GTD Notion: How to get MORE things done in Notion

so what we're gonna do today and a recap briefly the five steps of GTD I'm gonna focus on two of my favorite steps I think the the that's a typo it's inbox and review but two of the five steps are total game changers review in particular is one that is underappreciated by the broader productivity community and then we're gonna we're gonna build together it's kind of like what I do in my course I fire up a blank motion screen I show you how it's done you watch the replay it's gonna go a little bit fast in the spirit of just you know staying on schedule but you can re-watch the replay kind of go through it yourself and hopefully you'll have a similar system tweak to your own parameters by the end then a Q&A at the very end the ultimate goal there's a there's a phrase and Eastern phrase in ancient Eastern trade called called Wu way which is effortless action and that to me has been the magic of GTD I've used I bought the book in oh four so I basically used the strategy for my entire professional career and to put it in context I walked to a bookstore and you know bought the book in Barnes & Noble's in 2003 before you know Google really existed in earnest but effortless action you know in martial arts they might call it mine like water you know it's like kind of using using your own momentum to kind of to spar and to do jujitsu in rowing there's I think it's they call it the swing which is when like all five rowers are at the same time and you're harnessing the momentum so my goal for you is to find a system design a system where you can really capitalize on effortless action which is doing doing less and and getting more I'm particularly keen to help you guys with this pesky part of our lives which is the important and not urgent so that could be like your relationships that could be your personal finances that could be your health these are parts of your life that it's hard to make a task out of them like yes in theory you could say like go to the gym every day and like have a reminder but the reality is that that's not how how it works that's not how those like sleeping more meditation they're not tasks there are parts of your life that are important but not urgent because they don't have a fixed deadline these are the particularly sneaky tasks in our lives because you can hit snooze snooze snooze snooze snooze and a year later you realize that you haven't had an emotionally intimate conversation with your spouse I've been there so that is what I teach and what I would love to to help you design is a system to do that so let me just check I'm getting a few notices of a weak internet connection okay cool we are good just if someone if my internet starts to break up just barge into the the chat and let me know and good all right cool and then lastly I'm gonna lastly I'm a big believer in close this chat window sorry going on I'm a big believer in being a fast tortoise which is you know small incremental action over long long periods of time and hopefully having a system that can support being a fast tortoise was how you yield compounding games over many many years and decades for me that's what GTD has done against Ben I'm 41 and I've been using it since I was 22 so without any further ado let's just look at this timeless classic if you haven't read it I highly highly highly recommend you read it it's five steps and they go as follows capture clarify organize review and engage so capture is quite simple if you're on this call there's a chance that you are your mind's always racing its ideas ideas ideas ideas you have an idea you want to call someone you want to do something you have a business idea you want to tweak something in your workflow and the simple thing is you know David Allen says your head is made for having ideas not holding them and so he is very keen on as soon as some idea hits it's got to get out of your head because you're carrying a little tax a little mental load every time you try to juggle multiple ideas in your head so what do people do it right and in the notebook they email themselves they might have to do a store or things three they might have notion what he really really encourages is to capture everything into one inbox or two inboxes what I teach my clients is do to inbox do an analogue inbox because you know you always have like a pen and a piece of paper and then do a digital inbox and and so that would be kind of unifying your capture however once you capture you then need to clarify so when I look at a lot of my clients lists they have things like mom or taxes or you know laptop like that's not a task like mom is not a task call mom might be a task or send mom flowers for her birthday might be a task where taxes are not a task tasks might be broken up into different subtypes so so clarify is actually unrelated to any specific tool it is to actually narrowly define a task and a very simple way to do this is to start every task with a verb that's a very very simple way that way you know mom is not a task but call mom is it becomes a task taxes aren't a tax task file taxes collect w-2s become a task so that's the that is the clarify phase next is organized steps step three this is where GTD goes a little bit more extreme than most standard task management GTD they call them contexts but you basically add metadata to your tasks so the most obvious place you add metadata is you put a task on a project so again taxes might be a project and within taxes you have gather your w-2s input the data into TurboTax collect your receipts file your taxes and check if the check to see if the funds like hid so those would be eight tasks you notice they all started with verbs and they would roll up into a project called file your taxes so so projects is the most common metadata that's used across all task management systems due dates is another one prioritization would be another thing like high medium low GTD is actually a very against prioritization for reasons we'll show you after or speak about after but again that's your standard test management fair then there's there's something that's more nuanced which is called contexts contexts are now pay attention here person place or thing now contexts are basically tags for your tasks so person place or thing let's say that you are you have a boss your boss might be a context so you probably have in your work day five work projects with each with ten tasks so you might have 50 tasks for you know in your work and like nine of them might