Daily Data Tracking in a Notion Database (Life OS)

hi everyone welcome back to another episode of our ongoing journey to dig deeper into implementing a comprehensive notion life operating system week ago I did an overview sort of a bird's-eye view to give you a sense of how it all fits together today we're going to look at the daily tracking which is super important it's one of the most important things you can do to achieve what matters to you in your life in the last two videos we looked at building a task database what I call an action item database and that's really important to deliver on your projects to do step by step components that complete big projects that help you deliver on your big overarching goal outcomes and the pillars in your life the other half of your daily focus is what you track in the daily tracking database and this is so important because you are what you do every day like if you want to be a writer you need to write every day if you want to build a business you need to move parts of that mission forward every single day and if you want to be healthy you need to service that goal in some way every single day it's not a matter of doing it once a week or once a month or a giant effort on an inconsistent basis is far less effective compared to a small effort on a daily basis so when you define and we're going to do this later in the series at a certain point when we get to the pillars and in the value goals and the goal outcomes we're going to define what matters most to us what we want to achieve in life and the way you get there is you set daily rituals daily routines that move you toward that a little bit every single day you are what you do everyday it's the most important thing and what gets measured gets done so you not only have to establish the routine but you need to track it because if you're tracking it then you're gonna do it because that's what you're looking at in great detail that's what you're going to study in a way it gamma Phi's that we've seen some notion implementations that go heavy on the gamification but this tracking your daily progress towards the things that you've defined as priorities it's gamifying it this is the scoreboard this is one of the scoreboards the other scoreboard is achieving your goal outcome in completing a project so that's one scoreboard that's part of the game the other scoreboard is your daily tracking are your weight targets getting closer or further away are your sales call numbers a you if you're you might set a goal of business is a priority and you need to sell you might say I'm gonna make thirty sales calls a day and I'm gonna track the number of sales calls I make every day or you might say sleep is really important to me and I'll give you a hint it's really important to everybody so you should have some way of measuring your sleep habits when you go to bed when you wake up how much sleep you get and you might track other things resting heart rate they're an endless number of things it could be business it could be health so we're gonna go through how I do daily tracking in notion and then in the next video when we look at the daily action zone dashboard we'll see how this rolls up into that in a really elegant and well integrated way so here we are in the daily tracking database and in this database it's all about table view for me because this is just about capturing the data and seeing if there's any anomalies if 30-days missing this is a helpful view because the table view packs more data into a smaller area of real estate than any other view in notion so let's dive in just to give you a quick sense of how I normally look at I normally look at it at a higher resolution where you can see a lot more on the screen but since that's a little small for a video I'm gonna make it larger here so you can see what's going on better this is the show all view I typically use 30 days going back which is nice because they then give you if you assign it the 30 day rolling average across the bottom for each of the properties or fields let's just go across these I'll show you what I'm tracking the point here isn't for you to track what I'm tracking the point is for you to decide what matters most for you in your life and then what metric will indicate whether you're moving toward it or away from it what metrics will ensure that you're doing the activities and paying attention to the priorities that matter for you and those are the things you should track again I think everyone should track sleep because there is nobody where quality of sleep isn't going to impact their ability to achieve their goals and aspirations so I think that's one for everybody and some kind of Fitness needs to be in there for everyone sorry it's just there's no escaping Fitness I think nutrition and diet is an important one to track for everybody and then beyond that certainly on the business side you can choose your own but I'm going to show you some of mine so I have cleaned this up a lot in fact I put in dummy data and for others I've turned a lot of the data off I do collect more but you don't need to collect a lot so I tend to do a lot of data tracking take a quantitative approach and I want to make sure the things that matter to me I'm progressing in and I find that this creates a real incentive for me to deliver on the things that I define as important this is a form of gamification this is a scoreboard I will export this data and import it into Google Docs or in Excel and I will chart and graph them which is one of the reasons I have the data set up the way it is and I'll explain that further I have it set up to be optimized for exporting into graphing applications because unfortunately notion doesn't have any graphing or chart features I hope they will add that at some point it'd be nice to have that built in but for now a dozen which is okay because it's very good at collecting the data and creating other types of dashboards and it's very easy to export this as a CSV file open in Google sheets or in Microsoft Excel and then you've got great graphing functionality I don't do that very often but perhaps every month I'll take a look at how things are trending of course regret the rolling averages across the bottom which is nice okay so going across the title is on the left I will link this to the week and that's important because when I when we go and do our weekly reviews which is another video we'll do that if I link the week through a relational database connection then I can do a rollup of any other piece of data in here so when I sit down to do my weekly review each of these days that I've tagged to that week it'll have the aggregate for any column I choose so I'll see which days I had workouts on what my weight fluctuated at throughout the week and I will see an aggregate at the week level and then my weekly reviews roll up to the monthly reviews and that's all entered automatically with roll up its a beautiful feature of notions roll up capability which I'll talk about more in another