2 NEW Programs just announced here: ruclips.net/video/ghjHLAjvHoE/видео.html ⭐ My brand new Notion training program: www.FastTrackNotion.com 🚀 Info on the "Notion Life Design" course with PPV: www.NotionLifeDesign.com Get my NOTION TEMPLATES⚡ and join the NEWSLETTER📰 at: www.yearzero.io/notion-templates And join me on Twitter at twitter.com/augustbradley - my most frequent discussion is there.
"From any task that's going to take a meaningful amount of time, i need to know that this task is relevant for the things i have set as priorities and major objectives in my life. If i'm adding a lot of tasks that are not connected, that there isn't anything to link to at a higher level in my goal and aspiration structure, then i need to really think: Is this a task i should be spending time on? And the answer is : probably not, unless i fail to define an important objective in my life" This exploded my brain
Hi August! Great content. Maybe I've missed it, but what do you recommend we do first. Set up our pillars? pipelines? It would be nice to see in terms of implementation what should be built first. Do you input your tasks from this view or do you do it from your projects view?
Lilian - couldn't agree more with your comment. August - I think your emphasis on clarity and access is head & shoulders above anything being suggested right now regarding both the use & power of Notion. So many applications currently have had the user forced into rigid structures - Notion hands down crushes this paradigm. August you work here is invaluable to my productivity.
Thank you Eric, your thoughts here mean a lot to me. I totally agree, lets keep building and enhancing lives with the power of our systems and platforms. Lots more to come.
August, thank you so much for these videos! I think you're doing a great job of explaining how your system works, as well as why it's set up which is extremely important. Something I think would be incredibly helpful is actually a follow along guide to set such a system up. Right now, there are so many features present in your system already that it takes quite some dedication to try to set it up from scratch, and just using a ready made template of yours detracts from actually learning and understanding the system on a deeper level. This is coming from someone who's already very used to these kinds of system thinking, having iterated on my own task/project management setups, GTD, and building a second brain, etc. So my proposal for a future video series would to set up this system from scratch and creating a MVP of the core parts of the system, like pillars, projects and the task system, just so that everything is connected and there's a clear daily process one can start using. And then one can build on top of that.
Hey August! It's been more than a year since your video came out, and I'm so glad I came across it now. When I watched your Overview video, it validated a lot of the issues in my current systems and processes, as well as give an overview of what to expect in terms of answering the question I have of: "how do I create a one-stop powerhouse repository to store my ongoing thoughts, tasks, resources, annual and periodic OKRs, etc in addition to tying in processes that help me evaluate and optimise my current way of working / goal pursuit?" It's awesome to see that Notion is a tool that is becoming an all-encompassing solver to this problem, this job to be done, and thank you for sharing your thought process and system of how to do this. I love that you always emphasise in your videos that your model is a dynamic guide that can be altered and adjusted to suit the individual, which you also put into practice, because your Overview video shows your Notion layout to be different to that of many of your tutorial videos along this playlist. I'm finding it really helpful to regularly pause your videos while putting my Notion database ecosystem together myself and customising as I go. A great resource for people who want to organise, connect, and create new knowledge, in pursuit of their many life goals!!
You explained how Notion is very different from other note-taking, todo list, task management apps and that's a spot on. Notion is like clay and how one shapes it and creates something is completely based on their understanding and organizational models. No other app have given me that freedom or customizability yet that much simpler.
August, I am drinking the notion kool-aid and it tastes great. Thanks for all your hardwork and dedication. I came here to post a question as well but just realized you have a video coming up in the series. I am starting a residency soon and this information could not be more helpful. Thank you!
OMG ... August, I can't THANK YOU enough for a) creating these so-well-done-and-super-detailed videos, and b) making your templates available to us for free! The fact that I could just dive in and start populating my Action Items Database without having to create the database is just ... well, amazing. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
August, your work is absolutely brilliant! I’m a Canadian teaching English to top managers in Moscow. A few weeks ago I told my Russian brother-in-law (of course he’s Russian; when in Rome...) that he is my brain outside of my brain (he’s a computer scientist). Not long after that, he found Notion, then I found you on RUclips. Energy follows thought! Thank you for existing. In this video you commented that we could request that you make a video on “Introducing relational links to other databases”. It would be a Godsend. I try to teach (actually I teach my students how to teach themselves, but I digress) my students that learning a language is not just simply translating words, and learning grammar. Rather, it’s about learning a completely different system/logic (culture/mentality). Sooo, to make a short story long, it would be so useful to be able to understand more about “relational links/other databases” so that there would be an increased possibility of flexibility and exploration. Thanks so much once again for, well...for everything. Спасибо from Moscow
Thanks Irving! I greatly appreciate this feedback, wow 🙂. Will see if I can find a place to slip that video in, but won't be right away -- have others lined up. In the meantime, Notion's support Wiki is really good and I recommend you check out their instructions on this: www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79
Not even finished the video but I have to say: Thank You! For the dependent tasks. I wanted to do something like that and didn't found how until I saw you did it. Also, I like a lot your very practical way of defining priorities and how to reach your goals. Very good!
Hello. I want to thank you for your content. I very like you approach. Im using Notion for 5 months and in these days im taking my setup to another level. Im using Notion like you for almost every thing in my life. Personal and biz. Keep going please :) For me now best Notion videos. Greetings from Slovakia.
Thank you for the feedback Juraj, I love hearing that this video series is helpful to you. You and I seem to think alike, the Notion platform can really streamline and optimize life and business. Keep pushing to the next level. Cheers to Slovakia!
Suggestion for improvement/automation: The "Done" checkbox is only a reflection of the Status Column... you can make Notion auto populate the "Done" using a formula. For this, I added "Completed" and "Dropped" to the possible choices of "Status", then set the "Done" with this formula: or(prop("Status") == "Completed", prop("Status") == "Dropped")
Wanted to thank you for putting out to the world your systemic organization of daily task and visibly linking it to a hierarchical structure of the big picture. Really helps in improving clarity of actions towards vision. I can see a huge benefit of investing my time in building up the notion system, much thanks to your content!
Can feel all your energy, the passion you put to this videos, I really love that, a big thank you, my bell is on, the sub button is pushed as well as the like and the subscription to the newsletter, please keep it up. You're an inspiration not only on making these videos but with the passion you make them.
Outstanding. A "must" for busy/ overwhelmed entrepreneurs, who are juggling a ton of projects & tasks. Thank you for the great instruction. Very clear & easy to follow!
I've watched a few videos on Notion workflows, but yours so far makes the most sense to me. It's clear, usable and solves many problems I've come across with others systems. Thank you for this really nice advices!
This is so amazing! Thank you for sharing this great content for free. It makes me so happy and productive. What I added to the action items is a text property with next action! I write the immediate action, what I have to do, to accomplish the task. For example: open email....I find it so helpful to get this push in my back to get started. Thank you very much mister Bradley.
Hi August, to be honest, I have been lost for years trying to find a system to organize my stuff, and trying to organize even the most simple things drove me crazy. But now that I have found your Notion videos I am sure I have found not only the software and the system but also the person who explains everything in detail. Thanks a lot for all the effort put into the videos to explain your system. I really love how your system is structured and how detailed and well-paced your videos are. I do have a question though, I am not sure if it is suggested to wait to see all the videos and then implement or if I should implement after each video. I guess you can see why even the most simple things sometimes drive me crazy LOL Thanks!!!
Your videos are incredibly valuable and very helpful to me. I really admire the structure that you build into Notion in order to leverage it to serve you. From what I have seen, the current version of Notion is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible; I truly believe that future developments, especially the launch of the API will make it one of the most powerful organisational systems that we have seen in a very long time. I am very much looking forward to seeing your upcoming videos, and have learnt so much from those that you have already published.
Thank you for this Stephen, feedback like this is super helpful and makes the video production all worthwhile. I totally agree, that we have just seen the tip of the iceberg -- both in terms of what's possible with the current edition of Notion, and in terms of what is to come with this technology. And I think you're right, the API/Zapier integration will be a quantum leap. I'm investing heavily into the Notion platform to get the most out of all this. New videos coming out each of the next few days if I can stay on track (which h Notion will help me do :) )
@@augustbradley One area that does interest me is to regularly export the Notion Data to GoogleDrive, then use Google Sheets to analyse the CSV files and get even more of an insight into the data gathered by Notion. Sheets could then be used to generate Pivot Tables and Charts for even greater insight into the data collated.
I do the exact same thing with my Daily Tracking database, measuring sleep and fitness and business metrics I'm tracking. Will talk about that in the Daily Tracking video that will probably post on Saturday. Your approach there is super smart.
I love your videos! I have been active with Notion and always searching for ways to use it as a teacher and to understand it more. Your videos are amazing. Thank you!