be linked Lily associated to your boss so you would tag those nine tasks as with your boss that would be the context another example could be a place a place could be home office are some obvious ones or maybe a grocery store and so again I might have a bunch of tasks let's take home I could have a task that's like water you know water the garden I could have a task that could be like you know install a new webcam which might be related to my work I could have a task that's that could say like organize get my paper receipts for my taxes those are all tags that that fall under a place and so again you could tag the tasks they put they they lift up across you know they're metadata so they span all your different projects and so that so that's another unique GTD tag I won't go into every single detail but another one that I like to use for tags is energy states Low Energy higher energy I am a big believer in working in energy states so my I'm like a morning person so my best energies is up until like right now let's just say 2:30 just so I have my best energy for this call but the best energies in the morning my worst energies in the afternoon so I will tag across all dimensions of my life low energy test pay this bill call this person file this blah blah blah that way I know that when 3 o'clock hits I just click all my low energy tasks they might be for work they might be for personal they might be for my side projects and I could just start banging away at those that's the metadata those are the contexts in in GTD the fourth one is where the magic happens and I tell you what whenever I explain this to people they're like this is the biggest breakthrough the review function and this is what catches that that really difficult dimension in your life important but not urgent I always give an example about the review and the example that I give is your bucket list right so a bucket list is what are some things you want to do in your lifetime right so I'll give you a few of mine like I want a surfin in South Africa I would like to go to the NBA Finals I would like to I don't know what's uh what's another one I would like to live in Sri Lanka for a little while I might want to buy a Surf Shack I'm a surfer so a lot of my things will revolve around surfing so okay so there those are four or five things now what do you do with those things well you would put them on a list that's called bucket list but here's the issue with with that is that how do you remember to check on them like how do you like I can't put a due date like by a Surf Shack in Sri Lanka for you like four years from now they just there's no point in that but I don't want to just put it in some list and never ever look at it right because I want to make some kind of fort progress towards this bucket list is extreme but like an example they could do that that could be relevant to today would be developing new skill or change industries or reinvent myself right these are like one two three year type projects that it would be so arbitrary to say like okay by December 15 2020 I want to learn Python like that just like it's just not how we work right that you you if you put deadlines on things that don't have deadlines deadlines stop being relevant right you've kind of taken away the impact of having a deadline pay my rent by the end of the month that is a deadline that is a firm task learn how to use Python that is not there's no deadline for that but you still want to have a way to keep bringing that into your perspective and so what what GTD does and I don't see this in any other system even things three which is the most popular GTD app or maybe second most popular it doesn't even have like a dedicated review function the only place that has a dedicated review is OmniFocus which is a Mac app and and or apps like notion where you build it yourself so what you basically do is you would take like let's say I have reinvent myself would be one of my lists and bucket lists would be another one so my reinvention project that could have a monthly review and what that would do is every month it would pull all those tasks back into into like a dashboard and say hey Kay where are you on learning Python and then you would you know luring pythons a little you know wouldn't pass the clarify bucket but it might be take module one of Codecademy Python course that might be and again you wouldn't put a deadline on that so you would resurface that in maybe every six months it resurfaces by a surf shack in Sri Lanka and again I don't really need to be thinking about that every day but I also don't want to never think about that because it will never happen if I don't so the review function lets you tow that line between things that you want to move forward but they don't have the hard deadline the forcing function so to inch them for so super important and I'll show you how that works and the last step is engage which is you know it's basically like calibrating the tasks that you want to do with the current state that you're in so the low energy high energy example was a good one but you could have different perspectives like tell me all my tasks that are due in the next week that's again is more of your standard to-do list fare so I would say like the big differences of GTD are capture like really getting your capture super tight that's one of your homeworks for today think about to capture sources one analog one digital and then the second is review how are you resurfacing those longer tasks projects goals into your everyday life so now let's go build it I'm always like I refer to you all as notion ninjas so this is our spirit animal over here so I'm gonna drop in and I'm going to share my screen my notions screen and okay so I give you a thumbs up if you could see my notion screen awesome so what we're gonna do so this is what's this is what is so cool but what's so tricky about notion is that what I'm gonna show you is actually a database and I know we probably have all different levels of notion here we have people who probably are really good at it and we have people that have never opened the app so I'm gonna try to find that right balance between the two but the cool the coolest thing about notion is that it lets you could build stuff without any programming you just need to be like decent at like spreadsheets you can build stuff it looks super good and it's super duper customizable the main thing about notion is well there's a lot of different things but it has tables which are basically like spreadsheets