Notion Office Hours: Tiago Forte ✍️

hello everyone welcome to notion office hours let us know if you can hear me okay welcome welcome amazing we have a lot of notion pros here today too so it'll be a lot of people answering in the chat but if you've never been to a notion office hours just a little bit of a quick introduction because we do often get a lot of the same technical questions over and over again and this session really today is about having Thiago help us and show us kind of how he's been using notion to do his blogging workflow so that he produces a blog post every single week consistently so this is not necessarily a session where we're going to go too deep into how to use notion how to do specific things in notion or kind of tech support or notion we do have lots of other office hours where we do cover that in more detail check out our building from scratch that we did last week and these are recorded so you can access these anytime so today really it's about Thiago and Chicago's workflow and so we're going to focus on use case today so as someone's broadcasting from the kitchen [Laughter] okay so Thiago I'm so excited to chat with you today I took your course getting things done like a boss forever ago I don't know when you first made that course how many years ago it was but I think I might have been at one of your first versions of that and it totally changed my productivity and then recently taking building a second brain super influence the way that I set up my notions set up so Thiago is an incredible productivity consultant his frameworks are amazing they can help you regardless of whatever tech you're using whether using Evernote or notion and so I'm just super grateful that you're here and willing to show us your space of course yeah I'm looking forward to this all week there's so much energy and activity around here I'm just going to pause you for one second and have the kitchen noises stop that's oh and it's gonna be in Spanish there just hold on one second cool so we have a really good mix of people here it looks like more people haven't been to an office hours so if you're curious about past office hours you can actually click on the notion icon at the very top of your screen and so this is notion office hours number six we have lots of other ones we do go into a little bit about the second brain in a past event with Maria building from scratch and next week we have managing client and managing projects in notion too so we definitely have future episodes coming up for very different use cases but again today is all about logging workflow I'll do my best to keep an eye on the questions we're going to try and keep it on task as much as possible and then toward the end if we want to kind of veer into some of the more off-topic questions or kind of peripheral stuff we can do our best to address that but let's turn it over to Thiago let's do some screen sharing and let's dive in cool thanks Marie thank you for having me on the number of people here is staggering geez that's really really cool so I wanted to give a bit of a little bit of a preamble it's funny this morning as I was looking at my calendar I saw this you know that we were doing this and I and I had this thought this sudden moment of panic like shoot I better go in and like really clean up my notions make it perfect yeah make everything perfect so everyone thinks like have it all together and have all the answers but then I thought you know that's that's not what I'm gonna do let's just show exactly how it is like the current state and I think that one of the values of this for your audience here might be that to see like what is how does someone like me who is immersed in productivity and organization and knowledge management all day every day learn how to use notion because I'm really I'm a novice I'm just the past few months like dipping my toes in the water seeing some of your stuff a few other people so like how doesn't want someone like me go about doing that and the one thing I will say is the approach that I like to take is very bottom up I find that anytime I when I try to like architect the perfect system from the first moment I end up always every time creating something that looks cool but it's just like a monster it's like a monster maintain it's a monster to use it has nothing to do with my day-to-day life it's sort of like a it's like a modern art project it's a beautiful sculpture but I'm just the you know looking at so the way that I am that I'm doing this is really just little tests Oh could I do this a notion can I do that in notion and there's really three things one of them is my blogging workflow with two other kind of small experiments I'm running so let me go ahead and share my screen I can definitely relate to that too as I you know try to record more videos and more YouTube videos and I'm just saying I'm not editing it I'm not making it perfect I want for people to see the the real real life behind the scenes and it is messy exactly okay so you can see my notion right yes okay so let's see I'm really just doing these little three things right here and as you can probably instantly tell I'm not I'm really just using the built-in templates I'm not doing a lot of customization not doing any of the more advanced features linked databases all those things I'm really just seeing what kinds of really processes and procedures are most sensible in notion and and the reason I say processes and procedures is you know as as probably everyone here knows I'm really into Evernote I do a lot of things in Evernote but what I'm noticing is that as as pieces of information become mature so for example this is my my building a second branch is the course that I teach my bas B playbook you know this is something that until now I kept in in in Evernote do is basically just the different checklists and procedures that I do every time that I teach this class and what I noticed is is once a process like this gets mature right it's not this like completely uncertain thing I'm making up as I go along it really doesn't benefit from anything in Evernote it doesn't benefit from ever notes quick capture from ever notes kind of the messiness of it and and this is the point I think it makes sense to bring it into something like notion where it where it does benefit from all the the more advanced features in the structure and so you can see different things like they're really just checklists of how I launched this is the cohorts of the course that I teach so how do I plan them many of these links go to either Evernote pages or Google Docs or other things how do I do sales how do I do the launch and I love that I can really easily for example just get these and and move them around you know these these launches that I do like most online launches it never goes exactly the same way at the same time there's always a little bit you want to change and so you can't exactly just go one two three four five you have to think about each step and go okay I'm going to do this actually third instead of second this time yeah do you have a reflection process built into there too given that each launch kind of goes a little a little different each time that would probably be the next thing this is the first the cohort that I'm teaching this month is the first time I've used this so that'll probably be added right down here and I really like that these are nested you know the hierarchy I can do here for example like guests interviews and screen recording I have a few other such sort of recording checklists and those will probably end up going under just one one of these sub pages which is like check like recording checklists right and then in underneath there I'll have guests screen recording lectures each one of the kind of sub sub types so that's one thing that was probably the first one actually this was the first so here's my blog workflow this was the sort of the the main headline of this office hours and really I just again and took a straightforward approach just added in the kind of the color of my blog the logo just to kind of make it a little you know visually pleasing and really this was actually kind of a huge deal for me before I had I did have each of these steps these are basically the stages a a kind of piece of information goes through from this is the very very first idea all the way to getting posted on my blog getting emailed to my email list if there's paywall things they get to my practice members posted on social media and then archived but they were sort of just like distributed in different notebooks or I would kind of do it in a more haphazard way and this has been kind of amazing I just moved to this kind of Kanban board style maybe a month or two ago and the thing that immediately jumped out was how much there is hmm that guy I had no idea until seeing all