12: Guidance Inc.
In the last email (subject: System upgrade), I shared how Notion had finally given me what I wanted - a satnav for work. I now had a fully functional dashboard, showing me what I should be doing depending on the different contexts in which I was operating.
In the dashboard below, I could see all today’s incomplete tasks, sorted by priority.
It was also around this period in my career I had become disenchanted with L&D's focus on training, and I’d started taking performance consulting more seriously. And I started wondering how I could apply this thinking to my consulting work.
Surely these ideas could be integrated to help people perform better in an organisational context too?
I couldn’t help but wonder what I was missing…
And as I continued to explore Notion’s functionality, I discovered something incredible: templates.
Now, the words ‘templates’ and ‘incredible’ may not find themselves in the same sentence too often. And unless you’re a performance-focused, systems thinking, home automating productivity dork like me, I wouldn’t blame you for skipping past this email to spend your day doing something more gratifying.
But, seeing as you’re still reading, I shall proceed…
TEMPLATES. ARE. AMAZING.
And I’m not even talking about the functionality - but the implications.
As I mentioned before, Notion is built on databases. What I didn’t mention is that each database entry is a page (like a webpage) in which you can add text, images, videos, checklists, links etc. And the fascinating thing is this content can be saved as a template.
So, because I was using Notion as a task database, I could create pre-designed content that would automatically appear in particular types of tasks.
Let me share an example…
I used to make YouTube videos. And I developed a pretty reliable workflow that looked a bit like this:
Brainstorm video ideas
Research high-ranking titles
Write script
Design storyboard
Set up camera and lighting
Record video
Edit video
Write description
Publish to YouTube
Share on socials
With Notion’s template feature, I could save this workflow as a template. Meaning any time I created a new task, I could auto-populate it with this pre-saved checklist.
In the image below, we can see the Make onboarding video task. When opened, this would display the template (as shown in the image further down).
And this is where the whole thing started to blow my mind. Because not only can you embed a checklist, you can also embed:
guidance on how to do each step, and
links to the tools needed to complete that step.
For example:
the brainstorm video ideas step might have a hyperlink to a video idea generator website
the write script step might link to my Google Docs scripts folder
the setup camera and lighting step might show me a photo of my regular equipment setup
For years I’d seen amazing on-the-job resources designed by wicked instructional designers. Only to see them die on SharePoint or get lost on an LMS.
But this functionality overcame that problem. Not only did my dashboard tell me what to do, it could tell me how to do it!
Can you see the implications?
I hear the phrase ‘in the flow of work’ thrown around a lot. And very rarely are the things being discussed actually in the flow of work.
But this was!
It was the first time I had ever seen a truly integrated performance solution - a performance guidance system.
But unbeknownst to me, I’d only just started to scratch the surface of what was possible.
Stay tuned,
- Ant
