How I use Notion to help stay on task

Key Takeaways

hello my front and friends and welcome to my podcast General musings my name is Kevin and this podcast is an audio version of the introduction to my weekly Sunday newsletter this week I'll be talking about how I use notion to help me stay organized both in terms of the bigger picture of my content creation but also how I use it to stay focused on my daily tasks I'm also going to talk about how I manag to get this system to stick for me because it did take me a few tries before I was able to make it part of my regular workflow so first off if you don't know what notion is it's basically a really fancy note-taking app but one that you can use in a very simple way if you want to but it also has really Advanced things you can do with it from automations creating and linking databases together and a whole heck of a lot more I use several different databases to stay organized with the most important one probably being my master database for my content calendar this has everything that I create from my regular long form YouTube videos to my shorts to the quizzes that are on my YouTube Community page my newsletter is on there these podcast episodes are on there as well and I'll eventually have blog post on there too as I try and revive getting back into written articles as well now I can see all of these on a calendar view so it gives me a good idea of the overview of where everything stands and while this gives me that really good big picture view each one of those things like say I add a new video to the content calendar there's a lot of small tasks that are part of that uh from coming up with the title and thumbnail ideas to Preparing the script itself to recording and editing it to writing the description to add adding the time stamps to the video and a whole bunch of other stuff and when I add one of those things like say I add a new video to the calendar I have a template set up so I can add all of those substeps or all those little tasks to a second database which is a to-do database that I use I assign each one of those tasks a date and then I can switch over from my content calendar view to a daily dashboard page that I have and with that I have a view of that to-do database but that one only shows me the task that I have assigned for that individual day so I sit down in the morning and the first thing I do is I check that daily dashboard and what I like about this system is it helps me stay focused on what I need to be doing on any given day sometimes I do get over ambitious and I put too many things on a single day but near the end of the day if I haven't finished all the tasks I'll just reschedule them for other days and as I've used this more I've gotten better at knowing what I can actually get done in a typical day now this is currently working really well for me I really enjoy it and it is really part of my regular routine now but I did try setting up something very similar to this and even I used this exact system in the past and I would just let it lapse and I stopped checking that and I sort of was just winging things on a day-to-day basis at first it would be a day or two to get back on track i' be oh yeah I should be using that to-do list and I'd go back to it and then I'd forget about it for a week and then I'd recommit to using it again and then I'd forget about it again and abandon it for weeks and by then you're working on things that aren't even on your to-do anymore cuz you haven't been scheduling stuff on it and the whole thing sort of falls apart the thing is when I don't have something like this in place I keep forgetting some little things here and there that I need to get done and then at the last second when I realize it's not done I'm sort of chasing these loose ends and it's all these things that I shouldn't have forgotten about in the first place the real trick for me to actually start getting this to be a part of a system that worked for me is making sure that daily dashboard was the very first thing I check every day before doing any other work it's one of those silly things but by being the first thing I would do when it's time to work it became a habit and eventually it's a second nature that that's the first first thing I do in the morning and then because I'm always checking it when I'm actually adding new things to my content calendar or if I have something that I know I need to get done on a certain day I'm going to always add those tasks to there because it's front of mind and I'm using that daily checklist throughout the day to know what I should be working on so when I'm adding new things but it just becomes the habit of making sure I'm adding them to the to-do list now I don't know if having this type of system is something that everybody needs to bother with I think it might be a little bit of overkill for some people but being My Own Boss and with quite a bit going on at any given time and with all the different pieces of content that I'm usually working on within a given week being able to keep track of both the bigger picture through the content calendar as well as all the smaller daily tasks has really helped me be much more productive with my time mostly because then I know where everything is at and I also know what I need to be working on at any given time I'm not trying to remember like oh yeah I forgot to do the thumbnail for this video and oh this video is going out tomorrow morning and I still haven't done the time stamps for it and I just I keep track of everything and it just works for me much better than when I do Let It lapse and I'm not using something like this but different people will have different strategies that work best for them but I always hear about it and I know I'm definitely the type that tries to implement a new system or a new strategy and it's really easy to start strong and Let It Fade Away over time as I mentioned this happened to me several times with this before I really got it to be part of my routine it takes a committed effort to make something like this stick but the best way to do it is to turn it into a habit it's like the book Atomic habit says where it's if you want to create a new habit you should link it to something that you're already doing something that already is a habit of yours for me I just made it so when I sit down at the computer and it's work time the first thing I do is open my tab that's my daily dashboard and that just helps me stay within the flow and makes it front of mine for the rest of the day which is makes it much easier for me to use on a regular basis after that and that's it for how I stay organized but I've decided that we're going to introduce a new section uh to this podcast as well which is a section that I have in my newsletter and I figured it would make sense to pull into the podcast version which is my other awesome stuff from around the web and this week I'd like to highlight a YouTube video called technical SEO for developers that I found thanks to B one mind who posted it in the resource section of my Discord Community SEO is one of those complicated worlds that can just seem really hard to wrap your mind around as a web developer because it's not what we focused on we just want to make a website or a web app but of course SEO is extremely important because we need people to be able to find what we've created but in this video which is on the prismic YouTube channel Alex TR does a fantastic job of breaking down the technical side of SEO and the technical side of SEO isn't about the content of the site which is an incredibly important aspect of SEO as well but it focuses on the technical things that we as developers have a lot of control over so things like core web vitals accessibility responsiveness and a whole bunch more if you're a web developer who feels a little bit lost about what they can do to help with the SEO of a website I'd strongly recommend giving it a watch and you can find it linked in the description of this episode along with the link to my Discord and all the other content that I've been up to this week and well that is it for this week thank you so much for listening and until next time don't forget to make your corn of the internet just a little bit more awesome