How We Organize Our Life in Notion Second Brain

The single most powerful thing I've done in my business, in my life, and in my creative work is to write things down. I stopped trying to remember what's important and I started writing those things down instead. And one of the most important places I do that is in an app called Notion. In this video, I'm going to break down how I use Notion to manage the craziness of day-to-day life and focus on my priorities in my business, in my life, and my creativity. Over the last two years, I've gone from working as a solo freelancer to a 10-person team. It has been the wildest ride of my life. I had to learn so many things. How to manage a team, how to recruit and hire talented people, how to delegate, how to make sure all these different moving parts continue to operate at a high standard even if I'm not there myself all the time. I quickly became overwhelmed. One key thing that saved me was developing a set of rock-solid standard operating procedures known as SOPs. SOPs saved my life. When I hired my first employee, we started a weekly ritual. Every week, I would demonstrate how I completed just one repeated task. Could be anything. Publishing a post on our blog, paying an invoice, scheduling a meeting for me, kind of rambling and all over the place. But here's where Bethany would take a very critical second step. Actually re-watch the recording of that Zoom call and she would turn my messy explanation into a streamlined checklist in Notion. Let's take a look at a couple. So let's just look through here. For example, if I ask my assistant or someone else at the company to add a translated article to a blog post, sometimes we get people who have taken the time to actually translate our blog posts into other languages and I like to take the step of just adding links to those translations to the original post. There's some instructions where to put it. There's an example of one where we added Russian, Chinese, and Portuguese versions. Let's say for example, we want to add one of our customers to a Slack channel. So this is an action that we take often and you can see it's essentially a checklist. It's the steps that anyone can take to complete this task. Some of these are toggles, so they actually have sub-steps which are sometimes needed but you can also hide them if you already know what's being described. This is the basic checklist up here at the top and then we often have little comments or little memos such as if customers are having issues with the invites to Slack, this is kind of a secondary checklist we can follow to solve that issue. Look at a different one, for example, creating an ebook. So this is a different example in that this is a much more extensive SOP. We're essentially compiling about 15 or 20 existing articles from our blog into an ebook that then gets sold as a Kindle book on Amazon. So you can see it's quite a bit more involved. There's many steps and this is more of a project I would say but what's so valuable here is we only do this maybe once a year, once every two years. If we didn't have this documentation, if we didn't have all these notes, every one or two years we'd have to completely reinvent this from scratch and, you know, try to remember and piece together what we learned the last time. This way we remember all the lessons we've learned in the past and we can just follow the steps that we developed the last time. You can see that they tend to be structured in terms of actions. In other words, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to download a list? Are you trying to export audio? Are you trying to forward an email? It's not specific to any one person or any one function. Anyone in the company can go onto this page which is accessible throughout the company and can do a search up here in the little search bar. For example, if we type in forward here they can find the action and they can take that action without needing to ask anyone, without needing training, without needing a bunch of hand-holding. It allows us to move faster, to innovate faster, to not have to reinvent the wheel, and overall to have a company that people spend as much time as possible doing work that utilizes their best skills and their best thinking rather than trying to remember how to complete basic tasks. We also use Notion to organize our household. A couple years ago we finally bought our very first home in Long Beach in Southern California. I've now been a homeowner for almost two years and I can say without exaggeration running a household is at least as complicated as running a business. Bills to pay, things to fix, contractors and service providers to manage, passwords to remember, maintenance schedules, the crush of day-to-day chores and cleaning and errands. Luckily we also use Notion for this. I'm going to introduce my wife Lauren Valdez to explain how it works. Hi I'm Lauren and I'm going to walk you through our home's operating manual. So we started this operating manual when the previous owners of our house gave us this thick physical file of all the house history including documents on the remodel, different service providers they've used, things like that. We took copious notes and we decided to make this digital so that all the information could be searchable and actionable. So let's dive into Notion. So a principle we practice with Notion is capturing everything as soon as you have the information and you can organize it, reorganize it, reformat later. So when we got all of our notes on the house we just dumped it into these toggles. It has lots of different information on the different systems like the security system, the internet, the kitchen, all these kinds of things. Like we even got these notes from