Notion As A Second Brain: Full Recording

it's really good to see everyone here my name is Justin I'm notions one of notions community ambassadors for Los Angeles specifically for UCLA I'm currently assumed that that's going to UCLA and ocean asked me to help organize this event with Thiago and Rita house um thank you so much again Sarah and Leigh the house for having us here it's really great to see everyone we're gonna have a great event tonight we have a talk given by Iago Forte as I'm sure you're aware followed by a shorter talk by Lauren Valdez a little bit about myself um so I'm one of notions community ambassadors as I mentioned I hope notion get organized at UCLA and help students get on board of the product as I'm sure many of you are aware I'll let y'all go introduce himself and we can get this event started thanks Justin hey everyone a lot of familiar faces actually my name is tiago forte and i teach a course called building a second brain has anyone here heard of building a second brand by any chance can I see a show of hands okay Lots awesome building a second brain is a course but it's also a methodology a philosophy some would even say a way of life some that teaches people to use technology in a certain way not just as a distraction as an interruption as a burden but as an extension of their mind an extension of their intellect an extension of their intuition an extension of their self it's very deep stuff and I've partnered with notion to do the series of events to talk about the relationship between that methodology which has a lot of interesting ideas and concepts and frameworks and a very practical thing which is the notion software the tool right so what I want to talk to you about tonight with notion is a second brain it's kind of self explanatory in the title but what would it look like or could it look like or should it look like to use notion a piece of productivity software as something as grand and lofty and kind of profound as a second brain as an extension of the most complex and amazing mechanism machine in the universe which is the human brain can I see a quick show of hands how many of you use notion or have used it okay similar numbers so that's the course I teach I'm not going to really talk about it much if you want to learn more you can go to building a second brain comm there's a form at the top of that page that if you enter your email address I'll send you a series of seven emails that kind of has like my basic seven principles one per day for a week but I'm here to answer a different question which is the question I receive day in and day out not are you switching to notion but when are you switching to notion the only question I receive more often is are you Elon Musk it's the only one there neck-and-neck though and really this is a question I've been slightly obsessively thinking about as we've been going to different cities and meeting some of the most passionate smart engaged people really we've seen anywhere it's really incredible to see the movement the community that notion is building and so I had to really go back to the beginning we have to go back to the beginning to a history of productivity apps which may not sound like the most exciting topic ever but I promise you it has a ton of relevance for what we talked about today and what I saw was that it all started with email email was like the Big Bang of productivity software right I don't know if you remember probably not everyone in here remembers the arrival of email in the 90s remember AOL when you'd hear that sound and that you've got mail that was like a world-changing thing I mean truly a singular moment in history before that you had send telegrams write letters maybe make phone calls and suddenly you could fire off an electronic message to ever to any person with an email address in the world and it's funny to think back you know you'd hear that you've got mail and it was like oh my gosh I'm so special someone thought of me it was like this privilege it was like you were the chosen recipient of this email now you see the red dot and the fifty thousand you know number badge and you're just like Oh more emails it's amazing how fast has changed from the greatest blessing to the greatest curse and that's a pattern we're gonna see again and again so what I started to see as I talk to different people and that's the amazing thing is the people who invented these things are still around and some of them still working there's people on those postcards out there that are still working like Ted Nelson right so from reading from talking to people from from just looking at different sources I noticed that there's a pattern and this isn't mine this is from a company called I think Gartner which is a research firm it's very well established well recognized nothing controversial and it talks about the hype cycle of how technologies enter the mainstream so something happens there's some inventions some breakthrough some some new kind of capability then it tends to get overhyped everyone says the the characteristic here is this is gonna change everything the whole world will be different will never be the same our daily life will be transformed and it kind of goes way beyond any reasonable expectation of what a technology could do and then of course nothing can fulfill those expectations so it drops into the trough of disillusionment but then it's not that bad either right it's just a tool once a technology and it kind of goes up the slope of enlightenment and I love the parallels here to like meditation and stuff and then it hits the plateau of productivity and it's interesting because all through this roller coaster it's not really having an effect on the way people work maybe some people like the fringe nerds like you and me but for most people it hasn't entered the