How to set up notion using The 'Building a second Brain' Framework.

This is an efficient and effective Notion setup that prioritizes quickly and easily:

• making new things
• finding what you've made

In Part 1, we set up Projects and Areas, which will track our team's current projects, and areas of ongoing responsibility.

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Watch Part 2 here: https://blog.pragmaflow.com/posts/notion-series-notes-and-resources

Transcript

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All right, welcome everyone. Today we're gonna talk about how to build para. This will work individually. It'll work really well for a team also. Now there's a lot out there about  complicated ways to do things. Now, just a quick primer on the approach is notion is an awesome tool and it's also a

Bottomless pit and potentially a huge distraction. As you may already know if you're here and figuring out how to use notion, is also a bit of a challenge now in the last six or so months, they've come a huge way in making a lot of the workflows work together. Whereas before that. To me, it really felt like you could either use databases or pages, but it was almost two separate apps and the play between the two was poor.

So you were  stuck with one, each one has advantages and disadvantage. And so I found what I believe is a really balanced system. That's also going to follow the para principles with a little bit of modification, and it's also gonna really build on the idea that notes are these modular things that don't necessarily need to be in one place.

They're the information that ties everything together. So with that, we'll just jump in cuz it's gonna start to get abstract. And what we're gonna do first is build out our projects and areas. Those are each gonna be a database and then we're also gonna build out resources. And then we'll build out a notes section as well.

So the setup's gonna be pretty straightforward. We're gonna use a lot of concepts from Rome in terms of interconnecting things, but without turning it into the kind of wild west and while still creating a really strong not exactly hierarchy but navigation, so that it's easy to find an access things and easy to make new notes.

if that sounds good to you let's get started. So this is going to be our projects database. And so we're going to turn it just straight away into we couldn't do a table. We could do a board. I'm gonna start with table only because it really illustrates what's happening. But otherwise you could go straight to board or any other view, you.

So let's take a look at new database here. Okay. And then we have very little. So I'm gonna get rid of tags cuz I don't usually use that for projects. So we have the name. Now.  the first thing we're gonna want is actually like a connection to an area, but we don't have that yet. So I'm gonna wait on it.

The next thing we're gonna want is status is a way to track things. So I'll keep this really basic. I always add a testing slash approval. This just tells me when something is like ready to be delivered. And here purple's a good color for it. Okay. Now we have that property over here, so that's cool.

And what else are we gonna add? We could, if we were working with multiple people, we could add, say a person who is the owner. We could add like a target date. I know a lot of people like to work with due dates. I don't. So target date at best is what I'm going to do. And so there we go, target date and we can format that however we want.

Okay. So those are some basic. Now, what I'm gonna do is really importantly, we're gonna add something for projects so you can add whatever you want. I like take off icons or the rocket launch because a project often is, getting the things started and then often we have to maintain it or maintain flight afterwards.

So then it becomes an area.  So here we have the area and I'm also, I think I'm gonna do this as a gallery and I'll show you why afterwards we're gonna make a new database again. So it is called areas and we can just delete all the stock stuff that they give us here. Delete, delete.

Okay.   From here. We want to add a relationship between projects and areas. The relationships are the thing that's gonna make this a little bit roam and it's also gonna make it work really well. So this is projects. We're gonna link to areas. We're gonna show it both ways. And actually, there's just one reason I'm going to wait on doing this first.

I want to add an icon to areas, cuz it's just going to make life a bit. For some reason, I like the tree icon. So I guess you could make projects and the sprouts, if you wanted to stick to the same metaphor  moving along. So here relation areas and you see now it's just gonna give it to me with this icon, which I find is really visually helpful.

That's why I went there and did that first. So we're gonna show on both sides. We add it and now we have. So actually I really don't find table view as useful for most things, but, I wanted a good visual of the properties we're adding. So now we can go ahead into our layout and we can change it into, a board which is pretty appropriate for a project.

And then the other thing we're gonna want to do is okay, I like to color the columns, but we're gonna group by status.  there we are now. Sometimes you may need to go from sort ascending to manual just to order these in the order that you want. So again, I like to color the columns you don't have to.