these in one place I mean there's like 40 to 50 posts or not even post but you know things to announce or things to publish that I am working on any any given time from just the most random ideas it just occurred to me two things that I've started to collect notes on to outlines that I've begun to structure to drafts to posts on my blog to emails to social media and then to the archive and so what this does gives me a few benefits so first it's cool to just see it all in one place I can notice patterns you know I can see oh this idea is actually related to this post I'm already working on let me just combine them or let me you know accelerate one of these notes into a post so then I can announce two things that are related at the same time it just gives me a better bird's-eye view and then the second benefit you can see so a lot of these links go to Evernote so I'll show you this in a sec I'm curious how you manage to the content that you give up for free and then I saw that you've got your practice members I guess how much of that free content or you know how much of your paid content I'm curious how you manage that when you are creating so much content every week for free how do you manage kind of are you repurposing are you going in more depth into your paid content and curious kind of what that division looks like for you yeah you know it's it's um not that rigorous for example this this collection of things you see here is a mix of free posts and promotional things selling specific products and things for my subscription members it's sort of all part of the same process I don't treat them that differently it's more like I'm just trying to once to twice a week I'm trying to move you know two to three things is usually how many things are included in each email is usually like the main thing and then a secondary thing and then something in the PS so as long as I have two three things in this column right here you know the post column basically means it's either on the blog or it's a Facebook post or it's on Twitter or it's on YouTube or it's a link that I can link to it's like there's something ready to go as long as I have two to three things I'm good for the week and I the money is funny I don't try serves treat monetization is like a side effect it's like I'm publishing all the stuff so often that a certain percentage of people will buy a certain percentage of people will subscribe and I guess that's that served me well enough in terms of business planning to this day eventually I'll probably need to do some more strategic planning but for now you're right you're right I really just focus on on publishing as long as there's enough going out the door I find that the business really works another question to piggyback on that like I know that you're I would say a prolific tweeter and you know you have a lot of conversations that you get into on Twitter and sort of threaded conversations and that's where I hear a lot about your ideas to do you kind of tie those in with any of your publishing flow or is that just kind of in the moment I just chat about things do you store those threads and tweets I'm assuming as part of your second brain you know are you I guess tagging those keeping those documenting those almost like you got your posts and ideas here or that are those just kind of free and they're out there and whatever yeah that's an interesting question uh I do tweet a lot probably too much and you know in a way I never thought about this before but in a way Twitter is like here it's sort of like the pre idea stage where I truly have no filter with Twitter like half the stuff I I just haven't even thought two seconds about as you can probably tell us maybe this is weird or random or down or wrong I I don't put the minimal filter because I just find if I start to think about oh whatever people gonna think is this gonna be well-received all that stuff then I would just never tweet yeah and so usually Twitter is like the it's like the chaotic crazy stream of consciousness mind dump stuff and then usually I just see how people react and it's amazing you know I remember even when I just had a few hundred followers the amazing thing of Twitter is like you're seeing so many tweets that the the volume of you know the tweet flow if there's such a thing is so high you know I remember when I had three or four hundred followers I would go and look at the analytics and thought you know I wasn't even then and so what that means is you can test things like I'll have two deletes you know tweeted two minutes apart and there's an order of magnitude difference in how many how much engagement and how much response I get just between those two things and often it's the reverse of what I think yeah you know something I tweeted I think all this is brilliant it's gonna do great it's nothing and then something else that I think is just not really interesting gets huge huge response so often what makes it into this first ideas column is the tweets that get the most engagement right that's it's like I don't I don't want to spend even even the time it takes to like collect a few of these notes or write them in this this notion page I don't even want to spend that unless I have some initial indicator that it's good right that there's there's some quality there and so I use Twitter as the sort of the live fire testing ground look I love that yeah I think and something that I've done too is when something gets a lot of traction I'll kind of clip that tweet you know send it in to my notion note and then as I'm building my post I'll reference those tweets and be like well John said this and I thought that was interesting and it almost is a way to kind of build out your your blog posts in a bit more detail because you can pull in interesting ideas and kind of put your own idea forward of well here's why I disagree with that or here's why I think this was a really interesting conversation exactly exactly your social proof about the idea of being interesting right totally totally and that's one thing like is here that there gets to be with each subsequent stage there's fewer and fewer things and that's part of just the filter of not everything is worth bringing all the way to a you know a finished product but it's also kind of what you were just saying sometimes you combine things yeah you know sometimes one of these cards is for something and the other is against mmm right and then you go you can go Oh instead of you know treating these as completely unrelated things what if you combined them and then the posts would become like you know the pros and cons of X right and then you actually have like a lot of good rich material for both sides and it becomes kind of a richer post I like that there's been a couple a couple questions that came in that could tie in with this a little bit one person said what is the process you use to link to Evernote all I do is so in Evernote if you just do right-click you can you can do a public link but there's really no reason to do that if you're just in your internal systems so I just do copy note link which creates a link that it essentially is only available to you and then if I was going to put it here there's actually this is part of the pre-built template there's a link field I haven't even looked at I don't even know what half the stuff is I haven't even finished so much potential if you have any free consulting for me I love something so oh my gosh yes I would love to do to yourself with relational databases and I just I just think you're building a second brain methodologies work so well with notion like the ability to connect disparate notes like you were saying and because my notes live in notion I'm able to connect those blog post ideas right to the notes that kind of tie in with it to you so there's so much potential but I think I think that what's great about your setup is like you said you've only been doing this a couple months or so so it's great to see I think how you're approaching it and how you're thinking it and it doesn't need to be so complex just start with something that gets you moving and keeps you productive and you can always iterate on the system later right exactly yeah that's this is actually we were just talking about this in my class on Wednesday is is I this is sort of a principle of mine is is that structure is expensive structure you know especially organizing types and productivity nerds Sunday you attend the notion office hours in the middle of a weekday we tend till 2:00 to in like intrinsically enjoy structure you know we just we love the order of it we love the aesthetics of it it gives us a sense of honestly like it's sort of a can be a coping mechanism design feel like calm and groundings are in control yes the world is handled and so I because I often work with such people I often ironically am