Hi Friends 👋!

Today’s post aims to help all of my fellow productivity nerds out there🤓. I have searched far and wide for tool that could help me increase productivity and organization personally and professionally.

Ultimately, Notion came to the rescue with its minimalist design and intuitive functionality. Out of excitement in starting with the app, I couldn’t help myself and began adding page after page on various topics. This allowed me to learn many tips and tricks, but also helped in making my setup unorganized and a bit chaotic.

Page after page after page after page …🤯

Having suffered from hours of re-organizing my Notion, here are a 3 tips on getting started for a better strategy up front, which will help to streamline a number of things including recalling information, completing recurring activities more efficiently, and spending less time searching for pages and more time writing.

1. HAVE A SYSTEM

Set up a system of organization before starting. I recommend to keep it simple with high level categories. From personal experience, less is more!

What does a system entail? Groupings, Templates, Favorites

• Groupings — Separate your primary sections into broad, important categories (i.e. Health, Wealth, & Family). From there, drill down further with the sub-categories (i.e. Family → Baby, Wife, Values, Goals).

  🧠Pro Tip Think of Notion as a Windows or Mac 👩‍💻 in how you would use a folder system and insert Pages from there. If you’ve screwed that up on your computer already, consider this your second chance 😃. Periodically check in to delete any unused folders.

• Templates — Huge time saver tip ⏰ is to create templates for whatever you do on a repetitive basis.

  🧠 Strategy Don’t re-create the wheel, re-create with templates 🚀

• Favorites — Have a set of pages that you need to quick access to every day? Mark favorite by choosing the “...” at the top right of Notion and then clicking ⭐️

  🧠Bonus Homepages — These are awesome as a central location for all things business or personal. Links to other pages are best when setting up a home dashboard, just enter “/link to page”

FREE: PS if you are looking for free templates, check out a few that I use here.

2. SEPARATE WORK FROM PERSONAL

Having trouble working on yourself? It may be because you are letting your work creep deep into your personal time. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the hustle and so does your employer. But it’s also OK to step back and work on your personal goals.

Digitally separating Work from Personal is a way that I trick my brain into staying focused on one or the other. In order to manage my time and prevent overlap, compartmentalizing the two helps me for better focus and getting things done.

🧠Strategy My simple mental framework for achieving this separation:

• When I’m on ME time, I’m on ME time… stay in your PERSONAL tab and don’t let the mouse creep over to work

Here are my categories for Work & Personal

3. USE BOARDS TO VISUALIZE & MANAGE WORKFLOW

Boards help the creative process serving as a visual workflow tool. See below example of how Ideas for a YouTube Channel and be broken up into Categories. This can be useful in managing workflow for myself or across teams to see how ideas and projects are progressing.

🧠 brainy.bites Key Tip Summary

1. Organize pages in notion similarly to how you’d organize folders in Windows/Mac. Remember to keep top level categories simple.

2. Don’t re-create the wheel, re-create templates. Use templates to automate repetitive tasks and meetings.

3. Use Homepages as a home base to see all categories.

4. Digitally separate personal and work to improve focus and productivity.

🎁 BONUS

If these strategies perked your interest, check out Caleb Ward’s deep dive into 47 tips and that’ll get you to a grand total of 50 Tips for today! 🙌

47 Spectacular Notion Tips for Productivity - Curious Refuge

📚 BOOKS

AT BAT $100M Offers -Alex Hormozi

ON DECK Leadershift -John C Maxwell

💬 QUOTE OF THE WEEK 

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort -Paul J. Meyer

👨🏼‍💻 INTERESTING

• Article https://jamesclear.com/productivity

• Parent Corner Let Your Kids Be Bored