.
• Under that is a board view based on status.

 

4:32 Automated Progress Bar

• The first of the advanced features to be covered is the automated progress bar.
• There are rollups of completed, active, and total actions which come from the action items database.
  • 5:18
  • The formula uses the values from completed actions and total actions. 6:30
• Since this is all automated all you have to do is enter a project and manage the actions at the bottom of the page. 7:00
• Pros and cons of this:
  • It's nice to have everything automated
  • Tasks are not all equal, and this assigns equal weight to all of them
    • It's not an accurate measurement of the percent of the project that is completed, it's a measurement of the percent of tasks completed.
    • The manual approach of giving a subjective assessment gives a more accurate assessment of how close you are to finishing the project overall.
  • You often have to add tasks as you go, so the total number of tasks in the project is rarely the total number that will be in there at the end.
  • When a project nears completion it becomes a prompt for you to check if more tasks need to be added.
    • Example adding new tasks 9:10
  • There is value in both methods, the manual way allows you to get a better sense of how close a project actually is to being completed, and the automated way gives you more triggers to manage a project as you progress.

 

10:52 Automated Completion Checkbox

• Another approach that there is an alternative for is the active checkbox.
• This was added so that we could roll up to the higher level a count of total projects (Project Count) in the Goal Outcomes.
  • In the same way, we do this for Remaining Actions at the projects level
• We are now going to automate the project count, the only way to roll it up is by a checkbox
• Previously there was a manual checkbox, but a lot of people found it more useful to have this as an if-then formula. 11:56
• We then roll up the formula for the total active projects tied to each goal outcome.
• There aren't really any major positives and negatives using this method but you can keep the table simpler by hiding the checkbox field, however, switching projects to active status takes 2 clicks instead of just one.
  • This isn't really an issue in the projects level, but in the case of tasks, which are much more voluminous it matters.
  • August has left it as a manual checkbox in the tasks database, but at the projects level, it is automated.

 

14:48 Rolling Up Rollups

• You cannot do a rollup of a rollup, but there is a workaround in some circumstances especially with regards to numbers which a lot of rollups encompass.
• Looking at the weekly reviews in the review cycles section of the alignment zone 15:28
• From the relation to the daily tracking we can bring in rollups of all the various daily numbers, but these numbers cannot be rolled up to the monthly review; we had to summarize them.
  • In some cases summarizing is better, for example with regards to the improvements.
  • In other cases making a mirror of a value, such as an average, and then rolling that up can be more useful. 17:30
• 17:50:
  • Add a property, and choose a formula
  • Title it and add the formula (18:35)
  • Round it if needed (19:00)

• Now we have created a mirror that rounds up this formula, when we go into the monthly reviews and we add a rollup property with the weekly relation set, we can choose the mirrored value 20:15
• This value itself can then be averaged, or have some other calculation performed, to give a value for the monthly level which is useful.
• The problem is this cannot be done for text easily.
• It would be nice to roll things up from the action items, to the projects to the goal outcomes databases.
• 21:35 In the Goal Outcomes, for example, one of the rollups is the pillars
• The goal outcomes are connected to the value goals and since the value goals are already connected to the pillars above these are rolling up with them automatically.
  • It would be nice if these pillars could roll down to projects for example
  • The problem is that it will come through as a link which is completely useless
• The tradeoff of this is that you are adding more fields and that's why it was avoided earlier.
• This can be very cumbersome and unnecessary in some instances, for example bringing daily values up to the monthly or yearly level.
• The vaults section will be covered next, this section has been changed a lot since the original overview video.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video will give an overview of knowledge management and how it's integrated into the entire system.
• Everything we've done to this point has focused largely on project and task management.
• The project management systems are the most dynamic and complex with action items moving through them
  • They encompass largely the pipeline's section of the PPV organizational system
  • The knowledge management system resides entirely in the Vaults
  • The primary function of the Vaults is to capture information and turn it into actionable knowledge that informs and fuels the various action-oriented pipelines like tasks, projects, and goals.
  • It stands as an independent resource that can be drawn on and it's a growing living organism that culminates, aggregates, and synthesizes information becoming more valuable over time.
  • You are creating a series of vaults that become gold mines of informational resources, thoughts, ideas, and your best thinking across the topics that matter the most to you.

• After the overview, there will be a series of videos that goes deeper into each section
  • The books vault
  • The media vault
  • Training and academy vault
  • Knowledge lab
    • This is the ultimate culmination of where all this information and ideas flow into
  • Notes and ideas database that leverages the best functionality of Notion and applies systems thinking approach to integrating notes and ideas collection with all these other vaults.

• Most of what is available are individual silos of information, but there isn't a dynamic flow between these silos in a systemic framework that allows each to enhance the others.
• Here we will see a real systems thinking approach to knowledge capture, organization, and growth into final actionable form.

• 2:50 starting from the command center we move into the Mind Expansion area
• There are three categories on this dashboard
  • The top 2 are inputs:
    • Notes and Ideas
      • These are your own thoughts ideas, extracts from conversations, this would be the inbox for a team if you have one.
  • Knowledge sources
    • Are books, media vault, and academy courses/training
  • Knowledge creation and Aggregation
    • The top 2 flow into this category and the knowledge lab itself
  • Each of these is a vault on its own and exist in their own categories

 

• This video will cover the middle section first, then the knowledge lab, and finally will cover the Thought inbox section

 

4:20 Book Vault Quick Summary (Full Video Coming)

• The library is where books are stored and captured, it's also where the reading list is developed
  • These are organized by status Reading, Next Read, To Read, Paused, Might read, Finished
  • Finished becomes a gold mine of information and knowledge because as you are reading you are taking notes and as we will see in the book vault video Augusts hierarchical highlighting system will be covered.
  • One of two ways to capture content from books is to highlight and then have some form of hierarchical highlighting so you can put emphasis on the weights of different highlights.
    • You need more than 2 levels; the progressive summarization method covered by the building a second brain crowd is too limited in Augusts opinion.
  • The second way is to summarize in your own words; this is much more effective at allowing you to internalize knowledge more and commit it to memory, but it takes more time.
  • With books, August will make a judgment as to how important the book is before selecting a summarization method and format to cover the book; kindle, paperback, audiobook

 

6:40 Media Vault Summary (Full Video Coming)

• This is how you capture articles, podcasts and videos
• Tags for the medium  (Article, Video, Podcast)
• Tags for status (To do, Maybe later, Done
• Tags for priority (1st to 5th)
• Everything that is being consumed is being organized in such a way that you can easily return to the information and remind yourself of what the value was in that piece of content
  • You are setting up a learning system that is ongoing and a knowledge base that you can tap into very quickly and efficiently.

 

8:01 Training Course Vault Summary (Full Video Coming)

• This is for courses and instructional videos of any kind
• This can be very valuable, the right course can change your life
  • Course organizers who do things well will distill information and create a program that will efficiently and effectively deliver them.
  • For these, the notes would be very extensive, especially if it's a really big course
  • You make a dashboard in the database fields that would open into subfields, pages, toggles, etc.
  • Making good notes that you can repeatedly revisit and refresh in your mind will allow you to get so much more out of these courses especially since some of them are very expensive.

 

10:24 Notes & Ideas Vault Summary (Full Video Coming)

• You capture your own thoughts in the thoughts inbox in the Notes and Ideas database
• This is a database with various categories such as Teams for sales, marketing, HR, Admin, Customers, Vendors
• In a business setting each of these teams would have its own dashboard with a filtered stream of all the notes and ideas relevant to that team.
• If you are making a personal one it could be sorted by different interest activities such as sports and fitness, family, social life, etc.
  • In any context in another part of your notion system, you could have a filtered view of all your notes and ideas relevant to that context.
• The key to an effective notes and ideas system is that they're easy to enter when you have a spontaneous thought/idea and then you want it to resurface at the right time in the right place.
• This will be covered in depth later on in this series and in this video
• There are relational links to the Knowledge Hub, Media Vault, Books
  • These are the sources, if an idea comes from one of them you can note this as the source here and link it if it exists in the specific vault.
  • Most importantly you are linking to the knowledge hub which we will cover in a moment.
• These can be filtered at 12:30
  • By status, created by, last edited
• And sorted 13:20
  • By creation date, last edited

 

13:40 Knowledge Lab Vault Summary (Full Video Coming)