on the other side trying to get them to calm down a little bit where if you add too much structure up front you know there's a cost to creating structure there's a cost to maintaining structure there's a cost of changing structure it's it cost to interacting with structures so I really advocated just-in-time approach where only add as much structure as is needed to solve the problem at hand and that way you're sort of pulling you're sort of creating structure on demand and any response to a real need rather than trying to sort of predict what what you'll need actually yeah underline what you what you just said there because again I think due to notions complexity it can be so easy to spend a lot of time and feel like you've got to figure out the system but I think as you said the just-in-time approach and taking things sort of project-by-project iterating on it it's so easy to move data in notion it took me a while to realize that so you can correct you can shift databases you can change databases to pages very very quickly so like don't worry about getting it perfect up front I love the just-in-time approach and learning that in building a second brain was like it it's very permission giving you realize like it doesn't need to be so stressful you can adapt on the fly and it gives you a lot more permission to just be a little messy as you go because you you just can't predict what you're gonna need in a few months a few years yeah exactly exactly I think the better question is what is the the correct amount of structure for the task at hand you know when I'm writing if I if I like this seems like this super legit writing workflow but really you know in the actual writing like let's say turning an outline into a draft or a draft into a post it's highly chaotic I mean I have a Google Doc open and things they're just getting cut and pasted and deleted and moved from one document to another and and there's a certain amount of the creative process that should be that way yeah and so I think asking what is the correct amount of structure to not stifle your creativity is that it's a better question I think I think we also had a question about whether you don't know if this was a question or in the chat someone was asking whether you do your blog drafting and notion or I know you mentioned Google Docs so maybe you're actually collecting this information a couple different places but it doesn't seem like you're actually writing the content itself in notion notion becomes more like the planning workflow is that true um true yeah exactly it's for planning it's for status it is for checklists processes procedures that's currently how I'm using it at least I like Google Docs the main reason being it's collaboration I mean there's still just nothing like you know I'll have a Google Doc I've had up to like 100 people sometimes if I if I really needed a ton of feedback on a post I'll post it on on Twitter or my slack I don't know of any other - I don't know if notion can can have that many collaborators but you know Google Docs that's simplicity and how streamlined it is I love that I can just have that open and get tons and tons of different feedback on my my sort of writing in progress but yeah I do in Google Docs and then I have a plug-in that moves it from Google Docs to WordPress so there's actually I'm realizing there's many many different programs that I'm using the network flow mom but yeah each one has its pros and cons that's the one other thing I was going to share the kind of a third use case is process documents this is a so I'm doing this matchmaking service for for personal assistants that is that that my one of my marketing coaches recommended to me and it's just the most rigorous thing ever they have you you know it's like identifying your values your principles they they make you like share your schedule with them so they can analyzed it you do personality assessments this Kolbe and then your personality assessments have to match up it's like the craziest thing ever know one thing they have you do is is really as a qualifying thing like they only want to work with people they're really going to fully take advantage of having a personal assistant and so they ask you to make a list what are the what are the things you do that if someone else completely handled them and save you at least ten hours per week and at first I was like oh I don't know gosh I feel like I don't spend that much time on admin stuff I'm pretty efficient at it but then I made this list took me you know five or ten minutes which is about 18 items and I realized you know no one of these takes that long or feels that painful but as a whole this totally takes ten hours per week you know all these little you know draft the blog post put it from from notion into Google Docs or Google Docs into WordPress or just preparing the WordPress document providing discount code you know sending someone the course FAQ scheduling a zoom call cancelling someone's membership it's like it's really hard to have visibility into this stuff but altogether it takes a lot of time and so so how people on the call can use this is I think one thing I've learned I've had a couple of personal assistants and one thing I've learned is that no personal assistant or really anyone you hire can organize you if we think that they're gonna come in and somehow just like like tell us the answer and in my experience that really doesn't work I mean the the ceiling of how organized they can make you is the ceiling of how organized you are yourself they can't really go beyond that and so even if you're you're not ready to hire an assistant or you never do doing something like this where you just start standardizing your own behavior you know actually there's actually nothing in these I haven't actually created the checklist but just making this list made me realize that I am working pretty inefficiently and doing a lot of things that are rote and very kind of very you know we're repeatable and predictable doing them you know kind of in an ad hoc way and I think this is what one thing that notion is ideal for is these sort of processes and procedures yeah and that's one thing that I'm working with with the egghead IO team is almost making it so that if a brand if you were to drop a brand new person into the workspace that there's enough call-outs and introductions and they almost becomes like an onboarding process so a brand new person walks in and there's there's directives there's like hey this is this is our value these are our guidelines this is you might want to check out this document first and it sort of leads you through these documents in a way that's really practical and and quite inviting and gives a lot of context so it's not just a list of documents it's well what do I do with these documents what does this all mean so I like the idea of making your workspaces almost like a culture playbook of sorts it's like here's here's how we operate you know and I think that's it's really hard to do for yourself when you're so close to all those tasks yeah in fact it's this this process of sort of preparing myself to work with the personal assistant has met has been a tremendous learning and growth process like it was like a it was like a personal growth experience because everything about how I created my business was about freedom you know I wanted to be able to do whatever I felt like as much of the time as possible it was about adaptation you know being willing to turn on a dime once an opportunity arrives in my inbox just stop everything and go do that it was about creativity doing everything like expressing myself and the way that felt right and all you know that your weakness is always the mirror image of your strengths right and so all these strengths when it came to working with the personal assistant I just fountain Sand wanting to even create a checklist they the way that I respond to my customers is as a procedure I was like no I respond to every customer and a completely customized way and only I can do it ever yeah yes it needs my personal touch and my love and care for each one of them and so as part of part of that kind of growth I think it's having good tools you know a good you sort of need training wheels right before you if you remember the terror and fear it took to get your training rules was the one of the things that gave you that confidence and I think having well-designed tools can can it not replace the need for learning and growth but can make it a little less painful I love that I think probably a lot of people here can relate to that especially if you're like a so a solopreneur kind of working on your own and there's this idea of am i building a personal brand or kind of a legacy brand and what what happens beyond tiago forte what happens if diego forte gets hit by a bus do you want forte