Thanks Selin! Awesome to hear this was helpful. Lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
Hi August, this is really amazing stuff. Thank you for so generously sharing your knowledge and what you have learned in Notion. I've been playing with Notion for almost a year now and just haven't been able to find something that works for me, but this is a major push in the right direction. I'm a big GTDer and this doesn't stray from those principles. I've tried PARA for organizing my digital life but it just isn't making sense to me. This resonates, though, and I grateful for the amazing videos. Many thanks and looking forward to more.
Thanks a lot Peter, means a great deal to me that this is resonating. I very much like the GTD mindset and use some elements of the system, though have adapted for Notion's unique capabilities. Others were less helpful, so I've done a lot of modifying -- as I think every should do with any system. I think PARA has a lot of shortcomings, particularly in a Notion environment which can do so much more. I really appreciate your feedback and support!
Great videos, August. Watched them all last night and today lol :) I've got three questions for you: 1) You mention that all your tasks have Do Dates, but you also mention that you don't assign priorities and "lock in" your tasks until the night before. Let's say you read an article or take a course that you get a bunch of ideas from that may align with a Yearly goal/pillar... but to not derail from your Monthly/Quarterly goals, you won't be getting to them any time soon. How do you handle these sorts of "tasks"? 2) How do you handle recurring tasks? When you finish it, do you just manually move it to a new date, or do you just duplicate it over and over? 3) Other than the lack of a public API, and the recurring task issue, my other big gripe is how members of your team can see your entire master task database if they click through from a dashboard where one is embedded. I hope they implement private "views" of some sort, but in the meantime, how do you handle this? I often have tasks I don't want the whole team to see, even though the tasks would benefit from being linked to databases my whole team has access to (I.e. performance review of a direct report linked to a "People" table, or tasks personal of some nature). Putting them in a 2nd task DB is quite limiting because then you don't get the visibility of the whole system anymore :(
Thanks Nick! Awesome to hear your finding value in them. 1. I do assign priorities for the tasks down the road, but those are loose indicators, the night before they give them a more firm priority rating for the next day. Most of what I get out of courses or articles are not tasks, but rather useful info which goes into my knowledge Vaults (more videos on those soon). If it is a task, it will get a “Do Date” that will be the date when I again assess its priority level relative to what I have going on at that time, it’s really an assessment date. It could be done that day or pushed further out. If I keep pushing it out, that’s a sign that it’s not that important and at some point I’ll either do it or delete it.The hassle of re-assigning it over and over puts pressure on me to make a decision and either do it or delete it. But my system ensures I never just forget about it, it forces a deliberate decision - that’s the key. 2. Yes, once completed this cycle I usually just reassign the next date instead of checking “done". If it takes a lot of time and impacts scheduling other events I would schedule out the upcoming year (or however far makes sense) so that as I glance at the calendar I know to schedule around it. Would be nice to have re-occurirng functionality built into notion, but this manual system is still very easy and takes very little time/effort. Not a big deal to me. 3. Yes, yes yes - these two are my single biggest problem with Notion! API/Zapier integration (which is coming) and the ability for others to see up the database when they are sent a filtered view. This is an issue, no question. Workaround is you just have to create separate databases that silo-off the sensitive data and share the less sensitive data. I agree, this is a major drawback as there is much more power in single combined databases. If I’m working on tasks in a database shared with a client, I just need to have a dedicated task database from that client. Then I have to copy the tasks signed to me over to my database (perhaps linking in a relation, in some cases relational links do not permit outsiders from accessing). If you are a lot of these, create a page as a dashboard with each of these various task databases embedded together. This is far from ideal, it’s my biggest problem at this point -- and is a function of Notion being relatively new and not yet having gotten to this issue. It will be addressed. Notion wants to serve larger enterprise customers, so obviously this will have to be fixed to enable such clients. It's an early growing pain for us.
@@augustbradley Thanks for the response, August. Hopefully the API comes soon, I know they've mentioned it's been "on the roadmap" since early last year I believe. What do you mean by "in some cases relational links do not permit outsiders from accessing" do you have an example? If A links to B, and B links to C.... and C is shared with Tom... will Tom see A or just B?
@@nicks7tm I was referring a relational link from one database to a separate database (not the same database linking up it's own link path). If you share a database that's linked through a relation to another completely separate database that is not shared, I don't think that link works for the party the first database was shared with (meaning, they cannot click through to the other separate database that was not shared). Make sense?
I found your stuff just a couple days ago, and can't get enough. I've finally found a system that really clicks with me. Thank you. And now, a stupid question: I love your icons in your system - they really pop in dark mode. However weird it is, the aesthetics of my workspace matter, and if I'm happy with them, I'm that much more productive. Wondering where you got them. Thanks again. This video series rocks!
Hi Tim, great that you've joined us! Lot's more to come. I search a wide variety of icon website to find the ones I like, there is no single source. Just Google for "free icons" and some websites will pop up to check out. I tend to search for "flat" icons to keep the feel consistent. Hope that helps.
Fantastic breakdown of your Action Items! If you dont have this in your playlist - Id personally love to see how you configured your relational databases specifically Pillars, Clients, Projects, Goal Outcomes, Production Pipelines. Great work!
Thanks for these amazing videos August! I thought I had come up with a pretty solid Notion setup myself until I started watching your videos (thanks to Khe Hy for the tip!). Excited to level up my existing system based on your framework!
Hi August! Thanks for sharing this amazing system. It really helps to put some structure in my life. What I was wondering is how you deal with time for a certain task. How do you ensure a task gets done not only on a certain day, but also within a certain time?
Love this channel and your organization method. Adopting it to my life through these videos to help set up my life in a way that makes more sense. This is the tool/process I have been missing. Thank you so very much. Wishing you the best moving forwards. Would love to support you through patreon as well if that is a direction you go!
Thank you so much! Your feedback here means so much to me. Really appreciate your interest in further supporting the channel, I'm figuring out what to implement on that front., Thank you!
I definitely feel like I'm one of the few people that would benefit from having a complex set of properties to help me make decisions on what should or should not have priority, because I find myself creating Full blown lists of To-Dos for so many different things, & quite so indeed, those full lists can get absurdly overwhelming, haha!
Do Dates will set you free, a short to-do list to manage and prioritize each day. "Discipline = Freedom" as Jacko says: ruclips.net/video/yoEv5PxrDvs/видео.html
Great Motivations! Indeed, I’ve started to incorporate DO Dates across all my Tasks & Projects! Along with the priority levels! I enjoy how you also viewed your tasks in the Calendar view, based on those DO Dates; that was something I never considered before!
Hey August, I just want to tell you that after the "My Notion Life Operating System" I am fan now! Trying to learn notion so that I can follow along. You have completley changed the game. Great Stuff. BTW hoping to see you in a collar Shirt sometime soon :P
August, thanks for the great overview. I believe you've addressed this in a video or comments, but I can't seem to find the answer. I'd like to understand the "Scheduled" tasks more clearly. It sounds like you keep a separate (Google?) calendar. Do you enter ALL scheduled events, meetings, etc. from the calendar into your Actions Items Database with a "Scheduled" tag? It seems that, if you're trying to understand how full each day is and what you can accomplish task-wise, it'd be important to have all those scheduled events reflected. Some days are so full of meetings or research interviews that those are truly my only tasks! I love the idea of being able to check them off and show how they drive toward project completion or goal, but the double entry seems redundant. Thanks for your thoughts!
Great question Lynsey. You clearly see all the angles here, so really it's a matter of deciding what's best for each person's needs and preferences. Certainly scheduled meetings could be an entire day's work. You can commit to one approach or the other, or do a hybrid -- either all Notion with scheduled tasks, time-block in Google Calendar (or any Cal), or do a mix. For me, if it's a complex day or crazy week, I find the functionality of Google Calendar to be worth the effort of laying things out there in detail then have the line mark my point throughout the day. The evening before I will schedule out the entire day in Google Cal with appointments and block planned parts of the day for priorities from my Notion Action Zone. Plus I have automations from Calenbdly and other apps scheduling my appointments directly into Google Cal, can't do that with Notion. If the week is more about a sequential series of personal tasks/projects with just one or two shorter scheduled items, I'll stay in Notion and work through my priorities in order with the Scheduled item added so I don't forget (might set alarm on my phone too). It works either way, depending one how packed and diverse the day is. So I suppose in summary: all scheduled events are in my Google Cal, all tasks are in my Notion system -- whichever has fewer I update and add to the other system the evening before and use that as my primary map for the day. Hope that helps!