mainstream hasn't become a part of normal kind of work culture so what started to happen in the 1990s as we have this email explosion what tends to happen is as the tool gets adopted and as it becomes really mainstream people start to stretch the use case right so email was started for a very simple thing send and receive messages right but then as people spent more and more of their day in email it became like a another limb they started going all but we could use this for notifications we could use this as a to-do list we could use this as so many things and all these functions started being added on to email if you think about it though that really is not ideal right how many of you use your email inbox you can be honest use your email inbox as a to-do list sometimes even I do it sometimes come on and that's really not ideal that's not what it was invented for right how much sense does it make to have a to-do list that anyone in the whole world who has your email address can add something to at any time day or night and when they add it to that list it goes right up at the very top it doesn't make a lot of sense right so to kind of relieve that pressure task managers were invented task managers are essentially digital to-do lists it's a piece of software for managing and the things you have to do right so how many of you use a task manager like OmniFocus things to duyst wunderlist any of these a lot of us right okay and that was again a revolution it really was kicked off in really the the sort of explosion was 2001 with the publication of GTD getting things done which I'm sure many of you are familiar with right I mean the reason GTD needed to exist was because of the incredible volume of what we're called open loops basically new things for you to think of and keep track of but then the same thing happened right the percentage of the population who was ever going to adopt a task manager which is not a hundred it's never 100 they did and they started going oh we could use this for more things does anyone have any guesses as to what we started using it's still today using task managers for any ideas what's that notes yeah right you're you're already there you're already writing things down in the list format why not write your grocery list and a note to self and a reminder and a quote from a book all these things started going into your task manager which again created that pressure because it's not ideal right when you're there in the midst of the chaos of your day and you're just needing to know the next action next action next action you don't really want that Shakespearean Hamlet quote in there you don't really want that passage from us you know cognitive psychology book all these random notes that we take aren't really helpful in that context so in the 2010s really with the rise of smartphones starting with the iPhone in 2007 we had what I call the digital notes revolution and I don't know how many of you remember this like the early days of Evernote the fervor and the excitement was surreal right I mean now we completely take it for granted the ability to save text and different kinds of media and then just have it show up on different devices and be completely synched was absolutely magical and the big difference that digital notes had was that it could capture large volumes of notes it wasn't just one line at a time like Anna task manager' you could save thousands of words of text you could save images you can say links you could save PDFs attachments gifts all that kind of stuff in a place that it didn't interfere with your day-to-day work so it's now on the eve of 2020 an almost sci-fi eske year still feels like and I think this is where we're at right now it's like the bubble of digital notes is in the process of popping and this is what I want to explore and kind of look at more closely cuz I think it's really interesting it has big implications so the question is if notion is this new layer this kind of new level of the pyramid what is the job that it's best suited for right and we have some clues from what we've just seen it's probably the job that the previous generation of productivity software is not doing very well right so here's what I notice with digital notes there's a small percentage of notes maybe 2 3 5% at most that people access and relate to in a very different way right there's your book notes and your kind of your random just static notes but there's certain notes for example dashboards documentation dynamic lists which what which which I just mean lists that are more just more than just a list of 10 things that doesn't change but lists that have more action and and kind of change procedures checklists and templates right so things like standard operating procedures how do we do this process in my business things like a list of goals that changes that evolves things like like checklists for say how you pack for when you travel or checklists for how you publish a blog posts to all sorts of different things and I'm starting to think that this job is the one the notion is primarily gonna be taking over and I'm trying to come up with a word for these I'm very open to suggestions because I think these ones are not that great but I am currently calling them dashboards and I'll tell you in a minute why are working documents is a bit broader option and I like the the the double meaning of working documents in that you're using them to work but they're also working they're working when you sleep they have a certain intelligence they have a certain certain abilities beyond just a kind of static document and here's some kind of characteristics excuse me that I picked out they're essential for action right so these aren't just your notes on a text book you read in college 15 years ago it's like something you need to do your work each day but