but it has tables that can take all different types of variables so like a spreadsheet can take like a number of formula or a piece of text and I guess Google sheets does check boxes now but notion can do text numbers single tags multi tags dates people upload files check boxes and then there's all these advanced ones for like different database functionality and so you can do tables and then you can also link tables together to create databases and so if you what's a good example of you know like Spotify it would be a database right because you have a list of artists the artist has a list of albums and the albums has a list of songs and so you could connect those two together so that you could link Kanye West to my Dark Twisted Fantasy to monster right and you wouldn't have to retype Kanye West like if it was just enough flat one two 2-dimensional spreadsheet so and saw that the chat was hit but I'm gonna just I got it I'm in a good flow right now so I'm gonna just keep going with us a lot of people are gonna be watching this on replay so we had 375 people who RSVP'd to this which is incredible so here is your first table think about this as a spreadsheet this is step one capture and you just dump tasks into this so you know I gave you some of these tasks here but you know I could do something even more simple I can add a few Jisoo so you could get the hang of it I'm gonna actually been wanting to buy the book called the one thing which is like another productivity book by the one thing book you see they all start with verbs by the way another homework for you always start your tasks with verbs always always always so by the one thing book and review homework packet what is check-in on JetBlue refund okay so simple table simple tasks I made it look all pretty another nice thing about design of notion is that it really embraces like good design these are like custom icon sets things that I've built myself a little branding on my course so so I added a bunch of tasks so let's do let's add a few columns so actually I'll delete this just so you can see the process of adding columns so the first column for any to-do list is the thing done done and it's a checkbox the next thing in any to-do list dude it again we're in your standard fare of a to-do list all right the next thing that we talked about notion of GTD let's you have one prioritization flag so it's an actual flag which basically like high priority and this will be a checkbox another checkbox okay see we can check things then we'll do context this will be a multi-select so this is multiple tags so again we said person place thing or energy state so I'm gonna add just walk off you my boss not my boob that could be a good tag to my boss home work high energy low energy okay and I'm just gonna clean up I'm so peculiar about formatting and how things look visually I'll just clean that up so this is this diff what I just did was the define my list of tags and again if you know notion this is you're quite familiar with what I just did okay so those are contexts what else does what else could we add oh we could add [Music] duration that's not a super useful tag but people like to use that so you could sort by your estimated duration and that would be a number type so right there you have a bunch of different ways that you can set up just the tasks clearly we're missing something here which is projects right the project would be the main you know think your to-do list like these are my work tasks these are my personal tasks these are my finance tests we're gonna do that it's going to be in a different table so I might just put in like a few just like a little bit of data just so that we can play with this and it can look a little you know throw in a context duration okay so got a few things here and let's just say that you know cancel a chase card was done and you know check in on Jeb who was done now think about what I just showed you here is an inbox right this is your dumping ground for tasks we could talk about the speed issue let's save that for the Q&A if anyone has questions about speed because if you're like a speed freak for for especially for mobile you might run in some some issues here so there's some workarounds but let me just show you a few little things that you could do just within this table view again if you know notion that's gonna be pretty familiar to you but the one obvious thing we would do is we would filter out any task that is marked done cuz like alright if it's done like there's no point in really seeing it anymore so we would select the column done is not checked so that just knocked off all of our checklist so if I check this one off it's gone so that's how you use that's how you use the filter so again here is your inbox you're capturing everything here's your clarify because you're listing everything with verbs and here's your metadata due dates flags context duration that is that's how that's how quickly we just went through you know two of the five steps of GTD now the key thing though is like where where are our projects right we need our projects so let me flip in so projects will be the second table that we do and I started that one just because it's a it's a little bit trickier okay so I started these are my projects my finances my bucket list single action list single action would be like a catch-all for things that don't fall into your other projects now when you are building this on your own you could add you could add your own project so I see like Shawn Tarek and Rodrigo and Jared in front of me on my zoom but you know tarik might be a graphic designer so or he might be looking for for a freelance gig so it could be one of his could be identify new freelance gigs you know so you can just add projects using this button or this button just like you can add tasks by using this button or this button so I'm gonna go back into my projects ignore all this data here just imagine you just had one column and and so these are the five the four projects that you have now watch what I'm going to do I'm gonna go back into my tasks I'm gonna add a new column this is if you've never created a database it's like it's like such a delightful feeling like creating your first database you go in and you go to advance see you guys just started with were 30 minutes until you already in advanced fields you type in relate you click on relation and it's going to ask you it's gonna say which database do you want to link to so I click on it and I know that it's called GTD projects