Organise your ideas, projects, goals and knowledge with Notion

1. Introduction: Hey friends and welcome to this series. Whether you want to start a new habits such as meditation or exercising, or maybe a bigger project like starting your own company. You might have thought about it over and over again. You might have even talked about it with a friend, but have you done anything concrete about it? In this series, I will introduce you to a system that has helped grow in a personal and professional level by organizing my ideas, projects, and goals. But first, I will give you an overview of the system and explain to you how it has helped me. In the next videos, we're gonna get deeper into every single part of it. Now, let's dive into it. The first question you might ask yourself is, why do I need such a system? We all have hundreds of projects, ideas, or goals, but our brain cannot remember all of them. And before implemented the system, it was pretty hard for me to remember all of them. For example, I could be in the shower and find the next startup idea. Or I could be talking with a friend about a specific topic like for example, meditation and want to give it a try. If all of these ideas are not put into a system, we as humans tend to forget about them or do nothing about them. So I hope I've made it clear that without a system, it's pretty easy to forget about your project ideas or goals. The second problem is consistency and doing the work. For example, if my dream is to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, it is not enough to simply know about it, I need to prepare and do all the actions that would lead me to be able to do it. I need to find hikes that are close to my home to start with, I need to track my progress and fitness level, I need to buy equipment, I need to prepare my trip, etc, etc Well, this looks like a simple to-do list having 20 different dreams or goals. We make that to-do list really hard to organize and prioritize. Having a system in place will help you to know what's the next action to do and will avoid and reduce all the time that you spend wandering around. For example, planning a Sunday hike one day before, we'll make it way more likely to happen that if you wake up on a Sunday morning and think about, "okay, what am I gonna do today?" In the book, Atomic Habits, James Clear says that you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your system. And what he means by that is that it doesn't matter how motivated you are. It's more about how you're going to get there. For example, you can get really motivated for doing a half marathon. But if you don't put all the preparation before, you won't actually be able to do the half marathon. Even if you have amazing motivation, you won't be able because you won't be ready. And having a system in place helps you to prepare all different steps that you need to do in order to achieve your goal. Creating and finding this system took me over a year. And the main reason was that I had to make it complete, but at the same time, not too complicated. Now, Let's have an overview of the system. The system is divided into two parts. The first part is the Task Manager, which is an improved version of a to-do list. The idea here is to list all the different goals, projects, and ideas you have as a list of projects. Then you divide this huge milestones into smaller tasks that you can do in a short amount of time. As you complete these small tasks, one by one, you will get closer to complete this project. The second part is a knowledge management system. The idea here is to gather all the different information you've got. All the nodes from online courses, videos you watch, books you read etc, into one single place order by topics or more precisely, project. This way you will retain and have better access to all the information you digest on a daily basis. I'm 100% sure that all the goals that you have are achievable if you spend time and energy into doing the right things, and avoid losing your time and energy doing unnecessary things. In this series, I'm going to share this system with you. Hopefully, with it, you will know exactly where you want to go, what actions to do, what habits to develop and reach your full potential. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video. 2. Overview of the system: Hey friends and welcome to this course where you will learn how to build an efficient system to help you grow in your personal and professional life. You will also learn to manage the knowledge you acquire on a daily basis, A tidy and organized system assist you in your daily life. It will help you stay organized and focused on doing. You will know exactly what you're supposed to be doing and make sure that these align with your goals. Before diving directly into the system. Let's have an overview of these different parts. The system is divided into two parts. The Task Manager is the part that will manage the doing part. Your project ideas or goals. The tasks for these projects, quarterly, weekly, and daily planning. The knowledge management system will manage the knowledge part. It will contain tags into how to organize and group everything together. It also contains notes, books, courses, and trainings, medias, which is articles, videos, and podcasts. In the next video we will talk about how to sign up to Notion and import the template. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video. 