they also change frequently so there's an updating there's a dynamic there's a responsive element that they need they're much more sharing friendly that than in the past they're designed with the assumption that you'll share instead of sharing being this like backdoor kind of contingency plan multiple views needed right you need more than one way of seeing that data sometimes it needs to be in a calendar sometimes in a checklist sometimes in a template it's the same data just needs different views it's multi kind of similar it's multi-dimensional has more than just one kind of way of sorting it and modular blocks right and I think the analogy to dashboards is interesting because if you think of a dashboard it has to be accurate and informative right your life depends or safety and the safety of others depends on the dashboard so as to be accurate it has to be correct but it also has to be also has to change constantly right think about when you're driving and you see someone come out onto the road you have to be able to glance in just a moment for a second at your dashboard dashboard and get just the information that you need to take the action to swerve and it's interesting if you look at often the predecessors to these things start a business right there's not a start-up in San Francisco where we lived my wife Lauren and I lived up until a year ago you can't walk into a start-up office in the San Francisco without seeing dashboards it's kind of like a trend of the past few years right there's sales metrics there's revenue metrics there's customer metrics usage metrics all these kinds of things until now you had to have be an engineer or have an engineer a ton of API is ton of training back-end access a designer a UX designer all these things to be able to create these and now it's sort of like they're filtering down potentially to consumers there's a movement called the no code movement maybe you you've heard of it maybe not notion is part of it other apps like air table web flow that basically allow the creation of interfaces the creation of of software to a certain extent without the use of code right it's like drag-and-drop stuff it's it's things that you can not exactly create from scratch but you can configure you can customize you can sort of build on your own using very user-friendly tools so maybe we this new generation this new layer of the pyramid can be working documents if that's the case there's three patterns that we should look for and three patterns that we saw that we saw in each of the previous generations the first one is that the new generation of apps productivity apps takes over primarily the most sophisticated complex higher-order jobs right they don't take over the whole thing they don't even want to actually cuz most of the old jobs are kind of boring they're not very sexy they're not very trendy they want to do that the new cutting edge the frontier stuff second and this is really kind of unexpected in counterintuitive the previous generation doesn't become unnecessary right think of after all these generations is email obsolete in any way I'd say it's more important than ever it's the one platform that doesn't change constantly every few years right the previous generation doesn't become unnecessary in fact it actually becomes better than ever because and no longer has to constantly keep innovating and trying to be something it's not it can just refocus on its original use case and especially efficiency in that use case so you look at what is the other hot kind of up-and-coming productivity app alongside notion right now is super human right what is super human it's going back to that first generation reinventing it with an insane focus on efficiency right like they have in the corner they show the number of like milliseconds microseconds it takes to delete a message or to send a message all these things it's like they've removed all the cruft of Gmail Gmail has become this really kind of monster and they're helping you do that one thing with extreme speed and third each new generation provokes a massive explosion in the volume of the thing helps people create so you see this again and again think about email who would have guessed if you went back 30 40 years who would have guessed that the average knowledge worker the average professional needed to receive hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails per week like who would have thought we had no idea I mean how many letters did you get a week before email it's it's not even in the ballpark it's like to order two three orders of magnitude more same thing with tasks right when the staffs managers came out it was like Oh what are your 10 tasks now they have to be able to track hundreds if not thousands of tasks right it's normal to have hundreds of tasks anyone who does GTD knows that hundreds is normal as modern humans same thing with notes who would have guessed these Evernote collections of 10000 20000 30000 are normal right if you've been using these apps for any period of time they make it so fast to create whatever the thing is that the volume just explodes so if these repeat and I think they will here's what we should see over the next few years that notion specifically for notion notion will fulfill the demand primarily it will be used for other things some people will use it for tasks some people for notes but its core use case the most interesting thing the most innovative thing the thing that really allows it to start a new paradigm will be working documents will be documents that are essential for action and also need to change quickly and have different ways of interacting and kind of viewing them second and this is definitely controversial if you follow the digital note controversies on Twitter as I'm sure you all do the digital note-taking apps will survive