video and also by having an icon on each week it's very easy to see the breakdown week by week where they segment out and then I have a formula here that inserts the day so formula you look at it here that formula just automatically takes the date inserts it there now the way I enter this data is typically in the dashboard in my actions own dashboard which is filtered by day so I click new this new button up here but I'll do it from my actions own dashboard which is filtered by day so I'm opening it in the same day so it will automatically enter the date and then it'll automatically calculate the day Wednesday Tuesday and so that's pretty quick and easy this whole thing is designed to be super fast to enter data because this stuff needs to a large degree be manually entered once we have the API in the zapier integrations which is something that's on notions priority development schedule then that's gonna change the game here but even now I can enter all this and I collect more data than most people I can enter all this in about 50 seconds 45 to 50 seconds and yes of course I sometimes time it because that's just a mom who's trying to optimize for efficiency so I'll show you how I do that fast entry but let me just go through the fields so diet is something I'll assign at the end of the day I shouldn't have entered this I again I entered some dummy data just for the sake of this demonstration typically any given day I'm entering the diet number for the previous day and diet is just the quality of my nutrition and eating for the day so one is the best five is the worst and I will rate the previous day's quality of diet and it's amazing how much did that will track to the weight outcomes so again these may not track properly because I just went through and entered a lot of dummy data here just for the sake of this demonstration then I go to sleep here now sleep awake in time this is sleep time calc so I will enter the time I went to bed the time I wake up and how much sleep I got now for me it's a little bit easier because I use an aura ring which tracks my sleeping it'll tell me what time I went to sleep what time I woke up and the amount of actual sleep I got not just the difference between to bed and awake but the actual amount of sleep I got but if you don't have an aura ring and that's a whole different conversation whether that's worth it or not all you have to do is enter the time you go to bed enter the time you wake up and subtract the difference and that's going to give you a meaningful number that's going to give you a sense of the amount of sleep you're getting which again is super important I'm tracking weight here I also track some other metrics from my winnings scale which records the data sends it to the clouds thinks it with my app so when I sit down I'll just open my app I'll open the aura ring and enter the data straight in I have the fields for entry set up so they're in the same order as presented in the app same thing with the whiffing scale app which is that one by nokia so they may be calling at the Nokia scale and then finally I've got the habit tracking which is built into the full daily tracker so be there checkboxes once I do a meditation I check it off if I do my bullet planner I'll check it off and I've got a routine in the morning I'll do a future video on morning routine in my routine I will automatically do these first bunch of things just that's the first thing I do when I sit down on my desk and my morning meditations already done I actually have a second meditation but I'm simplifying the presentation here so it's not overwhelming with data and then check that off check that off and these will be checked off throughout the day as I do them but if I've got a gaping unchecked box it's telling me and you'll see in my daily action zone dashboard it's very clear what's checked off and what's not if I'm not getting something done it's going to be very apparent to me and I will have this perpetual reminder to get it done at the end of the day I schedule the next day so scheduled tomorrow is something I check off because it's really important to me I stick to that routine whether or not can get a workout in that may be the thing that slides the most but it's the priority so I track it and I sort of gamify I try to get as many checked boxes in a row as possible it becomes painful to break a chain once you get a long chain going and that's a game of fight incentive to deliver on these daily habits and routines at the end of the day I will rate the percent of time I stayed on schedule as I had scheduled my day the night before and the percent of output that I achieved relative to what I had intended to achieve and then I'll write out my improvements like what I can do better to achieve more from the day and these improvements will roll up to my weekly review automatically they'll all be listed the whole week's worth of improvements listed whole week's worth of workouts the whole week's worth of meditations of my weight of sleep time I'll get a picture of the entire week assessment of that from alt with all this data presented same thing happens at the monthly level we'll do another video on monthly and weekly reviews so that's pretty much it I want to show you one other a couple other features in terms of how I enter this so quickly though okay so you hit new to open it so the dates filled in it automatically calculates Tuesday diet is something we'll do the following day so we skip that week's we click on weeks sometimes when you open this it doesn't give you the options so you have to click in the space and then it'll give you the options yeah that's the end when I do my weekly review I'll set up the next week and then the current week always has these two carrots pointing in these two less than signs so it's easy in a row to just find the one with the two lesson signs and I just click that and it automatically fills it in with that all the other data will roll up to my weekly review automatically that's all I have to do to make that happen so hours to sleep so here's the key for entering it quickly I've got a field for hours that I went to sleep the time I went to bed I've got a field for minutes and then I've got a caliph or Milla calculating the hours and minutes there are two reasons for this one is it's a lot faster just enter 11 tab 32 tab tab the second tab is to skip the formula so I enter 11 anther 32 I find that holding shift and hitting the colon for 11:30 - to enter the time is slower because that takes two hands I can do it with one hand really fast if I'm just entering our tab minute tab and then it calculates the combination so it's faster and you'll see as I go through I enter several times and it's just faster to go our tab minute tab next instead of our hold shift hit colon hit minutes it's just slower and when you're doing like five or six of them in the whole entry it makes a difference the other reason is because it's very difficult when you export into Excel or Google sheets to do graphs when you