Hi, everyone. Welcome back. We're continuing our series, looking at the
individual components to a Notion based, comprehensive life operating system that helps you determine
what you need to do each day and links it to your, your ambitions and your aspirations
and your goals. And then links every aspect of the pipelines
and processes you need to execute to get from here to there. So this is a deep dive today into the task
database, which is a really essential component to the system. And it's a component that don't typically
look at directly I tend to look at what's in this database by looking at the action
zone dashboard, but the action zone dashboard is heavily dependent on the task database. So we're going to today look at the task database
itself, how its structured and set up and then either later this week or early next
week, we will look at the action zone dashboard and how I bring this to life and interact
with it on a day to day basis. Last week. I did a video on that. The whole system from a bird's eye view. So if you're new to this series, you might
want to take a look at that one. It puts everything in context that we're now
going through piece by piece. Sometimes you hear criticisms of how notion
is not good a task management, in that specialized to do apps like to do list, or things are
just a lot better than notion. I totally disagree. And I think that may be a factor of people
not having their notion systems, properly optimized and set up to do things efficiently
and effectively. I used to do this extensively before I moved
into notion. And I love to do it. I think it's a very well designed app, but
it's just limited. The most obvious example is dependent tasks. You can't put those into to do as you can
a notion, but much more than that notion lets you connect not only other active workspaces,
and active things that are being done, basically bringing Google Docs and shared collaboration
platforms into the same platform. As your To do task management app, but beyond
that, and most importantly, it is the best application and platform I've ever seen for
connecting your high level aspirations and defining pillars to your goal outcomes in
the projects that are moving you toward that, and then those further down to the line, to
your day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute tasks. nothing I've ever seen, will connect all these
things in a way where you feel like they're all visible together, you're connected to
all of them, you are watching all of them at the same time. In the same way. When I enter a task, my task database, I look
upward at how it connects to my projects, and how they move me toward building reinforcing
and solidifying the pillars that I've defined in my life. And then from the reverse aspect. When you're looking at the top down, you can
see all the tasks that are aligned for each goal for each pillar. For each project, and you just know, there's
nothing being left on attended to, if I will get to this when I get to the pillars, the
pipeline pyramid, but when I see a goal, if I don't have an action item, or several connected
to it, I know it's stalled, it's orphan, it's not moving forward. No other platform I've ever seen makes that
so visible provides that kind of transparency. Now, the other criticism is that notion slow,
it's slow to enter things quickly, and it's a little slow, but what you save on the back
end is so much more than the few seconds you spend up front, waiting for it to open an
extra second or two. And quick capture is not hard a notion if
you have your task database, and your dashboard for your daily actions set up properly so
you can enter them quickly. You need to have a system for just a quick
get it out of the way item in what is an entry for a significant step towards achieving goals. outcomes and pillars. And we'll get into all those higher level
elements later. But in this video, we're going to talk about
how to set up the test database, so that you can implement such that it's connected with
everything else. And you can see up the chain, and you can
see down the chain, or you can look in the middle in both directions. That's what makes notion so powerful. And I would argue that it is the best task
management platform available anywhere, unless you are in a larger organization that needs
a more sophisticated project management app. And even their notion can take you a long
way. So let's dive into how I do it. So here we see the task database itself. Right now it's open to a calendar view. I'm going to briefly give an introduction
with the calendar overview. Then we'll get into the database and really
get our hands dirty and see how it works. So here you see the calendar view of the task
database. This is a great view to see what's happening
in your world. So you can see it's organized by priorities
and organized by date. First and foremost, it's organized by due
date and as amended And before to this, this is the video I'm working on right now, notice
I have a do date. I also have a D ue due date. But when I talk about due date, I'm always
talking about the do date, the date that I plan to do the item. And I also call this my action items database,
I don't call this task database. So essentially, it is what is commonly referred
to as a task database. But I call it an action item database. Because I want to think of these as things
I'm going to take action on. These are a series of items you need to get
mentally psyched up for and approach them with the right mindset. And thinking of them as actions, things I'm
going to dive into and take action on. The vocabulary that you put on your system
matters a lot. And so I tend to use very action oriented
words, in this case, quite literally, the word action, because these are the specific
actions I need to take to get where I want to go. So call it what you want, but I like to call