and will thrive everyone's predicting the imminent demise of Evernote I don't think that's gonna happen I think that whole generation of apps and there's so many of them I mean you have Microsoft OneNote kind of the old dinosaur there's Google keep on the sidelines there's simple notes there's there's a whole group of note inking apps for the iPad that are kind of reinventing digital notes almost in the original way of drawing and kind of sketching and they'll be better than ever because they'll be able to focus on the really the one thing that they were always destined for which is just taking notes think about a moleskin write a moleskin a paper notebook just takes notes that's it right it captures it it saves it sort of pulls things from the physical world into the digital world and that's enough that's a big enough job I think to support an entire category of software and third there will be an explosion it's hard for us to imagine now I think with the other just like with the other ones but working documents are gonna explode dashboards are gonna explode think about if you had as much information on your productivity as you did about your car or your computer or some device that has a dashboard right imagine if you had a dashboard for your health that inter interrelated and showed you the relationships between your cholesterol and blood pressure and your exercise in your sleep imagine if you had dashboards for your relationships you kept track you had a personal CRM customer relationship manager that kept track of your different relationships how strong they were when you had checked in what plans you're making with them imagine if you had a dashboard for your finances one that you created not just some software someone gave you but you could customize what do you want to see about your finances what do you want to know imagine what would happen if we had the ability to create these working documents anyone did with whatever data they wanted with whatever data they could get their hands on it's really a powerful future I think that we are looking at so some of you came here I know to answer this question which is should I switch to notion and I hope by seeing this kind of more complex history that you now see that that is a really overly simplistic notion it really doesn't it doesn't take into account that our productivity as you saw with the pyramid is multi-layered it's not just one thing it's not one dimension your productivity itself is this multi-dimensional stack of interrelated capabilities some of which are always there have been there a long time maybe will always be there other ones that are much more advanced that maybe not everyone in the world needs only the most kind of advanced knowledge workers who work with the highest volumes of information or the most complex information but what I encourage you oh that's not yet actually ok so I think it's not about switching it's more about layering it's out layering the new generation on to the top of what you're already doing so let's get it a little more practical this is a note this is a note from Evernote I picked it at random from a recent Black Friday sale that I did it was my notes on making an analogy of the second brand idea to the Pensieve in Harry Potter which is this magical dish that you can sort of see your ol you can pour your memories into it and then relive your memories it's a very cool analogy I have a post on it if you search Pensieve on my blog you can find the post but this was just some simple notes pulling from I think a quote from one of the books that I saw online a couple of forums and maybe it's some social media just a few sources that I essentially used to write this blog post for this promotion and I discarded it essentially it's essentially a disposable notes I mean I'll keep it in the archives but it's super unlikely that I would refer to this note in the future I'll refer to the blog post right and to me this is a perfect note right this is a know that doesn't benefit from more structure doesn't benefit from headings and toggles and tables and interlinked databases and all these things structure would be a would be not an improvement on this but then you look at something so this is my notion this is how we manage the blog workflow practice is my blog and it's really central to our business because everything goes through the block every announcement every promotion every new product every interview every partnership every event like this one it's like almost like the pipeline of all things that are happening in the business and we use this kind of Kanban columns view of the workflow each one of these cards is a post so they start as ideas then they have some notes attached you can see some links here to Evernote then they become outlines and they become drafts and then posts and then social media and then email and then finally they're archived and this I think is a really great use case for notion right you think about what's happening here there's a dynamic quality right things are moving in nonlinear ways something might move forward but then I realize oh it's not ready has to come back to post might get combined if I realize they're similar one post might get split up there's a lot of different ways that they move and then of course by clicking here and creating a different view I could see these in a different way I could see them in a calendar view so if I want to know what are we gonna be publishing six weeks from now right what what announcement with that new blog post that's coming out in six weeks can i align there's all sorts of strategic things some things have to be published before other things some things can't be published until something else is published and really that dynamic kind of behavior is captured well in notion and just in case you're curious