3. Import: In this video, we'll talk about how to sign up and import the template. The whole system is using a tool called Notion. Notion is a powerful tool that helps you organize your notes in a simple and intuitive way. The first step if you haven't done it yet, is to sign up to Notion. To sign up on Notion, you need to go to a notion dot o and click on the top right button, sign up. And follow is the sign-up process. So this is the page that you're gonna see after you successfully sign up into Notion. And what you should do is you should click on the left here to add a page. And then here you're going to the link of the template and click on link to page. And then after this is done, you have to click on the left block here where you can hold the block which is the page, and drag it into the left part to have it as the root of your notion. And now if you click on the Dashboard here, you have the dashboard at the root of your project on ocean and you can have access to it easily. We're going to get deeper into every single part of the system in the next videos. For the next video, I want you to sign up to Notion and import the template. This will be necessary for the rest of the course. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video. 4. Projects: Let's define more specifically what I consider as a project. So a project is an idea, a project or goal that you have. And it can be something like starting a meditation habit, investing in the stock market, organizing a trip. Also, it does not need to be well-defined and precise, especially at the beginning. Different statuses for your project. These statuses are important because they help you to know what projects you can tackle. And also they will help you to go from a raw Project, a raw idea, something that is not really concrete, into something finished. We will elaborate on them later, but as an overview, there is idea here you write something that just came out of your mind without thinking too much about it, refining here you will think more about your idea. You will think about why you want to achieve that, what exactly you want to achieve, and how you're going to achieve it. Next up, once your project is clearly defined, it's ready to start. In progress. You're already starting doing some task and then post stopped and done. Now let's dive into the first status, which is idea. As I was saying in the previous video, our brain is designed to find ideas, not to store them. That's why the first thing I want you to do is to think about five different ideas, projects, or goals that you have right now, and adding them into the system. To add a new project, you need to scroll down to the Design Center and click on "Projects". Once this is done, you click on "New" here on the small arrow and "New project". So lets say I want to start a meditation habit and also track my finances. I recommend you to always write down your ideas, project, or goal when they come into your mind. And the best way I find for that, because I don't always have the Notion app, for example, is to open the app on your phone for notes. So for example, your notes for iPhones or Google Keep for Android users. And even if you don't have any apps, you can use a block note, but you write down all of these ideas that you have as they come. And once per week when I'm doing my weekly review, you will get there later. I put all of these different things that I wrote, all of these different nodes and I add them into the system as projects or ideas. Now, let's transform this abstract ideas into more concrete projects. For that, we will have to go to the next step, which is refining. The best way I found to refine these projects is to ask myself several questions. The questions are listed in template to access them, go to the refining process and click on the Toggle. Let's see what questions we have there. We will take the example here of one of my goals that is "Start a meditation habit". The first question is, "what do I want to accomplish here?" This helps you to define more specifically what this is all about and add some more details. For example, I want to start meditate five minutes per day in the morning, is way more specific than "Start a meditation habit". The second question is: "How can I measure my progress?" This is about finding a way of staying motivated by seeing progress. I recommend you to set that depending on something you can control. For example, if your goal is to start a YouTube channel, it is better to have progress that is based on how many videos you publish per week, then the number of subscriber you have. The third question is "Is it possible and in my power to achieve?" This is more about commitment and clearly stipulates that this is something that is achievable and depends only on me. If it's not dependent on me that I need to re-enter the previous two questions. Next question is, "Is there a way to improve and fasten the time to get there? How will they achieve this project if I would have only one month, one week? Is there anyone I know that can help me?" This helps you to explore new alternatives are ways of achieving a similar goal. This brings more creativity and also helps you brainstorm ideas related to your project. Here, for example, I could go to a meditation retreat or contact a friend that has been doing a lot of meditation and ask him or her for advice. This could already be a new task or a new project. The next question is: "what will prevent me from achieving that? What are the other solutions?" Here you are searching all the different blockers that could prevent you from achieving your goal and finding solutions or alternatives to avoid being in that situation. For this specific goal, I could say having no internet connection, missing my alarm and be late or traveling. The solution here would be to download the meditation, to have it offline and do the meditation after work if I miss my alarm. Finally, the last question is, the most important one, which is, why do I want to achieve that? Here you will list at least five reasons why you want to achieve that project, idea or goal. This helps you to stay motivated by knowing the reasons behind why you are doing this specific project and also be sure that you are doing it for the right reason. There are other fields that we did not discuss today that are linked with the knowledge management system. We'll talk about them later. Now that you asked yourself all of these different questions, you can now change the title of your project to something more concrete. For the next video, I want you to refine the five different ideas project on goals that you had at the beginning of this video by asking yourself the questions in the template. 5. Tasks: Now that you define your project more precisely, what we want to do is to build a list of tasks to do in order to achieve your project. This list of tasks is a bit like a to-do list, but for every single project. But first, let's define what is a task. A task should be something that can be done in several hours. The smaller the tasks are, the better it is. So let's say your project is about starting a meditation habit. A good example of a task would be, for example, to install an app to meditate or research a good YouTube video to meditate or maybe buy a book about meditation or reading the first chapter of that book. You don't need to define all the different tasks in order to achieve your project. But you should at least have two tasks for every single project. This is necessary to not have projects that have no actionable item to do and get stuck into these projects. We will take care of that during the weekly and quarterly planning, we'll talk about these different steps in the next videos. A task has several attributes. The first attribute is status, and you have next up, the task is ready to start working on. Waiting means that the task cannot be done because it is dependent on another one, or because these dependent on an external factor. For example, if the task is to open an investment account and you're waiting to receive the documents. ,it will be waiting. The idea here to be able to keep track of all these tasks during your weekly review, we will talk about weekly reviews in further videos. Then you have impact, it is about the impact that the task has on your project. This helps you to work on the most important task for your project. For example, if your project is to go to the gym three times per week, buying good shoes is important but not as important as researching which gym to go, going there and pay for a membership. It will help you know what to finish and focus on. first. Then comes priority, which is only used during the weekly and daily planning. It is used to prioritize what tasks to work on during the week between different projects you have. The task also has a do date and a due date. The do date is the date when you plan to do the task and the due date, is the date when it has to be done. The main reason to use a due date is not to wait until the last moment to the task and be able to plan accordingly. We will talk more about that later in this series. There is also a quarter attribute which automatically labels the quarter of the project of the task. Now, let's add tasks to our projects. To add a task to a project, I can scroll down to projects here where I have the list of all the different projects I have, then click on New Project I'm interested in. So for example here develop a meditation habit, and then I can scroll down here. So I have the refining process I defined before and the tasks here, which is the current task and the done task. So let's say I want to create a new task which will be to buy the book "The Power of now". And when I click here on Open and here I can put the status. So next up because it's ready to tackle and set the impact which is Medium. All the other properties will be set later. Once you add it at least two tasks to a project, you can change the status of this project from "Refining" to "Next up". Your project is ready to tackle. In the next video, we'll talk about planning your projects and decide which one to tackle first during a process called quarterly planning. For the next video, I want you to define at least two tasks for every single project you wrote before. 6. Quaterly Planning: In the previous videos, we created a list of projects and went through the refining process, and then added a list of tasks for every single project you had. In this video, we will talk about quarterly planning, which is about selecting and prioritizing the different projects you're going to work on in the next three months. Now you have the list of all the different projects you want to achieve in your life. But you still need to prioritize them and of course, work on them. Knowing what project attacker will help you to focus on all the different tasks you need to do in order to finish these projects. You will also not wander around, not knowing what project to do or what tasks to do, or trying to do too many projects at the same time, The quarterly planning is divided into two parts, the review part and the planning part. During the review, you will reflect on the last quarter and check what you worked on, how much progress you did and the status of your project. During the planning, you will decide what you will be focusing on during the next quarter. In order to plan your quarter, you need to scroll down directly here to "Plan new quarter". And here you have this page with the toggles that you can directly toggle and get all the details about what you're supposed to do. The first step is checking all the different projects of the previous quarter. Here you can see all the different projects that you had during the previous quarter. And what you can do is click for example, here on "Track my finances", and here you can see directly, if you go to the task, you can see all the current tasks and the tasks that has been done. So for example, this project still has one task to be done. So I'm gonna keep it like this. But if you have a project that is completely finished, then I can change the status here to Done directly and it won't appear anymore. The second step is creating a new quarter and closing the previous one. For that, you have to click on the toggle here, and here you have the previous quarter, you're