• This is where the magic happens!
• You capture all this information in the personal inputs from all the different sources where notes are defined by the source
• The knowledge lab is different in that it is defined by the topic category
• These are areas that you are actively interested in and in some way building knowledge deliberately in these categories.
  • Eg. Discipline, Fitness, Goal setting, Habits, and routines, Home creation, Marketing, Metacognition, personal finance, nutrition, and diet etc.
• These are all things that help to improve tasks and projects and helping to improve and grow as a person and helping to do business better.
• 15:20 within each topic there is a very organized collection of information, as you read books, articles, etc and enter things into the source vaults, the best pieces are pulled and pasted into the topic-specific category in the knowledge vault.
• You build out a central best thinking and insights center on each of the topics that your sources cover.
• These are also linked to other knowledge lab entries.
• You can create a hierarchy of information within these pages based on heading structures and create a table of contents automatically from that. 16:35

 

17:15 Integration of Notes/Ideas with Knowledge Lab

• There is a filter of all the notes and ideas for the specific entry in the knowledge lab, coming from the notes and ideas database.
• This is how these notes arise at the right place and time,
  • Many systems with notes and ideas will add a time counter for review after a specific period of time eg. 30, 90days, etc. This is completely arbitrary and the odds of the notes popping up at the right time are almost zero plus it takes extra time to review notes like this.
  • Now, what happens is when you choose to enter a topic that you need to use the notes will resurface automatically in the proper context.
  • If you hold Alt you can drag a link to that page into the body of text 20:00
• There are more ways to use this when working across teams for example, this will be covered at the end of this series.

 

21:13 Quick Capture of Notes & Ideas

• This is largely an entry database here, you aren't usually going to access or create notes here unless you are remembering them and you want to go back to them
• For the most part, you access this information in the knowledge lab or in the team member directory if you're part of a team, or on any specialty dashboards for specialty sections of your life which is when you use the tagging system.
• 22:00 at the command center there is a notes and ideas link for entries
• 22:30 In the Action zone there is also a link to the notes and ideas inbox to quickly edit, recall or create entries (filtered by recent creation date)
  • The key is that you link a note to a knowledge lab idea or a category
  • If you just want to capture something quickly here you can but if you want to access it later then it should be linked
  • Notes here can also result in the creation of a new knowledge hub topic or category if you think of something important that you can't link to anything

 

• This is an entire module that plugs into the pillars and pipelines section.
• The next videos will go into each section in more depth giving you instruction on how to build them and get the most functionality out of them.
• What's critical about this is that they all work together, especially your own note-taking and ideas capturing information from other sources like articles, courses, and books, and your own spontaneous ideas being quickly entered and flowing with everything into these topic categories which become super hubs of the things that are most valuable to you.
• The process of using this system makes you internalize information better, connect dots across the board and it's incredibly powerful to have all this information coming in and being organized so efficiently.
  • The process of curating information and then organizing and synthesizing it makes you smarter.
• This is why they are called vaults, they store valuable private things securely.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video will cover the book vaults
• We've now moved passed the pillars and pipelines sections of the PPV organizational structure and we are now diving deep into the Vaults section
• This is where we do knowledge management and store all the ideas and information that we turn into knowledge that we can use and apply to our projects, growth, and life in general.
• The last video provided an overview of the knowledge management system across the board giving a surface-level introduction to each of the components and a little bit about how they work together.
  • The next videos will go deeper into each section starting with the book vault.
• Books are long-form media that take a lot of effort to consume and capture, but out of that effort, we get a lot more in return.
• In addition to the organizational structure of capturing information from books, the book vault will also be used to line up the books we want to read are actively reading creating a great queue.
• After you've read a book it creates a finished section with a  complete archive of all the books you've ever read and all the information and knowledge you've extracted from them.

 

2:55 Database Setup

• Starting in the command center we open up the mind expansion dashboard which houses all these knowledge management systems.
• Under the knowledge sources section, the Library is where the book vault lives.
• The master table view is used most frequently because it presents all the information sorted and organized effectively.
• Fields 3:20
• There is a relation to a database of influencers that august finds influential in the fields that he works in.
• Status and priority fields are used to sort 4:00

 

4:44 Print vs. eBook/Kindle vs. Audio Books

• The format is chosen based on the importance of the book's content
  • Audiobooks can be sped through to get a quick overview of the contents of a book, but the cost is that you don't absorb the information as deeply as say reading a hardcopy or a kindle version of a book.
  • It's easier to take high-quality notes from books that you read.
  • When the book matters a lot, read it and highlight it
    • Kindle books are easier to highlight and manage than paperback books
• It is now possible to integrate highlights from kindle with your notion system using the beta version of an app from Readwise which will be covered later.
• The idea of taking notes, summarizing, and highlighting lets you extract the maximum amount of value both in the moment you are doing it and also later on when you review it (allowing for spaced repetition)
• Prioritize how important a book is and based on that decide whether you are going to sit down and read it or listen to it in audio format.
  • Even among those you sit down and read there are different levels of emphasis in terms of extracting information.
  • Ones that you simply highlight, and then for really important books you can create chapter summaries.

 

8:26 Book Note-taking System

• At the end of every chapter create your own synthesized summary of the information you have just covered
• Even if you are just highlighting there is a system of progressive highlighting that August uses that has been optimized for Notion
• Progressive summarizing from building a second brain was optimized for Evernote
  • Notion gives you quick access to a lot more colors.
  • Orange is a mid-level highlight
  • Ctr+Shift+H does an automatic highlight in the last remembered highlight color
  • When something is particularly important red is used, yellow is a lower level emphasis relative to orange.
    • This is a three-tier hierarchy of highlighting that August has found to be optimal.
    • This gives a lot more nuance than the 2 tiered system from the second brain crowd.

• The list of completed books becomes an absolute goldmine.
• There are tags for various categories of books as well to help sort and filter.

 

13:08 New Book Capture & Entry

• Keep a wishlist of books that might be interesting to get on Amazon
• In Chrome, there is a plugin for the Notion web clipper
• Open the book you're interested in and open the clipper
• Open the page in Notion (this is the primary advantage of the Notion web clipper).
• Clean up the title from the Amazon format.
• Embed a link to the cover image
• Give it a status
• Give it a priority
• Give it a purpose
• Select a format
• After you read the book you assign the value rating

 

16:58 Vault Views

• Master table
• Progress Board
  • Based on status
• Bookshelf
  • Gallery view
• Bookshelf - To read
• Books finished

 

17:33 Closing Summary

• You could combine the book vault with the media vault, but August considers books to be very special and valuable and prefers to have them in a distinct group
• You can set up different filters to create the different categories if you prefer
• There are also different database properties and fields for books than for other media so it does have some logic to it.
• Next, we will cover the media vault and how we capture articles, videos, and podcasts
  • This is similar to books but there some nuances and differences that will be covered
• The training academy will be covered in the next video as well
  • This covers course information that is a little bit more different in terms of the information you're extracting.
  • If the course is big it will be a lot more elaborate and you want to extract much more from it.
  • Here you will be able to create a much more elaborate structure in terms of your note-taking.
• After that, we will get into the knowledge lab where all the information aggregates and all the information becomes much more usable in a much more comprehensive way across different topics.
• We'll look at how to capture notes and ideas quickly and have them reappear in the right context.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This episode continues the exploration of the knowledge management section.
• This module can stand on its own or plug into the entire LOS. It has a systems thinking approach to capturing, processing, and formatting knowledge that's easy for us to use in our projects, tasks, habits, creating content, thinking, awareness and understanding in various contexts.

• The overview of the knowledge management system covered the series of databases called vaults within the PPV organizational structure.
• The previous video covered the book vault in-depth, this video covers the media vault in depth.

• The media vault is where we capture all other forms of media.
  • Articles, newsletters, blogs magazines, podcasts, videos, and any kind of multimedia presentations
  • It collects all of them and organizes and sorts so that views can be created for each individual type if needed.

• We will also briefly touch on the Training Vault
  • This is for courses and training programs you might take, it's structurally different in terms of fields and databases, which is why it's separate from the media vault. You could merge it but this can create a lot of redundant fields and properties.

• We will look at how we capture and input information into the media vault then how we organize it and make the information we capture there available widely to other parts of the system.

•  2:40 On the mind expansion dashboard we are continuing our exploration of the knowledge sources midsection, specifically the media vault and the Academy. Both of which are in the Vaults section of the PPV organizational structure.

• After the Vaults section is complete there will be a video covering the high-level organizational structure of the PPV system and how it's used organizationally and conceptually to frame and guide the design of the entire system.

