How I organize everything with Notion

good morning guys um today I thought we would go through a video of the notion system I actually tried to record this once already and for the first time ever uh it just got way too kind of complicated so I've decided I'm going to break this down into a series into kind of step-by-step shorter form videos just so that it's much more digestible for you basically like honestly I tried it this morning I was talking about an hour straight

and even I was getting lost um because the system is is pretty complex um but anyway I yeah so I'm recording this now and I've been getting requests to do this um personally I think implementing a system such as this in your life is the biggest I don't really like to use the term life hack but like the biggest life hack so to speak um it just makes things like 100 000 times easier and yeah I literally can't recommend it enough which is why you hear me mention it

so much throughout my videos like my entire life uh it's literally and I mean literally built on top of this system um so for management of like your personal life I do believe that notion is the number one tool for this job um if you're doing projects that are based on teams notion I don't believe is the right tool and I think you want to start to look at things such as like click up um I've tried everything

and I will say like notion isn't the best at almost anything in fact but it's the best at bringing kind of all these things together so if you don't know what notion is it's kind of like you can literally just build custom workspaces with something like Google Docs meets air table meets like your internal company workspace management stuff you can embed videos you can embed charts you can embed any of like the things that you work with inside these different pages

um yeah it's just a kind of fantastic all around tool for for management uh of of your life in my opinion um the other thing to mention is this system isn't going to change your life that still kind of comes down to you what this does is it implements structure and it kind of gives you a real understanding of your life and pushes you and it tells you what to do to go in the direction that you want to go into

and you'll understand what I mean by that very very shortly um so the point of failure in this system is still myself as a human um the system can very easily churn up the tasks that I should be doing in order to achieve my goals but it's still down to me to do them so the system isn't going to change your life uh you still have to do it but the system lays out a plan of what you need to do to get where you want to be

and of course look I'm only human there are times I veer off from the system uh previously for like six months I was off the system uh mostly through like, I wouldn't say laziness like I'm not lazy but um I just kind of fell out of it and it's the same as like if you're on a diet or something or whatever it is like if you're on trying to stick to a very strict diet and then one evening you eat like a cake or something the most important thing in my opinion is to accept that you have fallen off from the diet analyze how you

fell off from it and just move on and get back onto the diet as fast as possible if you let like one slip up kind of throw you off for weeks or days or months even in my case um that is when it really becomes a problem but the one thing to accept is that like we're all human and uh there will be times when like you miss a daily um checkup or like whatever it is it's okay as long as you get back onto the system as fast as possible

um yeah just lit and okay let's um let's go ahead and open this up so I'm going to structure this it's going to be kind of like a um a video series like it's the first time I've ever done a video series in fact um but yeah just to break it down into smaller steps so this is the introduction I'm going to give you an overview of the entire system this is kind of how all the different like here's an example of like a notion page

um where like just so that you can kind of cross-reference this is like my command center and then I have like my alignment Zone uh I have my like daily tracking uh here's an example of like the I'm offline um yeah like and anyway like this is an example of how it actually looks when it comes together but as you can see there's a lot of different pages all of these have some pages and kind of sub uh databases

um so what I'm going to do is start off by an overview of the system how everything works to outline all of the different pages that exist within the system how they communicate with each other how I interact with them and how they're used um to basically give a good overview and then in this video I'm going to put links through into all of the kind of sub videos showing you how you can you can use such a system in your in your life I guess a good place to start off with will be in this section which is identity sculpting by the way this

notion system that is here was originally um built off of August Bradley's PPV template pillars pipelines and vaults um I would say that I have now kind of adapted it so much that uh not that I would claim it as my own like it's definitely his uh original Foundation but his foundation was also kind of based off of getting things done and having a second brain so he kind of translated those ideas into a notion system

and built on top of it and I have now been working on this for two and a half years and added like my own touches and changes as well but you'll see like the top three if anyone recognizes this pillars, pipelines, and vaults uh it's it's all based off of um off of August Bradley's original template so to start off with uh we can look at life pillars. Life pillars are what are important to you in your life

so most people it's going to be money freedom Health family um I don't mean to give you the answers but for most people that is what will apply maybe some more than others that generally they are like the most people's kind of form key key pillars um in in their life uh at least they're online um so it's about establishing those four pillars writing down what do those pillars mean to you um and kind of establishing like life goals around what does that idea pillar of your life look like what does the the money pillar in my life what is my ideal situation there what

is my dream financial situation and I wrote this out about two and a half years ago and I've far um uh surpassed what I wrote down as my original goals at least on like the financial aspect and on the freedom aspect um on the on the relationship and health aspect on are still working on cracking that one but um but yeah um and so it's just about establishing here what are like the key pillars of your life

