Notion Office Hours: Planning for Next Year 📅

hello everybody welcome we are right on time welcome welcome so good to see some familiar faces here marsha i know working through susannah conway's unraveling 2020 i did drop that in the chat that is definitely one of my most recommended resources i think i've been doing it for two three years now and uh just the questions that she asks are absolutely fantastic and i think it's so important to obviously do the proper reflection on our year behind us before we even think about planning for next year so i would love to know how are you feeling about the fact that we are pretty much two weeks out from the end of the year welcome danica esteban welcome and if you haven't had a chance please fill out the poll below just want to get a sense of where people are at both in terms of their knowledge and experience of notion it seems like we've got a pretty big range today a lot of beginners a lot of advanced folks so uh for those of you that are pretty new you're definitely going to be seeing some more advanced setup here and i i'm going to try and do my best to make it as minimally intimidating as possible dragon good to see you uh i just i love how diverse this community is people from all over the world amazing welcome so we have more people that have used notion for over a year pretty interesting but it's a pretty even distribution very cool uh what's the difference between beginner and advanced yeah that's kind of interesting right because people kind of have to self-assess um i suppose how comfortable are you all with uh relational databases because i know my system is pretty heavily using these relations sounds like a lot of you already have a pretty good planning routine yes it could use some improvement and a lot of folks obviously interesting and have interested in how we break up big projects into actionable steps and specifically using notion for planning so before we dive into i just want to acknowledge there's definitely a few folks whose resources i do rely on heavily and people who i'll refer to a lot of their process so again suzanna conway with her unravel your year and that is a free resource too so it is up above in the chat also today's session it's going to be an hour to 90 minutes i'll stay late if people do still want to go through and still have questions but what we're doing today is kind of a crash course like this is something that i would probably take i'd probably take a weekend honestly to do a lot of this reflection and planning also we have to keep in mind that there's going to be people who are running their businesses in notion some people are doing this for personal some of the planning that we're doing today it's a little bit more geared at the personal planning because i do think when we're talking about business planning we're getting into like strategic objectives and um you know the team that's going to be helping you do this so this is going to be a little bit more uh i wouldn't even just say personal because obviously i'm a solo business owner you're going to be seeing pretty much everything behind the scenes in my own workspace so we're definitely going to get very messy welcome barcelona france bay area very cool amazing okay cool so unravel your year amazing resource recommend that 12-week year many of you have probably heard me mention that book over and over again that's going to be a huge one if you do struggle with planning the 12-week year is probably something that i go back to every single quarter and remind myself that's going to be really helpful some of the review process too i use questions from taylor pearson tiago forte and doing your yearly review is going to be so much easier if you've been collecting this information over time and so a lot of you you know you might have seen other parts of my workspace but daily journal weekly review monthly review quarterly review all of this stuff is going to make doing your yearly review so much easier which of course is going to give you that additional information when you think about your year ahead amazing uh charlie gilkey is another sort of recent one that i'm reading his uh start finishing book amazing really recommend that again especially if you struggle to kind of chunk down your projects welcome ben good to see you here awesome okay cool so my setup is kind of based on uh several core key databases and i i do move stuff around in my space and you're gonna see we are going to jump in and get pretty messy you're kind of going to see how i reflect on my own databases and how i sort of manipulate and move them around but the core key databases that have always kind of stayed the same are that yearly database quarterly database monthly weekly daily goals i kind of see milestones as goals and milestones i think are they're important i don't think they're absolutely essential not everybody does personal kpis that's totally fine but those are the databases that have never really changed and so let's jump in okay and just just want to get a pulse on how people are feeling um i'd love to hear what is something awesome that happened to you in 2020 because obviously it's kind of a kind of a weird year a lot of mixed feelings i know for some people it's been amazing for business other people um you know we have family members that have gotten sick it's been kind of a weird time so i would just i'd love to get a pulse on how people are feeling about 2020 is almost over moved into 2021 nothing really yeah let me know how you're feeling oh amazing defended your dissertation got a dream stove moved in with your boyfriend amazing amazing and and how many of you have already started doing a little bit of this reflection process to look back on 2020 ah adrian adrian amazing uh adrian was one of the first people that ever hired me for notion work so grateful youtube got a new job much happier amazing oh i feel like a lot of people got new pets this year launching a course launching a podcast amazing releasing an e-course about color that's super cool oh scared to reflect i'm curious gray why um why are you scared to reflect oh i know a lot of you planning nerds will have already started your yearly reflection amazing really nice to hear this stuff cool well let's let's jump in because obviously the first thing that we want to do as part of our uh before we can plan ahead we have to do a bit of this yearly review and so the review page is actually something i'm experimenting with lately let me know if you can see my screen okay and if the resolution is all right marcia said i was surprised in my annual review how many things did go well despite everything yeah amazing uh hypercritical especially even in the face of success of things that i didn't do well yeah i think i think a lot of us can relate to that um and even with planning process too like i know a lot of people kind of beat themselves up if they make plans that they they didn't really end up uh following through on and again you're going to see some of my messy space here i'm going to show you kind of how i i go through this process and um okay a little blurry but still readable now it's always a little bit tricky to get like the sizing and resolution so what you're seeing is is probably not going to be how i usually view it i like to actually zoom out to eighty percent in my notion space so i can see a lot more data um and it obviously gets a lot smaller and not everybody likes to see it that way hopefully you can see my screen okay okay great um yeah and and there's an amazing um quote mariah cause said this the other day in her annual planning and it was this idea that it's not about achieving the goal it's about who you become in the process and i really really love that so i think the planning process is so much more important uh than the actual outcomes i'm huge on that uh because we just we noticed stuff about you know why didn't i follow through on that like why has that been on my to-do list forever and i've never gotten around to it is it still important so i think that stuff is is really important to reflect on so this will be a pretty interactive session i'm gonna keep an eye on the chat if any questions pop up along the way definitely add them to the ask a question area below uh as you you can see i'm i'm a pretty open book with this stuff so you're gonna get to see uh this real life messy stuff in action okay cool so i've got this review dashboard again this is fairly new and this is me kind of pulling all of these different databases into one place so this is kind of what it looks like the north star the values the commitments these are things that i actually pull into many other pages again they're like reminders there are these anchors for me these are like personal and business values so um i do recommend uh having something like this for yourself so figuring out um what your vision is and making it super super visible all the way down to your weekly agenda and i will show you a little bit about that uh jessica because this is still this is still kind of in pro progress in process i think after i do this review i'll definitely be updating this inside of notion mastery course for those of you that are in the course i know there's a few students here you'll definitely get access to this yes exactly plans are useless planning is indispensable awesome okay cool so i love to make this stuff beautiful and visible and have this sort of dashboard where i can come to and just reflect on everything um here are some of the commitments that i had this year i'm experimenting with the apple pencil which is pretty new to me so just making this a place of creativity and fun and what i've done is i've filtered most of these to show just the current the current year so as i'm thinking about what are those commitments to myself in q1 these are filtered if i remove this filter you're gonna see you're gonna see a bunch these are empty i haven't designed these covers yet but i can open up these taking rest simplify all right so i can i can filter these however i want and i can show them in different ways in different parts of my workspace goals and so what i did here is i pulled in my goals database and this is filtered to show everything where the year contains 2020 and that's again why these different databases are so important because i pull them in to so many different dashboards so i can visualize and uh you know put the right filters in place so i can see just what i want to see but in this review i'm wanting to see everything that i had on my plate for 2020. you can see all the goals that i had here uh you can see take a european vacation is zero percent complete so that didn't happen i can see everything with the check boxes ones that were complete you can see that a couple are not totally finished and that's fine uh launching a coaching program that was something that i had on my list this year that didn't happen but lots of other things happened instead and so it's just it's not about judging yourself it's just about reflecting on that and i can open up one of these if you want to see what these goals look like in more detail and again i reference these databases often right so the year the quarters the months they're all connected up and that helps me kind of zoom in or zoom out at any level so i can click in and jump into 2020 if i want to and i can see all sorts of different data my daily journal rolls up into my weekly agenda and into my months some of these i've had to minimize and hide just so uh just so you don't see all of my my daily uh you know gratitude and wins and challenges there's a lot of personal stuff in there but uh yeah these snapshots are super important so uh launch a coaching program and i can say part of the reason maybe this didn't happen too is uh you know dates weren't put in there like not all the milestones were really well clarified next steps like there's nothing in there and so i think i i wasn't totally committed or i didn't have the bandwidth to do it so uh and why is this goal important i didn't put that information in there right what are the obstacles i'm likely to face i didn't do that so i think when we don't put the intention behind these goals and we really break them down into why is this actually important in the first place it's way easier to put this stuff off so i just wanted