 

3:50 Training/Course Vault

• Courses can be incredible if you find good ones, but it's important not to go through them on autopilot and deliberately extract as much information as you can from it while you're focused on it so that later you can quickly and easily scan and review what you went through to pull out the most valuable elements.
• A good set of notes from a course can be really helpful for someone who didn't put in the time or the effort to do it.
• Notes allow you to do spaced repetition on the high-quality information allowing you to internalize it and learn it and really understand it.
• When you need to review it for something relevant later on, it's easily accessible in a very digestible form.

 

Courses are lined up via status 6:05

• When you sit down to do a course you have everything you've ever considered as interesting available and sorted ready to make a choice.
• Completed courses will have extensive notes inside of them with added media such as clippings, slides, diagrams mixed with other notes. In many ways, the information can become more valuable than the original course because you've digested and prioritized what resonated with you what was most relevant for your objectives and you've extracted the highlights that you can easily skim to remind yourself.

• We can apply the same hierarchical highlighting to these notes as discussed in the book notes area.
• Within courses, you can create extensive organizational structures for the different weeks and segments of the course.
  • For large courses with an extraordinary amount of information covering a lot of different topics relevant to the focus of the course, you can create a whole dashboard of subpages and databases within the course workspace (each record in the database) so that it's extremely organized.
  • If you wanted to go into section 4 of module B in an 8-week course, you can very quickly and easily access it.
  • It's recommended that when you take a large course that you spend some time laying out an organizational structure to capture everything you can.
  • Shorter courses can be covered the same way you cover books.
  • You can change the way you do things depending on the scope and depth of the course.

 

9:19 Media Vault DB Structure

• This is something that everyone should be implementing in one way or another because we are all encountering a flood of information online.
• If you are not documenting and capturing it, it floats in and fades away. The time spent consuming it is usually just wasted.
• If you don't make an effort to read deliberately and capture information so it's accessible later, you miss so much of what you engage with and you waste so much time and mental energy.
• 10:06 Status board view
  • Organized by status tags:
    • Maybe later
    • To Do
    • On It Now
    • Just Saving
    • Completed
    • Archive
• Master table view 10:35
  • Organized sorting primarily by status and secondarily by priority and thirdly by future value (for completed articles).
• August has taken to using Notion as his read later app over Pocket and Instapaper as he found it was really difficult to highlight and get the highlights to transfer in a smooth automated way.
• The versions of pocket and instapaper that allow you to do extensive highlighting and notetaking are expensive.
• Notion gives you the ability to do all your 'read later' capture in one place along with all it's other capabilities.
  • No need to worry about transfers and movement between apps.
• Beyond what Pocket and Instapaper can do, Notion allows you to structure a heirarchy and priority level of what you're going to read in what order using a status
  • On it now
    • What you're presently engaged with
  • To do
    • Something you intend to do but definitely want to do
  • Maybe later
    • Something you want to get to if you have a chance
  • Completed
  • Just Saving
    • Capturing it, not going to read but want it around just in case
    • Generally this is the only thing August uses Evernote for
    • He doesn't like cluttering the Notion database with an endless flood of maybe's kinda sorta probably nots.
    • Things are only brought in to Notion if its something relevant to a project or habits, goals, pillars, or it's something that he's just curious about and engaged with so it will be relevant to some interest or activity.
    • Evernote is August's endless, bottomless shoebox.
    • Everything in Notion is more curated and has some specific value.
• Archive
  • For things that have been completed, but don't have any intended use in the future.
• Sharing
  • Used for articles that have been refined/modified and shared commonly, for example with consulting clients.

• Secondary sorting by priority 15:10
• Completed items have a future value rank and are sorted secondarily by it.
  • It doesn't necessarily mean the article is high quality, it means that you are likely to find value in it in the future.
• Tags for media type
  • Articles
  • Podcast
  • Video

 

17:30 Hierarchical Highlighting

• Within articles, as your read them you want to highlight and take good notes.
• The Notion web clipper will capture the title, link and 95% of the time it will capture the whole article.
  • The article will usually be nicely formatted allowing you to quickly make a TOC by using '/toc'
• The hierarchical highlighting that is done is the same as in the book vault
  • A color gradient of Yellow, Orange, Red, and Pink
    • Yellow is used for mildly interesting highlights
    • Orange is the default color
    • Red and Pink are used for important items
  • This gives you various levels of review options depending on how quickly you want to go through the content later.
• You can add notes using the comment feature
  • This becomes valuable when discussing things with a team using the '@' function. 20:35
  • You can apply a callout to make notes more visible
• This hierarchy of notation is so much better than Ever note, it gives so much more nuance.
• This is one of the reasons Notion is so good to use as a life operating system.
• Systems that are designed for specific platforms can leverage them and function so much better overall.
• If you highlight all the articles you read, which can be done very quickly especially if you are doing your read later in Notion itself it's an incredibly valuable resource to return to.
• You want to have views for 'to-do' and a view for 'completed' articles.

 

23:05 Capture with the Web Clipper

• Have the chrome extension for Notion installed
• Select the vault you wish to save it to
• You can immediately open it in Notion online which is just as good as Notion on desktop, unlike Evernote.
• Add a '/toc'
• Add tags
• If it pertains to a knowledge lab item, link to it.
• The web clipper works very well for videos as well 25:50
• Enter fields and take notes on the video as you watch it.

 

28:40 Closing

• By capturing and organizing information properly in a consistent systematic way, it becomes a very valuable resource to draw on when we put it into the next level of absorption and refinement in the Knowledge lab.
• The next video covers the knowledge lab.

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• The last two videos covered different kinds of inputs into our knowledge management system, books and media more broadly. This video looks at the notes and ideas vault which is designed for capturing our own ideas, thoughts and inspirations.
  • It's possible a piece of media could spark a thought that you might find valuable later and you'd enter it here.
  • If the thought came up during your consumption of a video/article that you thought was worth capturing then you'd ideally put that thought into the capture of that video/article.
• If you're working in a team, this is where everyone would enter their thoughts and ideas
• The design of this aims to enable quick and easy capture of ideas and other parts of the system that we'll cover in the next 2 videos are about how to extract and have the information that we capture in this vault resurface at the right time and place.
  • This largely happens in the Knowledge Lab, but in other instances like team profiles.
• Firstly we'll cover how to set up the notes and ideas vault and then how to set up quick capture mechanisms in the right contextual locations so when notes and ideas come to you, they can be entered quickly and efficiently.

 

3:06 Database Setup

• 2:35 Looking at the command centre we enter the mind expansion dashboard
• The past 2 videos covered The Library, Media Vault and The Academy which is where we capture books, media and course information respectively.
• Today we are looking at the Notes & Ideas database which lives in the Vaults section of the PPV  organizational structure.
  • This is a particularly interesting vault for the capture of our own thoughts and ideas or ideas from media that we might not want to capture entirely.
• The notes and ideas you create will be given a title and elaborated upon in the workspace 3:50
  • One of the best things about Notion is the capability of the workspace inside the note when compared to other apps
  • You can capture anything from quick thoughts to paragraphs, tables, organization of data etc.

 

 Keeping Notes Narrow in Scope

• The idea of the notes contained within this database is that they're individual, self-contained nuggets
  • These are not fully-fledged explorations of broad ideas, they are tightly confined in scope
  • The idea is to have all these pieces attach to bigger ideas in the Knowledge Lab or potential sources of information
    • Sources of information will typically only be linked if that source was the inspiration for the idea
    • One note could be linked to several knowledge lab topics (through a relational link), each entry in the Knowledge lab is a broad topic that you build up from many different sources.
    • As you're thinking about notes, keep them narrow in scope and modular, even if some notes are similar.
• When creating a new note we will out the properties 6:35S
  • Status: Active
    • The default status for new notes, there is an Archived option for when things are no longer relevant.

 

7:10 Enabling Filtered Views

• Filtered by active status
• If you're working in a team it's important to have notes filtered by Contains "Me", not your full name option.
  • "me" means that anyone who is logged in and viewing this database will have new notes assigned to their name 8:00
  • If you're using your own solo system you don't need this, or the created by property
• The category property could be useful for both individuals and teams.
  • In the team implementation, each category would be a department
    • e.g. Sales, Marketing, HR, Admin
    • A view can then be created for each category for the entire team to see as they go in
    • This category setting allows you to have dashboards elsewhere where only the relevant notes and ideas for that section are being seen.
• Sort is typically done by last edited, but the creation date is also useful
• Filtered is by active and within a week or so

 

12:25 Quick Entry Setup

• There are 2 important aspects to a notes and ideas database, one being quick and easy input and the other is that it resurfaces at the right time and place. The latter will be explored in the coming videos.
• To establish quick entry we have a point in the mind expansion dashboard.
  • This dashboard is set as one of the favourites
• There is also a quick entry point on the command centre 13:20
  • Toggle for the notes and ideas inbox
• Another one is in the Action Zone 14:30
  • Toggle for the notes and idea inbox
    • Sort and filter 16:20
    • This works really well on mobile

 

17:04 Closing Thoughts

• What's really interesting is how we make these quickly entered notes and ideas resurface at the right time and place contextually.
• In most cases, this is done in the knowledge lab
• Sometimes you want the to resurface in the context of teams
• Notes and ideas are all about quick entry and capture, and then availability later on which is what this system hopes to achieve.