labs to kind of grow and live beyond you do you want to train other people to be able to do it not everyone necessarily wants to do that kind of growth but I think as you crave more you crave more freedom you might want to create something beyond just what you've created right so that does require letting go a little bit looking at the parts that what can only Thiago do and what are the parts that like anyone could really come in and help you do that so that that's a process that takes a long time and I can relate to that discomfort of how do I let go of that and like it's just easy for me to do this 2-minute thing but those things add up over time for sure yeah yeah it's interesting because I I never wanted to build a big company and I still don't know if I I don't think I'll ever have an office I don't really want you know these full-time employees showing up at work I'll probably always be a some some version of a solopreneur if I do have a team they'll be remote they'll be distributed and so you sort of resisted all these things but there's a couple things like can I can recommend actually one is a book called work the system mmm yes oh yeah cool yeah I've just discovered that it's really like I always want to know like the philosophical view the big picture the principles and that book really gets into that it's not about the checklist it's about this it's about that your business even if you're the you know a solopreneur even if you're an employee in a traditional company there is a system in there yeah right and and I love the the philosophy of you have a system and your system is producing exactly what it's designed to produce so if you have stress and anxiety your system is working perfectly in producing stress that is true it's like if the systems are there whether you've articulated them or not and so it's making invisible systems this and I think that's a that's a really difficult skill if you're not exposed to systems thinking or design thinking or what have you so and again that's I think where the challenge of notion comes is it's so open that if you if you haven't created a system or you're not aware of kind of what systems need to be created you can be creating a bit of a monster without that those guardrails a little bit exactly yeah yeah Systems thinking and then the other thing was this book 1 million 1 million one-person businesses oh I don't know the title it's something like that one person 1 million dollar businesses it was based on Tim Ferriss his work but and they've done a few interviews on his podcast but it's basically it's an eye opener oh another one is company of one by paul jarvis another great yeah both both these books they they sort of break like we have this paradigm at least I had this paradigm up oh I can stay small and have this nice calm life where I can control things or I could build this big thing it was like this very black-and-white thing and then you read these books and you realize there are people that are making you know that are making a lot of money and and why that's important is making a huge impact reaching thousands tens of thousands of people and they're solopreneurs it's no longer a a black and white thing their arms case scale has been decoupled from having a huge permanent staff so you can choose the scale you want to work at and choose the level of the company almost as independent variables which is like so it's such a crazy thing so even if you don't intend to build a company even if you're not self-employed I think you have to start thinking of these things we are all a company of one if you have a full-time job you're a company of one that just has a one an exclusive client they've hired you for exclusive consulting I like that yeah I look cool I'm gonna check in to see if any questions came in that aren't there maybe on this same wavelength okay Tiago do you like using do you like using the Evernote link that links to the browser app or would you prefer the classic link that should open the note in the Evernote desk yeah it's a kind of an annoying thing I noticed in fact I was just gonna share when I click on those those notes in notion what I get looks like this so it does open in the browser it shows you that the note you're looking for but I would I would enjoy that that classic link but it's you know it's not such a huge deal it's not when I'm working on a post I'm usually it's like I'm sitting down to dedicate myself to that one note whereas if I'm kind of working across multiple notes in Evernote that I'm probably just gonna open up the desktop so not I'm not a huge pain point somebody was asking about can you elaborate on how you create the Kanban structure and then did answer that he's like it's just a view of the database so we do go into the sort of how to's of this you might want to check out the building from scratch notion in office hours that goes into a lot more because the the database functionality and notion is is really kind of their signature feature that I think is so powerful that it takes a while to kind of wrap your head around so definitely check out those past office hours that'll be helpful for you someone asked I'm curious I think you might also use text expander someone did ask I learned in the last ocean office hours about text expander it's an incredible tool was wondering how people you utilize it in their notion workflow I know how I use it in my notion workflow I don't know if if you use text expander or other sort of even like Alfred or there's other apps to kind of expand out your text I for URLs all the time so anytime anytime I'm creating a task that's notion related I will use it to upload the notion icon as a URL so I just type in icon N and it like spits out that URL so Lorre lorem ipsum any kind of anything that you copy/paste over and over again your email your address any tasks calendar links maybe even Evernote notes that you reference all the time you could actually put those in your your text expander but I'm curious Thiago if you use it or if you have like really specific interesting use cases for it that you're like Oh everyone needs to set this up in their their textexpander yeah I I really like TextExpander I use Alfred and which is sort of this this plugin for I'm not sure if it's for PC but it's definitely for mattock and they're really the only actually the two features I use it for are the sort of spotlight replacement you can hit a key combination and it has a little search bar come up that's a bit more powerful than the built-in spotlight search feature and the other thing is the what's called they call it it is its expander for them in snippets and I use it in a bunch of different ways the way you said I think is it's like really fundamental I mean your phone number your address your all your different email addresses like I I sometimes work with people one on one and all all screen share with them or sit next to them and then I I always notice this I'm watching and they start typing out their own email address it's like oh that that alone is probably dozens of hours over the course of your career yeah you tuck that in all the time every day how many different services do you log into you write even like if people are doing HTML snippets or things like that there's just so there's so many different use cases anything you've typed in more than once right it's yeah make a shortcut for it yeah it's really Anna and I have a system so anything that's like sort of personal information starts with the hash tag so like or a hash sign hash sign a is my address cache line P is my phone number hash sign what else few other ones and then business related ones are the dollar sign so like dollar sign like that know is Facebook dollar sign T is Twitter profile dollar sign what else L is LinkedIn and then a few others like this is really a big thing with my tasks is if you can standardize the way you write tasks it's actually huge yeah right like most people like again I'll sit next to them and say something like email you need to email someone right the number of ways that they'll write that they'll say Oh follow up with this person send someone this person email them get back to them let them know notify like there's like a hundred different ways you can say email but when you're doing email and you want to batch process you want to be able to sit down like kind of show this on the screen let's see and do a search across not just one project so here's my task manager this is things but you know you can see here I have maybe 20 to 25 different projects another 20 to 25 areas like how can I see everything that I have to email or everything I have to read or everything I have to watch well if I do a search and do so you're gonna see the text expander at work /w and a space see how it puts in watch and then I can do the search and here's