to show you what that uh what that kind of looks like and this stuff is so personal planning is so personal goal setting is so personal i love to see inspiring images i love to theme my space a lot of you love like a really minimal theme and not using color obviously nature is going to be one of my big ones so i like to kind of look at this overall snapshot and then we're going to start to jump into some of these projects here oh how is pride uh progress calculated in this case uh it's target and current sometimes the target can mean weeks so maybe not in this case uh launching a coaching program is going to take more than a couple weeks uh but that's something where i could say let's say i think that would take uh 12 weeks to do and i'm only like one week in or like i've completed uh completed one week or even uh it can be task based so maybe if you've got 12 milestones here 10 milestones it this will totally adjust based on your properties here some people like to do this in a more automated fashion i actually don't use a ton of formulas in my space i like i know this probably sounds silly to some people i like to keep the symbol um but yeah this is uh this is kind of at zero for the moment so that could these can mean whatever you want them to mean and that progress looks a little bit like this uh danny here is in the chat i know there's lots of folks here that are way better at this stuff than i am so i'm not going to get into too much of the nitty gritty of the progress because i don't think it's totally essential and necessary for getting your planning done how did you make that solid purple block with the pages embedded within oh yeah so that's just a that's just a toggle um i do i use a lot of keyboard shortcuts so um slash toggle and i can text in here and then i just give that a background color and there we go and you can put as many you know databases inside of there and all that good stuff so hopefully that clarifies okay so as part of this review um let's jump in and look at some of these here so again i like to pull in all my projects everything that i was working on i think projects is kind of the anchor of of any real notion workspace um i know some people like to do their their planning outside but assuming if you're here and you're thinking about planning you probably have your projects inside of notion so again i filtered this by 2020 and just to look at like what did i actually do this year what are all the projects that i completed and i'm like holy crap there's a lot no wonder i felt very uh stretched then so it's just this is again just a quick snapshot for looking at this stuff i'm like oh yeah i can look at you know how many client projects did i have i could sort this in different ways too and show a couple different views by energy by type i can look at you know how many client projects but i just like to give myself a bit of a snapshot before i move through 2020 content what content did i produce this year again this is just filtered to show me everything that was published created or written after january 1st and again we're doing like super crash course here i would i would honestly take uh i would take a full weekend if not two weekends to just really sit in this and reflect on this grab your your cup of coffee your tea or your wine and really dig into some of the stuff because susannah conway's uh unravel your year the questions are amazing uh and i often find i need two screens open so i've got you know her unravel your year open and then i've got my my notion pages over here so i can look at the data as i'm sort of answering the questions because sometimes again we forget what we actually did throughout the year um and so i like to filter this here okay let's look uh status is published and i can sort this by descending or ascending and so by going from ascending i can be like oh wow yeah i forgot at the beginning of the year that's what we did i can school scroll through see all the tweets that i i did all the blog posts the youtube videos and i was like oh my gosh 415 pieces of content in the air that's pretty cool right so you can start to get some of these these metrics a lot of the properties are also hidden here so um obviously you're not seeing like the full picture but what does twitter and instagram icon signify so those are twitter posts or instagram posts i probably won't be tracking those as much in the new year uh but often i like to post some uh tweet storms some uh twitter content storms so anytime you're producing a piece of content if you're shipping a youtube video and you're doing the work to create this content uh take it that extra level and break up that content into a tweet storm assuming that you're active on on twitter not everybody's going to be uh active on twitter but that's kind of an easy win is to uh yeah to kind of re repurpose reuse that content how how have you achieved to hide the page name in the gallery view pretty much everything you can do with your your databases is in properties and so for a gallery you can actually hide the title believe it or not uh let me see if there was i think you were talking about the commitments right properties uh yeah you can unhide the name on a gallery view cool so i like to yeah start to get a sense like what have i created this year what projects did i bring into the world how am i feeling about it and then i start to look at the time based uh databases so again you're seeing actual things here so i'm curious uh for those of you who are you know planners did you have a word of the year and if so i'd love to hear it if you're willing to share it i do like to give myself a word of the year so courage was my word this year especially anyone else out there who is shipping youtube videos definitely requires a little bit of courage alice had focus yep dare oh i love that one i love that really cool stay focused simplify aha i love that and so as we move into 2021 try okay i love it hey look at that one of my goals already popped up uh okay so i'm going to open 2021 because this is where i've actually embedded uh the questions that susannah conway asks i'm just going to close these up here cool so these are the key questions that i've actually baked this into my you know yearly database so whenever i say new year these questions are baked into there and i can start to reflect on that but again i like to uh these journal entries are are great and these questions are really great obviously i have to update these to 2020. but i i do like to look through my notion data before i actually start to answer some of these questions just to remind myself how i felt about those things and so obviously i need to update these so yeah thinking about what went really well what surprised you i'd love to hear what surprised us in 2020 i think there was probably a ton of surprises thanks for coming caro what are you most proud of accomplishing right i you know shipped shipped a course i hired a new a new coach to help me deliver that course um what challenged me in 2020 probably taking on too many projects there's lots of you know if you're anything like me and you just you love your work and you get excited about what you're doing it can be really easy to take on too many projects so that's definitely something that challenged me favorite days moments or experiences now for me uh i actually i will go through my daily journal and so i have a view of my journal that actually shows me all of the highlights and i will read through all of them so it's like looking at your year in a snapshot and just looking at all the highs all the lows the challenges so again i can't show you all of that stuff because there's some seriously personal stuff in there but i will have that open in one tab or one window and uh can you share these reflection prompts marie yes i mean they are baked into my planning templates which you can grab but actually uh susannah conway's resource is going to be the best place like these are honestly just taken from susannah conway so i will uh i will definitely if someone can share that in the chat i did share it in the chat already but i want to make sure that folks have um santa conway unravel your year google that and hopefully hopefully somebody can drop that in the chat cool thank you that's free and some amazing resource and honestly this is just the tip of the iceberg there's so many other wonderful questions in there thank you so much marcia okay i have a generic question i write a journal with random thoughts that fall into different buckets can we move a line or thought from the page to tag it and copy it into a categorized page i think i might have to see a little bit more about what your what you're thinking but i have a master tag database so you could certainly uh tag your journal entries with a with a topic i think that would actually be a really wise idea and of course uh notion has their their sort of built-in backlinks as well so if you at mention a topic or at mention a page and you go to that page you're going to see all of the articles that you've referenced in there so hopefully that helps perfect thank you for sharing that unravel and again honestly take a weekend to go through this take this weekend if you can and really spend some time answering these questions because the more time that you give these questions the easier it's going to be for you to actually map out what you want to do next year because uh there's so many opportunities here right to look at what were some of the fears that held you back those these sorts of things that challenged me are now going to become parts of things that i set as goals right um like one of my goals for you know for earlier this year was around uh reducing my client load right like i was stretched too thin i had taken on too many client projects so the things that challenge you this year can just be data for what you want to do next year okay cool just checking in with the questions here someone was asking oh sarah what is milestones a look up from so it depends on on where we're looking but milestones is pulled from each goal is a relation or has relation to milestones um and so i think you might have been referring to a month that pulls in uh pulls in those milestones through a lookup we can get we can dig more into the actually setting up goals and milestones because we're actually going to do uh go through that and set up a few test ones do you have a journal template what prompts do you use um i i do have a journal do you mean a notion like a freely available template if so i can see about dropping a simplified one in the chat but obviously my my setup is pretty interconnected it relies heavily on lots of different relations and so uh it's not easy to just share one of the templates without sharing the whole thing but i'll see what i can do about dropping something in the chat my journal doesn't have a ton of prompts um it's actually more yeah maybe i'm gonna open up a page where i can i can show you that hopefully without digging into too much uh personal information but because i have so many relations with my journal uh everything is is kind of at the top it's like what was my happiness level uh what you know what challenged me today how can i improve let me just open up one to share so here here's what i track on a daily level uh what is the theme of the day and this is most of these are templatized so monday has a template tuesday as a template wednesday has a template so preparing and planning that's what mondays are for i track whether or not i was in a flow state did i win the day which means did i do the task that i said was most important how am i feeling effectiveness energy happiness move your body is a relation to a database with uh activities so dancing walking snowshoeing uh i connect up to my knowledge hub so what courses did i do today what knowledge did i consume what articles did i consume what am i grateful for uh what wins did i have today what challenged me how could i improve today and some of these over time i've now moved those into their own databases so for example i have an improvement database which i'll actually show you as well because over time now that i do this stuff on a daily journal level i can actually see what are the the little messages to myself like what is what are the little uh ways that i can improve