Really appreciate you continuing with this series August. Most excellent. I imagine you will be touching on this in the next video but a couple of questions if I may. How do you enter a number of tasks/actions quickly and efficiently? Do you do it in the main task database, or have a operate entry window? Secondly aside form my day job I also have a small furniture making business. I'm often in the situation where I am planning a project that will have a lot of dependant tasks, none of which will become actionable until the project itself starts. Also as I think through/plan the project I will frequently be adding/rearranging these tasks into a final sequence. How would this type of workflow be incorporated into your system efficiently. Finally (for now at least) a request that you touch on project templating. Most of my furniture projects require a number of the same steps (design sketching, cad, cutting lists, timber prep etc etc). This seems like its crying out for a standard starting template that automatically creates a number of initial project tasks that can then be added to. Thanks again. Mark
Great questions Mark! My video coming out (hopefully) this afternoon will address how to do dependent tasks). Tomorrow at the latest. Good idea to do a video on project templates. Adding it to my outline now (for after the video on Projects). Good idea also on a dedicated quick-entry video, I'm adding that to the outline too (right after the Action Zone Dashboard video). Quick answer: I add almost all tasks in the Action Zone Dashboard, which has several embeds of my Action List Database (ie, the Task Database). There I will always enter directly into the Action Item DB, but if it's a quick entry will only designate a Do Date and a priority level (no other tags/relations at that time. If needed, will add those in Weekly Review). I have my phone app and my computer views always open to the Action Zone Dashboard, so it always opens right to where I need to enter it. Takes 3 seconds to complete. I do not use an inbox (common for GTD methods), because the time it takes to frequently sort and re-distribute tasks from the inbox is more cumbersome to me than taking an extra second or two to enter it directly in the Task DB up front. But if someone wants faster entry at the cost of having to sort/process it later, you can either set up a dedicated Notion Inbox for capture (on your home dashboard) or better yet for max entry speed, use Todoist or another specialty task-app to capture lightning fast, then sort that into Notion's Task DB when you get to your desk or as an end-of-day routine. This will be smoother and more elegant once Notion gets its API/Zapier integration released (it's on their development short list). Hope that helps!
Did I miss where you cover Google Calendar-Notion Calendar(Action Items) relations? If not, please explain exactly how you are going to keep them both in terms of the time blocks you have mentioned. And thank you very very much, Master!
Thanks August Bradley, have been using, trying and researching different tools, your videos convenience me, "notion" is the tool to go for. Your videos are incredibly valuable , very helpful and very must suits my requirement. I am looking forward to see video on how these tables are map and work together.
I am absolutely loving this series! Thank you so much August! Is there an upcoming video on Production Pipelines? You mentioned it on this video, but didn't specify if you'll dive furthur into it later on. Thank you so much for this invaluable knowledge. Regards, from Argentina!
I think that the scheduling issue is easier when you use time blocking. Allocate set blocks of time each day for different things, and block them out on Google calendar. Then you can be confident that you have that 1 hour block from 8am every Thursday to do work on a particular project or type of task eg bookkeeping. I'm going to experiment with tagging my tasks with tasks that correspond to my categories of time blocks.
@@augustbradley oh great! Have you done it inside notion? I've only ever done it in google calendar so far. Musing on whether it's worth experimenting with it in notion to support it in gcal.
@@jasmineandrews4727 It definitely works better in Google Calendar, and I sometimes do it there. To an extent you can do it with the Scheduled status tab in the tasks (Action Items) calendar view.
Hi August, do you retain all of your "done" items in your database, or only some? I can imagine that you might want to keep the completed items for an important project, but once that project is finished, are they still of value? Do you go in and review those on a scheduled basis to decide which ones you want to keep? (I can't imagine that you keep your "done" "Rent Check" items.) Thanks so much for these videos! As others have commented, you are putting tremendous effort into producing free content for the rest of us, and it is much appreciated!
August, great stuff. Part of what might help these videos have a more powerful impact for people who are slow on the uptick like myself would likely be to clearly delineate when someone should be doing and when someone should simply be learning in the middle of the video. This can likely be done via a video graphic like the CTA to subscribe. Effectively letting a viewer know at what point its better to simply get an overview and watch, or recreate to experience and at what point its actually time to pause the video and build. Does that make sense? The video lineup started that way with an over view video and then it had a clear CTA to copy or build the top level dashboard section. At this stage in the series im confused as to whether I should be using your template, recreating it on my own on going on to the next video where the CTA might have more clarity. I hope this feedback was useful because your videos are definitely top notch. Thank you for everything you do. Cheers,
If you want to learn notion just try to replicate his system without templates. Start with either this one and the Daily Tracking. Customize it to you. Try to understand why you need this. For example Task are things that help you to get clarity in your day, the Daily Tracking for me is about making new habits and tracking my success in a daily basis. Is important to do the dashboards where you can get inspired and motivate you to keep using the system. Overall if you are super lost I recommend that you read GTD or ZTD systems, they would give you clarity of what is important and what you need to focus in life like values, pillars, habits, goals etc. But whatever you do customize it to your needs or you just gonna get bored and disappointed in the system.
@@jon8367 Agreed, I originally started learning this to create a template based project/offering list for clients but I found that most of my clients have no interest in whats next as long as something is happening and they DEFINITELY don't want to learn Notion haha They keep inviting me to google sheets or docs LOL So I have to find a way to meld the two wolrds because I DO see the power of Notion.
You should definitely get on a Joe Rogan podcast sometime! People need to hear about this new revolution of human thinking! And it will definitely blow up this wonderful gift that you've given to mankind haha
You are doing an amazing job! I am currently setting up a workspave mixing your work and Marie Poulin workspace. Please continue!! It's a pity that RUclips doesn't put automatic subtitles on your content :/
RUclips is now doing the automatic subtitles on these videos. Thanks a ton for your feedback, and I wold love to see/hear about how you merge the two systems -- that sounds super cool!
Hi August, I appreciate the clear thought that has gone into these videos as well as the clear and concise manner you use to convey them. My question revolves around secuity/permissions/isolation. I want to use this tool within my teams but also my teams partner with other teams at the project level. At the heart of many things are TASKS and I'm not quite sure how I can use tasks for my personal stuff while at the same time have tasks be pushed into a project (or the reverse which is probably more likely) and have it become visible to the people in that project. Do you have any videos that hit this topic or any other resources you know of that you think do a good job of covering this?
Thanks Ken! This is one of the two biggest things Notion needs to address (the other is the API). And both will be fixed, we just don't know when. So for now, any task databases that have private items that others should not have access to need to be soloed (kept separate). The result is you would have a personal task DB and a team task DB. Then you would set up a dashboard that shows the two views for each of them next to each other (one on top, the other right under it). This is not ideas as a single view is better, but until we can control access to the database this is the best option.
Hello, I am watching your excellent videos and am very interested in the system structure you develop. Have you already done a video about the relation links between databases? Thanks for the good work!
it's really helpful and clear explantion. one question, if in our daily job, we might have a meeting with customer for an project execution, then you will write a meeting minutes with " action item" after the meeting. those "action items" will be in "task db " of course and link to "project " . I am wondering if those tasks should be linked to the the meeting ? will it be meanful? in the task db structute you demo above, incldues project only. it would be nice to hear your comments.
Congrats and thank you so much! Clear, didactic, and comprehensive! 🙏🏽 I apologize if I missed, where/how do you log in items that come your way during the day for further processing, what David Allen calls the input box/capture tool? Or are you only logging in task/action items that fit into an already defined project/pillar...? Many thanks again and I hope that you are safe and well. PS: Watched the task capture tutorial. Thank you! Is it a correct interpretation that any entry will be handled as a task from the start, as it is directly captured into your Action items database? Many thanks again!
This is a really good system, congrats for putting it together! I'd be curious to know if you have adopted the Notion Projects and Tasks entities, since they have been launched after you initially created the PPV.
Thanks! It's great to hear that it's been helpful to you. The Notion "Projects" and tasks functionality is really a marketing strategy to position itself relative to more single-focused project management software. There's virtually no new functionality in "Projects", and the tiny changes that are in there don't do much of value. The only change worth applying (that I certainly have done) is to switch the Status property to a property to a Notion-defined "Status" property instead of just a single select property. Other than that, there's really nothing in the Projects functionality that's useful, so don't waste your time on it. It's really just a setup wizard for people who don't know how to set up projects the normal way. It's for newcomers to the platform to try to make it easier for them to get started. If you know how to use Notion, it doesn't really do much for you. Hope that helps!
Great videos, I am a bit lost at the complexity of it all but I am sure 5 more rewatches and I should catch up. One request though, can you make sure your videos have the automatically generated captions? For some reason this and the previous video don't have them and it means I cannot watch them at night..
