My Creative Workflow with Notion

Key Takeaways

so one of the questions i often get is that hey ali you know you work full-time as a doctor saving lives but then on the side you've got this youtube channel and the podcast and the businesses and how do you do all of this stuff and one aspect of that is productivity time management environment design all these things that i've made various videos about but the other aspect of it that i haven't talked about as much is having this defined creative workflow for doing things like churning out videos and podcasts and blog posts and email newsletters and in this video i'm going to break down how i use the free app notion i've been using notion for over a year now and before i discovered notion i had sort of video ideas that would be sort of saved on my phone somewhere sometimes saved in evernote sometimes kind of written in a physical physical notebook and often i'd get like ideas in the shower and while driving and then i would just kind of completely forget about them but as soon as i started using notion and started developing this kind of workflow for my videos everything kind of changed and now i can you know churn out two or three videos a week hopefully the reasonable quality if you're a youtuber or you want to get started with youtube then maybe you'll find this directly helpful but even if you're not i still think there are a few takeaways from this that you might find vaguely helpful so there's three features of notion that i use a lot and that is kanban boards templates and linked databases and to be honest even if you're using notion for project management or for your schoolwork or essays or assignments or whatever these are really helpful features and hopefully by you know getting an insight into my creative process that will give you some ideas for how you might be able to use this sort of thing yourself so let's start with the high level overview of how this sort of creative process works basically what's happening is that every kind of video idea starts up either as no status or as an idea if i've you know fleshed it out a little bit so you can see i've got 49 videos here that are no status and 47 ideas so that is just under 100 video ideas that i've got going on and i've sort of been collecting these video ideas over time because whenever i have an idea for a video it goes straight into notion straight into sort of the first bit of this kind of creative funnel or factory refinery whatever you want to call it that sounds a bit pretentious anyway um once uh me or my team start writing the idea for a video then it becomes writing in progress and you can see we've got eight videos over here including this notion video seventh of july once the first draft of the writing is done it goes from the writing in progress column to the script ready for review column and this is where for example if one of my team members has written a script for a video then i'll be able to look at it and i'll be able to kind of make some tweaks and change the language so it's more like how i would speak on camera once it's gone through a round of editing then it is now ready to film and this is the column of videos that i choose from when i sit down and decide okay what am i going to film today i have a look through what's in my ready to film category and do it this video for example notion video 7th of july uh once i filmed it it was going to go into this filmed column and then i'm going to upload it by google drive to my kind editor who will be editing this video hopefully and then that's going to go to the with editor column and this column let's just keep track of what's going on there so for example this live update i'm moving to america video it then goes to ready for publication once everything is sorted and we're basically ready to hit publish on it and then it goes to published once it's been published and so an idea starts off all the way on the left hand side as no status or as an idea and then it sort of goes through these layers of the system and gets spat out at the other end as a published video this is quite helpful because it means that if i want to make videos and i know i want to make two or three videos a week it means that me and my team like we're never starting from scratch it's never the case of thinking oh crap you know what video do we do this week it's a case of oh crap we've got video to do next week um let's pick something from here and let's do that so it's it's kind of like with writers that if you have like a a good note-taking process you never need to start from a blank page because starting from a black page is just not fun at all i use this kanban board style kind of like trello style kanban board thing for videos but i also use it for blog posts and email newsletters and i know lots of writers who have kind of their ongoing writing projects something will start off as an idea then it'll become a draft and then it'll be editing and then it'll be published and i think just having this sort of workflow is really supercharged my own ability and my team's ability to kind of turn out these videos every week so that was kind of a high level overview let's now talk about linked databases which is another really helpful feature of notion so giving you a little insight into the behind the scenes of this youtube channel uh one thing that we always have to get done on time is the sponsored video schedule so most tuesdays wednesdays will release a sponsored video and those are the videos to have some kind of deadline whereas every other video doesn't really have a deadline i can just kind of do it whenever and so we always want to be on top of the sponsored video schedules and so here you can see a sneak peek of what's coming up on the channel for well up until like september and we can see it's so this is a notion sponsored video thanks guys for sponsoring this video we've got this on july 7th and that is linked to the videos database this is sort of a relational thing and that's one of the really nice things about notion is that rather than just having individual databases you can link those databases to each other so we've got one database for sponsored video schedule then we have another database for videos and the sponsored video schedule is linked to the videos database so for example what i can do is we've got this curiosity stream video coming up in july i can click on that and then it's going to let me