that i keep you know posting over and over and over again and i can see which ones are are really important to work into my 20 20 goals so these are the most important questions to ask yourself to reflect on in 2020 i love this one too what do you wish you'd been recognized for that's i think it's such an interesting question and the idea with this too is once you've answered these questions you start to do a bit more forecasting what do you actually want to have happen in 2021 what are you feeling apprehensive about all of this stuff is beautiful data that's going to help you fill out your goals and your projects which we're going to jump into so i love these two like preemptively identifying what are the challenges that you're likely to face right so i'd love to hear from you in the chat like what do you want to bring into the world in 2021 what's your big or multiple maybe of you know several projects what do you want to bring into the world in 2021 if you've already thought about that and you have a sense are you launching a course are you starting a youtube channel what are you doing yes all of this is from unravel the reflection the forecasting the declaration all of this is in there uh and this i think this is it kind of ends up in a declaration and again this is stuff you can work into your weekly agenda as well if you want these uh reminders on a more daily weekly monthly basis because i think in the past what at least what i used to do what i was guilty of is you set these big intentions you do your big year planning and then it kind of it sits somewhere that you don't you kind of forget to review and so you kind of miss your anchor a little bit and uh yeah it's it's got to be more visible if it's important prototype your copywriting business do more public speaking writing yes creating an online course very cool it's a spectacular a lot of online courses will be birthed in 2021 and i love this too this is the year i will say no to and this is the year i will say yes to so i love these anchoring statements they really help me shape up the next year can you share an example of how to build relationship goals and milestones yes totally we are gonna do that so i'm gonna i'm gonna start sharing some of my goals and show you how i actually set that up from a database perspective so year summary quarter summary um and again like once you have uh once you fill out that information it starts to populate in this way which makes doing your reviews a lot easier so as you can see the top the pink ones are the goals and the yellow is the milestones that are related to those goals so every goal has a set of milestones that it's going to take to actually hit that goal it's one thing to actually name a goal but it's another thing to obviously break it up into well when do i want to achieve this by what's the appetite or what's the size of this goal is this something that i want to do in a year and some goals will take multiple years to do i try to break them down into something smaller like reducing client workload that was my q1 goal that was going to mean like firing clients letting go of clients developing a live stream plan so there was you know create a functional live streaming setup there's equipment that i need to build so you've got to break up those goals into smaller goals so this is just like a snapshot summary there's lots of properties here that are hidden and again i'm going to go through this when we make a goal from scratch and you'll kind of see how this happens but there's lots of properties here so for example kpi progress right theme i like to kind of theme each quarter i find that really helpful progress projects right i can kind of see what what projects i had on my plate at the time but i like to just kind of look at this as a snapshot before i jump in month summary similar uh there's a lot of data in at the monthly level as well grateful for and again these are rolled up from my journal entries so i can one click turn these on and it's going to pull in every daily entry for that month which again just gives me more data to work with because i'm always wanting to work through these personal challenges those just become things that i want to rework into the new year uh and again it just shows you like you can view this information in any way that is helpful for you learning too like what courses did i take in 2020 any other course junkies here oh marcia was asking kpi key performance indicators at the personal level this you know may not be as as exciting i kind of think of um uh goals and milestones a lot of other folks like to do the uh you know okrs objectives and key results and all that good stuff but i find that a little technical it's not as it doesn't light me up when i think about kpis even though they're important uh yeah so here's my you know library of courses that i took in 2020 right a lot of courses happening here uh 34 34 courses some of these are in various states of of consumption uh yes exactly so for anyone who you know has followed past videos uh i am calling what used to be knowledgehub is now library because uh knowledgehub actually pulls in library my master tag database and and more kind of wisdom so i sort of think of this as like things i'm clipping and knowledge hub is basically the dashboard that pulls it all together uh yes may i know you guys have eagle eyes you always notice this stuff so this is something i'm exploring i don't know if this is something that i i want to do but i've started a skills database um and so it's not like there's not a ton of properties here i'm just kind of exploring and seeing if i want to do this but thinking of these more as what are the skills that i want to develop and i want to work on so dancing is something that i've wanted to improve i think i'm a terrible dancer i signed up for steezy.co uh and it's just virtual dance classes of any kind it's hilarious and so that's something that i've been i've been exploring so when you think of things too from like what skills do i want to develop then i can look at well trying to you know make sure that the courses that i am signing up for are related to the skills that i want to learn and uh same with books that i'm reading like there's lots of us have many many books on our plate uh but sometimes things get moved to the back burner because i'm like you know what that's not really the skill that i'm working on right now i can move that to the back burner and let's let's focus on what's most important why do you have a month both as the name and as a drop down not sure [Music] not sure which one you're referring to marina would you say the month both as the name and as a drop down oh it could be uh so you can't do uh kanban view by a relation and so um sometimes i will have an additional property so sometimes you might see duplicate properties and that's usually just because there's times where i just want to view something in a board view that's that's really the only reason okay i'm just going to dip into these questions here what is the filter set in order to show both these in this order i think i might have missed uh when you were asking about that gray what is the filter set in order to show both of these in this order can you clarify that gray how do you pull info from two different databases into the board view ah so that is because there's a relation in here i think you're talking about this one here right so what i'm doing here is i am showing the uh goals relation and the milestones roll up right so when you have relations you can start to pull in whatever beautiful data you want to see and i use the icons to just kind of help me visually separate those you showed both goals and steps to the goals yes exactly this is just a summary of of that just over time too just to see again this is just me kind of reviewing my snapshot and then we can go in and start to look at our planning unravel pdf seems to be broken oh that's such a bummer okay thank you for sharing that pdf uh barbara okay cool and so again some of these uh dashboards are still kind of i like to move the databases around which is super easy right so if i want to you know duplicate any of these i can just hit command d duplicate that and drag that oh i want i want that to appear in weekly cool and so i often will manipulate and move my databases around to make sure i'm kind of seeing only what i want to see in a given snapshot and so planning for me is kind of the big picture overview everything is here the north star the values commitments all of that good stuff and then i can start to dip into um at a time level okay so you've seen some of these pieces you've seen the goals just a second here okay cool okay you've seen the goals you've seen the commitments the quarters and this is where we start to get into okay well how do we actually start setting this up for uh 2021 right so i can either do this at the yearly level i can jump into my 2021 and i can start assigning things projects i can do this at the quarterly level now i i tend to always think of things in terms of quarters because we just can't plan that far out in advance it's it's uh the human brain i just can't kind of process that that far in advance so i tend to only do a quarter at a time so i plan out the big rocks like the big projects that i want to get done in the year or again just those big goals but then i kind of zoom out a little bit and i say okay like what's actually feasible in the next quarter and what needs to happen in the first quarter of the year such that the bigger goals are more likely to happen and so you can see here i actually have this this is kind of the same information but it's shown in different ways i can show at the quarterly level so for example these milestones are a roll-up that is pulling from uh the goals here or i can show it like this once it's been broken up month by month right so december haha lunch a coaching program uh that didn't happen and then these are all the milestones needed to complete there and so i do i rely heavily on uh you know those core relations with a couple of roll-ups as well so that i can pull in like this progress is is a roll-up from the goal property so i can just get a sense of where things are at and then again i can start to look at this data in different ways i can see it in a snapshot view i can see it in a reflection view and then i can start to say okay let's set up a new quarter and so here i've got my new months that are pretty empty right i haven't done this planning yet so i just have a couple things set up here but this is what it looks like when it's empty goals milestones projects weeks and i can start to map out what the next three months are going to look like what are the projects that i want to pull in and work on which again i can either do up here right i can pull in and say okay youtube channel that one for sure i can go through and and do it that way or i can also filter it from here this actually should be filtered so this month what happened there we go okay filtered to status is active and date actually let's say projects where the month contains january and because i didn't actually uh i didn't actually assign myself to those so let's say let's remove that i'm just going to show everything that is assigned to january that should update because we're in january 2021 let's double check quarters why is that not showing let's see that filter should be showing okay just took a minute to pre-populate so i can start to look at um and when you pre-filter that right so when you create a new month these all have templates here new month edit this should be pre-filtered to show any projects that are on deck for the month so this because this filter wasn't actually here i'm actually just going to remove this remove this and we're going to say just show me everything where the month is the current month new month so then it's kind of ready to ready to go for you to begin adding those projects cool and even this i'm actually changing up a little bit so review and update life goals some of these are from tiago forte review and update the projects list why you know at this point like why would i click off and go there when i'm already kind of in planning mode so i would actually again projects are here uh goals i can embed in here um areas of responsibility even that i don't do