everything that I have to watch across all the different projects it's sort of like a tag it's very much like a tag except like hey I hate tags I can't I can't stand tagging things and so so it's sort of like a it's like an embedded tag it's like a tag that you're putting in just in the process of writing the task yeah right so I have everything to watch everything to write well I think this is probably moved to notion by now everything to do online research on and these are the kind of things that it takes a few minutes to kind of plan and set up a once you've done it the amount of time savings on this sort of thing is just huge from day to day so I think it's so worth you know putting these are shortcuts in place yeah I mean it does it's true I'll show you um this is kind of interesting the set of these are the the action verbs that I found are the ones I use so you can see here I just do /a and it puts a nap /b by and this is only what a dozen action verbs but this covers every pretty much every conceivable action that I that I think of yeah I love that doing that for actions doing it for any like again booking links right your calendar links so it's like I've got like book of 30-minute session it's like Cal 30 Cal 60 Cal no like there's all these different variations and set it up once you are you're good to go and even things like your bio like how many times that do people ask you for your bio and maybe you need like 150 word version the 200 like you know I have snippets for like bio short bio long whatever and if those are things that you have to give for podcast interviews or whatever you know even like a Dropbox link if there's like a Dropbox link to my bio photo like there it is with my with my description so there's all these little ways I think you can like speed up your workflow day to day for all those things that you do over and over again yeah yeah definitely it's it's cool that we're talking about so many different tools because you see that they all can work synergistically they all have their strengths and and as long as you you are like what needs to be consistent is not the apps because they're never going to be they're always gonna have different philosophies they're gonna have different design aesthetics different brand guides but if you are consistent it's sort of like your locus of control is not it's sort of internal like you have your own method then what the tools do you're kind of just like oh sometimes I like what they do sometimes I don't but they are not the ones determining how I work I I have a a system that is apart from any specific implementation and the tools are just they slot into different parts of that workflow as as I need them I love that and I think again as you get faster and kind of know better how you work then you're able to switch out different tools or be like actually I could combine these tools these two into one or whatever and you get faster and better at doing that but it's like that just-in-time tool management right that you get you get better as you use the tools yeah yeah this is probably moved to know this is probably lifted notion by now yeah so I mean I have almost everything living in notion but I totally understand you know lots of people like to manage their tasks externally or they built their own systems and I think whatever whatever works for you and keeps you productive and not doing too much procrastinating is awesome it's a real thing someone asked you guys even use the notion or do you guys even use the finder in OS X or is everything stored in notion if not do you link to your finder like you do with Evernote I still use my finder because there's still like project files that like Photoshop files and things like that that I it's just easier for me to pull from the Finder window like I'm not going to be storing all of those files and notion like that to me that is an extra step that doesn't make sense I don't know about about you how much you use the finder versus relations same I have the UM my parama it which is sort of mine is it's my solution to how do you get organized when you have to when you have to use all these different platforms yeah like assuming that if for the foreseeable future we're gonna have to use different tools I mean it's essentially using the same organizational scheme instead of a different one in each place which is how people tend to do it you know here's by day tears by client here's by project here's by what I feel like here's nothing else you just have the same system and yeah there's always these exceptions you know you have huge Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator files those are those are never gonna make sense set to to store in any knowledge management not because there's just these huge massive files that can only be opened by photoshop anyway you're gonna have you're gonna have cases where you want the raw thing you know you want the you don't want it in any sort of structured database any proprietary file format you want just the original yeah all sorts of use cases but what I do for that is I use what's called system links a symlink that stands for something I can't remember it so this is what I use to sink my basically my entire computer file system to Dropbox you you can't actually just get all your your main like your home folder your Documents folder movies music all those and move them into your Dropbox folder but for various reasons I like to keep them where they are but what a symlink does is it sort of creates like a an alias essentially like a ghost folder in Dropbox so it says you know doc and there's a little black arrow but then it's actually finding the Documents folder and bringing it on to Dropbox I can probably show that but what this means yeah yeah let me show you so like if you look at my home folder on the Mac Elise this is kind of where everything is stored it's you know your pictures music movies downloads documents all that stuff and then one of these is my Dropbox folder and you can see here this is the one that's being synced but the issue is that I want to sync my desktop My Documents and my downloads folder continuously to Dropbox I want anything that I put in any anywhere in these three folders to be seen to Dropbox but I don't want to have to get them and actually move them there so inside Dropbox you can see like here see that little tiny black arrow see if I can make that bigger I don't know this is what's called a symlink and if you just look up you know how to create symlinks for mac OS or Windows PC you'll find many many tutorials what this does is it says go find what this arrow says is go find the desktop folder which is actually here and sync anything that's in there to Dropbox and what that means is what like it's funny before I would I would so the advantage here is as soon as you're working on something which tends to be the stuff on the on the desktop is the stuff that's active right now if I stepped away from my computer I can access that from anywhere I can access that from my mobile devices I can access that from a different computer even if I were to lose my computer if I can get access to any computer and you know the thing has been synced that I can access what is in all my main working folders from anywhere and that's just super valuable so like in documents I have my para system here with my projects and every one of these folders is available on any one of my devices got any questions about that that's I feel like you would have saved me a lot of time when I did the initial move of everything in Dropbox where even like renaming a folder to projects was like this is gonna take three days to sync all of your files and yeah I feel like there could have been a better way to do that yeah it's true it takes some some upfront syncing and I did try to move away from Dropbox because I thought it was too expensive and I moved to this other sync service that was a catastrophe I mean youyou don't you realize that what like what Dropbox does behind the scenes which is make it seamless and simple and you'll have to worry about it is well worth the money you know what actually I would try to move to Google sync like you think Oh Google Eitam is using Google Drive as your clothes for that's gonna work it's Google it was I've never seen a product from Google works so bad it would it would tell me file for synced and they actually weren't it would tell me certain files just cannot be synced for some mysterious error it would sometimes just not sync for some mysterious reason like definitely unless something has changed I would avoid a to Google Drive Wow and then you think like what's an hour of your time worth and how much time was spent trying to make that work and it's like well okay Dropbox is worth it it really is worth it yeah some of the other questions that have come in are a