Last Updated on February 15, 2023 by Stephanie
Do you need or want a one-stop shop for creating and organizing projects and tasks for work? Notion might be the answer for you! When I discovered Notion, I admit there was a learning curve to it. Now that I understand how it works, I’m never going back. Notion helped me create a one-page view of everything for my website. I can look at a content calendar, view a list of products I offer, check off my task list, and more all in one place. If you haven’t checked Notion out, my hope is that this post will give you the interest to try!
What is Notion?
If you were to go on the website, it says: “Notion is a workspace that adapts to your needs. It’s as minimal or as powerful as you need it to be.” Essentially it is productivity software that helps you get things done. It adapts and works the way you create it to be, which is super cool.
One thing that I’m a big proponent of is planning that meets you where you’re at. You may not know this, but I do love digital planning and productivity systems. If you read my posts about Checking Your Systems or Finding Your Perfect Layout you will see that I’m big on adapting and changing what’s not working. I am also a fan of figuring out what you need in a system and making it work for you instead of finding a system and trying to adapt what you want to do to fit in the system.
Notion allows for that because it is essentially a blank space for you to create your own very simple or very complicated system within it. I love Todoist, which you can read more about here, so I don’t use Notion for my tasks. However, I embed my Todoist within it to make things work. Notion is used to house all my content creation information and ideas. I can’t use Todoist for that and I was sick of looking at a million different places to find things.
Enter Notion and my Creating Time For Life Workflow.
My Notion Workflow
Let me begin by saying that this is a growing and changing-by-the-day workflow. I created a video on YouTube (shown below) that shows my Workflow if you don’t want to read about it. However, based on the screenshots, you can already see that I’ve modified something! I think I even deleted a view that I didn’t use in the video while filming!
The great thing about Notion is that I have been able to modify and add things as I needed them. I am also loving how it can integrate with my ever-expanding second brain, which is a post for another day!
So I’m going to walk through each piece of my workflow so you can see how things are set up!
PIN IMAGE
Content Calendar
Notion’s most powerful block is a database in my opinion. There are a million different “blocks” that you use to create content in Notion. The first one on my page is my content calendar, which is a database. Within each database, you can also highlight and display different views. On the left below is part of the table view of this data and on the right is the calendar view.
I mainly stick to the calendar views when I’m working on things because I love that I can drag things to different dates super easily. I also was able to add a task to-do calendar view as well. If my status for that piece of content is done, it takes it off the calendar. If I’m anything other than posted or scheduled to post, it keeps it on there so I know what I need to work on. This is so freaking smart.
Todoist Integration
If you’ve been around the blog you know that Todoist is my go-to for task management. I don’t want to abandon that, but again, I’m all about efficiency! Notion integrates with different apps in different ways, which you can research here on their site. While this isn’t a true integration, I can embed a certain view or a certain project from Todoist into one of my Notion pages. This is what you see below! This has all my Creating Time For Life Tasks that I’m working on and helps me not have to switch back and forth between apps.
Pre-Made Toggles
This is where the money is folks! One of the key takeaways I had from reading Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain was that we spend a lot of time recreating things that are already made. We have already created so many different things so why aren’t we just adding to that instead of starting from scratch? This is where pre-made toggles and templates come in.
In my workflow, this has already changed since the filming of my YouTube video because of the creation of my second brain in Notion. Notion has ways for you to create a button that will automatically populate different things. In my original video, I had created some pre-made toggles for digital products and blog posts that I used. It told me things that I needed to remember to do when I was creating stickers, creating a digital notebook, or working on a blog post. If I ever realized that I wanted to add something to it, I would just edit that pre-made toggle list and my life was made!
Templates
With the addition of my second brain… guys… this is where Notion is AMAZING, I just added my projects for CTFL into my workflow like below. My projects in my second brain have a lot more details than just toggle lists and tasks! I created entire template pages to help me get things done.
The list you see above links to my projects section in my second brain. Within my project section, I have a few different templates that I use including blog posts, YouTube videos, printables, etc. They are pre-made by me and I can edit them when needed. Basically, any time I start a project in my second brain and tag it as something for the site, it auto-populates in this list. That way, when I’m in website mode, I don’t have to go searching somewhere else. It is already there in my workflow. Here is a picture of one of my template pages for creating a blog post.
Product Listings
One of the things I really like about Notion is the ability to have a gallery view of things and use an image for information. I took my product listing and created a table of all the information I might need such as the name, price, the URLs to the product, and if I’ve pinned it or not. For things like a digital product, it is a LOT easier for me to see a picture of it instead of reading titles. The best part was that it is a link to the image too! I didn’t even have to download the image. I just copied the URL of it directly from my site to put it in!
More Amazing Databases
A few other databases I have are my Master Blog Post list, my Pinterest list, and my keyword list. I like that I can add so many different things to these lists and filter things down so much. If I ever have more time, I’m also contemplating having some of the databases talk to each other a bit more.
For example, in my blog post list, I have a section that tells me what products or freebies I link to in my post. That’s great, but it doesn’t link back to my product lists. I can easily do that, but just haven’t had the time to do it yet! Maybe I’ll put that as another video one day!
My Pinterest keywords, for example are in a Kanban view. Seriously, the possibilities are endless with how you can organize and present your data in Notion!
What I Like About Notion
Now that you’ve seen my workflow, I’m sure you can see why Notion is so handy to use! I’m excited to keep learning more things about it and it is constantly being updated with new features. Here are some main points I personally like about it:
- Price – It’s free! Like really….
- Relations/Linking – You can link databases to each other super easily and set up relations that talk to each other so you don’t have to do added work!
- Customizable – This can change along with you as you grow your different pages! If you don’t like something, you can change it. As new features are added, you can choose to take advantage of them or not! You are the author of your Notion pages!
- Accessible on all my devices – I’ve got Notion on my desktop, and can pull it up on the web on any computer, on my iPad, and on my Phone. Check out my homepage where I have a fun Notion widget that allows me to capture a Note that automatically goes into my second brain!
Those are the main things I love about Notion, but as I said, it is ever-changing. I’m sure there will be even more that I like about it soon!
My Notion Workflow Next Steps
So, I think it is valuable to share different ideas out there in hopes that people can draw on the ideas and figure out things for themselves. Sharing is caring guys. In that spirit, I wanted to let you know about my Notion next steps! As of this blog post writing, I’m working on my Notion Second Brain inspired by Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain. I am beyond excited about this because I have a LOT of digital stuff and I’m someone who loves reading and learning new things. I feel like the information that I learn though, is lost.
A second brain is a way to quickly capture ideas that I have and learn and save them for my future self to find when I need them. Notion is a great place, I think, to build that database of knowledge. I’m excited to use it to make my second brain and connect it to this current workflow. As I do this, I will be publishing videos on my YouTube channel while doing it! Subscribe to that to see more about what I’m doing in Notion and see if it can help you better understand the app. As always, my goal here is to help people realize their potential and also help them plan their days and their futures!
Final Thoughts – Your Call to Action!
If anything in this workflow interests you, check out Notion. Go create a free account, watch some tutorials, and see if Notion is something that could work for you! Don’t be afraid to play around with things and experiment with all the different blocks on a page. Playing with new technology is a super fun way to find things that you never knew you needed! Go check it out today!
Also… go do something extraordinary today!
