11: System upgrade
In the last email (Subject: Dim and dimmer), I began sharing how I became interested in 'designing work'.
After testing numerous productivity tools including a largely unsuccessful experiment with Evernote, I had pretty much given up on finding a ‘work satnav’ - a dashboard to guide me through my daily tasks.
I just needed something to remind me what I needed to do at the moment it needed doing! Was that so difficult?
Apparently.
But then I stumbled upon Notion.
Now, before we get into this, I’d like to clarify a few things:
I don’t work for Notion.
I’m not affiliated with Notion.
I don’t get paid by Notion.
And Notion has many limitations.
So, rest assured, this email series isn’t about to turn into a Notion sales pitch.
Because what I care about is performance improvement. And for that to happen, our approach must work for anyone, in any context. Otherwise we’re not doing our jobs properly.
And what I’ve learned since I started using Notion has been instrumental in shaping how I think about performance improvement. And also, how I believe organisations should be thinking about performance improvement.
But let me take you back to 2020, a few months before the world went into lockdown…
After seeing Notion on YouTube, I signed up and took a few days off work to experiment (and the system I built that week is still the system I use today!). And what I discovered was that Notion wasn’t just better than tools I’d tried before - it was different.
Because most tools are off the shelf, ready to go. Whereas Notion is DIY.
Now, for some, this can be overwhelming - they can’t figure out what it is. But I studied some gurus, who had built some clever use cases. And it was the combination of their systems thinking, combined with a platform that allows you to design your own system, that captured my imagination.
The most significant difference being how Notion stores and surfaces data.
To explain, let’s consider how most tools do this…
First, we create a ‘thing’ - maybe a file, task, note etc. Then we save that thing into a folder. And when we have too many folders we create subfolders. And so on, and so on. The key feature being that the ‘things’ are only accessible in one place. To find them, you must first find the relevant folder.
The same is true of tools like Google Docs, OneNote and Evernote. Whether it’s a file, a note or a task, they all live in a single folder, and can only be accessed from inside that folder.
Now, one caveat is that some tools use metadata to give files extra properties - just like in the last email when I described Evernote. In that example, I created tags like ‘high priority’ and ‘office’, so I could group together tasks in a helpful view.
We also see examples of this in photo apps. In the Google Photos interface, you can view photos by date, location or person. This is how they make those cutesy musical slideshows about your camping trip - they group together all photos geotagged at the holiday park.
Spotify functions the same way. You can filter songs based on an artist, album or genre. This is how they can make one playlist called ‘Songs for the Brokenhearted’, and then as new love songs are released, the playlist auto-updates with any songs tagged ‘ballads’.
By using the files’ properties, they surface in different places.
But all these examples suffer one of two problems:
the properties are defined by the tool, or
if the tools allow you to create properties, customisation is limited.
This means how we see our data is determined by the tool, instead of by us.
And that’s where Notion differs. Data in Notion is stored in databases, created by the user.
So, when I set up my Notion system, the first thing I created was a new database called ‘Tasks’. And then I added all my tasks into that database.
And just like columns in a spreadsheet, you can have as many properties in a database as you want. And in Notion, each property is ready-made for different purposes - dates, checkboxes, dropdown lists, URLs etc.
So, after creating my task database, I added the following properties to my task database:
Do Date (date)
Done? (checkbox)
Status (select from list)
Priority (select from list)
Project (select from list)
The Do Date property was the date I planned to do the task. And the Done property was a simple checkbox, so I could mark something as completed and it would disappear from view.
In Notion, not only do you have complete control over the properties, you can also add pre-defined values within each. This gave me a quick way to organise my tasks.
With the remaining properties, I also added the following:
Status - Active, Waiting, Someday
Priority - 1-High, 2-Medium, 3-Low
Project - Redesign website, Write book, Book holiday
Now, if you’re someone who has never explored the world of productivity tools, you might be thinking this is fairly unimpressive.
But this level of control has huge ramifications - it meant I could create different views, with filtering and sorting, based on the values of each task and its properties.
So, for example, I could create a view which showed me all tasks:
scheduled for today
marked as not yet completed
sorted from highest to lowest priority
grouped by project
Finally, I had built what I’d always wanted - a satnav for work!
And it was around this time I started realising the potential in an organisational context - could something like this help my colleagues too, even if we couldn’t use Notion?
The dots started connecting.
But what I discovered next floored me.
Yours,
- Ant