the same way i i start to pull this data in here because these are already existing in databases so i might i might actually change up this uh this monthly database to make it uh more useful to me cool and then i like to take a look at the snapshot of all of the projects that are on the go because chances are i am going to archive some of these projects i'm going to have to reevaluate are they still important still working on these how am i feeling about this and so i like to show just give myself some options for how i show these projects so i can look at it by type by energy level gallery view there's a couple different uh generally energy is what i look at here i think these are filtered anything that's not archived not completed or status is not back burner so i can just kind of go through look at what's on my plate which is a lot uh and if some of you saw one of my recent project planning videos i've i've really been relying on this energy use because again from week to week from month to month certain projects kind of take the forefront if a client is launching something that i'm helping them launch that gets moved to extreme right so ianna's launching her course this week and i'm kind of on call and helping her with that so that is extreme energy same with productize offers this little check box is something that i've i've added as well which means i have a team that i'm collaborating with that is helping me and so same with this one actually that should be checked on uh and so sometimes if i'm like hiring a consultant i'm collaborating with someone i want to be able to see that visually and that can also kind of help me think about what is the size of that project how much of my effort is that taking do i have other support with me and so i can also see some of these courses for example are ongoing which means they've been on my plate forever and at this point they've become almost more of an area of responsibility than a project and so i might actually decide i want to archive these projects i want to mark them as complete and then i want to start making smaller projects out of them so things that i can complete in less than two months so this is kind of a new thing that i'm i'm trying to work through and i'm sure lots of you here have opinions on this too but i know charlie gilkey talks about not having uh more than five projects at a time at any time scale so that might be like five large projects in the year but we're kind of thinking um zooming in and breaking them down yeah i think i think a lot of people too they they kind of get confused or or um have trouble distinguishing areas from projects and i think a lot of this is really uh personal preference as well but again my course is something that is it's ongoing all the time like that it never ends it's not it's probably not not ever really going to be complete and so there's going to be a number of smaller projects that are are tied to this i think i have some related oh i actually didn't relate projects here there's tons of related projects that might be like setting up my evergreen funnel or like redesigning the sales page hiring a new coach so at this point i think it's not as helpful to have these in my uh projects in this way charlie gilkey if anyone wants to share his uh his stuff or his book talk about energy as a filter for project yeah and um barbara i do have a video on that it's like my second last uh youtube video i think and it's um uh it's it's kind of how i've been doing my my project planning right now and i can dip into a couple other views like you're still kind of seeing like an overview of all the different planning projects but generally speaking throughout the year at the end of every week i'm jumping to my weekly review dashboard every month i'm jumping into my month um every time scale i have a different dashboard that only shows me the information that i need to see at that level so we can we can dig into a little bit of that um but what that means is for my projects every single week these get reevaluated right because this was not my highest priority last week it is my highest priority uh for the week coming up so for example i might be like oh i know that i've got uh uh you know like this you know b3 media they were in the middle of a launch two weeks ago so they i just moved them over to a second here um so they were under extreme and what this does is all of my tasks are they have a relation to projects and i can sort my tasks by the parent project energy so i can also if i want to hide anything that is idle in my task library so i can say show me all tasks uh where the project energy is not idle and that way again you can like clean up your views you can like really only see only show me projects that are extreme and high or show me tasks where the project level is extreme and high because i don't want to see any of the other clutter right now i just need to see what's most important so that's that's kind of how i think about it and honestly that's been that's been a change i've made in the last three four months love it definitely keeping that hope that's helpful i know i've got too many projects alice don't judge me i definitely know and that's going to be one of my goals because uh you know it doesn't it doesn't feel good when you don't feel like you have that spaciousness uh for sure so that's something i i want to make more space for in in 2021 uh curious how you made uneven column widths oh yeah you can i mean you can make uh you know you can adjust your columns any which way you like as long as you've got your column set up i get so many questions about how to put databases inside of columns you have to make your columns first so i'm just going to show you again i'm just dragging an empty block into here and so you can actually see there's three columns here then you can drag and move your databases into columns a little pro tip that will save you a crap ton of time so okay cool hopefully that answers your question okay so yeah project uh breaking things down to the project level i think energy is super important one thing i'm probably going to add is uh so like what is the appetite what is the size is this a chunk is this an initiative like how big are we talking about here too because i think uh bringing it back to charlie gilkey's like only five projects uh you know there's many of these projects uh have very very different time requirements uh not just energy requirements and focus requirements uh how many hours of my time so ideally like you should you should not be working on you know five extremely important projects at the same time uh so by identifying different sizes as well uh and again if i have help with a project as well maybe that takes up less of my time so there are some new properties that i might want to adjust in here and say you know again i haven't used that yet i put that in there because i think it's something that i i definitely want to adjust when do you determine a task to become oh if anything that has more than two steps is a project um yeah for me i i guess i think of uh projects should should certainly certainly i think take less than two months um yeah anything that that is more than a couple steps is is a project i think that is that is like the the one thing that most of us are guilty of i have certainly been guilty of that uh where you put something on on you know put a task down and if you see like a task has been in your list for several days weeks and it's just not getting done it's probably because you haven't broken it up into small enough steps so uh if it takes less than five minutes i won't put it on my my to-do list i will just do it um you know i need getting things done fans here that's a that's a huge one break it down break it down to like stupidly small and you're more likely to get it done i too also have a lot of um i don't think i have my tasks in this particular i guess i do here um i think i've probably filtered oh filtered this out all right so i've got my tasks in here um and i so i have a lot of task templates and so let's open up an essential task so when i click a new task and i click on essential it automatically uh fills out these properties so how many pomodoros does it take how much effort is it going to take and effort is like focused how much brain power is this actually going to take to do i had somebody asked me on twitter they were like what would you do with a task that takes like 20 pomodoros and i was like that is definitely not a task like no task should take more uh than a couple of pomodoros at that point it's definitely a project for sure so uh yeah if you anything that that takes more than this you know we're kind of pushing it over here if something is going to take that many pomodoros and that much focus it is probably a project yeah yep project is a group of tasks that are too big to keep in your head at once that's great sorry just catching up on the chat here my approach to icons do you have some kind of icon set template a lot of folks ask about my my icon set it's just notion minimal icons you can you can google that uh and i yeah i do have some i do rely on color quite a bit too to help me um i just find that very very helpful for example events are uh these red dots tasks are green if it's a win the day activity that's a template oh let's restore that page that shouldn't uh that shouldn't be there and that gives it a status of top three and what that allows me to do is i've got this focus dashboard here that shows me hopefully this loads okay the focus dashboard will only show me tasks that are uh that have that status of top three not done assigned to me and so if i add a new item here it's automatically going to inherit that as well so this kind of helps me focus dashboard filter like i heavily rely on these filters to just show me what i need to see when i want to see it so what i want to see at a month view when i'm like doing a monthly review is very different than what i want to see when i'm at a week view or at a yearly view so again in the year there's like a ton of databases a ton of goals and all that good stuff so i'm able to you know zoom out and see what i want to see and then zoom in you can use toggles to help yourself i often like to see all the databases at once when i'm when i'm doing this kind of planning i know for other people they're like holy crap that's really overwhelming like i like to tuck things into toggles it's totally totally personal preference it's whatever like that is the beauty of notion i say this over and over again like that's uh whatever works for your brain i would love to have an entire class on how to set up my icon game i can't figure out how to quickly and easily get them up there oh and that's what those those uh templates are for too right like if i make a new task here i know we're talking like planning at the very granular level i rely heavily on these i click essential there's the emoji added there's the effort there's the task it's all it's all there um so i try to avoid as much as possible having to like you know upload and pick an icon every time i rely heavily on those templates what is the difference you use with energy and brain effort focus oh so energy is um and this concept is from the book um making ideas happen by scott belski and uh so it's like arranging projects by energy line he calls it and that is the energy you've decided that you want to give this project so it's not necessarily the energy that the project takes or that um uh it's you could look at it as like priority or importance it's just like this project is important enough this is getting my extreme energy attention focus um whereas i think of brain effort is like how much deep work is required like how much of uh my brain power and focus level you know if anyone has read deep work you know how deeply do i need to focus on this task versus i can answer emails you know uh while you're like watching netflix kind of um you know that's like for me answering emails is typically a low effort task unless it's something where i'm like oh i have to make a decision here there's other information that i need to accumulate so uh yeah that's kind of how i think of of energy level and uh yeah once i don't know if we'll get too much into the nitty gritty of like task planning right now but i have some uh i have