there's a few other things we're currently I'm currently using notion for running my online course building a second brain so if you think about it that's something that repeats but is also different each time right so there's kind of a template quality and then this is now called 40 labs HQ is our operations we have standard operating procedures how to set a meeting how to organize a meet-up how to publish a blog post all that kind of stuff and they all interlink so all the actions and these two that have to be done more than a couple times have links to the standard operating procedures and of course this is all shared all shared with the team I think what's gonna happen with digital notes apps such as my beloved Evernote is that they're going to be as I said before they're gonna revert back to their true nature and become like a universal inbox imagine an app that was a universal Inbox you knew that you could capture anything from any source in any format for any purpose that is an important job and it's one that still to this day Evernote does much better than ocean right Ferdinand not for technological reasons like oh they did better code but for architectural reasons Evernote is like a black box with a slot in it you can just drop things in it because each note is the same each note exists on the same level each note is sort of interchangeable the fact that it's kind of dumb and it doesn't offer that same level of capability and intelligence is actually a feature not necessarily a bug so I'm gonna leave you with just a thought to think about your holistic productivity stack and to not necessarily have FOMO about jumping on the notion bandwagon just because others are just because it seems cool but to think about what is really at the peak of that pyramid which is your goals it's a perfect time of year we're on the eve of 2020 everyone's doing New Year's resolutions I'm myself running a two-day online annual review workshop January fourth and fifth we do it via zoom I encourage you guys to join it's gonna be super fun but when people ask like which app should I use how should I use them all these kind of questions it depends on your goals and I really encourage you to start there and work backwards what is that thing that pops up every year at the beginning of the year that you go I'll do that next year what is that unicorn that you find yourself dreaming about daydreaming about that's always there kind of at the back of your mind that you want that it calls to you that moves you that touches you that you know is something in some way related to your purpose related to what really matters to you in this world and then to work kind of downwards from there into what are the pieces of infrastructure that you need not that you want that you need to accomplish that if you don't productivity software even can just be another distraction if it's just an excuse to keep making things and keep trying things rather than the thing that really matters in the end which is action couple notes notion has programs for education I believe if you're a student or teacher right you can get the personal individual plan for free okay given a edu email address and also for startups I think you have to apply and kind of go through some things but you can potentially get it for free or discounted if your startup so I encourage you to take advantage of that and if you have any not just questions but anything to offer really this is like the beginning these events at the beginning of an Rd process of potentially one day I don't know offering a course doing more workshops writing a book who knows but if there's anything that you saw in this presentation that you have thoughts on that you think you can add some clarity to that you have some personal experience because I always just have my own primarily my own experience reach out that's my website you can find from there my email address my Twitter I may take some time to get back to you but I will get back to you and that's the talk and I'm going to now introduce my partner Lauren so she's gonna do a talk on how she uses notion on how we use notion for those customers and clients and she has a different take just because she's kind of honestly working closer with people kind of on more specific and customized issues which is what we do with our coaching and consulting and she's gonna have an interesting perspective to share with you okay so we're gonna switch out computers here and I'm just gonna get started chatting while she had a sets us up so I am the polar opposite of Thiago were married but opposites attract so he was born super organized like thinking and structures I'm like come from a big giant Latina family where we just do everything by how we feel not based on like apps and what's next like I got through college writing my things on my hand and then a professor would say like the papers due this week and I'm like oh we have to do that but I have trained myself to be organized because I've needed to survive as a knowledge worker but because of that I think I have a very different take on these sort of apps and things like this because I work with a lot of people who really struggle with getting productive and getting organized so I'd love to hear from people in this room who here has downloaded notion but hasn't really like touched it that much raise your hand all right okay cool so I mean I mean your guys's camp so I'm someone who I downloaded notion maybe about it maybe at the beginning of this year and then it was like too much and I just closed it and I didn't open it again for many months and so my talk is about how I kind of got into what I think is like the minimum level of getting the maximum value of notion for me and what I do and so my talk is about the lazy person guide to notion because I really see myself as