going to put an end date of the date of today, so 20th of March 2021, then you have to create a new quarter. So you will click on the arrow here and new quarter, then you will write 2021, for example, Q2. And what's really important here is to add the start date, which is also the date of today. So 20th of March. Now, all of you are going to update and show the projects that are linked with this new quarter. If you don't add the start date and end date for the previous quarter, then it will still show the previous quarter projects, Now that I created a quarter. I can decide to add project to the next quarter. So for that, I click on the toggle here. And here I have the list of all the different projects. And I can see how many tasks remaining and I can decide which project to take her for the next quarter. I can also decide to refine an idea. So for example, I could decide to go on the "learn to cook new recipes" and go through the refining process of the project video. But I can also decide to add, for example, painting my living room as the quarter two, projects. I can also decide to continue tracking my finances. So here I can select as well and develop a meditation habit. For example, once I decided all the different projects I want to do for the new quarter, I can see an overview here of all the different projects. The last step is when I click on this toggle where I have to write all the different tasks that I think about for every single project of that list. So for example, I can go through paint my living room and decide to add new task. or go to the develop meditation habit, tracking my finance. The idea here is to always have at least two tasks in order to have actionable items for these projects. For the next video, I want you to go through the quarterly planning and planning the projects you want to do for the next three months. Now, we know all the different projects you want to achieve in the next three months. In the next video, we will talk about weekly and daily planning, which is about planning all the different tasks that you need to do in order to achieve your projects. 7. Weekly Planning: Now that we have the list of projects for this quarter, we need to decide what tasks to work on for the week. I call this process weekly planning, and that's what we'll talk about in this video. To plan the next week, go down to plan next week here. And then you have a list of different actions you need to do. In the first step, you check every project of the quarter and you will check if the project is either done. So in that case, you can directly change the status of the project to Done or Next up. And in that case, you need at least two tasks in order to continue with your project. So for example, here I can check this project here, and I can see here the list of all different tasks that still has to be done. Here. The task that has been done already. In that case, I have two tasks here. I have no Done tasks, so I can continue with this project. I don't need to do anything. The second project is tracking my finances. And if I scroll down, I can see that I have one more task to do. But in this specific case, it's the last task that I have to do for this project. So I don't need to have two tasks, so I can just continue. The last project is paint living room. And when I scroll down here, I can see that there are two waiting tasks. It is recommended in every weekly planning to check all the waiting task and see if you can do something to unlock the task. So for example, in this case, I'm waiting to receive an order. What I could do after like two weeks, for example, if I don't receive it, is to add a new task will be send an email to the shop. And that would be a task that I would plan here as an extra task. This will help to unlock the situation and move forward. The next step here is if I have no projects, if all the projects are finished, then I can decide to add a new project or to refine an idea into a project and work on it directly this quarter. The next big step of that is to check which tasks to work next week depending on your schedule. So here, for example, I have the list of all the different tasks for all the different project I planned for this quarter and I can decide on the due date here, for example, next week, I want to work on this. So here I can put, for example, the sixth, and here I can decide to install Headspace on the 7th, for example, and so on. So here I would put priorities, which is the priority for that day that I want to do this task. This is pretty useful when you have a lot of things to do. So because you can decide what you want to focus on on that day and what's not so important that you can do on the next day. For example, here I could say that this is the first priority, so this is the most important thing for that day. While this thing here would not really be the most important. But for example, sending an email to unlock the situation here would be the first priority, I would do on that day. And then if I go on the last toggle here, I can see the list of all the different task plan for next week. So here I see the tags for the sixth, the task of the seventh, and so on. So now I'm back into the dashboard and if I go to today can have access to all the different tasks for the day. So here, for example, I have installed and sign up to headspace. And when this task is done, I can decide to drag it and drop it into the Done task. Then here I can see all the different tasks for this week with the status as well. So here it should be next up actually, if I go to all tasks here, I can see the list of all the different task for all the projects of this quarter. And I can also decide to add more tasks or change the date of the task if I want to directly from here, Now you have an efficient system and you can create projects add tasks to them and decide what to work on on a quarterly, weekly, and daily basis. For the next video, I want you to go through the weekly planning. In the next video we'll talk about a knowledge management system, a way to gather all the different information you get and link them to your project. 