so it pulled up this thing let me rename it linked to projects so so I'm limping linking to projects right now and look at that let me just show you what I did again I just clicked on this empty cell and it pulled up all of my projects my bucket list my finances my single-action list and and Tareq's I'm pronouncing your name correctly if I'm not please yell at me so look at these projects they just showed up here how magical is that so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go and a sign okay renew auto lease my finances and so I'm actually didn't do a quick thing this is how inboxes work in GTD once you put something in a project it disappears from your inbox because you've like you've added the right metadata so watch this new filter I'm going to add another filter if projects is not empty right I assigned it something I signed renew auto lease to my finances oops is empty if it's empty show it so watch gather w-2s my finances gone surf in South Africa my bucket list gone review homework packet with my daughter single action list I would have like a family one but not for this example by the one thing book single action list boom I'm at Taemin tasks zero inbox zero on my tasks and so the way look most people use GTD is that they'll be adding to their inboxes throughout the day and then at the end of the day I used to do this on my subway ride home when I lived in New York they they they put everything go to inbox zero doesn't mean your tasks are gone they just have been tagged with a project so that is so that will show you how projects get linked to tasks and so we've done the three phases of GTD right we've done capture we've done clarify and we've done organize which now lets us which now gets us to review but I know you're probably thinking yourself like wait a minute where'd all my tasks so like what if I need to see my tasks what if I need to see what's due soon like they can't just disappear like that what the f so the beauty of GTD and the beauty of notion is because we have all this metadata we can then go and create whatever view we want for ourselves so let's go in to a GTD dashboard I'm just gonna hide this for now actually I'm gonna be ballsy and deleted so now that we have database which again is two linked tables we can we can basically access it many many ways through many different views so we have this giant database with all these tasks some are done some are personal some have due dates some have flags some of contacts but we just want to see a little little kernel a subset of them notion lets you create this little little lens into a subset of tasks using what I call the three most beautiful words of notion create linked database you guys are learning a lot for you if this is your first notion course you're either overwhelmed or jumping with joy because this is quite dense - this is like week three of my course and we're you know in minute 34 so what you do is you add a new block let me show you the class the regular way you hit plus and you do create link database and then it lets you pull in any database that you have in your workspace so I'm gonna pull in GTD tasks dadada all my tests are here now I can customize the crap out of this so let's say I want to do a view that's like due soon actually let's make it easier has to date so again here are all my tasks even the ones that are done what I will do is I will just narrow the data again I'm not deleting anything or changing anything but I'm just narrowing it to the things that are important to me so if I'm looking at due dates only I only want to see I want the done box I want the due date I don't care about anything else so I'm just hiding them from my view all right so now I have a subset of my tasks and I'm gonna filter it even more and I'm gonna say once again I don't I never want to see something that's done so just get those out of the way and only show me things where due date is not empty so these two tasks have due dates my example was not good because I wouldn't put surf in South Africa as a due date but you you get what I mean we could do that again actually just copy it to make it easier copy this and the next one would be has a flag and again you could do whatever you want like however your work flow has a flag and then we just need to fill change our filters so we always will eliminate things that are done and flag you guys are blocking my flag is checked so and then just to show you what happened I can just show more data right gather w-2s had a flag and so you can just keep creating different views on how you know you could say you know work-related and high-end flag duplicate that view and again go into the filters and so instead of this we would say and our context contains work there's not so you get the drill right we had this master inbox and now we are slicing and dicing different perspectives to shape it accordingly so the last thing I'm gonna show is the review I'm gonna drill into the I didn't realize there were ten chat questions so okay I will come back I will come back to some of these I will hit all the questions did it I wanted to make sure that I could the people watching on replay could see this without interruption okay so the last thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to show I'm gonna show you this review function this is like just this is the thing where people were like oh my god you can do this in notion or you could create this so I'm back in my projects page and I've created I did this before because it's a little bit of extra work I've created something called review frequency which is weekly quarterly monthly and what I do then I use a formula now this is beyond the scope of this webinar to like show you all the details but I just want you to see what's possible I created a formula that basically says if it's monthly converted to 30 if it's weekly converted to seven if its quarterly converted to 90 now here we have a date which is a manual input which is when was the last time I reviewed this so last time I reviewed my finances was March 11th and I would like to review them every weekly which is every seven days so my next review is eleven plus seven right more March 11 plus seven days which again is a formula it's similar to an excel formula maybe little bit more complicated then I do a test so today is March 26th so I am 8 days overdue on my review of my finances so what that means so I tested this by basically comparing this column I'm sorry this column next review with today's date so today's