My Notion Life Operating System Overview (Notion Life OS)

hi everyone in this video I'm going to share overview of my notion system this system functions as my life operating system and is the central engine to business operations for my company I've learned a lot by looking at other people's notion systems but didn't find one that would be sustainable and fast enough for me on a daily basis so I took the best practice as I saw added some new elements to create the system that works optimally for me I've taught the system to many people one on one received great feedback and further refined it I think is ready to share more broadly now so I hope this is helpful to you as always with notion take what works for you and customize or modify for your own unique needs and way of thinking I've said some of these notion workspaces up as templates that you can duplicate I intend to keep the videos in this channel on the shorter side to make them easier to go through in bite-sized stages so in this video I'm going to do a bird's eye view flying through key areas of the system to give an overall glance at how they fit together then I'm going to do a series of videos section by section going deeper in each one of them so this one will move at a good pace and not dig into details if greater detail is of interest to you hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to be notified as future videos come out now let's dive in every system should have its goals and objectives explicitly defined at the outset my objectives with this notion system are transparency prioritization and focus transparency revealing where everything happening in my world stands and what's progressing as planned and what's stuck prioritization centers on what matters most in what order and focus so when I sit down to work I have everything needed for that effort and nothing else distracting me from it and the system is designed to be quick to interact with having direct access to all the relevant resources at any given moment and finally it has to function well on mobile I'm about 60/40 between desktop and mobile many beautiful-looking notion systems out there are great on the computer but hard to interact with on mobile my approach enables full mobile functionality for the daily activities so with that let's moving to notion and take a look this is my top-level notion dashboard what I call the command center I try to put only what's essential here and no more I work to avoid clutter and overload anywhere I can it's organized into four sections focus growth business and home slash life focus includes the most important parts of the system and shapes my process for getting the most important things done consistently the focus area makes things happen in the lines how time is spent with my ultimate objectives the growth area is for personal enhancement today I'm going to summarize the focus in growth areas the priority actions and goals of the business section in the home life section are both represented in the focus area then these separate categories in dashboards go deeper as necessary future videos will cover these sections in greater depth moving briefly to the side panel zooming in my notion organizational structure is based on a system I call pillars pipelines and vaults or PPV the PPV framework provides an organized home for all elements in an ocean system other organizational systems like para were designed for a pre notion world notion brings a range of capabilities that have never been seen before in a single platform so it needed a new system that can accommodate its scope I'll do a video specifically on the pillars pipelines and vault systems soon but here's a quick look into how PPV works in practice you make four folders over here the first one is for dashboards which are a convenient organized pages integrating the most important and most used elements from the different pillars pipelines and vaults then you have a top-level folder four pillars and one for pipelines and one for vaults dashboards just to give you a quick glance of how I the types of dashboards I have again are just simple easy to access easy to use aggregations of the others but the real organization is in the pillars pipelines and vaults so if we look in pillars pillars are the support beams that hold the roof up that support your life and your aspiration inside the pillars folder we have the pillars database which is where you define your actual pillars so inside the pillars database it's a pretty small database but the database format helps organize it and helps create relations that roll things up into it so I've organized mine by business C this category here type has business is personal and then overlapping personal business so business items would be things like business admin branding client execution then on the personal side we have health and fitness personal admin home family and then some overlapping things like learning that is applicable to everything the other elements of this folder are pages and databases that directly support your pillars on an ongoing basis these are regular routine elements enabling and empowering your pillars we'll get more into these soon in the pipelines folder we have the databases that track actions and progress and these are all databases everything in pipelines is in motion progressing through stages of process this is where action happens in it's tracked here with clarity this is what focuses you in on what matters most at any given moment the action items database right here is my task database with daily actions organized and prioritized the other pipeline databases build up from there we'll get more into that soon as well then finally in the vols folder we have knowledge management these are the resources that we draw from to execute on our pillars and pipelines this is the collection and organization of information and learning our private collections of knowledge and information need to be easily captured and stored and protected vaults I'll go into this in much greater depth in another video soon so back to the command center I've also got weather and a little information here I've got keyboard shortcuts always trying to learn the keyboard shortcuts just so I can move faster through here and it's nice to have a quick handy reference there in the toggle but if it's open it's too much clutter so just toggle that guy and I've got a flow chart down here that maps out my whole system this was really helpful in the beginning when I designed it we'll do another video specifically