Edited November 22, 2021 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

0:00 Intro

• We are now in the midst of our exploration of knowledge management which is a module that can stand on its own but also plugs into the goals, projects, and task management system in the LOS.
• We are digging deeper into bringing knowledge into the system, how to use it, how to make ourselves smarter, and make the system smarter so that it can support and facilitate our goals across our life.
• The Knowledge Lab is Augusts' favorite of all the vaults, it makes us smarter and congregates all the different ideas and resources, notes that we bring in.
• The last several videos have focussed on the various different input sources such as books, media, articles, etc. how to organize them and have them available.
• The previous video looked at the notes and ideas database, how to quickly capture our thoughts and ideas and organize them in a way that makes them accessible.
• Today we are looking at the Knowledge lab which is where all this information is mixed together and turned into something much more valuable, actionable, and powerful. The Knowledge lab will grow into one of the most valuable assets you have.
• We hear about many systems such as external brains, second brains but as David Allen pointed out brains are good as some things and not others.
  • They're really good at thinking, processing, sifting through organizing and prioritizing, and extracting insight, but they're not good at remembering, holding, and containing.
  • We have one brain that is really good at the things brains do; thinking, analysis, critical assessment. Why would we duplicate what we already have? We don't need external or second brains, what we need is an extension to our brain that can do things we can't inherently do well.
  • This is what the Knowledge lab ultimately does, it not only helps you remember, but it puts pieces together gradually as you grow, building them into bigger ideas that are more useful and actionable.
  • These ideas can also be funneled into so many different directions.
    • Your better understanding of a topic, creative output like articles/videos, etc. it can funnel into better contributions to meetings and work discussions, better performance.
• We're going to dive into how the Knowledge lab takes all these pieces and brings them together into something far greater than the sum of it's parts. This is where the emergence happens.

4:37 Database Structure

• 3:40 from the command center we jump into mind expansion
  • We can see the quick entry location for notes and ideas, as well as the option in the action zone.
  • 4:15 looking at the mind expansion dashboard we can see all the sections we've already covered. Notes and Ideas, The Library, Media Vault, Academy.
  • Now we are entering the Knowledge lab, 4:32
• 4:30 When working with teams this is called a Knowledge base, for individuals, it's called a knowledge lab.
• Unlike all the previous vaults which are defined by the type of entry/source, this one is defined by topic categories themselves. 
  • Examples:
    • Community building
    • Course creation
    • Design thinking
    • Discipline
    • Divergent/Convergent Thinking
    • Fitness
    • Goal setting
    • Habits & Routines
    • Home creation
    • Marketing
    • Metacognition
    • PPV development
    • Product design
    • Professional Network
    • Sales
• Each entry here is a topic or 'zone' of knowledge that you want to develop insight into and understanding of.
• In many cases, each of these are linked to many other items in the Knowledge Lab 8:30
• There are also relational links to 
  • Notes & Ideas
    • We'll see how this develops in a much more interesting way than simply relational links
  •  Projects
    • Projects we are working on will be linked to relevant Knowledge Lab topics
    • When you are in the project's workspace there you will only be one link away from all the relevant information
  • Habits & Routines
  • Content Links
  • Example, August knew that he was going to write an article on Design thinking so he created a topic and aggregated all the relevant information from all the books, articles, podcasts, and videos that he read.
• Database if filtered by active status, and sorted alphabetically

 

 

10:40 Knowledge Workspace Build-Out

• Inside the community building topic, all the properties we just went through are linked her e.
• There is then a table of contents created using '/toc' automatically using the heading types
• Beneath that is extensive information that is pulled from different sources
• As you adjust, add, remove different sections and headings the table of contents will automatically adjust and update.
• The best highlights and insights from various sources are used, the things that give you the most actionable and interesting insights are put in these topics.
• The articles that are the most interesting and relevant are brought into the media database, books into the Library, Courses into the Academy, and then the most valuable points from each of these are brought into the topics.
• After all the most valuable notes have been brought in, it will then be refined further to be really sharp and powerful.
  • Hierarchical highlighting could be used again
  • Diagrams can be added, along with quotes or other formatting
• You want to format these topics in a way that allows you to quickly move through it, digest it and revisit is to pull out the valuable pieces with a quick skim.
• If you are developing an idea for a type of output like a video, presentation or keynote this is where it's built and shaped.
• If you just want to be more knowledgeable about something then you want to structure it in a way that makes it easy to review and get the benefits of spaced repetition.

 

 

14:00 Notes & Ideas Contextualization

• This is one of the most interesting toggles
• You enter notes, ideas, thoughts all time into all those different entry points we looked at in the last video.
  • Here is where they resurface in the time and place that is most valuable.
  • The place is the context of when you sit down to examine what's happening in a topic area all the ideas that you've collected link to the topic.
  • The key is that these notes resurface contextually rather than just arbitrarily by some date.
• Notes and ideas are filtered and then sorted by last edited, so the most recent notes appear first.
  • Having the notes here is very valuable, you can simply open them up and see everything within,
  • If you are fleshing this out, building it out further, etc. you can take a note and drag it out of the notes database (assuming it isn't linked to other important topics) and drag it down into the topic page. Alternatively, you can just hold down the Alt key and drag out a copy of the note.
  • Notes are probably connected to several things, they are captured and tightly defined.
  • You can drag them to relevant subsections of topic ideas and keep things growing.
• This is what makes this a comprehensive system that allows for emergence.
  • Ideas are captured anytime anywhere and they reveal themselves at the right time and place.

 

• New topic template 19:53
  • The notes and ideas database filtering to the relational link to the knowledge lab and contains New Topic template (this was covered early with the self-referencing filter that can be applied to a template.
  • The template automatically creates the table of contents
    • You quickly create headers using markdown language
    • # +space creates a header 1 ## + space creates header 2 etc.
• Whatever topics are pertinent to you, to learn and understand, for work, for projects, or for any area of your life, build a specific topic category for it, read and research the relevant information, bring the sources into the other vaults.
  • Think about it, add your own ideas and notes as you have them
  • Have locations all over your system to immediately enter ideas as you have them

 

23:55 Project DB Knowledge Integration

• Moving into the alignment zone when we open any project we will have an immediately accessible link to any of the knowledge lab topics relevant to the project.
• In the projects page, you could add a filtered database for all the knowledge lab items for each project as your knowledge lab grows 25:20

 

26:08 Closing Thoughts

• You can now see how each piece works together to create such an incredibly valuable resource.
• This becomes a zone of ideas that can flourish and grow, taking on a life of their own over time.
• This is a brain extension, meaning it does things that a brain can't do.
  • Bringing ideas, information, and resources to light in the right context is what makes them valuable, this is what the system does and is hard to do in general.
  • If you're taking notes by any other means, the information isn't going to surface as it's needed.
  • Notion has the whole task management system with the interconnectivity of all these different databases and the self-referencing resurfacing capability of having one database bring the notes and ideas together in context through these relational links and smart system design.

 

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This video will introduce methods that radically enhance the media vault that was covered a few videos ago.
• There are going to be 2 parts to this video:
  • How to go into amazon and create a nicer format of your highlights and notes in the amazon kindle platform that can then be brought into your book vault.
  • Then we will cover something amazing allowing us to do all the automation we'd need for the entire PPV system without the API
    • For knowledge management what we really want is to be able to automatically sync all our notes and highlights in kindles, apple books, e-readers, pocket, Instapaper, Twitter threads etc. into our notion media vault database.
    • This is now possible with an integration of a beta version of Readwise
• This is not a paid promotion of Readwise, August has just personally found this to be something valuable.
• This automated integration does require a paid service, costing $8-9 USD per month.
  • This will give you the automated syncing and a spaced repetition system to help you learn and internalize the notes and ideas that you're taking in across all these platforms.
• After the integration has been covered there will be some information on the core service of readwise which is very valuable on its own.
• We will be working in the media vault and in this demonstration, we will have the book and media vaults combined into one database, as discussed there are pros and cons to this, but the integration requires that they're all in one database.
  • You can have one relational link to all the other databases that give you access to all the different types of media you have notes and highlights from.