little more techie so I don't know if you guys have any other questions about you know Thiago's whether it's the philosophies of how he organizes things or you know gets things done cuz you know check was a smart cookie and it's a nice chance to pick his brain otherwise we'll try to answer some of these slightly more cheeky questions someone asked how how do you manage media photos and such within this workflow yeah media media is interesting a few different ways so it depends how it's being used depends how it's being used so a few things the sort of default like the the catchment like Basin is I have all my photos synced from my phone to Google to Google photos Google photos does work incredibly well so that's like the the last case scenario any any photo that I take on my phone which is almost all the media that I that I that I create is automatically synced to Google photos but then there's a few things have one thing on my weekly review is to just go through the photos from the past week and if there's any so there's a couple scenarios one is there they're not really just like a photo I took at a local you know event but it's like ambiguous creative inspiration right it's like a piece of modern art that is like oh that could be that could be used somehow or it's a photo of like often arts but it can be sculpture could be posters graphic design performances usually something creativity related that I I want to save where I'm doing my creativity work which is Evernote so I'll just get it from Google photos save it on my desktop and then put it into Evernote and then the other scenario is there sometimes business-related photos right like if you if I speak in an event there might be 50 photos that come out of that event right and the thing with with professional photos is you never know what you're gonna need yeah like you can get headshots which is just like your face but sometimes you need like something looking like mysterious and things need to look like like up to the side sometimes you need to be really productive yeah really alrighty cuz I mean maybe this is exclusive to online content creators but your face it has to match what you're doing yeah and so but then those photos don't make sense to taking down Rio because if we're just be too many there would be you know thousands of photos so I have Google photos for my personal Gmail but then I have a separate Google photos for my business so I use I use Google suite which is Google's you know services for managing your business using Google and it's cool because since they're both in Google photos all I have to do is select those photos and then say share and share them from my personal gmail to my work email address and then they just pop up right there I don't have to like X for it don't have to I don't have to like download them and then re-upload them they just get kind of shuffled right over there and the cool thing is then I can open up my work Google photos and I have just I mean thousands a photos every conceivable professional scenario and I'm constantly surprised by you know how how diverse my needs are when it comes to photos for work oh my god super smart that's something I haven't taken the time to do but I do think it's often like oh I need that like that profile shot or I need whatever and it's combing through that you know big folder of photos so I think that's a really great use case somebody asked a great question how do you balance your creativity work versus your maintenance work I find myself favoring the maintenance just because there's always something that seems there's always something that needs to be done it's probably easy just to do that maintenance work so yeah how do you almost like make her manager time right like how do you balance that time yeah there's a few things one is by day I ate all my calls meetings anything that is like an obligation that is time specific on Monday Wednesday and Friday and the Tuesday and Thursday it's like it's like oh it's I'm RELIGIOUS about it like Tuesday and Thursday it's like I often sleep in it's like it's like Tuesday and Thursday I'm like a starving Parisian artist just like I get up and I just like sit in bed and I wander around I just like I need that freeform I can't agree if like in this 45 is the slop usually what comes out of those days is some finished piece of work on Tuesdays and Thursdays in that Kanban board you saw it calm on board you saw I'll often be getting something from draft it to finished right and the only way I can get away with that is Mondays Wednesdays Fridays are pretty packed yeah like today I have from 11:00 until 2:30 in it and again at 5:00 pretty much back to back calls which is which is also fine I can kind of get in that mode you know just be in the in the mode of being on zoom call sometimes if they're only by a voice I can take a walk and do like two or three calls in a row just walking around are yeah yeah yeah that's that's the main way and it gives it makes it so clear the division you know but the other way is I really handle maintenance tasks in my weekly review my weekly review is is a it's like a ten point checklist that I've really carefully refined over the years and I know basically in like an hour follow this checklist I can go from the biggest chaos the just total everything is my life is a mess to almost complete clarity in like an hour or two which is the most amazing like you know if you think about it you can only go out of control when you know that you're able to get in control predictably yeah right right like what allows me on Tuesdays and Thursdays to just be wandering around is I know Monday morning Wednesday morning Friday morning not the whole day but just in this defined slot I can just go Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam essentially just what I'm doing that time is just clearing all the inboxes you know everywhere that information is collecting I'm just clearing them where they go and David Allen always says you know things only get piled up and accumulated if they have nowhere to go surgery right yeah as long as you have somewhere to just go you don't have to read it necessarily you don't have to understand it you don't have to engage with it you have to complete it you just have to be able to make one clear decision that it goes from the inbox to this place and that you know where that place is when when you need that information and are you doing a daily review and a weekly review and if so like do you have like I said is it like end of day on Friday after all the chaos is kind of done is that your kind of review time or like what's your ritual around that review process yeah you know I've never found it useful to have an exact schedule time I know David Allen there's all these debates like oh no it's Wednesday afternoon it's Sunday evening it's Friday at 1:30 p.m. there's all these theories but the reason the reason I it's variable for me is it depends on the current workload if I'm say in the middle of creating a course I know what I'm doing for the next two weeks right I don't need to I don't need to step back and do all the sorting to try to figure out my priorities it's like my focus is clear and in fact I would say it's counterproductive just you know if you're about to land that big client and you're doing everything and you're on the phone and there's all these things happening that's not the time to go oh I have to go to the gym like because this is the time right at this moment like even you need these times in life where you just let it all go but then you need you need a way to come back and so what I find is is there will be weeks where I'm doing my so-called weekly review like every day because things are changing so fast and I'm just doing a bunch of small things and then other times where I don't do my weekly review for two weeks because I'm in a crater mode so I sort of see it more as a variable thing than like a fix thing I really I really do appreciate that like it's nice to hear that because I think a lot of productivity tips that advice can feel very rigid and feel like this is the only way to get this done and I feel like as much as you know you're quite structured and you know you're very into productivity you you still you're creative in there's a lot of room for moving things around and adaptation and I think that's really important for people to know that it's not a fixed process so I just again think that's very permission giving that like if you if you miss a weekly review it doesn't have to all go to because you're like oh no I broke this system and it you know I skipped my habit whatever you just get back on board and you pick things back up again and adapt I think that's awesome totally yeah yes if there's creativity in that too and I think what you said is so important it's like organization really