search through all of the different videos and let's say we were doing a personal knowledge management video there that would show up and then if we look in that video if i change the status of that to ready to film you'll see that that automatically updates within this kind of linked database and that's kind of the power of linked databases and this sort of relational relationships that you have within notion and so what this means is that when we go on our videos database and we change the view to calendar for example we can kind of see in a calendar exactly what videos are coming up and exactly which videos are sponsored and which ones are not which is quite helpful in terms of managing deadlines and we've got loads of other views here as well so for example the everything view which i wish i look at occasionally this basically is all the video ideas that we've got in the database and so if i want to add a new video idea to this i just hit the new button and then we've got a new video added to the database so that was the linked database feature in action and now i want to show you how we use templates to try and make better videos and this idea was taken extensively from my friend thomas frank he's done a video talking about his own notion set up for how he makes videos and i watched that and my mind was blown i was like oh my god this is incredible but i thought his was a little bit too complicated for the workflow that me and my team use and so i kind of simplified it a little bit and added my own elements to the point where this is now the process that we use for making videos for this channel so just to start again we go on the videos database we click the new button um open this page and then we can kind of title this video anything so let's say i was making a video on uh is oh donut's good for you i can add a little icon to that perfect just makes me feel a little bit good and now if i scroll down a little bit we've got a new video template over here and this is where all the magic happens uh this will be linked in the video description by the way if you want to copy this video template for yourself but when i click on new video template suddenly this has now been sort of significantly fleshed out in a way that means i don't have to continuously copy and paste stuff so let's look at what's going on it's you know upgraded the status to idea so now we know this is an idea i can look through and i can set all the different parameters for this video if i want so let's set myself to the writer we don't need to set a publish date yet because it's just an idea and so if i want to i can fill out all of these fields whichever later but the interesting bit is this this is the template and i think the template is really good because one of the things i like about discovering new apps and new workflows is that when you find the right one that works for you and for the thing that you're doing it becomes almost a tool for thought like it encourages you to think about things in a way that you wouldn't have before and there's an argument that none of these apps actually make any difference and you know making videos you can just use pen and paper to organize your life just as well as you can use notion but i think when an app is designed in a certain way it encourages you to think about things in a certain way and the nice thing about notion is that you can encourage it yourself to think about things in the way that you want to think about it sounds very better anyway so what we're doing is we've got title and thumbnail we've got notes we've got all of this story stuff we've got some story structures and we've got all of these details about the video and then a publishing checklist so this is just sort of a very quick overview there's going to be a link in the video description if you want to check it out but instead of just explaining this i will show you now from yesterday when i was writing the script for this very video how i used the video template to kind of go through that so if you're interested you know this is the process that i used to actually make these videos a quick plug just before we get started with that for the last few weeks i've been streaming fairly regularly on twitch so you know a few times a week for a few hours i do like a study with me stream or a stream where i'm using notion to kind of make videos and stuff using these sorts of templates so you should follow my twitch profile link in the video description and then you can follow me along in real time and ask questions and stuff if you want to see how i actually use notion to do this stuff in real time anyway this is me from yesterday using notion to create this video about notion so looking through my sponsored video schedule i see that we've got this notion video coming up on july the 7th and so that's going to be the video that i'm going to make today so what i'm doing is this is a a link to my video database so let's go into the video database and we're going to hit new and let's call this one um notion video 7th july or something it doesn't really matter what the title is the important thing now is i'm going to use my new video template now this is something that's based loosely on uh what thomas frank uses and i will of course link this in the video description if you want to check it out when i hit new video template look what happens boom all of a sudden we've got all of this stuff that has been pre-filled by default and this kind of encourages me to think about making my videos in the right kind of way and this is sort of how notions transformed my video production process because i didn't really have anything like this before anyways i'm going to say writer is me publish date is the 7th of july status writing in progress sponsor this is notion video intention this one's interesting um i said apparently well apparently there's only three sorts of video intentions there's discoverable community and sales this is a discoverable video i want people to discover the channel through watching this video video genre let's call it apps and partly productivity and creativity is another one channel this is for my main channel editor is going to be my boy christian editing this video now this one is interesting so this sponsor date this is a link and it's a link to this sponsored video schedule so what i can do now is i can find this video oh here we go notion video 7th of july and i can add it in here