it action items. And when I refer to the action item database,
I'm referring to my test database. But diving in to take a look at one item,
you'll see I have a do date. I also have a due date. But when I talk about a due date, I'm talking
about the do date. And that's the date that I'm going to do the
item. We're going to talk more about this once I
open up the table. But I just want you to know whenever I refer
to a due date, I'm talking about the date I plan to do the item. So I call it a do date. Occasionally, I'll have a D date if there's
you know, consequences not getting something done if there's a hard fixed deadline, external
to me in my system, but most items don't have a D date. Every item in my system has a do date. More on that soon. So you can see how it lays out nice and organized. This is the ultimate objective that we're
we're working toward as we soon get into the table and look at the structure. It's very organized day by day. So I've got this is organized in the calendar
by do due date, if I'm on top of the do date, the D day to take care of themselves. So I've got scheduled Items, notice that there
are anything with a time has this purple color and a schedule. And you do that by going into the due date
you turn on include time, and then it will have a time. In my system, I always assign it priority. If there's a scheduled time I give it a scheduled
designation. The reason for that is then all the scheduled
items are next to each other in the lineup. The rest of them are sorted by various priority
levels. This item right here happens to be the video
that I'm recording at the moment. So just to get a sense of the priority levels
have immediate and quick these are just quick things to get done in the beginning of the
day. A quick item is something that will take four
minutes or less five at the most and you can just knock it out get the list shorter streamline
the list of items ahead of you. So if I can knock something out quickly, I
just want to cued up at the top their immediate means I must do this immediately. This is the first thing I have to do that
day and I don't want to miss it. So make it bright yellow, and the very top
item, then scheduled all queued up scheduled items, I like to have those near the top. So I know what's coming ahead and I don't
miss something, then we get into the most important part, which is the first, second,
third, fourth, fifth priority, I try to have just two or three priority items a day, these
are the most important things. If I get these items done during the day,
then I had a good day. And you'll see how I track and create incentives
for accomplishing that. But ideally, I'll have one, two or three priority
items. And I'll try to designate each with just one
designation. So there'll be one first one second, one third. The only exception, as you'll see here, is
today, I've got three first priorities. That's because they're the same thing. They're just this video, the next video and
the one after, and I'm batching them, I'll assign the same priority rating, if I'm doing
them together as a batch, and then second and third toward the end of the priority. rankings is Aaron's so if I actually need
to run out and pick something up or drop something off, then I'll put an errand in there. If it's an appointment, it usually has a scheduled
time and that'll be a scheduled item if I'm meeting somebody, but if it's just an errand,
and it can be done at any time during the day, I'll just mark it as an errand. And if it's just a reminder, try to remember
this try to fit this in. Don't forget this, but there isn't an urgency
as to when or how it gets done. I'll just tag it at the bottom with a reminder
tag. And with those sorting things, first, having
assigned the due date, the do date, and second assigning the Priority Ranking. Everything is laid out organized day by day. It's very structured, I look at this day and
it's clean. Now you have to be very careful not to have
too many pile up in one day. And that's the importance of assigning a do
date. So if it's piling up, then you want to throw
it out to future dates. It's really important to assign these on a
date where it's plausible. Now, if they start piling up, then what that
action item is, is a to schedule item. So if you have too many that are could possibly
be done in the day, you do have to take action on every item scheduled for today. But what that action could be is rescheduling
it. That's a legitimate action to take on an item. Now the way I approach this is the night before
every day, I will lay out the following day's schedule. I will assign the priorities for the following
day, anything that's too much, that's not seriously viable to get done that day, I will
push it to another day. Now when I get to that other day, it could
turn out I have too many things that day, the night before, I'll determine what is most
important to get done that following day in anything that doesn't make that cut is reassigned. But again, I'm acting on it by reassigning
it to a specific date down the road. I will also in many cases, layout blocks on
the calendar. That's not something I do in notion I do that
in Google Calendar at some point I'll probably do a video on working between Google Calendar
and notion. But suffice it to say this can work on its
own, even without the Google Calendar tandem operation. And just by laying in your scheduled items. And working out your priorities around it,
just have to make sure you leave large blocks of time available during the day to execute
on your first, second, third priorities, and try to squeeze any reminders in as possible. Okay, so that's the overview. And this, to me gives an incredible view of
what I have going on and what I need to do. Even in the upcoming week or two. I much prefer this to the Kanban board layout. The problem to me of these Kanban board daily
action lists that I see all the time is first of all, they don't play very well on mobile
device. This works pretty well on the mobile device,
though I have a better view for mobile in my actions zone dashboard. But in the mobile device, this will just show
dots, but you click on it and it will show the list and you can go forward Back to the
list on any day. So this is actually quite functional, I think
more so than a Kanban board. The other problem I have with the Kanban boards
for your daily or weekly actions is that there's a lot of manual manipulation required to maintain
that. And I try to minimize the manual input and
have as much automated as possible. The best way to automate in notion is to have
due dates, dates, where things are assigned. And just as the day rolls, as you roll forward
and the calendar, they slide into the into tomorrow and then into today, there's an automation
built into the calendar functionality here, just by the very nature of time rolling forward. So if I assign assign these things for Friday,
when it's Friday, they're going to be in my today list. On this calendar view, it'll be the red dot
day, but in my dashboard, they'll roll into the view or have just up today and I won't
have to change anything or move anything around to line today up. I find that these konban boy style, daily
action or weekly action setups just require a lot of manual manipulation. And I try to avoid that I try to keep this
as simple and streamlined as possible. Okay, so let's dive into the table to get
a cleaner look of what's happening. The other aspect of my philosophy on the task
database or in my case, the action item database, is that this is not an end of itself. This is a means to an end. So I'm not trying to make this the most slick
and sophisticated design imaginable. And notion there are a lot of clever design
elements that people put into their notion tasks databases. But to me, the elegance comes from how this
database fits into the overall system, which goes back to my systems thinking introduction
at the beginning of the series, I'm less concerned about how slick or sophisticated the task
databases and more concerned with how elegantly it interacts with in streamlines and facilitates
the flow of the overall system. So I want to put out Little complexity into
this system is possible. And for those really new to notion, just super
quickly at the top here, you can set up different views. I'm not going to do an introduction to views
right now, but just know, you can create various type of views here and name them. And in this case, I'm using a table view and
a calendar view. So this is the calendar view, the table view
is what I used to build it. And to really get to work under the hood and
design it the way I want or to check if something seems out of whack, I can check your most
easily. Okay, so we're now in the table section. Let's go through each of the properties and
the fields in this and I'll give you a sense of how this whole thing works. Again, now this table here is filtered by
everything that is not done, and everything that is assigned to me as the owner. So it's my personal action item database. When you're working with team members, their
items assigned to other team members, and they'll do a filtered view on their own items. Or you can do everything If you're just trying
to do an admin over the entire system, I've also have a checkbox for private or not private. I have this filter to not show anything that's
private. It's a checkbox over here on the right. Just because doing this public demonstration,
there's an immense amount of cleanup, to be able to show your personal life operating
system with every single task on a public broadcast, like on YouTube here. So I have a checkbox to hide some things. I've also done a ton of cleanup to disguise
or abbreviate client names, and names of team members and people who are involved just so
I'm not doxxing them or outing them in some way, without their awareness or permission. So it's a lot of cleanup to be able to present
something like this, but I think it's certainly worth it. And I have a lot of sympathy for all those
people I've seen do videos like this, I didn't realize what was involved in in preparing
your own personal system. But with that noted, I am filtering on those
items. I'm sorting by due date descending again do
date, the date that I'm going to take action on these items in its distance. Just so it's the most future forward date
first rolling backwards. So these first ones are pretty far out. And these are typically just reminders I've
put out here for in one case, June 2024, we're gonna have to renew something for my business. But rent is on a reoccurring basis going out
on the 17th every month. And you can see it's out here to November,
October, September, August. These are just things I want reminders in
the system to pop up as I eventually get to those dates and inevitably, won't just remember
when I entered them six months ago. So rolling down here to some more current
items, we can see it more fully fleshed out and just quick view, every single thing in
here has a do due date, every single thing except items, tasks that are dependent, dependent
tasks, which I'm not going to go into in this video. The video following this one will be specifically
on how to do dependent tasks, which are tasks that kick into play. Only once another item, another task item
has been completed, a dependent task is the task that is dependent upon another task. So the dependent task becomes live and active
only after the task it's dependent upon is completed. So dependent tasks will not have a due date
to date, but the task is dependent upon does have a due date. And as soon as the master task is completed
and checked off as done, then the dependent task gets a due date, a date in which it's
assigned to be done. So every task is either a dependent task or