have it formatted in the time format like 11 : 32 it's much easier if it's as a fraction so 11.5 or eleven point six as a fraction fractions will map and graph and chart better than time formats so by this I interr it faster and I get a fraction calculation so 1132 rounds out to 11.5 so eleven and a half is the time I went to sleep one quick note on that if you happen to go to bed after 1 a.m. enter it as 13 after 2 a.m. enter it as 14 and then it'll graph nicely because when it flips to 1 a.m. 2 a.m. on a graph that's not gonna work very well so just for the sake of graphing and charting all right so I come to awake hours again I'm doing this fast I'm just taking time to explain it awake hours so I'm looking on my app from the aura ring but you can just look at or enter your wake time so if you wake up at 7 tab 45 tab tab and it calculates 7.8 so 7:45 in the morning is 7.8 wake time the number of hours I slept 8 tab Oh 5 tab tab and it calculates eight hours and five minutes is 8.1 so then I'll just quickly you know enter tab enter tab I typically track what time I sit down and start work and it'll calculate that as 7.5 which again is chargeable and graphical then I usually at this point when I'm filling out in the morning we'll have done my first meditation save the second one - later I'll do my visualization which we'll do a video on in the future business planner sorry the bullet planner which we'll do another video on in the future mindset work another video in the future work out anything you want to track you define what matters to you and then you define what will help you get there and then you enter those things in here and you track them that's how you make things happen in your life so one last tip that you may or may not be aware of this table is going to get pretty wide and there's a little trick if you have a mouse that Scrolls left and right that's great that's helpful but if you don't all you have to do is hold the shift key and spin the normal up and down scroller on your mouse if you have one if you don't have one you don't know what you're missing you need one get a mouse that has a wheel scroller and normally you scroll that up and down and the page goes up and down but if you hold shift it'll scroll left and right finally the last thing I have over here on the right I do weekly reviews monthly reviews quarterly reviews which are but you'll see how I keep that all manageable by breaking it up into different parts and the far right I'll have the planning review date like if I do my weekly review I'll part of my checklist at the end of the checklist is to come over here and check it off as weekly review done if I did the weekly review here I would check that off there and that lets me know at a glance while we're here on the right when I've done my weekly reviews and monthly reviews and that matters more when I see the full view and I see more than just one month view I'll know if I'm missing weeks I'll know if I'm missing months it'll give me an indication of how well I've been doing at hitting my weekly monthly quarterly reviews and let me tell you something that is the biggest game-changer like it's hard to get started but it is so essential to achieving what you want to achieve in life what I'm gonna do a whole video just on that but this is where I will track when I hit those review dates so that lets me just keep an eye on whether or not that's working or there's a breakdown in that system so that's the daily tracking from an ocean functionality standpoint it's pretty simple though it is setting up some roll-ups which will see the benefit of in a later video but generally it's basically just rows of data and entering the data and organizing it in a way that you can enter it really fast the efficiency of entry is critical to sticking with this and if you can get it down to like 45 50 seconds like I have it it's just nothing you make it part of your routine to do this in the morning and let me tell you this will change your life if you get nothing else out of this whole series just start identifying what matters to you in your life how you can measure on a daily incremental basis what'll make a difference in that start doing those things daily it can be the smallest amount if you want to meditate just set a rule I have to meditate for at least three minutes then most of the time you'll do more but take my obligation to check off this box is to sit down for three minutes or sit down for five minutes and then you'll do 10 minutes most of the time if you set a checkbox and you'll see the row after row after row day after day and if you see all these empty boxes it's you're gonna feel oh I am failing myself this will graphically demonstrate to you in front of your eyes every day because you're gonna put this in your daily actions own dashboard and it will be apparent to you when you're failing and you're gonna feel like you're letting yourself down because it's visible but because it's visible you won't let yourself down you'll want to live up to that you want to see these series these strings of checkboxes for your habits these this row of numbers that are improving gradually over time if you're falling off of it you'll know you have to weigh yourself on the scale so that you can enter it so there's no hiding this makes everything transparent and transparency helps you get it done and then it shows the results so this is a scoreboard think of this as a game and this is your scoreboard and you want to win the game so you want to put good scores on the board and that's how you do it that's what this enables what you do day to day that's the game that's what gets things done you are what you do every day don't forget that implement on that and this is the tool that helps you execute so I hope that's helpful so after starting with a system overview last week this series of notion videos is diving deeper into each part of this an overall notion life operating system if you find this of interest be sure to hit the subscribe button in the bell icon to get updates on future videos leave thoughts or questions below and hit like if you found this valuable I also write a newsletter called mind and machine on increasing human capability I give away several of my best notion templates to anyone who subscribed to the newsletter you can unsubscribe at any time of course but I hope you'll give it a chance because I work hard to pack it with a lot of valuable insight the newsletter link is also below in the show notes thanks for watching lots more to come

Channel: August Bradley - Life Design

Views: 106,364

Keywords: notion, notion app, notion productivity, how to, notion how to, notion productivity app, database, notion database, notion table, notion pages, task, task database, project, project database, productivity, personal productivity, notion linked, efficiency, business efficiency, small business systems, systems, august bradley, Evernote Marie Poulin

Id: 9qLdGOLs7u4

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020