date is after greater than March 18th so this project is overdue and then I need to go and go look at it so this is how you get the review function going and so for the last part of the demo what I'll show you is to it on top is that you can then create your own review function needs review again we'll create a linked database this time we'll just pull it into GTD oops GTD projects so it pulls up all of our projects right bucket-list finances freelance gigs and then we're going to filter it we'll just clean it up to just show last reviewed a next review overdue so you could see you tis right well these are the links to all the related tasks okay so once again we go in and we just say I only want to see the top the projects that are overdue and so I'll do a filter once again that says only show me tasks we're overdue is checked and so then let's say I reviewed my finances my finances because it's overdue renew auto lease I can go in and see all the tasks or new auto lease gather w-2s ok cool and then I will mark this oops mark this as today so today is the 26th watch what happens when I click the 26 it no longer requires a review and in seven days it will pop up again in my needs review section so again I have reviews on things ranging from like three every three days like when I'm in like a near term project to every six months eight months like you know bucket list type stuff long long term goals and they keep they keep getting resurfaced so that I just remember I have to acknowledge that I thought about that thing and thought about the tasks within that category so with that we flew through this is like years worth of GTD knowledge and a couple years worth of notion expertise so the point was not for you to to get this the point was not for you to get every single detail but to really understand what's capable what you're capable of I'm gonna send you a follow-up email that has like a lot more tutorials and things like that and again this is this is early this is this is I just want you to a understand the power of GTD like what makes it unique so that is the inbox and the review and whether it's notion or anything else just remember those two things so that would be the first the first thing that I that I would recommend to you and if you are going to start to use this in notion I would just start with the basics of like learning how to use tables and learning how use table tables and filters and sorts and that would get you you know a large part of the way and then as you got familiar with tables you can sort linking them into into you could start linking them into databases and make some of these more advanced things so with that I will there's a lot in the chat but maybe I will I'll just open it up to verbal questions and then I'll fly through the chat just because verbal in-person is more fun so I knew yourself show your video show your face say hi and we've got a question Wow you guys like the chaat that much all right I'll go through the Chad okay I had to leave can you show how to create from scratch if you've never used notion is this better to use than Evernote I will answer the Evernote question first I think it depends I am against productivity tribalism I don't like I I know my I know what I like but I'm not I don't bash other people's tools Evernote is has Evernote you can't do tit you can't really do tables so that would be a big one Evernote is also just not very pretty too like if you get inspired by being in like a clean UI Evernote fails at that but Evernote's been around forever it searches much better it's way faster its mobile app is faster it integrates with IFTTT it has better integrations so that's the trade-off you can search PDFs in Evernote notion doesn't work well with PDFs so that's really the trade-off I think if you really were to distill a difference between the two it's how badly do you want tables like you couldn't do this well you probably could but it would be a lot more manual to do what I just show you in Evernote let's see how to create a table from scratch I'll do that when I reopen notion not sure how just to add if you maintain yeah okay databases overwhelmed just we used to come back yes it's do not like again this is it was this is a tutorial to show you what's possible and you can watch I recommend you depending on your level like why re-watch it like by pausing across the increments and trying trying it alongside and when you get stuck going into like deep diving on those specific parts which would probably be tables for most of you if you have a video on formula I do I will include that in in the notes yeah Oh GTD is against prioritization this is really this is a really important point GTD is against two things prioritization and due dates GTD is very adamant that unless something has a serious repercussion for not being done at a certain it by a certain date it should not have a due date and the reason why is if you put due dates on everything you've lost the power of due dates and so and the same thing with prioritization it's almost too binary for GTD and so what GTD would say is this is why we give you context context this is why we give you contexts plus review because the combination of those two if done appropriately will always be able to surface up the right set of activities for the right point in time that's why it would be against prioritization the way you would prioritize with GTD would be to tighten your review function right so if I'm like when I'm in my notion course the review function is daily so every day which basically is like everything's do every day so every day it pulls things back but when I get out of that mode I shift it to like 30 or 20 or like 15 so so that's that is why GTD is against prioritization you can also think of the way I talk about GTD with my clients is that GTD is like a Zamboni it like it just like sweeps all your tasks into you and like puts them in your face at a frequency that you determine so nothing can fall through the cracks if your review is set up properly that's the this is why people get so scared of GTD because you have to commit to a review or else you're gonna be constantly terrified that you're missing something but I'm never scared of missing something because I'm always reviewing every day and it's the different frequencies are coming in so you also mentioned capturing analog is what was digital to what extent do we do that without duplicating I think I mean it's a good question like do you need analog I'm of the perspective that you