3:55 Importing Kindle Notes

• First, we will cover how to take your book notes and bring them into Notion manually.
  • This is very simple and is basically a short addendum to the book vault video
  • This can be done for a stand-alone or combined book vault
• First, go to amazon and there will be a page with all your book notes
  • Read.amazon.com/notebook
    • On this page will be all the kindle books you have highlighted.
    • As you click on each book you will see all the highlights from that book.
    • You could copy and paste these directly but they will come over in a format that doesn't look very nice.
• The best way to bring them over is to visit readwise.io/bookcision
  • Drag the javascriplet into your bookmarks bar
  • Return to your Amazon page and select a book, then click the applet and copy and paste the highlights from there.

 

6:33 Auto-Syncing Database Setup

• Now we will cover the completely automated option which takes things to the next level.
• Readwise has a free trial period, so you can test it out and see if you like it before subscribing.
• In order to set this up, you have to start at the readwise page on your account.
  • Go to the Notion export area, link in description for how to set this up
  • The setup itself is incredibly easy and only takes a few minutes
  • 7:50 settings
• The first time you do this it will create a new database for you in Notion, after it's been created you can then customize it as you like
  •  9:00 You need to leave the synced category names the same as well as the synced property names.
  • You can create additional categories for videos, podcasts, etc and you can then save these formats to this database as well without messing up the syncs.
• You can't use the database that we set up previously, you need to let the integration create a new one which then becomes your new media vault and you can add to it from the old one.
• You need to set up the integration through chrome or firefox because there is no real API for Notion, they've created it through a browser extension.

 

11:00 Merging Old Media DB + New Synced DB

• If you have already added a lot of material to your existing media vault, but you wanted to move into this automated direction you'd set up the new one, label the old one and then move old content into the new one.
  • Highlight the ones you want, click the handle on the left choose 'move to' and select the new database.
  • Before you do this take columns that are overlapping already and give them the same property names, this will save you a lot of time. 12:00
  • In the old vault we had two tags columns, one called tags and one called purpose, these are now consolidated, this should also be adjusted in the old database before bringing them over and adding a new property. 13:00

 

14:00 New Highlighting Strategy

• The new formatting also changes how the database is used, previously this was August's next read/watch list, but when it's completely syncing with the other apps he is now able to use pocket as his read later list and youtube's watch later feature for videos,
• The reading experience in pocket or insta paper is nicer, but there is a trade-off that is now being made; you don't have the highlighting options you get in notion and you are only saving the specific highlights from each article
• Previously you would highlight only the most important gems of an article, but now we know it's only saving the highlights so we can highlight more context around key points. Then the relevant gem can be highlighted in Notion later on. 16:00
• In some cases, you might want the entire article, which you can just clip through in pocket and send to Notion using the web clipper.
• Videos and podcasts will be much the same, the next video will cover this in more detail with another cool integration.

 

 

17:28 eBook/Kindle Synced Highlights

• Inside the books, there is a toc at the top of each page
• If you are just highlighting in readwise as you go, you will not get these section headers automatically, however, if you tag in readwise in an app on your phone, or on your kindle when you highlight if you add the note .h1, .h2, or .h3 it will designate that highlight as a header of the corresponding level.
• 18:40 example on phone app for kindle
  • Tap the kindle sync option in the readwise app
• Back in Notion the new highlights are imported with the headers settings

• 21:23 Article Synced Highlights (Pocket)
  • Very similar to the book highlights on the kindle app

 

22:40 Synced Tweets & Tweet Threads

• Increasingly you come across long thoughtful tweet threads that you might want to save.
• Go to Twitter and find a thread you like
  • You can reply to it with @readwisio save thread, post it and readwise will reply saying that the thread has been saved (everybody can see this)
  • Alternatively, you can click share to and send via direct message  to @readwiseio, in the comment write 'thread'  23:40
    • Takes some time to sync but it will then be available in Notion

 

24:37 Synced Print & Audio Book Notes

• If you are listening to an audiobook or reading a paperback that cannot be synced all you need to do is enter a note using the pen on the readwise app for your desktop or mobile, then enter the note, hit next and select the book you've been reading. This note will then automatically sync.

 

25:27 Spaced Repetition with Readwise

• Now we will briefly cover the core service that Readwise offers outside of Notion.
• The original intention of Readwise is to enable spaced repetition of content.
• 26:00 in the app click on your daily review once per day and see the highlights from content you've read that have been cued up.
  • You then choose the ones you want to revisit using keep and discarding the others.
  • Over time you will accumulate a lot of very high-quality notes that you'll remember well.
• You can have these emailed to you, but for most people, this won't be ideal as the emails won't come at good times.

 

28:23 Closing Thoughts

• If you are reading a good number of books or articles, the price is worth it to have all these notes automatically sync and have access to the spaced repetition of your highlights.
• The next video will show you how to capture notes from podcasts which have always been one of the hardest things to capture in note form.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• This episode will cover a cool little add on to the media vault; which is where we capture videos, articles, podcasts, books that we find valuable and want to keep.
• This typically all funnels into the knowledge lab as covered in the previous 2-3 videos.
• This addendum is for one category of media that is particularly hard to capture; podcasts.
  • Typically you listen to these on the run, while you're driving, at the gym etc. where it's hard to stop and take notes and typically the way the spoken word is expressed is part of the nuance of the ideas being communicated.
• There is a new podcast app called Airr (no sponsors), that although very new does solve the problem of capturing highlights and segments of podcasts for sharing on social media or for capturing into the media vault.
• This is the best solution August has seen to capturing podcast highlights and notes on the fly in a shareable way, that also allows you to capture the nuances of the spoken word.
• The last video covered the new Media Vault which is very similar to the original except that it's automated using the Readwise integration with Notion that brings in automated highlights from kindle, apple books, pocket, Instapaper and Twitter.
• If you use the manual version of the vault and don't want to pay the monthly fee for Readwise then it looks just like the original video and this will work fine either way.
• Podcasts are going to come in from Airr, however, Airr is working very closely with Readwise right now and in the not too distant future, the Readwise integration should be able to bring in the Airr clips that we will see very soon.
• For now, it's still very good and if you're not going to use the Readwise service in the future, you would use Airr as it's covered in this video.
• The core features of the Airr app should be free for the foreseeable future.

 

 

3:35 Using the Airr App

• Opens the App on iPhone.
• You can select an episode to download and these will be visible in the library.
• You can also select to automatically download episodes from creators as they come out, but then you won't have a handpicked selection to choose from.

 

 

5:00 Selecting Highlights

• 5:15, while listening to an episode when you come across something interesting you can push the quote button and it will enter a clip mode with the endpoint.
  • You want to listen until the end of what you want to save and then you can scroll back to the beginning point of what you want to save.
  • When you stop at a point it will start playing in your headset from that point so you can clearly see if that's the starting point you wanted to save from.
  • When you let go, it saves that clip and you can title it.
• 6:50, These saved clips also have transcripts, popular podcasts will have transcripts attached, but if not you can select to request a transcript (7:05) and it will take about 30 minutes for it to be generated.
• The idea is that when you save the Airr quote you get both the audio quote and the transcript of that section of the podcast.

 

8:20 Capturing Highlights to Notion

•  If you go to 'My Airr Quotes'  you will then have this episode with all the segments that you saved.
• 9:00 select all the clips you want to export, then go to share via, press and hold and select copy to send them to your phone's clipboard.
• Click on the episode itself and share episode, choose Notion, and then your Media Vault.
• Then paste the notes into the page that is created.
  • If you are only adding a single quote you will get the full quote, if you add multiple, you will just get the links to the podcast section.
  • The beauty of this is that we are now saving individually selected segments of podcasts.
• 10:30 Returning to the Desktop Notion database, we can see the podcast we just entered with the Title notes you add and link to the Airr quote itself and its transcript.
• You can then play back the individual snippets and you can share them with others and/or review them in your notes.
• All of the special elements of an episode are then available to you.
• The functionality of Airr and the ability it grants to quickly and precisely extract a very specific snippet of audio with the ability to have it converted into text is the best August has seen.
• If you intend to listen to a podcast it's easiest to request the transcript upfront.
• In most cases, there is something worth saving and remembering in a 45min plus podcast.
• If you are listening to podcasts you probably find yourself hearing thoughts all the time that you want to save, now it's possible.
• The next video will have a surprise reveal of the revamped front interface of the Mind Expansion dashboard.
  • We will be looking at how the databases we've covered in the last several videos are now interfaced with.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

0:00 Intro

• August has come up with some better ways to interface with the knowledge management system,
• The mind expansion dashboard is where this happens primarily where we bring in our inputs from our own thoughts and other resources.
• The readwise integration now handling a lot of the apple, kindle, pocket and Instapaper notes automatically.
• The new dashboard uses the same databases, but interfaces with them differently.