a highly lazy person iago jokes that the amount of creativity I put into being lazy is like astonishing because I read we try to do a little bit of everything but I am highly ambitious and I do an achieve a lot and I do that by making sure I invest the minimum amount of energy that I can in all the different things that I am interested in and so I want to give you guys that kind of like base level here's the way we bring ourselves into into notion alright so notions been you know been promoted as this all-in-one workspace the thing that replaces everything and becomes a thing that now you can get rid of the rest of your apps because now you have notion and that sounds amazing if you guys follow the GTD principles there's the idea that having a universal inbox is this like amazing thing right everything goes in one place and then you're not searching across all your devices you're finding everything in one place that's an amazing principle in theory and as Jia has talked about with our the holistic stack of productivity apps that it's it's hard when your information is split everywhere but there's reasons why our information is split because each application serves a different purpose so when I started playing with notion and watching YouTube videos about it I've seen people who've basically made notion like a end-all be-all for their task manager they're uploading files they're basically recreating like Instapaper and their or their Pinterest boards like in notion it's pretty intense the amount of things that people have used notion for it's really phenomenal and it's inspirational and I watch these videos and I was like that is too much like I just I don't have time for that right now the doing a transition of all my things seems really hard and complex so I just quickly gave up because I'm an all-or-nothing person like if I can't do something perfect I don't do it at all and so what I have had to find is that entry-level point that allows me to get something out of notion without having to go all in diving into the deep end and replacing all my apps that actually have a really great function and workflow for me so this is my productivity principle that what is simple is sustainable I spent many years trying to perfect my GTD system and trying to do things to the complex level at which Tiago is organized but that doesn't work for me because like I said I'm kind I'm I'm pretty lazy I can't spend so many hours tracking things and inputting information and adding tags like that does not work for me though systems quickly break down as soon as I make them too complex and I know plenty of productivity nerds like Tiago who love all those details and when you love doing something then please do it which is my second productivity principle which is what is pleasurable is motivating so if something gives you pleasure if you get really excited like creating the most beautiful notion board that is the wiki of your life then do it and keep doing it if you have no breakdowns with that system do it you have to find those things that are that are good for you and that's something we pull into the courses that we do and the coaching that we do is helping people find that balance of what is the level of system that gets you the outcomes you want to do and achieve in your life as well as what makes you excited like how do you like to organize and do things like my productivity principles are very embodied there are a lot less outside of the apps if I was to add to that productivity app triangle that you just showed I would call that the digital productivity pyramid because I I work in a side that's all embodied my eye my way of organizing is in the morning I wake up and I do a meditation and I feel like what is the most important thing and I do that before I check my email because if I don't do that then I will get stuck in other people's priorities so I have to like feel and journal right in the morning so my method is very different but that is pleasurable and motivating for me to sit and meditate rather than sit and look at my two duis and be like overwhelmed by my day I do that first so that I feel excited about my day so I encourage you all to really find for you what is sustainable and how you do your setup in your system and this is something I'm finding as we are doing these notion this notion tour right now this is our third stop we did a Mexico City and SAAM Paulo and we're talking to these people who are like all gung-ho about notion and they have these like insane dashboards and they have these breakdowns because you have to input all of that information physically and that's exhausting and so as soon as you have a breakdown in not updating all your habits trackers and those sort of things then the whole system is broken and so if you have to create a really complex system and it has to be perfect to work then that system doesn't work that's a breakdown and so I encourage you all as you're moving into notion to really understand what is the the simple level that you can sustain and then what is pleasurable and motivating to you and do that and stick to that because that's going to be what pulls you through your own personal productivity alright so if any of you have taken our building a second brain course this is something we talked about is that most people when it comes to knowledge management are in level 1 & 2 of this little pyramid right here where there's there's the part of storing information we if you have Evernote and use a task manager and using notion that there's a lot of focus on getting information into those systems and as you become a more advanced user you start being able to organize that information a lot better and creating a system and containers and figuring out your best next action and all those things but what we focus on in our in our building