and how would you like those to look mapping out what is your actual ideal situation and most people this is where we start off with on this system a lot of people in their life have no idea what they actually want out of life and what they want to achieve they just kind of let life happen to them and this is the complete opposite this whole system is about taking control of your life figuring out what it is that you want

and implementing them uh it's starting to sound like I'm selling you something I'm really not this is all completely free um so understanding what map out those key areas of your life and how you really want them to look if you haven't got the best relationships how what does it look like for you to have a dream relationships um if you had like for example location freedom is also one of mine where would I go to where do I want to travel to How would how would my life actually look if I had complete

um location freedom and so that also comes kind of falls into that aspect of who do you want to become because the one thing that I can guarantee you is if you're mapping out where it is that you want to be you're not going to be there uh remaining like the same person by having the same habits the same financial habits the same routines managing your life in the same way if you want to change your life you you kind of have to change who you are

um the skills that you have how you approach work the projects that you work on what you invest time in it all it all needs to adapt like if you kind of analyze a Millionaire's life it's going to be very different from your your average person's life or if you analyze myself for example like at the moment we're doing about 200 to 250k per month I don't watch any Netflix I don't waste time on anything I literally spend my whole life working

um and I'm not saying that's the right answer by the way that is the right answer for me because that is one of my goals maybe some people will prefer a much more relaxed life with a much lower level of financial income and that's completely fine there's no right or wrong answers in this you don't share this with anyone it's going to be very intimate details about your personal life and what it is that you really want out of life

um so yeah who is it that you want to become um so like kind of map that out what is like your kind of dream um what is your dream life who who do you really want to be which then translates over into life goals and so now we're starting to actually set out what are what are your life goals and so a few years ago I mapped out that my life goals were to have a hundred thousand dollars per month in income

um to have complete location Freedom at the time of doing this oh it's very much tied down to Georgia uh as a location so I wanted complete freedom and I mapped out kind of how that would look um bearing in mind I hadn't left Georgia the country for about two years and for me that looked as changing locations every three months spending my Winters in Colombia I literally wrote out this stuff years ago and I literally just spent my my winter in Colombia

um and so yeah building that out and then we translate that down into baby step goals so if your goal is um you know Financial Freedom we're not going to break that down into you need to be making a million dollars per year if you're making two thousand dollars per month at the moment it's simply too much of a jump we break it down into baby step goals the first goal is I need to make five thousand dollars

and ten thousand and twenty five then 50 then 100k is the way to kind of tackle that and then we tackle each problem literally just one step at a time this is literally you notice what already we're down to breaking down your life goals what it is that you really want out of life who do you want to become what are those actual goals for you and sorry this actually goes over into yearly goals and we break it down into this is what I'm going to achieve this year these are my non-negotiable goals this year that should actually come over here this is what I

mean my system is so complicated that uh yeah so we break it down into what will I achieve this year because your life goals can maybe be set over the next five years or so whereas we're literally talking about this is happening Here and Now um I'll bring that there and yeah a little bit messy but yeah and so life goals are taken down until I do this year and then baby step goals are going into like step-by-step things

and now we have let's say a life goal if I want to make a hundred thousand dollars per month it's been broken down into this year uh you're starting off with a baby step goal let's say right now you're making two thousand your next goal is to make five thousand and ten thousand then twenty five thousand and we're going to break down into how you actually get there so baby step goals is then going to flow over into projects projects are going to be every

um anything in your life I Define a project as anything in your life that contains like more than two tasks which is taken from David Allen's philosophy in getting things done uh is just simply a way of organizing something so a project can be a very very small thing such as you need to take the car to the to a garage to get fixed it has like a couple of different steps in it first you need to call a garage

and you need to go and drive the car and drop it off there and there's actually about four or five steps to it so you can make that into a project every single project will then contain action items which are steps to that project that need to get done so a project could be yeah we can do a simpler example if you need to fix something in your car the project is fix the car action items are find a place to fix the car arrange appointment to drop off Car drop off car collect car pay bill done

um of course it's very very simple example but going back to our example of like the first baby step goal of 5K per month income the first project should be something that is income related so it can be setting up your own business it could be acquiring a skill that you need in order to um like if you haven't got any skills yet acquiring a high income skill would be a project for you you know go

and learn marketing go and learn copywriting go and learn design go into programming whatever it is you can literally Mark that down as a project and add that in into your notion system and that is assigned to your baby step goal of achieving five thousand dollars per month and of course as we increase the goals the projects are going to change um and this is actually how I make my decisions on whether I take on a new project whether I start a new business or not it still applies to me does this fit into my current baby step goals which are much higher than they