And there we. So then let's just go into our areas and I'll do these at a more of a team level, but this can translate to personal as well.  Areas I'll do this,  okay. I'm gonna make up a name, so it's less confusing. So this is gonna be ABC Corp cause we have, and client. Now the reason I do the vertical line client is just because when you're doing a reference to this, if you have a project for ABC Corp, you have another thing, ABC Corp, you're gonna wanna see that it's the client when you're trying to use it in a relational field like one of these.

So that's gonna come in handy. You can skip it now, but you may see later why you want to do it. Okay. I noticed I never deleted tags. And you may know that you can just come to this. And edit properties from here as well. So there's a few ways to do that. All right. So I've got my area for ABC Corp.

Now let's create a project and by the way, one of the reasons I set it up, like this is you can just go plus side new project. Of course, if you actually go to the view, then you can create it inside of the status. And that's going to, automatically apply the status. So it could be better.

Now let's go one further. I like to see my project. Sort  not sorted, but rather grouped or subgroup in this case by area. Okay. So right now it says there's no areas, but there actually is one. So what's happening. If we take a look in our subgroup visible groups, so that is visible, hide, empty is off.

And so what is the problem that's happening?  let's see, I'm just gonna type something in here, actually. No, I shouldn't even have to do that. Okay. So this is a little bit of a weird one, but here let's go ahead. And we're gonna say here, the project, which we probably want to give, like a very, a name that defines the closing of the project.

Complete. Or automation between, X and Y systems, cuz we actually do quite a bit of integration work. So I'm just gonna go in here and under areas, just gonna select ABC Corps. I don't know why that was being stubborn. And now I still don't know why it's showing it. So what gives.

So there we go. So now we have it and we'll have everything, every project we add. So if I add a new project in here, it's gonna take the status, not started and it's gonna automatically belong to ABC Corp. And we're gonna say launch the next project. Let's say, I don't know. Cause we're making a project names here. So now when we go in, it's got the ABC Corp area it's got a status already. So that's one of the nifty things about boards is that you can assign two properties at once by clicking in the right place.

So we're gonna go to areas and because I'm a little bit anal, we're going to just put a logo here for the ABC Corp. I like logos on everything. Okay. So that's projects and areas. Now, if you want to get complex, you can actually make parent areas and child areas.  That's one thing that I've done in the past.

And then you just could create like a relationship to area from within areas and that would allow you to do child parent, but we won't get into that now. I'll just mention it's possible. Okay. So what's another property I like on my areas as a business is we could call it type. You could call it whatever you want.

for this, I do single select, but you can easily change that in the future, which is.  so here this selection property is going to be now there we are. And so the possible types are client. This could be an internal area. What else do we have client internal? I guess those are fine for nap.

And so let's say this is obviously a client, right? So there we go. And then once again, we're just gonna group this.  by type. And so then we'll be able to easily see client internal, no type. Now one trick, especially when working in teams is put no type to the top. Cuz if something's unsorted, you wanna see it.

Otherwise it's gonna just fade very quickly out of memory. So then here, internal, this is gonna be create content about notion for teams. Okay. No, that's obviously not an area. That's a project. Notion. I don't know, notion, leadership, notion, whatever. Okay. Notion content. This isn't a great area name, but I don't wanna waste your time thinking about one.

We can add from here, for example, a project, if we wanted. So I could start typing something like create a video about how to set up para for teams. It's meta. So then I can go in here and the status is gonna be not started. Oh, this is actually worth mentioning. You can set now default.

So I don't know if it's in here.  Yeah, default.  You can choose, and that's a really nice thing also for a lot of the properties. Now, if you don't select anything, what it should be. So I could default all of these to my ownership, for example now, because I said I was being anal and so on, I'm just gonna notion cuz I also , there's no notion icon, but I like to use this notebook.

And here, I don't know this is gonna be, make a video, that's like the one password icon there. Okay. Make a video. So once we've done this,  here, let me pop into my projects just so you can see I have this next row notion content. I can create a video about blah, blah, blah.  We can see it, I'm able to create projects or area.

From here. And I'm also able to create them from inside of the pages as I assign properties, which means a lot of the workflows are really resolving themselves here. Okay. So that's projects and areas.

next  we'll talk about notes and resources.

If you'd like to learn more about setting up notion or if you'd like help we're thrilled to do it.

Subscribe reach out or drop a comment. If you have questions. Thank you for watching.

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