on how to map out your whole system in a flow chart in another week or two so that's coming very shortly so in the command center the number one position is the daily action zone this is ground zero of making things happen and my most frequented dashboard inside the action zone this is like this is where I look at what I need to get done now today this week this is where I organized the tasks today action items is what's happening today prioritized tomorrow of course tomorrow in the upcoming week waiting on are things that I'm on hold until something else happens outside of my control zone usually waiting on somebody else to do something or it's a dependent task waiting on another task to get completed I'll get into that more in a second on going low priority lists are things that aren't important enough to put into the system but they're just there when I have a free moment and importantly the not to do list not to do this are very important just as important as to-do lists so no distractions tangents or rabbit holes do the work as planned no erratic start to transition is directly dive in their junk food no food late in the day just the things I just need to remember not to do and if you write them down then you're being deliberate about it and it's going to be front of mind when you start seeing yourself veering off course this goes to those balancing processes keeping you your system on track and on the rails so going into the each item here this is the most important one and this is the one that I live in day to day my action items database which I referred to over here at the top pipeline is what is often referred to as a task database some people call it a master task database this is the action items I need to get done to move the ball forward every single day and they're prioritized so I've got this priority system it can be immediate quick scheduled is if I've got an actual time assigned to it I still keep a Google calendar I'll discuss calendars in a future video but sometimes I want to have in my my priority list here which is the list I look at most frequently where I go to for the next item I need to get on top of so I sometimes it's nice to have the scheduled items in here priorities and errand if I have to run out later in the day or if it's just a reminder at the bottom and it's sorted to rank in this order the order of the list here so I try not to have more than three actual priorities of work each day because I want to be realistic about what I can get done this helps me see if I'm over reaching or if there's smaller things then maybe I can get a fourth one in or even a fifth one depending this is the video I'm working on right now so it is top priority and it is what I'm doing at this moment importantly I have a due date but not the due date most people have I have a do date I also have a DUI deed but when I talk about a due date I'm talking about the do date the date that I'm going to do something not the date that it has to be done by because the date it has to be done by by the time that date rolls around it's too late I mean you're up against the the final moments with a do date I assign the date that it's going to get done prior to the date that it has to be completed by in most cases you don't even have a d ue date but you I always in this system have a do date every single task in my action items database has a do date or is a dependent task on a date on a task that has a due date we'll get into that in just a minute when we get down to the waiting on items but I do have a system of dependent tasks that will kick in once the primary task is completed but can't get done and you don't want to have due dates do dates assigned to you know five different tasks in a sequence because if the first one keeps rolling you have to keep assigning new due dates to the twelve five of them this way I assign the due date to the first in the sequence and the others are just sequentially lined up behind it and we'll get due dates as the one in front in front of it is completed so you have a field here for next in line that's going to be if there were dependent tasks those would be noted here so I would have a direct link to the next in line behind it I'll give you an example of that below then also I'll just give you a quick glance at what these tasks look like let's pick one here's an edit for my podcast coming up so in each one I can view what I'm setting up a task I have to think about if it's a quick little task if it's just a quickie or immediate then I won't do this but if it's an actual important task with a priority listing I need to say to myself what project is this driving forward or what pillar is this supporting or what goal outcome is this delivering toward and if I can't answer that question then then either this task shouldn't be added or I haven't defined one of the important things that are a priority for me I need to go back to either my goal outcomes pillars and projects projects are tied to goal outcomes as we'll see here soon and if there's something in the production pipeline if this is actual content production then it's linked to my content production pipeline which will we'll see in a little bit here we'll get more into this whole thing when we get into the deep dive on the action zone but also I've got daily tracking every day I track certain things just to measure how closely I'm getting to improving the pillars and the goal outcomes that I've set for myself so in this daily view again this is just today view I have the one row of daily tracking items that I need to check off as I go through the day if you click through here you'll see there's a lot more information every morning I fill out the first bunch first part of the day I fill out this first session a lot of it comes from my aura ring in terms of sleep tracking I rate my diet and my nutrition on the previous day I'll my whiffing scale automatically measures tracks and and syncs to the cloud my weight and some other biometrics and then once I finished that I go back to the action zone and today and I've got this one record just for today and then as I go through my Bullitt planner my mindset ritual my visualization practice and of course meditation up front and then the workout for the day and then every night I scheduled the next day and I check that off as something to make sure I do that and then I will end of the day shut down involves rating on a percentage basis what percent of my effort today was spent on the things that I had scheduled what percentage was on track