Thanks Antti, appreciate that. I know it looks like a lot up front, but it's not complex once you get it in operation. Just a learning curve and initial setup. And thanks for the heads-up about the captions, for some reason RUclips has been inconsistent about generating those -- so we've been filling in with an outside service when that happens. We must have missed these two, will add them to the list to do right away. Let us know if you see any more without captions, Thank you!
Yes, for sure. I have a video coming up specifically on that. Will show in in the video -- if when you see it you would still like the template too, just mention it in the comments of that video. Thanks for the feedback!
I have a question. When do you enter the "do" date? As soon as you add the task? How do you decide in advance when the task should be done, isn't it hard to judge how much you have scheduled for any one day? I'm guessing assigning tasks to days is part of your weekly prep?
I want to love this system, and I think it is super clever. BUT i'm having difficulty trying to blend personal projects, eg renovating a van with business projects eg a software development project. Software has a number of different tasks for each action if you will. Eg for one thing you might have Idea, Design, Plan, Code, Test, Release etc. With this system I think I would need to create a separate action item for each one and give it a do date and link to the task. Its quite a lot of work compared to a simple Kanban that moves a task along. Im going to keep playing with it but not quite nailed it down yet. Thanks anyway though, still learning a lot about Notion.
Nice video. What I don't understand is how you are linking these with your action items on other pages (daily action dashboard). Maybe it's on another video?
Thanks Chris, good question. Yes, there will be a video on that (two between this one and that one, hoping to get that one out Sunday). But the quick answer is that I'm embedding views of this task database (the action items database) into the "action zone dashboard" (which itself is set up as a page, not a database). Embedding a database into a page is done by using what Notion calls a "linked database", though I think that terminology is confusing because you are not so much linking to the database, you're embedding it. Here's a link to Notion's support site explaining how to do it (then in a couple videos I'll show how I apply this feature in my system)... www.notion.so/Linked-databases-fb007e2798d04c57aee839ecf6ce450a
Hello Agust, thanks very much for the VERY comprehensive content. Your system and the way you present it is just what I was looking for - for years to be honest. Part of what makes the calendar view here so amazing is that the action items are sorted by priority and that the priority shows in the calendar view. In my NOTION view of this very same database, only the headlines show up. SO: HOW DO I MAKE THE PRIORITY TAGS SHOW UP IN THE CALENDAR PLEASE? Try as I might I could not find an answer to that question. Best wishes - Martin
Hi August! Do you have any suggestions for tasks that may span multiple non-consecutive days? For instance, maybe I have a task like "Organize Office", but I know that I can only work on this for about 1 hour in order to make progress on additional items as well. I know I can work on "Organize Office" on Wednesday and Friday, but not Thursday. I see in Notion I can add an end date to an item, but it then spans over Thursday too. I thought about maybe just working the task on Wednesday and then simply changing the "Do Date" then to Friday, but then it feels like maybe I'm not going to be able to look back and say that I worked on it Wednesday too. Perhaps this is where a separate Google Calendar makes sense? Interested to hear your thoughts. :) Thank you!
Good questions Amanda. This situation happens a lot for me too. First, be sure you're breaking tasks down into small enough units (no projects posing as tasks). Then if the task is not completed on the Do Date, I slide it to the next day I plan to work on it. Move it to later dates as it progresses, until it's done then check it off. But these date slides should not be going on for a long time -- in that case make smaller definitions of the task ("get started on XYZ" or "write 1st page of the article" instead of "write article", etc...). Hope that helps!
...and yes, at some level of complexity you might need to time-block in Google Calendar. Nothing wrong with managing the action items in Notion and time blocking from that the night before into Google Cal.
Hi I am completely new to this. I have been looking for an alternative to something I have been using for 20 years. Its an install, and in my new job, we aren't allowed to install anything on work laptops. I found this channel whilst looking to see if there was a web based solution I might use. I have watched 3 of your tutorials so far and feel like I might have struck gold!! I now need to try it out, watch more of your very clear helpful tutorials and work out how I can use it best. one immediate question I have, is can you create recurring tasks? My other system you could. So if there was a task you had to do weekly, you set up the recurrence detail and it would automatically do this for you. There are some tasks I need to do daily - like fill in timesheets. I don't want to have to manually enter this all the time if possible. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and systems in this way. I have downloaded the action zone template and will try to get to grips with it all!
Not sure when to create tags instead of using relational. I saw that you set priorities as tags, and was not sure why and what limitations that presents by doing so.
@August Bradley, great video! I have a question? What does 1st priority mean versus Immediate? Is Immediate something that has to be done first thing in the morning and 1st Priority something that absolutely HAS to be done that day. Can you also please define 2nd, 3rd, etc. priority. This will be helpful to me. Much thanks.
Hey August, I have a quick meta question about your PPV system. How would you explain the difference between Value Goals and Pillars? p.s. thank you again for sharing these with the world!
Good question Lilian, you've been thinking deeply about this stuff. I will of course have a video that addresses this, but quickly here: Value Goals are specific things you would like to accomplish. Pillars are ongoing constants in your life (or for long periods of your life). Value goals are the softer, more aspirational side of your goals, and link directly to Goal Outcomes (which are more tangible, specific and measurable). It helps me to think asprirationally about my goals first, then nail down the measurable outcomes to represent those aspirations. So Value Goals are a way of getting to and shaping your Goal Outcomes -- the two types of goals are part of a process (Value Goals first, leading to Goal Outcomes second). Starting with goal outcomes can create too much of a disconnect from your life values and become too transactional if not shaped by your guiding principles. Value Goals are a link between your personal values and your Goal Outcomes, making the connection more clear and explicit. More soon.
@@augustbradley Thank you August for taking the time to elaborate on that... and definitely looking forward to more videos from you. I think your channel is the first one I triggered that Remind me bell from youtube for :-)
Perhaps one tweak you could do to make it slightly less confusing when speaking about it, might be to change the two do/due dates to: "Do-on Date" or "Do-it Date", and "Due-by Date"... ?
I like the fact that they have the same sound, that's the point. I'm challenging the traditional usage. There is no confusion when I say it, I always mean Do Date.
Just rewatched this and got even so much more out of it a second time! Thank you again! But now I have one more question. I didn’t realize you had the action database in your daily action zone pages so no need to recreate the wheel, yay! But if I try to add something to the master action database page, if the Do Date is further out or not assigned a date, it disappears due to the filters on that page. I’m assuming I need to change one of the set filters to be able to see all the actions in the database since it says master?
Depends on what you want to see in the view, yes change as desired. Different views are set up for different purposes. If you do a function often, set up a view that is focused on that function.
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"From any task that's going to take a meaningful amount of time, i need to know that this task is relevant for the things i have set as priorities and major objectives in my life. If i'm adding a lot of tasks that are not connected, that there isn't anything to link to at a higher level in my goal and aspiration structure, then i need to really think: Is this a task i should be spending time on? And the answer is : probably not, unless i fail to define an important objective in my life"
This exploded my brain
This video series is making 2020 a foundational year for me
Hi August! Great content. Maybe I've missed it, but what do you recommend we do first. Set up our pillars? pipelines? It would be nice to see in terms of implementation what should be built first. Do you input your tasks from this view or do you do it from your projects view?
This is just insane how this system is working, great job
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
1:08 Why Notion for Tasks
4:34 Prioritized Calendar View
14:21 Under the Hood Look at the Database Setup & Structure
This is amazing, thanks again. Hugely appreciate this!!!
Lilian - couldn't agree more with your comment. August - I think your emphasis on clarity and access is head & shoulders above anything being suggested right now regarding both the use & power of Notion. So many applications currently have had the user forced into rigid structures - Notion hands down crushes this paradigm. August you work here is invaluable to my productivity.
Thank you Eric, your thoughts here mean a lot to me. I totally agree, lets keep building and enhancing lives with the power of our systems and platforms. Lots more to come.
You are quite brilliant at this.
You would probably hate me if you worked with me, but thanks for your help with making Notion as useful as possible.
August, thank you so much for these videos! I think you're doing a great job of explaining how your system works, as well as why it's set up which is extremely important. Something I think would be incredibly helpful is actually a follow along guide to set such a system up. Right now, there are so many features present in your system already that it takes quite some dedication to try to set it up from scratch, and just using a ready made template of yours detracts from actually learning and understanding the system on a deeper level. This is coming from someone who's already very used to these kinds of system thinking, having iterated on my own task/project management setups, GTD, and building a second brain, etc.
So my proposal for a future video series would to set up this system from scratch and creating a MVP of the core parts of the system, like pillars, projects and the task system, just so that everything is connected and there's a clear daily process one can start using. And then one can build on top of that.
Hey August! It's been more than a year since your video came out, and I'm so glad I came across it now.