8. Knowledge Management System Overview: Hey friends, welcome back to the second part of this course where we talk about the knowledge management system. But first, let's see why you need such a system. The first reason is to gather all the different information in ledgers on a daily basis. You will know where the information is stored and you will not need to go to different apps or notebooks. The next reason is to link everything we stags and projects so that you can easily find any information you need related to them. The last one is to actively consume content. This forces you to take valuable notes and learn with active listening, instead of just consuming. There are different things you want to store information from notes, books, courses and workshops and medias, which is the water used for videos, podcasts and articles. And muscle type table is a list of all the different topics you are interested in. Example of target would be, for example, in meditation or business, there is no limits to what it can be. Now let's see how this would work on Notion. To see all the tags go to the Knowledge Center and click on Master tags. Here you have a list of all the different tags and can create a new one by clicking on the New. Once you click on the tag, you can add an icon, a cover photo, and see the list of all the notes and books, courses, trainings, and media related to that tag. For the next video, I want you to create five tags about topics that you are interested in. In the next video, we'll talk about how to add notes. 9. Notes: In this video, we'll talk about how to add notes. We all write down notes on a daily basis, whether it is about our studies, work or personal projects. I encountered several problems while using other tools and methods. The first problem is how hard it is to find a specific note. If, for example, I used notebook and I wrote in it every day, how can I find a note that I wrote three months ago about the project that I want to start working on now, I would need to go through that notebook again and search for that specific note. That's pretty cumbersome. The second column is that it is hard to group ideas about the same topic or projects. Let's say I want to find all the notes I wrote about meditation. How can I do that with an app like Evernote or even a notebook? But last problem is that not having the possibility to group the notes leads to duplicated notes. The way improve that in the system is by adding attributes to a note. First one is tags like for example, in meditation or business. The second attribute is projects that are related to the one created in the first part of this course. There are several advantages to do it this way. The first one is that it is easier to find specific notes. I can use the search or click on a specific tag or projects. It is also easier to group ideas about the same topic or project by just clicking on the tag on the project. That's pretty useful when you want to have an overview of all of knowledge you gathered about a specific topic or projects. Before writing a note, I can shake if that note has been added already and there will be fewer duplicated notes. Now let's go to Notion and see how this works. To add a new note, Go to Knowledge Center and notes. Here you can click on New and add several tags or projects to your note If you go to a specific project and you go down to the knowledge part, you can see the list of all the notes you took about this project. If you go to the master tag database, and click on the tag, you can see all the different notes related to that tag. Organizing my notes this way has been life changing for me as I could easily find my notes by project or tags. And they could get rid of all the different notes in other apps and notebooks. Sometime we don't have internet. I just write down my notes in a notebook or in another app. And once per week, I just take all the notes that, that outside of the system and put them directly into Notion. This way I have all my notes into one single place. For the next video, I want you to add some of your notes related to some of your projects. From now on, you will write down your notes directly there. In the next video we're talking about courses and trainings. 10. Courses: In this video, we'll see how to add courses and training. Through our careers and personal lives, we all follow courses and trainings. There are several reasons to add them into the knowledge management system. The first reason is that it will help you knowing what courses and trainings you plan to do related to your project. The second reason is that it helps you to gather all the things you learned instead of having them in separate notebooks. Now, let's go into Notion and see how this works. So let's say I receive an e-mail about an online meditation course that looks promising and would help me in my develop a meditation habit project. I could either decide to do it right now, or link it with the project and start it when I want to focus on that project. Two added to the system, go to courses and trainings and create a new entry by clicking on the arrow close to New. So let's add learn meditation with Mark. I would base the URL in the URL field and set "might do" as the status. Link it to the develop your meditation habit. And I could also add some tags like meditation for example. Now when I looked at really develop a mutation habit project, I will be able to see that course. Once I start the course, I can change the status to doing now. Then I will write down all the notes of that class on that page and sell it to complete it. Once it's finished. For the next video, I want to add some courses and trainings you want to follow and add some notes to the one you went to. In the next video, we'll talk about books and book notes. 