do because there are actually moments when you don't have your phone and I do especially if you're even a remote visual thinker he's like you don't you just like to write stuff down and so so like I I don't for example most people don't take notes like in meetings and stuff on laptops that's still quite rare at least when I was in the corporate world so you have a notebook right so if someone if the task comes up in a meeting you're not gonna like whip out your iPhone and and put it in the test maybe maybe you can but that would be why I I'm not like adamant that you need an analog but I think that analog still plays enough of a role maybe you could think about it as having like a primary versus secondary mode probably outside but how do you think estimating the top the time it takes you to take a talk to how do you estimate the time that it takes a task IIIi kind of wing it I don't use derision but I do try to keep tasks under an hour and so like I'm a big believer that you get a lot of momentum by like cycling through but like you know it's that clarify stage to like by really having tight tasks that you can kind of like move through things quite quickly but again I think that that happens to tack that probably is like a more that depends on your your personality I guess you haven't in one second I saw have you looked at power and you compare the two methods I think notion can do either so I so I teach who asked Jonathan Jonathan I teach par like a hybrid of Parra and GTD in my in the course so I think I think thee for those of you who don't know Parra it's a way to delineate like it's a little bit beyond the scope of this it's a way to delineate things that are projects areas which are kind of like they're kind of actionable like being healthy would be an area a project would be submit this RFP and then the R is like in different resources which is information management it's like data that I'm collecting so so I teach I actually teach para in the course as like the organizing principle for your information and then I have AI I bake in the review function into every part of Parra oh yeah John can go for it you know I was gonna say I've just been looking at both of them alongside one another so I appreciate the difference they're just awesome I have a long video on how I use para and GTD I'm in Para and ocean on YouTube if you just do like para notion it will come up and I'll try to add that to the to the notes Evan what's up okay can you give more examples on how use context like for example I'm just thinking like if I have a bunch of like 10 things on my low energy context how do you decide where to start I think so so what what you could do is remember you could do Low Energy and then you could filter it by projects right so you could do only show me Low Energy tasks related to rad reads projects right if you if you're like is still in work mode right or it could be only show me Low Energy tasks that I could do at home which could be like lots of like yard work and stuff like that so the the beauty of it is that you could combine any column right and just like tweak it like show me all work things that have flags that are low energy right you can just create that GTD calls them perspectives or I guess yeah GTD calls some perspectives where you could just like you could think of them as like super filters and what GTD would say is kind of like understand how you work and then create super filters for like every way you work so like someone might have a like start of day super filter you know which would be you know like maybe they try to do like eat the Frog or do like the most difficult thing or like three high energy tasks related to it to a project like that's how that might be one super filter or you could have like super filter like wine down routine which could be like you know stuff that you do with your kids or stuff that you do at home you know stuff that's low energy some permutation of those and also a kid you do you still use OmniFocus I do so I think this is worth talking about capture speed again I'm some of some people will will be new to notion it'll be like what you're like talking about another app on top of it but here's the analogy that I give so um I'm a I'm a surfer so like if you look here you see I have four surfboards and they call it the surf quiver and so there's a surfboard for steep waves there's a surfboard for tiny waves there's a surfboard for mushy waves there's a surfboard for when you are tired your shoulders are tired but if you're new to surfing you only want one board you want the Ross the board because it's easy to paddle you can't hurt yourself with it it floats and all that so if I've been studying productivity since I was 19 years old like I want to have a surfboard a Productivity tool for every dimension of my life and so my stack is like mostly notion omni focus and then I'm playing with Rome research a bunch that's like my stack but if you're just starting off just pick one pick one you don't pick Rome as your first one because that's like a shortboard but pick one Omni Omni focused notion things Evernote doesn't matter pick one and start thinking about the system the system this is why so many people get so frustrated with productivity is because they think the tool will solve their problem that's so wrong why has David Allen's book stood the test of time because he taught a system a system that's actually ignite you could do GTD on a piece of paper and so so I would say just pick one tool to start awesome I see there's more questions about coupling the Eisenhower matrix priorities with GTD is there any disadvantages so the Eisenhower matrix is important not important urgent not urgent two-by-two matrix you absolutely can I played with that for a little while I found that you know using energy states using energy states kind of covered that quite well for me because like my high energy tasks tend to be important but I like it like paying my cable bill will never be high energy but like researching you know the next cohort of my course is like high energy so for me that they tend to fall like skew on those dimensions but that's the beauty of GTD is like yeah you could add that as a tag you could add an important but not urgent tag and then filter off of that you so Rodrigo said actually you go you're there yeah you want to ask question ask it instead of me reading it yeah I was just sorry I don't you use databases I found it quite interesting but I'll try but just wanted to see if you could give me