previously were and it just helps you eliminate and make sure that you're really like staying on track and investing time into um in into your projects um so this is where we enter the pipelines area of the um so we've we've kind of identified what we want out of life I redo this every single year by the way I'll analyze my previous year and reassess my goals for the upcoming year and I will re-review this maybe every like three months or

so just skim over my identity sculpting uh like the person that I want to be the person I want to become and just make sure that what I want is still aligned with what I previously wanted in most cases it is you don't really change this too often perhaps every couple of years like you may have some major shifts in in the direction that you want to take your life in this isn't something that I change or review too often it's like a one-time process

and then the rest of it is building um building our life around it and the baby step goals I I go through like every month and every quarter I go through and check my baby step goals and tick off all of the one that I've all the ones I've achieved um and a baby step goal is literally just a word for like breaking down your yearly goals into smaller tasks so they're more manageable and more achievable

and then they're broken down into projects um so pipelines is anything that requires action or activity from you so I have projects and then this is just an example of on some bigger projects that are constantly ongoing for me so I mentioned a project here so anything like two tasks and above let's say on my YouTube which is kind of I have no plans on completing it as a project it's kind of an incompletable goal

but it's something that requires action and activity from me YouTube has its own dashboard which I actually started off on here I don't know if it will load yeah here it is um this is my YouTube dashboard this is the idea of my videos I want to create this is some notes that I have um and this is like my calendar which is pretty empty at the moment this is my repurposing schedule um these are videos I've done these are videos that are in process that just gives you an example of how that actually looks

um then I also have a financial planning pipeline not planning but kind of financial management pipeline where every month I will go through that with a personal finance advisor I go through all of my transactions I check there's no subscriptions I don't want to be paying I check what I've spent money on and categorize it I analyze my employees and how much money I spent on each of them I analyze my purchases did I make money off them I see where I was happy spending money see where I'm unhappy spending money check on my investments

and kind of just make sure that my money is positioned in an optimal way as as possible so that's just an example of any projects that are kind of got huge projects or constantly ongoing I will turn them into like their own dashboard but technically they still do full under projects the project is always going to have one of two things it is either going to have you can see this Arrow coming down here it's either going to have a habit assigned to it or it's going to have an action item assigned to it an action item if it's another word for a task is

something that needs action from you habit is something that is like the same tasking is frequently recurring so rather than me needing to make the same action of each month I need to talk to my financial planner I simply just have a habit of monthly we have a call together and for example on YouTube I don't really do action items I do a habit of every day currently I must spend two hours uh on YouTube either recording content or planning content

so every in order for a project to be considered active it needs to have at least one action item or at least one habit that is active on it and and being completed so we can then come up the system here this is an app called sunsama which is kind of like a calendar manager task manager which does integrate with notion that I can sync my habits across to and I can sync my action items across to to then get them into like this is my day-to-day process of these the tasks I complete every day it's got a direct integration into notion

so anything that's in my notion system as needs to be done I can use in Sunsama and I kind of use that as a task manager it's just quite lightweight and I generally prefer working from it the notion I did used to work directly from notion but since Sunsama released that update I was really quite happy with it then every single day I will complete a Daily Review so in the morning we'll go through that in a separate video every single morning I complete a morning review uh which is like a five minute Journal

um the my daily tracking also has all of my habits stored in it and it also has all my action items stored in it so I plan out what I want to do today um and it also contains all of my habits which is where I complete these are yeah sorry my habit tracker which is where I complete these are the habits I completed today it also contains some interesting automations that I built from Apple Health

um where it sinks over my macro so it syncs over how many calories I eat today my how much fat I ate how much protein a how much carbs I ate um I use some like smart Health trackers for sleep tracking so it sinks that over into my daily tracking as well it syncs over my blood pressure which I do every morning and every evening as well daily tracking is then synced over to weekly tracking

and sorry and I also do like a daily analysis of disappointment improvements and achievements and take off all the tasks that I've done that all that data then gets synced up into like my weekly analysis which can then be from kind of like a higher level it gives me an overview of everything I did that week my calorie intake of each day so I can view it in kind of like a spreadsheet which is just much a much easier way to digest this information

so daily tracking is purely information capture there's no real analysis going on there I just very quickly blast through it input all the data on this is what I ate today this is what I achieved today this is how much money I made this is um these are like the key metrics and then every single week usually on a Friday afternoon I do a weekly review which involves analyzing kind of day-to-day list stuff like the information is fed up into the weekly review