When I watched your Overview video, it validated a lot of the issues in my current systems and processes, as well as give an overview of what to expect in terms of answering the question I have of: "how do I create a one-stop powerhouse repository to store my ongoing thoughts, tasks, resources, annual and periodic OKRs, etc in addition to tying in processes that help me evaluate and optimise my current way of working / goal pursuit?"
It's awesome to see that Notion is a tool that is becoming an all-encompassing solver to this problem, this job to be done, and thank you for sharing your thought process and system of how to do this.
I love that you always emphasise in your videos that your model is a dynamic guide that can be altered and adjusted to suit the individual, which you also put into practice, because your Overview video shows your Notion layout to be different to that of many of your tutorial videos along this playlist. I'm finding it really helpful to regularly pause your videos while putting my Notion database ecosystem together myself and customising as I go.
A great resource for people who want to organise, connect, and create new knowledge, in pursuit of their many life goals!!
You explained how Notion is very different from other note-taking, todo list, task management apps and that's a spot on.
Notion is like clay and how one shapes it and creates something is completely based on their understanding and organizational models. No other app have given me that freedom or customizability yet that much simpler.
Absolutely Vignesh! You and I see this similarly.
I really like the idea of 'do date'. Thanks for sharing. Keep up the good work!
I have been watching all your videos all day. This is amazing and is changing my life. Thank you!
You have dope shirts man! Great content. Enjoying this. Applying this.
August,
I am drinking the notion kool-aid and it tastes great. Thanks for all your hardwork and dedication. I came here to post a question as well but just realized you have a video coming up in the series. I am starting a residency soon and this information could not be more helpful. Thank you!
You are the best tutor on Notion.
Thank you Lokender! I work hard at it.
OMG ... August, I can't THANK YOU enough for a) creating these so-well-done-and-super-detailed videos, and b) making your templates available to us for free! The fact that I could just dive in and start populating my Action Items Database without having to create the database is just ... well, amazing. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Hi Linda, where can I get access to those templates you mentioned for free?
August, your work is absolutely brilliant!
I’m a Canadian teaching English to top managers in Moscow. A few weeks ago I told my Russian brother-in-law (of course he’s Russian; when in Rome...) that he is my brain outside of my brain (he’s a computer scientist). Not long after that, he found Notion, then I found you on RUclips. Energy follows thought! Thank you for existing.
In this video you commented that we could request that you make a video on “Introducing relational links to other databases”. It would be a Godsend. I try to teach (actually I teach my students how to teach themselves, but I digress) my students that learning a language is not just simply translating words, and learning grammar. Rather, it’s about learning a completely different system/logic (culture/mentality). Sooo, to make a short story long, it would be so useful to be able to understand more about “relational links/other databases” so that there would be an increased possibility of flexibility and exploration. Thanks so much once again for, well...for everything. Спасибо from Moscow
Thanks Irving! I greatly appreciate this feedback, wow 🙂. Will see if I can find a place to slip that video in, but won't be right away -- have others lined up. In the meantime, Notion's support Wiki is really good and I recommend you check out their instructions on this: www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79
@@augustbradley Excellent, and no worries that it won't be right away; I have developed "Russian patience" :🤣 Cheers!
In awe of collection of your shirts.
Not even finished the video but I have to say: Thank You! For the dependent tasks. I wanted to do something like that and didn't found how until I saw you did it. Also, I like a lot your very practical way of defining priorities and how to reach your goals. Very good!
Hello. I want to thank you for your content. I very like you approach. Im using Notion for 5 months and in these days im taking my setup to another level. Im using Notion like you for almost every thing in my life. Personal and biz. Keep going please :) For me now best Notion videos. Greetings from Slovakia.
Thank you for the feedback Juraj, I love hearing that this video series is helpful to you. You and I seem to think alike, the Notion platform can really streamline and optimize life and business. Keep pushing to the next level. Cheers to Slovakia!
Thank you so much for sharing!
Suggestion for improvement/automation: The "Done" checkbox is only a reflection of the Status Column... you can make Notion auto populate the "Done" using a formula.
For this, I added "Completed" and "Dropped" to the possible choices of "Status", then set the "Done" with this formula: or(prop("Status") == "Completed", prop("Status") == "Dropped")
Fantastic! Greetings from Brazil!
Straight and structured| Not easy job. Thanks a lot
Not always easy, but doable. I find this system makes it a lot easier. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, definitely share any future thoughts!
Wanted to thank you for putting out to the world your systemic organization of daily task and visibly linking it to a hierarchical structure of the big picture. Really helps in improving clarity of actions towards vision. I can see a huge benefit of investing my time in building up the notion system, much thanks to your content!
Thanks Moshi! Awesome to hear this was helpful. Glad you've joined us!
Can feel all your energy, the passion you put to this videos, I really love that, a big thank you, my bell is on, the sub button is pushed as well as the like and the subscription to the newsletter, please keep it up. You're an inspiration not only on making these videos but with the passion you make them.
Outstanding. A "must" for busy/ overwhelmed entrepreneurs, who are juggling a ton of projects & tasks.
Thank you for the great instruction. Very clear & easy to follow!
Thank you for your feedback and support Ron! I massively appreciate it.
I've watched a few videos on Notion workflows, but yours so far makes the most sense to me. It's clear, usable and solves many problems I've come across with others systems.
Thank you for this really nice advices!
Can you please do a video on how to do time-blocking on google calendar and how you combine it with notion? Thank you.
Super useful content! Helps in aligning executive functions with the fast-paced life that requires super high productivity! Thanks!
Thanks for sharing this with the world.
This is so amazing! Thank you for sharing this great content for free. It makes me so happy and productive. What I added to the action items is a text property with next action! I write the immediate action, what I have to do, to accomplish the task. For example: open email....I find it so helpful to get this push in my back to get started. Thank you very much mister Bradley.
Awesome! Always think about how to modify any system to suite your needs. Much more to come.
Hi August, to be honest, I have been lost for years trying to find a system to organize my stuff, and trying to organize even the most simple things drove me crazy. But now that I have found your Notion videos I am sure I have found not only the software and the system but also the person who explains everything in detail.
Thanks a lot for all the effort put into the videos to explain your system. I really love how your system is structured and how detailed and well-paced your videos are.
I do have a question though, I am not sure if it is suggested to wait to see all the videos and then implement or if I should implement after each video.
I guess you can see why even the most simple things sometimes drive me crazy LOL
Thanks!!!
Thanks so much it's helpful
Your videos are incredibly valuable and very helpful to me.
I really admire the structure that you build into Notion in order to leverage it to serve you.
From what I have seen, the current version of Notion is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible; I truly believe that future developments, especially the launch of the API will make it one of the most powerful organisational systems that we have seen in a very long time.
I am very much looking forward to seeing your upcoming videos, and have learnt so much from those that you have already published.
Thank you for this Stephen, feedback like this is super helpful and makes the video production all worthwhile. I totally agree, that we have just seen the tip of the iceberg -- both in terms of what's possible with the current edition of Notion, and in terms of what is to come with this technology. And I think you're right, the API/Zapier integration will be a quantum leap. I'm investing heavily into the Notion platform to get the most out of all this.
New videos coming out each of the next few days if I can stay on track (which h Notion will help me do :) )
@@augustbradley One area that does interest me is to regularly export the Notion Data to GoogleDrive, then use Google Sheets to analyse the CSV files and get even more of an insight into the data gathered by Notion.
Sheets could then be used to generate Pivot Tables and Charts for even greater insight into the data collated.
I do the exact same thing with my Daily Tracking database, measuring sleep and fitness and business metrics I'm tracking. Will talk about that in the Daily Tracking video that will probably post on Saturday. Your approach there is super smart.
I love your videos! I have been active with Notion and always searching for ways to use it as a teacher and to understand it more. Your videos are amazing. Thank you!
Thanks Selin! Awesome to hear this was helpful. Lots more to come, working on some cool new things for the channel and the community growing around it. Glad you've joined us!
Hi August, this is really amazing stuff. Thank you for so generously sharing your knowledge and what you have learned in Notion. I've been playing with Notion for almost a year now and just haven't been able to find something that works for me, but this is a major push in the right direction. I'm a big GTDer and this doesn't stray from those principles. I've tried PARA for organizing my digital life but it just isn't making sense to me. This resonates, though, and I grateful for the amazing videos. Many thanks and looking forward to more.
Thanks a lot Peter, means a great deal to me that this is resonating. I very much like the GTD mindset and use some elements of the system, though have adapted for Notion's unique capabilities. Others were less helpful, so I've done a lot of modifying -- as I think every should do with any system. I think PARA has a lot of shortcomings, particularly in a Notion environment which can do so much more. I really appreciate your feedback and support!