like a task planning uh dashboard as well that helps me map things out by energy level um by brainpower as well and that way when you're kind of mapping out your pomodoros for the week i can actually see like oh how many super high focus tasks am i putting into place in one uh in one week and let me see here and again like i have so many different views here to be like show me the low-hanging fruit i don't have energy like let's do this or um they eat the frog right brian tracy eat the frog right i can i can sort this by um uh this is gonna take me a lot of time and the effort is super high so you really get to decide kind of how do you want to view this information in a way that is is really helpful for you i think the planner has two um task databases side by side and then again i have the projects visible here they're kind of tucked away but i find it's really hard to do your your task planning without seeing okay like what's actually on my plate right now what's most important and i can start to drag these items into the calendar such that i can see okay if i have like three high energy tasks today um and like these are gonna be about an hour an hour an hour it's like okay like today's gonna be a pretty intense day like this is what kind of helps me map out uh what my week is going to look like and in an ideal case i've actually broken up uh what does an ideal week look like for you i think as part of your your planning i think it's really important to map out what does an ideal week look like energetically you know are you batching certain things on certain days of the week to be really mindful of your energy i definitely need to do that like i know if i have uh one two three calls in a day there's no way i'm gonna be able to write a blog post it just uses such different energy level and again this is what i love about notion is that you can change your mind you can manipulate information in different ways i never used to do the pomodoro i never used to look at things on the calendar view but i have found that the calendar view now that i'm coordinating with more people and working with more contractors and team members i need to be a little bit more specific and mindful about when things are getting done i might change my mind next quarter and be like i don't like the calendar view i want to i want to look at this in a timeline view or or uh you know a different view and that's totally cool so new properties get added um and sometimes taken away if i define myself not really using them let's see you mentioned having several databases that you can pull into dashboard spaces with filters my question is how do you navigate the tension between creating several databases that are related through relational databases versus streamlining some of those databases into an existing database as property columns status multi-select etc um yeah i mean i think there's there's several you know core key databases that have that have stayed in my space for the last two years uh i certainly do you know clean things up and just like notice where i'm not using something or notice where uh maybe this would make more sense as a relation to my tags instead of having a drop down and so i think you only know by using your space over and over again and just noticing where there's friction noticing when you're not using something like what feels good what doesn't feel good um and again it's another thing i love about notion i think is that it does force you to look at your own behavior your own tendencies your own preferences and everything is just i think a design project that you get to design for so ah this isn't feeling good okay what's what what's missing what do i need to do here like oh there's like way too many things on the go okay um what properties are being used here what's what's working what's not working i think uh it's an opportunity for for design really i don't know if that answers your question but uh basically my relational databases have not really changed all that much like the year quarter month week day uh my library or knowledge hub my master tag database my tasks and projects like those are the most commonly used databases that i use all the time and they haven't really changed much i'll make sometimes tweaks to the the dropdowns and such but they haven't really changed all that much how do you manage executing what you've set up for yourself and notion versus adjusting your notion for better productivity also how do you keep yourself clear among the techniques you're implementing or trying out um that's so interesting how do you keep yourself clear among the techniques you're implementing or trying out i mean i've been using notion for you know i don't know two and a half years or whatever so uh it is like tailor-made to the way that my brain works right so some people might see this and be like oh my gosh that is like that is like way overwhelming or this or that um but i like it works for my brain it's just for me it's just tweaking at this point um and because i can move so fast through notion i can duplicate databases and move and filter i can just move them wherever i want so um i do think of course there's a there's that danger and not doing uh procrasti planning right like is this and this is where i don't fuss with formulas too much right like it is this actually adding something to my space or is this is this busy work right and you know obviously in an ideal world we're setting up these spaces such that we can get things done quickly and get the right things done quickly um as much as i love you know playing a notion like that's that isn't uh that isn't always the most productive activity right so it's just getting uh it just it does take a bit of time i think to find your flow and make sure that that you've got a system that works for the way your your brain works uh how do i use timeline i think i covered a little bit of that um i pretty much only am using the timeline view for for projects and even then like i i don't always use this view like i have a couple different uh views here right internal energy like energy is probably the most commonly used one where i'm like okay that's like not as important now i can i can kind of move this around but yeah i just use it for for projects what's the difference between tasks with an arrow and a circle um honestly i think i just changed up my system at some point so they're they're probably the same i need to use jesus from now on okay i'm just checking the chat here okay a couple questions have popped in uh the purple box on the outer page is solid purple is it uh it's filled with pages how do you get the box to be purple it says planning and review yes it's okay i know what you're talking about here little hack little shortcut okay so let's say i want to put this into like a pretty purple box purple box i don't even think i should put that in there let's do this great give this a purple background and actually i should be able to just delete that line there's like a couple different ways you can do that but yeah there's the purple box i hope that helps okay what's a win the day activity one of your top tasks yeah exactly so i you know i know we're not getting into like weekly planning i think i think honestly we're i'm probably gonna do like a workshop or a course on on weekly planning because i think that's that's like the most effective and once you get a weekly planning routine going like everything else is smooth sailing and so um and really we could do this at any level right like uh monthly planning weekly planning uh quarterly review there's there's so many nuances at each time scale but i think uh weekly planning is such a powerful process and again doing a weekly review i think is seriously a life-changing activity so i know we can't necessarily get into the nitty-gritty here but i try to um have every week has no more than say three three like epic tasks that need to get done three like win the day activities and so every day there's there's usually like one main activity like what is the one thing if nothing else that i have to get done today and uh that's the win the day activity so yeah we'll probably get into more of that nitty gritty uh i think that's still after 14 months the video about uh setting up a weekly agenda is still my most watched youtube video and so i feel like it's the thing people have the most questions about they're like fascinated by it and so i think we're going to do a whole session that is just on weekly planning have you found particular places where the timeline view really works better than others yeah i mean at this point maybe goals and projects are probably the places where where it works uh let me let me go down to one here yeah uh you know it's it's funny but like this isn't always the most helpful view and especially to like all the the names being on the left-hand side sometimes even just breaking up the same project database in a couple different ways can be an easier way to view your information so um you know these are like filtered by month and this is just to show you there's like a few different ways you can you can set up the same information right and when you're thinking about your projects too i honestly i as much as i'm like very database heavy once i'm i'm in planning mode um and you're doing like the suzanna conway questions and you're reflecting i would do i would be doing a brain dump first like i wouldn't even be jumping into projects i would literally just start typing like okay projects what do i want to do this year okay like do i want to launch that coaching program do i want to launch like v2 of my course right and i would i would just start with the brain dump of all of the projects and then i would start prioritizing dragging things around um you know whatever go start start doing a brain dump uh and then once you start looking at your time your availability and your goals you can start to be like okay yeah like that's definitely going to happen in january right and i can say cancel um that's now going to have the filter of january i'm not actually going to to put that in there right now but just to give you a sense like i would do this in a very very rough format first before i would commit those items to my database uh yeah so gray i i'm curious if other folks here um have been using the timeline view and if you think there's a there's a few specific uh use cases that lend themselves better than others honestly projects at the moment is kind of the only i could see this may be working well for studies too like if you are taking a lot of courses at one at one time and uh and you need a reminder to be like no marie you do not need to buy another course because you have six active courses right now that might be a really cool use case um okay let me i just missed a couple questions probably beginner question how do you underlay a database with more complex text or links with a color background i only know about call-out blocks or generally adding color background to text how can you underlay a database or more complex text or links with a color background i mean almost everything can have a color background the only way to do that with a database is if you um you have a block uh or like a toggle and then you drag the database into the toggle let's let's do it so if i make this uh you know purple and i drag projects into there that will look purple and similarly you can do that same trick where i think you can uh you can delete the there you go delete the toggle and now you have color databases yay uh let's move that back there we go little hacks like that but they can they can make a big difference in your space okay i hope hopefully did that clarify your question alice with the color background stuff um hope i'm not jumping ahead will be making these templates available via gum road uh yes so i do have there's a number of these templates that are available i do have a set of planning templates that are available now i think they are updated for 2021 how to confirm um anyone that buys my planning templates or my all-in-one template the all-in-one has like almost every single other database that is in my space it's like a close replica uh you will have access to any of these changes that i make i always keep uh folks updated on that um again i still feel like i'm sorting out like