and analyzing how successful was my week and what are some key improvements that I make and then I have some weekly habits and routines I complete up here in order to keep my life and my kind of notion system in place weekly then get synced up to monthly um so already we've taken the highlights of daily tracking which are now visible in weekly tracking and then I take the highlights of my weekly tracking and add that into my monthly tracking

so mostly we're just kind of filtering through data um taking the most important information and passing that up to the next database the monthly review is in kind of more of like a higher level overview more like generic questions on if I look over the past month if I look over this data that I've collected every day um what can I do to kind of improve my life and quarterly tracking is kind of similar um sorry on monthly review as well I also do like a

um uh like measuring my um body parts it sounds very funny it's like measuring my waist my arms my forearms my legs and I pass that back onto it there's a Russian scientist that I've been working with and I've passed that data back onto to optimize and improve my my health um and then in like a quarterly review as well it's even higher level than that it's just really planning out what what did I achieve last quarter were there any big mistakes why didn't I achieve what I want why did I achieve what I want

and then planning for the next quarter so it's more planning whereas the monthly review is really analysis of your days and weeks um and then the other thing that every single quarter I will try to get my blood work done depending where I am in the world so I'll just measure my testosterone and some other kind of key health indicators um so what I'm trying to do is have like a very very complex very um detailed blood samples for like the previous 10 years you know I started this a couple of years ago

um so what I want to have is when I'm like your blood really tells an interesting story so when I'm like 50 for example or 40 I think there are going to be some very very interesting improvements in healthcare and I'm kind of betting on the fact that um if they have access to very detailed reports of your historical blood work it makes the job for doctors much much easier so I don't um I have kind of no requirement for for it at the moment I mean it's interesting to have an overview of where testosterone

and things are at but um it's more really betting on like my kind of future health and the direction of the health industry then I do a yearly review which means to analyze my previous year and again this is kind of like very very high level analysis of what did I achieve what were the main highlights and you where was I happiest what were my main disappointments and then I also do a plan for the next year which then gets passed up into yearly goals

and we start this process all over again that is like my um process and most of the time it's really spent out in Daily tracking uh of course like that is where most of my day-to-day time within this notion system is spent it's within daily tracking so then we can come on to the knowledgeable and I'll actually start this one down from the bottom in fact so this is me these are all of the different systems that integrate with my notion system

so we have the Apple watch which I'm not wearing currently but that syncs data into my health tracking and I also have some shortcuts on it so whenever I have a new idea whenever a task comes to mind I can just press a shortcut I can say it and it will literally be input into my notes in the ideas section and the theme applies on the iPhone like I can just open the notion app where you can use notion widgets anytime I have an idea the very important thing this comes from the concept of building your second brain is just to offload any information as

soon as it comes in get it into your notes and ideas just to free up your like attentional space the other one I have is that the desktop app on notion these are basically all the ways I integrate with my notion system other one is raycast Raycast is like a shortcut manager and you can add tasks you can update things uh whatever you want from notion uh sunsama should be here actually as well because there's another way I integrate with notion I knew that I'd forget something yeah Sunsama is another way that I used to integrate with notion Kindle readwise

so Kindle uh I'm sure all of you know if is Readwise is a app that sits on top of that and it syncs over all of your highlights that you've made whilst reading books and sync them over to notion Apple notes I don't actually use anymore I deleted it because this was kind of a wasted process I had a bad habit of using Apple notes when now I just literally put straight into my notes and ideas tab within notion

and then another one that is really really interesting is Apple photos or the photos app which whenever I see something interesting you know whatever it is if I'm scrolling through Instagram if I'm on YouTube if I'm on if I'm reading an interesting article I have a habit of screenshotting things and I had about 20 000 screenshots so I now every single week as part of my weekly review I go through those photos and I add them into relevant parts of my notion system often into the habits section of notion

um because it will often be like inspirational things or advice or yeah anything that I kind of find it interesting um or if it's something that I need to take action on maybe it's a holiday destination that will go into locations uh or like yeah um whatever it is um so yeah or it can go into subjects and information um so yeah these are all the ways that I integrate with the notion system that information gets put into my notion

so under the knowledge role I have subjects and information these are about 30 subjects I have like a keen interest in anything from chess to biohacking to learning to uh any to all different forms of social media marketing for me are under different categories to SAS companies to programming to design uh to psychology to operational security to various other subjects are all within my like a research base and they all have their own unique workspace of whenever I collect information from books if I re if I read a podcast if I listen to a podcast if I watch a YouTube video

and I see some interesting notes that will get put into my notes which then integrates with subjects and information so I can categorize my notes that they fall into a particular category maybe psychology and it will automatically appear within this database I also keep a database kind of like a library of books to read which then of course gets digested by Kindle and then gets synced back up into the subjects and information database I also keep a database on software