has a do date that's really fundamental for my system. And I see a lot of systems that have complex
formulas to calculate the priority or the ranking of the of that task in the overall
system. And that can be really cool and shows off
some of the advanced formula capabilities of notion. But I also find that level of complexity is
unnecessary because what You're dealing with, there's just a long to do list of items, and
you're trying to get some kind of logic applied to sort them. And when you have a huge list of to do items,
you're struggling to wrap your mind around all of it, you can't put all of them in your
mind at the same time. So you've got these formulas trying to break
it down into smaller decisions on what's urgent and what's quick and doable, and, and all
these factors that determine his priority level. But if you're only ranking the priority level
of a handful of items on a given due date, then it's much easier. It's very easy to rank one, two, and three,
or even one through five out of five items or for three items on a given day. But it's hard to rank 30 items or more on
a giant list of to do items, which is why I never look at a giant list of to do items. I only rank the items on any given day, and
I make sure those are a small manageable quantity. So first and foremost, my ranking priority
starts with a due date. By breaking things down to days, you know
if if it's urgent, it's going to be today or tomorrow. But if it's not, I'll bump it out to Friday
or bump it out to Tuesday next week, when I'm pushing it out in the distance, and it's
not urgent. It's somewhat arbitrary, but I just give it
a date. And I'm guaranteed to come upon it by that
date, and then either rank it for doing that day or reassigning further due date down the
line. So it's very easy to do just a simple first,
second, third priority. When you only have a handful of items you're
looking at, you know, the quick items, they don't even take time to rank, they're just
two three minute items they just need to remember to do so I don't need that complexity of these
formulas to calculate the Priority Ranking because I'm managing the quantity on any given
day that I need to look at and it makes it very simple. That also reduces complexity of the overall
database. I also want to highlight while we're looking
at the master table here, everything is by due date, and then secondarily. So the sword here is first by due date, and
then By priority, but in this view, it's kind of hard to see because the due dates all run
together. That's why the calendar view is more helpful
when you're really looking at what needs to get done day by day. But this is helpful when you want to just
check the overall structure or build the overall structure of the database. So notice virtually all of the items have
a pillar assigned, we're going to do a whole video on pillars, but just very simply, as
I said in the overview video of the system, that pillars are the structures that hold
your world up. And they're the aspirations you're driving
towards in the things that just need to get done day to day administrative tasks, chores,
priorities you've set for your life that need to get done for your life to be working smoothly. So I have a database of pillars that we'll
do a video on separately, and every single task item with a few exceptions, such as weekly
reviews, I assign a pillar, so I know that this task is actually driving towards something
that matters in my life, something that I have designated as a pillar in my life. Now if I'm just adding a quick task is install
water filter, it's going to take three minutes, I have assigned a pillar, but it wouldn't
need to like I don't always assign it for just quick items. For any item that's going to take some meaningful
amount of time, I will always assign a pillar. So I know that it's driving towards something
that matters in my life. If I can't find a pillar in my existing pillar
database to assign that to, then I need to really think is this really a task I should
be spending time on? Probably not. Or maybe there's a pillar in my life that
I haven't clearly defined, in which case I need to add that pillar. The same time for each item I asked, Is there
a goal outcome? In a project that this is driving towards
completion on, I have a separate database for goal outcomes and a separate database
for projects. We're going to do future videos on all of
that. But just suffice it to say, looking at this
from the task level, we're looking up at the bigger items in my world, and I'm asking for
any task that's going to take a meaningful amount of time. I need to know that this task relevant for
the things that I have set as priorities and major objectives in my life, if I'm adding
a lot of tasks that are not connected, that there isn't anything to link to, at the higher
level in my goal and aspiration structure, then I need to really think, is this a task
I should be spending time on? And the answer is probably not unless I fail
to define an important objective in my life. So I measure projects in what tasks are connected
to them. I measure pillars. I measure goal outcome. So the projects are directly connected to
the goal outcomes. We'll do a video on all that. But whenever I set up a new task, so if we
open this, this is editing an episode of my podcast, you go through these first and foremost,
I set the due date, the day I plan to do this item. Then when I come to the night before and I
look at what's scheduled for tomorrow with due dates. I'll either rank it as a in priority order
for that day, or I'll reassign Further down the road. So the action I'm taking on it is either doing
it that day, or reassigning it to a date further down following and next in line. These items are how I set up dependent tasks,
which is what the next video is going to be about. So I'm going to skip that for now. place for notes. clients, if this is for a client, this one's