lays the foundation for creativity you can only really be spontaneous in your life if you have a life that has a certain amount of predictability in it and I often see people sort of treating those things as counter to each other when in fact that aliyyil complimentary and if you look at you know I grew up with that with a a working artist as a as a father and he was highly organized in the ways that mattered you know in in the in at the the certain leverage points that determined whether he was going to move forward with his artwork which were paintings he would be highly efficient highly structured but then where it didn't matter he would just let it all go and you you know you only have the energy to focus on those levers points if certain other parts are just sort of freeform so I think there's there's something in that as more and more of our work it gets to be like art like an increasing percentage of our work is creative its spontaneous which ironically means that the increasingly smaller percentage that is predictable needs to be super predictable and organized I really like that yep I'm fully and fully on board with that it's like yeah structure enables creativity but again just enough the just-in-time but just enough not overdoing it giving yourself room to ebb and flow with your schedule I just I love it a few other questions came and related to that someone said related to creativity versus maintenance how much time do you allow yourself no input so you have time to mow and reflect I think you kind of went over that with like you've got your you know Monday Wednesday Friday schedule which i think is awesome I think we might have covered most of those another question that popped in was can you share the main 10 steps of your weekly checklist how do you go how do you manage to go from complete this organization to organization yeah it's a good question so it's very simple it's this little guy right here and you know this started off much longer and I noticed this with people they'll have things like review all next actions and I'm like oh my god that would take hours or they have you know a weekly review review all life goals for following for next four decades you know and I find what's what's better is to just like really my guideline for this is put on to this list what you're already gonna do anyway you know are you going to you know review your budget anyway this week then just put it on the list are you going to look at your downloads folder put it on the list like do what you're gonna do anyway and just put it into a checklist so it actually becomes streamlined and I find that that I can do this like I said in about one to two hours and the real key is to only sort things not do things right like if you start clearing your email inbox and start responding to emails you start taking oh god forbid taking action on those emails you're lost it's immediately all you have to be doing an email is just deciding what needs to be done and putting that in your task manager um and things one of the things I like most about things is it has this quick capture this is the window that comes up when you do in my case I have a set to control spacebar and then if I'm looking at Annie do control options spacebar then it automatically gets the link to the email and puts it right there in the notes so then I would have here you know something like add David to speakers list that would be the task the link to the email here in case I need context I hit save and then it would show up right here that's that's really the key that the whole system is only capturing tasks like limiting yourself to only the manager decisions and not executing anything if you do that you can do this list easily in one to two hours yeah and I do this I do the same thing but I'll do it in my weekly agenda that has an embedded task view and I just put the check out the email INBOX put the tasks in there so again it doesn't it doesn't matter what tool you use but the point is having a system like this where it's like you're just sorting that email inbox you're not actually doing the work that's required within the email if that makes sense yeah you have to be able to trust that the place you're sending that to is going to be reviewed on a regular basis you know for most people the only the only place that they're confident that's going to happen is their email inbox and therefore the email inbox and I have a one of them I think actually maybe my most popular post of all time is called one touch to inbox zero you can search for that on Google or my blog and it's basically just the email inbox has taken on all the jobs it's a content and knowledge management system it is a reminder system it's a calendar system it's a to-do list is a contact manager and it was not designed that were meant to do a dozen different jobs and so much of what productivity is the past you know twenty years of productivity is just getting all those jobs and like what's the word D disciplining them yeah you're complaining or decomposing them into things that are actually designed for those purposes of course then you need a method or a checklist at least to go and check all those little places that you sent those emails to yeah Maria asked do you follow this checklist completely or do you pick up and choose what to do totally yeah you can kind of tell the theme here I'm always picking and choosing and what tends to happen is um I know and I could even probably bold certain of these I know some of these are essential and some are just nice to have right like clearing my desktop in my downloads folder that's that's just you know making my digital workspace nice it's not going to you know if it's Monday and I know I have something really urgent to get to I can just skip those same thing with Evernote inbox same thing with budget review in fact really if I may truly pressed for time I can sort of compress this checklist down into just clearing my email inbox checking my calendar filing my the open loops I've collected in my task manager and deciding what I'm gonna do today really you know be out what does the output of this is not just a feeling of calm it's that today list you know at the ability to just generate in a short amount of time what matters now not reacting in the moment but from a bird's eye view considering every single priority in your life and then deciding on just five or ten things is magic because so often with with modern knowledge work whatever you're working on there's this voice in your head that you should be doing something else so true yeah right it's nice oh and and that voice is constantly going and it's taking up resources it's going oh maybe you should be doing that oh maybe this would be easier maybe this would be more valuable maybe more impactful mental Rand is spinning music it really is it's like this nagging self-doubt that never allows you to fully give yourself to one task which is a prerequisite for creativity you know creativity that voice is really the inner critic it's the inner critic in your prefrontal cortex that's nagging and pointing and being perfectionistic you can't truly access the full reserves of your creativity when that inner critic is running the show I mean this goes back to like neuroscience studies at some point in flow the inner critic has to shut off and this is comes back to what we were saying structure enables creativity the purpose of structure is to give your inner critic that the self confidence that it can just rest yeah it can lay back can let you do your thing because you've given it the assurances that everything has been looked at someone asked you say that you should not bond on the email while doing your weekly review but the getting things done says do everything directly if it only takes a few minutes so as you're processing that email if it is a two minute task will you just do it or do you say like nope do you leave those in the Inbox how do you how do you kind of deal with those like a quick two second two minute tasks yeah there's definitely something there I think that threshold partly depends like for example if I come back from vacation I've been off the grid for a week if I were to follow the two-minute rule it would take me like three days cancer my email right so so it's it's it's partly the volume of email that you have like if you have that many you need to lower that threshold and just just capture that faster but then other times like if I know I don't really have anything going on today then I'll just oh I will respond to each email just as I encounter it because I know I don't have to get quickly to that end point of having my today list so I guess the the I guess one of my operating principles that's coming out of this is like I don't treat virtually anything is hard and fast maybe this comes back to how I like seeing