okay what is the best way to set these databases for my review for my yearly um you know i'm not sure if i jumped into some of these pages here but just like i can look at you know all the past years as well what were the themes that i've had in the past what have i got here okay what were all the milestones what was my vision quarters okay months i can scroll through look at everything uh oh here here's my database of improvement right you can actually see this is sorted by the number of times i've put this in my journal so i'm like okay no technology before bed like maybe that actually needs to turn into one of my commitments for for 2021 right or like moving your body every day it's like these little mini affirmations or messages that i sent to myself so uh noticing these like okay maybe these need to get integrated in some way so all that's to say um i'm still figuring out what the best uh i guess flow or process is that works for me uh every time i do this sort of yearly review or quarterly review i do make some changes here um even like my weekly agenda has has a new process here where it's like uh plan the week i won't pull this up because again it pulls in uh all of the journal entries from the last week so i can see all the highs wins lows moods all of that good stuff then i can actually do a proper weekly review and then similarly plan for the week ahead so again i like to show review the projects by energy review the action backlog start mapping out your calendar so all of these again i still feel like i'm just honing them in a little bit but there are you can definitely access the the version that was just uh just before this version and again um anyone who has if you have purchased any of those templates i will absolutely send you an updated version before the end of the year that kind of has more of um more of this visual style and a couple of these other databases that weren't in uh that original set so yeah hopefully that that helps difference between goals milestones and projects yes i get asked that all the time i think of goals as like big picture initiatives like i want to learn spanish and so i might have a like i will also probably have a project uh because projects are the most active i almost think of goals as um like there are things that i want to achieve but the project is how i'm going to get there the project is the bucket a bucket of activity that is going to support a goal so if i want to learn spanish i'm going to have to set up a project for myself where i have tasks probably recurring tasks every week or every day where maybe i need to sign up for duolingo maybe i need to connect with a spanish friend right there's um and so there's going to be certain milestones along the way like what does it mean to actually learn spanish how in depth do i want to go with that right so there's going to be certain milestones that are the markers that show i am making progress toward that goal and the milestones are like yes no like yes i did this by this time whereas a goal i think of is a little bit more high level like it's just a thing that you want to achieve i don't think of those as necessarily um like i don't say measurable because they are measurable in terms of like did i achieve that but projects as projects and milestones is where the rubber meets the road how are you actually doing the work to implement this stuff such that you are going to hit your goal so often i will have a project and a goal that are similarly named so let me find an example of a goal here uh like launch productize offers right that's like a go i want my goal was to launch this course this year i've launched it in the past i wanted to relaunch it this year i can see like oh the last time i did this was may 2019 hopefully december 20 uh 2020 making that available and so the milestones as part of that are can i enroll 10 students and can i redesign the sales page um there's actually a few more milestones in there so productize offers is the project that supports that so i'm tracking different things at a goal level like target and current and challenges and whatever but at the project level uh that's where i can collaborate with kai there's way like i can pull in any articles that i'm reading next actions are in here related projects are in here so they all kind of connect but i think of a project as almost like a bucket that supports the milestones and the milestones are in support of a goal so it's kind of like a trickle down a trickle-down effect so projects are just very action-oriented hopefully hopefully that makes sense uh trying to think of any others that might be all right so the project is zone zero that's like the name of it uh and it's in support of launching a coaching program so if that's the name of the coaching program those are the milestones what are the next steps that actually support uh those milestones so the steps should really be again those like smaller pomodoro pieces and maybe this didn't happen because i didn't map out any next steps for myself so hopefully that that helps what is the mood view in the actions dashboard i love how you guys have those eagle eyes okay um okay so let me actually yeah this is a decent one to show okay this was something that i was fiddling with what date are we today uh are we the 18th okay december 18th okay so there are times where you're just not feeling things need to get done but you're like um yeah i'm feeling a little overwhelmed today uh i don't know so i'm coming in today let's say oh i'm just feeling like oh extended or overwhelmed let's let's just let's just put that in there uh then i have this data my database of feelings which is connected to my daily journal now this is a board view that's showing me all the recommendations uh and it's not about getting focused you'll notice it says take a deep breath go for a walk do a dance workout with steezy fill out your gratitude journal drink water and delegate like you know if i'm feeling overwhelmed uh doing more work and just hustling more is is actually probably not the best move i need to get out and go for a walk and so these are just these little reminders if i just uh if i want to work based on mood this is just kind of a neat way to uh to do that one thing i could do is if i'm feeling i think it was and this was inspired by ben issenman i'm not sure if he's here today let's say i'm feeling inspired here's another one write a new article record a new video brainstorm and ideate so uh these are activities that you can do when you that are like higher intensity maybe they take more focus and so you can make this up for yourself right um what this is doing affirmation is not empty so let me just show you what this looks like uh this is what it looks like when i open it up right underlying emotion journal those are all the days that i put overwhelmed in in my journal that's 34 entries total and i've been doing my daily journal for like two years now so 34 times i've used the word overwhelmed and this is to someone's previous question this is some of the reason why sometimes i will use it today a database instead of a drop down because i can actually give more information and data to this feeling uh this property if i just used a drop down property in those uh journals i wouldn't be able to give extra context to this or use these interesting dashboards in this way so um what i did is i have templates this is like super nerdy i know we're like this is maybe a bit of a rabbit hole but i have a couple of templates for these feelings where if the underlying emotion is fear or whatever i'm gonna have different uh recommendations kind of ready to go in the template and this is like super nerdy uh okay just checking the chat yeah i used my three words list in my roll up to show my board view of how the year had gone yes like there's there's so much fun stuff in the feelings database now that i've been doing that for you know a year of referencing this database i can very quickly see how many times in 2020 did i use this word what was my word of the year like how many times did i use like excited or stoked or inspired or whatever i can see all of that data which can then help me um i can help me uh with my planning in the future so how can i actually take steps to reduce my overwhelm i need to let go of certain projects i need to get improve my boundaries that's why i'm taking them healthy boundaries for kind people program and stuff like that so all of this stuff is just data it's not i'm not using it to judge myself it's just a place to um to be more mindful about what we need more of and what we need less of cool yeah i know and again uh for anyone that might be maybe just starting with notion like this is you know two two and a half years of just like playing tweaking and kind of um hacking my brain a little bit you know like how can i how can i make this stuff more um how can i make myself more effective i think here's like you know process dashboard some of you might have seen like older versions of this this is a lot cleaner now right so i've just over time it's like always the same key databases but they just get manipulated and moved in different ways that make it easier for me to follow through on the stuff that matters so uh and again i never used to have these different uh dashboards at the yearly quarterly monthly level but now it's becoming more helpful to me okay like financial goals as well like that's something to consider i think i've hidden some of that right here but um setting up some quarterly financial goals like what are you gonna have to do to to meet your financial goals for the year so i have a lot of that information in there uh this was taken from charlie gilkey too like when you're thinking about projects that you want to do at the quarterly level these tend to be some of those those verbs i really do recommend that book start finishing when i want to do a new quarterly review i can just click on this that that'll open up a new page and i can be like okay that's q1 of 2021 these questions are from from taylor pearson that are geared at like a quarterly reflection relationships what went well and then again i can pull in my quarters here so i have the place to review it while i'm answering these questions and once that's done i can literally drag that into the quarter and that is we're good to go we're done now i can move on to 2021 right so it's just like it's taken time to design what is the workflow such that i'm not having to like click around bounce around like oh it's like get get me everything that i need in one place so that i can do the work there and be done with it it takes time it just takes time to figure out what is your ideal your ideal flow so hopefully that helps how do you automate the fact that adding inspired automatically takes the makes the card pop up on the feeling gallery uh it's actually there's no formula there believe it or not uh fanny and i feel like i will record a youtube video about that one to go into more detail because it's it's pretty nerdy and nuanced so i'm gonna make a note of that okay cool i've uh i've done fine integrating daily and weekly review quarterly and yearly not so much yeah if you struggle with quarterly planning like i seriously cannot recommend enough the 12-week year and the idea is that you're taking you know what you could have done in the year but you're actually able to get a lot more effective because you're being way more realistic about how things break down uh again we are like terrible planners long term big scale and so i think 90 days is always like a really good chunk of time to be able to like really sink into what projects are going to need to support these 90-day goals so i really recommend again susannah conway's questions and uh the 12-week year and that's a free book by the way the 12-week year you can there's like um i think there's a free workbook correct me if i'm wrong um i could be wrong but it's worth it's worth grabbing for sure i love this i think i think someone does this great if you want to make a feelings template for a team how would you set up that database to log stated feelings at morning meetings oh i feel like someone else has done this and asked this as well um yeah i guess you'd have to have a feelings database that your i guess it depends what your morning meetings looks like um