and resources so these are going to be things that I stumble across maybe it's on product hunt maybe someone recommends me at all that I'm not ready to quite use yet maybe I find an interesting payment Gateway uh interesting app interesting piece of software uh interesting you know like set of icons or website template you know you can or a bank it can literally be anything anything that I think is an interesting resource that could be useful to my projects in future or is useful to my projects now gets put into this database

and maybe you've had that feeling before if you've seen a tool that looks interesting and you um but you just can't remember what it was or you thought they'd be a good tool for a job and you've forgotten the name that's why I manage this database so whenever I do a project I can go and review my software and resources database and think this would be a good tool for this job notes and ideas I've kind of explained it it's nothing complicated it's literally just a note-taking system

but it integrates with all of my different databases which gets very interesting and then finally not finally locations database um this gets this is another interesting one that I also developed myself is uh I note down so when I used to scroll through Instagram I would see reels and they're showing these amazing travel destinations often in these weird places he's never heard of I would screenshot them and I would tag them into different locations so I now have like a travel bucket list that is there as well

and I also have the key locations that I spend time in London Georgia uh you know Portugal um Columbia like and they're marked down those locations I keep track of my favorite restaurants there my favorite places to shop at good places to live out recommendations of places nearby people gave me to visit it's just a database of each different location and if you saw my previous video and talking about traveling around different locations I also write out the positives

and negatives of each location and the strengths of each location so that I make sure when I am in that specific location I spend time doing tasks that align with what that location has to offer a lot of times saying location just then but yeah that is the purpose of that database and then on my home page I put down my active locations that I can use from navigate through to it find a good restaurant find the contacts that I have in that particular location whatever it is next up I have a people database this is probably the least managed database that I have I'll

be completely honest it's kind of too much work to manage um the reason for this database is to keep track of contacts uh where kind of what they're doing like I can add their kind of LinkedIn profile there and pull data in automatically just like interesting people that I kind of follow it can even be like influences um that like I'm interested in consuming the content they put out putting links to all of their social media profiles

but the other thing that I do which was a recommendation that I was given by someone is to keep track of the people that you kind of work with and spend time with uh whenever they kind of mess up on something um you can keep evidence I mean this can get pretty dark I haven't actually had to use it yet but it's always good to have um you can kind of keep evidence on that and let's just say if you ever needed to uh just kind of get your not get your way in something

but just remind someone of something uh if there was like a situation that was getting a little bit sticky in business um it's good to have kind of like active monitoring and evidence and kind of like a history of like the people uh people around you I don't mean like doing this on like your best friends or anything like that I'm mostly mean about people that you're working with for example I've had situations with business partners in the past where like things got a little bit yeah it just I just built this habit of keeping out tracking information on on other people

but you can also do it for like um I do it for using people's skill sets so if I ever think I need need to call someone who is like really good on Instagram like I can maintain a database of um people their specific skill sets and the specific services that they offer like Freelancers for example uh would also like fall into into the people database um people in a particular location although I generally do that through like my phone book

um yeah this is I hope that that made sense I literally recorded a video this morning for about an hour and even I was getting lost um so yeah I hope that this gives like an overview of the system now you kind of see like the the moving parts of the system and it sounds very complex but most of this is actually completely automated and you just spend time in Daily weekly and monthly tracking and all of this is handled within you've built out processes to handle all of this stuff this is kind of just giving you a layout of the the database

and how everything works and and actually falls together um but hopefully this has given you an impression even just for this little diagram that I put together in five minutes of anyone who is working without a system such as this is just playing at a disadvantage like you genuinely are I think there's kind of no two ways about it your brain is not designed to your brain for one is not designed to retain large amounts of information the maximum amount of information you can retain in short-term memory is about seven pieces of information at which point you will start to cause yourself stress you'll be

stressing out your system when when your brain is trying to retain more than that and you feel stressed which has all types of negative health benefits it's not benefits all types of negative Health implications um but number two like the brain just can't operate in a way like this like this is something that is designed to be done by computers and like I said at the very start the weakest point in this system unfortunately uh is myself down here at the bottom here I need to make sure that I'm the one who completes the tasks he does the habits

and does the daily tracking does the weekly tracking does the monthly tracking does the quarterly stuff once I've kind of laid out where I want to be and laid out my goals and my projects are going to get me there it's literally just a case of Ruthless execution around this area this is where all of my time is really spent in the yeah in this little space down here uh the rest of it is kind of like handled by itself but yeah I hope this gave a good overview um and yeah I'm excited to uh to start putting this video series together