with what do I had planned to do at the outside of the day and then what percent did I complete that I had intended to complete so I can track that over time and then in the the big database here you can measure over time how consistently you're hitting those goals this view is a 30 day view also so it gives me a 30 day rolling average but I can track how effective I've been at staying on schedule and delivering the results that I had planned and then I can do all from the today action zone so that's today again there's a lot more in there happening that I can get into when we get into that specific video tomorrow gives me a glance of the same information for tomorrow upcoming week is the same view of the upcoming week it's all the same database but just having these toggles right here makes it so easy to check especially at the end of the day what I can open today and tomorrow and just move things forward as they need to be reassigned then I have the waiting on section now obviously sometimes you get stuck you're waiting for someone to complete something before you can move on it so that's here in my weekly review I always check this if something's taking too long I'll assign a due date a do date to follow up on it but if it's not urgent and I'm just letting them take their time do it on their own schedule I'll just leave it here and check it once a week to make sure it's not falling through the cracks now at the same time another view here has dependent actions dependent actions are actions that are in my task database my action items database but do not have a due date these are the only items without a due date because they are dependent on another item that does have a due date so this is the item here any item that has a dependent task two behind it I have a plus sign here so for this task it's following this task and then after this task the next in line is this one so this one would be the one here this one is in between following this one and preceding this one this task of course is right here again so this is a chain of three tasks none of which are scheduled but the one that the first one is following is scheduled this is a longer sequence you can see the end of the sequence when there's no next in line tasks these follow each other following this one follows this one and then here's the next one which is in the next row this one is on the next row this one is in the next row it's a chain of actions it doesn't take too long to set up but this is a pretty advanced thing don't start with this if you need a notion this is one of the reasons that I think notion is more powerful than dedicated to do apps to do us can't do this I mean some of the big project management apps can but those are way more complex this is just so much more effective I was using to do this prior to this and I loved to do it it's really a fantastic app but it does not have nearly the capability of this so I have completely replaced to-do list with this as well as replacing many other apps okay so that's pretty much what we have up here and then we have this incredible calendar view the notion calendar view is fantastic it's so dynamic these things react so quickly and a lot of other systems I've seen out there have this convo of you layout and that's fine but first of all that doesn't work very well on a mobile device and secondly it's very manual the most dynamic thing in notion is the date so I don't adjust everything in today I don't like roll everything into tomorrow the due date is set and they automatically roll into the current view and the tomorrow view and the upcoming view they're automatically progressing with time same thing of course in the calendar view they are I mean that red dot and that moves steadily forward and everything's there and you just roll into what's next so leveraging the date function is the best way to implement automation and ocean and this layout is really designed to leverage the date function this is to me way more functional than the Kanban layout view for your week view in fact it gives you more than a week but even if you're just looking at the upcoming week it's just so it's so clean and compact uses real estate much better than the Kanban view for this kind of functionality I just think you can't beat this the mobile versions a little bit different this is a little bit more functional but it's still very functional on the mobile app we can do a mobile video in the in the future and then finally down here I have these gallery views just cards for quick access to each of my active clients a little bit of information these are the dates that I have standing weekly meetings with each of them just all they're different at a glance I click into it now into their full page active project same thing these are the projects that are currently active in my projects database with some key information you know what they're linked to in terms of the pillars in terms of the goal outcomes that they're driving toward and then finally the goal outcomes with progress bars since goal outcomes are measurable they're a good place to have a progress bar measuring your progress toward them and that is the action zone that is the most powerful page to me in terms of getting things done so we've seen the action zone so these two are super important there's the pillar pipeline pyramid this is what links my daily activities to my bigger vision and this is to me I think of it as a pyramid the top point is narrow with more focus in the bottom is the base which is broader with the larger number of items going on which so this is the action items which we were just looking at these are the tasks database items that are prioritized in delivering the smallest unit of work but starting at the top we have guiding principles to define who we are in the direction we want to go in and what we value and what matters to us so I've got my overarching personal theme fuel but you know what fuels me got my why the driving forces behind what I do and why I do it got my life compass each of these informs the next one until you get to the life compass which is sort of your guiding compass your guiding direction so that's at the top and then we get into the pillar pipeline pyramid it's quickly going through this because this is a long video in and of itself too to get into this whole thing but we got the annual reviews in the annual vision review the previous year we set the goals and the objectives in the hopes for the upcoming year that's a year-end process I mean here we have quarterly and