and now this is updated because it takes the writing in progress from there and that means that immediately i can like if i'm looking at my sponsored video schedule i can see okay where we've got the gaps and where do we need videos so let's see a curiosity stream well let's go for the for this brilliant one on the 28th i'd be able to look through all the video ideas and then i'd be able to figure out okay which video are we going to plug into the brilliant sponsor in july the 28th anyway let's go back to this video notion video 7th of july opening it as a page i can kind of ignore the rest of them but i want to show you the template now so it's it asks me for the title and the thumbnail first and this encourages me to actively think about what the title and thumbnail for the videos is going to be so i'm going to brainstorm some ideas here so and like some of these are a little bit a little bit ridiculous but it just sort of having the title up here just encourages me to actively think about what the title should be which is just something that i i didn't really do beforehand and then in terms of thumbnail like actively thinking about okay what's the thumbnail gonna look like so we can say okay so i've got some title ideas i've got some thumbnail ideas now let's move on to the actual video and the key thing here is that within this template i've made myself think about the story so this is sort of the seven part standard story structure so who's the character me what do they [Music] want and over here i've highlighted points number four and number seven because commonly these are the bits that um people pay less attention to when it comes to stories and these are arguably the most important bits of telling stories and so i i've highlighted them in the template and therefore brings my attention to it [Music] okay so this is the sort of thing that i try and do for every video and it's it's a little bit ridiculous um and clearly i won't be talking about all of these within the video or i might who knows but just kind of forcing myself like asking myself these questions forces me to think about the video in more of a story mode fashion rather than in a you know here are five five ways that i use notion which is what i used to do in the past i've got another template thingy over here and this is also based on one of the courses from video creators which are very good and this lays out the two different story structures so let's go over the three act structure first so we've got you know act one the character wants something act two the character faces conflict and act three the character overcomes uh or is overcome by the challenge usually the character overcomes a challenge and the idea is you want to sort of create tension and add obstacles and stuff i don't quite think the three-act structure is suitable for this sort of video because this isn't really a sort of a journey kind of video instead i think the hero's journey is what is kind what maybe we can sort of use for this video so character living in the status quo i can talk about how you know my process before notion was just like really bad and i want something more is forced to take action because now i've got like a full-time job and i need a system wind up in unfamiliar territory must adapt experiences victory is like oh you know i discovered optical help from others discovered thomas frank's video like oh my god this works has an inward realization that about how tools for thoughts like notion are important in giving us a nice workflow once i'm back in familiar territory i.e oh i'm now sitting at my computer but now i have been changed by the journey of you know appreciating the app and i therefore change the environment that i've now got this whole this whole process for the videos so this is another way that i can think about telling the story in more of a story sort of fashion but again this is just something that i keep within the video template so that i'm forced to think about it for every single video there's basically four parts to the video there is the hook the intro the value and the custom playlist so the hook is going to be you know i do i don't just want to do a hey guys welcome back to the channel that would be sort of the intro i want to think about sort of a 10 second hook that if someone is discovering my channel for the first time they'll be like oh i kind of want to what i kind of want to watch the rest of the video so we think the way we're thinking about this is um we've got the title and the thumbnail which sets an expectation so let's say how notion transformed my creative process let's say that's the title that we're using for this video and let's say we're using this sort of thumbnail the video is clicking the the viewer is clicking on the video expecting to get some sort of value from it and i want to deliver that value within the hook that encourages them to keep watching so how notion transformed my creative [Music] process so now i'm kind of thinking about my video and in terms of these four parts and in just a few minutes i've kind of got a structure in mind and then i'm going to change this up and i'll add some bits and bobs here and there and but it just sort of gives me a good structure that i can use for absolutely every single video and then we've got like this you know uploading and publishing uh checklist a description call to action for the sponsor tags and card caption files using rev.com which is a caption service uh and these are just sort of final tick boxes at the end um just to you know make sure we've sort of hit everything so this is you know a bit of a meta look behind what the process is like for creating a video like this one all right so that was my kind of creative workflow again you know if you want to see me do this stuff in real time and you have nothing to do at home you should follow me on twitch because i stream myself studying using notion and i stream myself making these videos using notions all the templates mentioned in this video are linked in the video description so you can check them out you can duplicate them into your own notion workspace and if you like this video and want to learn more about how i use notion here is a playlist that has all my notion themed videos where i show you the behind the scenes my workflow for different other aspects of my life and how i manage it using notion so thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye