How I use notion with other tools and why you can't use it for everything

hey and welcome to tools on tech now you all know i love notion but in this video i'm going to talk about why i don't use notion for everything i got started on this video because i posted my gtd workflow to facebook and somebody on facebook timur asked me a couple of questions that got me thinking on this workflow that i have on my desktop all the time and made me realize that after taking a step back this is something that i want to show to everyone now we're going to start with why you can't use notion for everything work is usually about turning input into output and notion isn't really the input the input is usually slack email jira or even worse meetings to make things worse notion isn't also the output that's usually a document a presentation or something physical like getting a tow cable to go sledding behind a four times four in semi winter time as a result notion to me is more a step inside the process than the actual process and for me personally it's mostly a reference place somewhere where i place the curated notes and links to other information so that i can easily reference it later and then the question becomes how do you keep all those different applications tied together without losing your mind in the process one method i use is to use para which has a base where you use the same name for a project in all your systems this small change of using the same name everywhere saves your brain a lot of brain capacity because it doesn't have to figure out with different names which projects belong to each other it's amazing how well that works and i use that name in all my communication making it easy for me to find back information when i get like a return email or a slack message unless of course this person calls you doesn't know that name that you're using and you have to play this 20 questions system to figure out what project they mean because they don't realize that you have 50 other projects you're trying to keep track of next it is i link everything together with urls and that allows me to glide through data and find related information without having to copy all the data over into notion now i hear you thinking what about embeds and i do use those but limited they're a bit more work than just pasting a link you have to think about spacing and sometimes you have to send them to a special system like in my case with todoist but i do use them on dashboards and long running projects so i don't have to open like another page but in most other cases i just use links now i use a lot of tools hence the whole tools on tech thing to name a few notion duh but also todoist google calendar google drive i use toggle for time tracking lucidchart to make flow charge i use koda when i need something which is a bit more complex than what notion can provide and a whole slew of browser windows now i'm going to limit this video to todoist and google calendar else it will be way too long but if you guys are interested in me ranting on these tools then let me know in the comments and i'll see what i can do now let us start with the real mvp my running mate for over a decade and that is todoist now what does todoist bring to the table well first of all it has quick add functionality it has extensions it works together with nearly everything at some point i even had like an application that i could use my watch to add tasks to it but it also gives me other things like repeated tasks that come back at a set interval and reminders not only on a set time but even on a specific location and then i haven't even gotten started on things like labels subtasks projects and the fact that after using this for over a decade i basically get a dopamine hit every time i just click on that mark as done button now to use it with notion i either embed it in long running projects or on dashboards and to do so you need a bit of a hack i put a video up on that earlier i'll put a link in the description in the card to the site so you can access that or i link straight to a task and then i use subtasks under that and that's how i quickly get to the tasks that are related to some project or information i also use it a lot the other way around where i put a link to a notion page with more information as a comment to my to-do is task meaning that if i'm working on tasks i can just click on that and straight go to the relevant information that i collected earlier now let's bring in the second tool that reminds me about birthdays dentist appointments and where i spent way too much time last year moving the cyberpunk 2077 release date and that's google calendar finding a spot to meet with people is a pain and something that's been partially solved by allowing you to share your free busy information with other people so they can find a slot that then nobody has enabled it still does a lot of things right like sending an email with the location either physical or virtual where you want to meet up the exact date time and allows people to respond on that with a yes no maybe so you don't spend a lot of time waiting in front of a store and nobody's gonna show up crossing time zones you know who does all the calculation not only for the specific time zone but also if it's summer winter time over there compared to your summer winter time that's google calendar and if you ever need to meet with anybody across time zones that's a godsend so how does notion get into play well notion is for me mostly note keeping so what i do is that i create a calendar account and then i have a public link that i have from notion that i put into the comments where i put my meeting notes or any of the things that people need to know up front because they'll get an email with that link they can click on it get to my notion information and that works 9 out of 10 times if i need to be able to access the specific calendar item from notion then i would put a link in notion to that calendar item because every calendar item has its own unique url and it does make it a bit tricky i spend some time scoping date and time over but i think that the benefits that i get from using an actual calendar that works together with outlook and other calendar apps is well worth it as you can see using the urls to link between different systems is a very lightweight way of linking things up and that's by design even though i lose some functionality because i can't search in one place for everything by just copying over the important data i get updated and i can find things back and i don't waste time copying over data that i need to then keep in sync and copy over now if only there was some kind of way to automate that process like an appy of some sort breaking news right so we talked about why i use other applications because they can do things that notion cannot and let's step back to where we got started my gtd workflow let us have a closer look on how to deal with the tsunami of small requests that comes towards us each and every day now it's based on gtd and as such the first step is stuff and stuff is the bane of my existence the interruption the thing that gets me distracted all the time i thought watching all those youtube videos was your greatest distraction i'm doing productivity here like people might get wise and stop watching my videos and start doing actual work can't have that now on a productivity channel anyway if you look at the flowchart it looks very complicated but you should remind yourself that this is not something that gets used all the time most of the things that come my way get handled before they even reach this flowchart either because you can just instantly reply an email to people or i know that it's not relevant for me and i can just trash it before sending it into my system making that the most efficient way of dealing with stuff now if you have the option i would highly recommend putting your phone into airplane mode to avoid interruptions of course this only works if you are working remotely and you can effectively block the world that way if not then trying to find a secluded spot to work where you don't tell people where they can find you might help at least in my case i'm pretty quickly distracted and having a place where my mind just knows that it can focus and it won't get interrupted helps a lot now the rest of the steps help me with deciding what i will and will not do and keep in mind that this is something that at some point becomes like an automatic process inside your head and i've mostly written it down because sometimes i'm just tired or i just can't focus enough and i just spent five minutes looking at an email and then gathering this just going through the flow chart means i get like a conclusion and i can get myself unstuck now i'll go through two examples as a quick way of showing you how the system works and there will be a link to the full version down in the description for anybody that wants to follow my flowchart for their own work though i would highly recommend tweaking it to you personally let's say i get an email with extra information for a project i'm working on i'm processing my mail so i can skip the inbox step as email is its own inbox in a way is it actionable no do i need to think about this no do i need this for reference yes is it part of a project yes so i'll copy and paste the relevant information to my notion project for later and it will be there when i need it for some projects i also keep a folder with the project name where i would move this mail to but that's optional as a second example someone asks me to send them a document while i'm getting coffee i'll add it to my todoist right there on my phone something like send bob document about x takes two seconds and i can get back to my coffee now we get to the flow is it actionable yes is that action multi-step no can i do it in two minutes yes well do i send the document and mark it done now if i was behind my computer when i got this request i would have probably done it right away and not even opened this whole flow but requests come from many places and this shows the importance of the inbox when you need to get things out of your head quickly to get back to what you were working on if you enjoyed this video and want to watch more be sure to click on the videos on the side if you want to help me grow then be sure to subscribe so youtube knows that my content is valid and that more people should be watching it remember you're awesome keep it up and see you in the next one

Channel: Tools on Tech

Views: 8,760

Keywords: notion with other tools, notion iwth other tools, notion with olther tools, notion iwth olther tools, notion todoist, notion google calendar, notion ms office, notion office, notion toggle, why you shouldn't use notion for everything, Stop using Notion for EVERYTHING, productivity notion task manager task management, productivity, notion, task manager, task management

Id: sSFC1ZxAphw

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020