a second brain course is organizing your information in a way that is enabling action and so if any of you follow our para system the whole system is about organizing your information for action and something I see a lot in people who get really tripped up in their productivity methods and have a lot of breakdowns is they organize to organize I don't know if there's any of those people in here I like to think of it as procrastination a lot of time for the action we know we need to take a lot of time we know the most important action we need to take and it's a scary action and because it's scary we avoid it and then we make plans and we project plan and we organize and we add tags because we're actually afraid to just pick up the phone and make the phone call we're afraid to make or to go sell and market the thing we have to sell a market and we hate marketing so we're just going to keep fiddling and organizing things in our todoist or our ever or whatnot and so what we like to focus on in our course in our courses is what are the actions and the outcomes and the goals you're trying to achieve and then organize that information so that you can you can do and achieve those things and this is something like people like I always shocked to know this about me I'm so organized when it comes to work and then if you come into my house like my closets are like a disaster and I will only organize my closets when I can't find something I'm like oh hi I'm like looking for something really important so then i reorganize my entire closet and that's because the goal or the action then becomes important when they need to find something so then I get organized and I think that needs to apply a lot more to people's lives like there's no reason you need to perfectly organize your Evernote because most of the things in your Evernote they're just not that important they're like little clips and ideas and quotes and things like that so they like why should they be organized so with notion something I think is really critical about it that makes it really impactful is that it is a great space to organize when you have a really clear goal and objective and reason to use notion and what we're hearing and seeing from a lot of people is they're using notion to then replace every system they have and the first thing I want to ask you all to question before you do that is to think about what is the purpose and the outcome of that what is the purpose or outcome of tracking your habits I used many habit trackers and I finally gave up on them because I realized checking the habit tracker makes no difference on whether or not I do the habit so I gave up tracking them so I feel like I really like that serves no purpose so for you all I want to encourage you to think about what is the purpose and the outcome you want to achieve and how does notion or whatever specific app or method you're using actually help you do and achieve that thing so because I'm super lazy I I try to put in as low effort as possible but the bigger a pain gets the more effort it's worth so something like two duis is what I use for my task manager two duis is is a good amount of effort to organize well for me and for me to stay on top of it but there's very little pain in my two duis system ever no very very little effort to capture it's not as great as being organized like my to do but it works for me but then recently I've had some projects and some systems that just have been huge pains for me one of them has been consulting and working with clients and if any of you guys work with partners there's huge barriers when people work on very different systems so when you have clients and everyone uses like one groups on Trello one groups on asana some of them are old-school and they don't even have any sort of joint shared task managers like I with some clients and they don't even have Google Docs and you're like oh my gosh and then you have access level issues so working with clients and partners who use different systems is always a huge pain for me and then another problem I've been having lately is some overly complex web systems that don't actually serve a purpose and so I want to show you some case studies on how I've addressed some of these pain points with notion so I told you guys earlier that I am i opened up notion earlier this year and then I didn't touch it again but then at some point my pain got too much and then I reached this tipping point and the tipping point occurred and I was like okay and now I have to get over my laziness because the pain is too great and that's how I started using notion just recently so once the pain is greater than my effort I start getting organized but for me the solution has to be greater than the amount of time I input into a system and notion could very easily take a lot of time to set up properly and so for me notion has to solve a really big problem if I'm gonna spend the time organizing the information I need to in notion all right so this is kind of how a lot of my like this is how my closet looks and this is how my Evernote inbox looks but as soon as I have a goal in mind then I have to then I have to get things in order and this is kind of what i've done with notion i have a lot of information in in dropbox folders in my evernote folders across different systems i'm using four different clients and i've taken all that information that's spread across so many different systems and i've turned it into notion pages that then take all that information and organize it and hyperlink it in a way where i can quickly get that glance of everything I need to see that's important and then to share that in a way that's really easy so notion for those of you who are just getting into it notions capabilities that make it really impactful and that make it the new thing that everyone's