 

0:57 New Mind Expansion Dashboard

• Quick overview
  • Looks cleaner and more stylized with some quick access to some filtered views
• This uses the exact same databases as the previous version with the readwise integration feeding both the books and all the other media into the same database.
• From now on the Knowledge lab will be called the Knowledge Vault for naming consistency.
• 2:20 The notes and ideas vault has now been changed to a gallery view.
  • The toggle has been removed for very quick access.
  • Filtered by either today or yesterday, most of the time.
  • The filter can be changed very quickly
  • The gallery view shows us a nice block of information (as opposed to it sitting in a table), and it makes starting new entries easier as well.
  • There is now a toggle for the Notes and ideas Vault in the Action Zone as well, immediately above the Daily action zone.

 

• 4:40 Below that are the sources, the layout of the Vaults has been changed.
  • Courses is put into a half column in a list view which works really nicely as a half-page column, sorted in order of status and creator.
  • 5:10 The book Vault is a nice long gallery view of the books including their covers, sorted by last highlighted descending and last edited.
    • These are automatically syncing through readwise to the kindle app and updating automatically as shown in a previous video.
    • Each time highlights are added to a book, that book will move to the top of the book list so the books that are actively engaged with will always be on the top.
    • These can then be reviewed a second time  and highlighted using the tiered highlighting system already outlined in a previous video.
• 7:00 Articles are also put into their own section on list view, filtered by the past month sorted by last edited and highlighted.
  • These are all also being updated automatically using the readwise integration, if you want the full article you use the Notion web clipper as was shown in the past.
• 8:20 Twitter Threads can be easily saved using read wise and some valuable information can be imported, these are also available here in list view.
  • The previous video covered how to do this, they save with the same level of automation as books and articles.
• 9:20 Videos are not saved automatically, but very easily using the Notion web clipper.
  • Videos can be saved and watched in Notion allowing you to take notes underneath immediately.
  • Recording timestamps allows you to access the information again in context.
• 10:25 Podcasts are also kept in a list view
  • The last video covered how to save snippets as you listen to them and then bring them all in together.
  • 10:40 AirrQuotes saved example

• 11:25 The Knowledge Aggregation section is now shown in gallery view as well, sorted alphabetically.
  • The same database is used with the same functions in the Knowledge Vault video layed out much nicer.
  • The template workspace within each topic has been altered.

 

12:10 New Knowledge Vault Template with Contextual Media

• The properties are the same
• 12:30 The TOC is on the top, each heading automatically creating a quick link.
• 12:40 The References block contains what we originally had with the Notes and ideas listed in order from most recently edited, but there is also a self-referencing list view of any Media from the Media Vault that is related.
• 14:20 Gives an indication of all the items in the Media Vault that are related to the topic, make the content type visible by adjusting the properties.
• 15:10 Jumping back into the mind expansion dashboard we can see how to set up this template
• 15:30 quick notes is set up because inevitably when something is being started you want to throw something in very quickly.
  • As the topic is built out, these will be moved into context within a larger organizational structure.
• 15:50 All the Notes are set up to filter for the Knowledge Vault property within the Notes and Ideas database contains Knowledge Vault template, which means when you apply it to Knowledge Vault entry it's applied to itself.
  • All of the items in the Notes and Ideas Vault that are related to that item in the Knowledge Vault
• 16:15 The same thing with the Media Vault; it is self-referencing to the Knowledge Vault Template which means for any new Knowledge Vault entry we create all the media items that are linked to that new knowledge vault entry will appear.
  • It is sorted for descending, by Last edited.

 

17:04 Mobile Phone Demo of New Dashboard

• This is just for you to see how nicely this new design works on mobile.
• The list views for all the databases (with the exception of the Books which are in gallery view) scroll very nicely.
• 18:20 At the bottom, the alphabetically listed items in these nice blocks are very aesthetically pleasing and are very easy to open.
• This new interface is perfect for mobile!
  • The buttons are bigger and it's easier to organize and digest the information on the dashboard.

 

19:12 Conclusions & Plan for Future Videos

• The old interface is perfectly functional, but this one is a little bit more efficient and looks a little better.
• Choose what works for you.
• There will be one or two more videos on specialty vaults just to show you more capabilities of what you can do in the Vault section and then we will get into the Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults overview after now having gone through each of the segments in detail.
  • We will then have a higher-level overview, summary and in some ways introduction of the PPV organizational structure.
  • Having gone through each of the sections now individually allows for a more comprehensive understanding to emerge.
• The PPV system will then be compared and contrasted to other available systems.
• There will then be some more specialty segments such as mindset and identity sculpting and client operations that are important for a fully functional LOS and business operations system.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• We are in the final few videos that cover the Knowledge Management section of the overall system.
• These last videos for this section will cover ways to enhance and optimize.
  • These are little touches that can really be added to almost any Knowledge Management system but it fits in exceptionally nicely with the PPV system we are constructing.
• This video covers a feature to add to the Knowledge Vault which is HOT and COLD topics.
• The knowledge vault is where all the best thinking, notes, and ideas are brought in from all the resources we consume and come up with on our own all come together by topic.
  • This new addition to the Knowledge Vault makes it easier to interact with quickly and efficiently; Hot and cold topics.
• Hot topics are those that we engage with more frequently, cold topics are those that we may want to build knowledge and insight in but are much less frequently engaged with.
  • As you do more knowledge aggregation in this system, the vault will begin to expand with more and more topics, which is positive and will make this one of the most valuable resources you own.
  • Although we have the ability to archive topics, we will find that we have many that we are active with only periodically, perhaps only a few times a month or less but are still important to us.
  • Hot and Cold gives us a way to separate such topics and integrate them into our mind expansion dashboard.

 

1:56 Roadmap & Course Info

• The next video will cover some specialty vaults
  • The tech stack Vault and how we collect information on skills, people we might draw on, contractors, professionals etc.
• After that, we will look at the concept of a master tag database
  • There are pros and cons to this, but August has had a breakthrough idea on how to take this database to the next level.
• You will be getting a sneak peek at the second version of the PPV system that have been creeping in.
• A lot of version 2 is about consolidating/simplifying while maintaining or even expanding the power of the original.
• The details of the next course will also be covered while giving you the complete on-ramp and integration of the PPV system into your life.
  • The course will go into depth on how to integrate it into your life and make its principles a part of your daily living and to bring clarity, alignment, and focus to everything you do.

 

4:01 Mind Expansion Dashboard Updates

• A lot of the top banner graphics are in the way and push the functional parts of the page down meaning you have to scroll to access some of them. They have been removed as a result.
• An icon is still needed to make it easy to spot in spite of how much room it takes.
• The spaces between the media toggles have been removed to collapse them down tighter 4:50
• 5:10 The Notes and Ideas section at the top has been removed as they aren't entered here very often.
  • 5:30 there is a toggle here and a separate page on the phone for quick entry of notes and ideas.

 

5:52 Hot & Cold Topics

• The Knowledge aggregation area is the same, with the same vault but now there are toggles for Hot, Cold and All topics.
• First, the topic categories will be explained and then the circumstances you might want to use them and those in which you don't
  • There are systems that force you to use them and sometimes it's detrimental when a global category can be used.
• 6:20 In Notion you can have both
• Hot topics are those that you are going to engage with more frequently, the benefit of having a section like this is that it's easier to find things quickly that you access on a regular basis as opposed to sifting through your growing list.
• Cold topics are those that aren't accessed as often and can be sorted through quicker than an all topics category.