not, but if it were, I would just choose one of these and just add it there. And then it would be assigned to that client
I can click through to that client's whole workspace. And when I'm in that client's workspace, I'll
see what tasks are linked to that client. The D ue due date is the date if there is
a firm hard deadline by which it has to be completed by not usually the case I don't
have to put anything here unless there is but I always have to do date. Unless it's a dependent task projects I have
to look upward into my aspirations the projects I want to complete. Is this helping me get closer to completing
a project if so I link it to that specific project. You have you can get a list of projects to
choose from here pillars, is this helping me deliver on what my pillars one of my pillars
is branding and audience development. So my podcast is about achieving and delivering
in helping me move closer towards achieving on that pillar goal outcomes are very tangible,
measurable outcomes that I hope to achieve. And I track those, and this is working towards
some of those measurable outcomes. I've put blanks here just because I don't
want to broadcast my internal metrics. But give yourself you know, we'll talk about
this when we get to the pillar to pyramid pipeline. But it's important to give yourself measurable
objectives that you're moving towards. So you can see the degree to which you're
achieving or not achieving on that gradient. If there's an item in the production calendar
in the recall the content production pipeline. I will link directly to that and then I click
on this, I'll go to the development of this podcast episode in the content calendar, and
that's where the detail is the script There might be any links I've collected or research
I've collected for it, interview questions, it'll all be in this workspace for that item
in the content calendar on the production pipeline. And then when it's done, I hit done and then
it disappears from this table because it's filtered not to show completed items. If I get to the point where I'm waiting on
someone else, I can't move forward on it until someone else does, I'll check waiting, and
then it'll be viewable in the waiting view on my daily actions own dashboard owners assigned
to me could be assigned to any team members. So again, across the top, we have all these
items that are higher level aspirations or priority they've established for myself, so
it's a very explicit what each task at least the ones of any size or substance, it takes
some time to do, how each one of those tasks is specifically moving me towards these aspirations,
priorities and objectives. You know, linking to things like the production
pipeline items or workspaces that put in front of me a direct line link to the workspace
in which I'm developing, building and implementing that task item. Now you'll see down here are two items that
are checked off as waiting. So those are items I'm stuck on in terms of
my executing, waiting for someone else to do their part before I come back to them. And they're checked off here so that I can
have a view in my daily action zone dashboard. That lets me know that those are stalled until
someone else does their part on it. If you're new to notion, just know, you can
click on the properties in turn the visibility of any of these fields and properties on and
off and you can the same way you can sort them by dragging them left and right here,
the usual sort that way, you can also sort them and probably the better way to do it
is to go in here and do it and it moves them in the overall database. So that's the structure again, it's not super
fancy, other than it relies heavily on relational links to other databases. If that aspect is confusing and you'd like
a video introducing relational links to other The databases just let me know in the comments
below. But other than that, it's really simple. And I think part of its power is that it's
simple. The power of this is not in the sophistication
of the table design. It's in how I integrate it into the whole
system, and how I make my interaction points with it through dashboards. fast and efficient. So basically, my to do list is what's coming
up today, which I've prioritized the night before. The rest of these are actually to do lists. The rest of these are to schedule lists the
night before each day, I will schedule them for that day, or reschedule them to another
day. So the to do list is short, it's five or six
items. You know, in a crazy day, it's 10 items, but
all I'll push some of those out to another to schedule list any day other than the one
day I'm scheduling is not a to do list. It's a to schedule list. Okay, so I think that's good for looking at
the task database. If you have any questions. leave them in the comments below happy to
elaborate or clarify then in the next video, which will come out in a day or two, I'm going
to look at how to set up dependent tasks. Then following that, I'll do a video on how
to do your daily tracking. Then after that, I'll do a video that puts
the action item database and the daily tracking together into the daily action zone dashboard,
which is really the place where I run my day, minute to minute hour to hour and get stuff
done. That is the key to my knocking things off
my list moving forward toward my goals and pillars. If this is of interest, be sure to hit the
subscribe button and the bell icon to get updates on future videos. The thoughts or questions below and hit like
if you found this valuable. I also read a newsletter called mind and machine
on increasing human capability. I give away several of my best notion templates
to anyone who subscribes to the newsletter. You can of course unsubscribe at any time
but I hope you'll give it a chance. I work hard to pack it with a lot of valuable
insight. The newsletter link is also below in the show
notes. Thanks for watching. Lots more to come.