everything as creativity it's like I'm always trying to sense okay here's the rule here's the principle behind the rule how does that principle apply in this situation and almost always it can be when we break it yeah it can be bent it can be broken it can be split in half it can be abstracted to a meta-level or down a level there's I mean I really love I love this stuff but if you don't just make a list and follow it yeah a question that came in too was like what do you mean was step seven of your weekly review list where it says prioritized and file/new open loops I mean that's pretty tied in with the getting things done methodology like those things that haven't been sorted right those like just whether it's tasks or things just email like all the things that's kind of creating that mental clutter that needs a decision to be made right whether it's this is a thing to do and I need to schedule it this is a thing I need to archive this is whatever it's that those loose ends that haven't been exactly you you you task manager' inbox if you follow this approach starts collecting so many things I probably have 30 to 50 new open loops that I've captured every time that I clear the inbox and that's daunting you know 3250 things but each one just needs one decision and you're still like yours you're still not acting on them you know you felt you saw an email you capture the task it went to your inbox task manager you see it again you're sort of clarifying what it means exactly is still not acting on it in a funny way it can feel like you're you're sort of continuously postponing things than you are but it's it's effective because you're postponing them to the exact moment when it's most appropriate to do that thing we're just almost never now yeah otherwise it would feel like everything needs to be done right just yeah not possible exactly yeah much I put clarify that that's what I'm doing with those 30 to 50 things I'm just because you know with capture the key thing is no thinking required like like sometimes I'll have open loops I said like you know I had one today book Seattle that was the only thing I was like what was that because I was on a street corner and probably yes typing it or even on my watch where you know I need to just say something briefly to capture and I was like oh okay oh okay I'm going to Seattle next month okay book oh that probably means the flight hotel flight in hotel and so I just booked Seattle with book hotel and flight in Seattle you didn't have a snippet for that what are your consistent good I could I could do that yeah another question that came in was do you follow these organizational steps or these tools on your creative Tuesdays or Thursdays or are they reserved for your admin days um I've been Dave oh my gosh I don't even look at email I can't if I were to look at email on a Tuesday or Thursday all hope would be its just get sucked into it yeah I don't look at anything on Tuesdays and Thursdays usually I begin the day I have one note or card in my column that's like a draft or an outline so it's had some work done but it's it kind of needs that that you know that last jump to completion is the hardest like there's a--there's the creative energy and occurred at creative momentum that like has to be like deeply embodied that you have to like at least I have to really generate over a period of hours to get it over the hump to completion and so I usually have it in mind before the day begins in fact probably the previous day this is the the other value of having designated days is like on Sunday I'm already thinking about what I'm gonna do on Tuesday right and so my evening reading on Sunday night might be related to that post I might be you know summarizing and highlighting one of the sources so that on Tuesday I can just quickly get only the key points from that source it's like there's momentum building over days so I get up in the morning Tuesday I'm excited I know what I'm gonna be doing it's like all my neurons are primed you know there's a priming that happens where you actually have to load up all the knowledge and information in order to write that thing especially because what I'm often writing is really in-depth long-form pieces I can't just load all that stuff up in a minute and that way I can take most of the day to write that thing send it out in the evening and I know that that all sounds like it takes a huge amount of effort it does but those pieces are my business I mean my entire business is just built out of these Lego blocks that is blog post so that's that's all it is I'm my business is creating blog posts primarily and then secondary is assembling them into products and services hmm so obviously that's been like your major you know lead generation like you said that OneTouch email management blog article is probably like a piece of evergreen content that continues to pay dividends today right so it's and like how many times have I shared the the Pera method you know of organization it's like when you've created these pillar pieces of content like that stuff will be selling your course for you long into the future right so yes I'm curious how much of your your Tuesdays Thursdays which is your creative in creation time are you doing any client work on those days how much is your time to play about between like self-directed cool you know your own products and services versus other people's products and services yeah definitely focus focus days definitely include client work especially if I have to create something for them although sometimes they it's surprising how much they overlap and the overlap between these different kinds of work is kind of one of my big things if you search for the rise of the full stack freelancer the full stack freelancer is what I am is sort of the model that I advocate and it's like you can do consulting coaching you know selling selling ebooks selling workshops selling online courses all these things are actually synergistic and one way they're synergistic is that they all rely on content so often you know with that Kanban board you might think like he is so unfocused to have 50 things they're working on like why not have no is Thiago frozen Korea it's frozen on my side can you guys still hear me I can't hear Thiago anymore getting here Diego oh I came here Thiago oh okay you're frozen for a little while they're sad oh and now you're muted oh well I know that we're already already cut at 10 minutes over I don't know if if Tiago will come back but oh no I'll assume that I'll assume that his internet connection is is gone sad so I know we kind of went off track a little bit from the blogging but I just think Tiago has so many amazing insights in terms of kind of how to organize your space that I think are so so valuable when you're just getting up and running with notion I know we had a lot of questions about kind of how to do some of the things in ocean how to set up those Kanban boards how do you actually do that notion does have a lot of amazing starter templates that you can start from if you're really really just getting started but otherwise I would say definitely like check out my youtube videos check out click on notions name at the top of the window here and you can check out some of our past office hours we do have that building from scratch one that if you're if you're totally brand new that one will give you a little bit of a sense of kind of how two databases work how two pages work and hopefully that will give you some place to start so any other questions put them in here we'll definitely keep them in mind for a future office hours and I'll do my best to answer those I know some of these are really technical and they're not necessarily something that we're going to have time to answer in terms of a how-to I know we're kind of we've already completed our hours so thank you so much everybody for showing up for these office hours we do these every week again sometimes we do how-to sometimes we interview people next week is project and task management which is probably the thing we get the most questions about how do you actually manage a project manage your tasks across working with different a number of different clients so if you're a consultant and you're looking for how to actually do this with clients nealy join us next week with Jason Resnick super excited about that one thank you everyone for showing up really appreciate it for spending your Friday morning or evening depending on where you're at so we will see you next week thank you Thiago sorry for the unceremonious ending but we will see you next week thanks guys [Music]

Channel: Notion

Views: 24,826

Rating: 4.9098592 out of 5

Keywords: blogging, second brain, tiago forte, para method, notion

Id: sDNooHDj2Dk

Length: 74min 4sec (4444 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019