just a plain advice like what I follow you especially in the beginning and how to order the list how do they like capture organize review essentially I'm working from home I work in advertising but I I do writing on my spare my spare time I'm thinking it's such a great opportunity to drive more I find them I the best hours of my day when I'm more productive and soaked into the word machine and then by the time I finish and I want to see my laptop anymore yeah I don't want you know eight weeks to go by and then I didn't you know I didn't use it properly to do my rights that would be a shame yeah so how what word basic things like I made a lot of notes above mm-hmm early on but if you did yeah well so I mean that that's a you're getting to an interesting part about you're talking about habits almost right where like you want to develop a writing practice you wanna you know you wanna like squat 25 extra pounds or you wanna you know in you know increase your running time you start to get into areas you can start to get into things that are very hard to like just turn into tasks period right this is outside this is like I would actually pull this outside of GTD I think that that we're really now in like the land of habit formation like I think like James clear and Charles Duhigg are two of the oh geez of habit formation but one idea could be something super simple actually just wrote about this today is to just set up a tracker it's like three checkboxes and it's like did I write did I meditate did I exercise and you create a new row every day Peter Drucker the famous management theorist wrote what gets managed what gets measured gets managed some people have appropriated that quote to say what gets measured gets mastered he actually didn't say that but he's on to something right if every day you see this list like you don't have to put it on in notion just write in on a piece of paper and tape it to your fridge three boxes every day right meditate exercise I like that yeah yeah I think this shows like sometimes we can get so caught up in the tools and and forget that like the most basic thing right like and the thing about habits I mean habits are its own thing but like like okay what's one habit for me would be like I don't let myself drink a cup of coffee unless I meditated before I want that cup of coffee I'm going I will like fight someone for that cup of coffee oh you're making me meditate sure I'll do that that's actually much easier than fighting someone so I would think about it in the domain of like habits habit formation I mean that's a whole separate topic but a simple tracker read I would read James clears atomic habit I'll put it in the notes because I wrote a really detailed summary about it great thank you yeah I find it it's just I to me working from home was a novelty it was fun but now it's not a novelty is what you have to do so it's it's finally sometimes even easy to have launch because you're like just yeah I'll do it after this absolutely yeah you know no working from not healthy yeah working from home is it takes a lot it really takes a lot of getting used to and like like what's something I do every morning I make my I'm in a competition with myself where I want to make a bed better than the make it in a hotel and so you know that there's that famous speech by General something-something at Austin where it's like make your bed every day which is basically like you control how you control your intentions right and if you said you know like you know a chef would call it the the meson class which is like they lay all their things out general general McRaven thanks Charles they lay out all their bowls and pans and knives and this and this because you know like a clear head declutter your space declutter your mind right so so anyway that we're we're veering a little bit off the topic but I'll definitely put some notes there thank you any other questions there's one from a be wonder if this is Antonio if it is hello if it's not hello but okay my biggest hurdle is I face is getting things off my to-do list is tasks dependency I start one task and realize that another task in my to-do list needs to be done first I was creating self relation okay I'm glad you asked that question because I actually glossed over one of the big parts of GTD that that is actually hard to replicate in notion and easier to replicate in things three or OmniFocus and that is the sequencing of tasks or as Antonio says I think it's Antonia the tasks that the path dependency or task dependency right so let's take the example of filing your taxes gather your w-2s input them and apologies to our non-us listeners put them into TurboTax gather your receipts from the Salvation Army see Rodrigo email me with any questions gather your receipts from the Salvation Army input your checking data and then check that the refund came you know two weeks after there's no point in checking if the refund came if you haven't gathered your w-2s so GTD is quite strict in the clarify and organized phase of making you sequence out your tasks and what it does like a good GTD app like things or OmniFocus you can't do this in notion to my none to my knowledge is it basically hides them right like you don't even need to be thinking about TurboTax if you haven't collected your w-2s and that's why I mean if you see the pattern with GTV it's all about like reducing that mental friction like why should I be thinking about TurboTax if I haven't collected my w-2s there's no point and so GTD is all about like like minimizing it's almost like having a super smart assistant that's like like I know you shouldn't be thinking about turbo tax but really like do this thing right now collect your w-2s the second you hit you checkoff collect w-2s poof collect receipts from Salvation Army shows up the second you click that off poof log into TurboTax shows up could you build that with us with an if function you know if task done then kind of like a recall something the maybe the only issue though is that it's hard to preserve the yeah the thing is like um get up the link tasks to other tab you'd have to link tasks to other tasks and notion like notion doesn't really have variables right like you can't remember the state of a variable and so I bet someone could figure that out but if you're gonna do that you should just like to use them if you want that you should just use another app things and OmniFocus are I think those apps are incredible they might actually be a better starting point then the notion