It’s been a while since I shared my *Notion workspace with you. I wanted to give you a very high level overview of some of the changes that I’ve made in the last couple of months, so that you get a sense of how things are set up in my workspace and how I manage the shared team assets alongside of my own private, personal goals and tasks.
Marie HQ, which is a private page, is really my homepage. It’s got my commitments, my goals and my areas. I use projects, areas, resources, and archives as a way to organize my space. I take a lot of liberties with PARA and don’t use it literally, exactly the way Tiago Forte does, so I will elaborate on that a little bit.
Essentially, Marie HQ contains my own, personal areas. They’re not the businesses areas, it is all stuff that is unique to me.
In some cases, when I open up some of these areas, I will have a mix of private stuff and shared stuff inside. For example, I may link out to our shared projects database. But, permaculture, for example, is something that’s only my stuff.
My project database contains everything personal and private and I filter it in the way that I need it. I like to use the gallery view and have this sorted to be an inspirational, visual area.
All of my planning lives inside my own, private Marie HQ, including my daily journal and weekly agenda. This is stuff that other people don’t really need to see but is important for my own personal planning and alignment and goal setting.
I also pull in my month database and quarterly database, so at-a-glance I can see what my goals and projects are. Projects is a shared database, from the Oki Doki workspace, that I embed here and filter so that it shows only my self-directed projects.
In terms of the changes to the workspace, the Oki Doki page looks fairly similar. The main update is that each of these areas on the side here are pages now and not databases. Even projects is a page that has the original database embedded in it several times.
This enables us to see the projects by size, by type, or ongoing and then our actions below. It gives us a couple of different options that provide a snapshot of projects and tasks all in one go. There are lots of project templates included on this page as well.
Resources is also a page, not a database, with a number of different databases inside of the page. I use icons to differentiate, so anything that is a solid circle is a database. Anything that is an open circle is a page, and dashboards have their own icon too.
A dashboard usually means that there’re a number of different databases and pages mixed together. And, it’s usually to deal with a specific context. For example, learning is going to pull in my knowledge hub in different ways and as well as my notes and ideas .
More and more, dashboards have become a bigger part of my workspace, which is why I decided that they need their own area.
You’ll see there are planning related dashboards, content related dashboards, and some that are a little bit more on the resource side of things, like learning, ideation and inspiration.
I consider fulfillment, operations, growth and marketing to be our Oki Doki areas. They’re high level categories and each of them is actually a dashboard.
Fulfillment includes the sales database, client information, and product and service information. It pulls together all of that into one page.
For growth and marketing, we do the same thing, pulling together our case studies and affiliate links.
Content hub is its own dashboard with quite a few different databases inside.
Operations pulls together the team, our roles and responsibilities, how we work, our SOP’s, all our tools organized by ‘must haves’ and frequency of use – everything is inside of the operations page and gives us a snapshot of the operations of the company.
I do recommend if you have a team greater than a few, it’s going to be important for you to set up a database of all of your team members. You might even want to connect up your projects and tasks to specific teams.
For example, if you have an engineering team or a design team, you might want to connect your folks to the team and then assign certain projects to certain teams. We’ll cover more of the business use cases in future videos.
These are some of the major changes in the way I have been thinking about my space and thinking of things much more as dashboards. These days I very rarely go and click on an individual database.
For example, I very rarely click on sales. I would be more inclined to click on fulfillment and look at the bigger picture of the sales compared to goals and see everything together. I lean more toward making these much more in depth and useful dashboards for myself.
Some of the other dashboards that I’ve added and frequently use are focus, collect and process, and connect.
Collect and process is where I collect material in an inbox throughout the day and everyday, by the end of the day, I decide what I need to do with it. Whether I need to assign it to read it later, or I want to process it, turn it into a course, whatever it looks like. I turn those items into a note or idea or add them to the knowledge hub.
As I do that processing, summarize the articles, and give them tags, they disappear from this area.
I’ve been really relying on these different databases to get focused, do my collection and processing, connect with people, set my goals, and focus on my learning.
There are so many different ways you can set up your space. There’re no rules. But, I have found that PARA (projects, areas, resources, archives) is a really good starting point. And then you’ve really got to take it and run with it and not stick to any hard lines because with Notion, your data doesn’t have to live in one place.
I don’t worry too much about thinking of things like a file folder structure. Lots of databases actually appear in multiple places in my workspace. It’s a way for me to not forget what is most important and to keep things top of mind.
I’m going to dive in to a little bit more detail for some of these key dashboards that I’ve been using, but I’d love to hear from you if there’s something specific you’re not sure how to do or want to see me cover in more detail.
[*For full disclosure, I’m a Notion Partner, so when you sign up with my link, you also help support me and my content!]
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