 

7:35 Filter Setup

• This is very dynamic and largely automated.
• 7:55 Archive is unchecked
• 8:10 The middle section here is most important
  • The first and more dynamic of the 2 is Active Projects, Any, Is, Checked
  • Seeing what this does 8:20
    • Product design is linked to 2 different projects (example) through a relational link to the projects database
    • 8:30 There is a rollup to check whether they are active projects.
    • If the project is active it will have a checkbox
    • 9:04 If any of the projects are checked then it will pass this filter screen
  • 9:22 Reminder of how that checkbox is calculated in the Projects Database
    • Active checkbox is actually a formula (although it could simply be a manual check if you wanted)
    • Since you need multiple projects to move your goals forward we wanted to have a counter in the goals database for the projects.
    • 9:59 This formula simply checks whether the status is active.
• 10:30 Any Knowledge Vault topic that is linked to an active project will automatically appear here, which is what you want because the topics that are linked to the active projects are the ones you are going to be the most engaged with.
• Occasionally there will be topics that aren't connected to active projects that you access frequently.
  • 11:03 Example 'Business building'
  • There is a checkbox for priority topics that is selected for in the filter 11:35
• 11:45 The filter for the cold topics is the exact opposite.
• The All Topics category has no filter and shows everything.

 

12:15 When to Use Hot & Cold Topics

• Some personal systems will benefit from Hot/Cold topic categories and some will be hurt by it. This is why systems that force them are not always optimal.
• The Hot/Cold topic distinction is helpful if you are not cycling through projects at a rapid speed.
  • If this is the case for you, you won't know where any of the topics are and will waste time searching for them.
  • It would be better to simply use the All topics category.
• If your projects are static for a month or so, you will be familiar with the organization and positioning of topics and will be able to access them faster.
• Try both and see which works best for your circumstances.

 

14:08 Closing Thoughts

• The next video will cover a few more specialty categories, how to aggregate research on skills; from people, professional services, and how to aggregate research and knowledge on your Tech Stack.
  • Tech Stack: All the technology and software that you use or may potentially use in the future.
• Then we will cover the master tag database which will be a fun exploration.
• The course will be released soon and will be the complete aggregation of everything August knows about how to implement this system in your life.
• Whether you take the course or not this youtube series will continue with more information on ways to enhance the PPV system and how to bring other life enhancement practices into the way you live your life.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

0:00 Intro

• Today August will demonstrate that the Knowledge Management system in the Vaults department is not just about aggregating media, inputs, notes, and ideas into Knowledge Vault items but about capturing ANYTHING that will be valuable to you in the future.
• Any notes or research you've ever done should be available for future decisions and future research to build upon.
• Sometimes we do research across software/technology that we want to implement, or for tools, we may want to use in certain instances.
  • We may compare multiple options to make a decision but further down the road we need to revisit the information, or there may be a different context in which something else might be more suitable.
  • We can have all the research we do available for any subsequent decisions or expansions on that research category.
• We might be looking for people/skills to help us with a  problem such as plumbing, accounting, law, etc. and we research people and categories, compare options, accumulate contact information for various possibilities
  • We can ensure that in the future all this information is readily available
• We want all the information we collect to be accessible and we want a central place to collect it and organize it the first time, every time.
• Today we will cover how to capture and maintain information about software tools, various people skills, companies/service providers, service categories, and aggregate and organize everything.
• The previous few videos covered how to capture ideas and insight from various media sources and from our own thinking to be funneled into the Knowledge Vault.
• The next video will cover the Master Tag database; how to implement a global tagging system.
• Preannouncement about the new course. 3:05

 

3:40 Database Evolution

• Tools-Skills-Services Vault (TSS Vault)
• Initially August started with databases for individual skill providers, service providers, professional services, software tools, etc.
  • He noticed it became difficult to decide how to categorize some things, e.g. the line between software and services has become blurred. Etc.
  • Having separate databases made things confusing.
  • The distinction August uses to decide whether to combine databases is whether the properties are similar or different.
  • For the most part, the differences in the properties of these categories are not huge so it's not difficult to combine them.

 

6:57 Database Structure

• A look at the properties that make this work as a single database.
• This is very different from media, but all these things fit reasonably well together.
• 7:37 Looking at an example page
  • Type
    • Individual
    • Service Provider
    • Profession
    • Membership
    • Automated Service
    • Software
  • Functional category 7:53
    • Tagging system that allows filtering in other dashboards
    • Long list of tags in this example
    • These tags are unique to this database
  • Description 8:15
    • This is very important and is required every time August adds one
  • Website link
    • August almost always captures these using the Notion web clipper and fills in the very few required properties for each of them.
  • August has started using the smiley face icon for individual contractors, individual icons are used for things like software; this makes things easier to see at a glance.
  • To Review 9:50
    • If it's something that he saw, and looks interesting/relevant to a need but he doesn't have time to look at it he will tag it here to take a closer look at it in the future.
  • Notes
    • For comments
  • Rec/Ref/Used By
    • Recommended by, referenced by, used by : If somebody you trust is either recommending or using something then it's useful information.
  • Pay Frequency and Price
    • Useful for subscriptions 11:10
  • Company
  • Email

 

12:30 Knowledge Vault Integration

• When in the Knowledge Vault topics it can be helpful to have a listing at the top of that Knowledge Vault topic of all the TSS's that are related to that topic area
• e.g. there are links to every TSS related to Law and Legal Setup in the Knowledge Vault.

• Overall it's just another database, it's very simple but it's very valuable to aggregate this information that you can also then embed in a wide range of dashboards and different views across the system.

• 13:40 Back in the Mind Expansion dashboard where we access the Knowledge Vault we can see where the TSS's roll up into context
• 14:03 Quick note on correcting the filter for this view that was covered in the last video
  • For cold topics, Active Projects, None, Is, Checked
• 14:50 from the example today we can see the Law & Legal setup topic
  • Just as we had Notes and Ideas aggregating under a toggle, along with Media, there is also tools and skills aggregation.
  • 15:35 How tools and skills are sorted and filtered

 

16:45 Closing Thoughts

• Information on TSS's becomes a valuable resource just like the Media and Knowledge Vaults
• In the next video, we will cover the Master Tag database, August is excited to share a 'next level' innovation on the entire concept of a tag database
• There will then be a video providing an expanded vision of what pillars are. The previous video on pillars was insufficient and misleading in many ways. After having gone through the Pipelines and Vaults in depth we can now cover pillars that will allow a strong interpretation of the entire system.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

0:00 Intro

• The Master Tag database is something that has been difficult to decide whether to implement or not, get's a lot of questions, and polarises users; some love it some find it cumbersome.
• This video will explore all the different aspects of it, it's a great idea if you're doing a comprehensive system across many parts of your life.
• Augusts has also come up with an expansion of the concept that takes it to another level of value and power in the system.
• First, we will cover the standard Master Tag database then we will dive into the expansion.
• The Master Tag database is a concept that has been advocated by many people such as Maire Pullen(?) who popularised it with a few videos she did.
  • For a long time August was focused more on the Action part of the system; Goals, Projects, Tasks, Daily tracking.
  • In this area, the Master Tag database is not that critical
  • However, in the Knowledge Management area and the expansion of this component of the system it's become something that adds a lot more value.

 

1:51 Traditional Tagging

• In the last video, we looked at the TSS's Vault
• In a database like this, you are going to want to be able to sort and filter by different criteria.
• 2:25 There is a property in this database called Functional Category which is how a traditional local database-specific tagging system is set up.
  • Typically you will use a multi or single select 2:50

 

3:05 Master tag Database Concept

• A Master Tag database is a database that purely contains tags; each entry in the database is a different tag.
• Then in this example database, instead of having a property for local tags, we would have a relation to the Master Tag database.
  • This would also allow you to sort and filter through the relation, as opposed to the multi/single select.
  • One of the negatives and points of resistance to this is that these multi-select tags look better than relational links which don't have color-coding and aren't as easy to open and select.
  • The other is that most of the databases didn't need the same tags over and over again.
    • The point of the Master Tag database is to apply the same tags across different databases.
    • As Augusts' Knowledge Management system is expanding he finds more and more of the databases would benefit from having the same tags applied to them.
  • A Master Tag database would have a few advantages
    • Firstly any updates to a tag in the database would update across all of them
    • Secondly, the Master Tag database will then be able to provide a central viewpoint providing visibility across the entire system for everything else tagged to individual items.

 

5:55 Enhance Master Tag Database

• After he started applying the Master Tag database he kept finding that the same tags he was applying to it, he was also (through the separate relation to the Knowledge Vault) tagging Knowledge Vault topics.
  • He then realized that the Knowledge Vault should be the Master Tag database
  • In the Knowledge Vault, you would already have made a collection of all the topics that are important to you.
    • All the topics you are aggregating knowledge, ideas, insights, taking highlights from books, articles, videos, etc. and having information resurfacing contextually (as has been covered in past videos using templates with self-referencing filters under toggles)
    • There is no point in duplicating all this and having a separate relation to a master tag database. Not only do you have a Master Tag database built into the Knowledge Vault, but you also have extensive knowledge and research already organized in the workspaces there. Many of these topics are already interconnected to many other parts of your system.
• 7:45 Looking at the Knowledge Vault; a global repository for all the best thinking and research organized by topic for all the topics that are important to you.
• 8:15 Looking into a topic we can see it's already connected to Pillars, other Knowledge Vault topics, TSS's Vault, Media Vault, Habits and Routines, Content Pipeline, Action items, etc.