really excited about are being able to synthesize lots of information for me taking notes in notion and changing bullets to toggles that's already too hard that's already harder than than an Evernote document document but where notion is really groundbreaking is being able to synthesize lots of information like Thiago was talking about and then the other thing that I think is super impactful is just creating your own custom structure and creating custom web pages that you can easily share and then the linked databases the linked database features are really incredible being able to put information in one place and have it show up somewhere else so I'm gonna show you guys a case study of how I've recently used notion so this is a program that I am mentoring in its the Clinton Global Initiative University and there's over 700 students across the globe in this program and this is their back-end website which is so terrible and hard to find information in and I work a lot with nonprofits and nonprofits are always having these like terrible ancient systems and so what I did my students in the program were like where do I find this I don't know how to do this and I went through this whole system and I also struggle to find the important information and so I took this website and I took all the important information they need to know about the program and I just turned it into a notion page and I'm gonna show you that very quickly I took the website and rather than having all the information for the whole pro every month I just update this notion page it looks terrible right now but it looks prettier on the app and I just put the exact information that the students need to to find so that they're not emailing me all the time and if any of you guys work with students Justin this is like part of my mission for you teaching students how to organize their information is a super critical thing for the the Future youth because a lot of times they ask you like ten thousand times for the same PDF you've already attached for them in like 15 emails I'm so now here I keep it all in one place where they have everything they need to do synced in one place where they just go through the five steps rather than having to find all this information on the notion website and then the other thing I'm using notion for is for our coaching clients and our personal clients we use where we we create a page for them and the page has everything they everything we work on the goals we set the next actions all the call recordings on everything we cover as well as like relevant resources we guide them to and so everything in the project is saved in one place rather than them having to go find it and that this also serves as our final deliverable for the projects that we work on everything we've touched everything we've worked on is like hyperlinked here so it's an easy way for them to stay on top of everything so this is just a couple really quick use cases I know many of you in here are using notion in far superior ways and I encourage those of you to start making YouTube videos about this because there really is very little information on how to use notion well and all the people who are new notion youtubers they're all blowing up so I encourage you to make more videos and show people how do you actually get into these programs I know Harvey over here is doing some interesting api's with his gaming company so you guys can go talk to him and I really encourage you all to be those leaders and people showing and demonstrating here's how you use this program and I just want to leave you with one thing so the last thing I want to leave you with for those of you who follow the para method with that we teach which is organizing all of your information in the same hierarchy across all your programs is to think of notion as another layer that's part of your para system so we teach this to people is naming your projects the same exact way and having the same hierarchy across every system so the same way you name your projects in Google Drive your task manager your notes apps do the same thing in notion and that's how you start to create consistency across all of your programs and that's the way you're able to find what you need to find across all your programs even if you're not moving everything into into notion this is the way that you stay consistent across all your things and my last quote I want to leave you with is something we like to live by that systems that must be perfect to be reliable are deeply flawed so really keep it simple because that's what's gonna be sustainable for you but this is a great point for everyone is call to action here because I think we should probably finish up there's an enormous opportunity right now there's a vacuum a powerful vacuum for Thought leadership around notion and the whole no-code movement I mean it's rare that you can see the next paradigm coming from so far away in such an almost predictable way and there's just incredible demand so many new people coming onto this and related platforms and if you have an itch which which super-interesting these sounds like you have or you have an interest in blogging or creating YouTube videos or teaching online courses on made huge evangelists for online courses now is the time if this is your thing there's just it's like this green grass this beautiful pasture of opportunity opens so I would I'd really step into it and and tag me on Twitter and I'll retweet it thank you so much everyone [Applause] you

Channel: Tiago Forte

Views: 68,991

Rating: 4.8712792 out of 5

Keywords: Notion, productivity, Second Brain, Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte, Forte Labs, meetups, note-taking, knowledge management

Id: uK8KvSRetpU

Length: 49min 0sec (2940 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 11 2020