monthly reviews also part of that process we'll get to that in a moment milestones our database for accomplishments and a separate database for disappointments it's really valuable to track these then you can roll these up into the quarters in the months and the years and you can see them an aggregate what's accumulating in terms of accomplishments what's accumulating in terms of disappointments it's really easy to have these things happen and just forget about them and not realize what you're really doing I mean these really reveal what you're achieving in weight and gives it a transparency and visibility that you typically don't have just from memory then pillars the pillars what we saw in the first database and the pillars folder here is more compressed and this is designed here to connect with the rest of this pyramid so we've got goal outcomes which go down here into the goal pipeline the second this connects the pillars to the things beneath it in the pyramid in the we get the goal section in the pipeline in the middle we've got our value goals it's helpful sometimes to open these together and our goal outcomes value goals are tied to our pillars that's not in this view but they are tied to the pillars as we saw in the pillars table but importantly the value goals are our aspirations these are the things we hope for in a very touchy-feely way and very aspirational soft but but central to our to our hopes and dreams and then we connect those to go outcomes which are tangible measurable incarnations of those values in the valuables so our value goals are directly linked here to our goal outcomes value goals listed here linking them up goal outcomes here linking them down we've got a lot of other things going on in these databases but that gives you the gist of how they connect how I'm connecting the pyramid together and then we've got projects projects are assigned a quarters assigned due dates these are specific things that get done that advance us toward the goal outcomes or in some way support the pillars but in most cases they're advancing towards the goal outcomes and they're tied directly to the goal outcomes are tied directly to the pillars and they're tied beneath them to the action items which are below the action ends which we've just seen in the other section but they're here so that they can very clearly all be linked together in a pyramid the base of the pyramid delivering day by day inch by inch toward the bigger goals higher up in the pyramid delivering for the pillars which are the cornerstones of our life all centered around our guiding principles and then the bottom I just have an execution dashboard which are just some quick links to relevant areas to execute on the pyramid so back to the command center so finally in the focus section we then have the weekly monthly quarterly reviews so these are just displayed by gallery view and these are all the weeks of the week there we got the months here and then we got quarters here the key here is that we the end of every week I go through an assessment I look at I'll just pull up the upcoming week which has not been done the beginning of each week I'll define an objective and a focus and then at the end of the week I'll go through or I'll rate the effectiveness what I'm grateful for from the week accomplishments disappointments improvements now and then I'll have a whole template down here I click the template it brings in the entire checklist I go through in my weekly review we'll do a video on that as well now one really cool thing here so if we open one of these I've got a lot of roll-ups going on I linked to these days and then these things come in automatically from the each day I enter the improvements they automatically roll up my workouts roll up my sleep times weight tracking output percentages roll up and it all rolls up so I don't have to enter this it's just all aggregated here for the record and then I have the action items filtered for that I'm gonna do a whole video on how these work we don't have enough time to get into that right now but it gives you a sense of how things are linked together in a comprehensive system and then obviously there's an image that capture that represents a significant happening from that week or that month and then the quarters just I'm tracking very carefully what I want to achieve each quarter and this links it all to the pyramid back to the command center that takes us through the focus area and that links everything together up and down that pyramid with very specific things to address at any given moment throughout the day then quickly just jump in through the growth section here we've got mindset and identity sculpting this is directly building towards my pillars building towards the kind of person I aspire to be and helping me to become better at what I do so this is an outline of it I love this table of contents feature in notion you just do slash TOC and it'll summarize based on the headings in the section this is a large section each day I'll spend time in one section of this one or two sections to remind myself of the things that are important to me I'll do a whole video on this on mindset and identity sculpting but that's part of this growth area Fitness I track all my workouts swimming biking cycling weights habits and routines this I don't go into very often I this is but did i review it in my monthly review and I just am very deliberate about how I'm shaping habits and routines I had lists the habits that are important that are building towards the pillars that I've shared with you and that I've defined for myself I define the frequency the time of day why I'm doing it and then it links to things such as pillars or related goal outcomes and then finally mind expansion which is really a nice organization of the vaults folder not all of them but the most important ones so I've got the library with books these are the books I'm reading in order I've got next up I've got paws I've got under way I've got the priority within each status category and then whenever I finish one or as I'm reading it I'm entering notes in these pages so let's say this is one that I'm reading right now so I'm entering notes as I'm reading and that is how I a great knowledge from books media vault is whenever I see an article that's relevant to something I'm working on that the priority of my life when I see here a podcast or see a video it all goes into this media vault and I'll define what medium it is article video podcast or social media then the URL to the original source