11. Books: In this video, we will talk about book and book notes. First, let's talk about why it's important to add books to the system. Having a database of books helps you to keep track of all the books you read and also the books that you are interested in reading in the future. I use this as a place where I add books that people I know are recommended to me or that I discovered but do not have time to read right now. Later I can decide which book to start reading depending on the project I want to progress on, and also write down notes about the books I read. Second reason is to keep track of what you learned while reading books. Personally, I buy eBooks, highlighted the nodes with the Kindle highlight feature and synchronize the nodes with a tool called Readwise. Since this is a bit complicated to set up, I will talk about it more in the bonus section of this course. The last reason is that you will be actively reading, searching for the golden nuggets of the book you're reading. This will be a more productive way of reading for you and will help you remember more. Now, let's see how to add a book in the database. To add a book go to books and click on New. Now you can put a title, subtitle, author and image. I usually use the cover image and icons so that it is shown nicely in the gallery view. You can set the status to interested or to read. And you can also link it to a project or add tags. In the page, now you can write down some notes. So for example, if you have a physical book, you can go through all the different notes, you highlight it and copy what you find the most important there. Now you can go to your project and see the list of all the books linked to it. For the next video, I want you to add five books that you want to read. You can also add some books that you read with the notes you highlighted or by asking yourself, what did I learn from that book? What are the main takeaways from that book? In the next video, we'll talk about what I call media, which is all the content that you come across on a daily basis. We are talking here about articles, videos, and podcasts. 12. Medias: Today we'll talk about a way to manage all the content that you come across. As always, let's see why this is important in our knowledge management system. Whether I'm watching YouTube, reading articles or just listening to podcasts. I realized that I was often consuming without taking any notes or learning anything. Therefore, I created this table to write down what I learned in my own words. This way I am now actively consuming the content I come across. The second point is that I found out that when I have a list of content, I want to dive in. It's easier to not get distracted and consume content that has nothing to do with my goals. This was happening when I was opening YouTube. I was first watching videos and slowly by slowly ended up watching content that won't help me with my goals or projects. I decided to call this table media. And there you can list videos, articles and podcasts. Now let's see how to do it on Notion. First of all, I advise you to install a Chrome extension called "Notion Web Clipper". It will help you to create automatically an entry in the media database when you find good content online. To do that, go to https://notion.so/web-clipper and download the Chrome extension. Then click on the Login button and login into your account. Finally, select the media database and workspace. Now, let's see what is a process I do when I see something interesting, when I see something interesting, I think on the web clipper and import it into my media table. Then I add some tags. Now you have the table with all the different content and you can decide when you have some free time to watch, read, or listen, and at the same time write down some notes on the Notion page. If it is an article, you can also highlight or edit the article and only write down the key points. Slowlu, you will build an amazing database of knowledge. Also taking notes will help you to stay more focused on what you're consuming. For the next video, I want you to add five videos, article or podcasts that you want to watch, read, or listen to while you are consuming, write down notes and summarize the key points. 13. Conclusion: Now let's quickly recap how the whole system works. In the first part of the course, we talked about the task management system, which is the way of organising projects. Every time you get an idea of something you want to achieve, you will add it as a project. At any moment you can go through the list of all these ideas and goes through the refining process to define them more precisely, thinking if there are any other ways of achieving that goal, what exactly you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it. During this refining phase, you will also add the first tasks that needs to be done to directly start these projects. Every quarter you will do a planning where you select the projects you want to work on during the quarter. Every week you will plan the task that has to be done to move forward with your projects and say which task you will work on during the week. And the second part of this course, we talked about the knowledge management system and how to actively consume content while feeding the database of knowledge with all the nodes, courses and trainings, books, summaries and media that you consume for that you link them with Starbucks and projects, these hubs you to find the notes you took, you will be surprised how many nodes you can have up to a year or two if you add new nodes every time you come across contents that interests you. Thanks for watching this course. I hope it was useful for you, whether you use this system or get inspired by it and build your own. I'm sure it will help you organize your life and grow on a personal and professional level. Here there is an infinite.