you'd probably want to have a relation so each person would have i feel like in your meetings database you'd almost have to have like how the team feels and you'd have to have like a date entry that would uh relate to the feelings so it's like gray would put a new entry in for december 18th and relate it to that uh that database so you'd almost maybe it's like a meetings and notes relation to feelings but then you'd have like a an inline database i'd have i'm gonna have to wrap my brain around that one but i love that as an idea i think someone else did that and it was a way for the team to get a sense of like how is our ceo feeling this morning that's pretty that's a pretty fun use case um what's your decision process on where to house a database that you're pulling into other spaces um that's so hard to answer i feel like uh part of this is probably like background in user experience design web design and also just like what will give my brain peace in this moment um and so i'm huge huge on contextual dashboards like what is what is necessary in this moment like what am i trying to do outside of notion like just what are you trying to do what do you need to see uh okay i need to like get a grasp of what are all my commitments what's what's on my plate you know so what courses am i taking what projects have i signed up for all that good stuff so uh it's it's kind of a reverse engineering from what are you trying to do at the end of the day and what information do you need to be able to do that okay what databases do i have that support that do i need to make any new ones do i need a filtered view of an existing database it's hard to it's hard to explain but i think probably uh if you anyone that's got maybe a background in user experience design or systems thinking uh that probably comes a little bit more natural but again like because you can you can literally design anything you can dream up in notion it's sort of like well what do you want to see what are you trying to do um start from kind of first principles like why why are you doing this what do you want to do um that's why i often like i'm often experimenting with some of these these dashboards and databases right like what's the most important thing that i need to see in this moment what's going to be helpful right like sometimes i want to separate ongoing projects from the rest of the projects too because that helps my brain other people might find that really overwhelming tasks by project yeah there's again i'm often experimenting even in my own dashboards to be like is this the most helpful way to see this okay i'm gonna try this out for a couple weeks if it doesn't work i'll just i'll make some tweaks to it um i hope that answers um i think i think you would need another standalone feelings entries database yeah right um where dates are not unique within the data yes exactly feelings has to be one database and you have to have like a dates entries that would be separate um interesting is there anything else that you guys want me to dig into any databases you're curious about more process again like even like an hour and 90 minutes is we're kind of not even scratching the surface of what a real like true planning process would look like um and so i know we're when did you start planning at this level okay i will i will share that uh i love the term chaos monkey i feel like that has been my way of being for most of my life like just a tornado of chaos and kind of going with the flow and just like flying by the seat of my pants and so i have had to rely on planning in order to function as a human and so i would say it's something that i've kind of i don't know like obsessively studied because i was like please help me like there must be a better way to do this uh and so it's taken it's taken a long long time to figure out a planning routine that really again like works for my brain makes me feel good um yeah that would be my that would be my superhero identity i love that phrasing i really yeah painfully relatable so i really do want to put it out there like if i can learn to be a planner you can learn to be a planner for sure it's totally a learnable skill it's just a muscle that you practice like anything else if you want to get good at dancing you're going to have to dance every day that's just how it is and so that's why for me when you find a system that works like 12-week year i'm like yes it's so simple it is so simple but it gives me a framework to follow and i've been able to to stick to that and once i started adopting planning especially 90-day planning 12-week year planning and also setting quarterly revenue goals and yearly revenue goals i have hit them every year every year i like it's unbelievable and again it's just that process even just putting the intention into the thinking about what you want uh it's just it is so much more helpful than uh kind of flying by the seat of your pants and seeing what happens that doesn't mean there isn't like tons of room for serendipity in in my business but it's like what are the things that you know for sure that you want to have happen get those in your calendar because if they are not in your calendar they literally do not exist and they're not going to happen then the new shiny comes along and i'm like yes yes i want to collaborate with alice yes i i want to do that um and so it does it does take a bit of time i think to like understand your own capacity and um we have to remember to again planning it's not about how we adhere to the plan it's about the process that we go through and again who we become in the journey of planning those goals that that really uh shapes us and changes us so yeah you're gonna plan stuff and you're not gonna you're gonna put goals on there that are not gonna happen and you know 2020 i think has shown us that too like half the stuff that that got accomplished this year like was not even remotely on my my radar at the beginning of the year like i had all these like travel plans right like lots of us did so uh we often have to shift gears right and that's why it's kind of silly also to do a full year plan because we just we don't know what i don't know what september of 2021 is going to look like i don't know what connections i'm going to form in the next quarter that are really going to open up so many incredible possibilities in 2021 but if you uh if you kind of know what anchors you and what you want in the new year like what you want to bring into the world who you want to be that like you 2.0 megan men's calls that i really like that um then we can start to break down well who do i need to become to be this next version of myself and what skills am i going to need to build who are the people that i need to support me in that process you can start to to bring some of those things into life by by turning them into projects so um i hope that is i hope that's helpful uh i love the template campaign planning yeah thanks for sharing that esme uh the quarterly review was that a template button yes yes it was um yep so that quarterly review was a template button here and then again i like embed databases inside of databases and then drag and drag them where they need to go yeah so please please be gentle on yourself as you're doing this planning process this is a really messy process like it just is i don't think um i'm you know i hope that uh that you can probably see that like some parts of this are organized some parts are very not organized i changed my mind i'm like i don't know like is that helpful like we'll see uh and it takes a bit of time and so give yourself some time this weekend and go through again whether you use susanna conway's questions or you have your own set of questions that you ask yourself every year i think the important thing is just that you do that reflection and uh yeah it's so tricky again just doing this in like an hour or 90 minutes i feel like uh it's kind of it's a bit of a crash course and so we didn't necessarily get into you know okay how does that actually translate now how do i how am i going to map out that project over the next quarter so uh yeah i feel like i could probably do a whole planning series maybe maybe i'll have to make some some youtube videos to kind of break things up into smaller chunks a lack of motivation to act the more i lose myself in notion for weeks at a time i also recommend for people to you know uh treat setting up their notion workspace like a project right because it's a thing that you're working on when you're trying to figure this out and uh i think we're guilty often of we have a lot of things that we're working on that we don't consider projects even though they take up a lot of our time um what is your what's your call i mean that's the that's my personal youtube uh link you can probably google mariepool in notion and you will you will find me but yeah treat this like a project right like setting up your planning routine um notice what works notice what what questions kind of confront you figure out your word of the year oh yeah i need to figure that out so courage was my year for 2020 and i will definitely say that that that was very helpful especially if you are putting out youtube videos uh just a willingness to ship even though even though it feels scary even though the quality might not feel super high or sometimes you just don't feel like you know what you're doing uh that was really really helpful for building up a thick skin but yeah so i'm still thinking about this i i need to go through that unravel your year this weekend really do some of that work uh and because again it takes time i am going to go through all of my daily journal entries all of the um the gratitude and the wins and everything and look at yeah what do i want more of and what really challenged me this year so happy love it yeah if anyone here has done the work to identify their word of the year i'd love to hear i'd love to hear what it is it's often inspiring to hear other people's words cool any other final questions i know we're at 90 minutes here it's been uh it's been a fun session i hope i hope that this is helpful inspiring um now it's not necessarily super tactical it's it's again really hard to do this stuff um yeah we almost need like a workshop style session where we could uh break these up into smaller pieces into a series but hopefully it gives you some ideas of how you might want to think about setting up your spaces again those core databases yearly quarterly monthly weekly uh journal and when i'm planning ahead um i think of almost journal and week as more like day-to-day reflection whatever but planning ahead obviously is more like quarterly level monthly level milestone level recycling my word from 2020 because i don't think i met my intentions that's great um clarity what word is that exactly to find you oh yeah so lucia that is from unravel your year she actually like in the process that she takes you through uh let me jump in open up the year i think at the end uh to describe 2020 in three words i think you end up uh declaring a word for yourself again like this is a very distilled version there's like so many incredible questions in that uh susannah conway pdf so there is um i think one of the first questions she asks is if you had a word for 2020 how did it serve you how do you feel about it so rotten trash fire wow that's very extreme uh transition yes cool yeah maybe i'll maybe i'll do a series on this then gail i think that i think you're right that would make i think that would make a lot of sense as a series clarity i brought in trash fire that cracks me up another question that just popped in how do you maintain to plan with all the uncertainty that is going on right now such a great question you can only plan for what you can control right there was lots of things that were on my plan that did not happen this year that's okay again it's just the process of planning that helps you identify what you want right um like my course was a big focus of this year i was like i want to i want to create an excellent excellent course i want this to be awesome i want this to be next level who do i need to work with to make that happen that's in my that's within my control um but there's lots of things that that were on the plan that that i couldn't control so um often if if i'm feeling this sort of like ah