Great video with a simple, but clear layout and pacing.
Great videos, August. Watched them all last night and today lol :) I've got three questions for you:
1) You mention that all your tasks have Do Dates, but you also mention that you don't assign priorities and "lock in" your tasks until the night before. Let's say you read an article or take a course that you get a bunch of ideas from that may align with a Yearly goal/pillar... but to not derail from your Monthly/Quarterly goals, you won't be getting to them any time soon. How do you handle these sorts of "tasks"?
2) How do you handle recurring tasks? When you finish it, do you just manually move it to a new date, or do you just duplicate it over and over?
3) Other than the lack of a public API, and the recurring task issue, my other big gripe is how members of your team can see your entire master task database if they click through from a dashboard where one is embedded. I hope they implement private "views" of some sort, but in the meantime, how do you handle this? I often have tasks I don't want the whole team to see, even though the tasks would benefit from being linked to databases my whole team has access to (I.e. performance review of a direct report linked to a "People" table, or tasks personal of some nature). Putting them in a 2nd task DB is quite limiting because then you don't get the visibility of the whole system anymore :(
Thanks Nick! Awesome to hear your finding value in them.
1. I do assign priorities for the tasks down the road, but those are loose indicators, the night before they give them a more firm priority rating for the next day. Most of what I get out of courses or articles are not tasks, but rather useful info which goes into my knowledge Vaults (more videos on those soon). If it is a task, it will get a “Do Date” that will be the date when I again assess its priority level relative to what I have going on at that time, it’s really an assessment date. It could be done that day or pushed further out. If I keep pushing it out, that’s a sign that it’s not that important and at some point I’ll either do it or delete it.The hassle of re-assigning it over and over puts pressure on me to make a decision and either do it or delete it. But my system ensures I never just forget about it, it forces a deliberate decision - that’s the key.
2. Yes, once completed this cycle I usually just reassign the next date instead of checking “done". If it takes a lot of time and impacts scheduling other events I would schedule out the upcoming year (or however far makes sense) so that as I glance at the calendar I know to schedule around it. Would be nice to have re-occurirng functionality built into notion, but this manual system is still very easy and takes very little time/effort. Not a big deal to me.
3. Yes, yes yes - these two are my single biggest problem with Notion! API/Zapier integration (which is coming) and the ability for others to see up the database when they are sent a filtered view. This is an issue, no question. Workaround is you just have to create separate databases that silo-off the sensitive data and share the less sensitive data. I agree, this is a major drawback as there is much more power in single combined databases.
If I’m working on tasks in a database shared with a client, I just need to have a dedicated task database from that client. Then I have to copy the tasks signed to me over to my database (perhaps linking in a relation, in some cases relational links do not permit outsiders from accessing). If you are a lot of these, create a page as a dashboard with each of these various task databases embedded together. This is far from ideal, it’s my biggest problem at this point -- and is a function of Notion being relatively new and not yet having gotten to this issue. It will be addressed. Notion wants to serve larger enterprise customers, so obviously this will have to be fixed to enable such clients. It's an early growing pain for us.
@@augustbradley Thanks for the response, August. Hopefully the API comes soon, I know they've mentioned it's been "on the roadmap" since early last year I believe. What do you mean by "in some cases relational links do not permit outsiders from accessing" do you have an example? If A links to B, and B links to C.... and C is shared with Tom... will Tom see A or just B?
@@nicks7tm I was referring a relational link from one database to a separate database (not the same database linking up it's own link path). If you share a database that's linked through a relation to another completely separate database that is not shared, I don't think that link works for the party the first database was shared with (meaning, they cannot click through to the other separate database that was not shared). Make sense?
The amount of effort you put into this Notion series is INSANE! Thank you very much, August! You've been helping me tremendously to organize my life.
I found your stuff just a couple days ago, and can't get enough. I've finally found a system that really clicks with me. Thank you. And now, a stupid question: I love your icons in your system - they really pop in dark mode. However weird it is, the aesthetics of my workspace matter, and if I'm happy with them, I'm that much more productive. Wondering where you got them. Thanks again. This video series rocks!
Hi Tim, great that you've joined us! Lot's more to come. I search a wide variety of icon website to find the ones I like, there is no single source. Just Google for "free icons" and some websites will pop up to check out. I tend to search for "flat" icons to keep the feel consistent. Hope that helps.
Hey August, a quick question. How are you going about the repeated tasks setup in Notion ?
Fantastic breakdown of your Action Items! If you dont have this in your playlist - Id personally love to see how you configured your relational databases specifically Pillars, Clients, Projects, Goal Outcomes, Production Pipelines.
Great work!
I would love a video on relational links if you haven't already done one. I'll search to make sure! Thank you!
Man, this is too amazing to be real
Thank you so much! I've been looking for a system like this. I will be recommending your channel to all my friends!
Awesome, thank you Rashid! Very happy you've found us and joined us on this adventure. 🚀
August, thanks for putting out this information, great system you got there, im learning a lot with your content.
Thanks Vini! Awesome to hear this was helpful.
Great Video! Love the level of detail you are sharing. Brilliant ideas. Can't wait to tweak my system. Looking forward to more of your content.
Thanks Jennifer! Really appreciate the feedback. Lots more to come soon.
Thanks for these amazing videos August! I thought I had come up with a pretty solid Notion setup myself until I started watching your videos (thanks to Khe Hy for the tip!). Excited to level up my existing system based on your framework!
Hi August! Thanks for sharing this amazing system. It really helps to put some structure in my life. What I was wondering is how you deal with time for a certain task. How do you ensure a task gets done not only on a certain day, but also within a certain time?
Love this channel and your organization method. Adopting it to my life through these videos to help set up my life in a way that makes more sense. This is the tool/process I have been missing. Thank you so very much. Wishing you the best moving forwards. Would love to support you through patreon as well if that is a direction you go!
Thank you so much! Your feedback here means so much to me. Really appreciate your interest in further supporting the channel, I'm figuring out what to implement on that front., Thank you!
I definitely feel like I'm one of the few people that would benefit from having a complex set of properties to help me make decisions on what should or should not have priority, because I find myself creating Full blown lists of To-Dos for so many different things, & quite so indeed, those full lists can get absurdly overwhelming, haha!
Do Dates will set you free, a short to-do list to manage and prioritize each day. "Discipline = Freedom" as Jacko says: ruclips.net/video/yoEv5PxrDvs/видео.html
Great Motivations! Indeed, I’ve started to incorporate DO Dates across all my Tasks & Projects! Along with the priority levels! I enjoy how you also viewed your tasks in the Calendar view, based on those DO Dates; that was something I never considered before!
Thank you August! The task calendar idea is optimal! I just added it to my linked database views. Helpful.
Isn't that great?! Glad it was helpful.
Great video.
Thanks Umberto! Very happy to hear you liked it.
Hey August, I just want to tell you that after the "My Notion Life Operating System" I am fan now! Trying to learn notion so that I can follow along. You have completley changed the game.
Great Stuff. BTW hoping to see you in a collar Shirt sometime soon :P
Thanks! Awesome to hear this was helpful. I've given up collars, it's my minimalist tendency. Eliminate all unnecessary distractions... like collars.
August, thanks for the great overview. I believe you've addressed this in a video or comments, but I can't seem to find the answer. I'd like to understand the "Scheduled" tasks more clearly. It sounds like you keep a separate (Google?) calendar. Do you enter ALL scheduled events, meetings, etc. from the calendar into your Actions Items Database with a "Scheduled" tag? It seems that, if you're trying to understand how full each day is and what you can accomplish task-wise, it'd be important to have all those scheduled events reflected. Some days are so full of meetings or research interviews that those are truly my only tasks! I love the idea of being able to check them off and show how they drive toward project completion or goal, but the double entry seems redundant. Thanks for your thoughts!
Great question Lynsey. You clearly see all the angles here, so really it's a matter of deciding what's best for each person's needs and preferences. Certainly scheduled meetings could be an entire day's work. You can commit to one approach or the other, or do a hybrid -- either all Notion with scheduled tasks, time-block in Google Calendar (or any Cal), or do a mix.
For me, if it's a complex day or crazy week, I find the functionality of Google Calendar to be worth the effort of laying things out there in detail then have the line mark my point throughout the day. The evening before I will schedule out the entire day in Google Cal with appointments and block planned parts of the day for priorities from my Notion Action Zone. Plus I have automations from Calenbdly and other apps scheduling my appointments directly into Google Cal, can't do that with Notion. If the week is more about a sequential series of personal tasks/projects with just one or two shorter scheduled items, I'll stay in Notion and work through my priorities in order with the Scheduled item added so I don't forget (might set alarm on my phone too). It works either way, depending one how packed and diverse the day is.