• 9:00 Using this instead of a different tag database provides not only the tagging and its benefits, but you are also always one link away from the depth of information accumulated for each tag.
• 12:00 By feeding two birds with one scone you make both of them more powerful
• The one caveat is that in theory, you might come up with some topics that you'd want to sort out and organize by, but you're not really interested in collecting knowledge on, you can simply add these to the vault and not build out the workspace of that topic.
  • At any point, if you do have ideas or insights on that topic it will be sitting there waiting for you.

 

• 13:10 the title to the Knowledge Vault relational link is now called Tag/Knowledge Vault
  • Examples in the Notes, Meetings and Ideas Vault as well as the Media Vault

 

14:12 Closing Thoughts

• Merging the Master Tag database with the Knowledge vault is a very powerful way to organize your information and provide visibility, sorting, and filtering capability across the system at the same time.
• This gives you a lot of nuance and finesse as to what you have across different dashboards and pages in the system as well and makes the Knowledge Vault itself even more powerful by providing transparency and consistency.
• It's particularly elegant to have this one vault and its topic category organization serving as the connective tissue across the entire system; Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults.
• Soon we will cover an enhanced look at pillars before giving a detailed overview of the entire system again.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

0:00 Intro

• Pillars are one of the foundational aspects of the PPV system, they have been covered previously but this is both a reset on the introduction to it as well as an expansion on the topic.
• This is part of Version 2.0 of the system and the role that pillars play.
• Brief mention of the online community. Year Zero collective.

 

1:20 What Pillars Are

• Moving into the Alignment Zone where pillars are best explained (sneak peek of the new visual design of this zone)
• Opening the pillars section we see that things are pretty similar
• Reexplanation of Pillars:
  • They are merely an organization of every aspect of your life, they are not aspirations, dreams, visions, etc. they are categories to break your life into.
  • You create somewhere between 5-15 groupings to organize your life into, this is often mistakenly compared to areas in the para? System.
    • Areas are about maintaining a high level of standard which pillars are NOT about
    • Areas are the second tier of prioritization in Para? below projects
    • Pillars in this system not a prioritization, merely categorization

 

• 2:25 Looking at the groupings such as Growth, Business, Home/Life
• Within each grouping are things like Mental Clarity, Mind Expansion, Health and fitness for growth and then Family, Home & Household, Personal Admin & Finance in Home/Life

 

3:17 Database Views

• A board view is a really nice way to break these out and makes things easier to digest visually.
• The key is that Pillars are organized into larger groups like Pillars and sub-pillars.
• Two will work as kind of a catch-all for all the little things you have to deal with; Admin and Team within the business grouping and Personal Admin in Home/Life
• These help you organize your life and give you a window into each part of your life when it's time to sit down and address them.

 

4:42 Pillars for Pipelines & Vaults

• [Image] 4:46
  • We can see the pillar groupings under Pillars: Growth, Home/Life,  Business
  • These slice across all the pipelines and vaults.
  • From the pillars view we then have the ability to look at all the information that is relevant to the individual pillars.
  • Cycles are outside of this structure because they are more about time and review processes.
  • Even things outside of your Notion system will also be organized by pillars (a separate video will show how this works)
    • This is another differentiation from Para?, things are not organized by a hierarchy structure of Projects, areas etc. but by category of your life which keeps things much more organized and easy to navigate since categories are static.

 

7:04 Database Relations

• All the pillars are linked to Habits & Routines, Value Goals, Goal Outcomes (rollup), Tag/Knowledge Vault through relations.
• Tasks are connected to pillars but it's too much work to maintain items you move through quickly such as tasks.
  • The fact that many of your tasks are attached to projects categorizes them by pillar and the ones that don't tend to be quick one-offs anyway.

 

8:20 Pillar Dashboards

• What is a really big advancement in this version of the system is that the Pillars are now entire dashboards looking into each category of your life.
• 8:45 Looking at the Mind Expansion pillar (learning pillar) it's the same dashboard we have covered before but it now lives inside the pillar entry in the Pillar Database.
  • The advantage of this is improved organization and it can be linked to other databases through relational links.
  • In addition, we now have all the relational links to this pillar from throughout the system.
    • Eg. Habits and routines, Value Goals, Goal Outcomes, Tag/Knowledge Vault.
• 10:30 Looking at the Content Creation Pillar example dashboard
• 11:30 There are several categorizations of status for each pillar; every pillar is either active, paused or inactive.

 

12:08 Closing Thoughts

• Pillars are simply a categorization of the aspects of your life.
• It's an organizational structure within the Notion system as well as outside of it as we will see in a future video.
• Breaking your life into pillars brings enhanced clarity and visibility across all your pipelines and vaults for each section of your life, making it much easier to see what's moving, not moving and what needs to be addressed.
• In the next video, we will be looking at the new command center and an overview of the PPV system.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib

[MuadDib]

 

0:00 Intro

• Today will be an unveiling and walkthrough of version 2.0 of the command centre.
• The command centre was the first video that was shared, covering the entire system in the beginning and it's become a classic at this point in the series.
• The new command centre is much more streamlined and simple while also being more functional in many ways with a lot more connectivity and automation built into it.
• This builds heavily on the previous video which provided a better explanation of the Pillars concept.
• Mention of the online community that you can join.

 

1:44 Interface Option #1

• This interface is modelled after the old one, but there are some new additions to it.
• 1:50 The categories are the same but everything underneath them are much more dynamic now.

 

• Starting with Focus & Alignment (which is a central function of the PPV system) we have our most important dashboards.
  •  They are the command centre itself, the alignment zone, the action zone and a highlight of the Knowledge Vault
  • Under that is a module for Daily tracking, Weekly Review, Monthly Review and Quarterly Review that provides quick links to each respective section in the Alignment Zone. 3:00
• 3:20 The last video covered the expanded role of Pillars; they are now not only the organization and categorization of each aspect of our life, but also function as the primary dashboards for each part of your life.
• Now we have pillars embedded into the command centre and filter them by their grouping and active status.
• 4:35 There is a quick capture spot for the Notes and Ideas Database
• These all look and function really well on mobile, the views for each of the groupings are adjusted to the gallery view. 4:50
  • Notion remembers each context settings, so on the mobile, they will stay in the gallery view and on your desktop they will be in list view.

• 5:45 Under that is a new stack of all the databases and a stack of the widgets
• The databases stack is very useful, it used to all sit in the left navigation, now the entire system is contained within the command centre.
  • Pillars 6:20
  • Pipelines 6:26
  • Cycles and reviews 7:00

 

• 8:18 There is a little key to distinguish core system databases and insight databases
• In the alignment zone, we have an insight section that includes the cycle review, similar tagging makes things easier to spot visually.

• There is an alternative implementation of the Command Centre dashboard that August is currently using.
• This one you could see the evolution from, from the previous version so it was shown first.

 

9:04 Interface Option #2

• This alternative version is a little bit more compact but is a bigger departure from the previous version.
• They have the same functionality, however this version has the pillars linked in one embedded presentation using less space. 9:20
  • The benefit of that is that the database stack can be moved to the top and having them higher means less scrolling is required.
• 10:00 In addition to the Notes and Ideas quick capture there is an Action Items quick add
• There is also a toggle at the bottom to provide a quick view of the today action items list.
• August tries to keep all the power and functionality above the fold (scrolling line).
• 11:50 A final new tweak we can see.
  • Since we lay out the dashboard's presentation by embedding the pillars database we can move to the pillar listings and look at the additional active setting. Where CC signifies command centre.
    • Active -CC
    • Active- No CC
• You can filter dashboards that are most important to you in the Command Centre.

 

12:50 Closing Thoughts

• We've covered 2 new variations of the new PPV Dashboard.
• They are much more capable, simple and faster to use with much more automation.
• As we update anything within the system it is automatically reflected in these new Command Centre dashboards.
• We can also add new notes and tasks very quickly
• All of it works brilliantly on mobile
• Next, we will cover a more concise overview of the entire PPV system, wrapping these concepts together before diving into some more speciality areas of the system.

Edited February 18, 2022 by MuadDib