like everything is uncertain i i just zoom out one or two levels and that might be again like looking at my vision like let's let's anchor in to my vision right educational leadership aligned team daymaker giving back um and then i like there's some very personal stuff in here uh of like what is my three year vision the vision that excites me inspires me and guides me because this is something that like regardless of what happens will always be an anchor for you right you can always anchor into what is most important to you if you know what your values are right um i want to give back 20 of my time in revenue underserved communities through donation resources scholarships and mentorships like that's a thing i can i can sit in regardless of what happens in 2021 um that's just a thing that's that's really important so i always try to anchor into what are like what are the values that are guiding me at the end of the day what's your why you know like the simon sinek what is your why and when you know that i feel like you can adapt to any plan so um and commitments right like commitments are a thing i love how tara mcmullen talks about um uh i think she's called the commitment blueprint right it's this goals are like future focused right there's like things i want to do someday that i'm working toward commitments are a thing i can start doing now today things i can be fiercely committed to anchor into acknowledge that like if i'm saying moving my body every day is important even if in some tiny capacity if it's like just walking around the block or whatever and if these are visible and they're in a place like every weekly agenda if they're embedded at the top um make it visible on your dashboards to remind yourself right this these are things i can do now this is what i can control i can be brave i can i can commit to making people's day better those are things i can commit to regardless of whether my projects get complete or whatever so this is most important anchoring into what's most important everything else is supplementary there's fully acknowledged i'm not you know i'm an ambitious person i have lots of things on my plate that i want to do and uh i know they're not all gonna get done because as new information comes in as new connections get formed you're like ah you know what i thought that was important last month but now with this new information i actually want to shift gears a little bit and that's totally fine that's totally fine so i just uh plan what i can plan for and let go of any sort of expectation and uh i've just learned to be a little bit more more gentle on myself and i think we could all use a little bit more uh compassion this year it's been a tough tough year so even for those of us that are doing really really well this year there's lots of people that are really really struggling and so um i think we could all use a little bit more compassion both for others and for ourselves it's been kind of interesting year that way i'm just checking in on the chat yes commitment blueprint is another amazing um resource from tara mcmullen what i'll do i know like a lot of links were kind of referenced and mentions and people's names i will add a call to action to this event after we wrap up give me like 15 15 minutes or so and if you want to check back to this event i'll add a little um call to action button with an of course with a notion page that will reference just some other reading um blog posts a couple reading materials even like live events uh youtube links and things that have really helped me as i think about my planning process because you know i've been influenced from tons of different people and i'm always sort of picking and choosing what fits and leave the rest so that's awesome i love how we're always taught to think about the whys for companies but we need to shift focus to ourselves and our planning and our own personal vision that's such a great point lucia too because if anyone here is kind of like a solo creator or maybe you're working on your own or just with one other person you know my my workspace is very much a blend of business and personal right so you can see like most of my goals tend to be business related goals because they run my own business and so um originally some of these things here the values and the north star like a lot of that actually used to be in my personal workspace and i was like you know what these are they are my personal values and they're my business values they're one in the same they're not separate so i now move these into the team level planning so georgia my incredible assistant she can see all of this stuff right so that way she knows what my values are she knows what i think of as our north star she knows what my commitments are and she can kind of keep me in check and she just kind of knows where where i want to head i prefer time versus calendar for my planning so instead of quarterly i do 12 weeks same amount of time but not rigid absolutely and that's it's all about personal preference wonderful um cool amazing yeah teams need to know the values absolutely in the last updated part of your homepage dynamic i.e today is the last updated um not sure you're referring to if it's this but yeah you can do a timestamp of at now and that will give a specific timestamp or you can say at today you can do that anywhere in your database properties and in the body here hopefully that helps do you find it do you find the template buttons on your actions dashboard are still working well for managing recurring tasks yes i do still do that kyle on my actions dashboard here i think it's on my planner yep so i will i will do my weekly recurring items but actually i've started again doing this at the the weekly level now so actually having a weekly dashboard having a place to come to so i'm like okay it's time for my weekly review open up here again there's like yep there's some personal stuff in there we won't go in there and then planning the next week where schedule weekly recurring items okay there's a lot great okay let's do this right and i start dragging them in and all of these have properties already kind of built in and so i can just rapidly move those in look at how many pomodoros okay overbooking myself okay good to know right so i can start to look at i think this is why it's so important to do the quarterly review and in the 12-week year they say um you're technically supposed to take a week off between each of those 12-week blocks and in that week off that's when you're like you're kind of reshaping right um a new reshaping process and you're giving yourself time to to clear out some of this this clutter things that you over committed to um see poor joy i think i have like respond to joy has been on my there we go there you are joy i don't know if you're still here but i'm like gotta reply to joy and it's it's been taking me a little while to get back to you so um you know it's that time of year i don't know if you guys can relate but the week before christmas it's it sort of feels like everybody needs needs to get their stuff done before the holidays so um that's that's real life it's just there's there's things that have been on my list that i haven't been able to get to so um yeah some decluttering is going to be required over the holidays but yes i do i do still use that weekly recurring item process so hopefully that helps kyle cool um love the idea of a week off to work on reviewing yes yeah i think and i i also tend to skip that like i will block that off in my calendar as a non-bookable week um and this is another another habit too that i've that i've been practicing or kind of working on this idea of blocking out the first week of every month such that you're not doing client work it's my content creation week and so on the monday of that first week i'm like thinking about the content for the month ahead and doing better batching both at the weekly level and the monthly level so again i'm always uh experimenting with what's working you know where do i need to create more energy how am i um where is there like friction and it feels like quicksand like what is is not quite working and how can i optimize my time better scheduling your planning check schedule self-care yes yes um and that's also why i think like planning your ideal week is so so essential that you're putting in the stuff that that matters most in the calendar first even before you put in all your your things that you want to do right uh and so i want to do like a quarterly retreat even if i'm not leaving anywhere fancy i'm not going to hotel it's just a staycation but like taking a week or taking a weekend off every quarter where it's just for me to work on my own stuff and to work on my own projects and so putting that in the calendar for the full year for 2021 go in there i'm going to challenge you to do this right now put that in your calendar at the end of every quarter this year 2021 block off a week in your calendar that's not bookable kyle i know i i think i i blew my own mind when i when i realized that you can actually um keep those properties like all the pomodoro and all that stuff oh man so time saving anyway cool uh jumping jumping around a bit there um but yeah so hopefully uh hopefully that helps this is not an overnight process this is a muscle to practice and everyone's at a different level with notion different level of planning so please be patient with yourself in this process and if you make any changes too i don't know if you're if you're on twitter or whatnot uh you know tweet at me share share a screen cap of your workspace or any changes that you made feel free to uh tag me and keep me posted on any changes that you've made if you found that any of the books were really helpful for you or any of the resources um let me know how that goes for you i'd love to hear that and you guys have inspired me i think it is time to do a planning specific series on youtube uh and yeah i feel like the planning doesn't end like whatever planning i'm doing right now i'm sure even like early january there's just going to be some tweaks as new information becomes available so amazing cool i hope that was helpful everyone this is a awesome long session i really appreciate everybody staying this late um i need a reading list just for these last two days yeah i'm gonna be i'll send you guys some some homework and uh maybe too uh if you guys like i can do a send out from crowdcast specifically so anybody that attended this um i'll do a roundup a notion page that kind of has a bunch of these these links and such amazing yes be be gentle on yourself in this process amazing yeah i'm curious if there was anything uh kind of like anything that that really stood out to you in the session i'd love to hear was there something specific you're taking away is there um i know it's a lot uh but i'd love to hear if there was something that really resonated that you're that you know you're gonna implement i would love to i'd love to hear cool thanks joy thanks stefania big picture stuff cool alice we're gonna have alice on in the new year one of our office hour sessions coming up time to rest goals aren't specific enough need milestones amazing brian i think i'll have to answer your question in a youtube video with the pomodoro method be patient creative lots of purple boxes yes ah yay awesome yeah how to take things that resonate with you and apply them to your notion all of this stuff is just a suggestion right it's just to show you what is possible now it's up to you to kind of take it and uh to really make it your own but yes i will follow up with anyone that showed up for this session had a great time with the full reading list and all the amazing resources that i recommend to make your year better thank you everybody who came today and asked really amazing questions and participated in the chat and yeah this is our last session of 2020. sad um and so we'll kick things back off again in the new year for those of you that do celebrate uh christmas have a merry christmas have a wonderful holiday happy new year and we will see you we'll see you next year bye everybody

Channel: Notion

Views: 29,129

Rating: 4.9271255 out of 5

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Id: -DkvIri06AQ

Length: 106min 34sec (6394 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020