So I suppose in summary: all scheduled events are in my Google Cal, all tasks are in my Notion system -- whichever has fewer I update and add to the other system the evening before and use that as my primary map for the day. Hope that helps!
Great content sir. Thank you a lot! I have long dreamed of such a program, because others lacked consistency and flexibility.
Thanks starman, I had a similar dream. Then I made it come true :)
Pure liquid awesomness puring out of my screen.
Awesome work!
Really appreciate you continuing with this series August. Most excellent. I imagine you will be touching on this in the next video but a couple of questions if I may. How do you enter a number of tasks/actions quickly and efficiently? Do you do it in the main task database, or have a operate entry window? Secondly aside form my day job I also have a small furniture making business. I'm often in the situation where I am planning a project that will have a lot of dependant tasks, none of which will become actionable until the project itself starts. Also as I think through/plan the project I will frequently be adding/rearranging these tasks into a final sequence. How would this type of workflow be incorporated into your system efficiently. Finally (for now at least) a request that you touch on project templating. Most of my furniture projects require a number of the same steps (design sketching, cad, cutting lists, timber prep etc etc). This seems like its crying out for a standard starting template that automatically creates a number of initial project tasks that can then be added to. Thanks again. Mark
Great questions Mark!
My video coming out (hopefully) this afternoon will address how to do dependent tasks). Tomorrow at the latest.
Good idea to do a video on project templates. Adding it to my outline now (for after the video on Projects).
Good idea also on a dedicated quick-entry video, I'm adding that to the outline too (right after the Action Zone Dashboard video). Quick answer: I add almost all tasks in the Action Zone Dashboard, which has several embeds of my Action List Database (ie, the Task Database). There I will always enter directly into the Action Item DB, but if it's a quick entry will only designate a Do Date and a priority level (no other tags/relations at that time. If needed, will add those in Weekly Review). I have my phone app and my computer views always open to the Action Zone Dashboard, so it always opens right to where I need to enter it. Takes 3 seconds to complete.
I do not use an inbox (common for GTD methods), because the time it takes to frequently sort and re-distribute tasks from the inbox is more cumbersome to me than taking an extra second or two to enter it directly in the Task DB up front.
But if someone wants faster entry at the cost of having to sort/process it later, you can either set up a dedicated Notion Inbox for capture (on your home dashboard) or better yet for max entry speed, use Todoist or another specialty task-app to capture lightning fast, then sort that into Notion's Task DB when you get to your desk or as an end-of-day routine. This will be smoother and more elegant once Notion gets its API/Zapier integration released (it's on their development short list).
Hope that helps!
Paused the video to subscribe lest I forget.. excellent idea for working around some of the limitations of the kanban view
Did I miss where you cover Google Calendar-Notion Calendar(Action Items) relations? If not, please explain exactly how you are going to keep them both in terms of the time blocks you have mentioned. And thank you very very much, Master!
I can't find it as well
Thanks August Bradley, have been using, trying and researching different tools, your videos convenience me, "notion" is the tool to go for. Your videos are incredibly valuable , very helpful and very must suits my requirement. I am looking forward to see video on how these tables are map and work together.
Thank you Ansari! I greatly appreciate your feedback, it means a lot to me that this has been helpful to you. Lots more to come.
I am absolutely loving this series! Thank you so much August!
Is there an upcoming video on Production Pipelines? You mentioned it on this video, but didn't specify if you'll dive furthur into it later on. Thank you so much for this invaluable knowledge. Regards, from Argentina!
Excellent, Ammiel! Yes, the video on the Content Creation Pipeline dives into that topic. Keep up the great work!
Thank you, August, but how can I build this template in Notion?
I found it very difficult.
I think that the scheduling issue is easier when you use time blocking. Allocate set blocks of time each day for different things, and block them out on Google calendar. Then you can be confident that you have that 1 hour block from 8am every Thursday to do work on a particular project or type of task eg bookkeeping. I'm going to experiment with tagging my tasks with tasks that correspond to my categories of time blocks.
Absolutely Jasmine, I'm a huge fan of time blocking as well. Excellent approach.
@@augustbradley oh great! Have you done it inside notion? I've only ever done it in google calendar so far. Musing on whether it's worth experimenting with it in notion to support it in gcal.
@@jasmineandrews4727 It definitely works better in Google Calendar, and I sometimes do it there. To an extent you can do it with the Scheduled status tab in the tasks (Action Items) calendar view.
@@augustbradley Thanks I'll play with it and see how it goes :)
Hi August, do you retain all of your "done" items in your database, or only some? I can imagine that you might want to keep the completed items for an important project, but once that project is finished, are they still of value? Do you go in and review those on a scheduled basis to decide which ones you want to keep? (I can't imagine that you keep your "done" "Rent Check" items.) Thanks so much for these videos! As others have commented, you are putting tremendous effort into producing free content for the rest of us, and it is much appreciated!
Thank you thank you and thank you!!!
You are so welcome! Thanks for joining us on this journey 🙂
This is super inspiring, August! Thank you so much. Can you say a bit more about what the Production Pipeline is, and how you use it?
The do D.O. date ! 😆
I knew sorta that you had a podcast, but I didn't realize it click mentally for some reason. Just followed you and it on spotify
August, great stuff. Part of what might help these videos have a more powerful impact for people who are slow on the uptick like myself would likely be to clearly delineate when someone should be doing and when someone should simply be learning in the middle of the video.
This can likely be done via a video graphic like the CTA to subscribe.
Effectively letting a viewer know at what point its better to simply get an overview and watch, or recreate to experience and at what point its actually time to pause the video and build. Does that make sense?
The video lineup started that way with an over view video and then it had a clear CTA to copy or build the top level dashboard section.
At this stage in the series im confused as to whether I should be using your template, recreating it on my own on going on to the next video where the CTA might have more clarity.
I hope this feedback was useful because your videos are definitely top notch.
Thank you for everything you do.
Cheers,
If you want to learn notion just try to replicate his system without templates. Start with either this one and the Daily Tracking. Customize it to you. Try to understand why you need this. For example Task are things that help you to get clarity in your day, the Daily Tracking for me is about making new habits and tracking my success in a daily basis. Is important to do the dashboards where you can get inspired and motivate you to keep using the system. Overall if you are super lost I recommend that you read GTD or ZTD systems, they would give you clarity of what is important and what you need to focus in life like values, pillars, habits, goals etc. But whatever you do customize it to your needs or you just gonna get bored and disappointed in the system.
@@jon8367 Agreed, I originally started learning this to create a template based project/offering list for clients but I found that most of my clients have no interest in whats next as long as something is happening and they DEFINITELY don't want to learn Notion haha They keep inviting me to google sheets or docs LOL So I have to find a way to meld the two wolrds because I DO see the power of Notion.
I love this man.
You should definitely get on a Joe Rogan podcast sometime! People need to hear about this new revolution of human thinking! And it will definitely blow up this wonderful gift that you've given to mankind haha
I'd love to, can you introduce us? Thanks Zion!
@@augustbradley ahaha unfortunately we're not close like that but I will definitely tweet at him for you!
@@RebelousGenius Awesome Zion, appreciate that!
Very useful
You are doing an amazing job! I am currently setting up a workspave mixing your work and Marie Poulin workspace. Please continue!!
It's a pity that RUclips doesn't put automatic subtitles on your content :/
RUclips is now doing the automatic subtitles on these videos. Thanks a ton for your feedback, and I wold love to see/hear about how you merge the two systems -- that sounds super cool!
what marie Poulin's workspace are you refering to ?
Hi August, I appreciate the clear thought that has gone into these videos as well as the clear and concise manner you use to convey them. My question revolves around secuity/permissions/isolation. I want to use this tool within my teams but also my teams partner with other teams at the project level. At the heart of many things are TASKS and I'm not quite sure how I can use tasks for my personal stuff while at the same time have tasks be pushed into a project (or the reverse which is probably more likely) and have it become visible to the people in that project. Do you have any videos that hit this topic or any other resources you know of that you think do a good job of covering this?
Thanks Ken! This is one of the two biggest things Notion needs to address (the other is the API). And both will be fixed, we just don't know when. So for now, any task databases that have private items that others should not have access to need to be soloed (kept separate). The result is you would have a personal task DB and a team task DB. Then you would set up a dashboard that shows the two views for each of them next to each other (one on top, the other right under it). This is not ideas as a single view is better, but until we can control access to the database this is the best option.
Hello, I am watching your excellent videos and am very interested in the system structure you develop. Have you already done a video about the relation links between databases? Thanks for the good work!
Yes, in many different videos I highlight the relevant links across DBs for each section.