and then finally well the third third one that last link goes to this bottom section which I'll get to in a second Academy in courses training our courses or training programs that I'm doing and in all the notes and documentation of what I'm learning throughout the program is all in the pages of those different records these are areas that I'm working on that are broader than a specific project rather than a specific piece of media or content that I've saved these are aggregating different learnings across books across media content across training courses across conversations I have with people that often support multiple projects or really long-term projects it's if I'm working on material just for a project it'll usually go in the project page itself but if I'm working on a broader theme of aggregating knowledge and learning broader than a project it'll go in my in action studio but everything in here is something that I'm actively interested in and working on and deliberately building knowledge for and these of course are linked to projects linked to action items linked to pillars tagged for what area they're focused on so I can sort by those as well and that what I do to expand my learning my knowledge base and manage and organize information to support my pipelines and my pillars and then finally we're going to get more into these in future videos we've got the business section in the home life section the business section has some pretty obvious categories it would take a long time to go into each of these but just you know a quick glance the content production i've got quick scratch pads up here this is how i sequenced out i'm always changing the sequence here but the sequence on the notion video series that i'm working on right now just sketch them out there once i they become solid or the next few as they come close to them i'll schedule them in the production pipeline they'll actually be assigned a status is everything has one of these statuses all of the databases in here are the same production pipeline but they're providing views and different parts of the sequence with which an idea or a production element goes through the system so here's just a way to look at what's actually in production right now with a lot more information the next one shows it in a Kanban view which is a little bit more of a process flow so things just flow back and forth through here some periods I'm really busy with lots of stuff and when I have other people involved when I have my editors working on projects or I have writers have different people involved then we can assign who's working on what and at a glance I can see where everything is if something's not moving it becomes obvious this is the video I'm working on right now it's going to be a link to action items it's going to have a publish date and the next action date and it's going to be linked to an action item which is in the action zone tasks database then down here of course we got our next up and we've got a post archive here things that have already been posted with a link to everything that has been posted I can access it directly from the video link if you look at one of these you'll see I've got documentation and when it was published where it was published in video forum what was published in written form if it is a written form I've got the actual text in there so I've got an archive of everything down here we've got two content calendars one is the next action calendar these are the things I'm working on each day so today I'm working on this tomorrow I'm working on number five in this series that I'm working on the mind of machine podcast then I'm working on the mind of machine newsletter these will be added as a role but this is the one these are the ones that are already mapped out and this is the publishing calendar that's above is the next action this one is the publishing so this one will have past items it'll have future items and it just documents the date everything is to be published which helps me keep on track so the different categories have workflows similar to that we're going to go through all the major ones and that's pretty much it but it functions so smoothly for me obviously takes a while to build up a system like this and you do it step by step you build one section at a time if you're getting started I find laying this dashboard out to be super helpful and then just have blank pages and build one at a time but by laying it out you know what you're building toward and you'll know how each one will ultimately be connected to the rest so I think step one on building a system from scratch is to start with this page and then if you're going to do your tasks in ocean I think the next thing is to build your task database and your action zone and then I'd build the pillar to pipeline pyramid so you can link your tasks to your goals to your out gold outcomes to your value goals to your pillars to the compasses that matter most to you in life and then establish your weekly monthly review and then build in your mindset and then build in your business and then build in your home life its gradual but if you have a vision of how it's all gonna come together I think you build something better faster and that's a basic relatively quick overview of the notion system the series of videos following this one will dive into each section in more detail if this is of interest be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to get updates on future videos leave thoughts or questions below and hit the like button if you found this valuable it boosts the video and the algorithm helping others to find it and I write a newsletter called the minded machine newsletter on increasing human capability I give away several of my best notion templates to anyone who subscribes to the newsletter you can unsubscribe from the newsletter of course at any time but I hope you'll give it a chance I work hard to pack it with lots of valuable insight the newsletter link is below in the show notes thanks for watching lots more to come

Channel: August Bradley - Life Design

Views: 316,816

Keywords: notion, notion app, notion productivity, notion productivity app, productivity, notion solutions, personal enhancement, efficiency, business efficiency, small business systems, systems, august bradley, personal operating system, business operations system, performance, personal performance, business performance, Evernote, asana, trello

Id: 4-TYSah25UM

Length: 33min 35sec (2015 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020