if you're if you're like truly focused on task task management and less some like information management and those like nebulous parts let's see Charles asked if you try to think about toss an hour then you automate then you automatically break them if you autumn sorry if you try to think about tasks in our increments then do you automatically try to break down a project into its smallest components yes I think again I've like borrowed a lot from Thiago here where there's a like there's momentum to be had and like collecting a win and so if this you look at this task that's like six hours like you can't get that win and so again I would I would like caveat everything by saying that like event should the cool thing about all of this stuff is eventually it becomes intuitive right like I don't need to do next action because I think about my tasks that way and I don't need to see it right like it's it's so internal to how I operate that I don't need it to be so so precise right like it's almost like take the surfing analogy right like like Kelly Slater could surf really well on the shittiest waves I can't and so it's because like he's been internally he's internalized like the subtleties of like all of this so I think so so that it's not it's a little bit of a cop-out answer Charles but but I do I do do it I believe that there's like momentum to be had and like scoring that small win you all right any other I got one more a B question but let me go to the to the live if anyone has cool I will say that so one of the issues with notion and I was trying to I was actually working with notion I don't have no relationship with him just like there helps support it is like you can't share templates that have links in them so so it breaks so actually it would be pointless to share this with you anyway because it's so complicated but I'm trying to think about the best way I might share the three tables with you and then have you guys relink them yourselves by watching the video but I can't just share this set up because it will just break in the process of sharing it with you so I'm gonna try to play with like the best way for you guys to do that and abs can we use a daily review tag and GTD to check sure I mean you could I think you know for a while I had like take my vitamin in GTD as a recurring task I think if you're gonna do daily tasks I turn it like make it a habit like if you're doing like ten daily tasks a day like you should reconsider if you need to be doing those ten daily tasks but if it's something like a daily task like the point of OmniFocus is to reduce the mental load like if you if if having a daily task pop up every day to remind you to take a vitamin I don't know why that's the example I came up with if that reduces the mental load for you by all means do it when I tried to do that it just always just you know I just started like click like go away go away go and then like I stopped taking the right of it like it became counter counterproductive so I again it's it's gonna really be a function of like how you know how you move through this world you awesome well you're all y'all are are awesome thank you for sitting through this there's so much more where this came from I've probably I have probably like 15 hours of YouTube videos that are all out there free I have a thing like if you ask me an ocean question on Twitter and as long as you're like not rude I respond with a video so ask me questions on Twitter we've got a slack group I see a bunch of our a bunch of our members and in the slack group I'm not gonna put the link there because I do want people to opt-in to it and not default into it so if you want to to get into the slack group just email me and just you could you just write slacker I got you covered and yeah and if you again like this just for context like what we did today is is probably like one and a half lectures of my notion course so like you you come into the course you know nothing it assumes you know nothing in the first week you learn kind of all the basic features it's actually quite easy the second week you learn everything about tables the third week you learn about databases and the fourth week you create like these dashboards to like pull all the data together and you leave I call it you know like I see Shawn and and J Flynn and in my screen right now so you leave with what I call the Shawn HQ or the J Flynn HQ which is basically a task manager a CRM app are a setup and a Resource Center for everything that you clip using the notion clipper and then a dashboard that sits on top of that that that incorporates reviews and all the cool thing about review now I'm digressing is that you can create a review function on your reading list like if you read a great post like Paul Graham's do things that don't scale I love that post I want to read it every year I slap a review function on that and so my root my reading list resurfaces things to me like as the date moves on it's like oh it's been a year since you you do things that don't scale pops it back up to my reading inbox and so you could put all these things together and it's just it's awesome I just love I love teaching it and and it is and that's just what I think is so cool about it is that you have that like you learn this overall system but then you can go use notion like for your work you can go use notion as an entrepreneur you could use it a lot of people actually used it to like really like set up like their household it's like coordination like school stuff with their wife and their kids and and their personal finances and habits and things like that awesome well thank you everybody again we are we're living in kind of crazy times right now I do believe that we will make it it through this be kind to yourself in this period please be kind to others if you're on this call you're probably faring much better than the vast majority of the population as it relates to coronavirus so just please please keep that in mind as you you know as you move through your days and as you interact with other people and Lisa Oh Santonio cool thanks Antonio so yeah you guys are awesome I'm so glad you're part of the community and I can't wait for you guys to play with all this have a good day

Channel: Khe Hy - RadReads

Views: 168,686

Keywords: GTD Notion, Notion GTD, notion, getting things done notion, productivity, time management, project management, GTD, getting things done

Id: 4YspgkLRsrs

Length: 69min 42sec (4182 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020