Thank you
8:58 - Priorities for Tasks explained - incl, errands, remember, and quick
it's really helpful and clear explantion. one question, if in our daily job, we might have a meeting with customer for an project execution, then you will write a meeting minutes with " action item" after the meeting. those "action items" will be in "task db " of course and link to "project " . I am wondering if those tasks should be linked to the the meeting ? will it be meanful?
in the task db structute you demo above, incldues project only.
it would be nice to hear your comments.
Congrats and thank you so much! Clear, didactic, and comprehensive! 🙏🏽 I apologize if I missed, where/how do you log in items that come your way during the day for further processing, what David Allen calls the input box/capture tool? Or are you only logging in task/action items that fit into an already defined project/pillar...? Many thanks again and I hope that you are safe and well. PS: Watched the task capture tutorial. Thank you! Is it a correct interpretation that any entry will be handled as a task from the start, as it is directly captured into your Action items database? Many thanks again!
You are amazing 😭
This is a really good system, congrats for putting it together! I'd be curious to know if you have adopted the Notion Projects and Tasks entities, since they have been launched after you initially created the PPV.
Thanks! It's great to hear that it's been helpful to you.
The Notion "Projects" and tasks functionality is really a marketing strategy to position itself relative to more single-focused project management software. There's virtually no new functionality in "Projects", and the tiny changes that are in there don't do much of value.
The only change worth applying (that I certainly have done) is to switch the Status property to a property to a Notion-defined "Status" property instead of just a single select property. Other than that, there's really nothing in the Projects functionality that's useful, so don't waste your time on it. It's really just a setup wizard for people who don't know how to set up projects the normal way. It's for newcomers to the platform to try to make it easier for them to get started. If you know how to use Notion, it doesn't really do much for you. Hope that helps!
Great videos, I am a bit lost at the complexity of it all but I am sure 5 more rewatches and I should catch up. One request though, can you make sure your videos have the automatically generated captions? For some reason this and the previous video don't have them and it means I cannot watch them at night..
Thanks Antti, appreciate that. I know it looks like a lot up front, but it's not complex once you get it in operation. Just a learning curve and initial setup. And thanks for the heads-up about the captions, for some reason RUclips has been inconsistent about generating those -- so we've been filling in with an outside service when that happens. We must have missed these two, will add them to the list to do right away. Let us know if you see any more without captions, Thank you!
Great video. Can you share your weekly review checklist?
Yes, for sure. I have a video coming up specifically on that. Will show in in the video -- if when you see it you would still like the template too, just mention it in the comments of that video. Thanks for the feedback!
I have a question. When do you enter the "do" date? As soon as you add the task? How do you decide in advance when the task should be done, isn't it hard to judge how much you have scheduled for any one day? I'm guessing assigning tasks to days is part of your weekly prep?
I want to love this system, and I think it is super clever. BUT i'm having difficulty trying to blend personal projects, eg renovating a van with business projects eg a software development project. Software has a number of different tasks for each action if you will. Eg for one thing you might have Idea, Design, Plan, Code, Test, Release etc. With this system I think I would need to create a separate action item for each one and give it a do date and link to the task. Its quite a lot of work compared to a simple Kanban that moves a task along. Im going to keep playing with it but not quite nailed it down yet. Thanks anyway though, still learning a lot about Notion.
Nice video. What I don't understand is how you are linking these with your action items on other pages (daily action dashboard). Maybe it's on another video?
Thanks Chris, good question. Yes, there will be a video on that (two between this one and that one, hoping to get that one out Sunday). But the quick answer is that I'm embedding views of this task database (the action items database) into the "action zone dashboard" (which itself is set up as a page, not a database). Embedding a database into a page is done by using what Notion calls a "linked database", though I think that terminology is confusing because you are not so much linking to the database, you're embedding it. Here's a link to Notion's support site explaining how to do it (then in a couple videos I'll show how I apply this feature in my system)... www.notion.so/Linked-databases-fb007e2798d04c57aee839ecf6ce450a
@@augustbradley thanks for the info!
Hello Agust, thanks very much for the VERY comprehensive content. Your system and the way you present it is just what I was looking for - for years to be honest. Part of what makes the calendar view here so amazing is that the action items are sorted by priority and that the priority shows in the calendar view. In my NOTION view of this very same database, only the headlines show up. SO: HOW DO I MAKE THE PRIORITY TAGS SHOW UP IN THE CALENDAR PLEASE? Try as I might I could not find an answer to that question. Best wishes - Martin
Your smile while answering the issues of Notion's slowness, say's it all HAHHAHAAHAH!
Yep!
Hi August! Do you have any suggestions for tasks that may span multiple non-consecutive days? For instance, maybe I have a task like "Organize Office", but I know that I can only work on this for about 1 hour in order to make progress on additional items as well. I know I can work on "Organize Office" on Wednesday and Friday, but not Thursday. I see in Notion I can add an end date to an item, but it then spans over Thursday too. I thought about maybe just working the task on Wednesday and then simply changing the "Do Date" then to Friday, but then it feels like maybe I'm not going to be able to look back and say that I worked on it Wednesday too. Perhaps this is where a separate Google Calendar makes sense?
Interested to hear your thoughts. :) Thank you!
Good questions Amanda. This situation happens a lot for me too. First, be sure you're breaking tasks down into small enough units (no projects posing as tasks). Then if the task is not completed on the Do Date, I slide it to the next day I plan to work on it. Move it to later dates as it progresses, until it's done then check it off. But these date slides should not be going on for a long time -- in that case make smaller definitions of the task ("get started on XYZ" or "write 1st page of the article" instead of "write article", etc...). Hope that helps!
...and yes, at some level of complexity you might need to time-block in Google Calendar. Nothing wrong with managing the action items in Notion and time blocking from that the night before into Google Cal.
Thank you!
Hi I am completely new to this. I have been looking for an alternative to something I have been using for 20 years. Its an install, and in my new job, we aren't allowed to install anything on work laptops. I found this channel whilst looking to see if there was a web based solution I might use. I have watched 3 of your tutorials so far and feel like I might have struck gold!! I now need to try it out, watch more of your very clear helpful tutorials and work out how I can use it best. one immediate question I have, is can you create recurring tasks? My other system you could. So if there was a task you had to do weekly, you set up the recurrence detail and it would automatically do this for you. There are some tasks I need to do daily - like fill in timesheets. I don't want to have to manually enter this all the time if possible.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and systems in this way. I have downloaded the action zone template and will try to get to grips with it all!
Not sure when to create tags instead of using relational. I saw that you set priorities as tags, and was not sure why and what limitations that presents by doing so.
@August Bradley, great video! I have a question? What does 1st priority mean versus Immediate? Is Immediate something that has to be done first thing in the morning and 1st Priority something that absolutely HAS to be done that day. Can you also please define 2nd, 3rd, etc. priority. This will be helpful to me. Much thanks.
Thank you! How do you create reoccurring events?
Hey August, I have a quick meta question about your PPV system. How would you explain the difference between Value Goals and Pillars?
p.s. thank you again for sharing these with the world!
Good question Lilian, you've been thinking deeply about this stuff. I will of course have a video that addresses this, but quickly here: Value Goals are specific things you would like to accomplish. Pillars are ongoing constants in your life (or for long periods of your life).
Value goals are the softer, more aspirational side of your goals, and link directly to Goal Outcomes (which are more tangible, specific and measurable). It helps me to think asprirationally about my goals first, then nail down the measurable outcomes to represent those aspirations. So Value Goals are a way of getting to and shaping your Goal Outcomes -- the two types of goals are part of a process (Value Goals first, leading to Goal Outcomes second). Starting with goal outcomes can create too much of a disconnect from your life values and become too transactional if not shaped by your guiding principles. Value Goals are a link between your personal values and your Goal Outcomes, making the connection more clear and explicit. More soon.
@@augustbradley Thank you August for taking the time to elaborate on that... and definitely looking forward to more videos from you. I think your channel is the first one I triggered that Remind me bell from youtube for :-)
Perhaps one tweak you could do to make it slightly less confusing when speaking about it, might be to change the two do/due dates to: "Do-on Date" or "Do-it Date", and "Due-by Date"... ?
I like the fact that they have the same sound, that's the point. I'm challenging the traditional usage. There is no confusion when I say it, I always mean Do Date.
Just rewatched this and got even so much more out of it a second time! Thank you again! But now I have one more question. I didn’t realize you had the action database in your daily action zone pages so no need to recreate the wheel, yay! But if I try to add something to the master action database page, if the Do Date is further out or not assigned a date, it disappears due to the filters on that page. I’m assuming I need to change one of the set filters to be able to see all the actions in the database since it says master?
Depends on what you want to see in the view, yes change as desired. Different views are set up for different purposes. If you do a function often, set up a view that is focused on that function.