the old owners on paints and grouts and you can see this links to a database that has all the different colors of the paints and grouts and what they're called so that if we ever need to make updates we can quickly reference this and purchase the same materials. There's lots of maintenance notes in here as well like how to clean a hot tub, the manual for that, all that kind of stuff. It all lives in here. This information I've been slowly reorganizing into databases so that it's easier to find and we're able to take action on this information. Down here I have these different tables. The first one is on house services. On this page we have all of the service providers and utility and things like that that we've used on the home. We started this page because it's actually really difficult to find good service providers. For example, we have an antique stove that needs a special kind of repair person and so that's who we have to go to. We also had this problem when we bought the home. We had this motorized gate that was broken and the old owners told us that they couldn't find anyone to fix it and so we had to go through like three or four people before we finally found someone to fix it. We have their information in here and if we ever have a friend that needs a gate fixed, you know, we can give them that number. In here we keep all of the key information that makes it easy whether it is me or Tiago or maybe someone in our household using this information to schedule a repair. So we have things in here like the phone numbers, the account numbers, we have details on is auto billing set up, is the password shared in our shared password vault, and then we also have who is responsible for that service. Who's the person whose name is on the bill, that sort of thing. So I've added new databases and new pages as that information has become important to maintaining our home. For example, we have a 15 month old baby and recently I had to reorganize all the closets to get all of his Christmas gifts into the closets and that took reorganizing a lot of things into storage. It was really important to me to track where I stored stuff so that I could easily find it for a future child or for loaning it out to a friend. So I created this database called storage and it has different items and where those items are located in which closet, in which area of the closet, and then I also track when this was last edited and then there are certain tags like these are tagged baby but I might have stuff tagged, you know, kitchen or guest or things like that. So this way we can easily find it. Also when it comes to managing a household there's things that you have to manage over very long periods of time over, you know, years. So we have a database that also keeps track of time of certain things that we have to do. Like we have to change the HVAC filters every six months or you have to clean the air ducts every three to five years. So the next time we have to do that is 2025 and because these are such long timelines we want to track it on something like this rather than a calendar or a task manager. Our Notion home operating manual saves us a ton of time and it gives us a lot of clarity on what we need to do to maintain our home. The third way I use Notion as a second brain is to support my creative efforts. Writing is my passion but it also happens to be our business's main marketing channel. The blog posts that I publish are what bring new people into the business and into our courses. I needed to figure out a way to make my writing more systematic and predictable but without killing the spontaneity and the joy of following my curiosity. This is where Notion's Kanban boards become so useful. Kanban boards were invented by the automaker Toyota in its famous Toyota production system and they would use it to just track the movement of parts across the factory floor all the way into finished vehicles. A Kanban board is a system for tracking the progress of a piece of work over time. The whole board is divided into columns. The first column all the way on the left represents the first stage of creating something, the first step. So let me show you an example with the kind of thing that I create which is a blog post. Every post that I write, every article, every essay starts out as just an idea, the first hint, the first clue that there might be something interesting happening here. Once it enters the idea column I start slowly starting to gather a loose collection of notes which I draw from various sources such as books, articles, podcasts, quotes that I find, interesting facts, and of course my own thoughts and experiences. As I start to make progress on writing this post all I have to do is simply move each little card which represents one single piece of writing over to the next stage of the process. So from the idea step my pieces of writing go into the notes column, then into the outline column, then into the first draft column, and eventually they become finished pieces of writing that are ready to be published and to be sent out. Because we have all this space and these long columns we can do this tracking with many many pieces of work at once. At any given time I have between 20 to 30 separate pieces of writing incubating at various stages of completion. Obviously clearly way way too much for me to keep track of in my head. Some of these posts I can barely remember. I would need to click these links to see what my current notes are on that topic. This is why it's so important to use a knowledge management tool. I can see at a glance by looking at this page my holistic creative process. You would think having so many things going would be stressful and overwhelming and if I tried to do that with my own brain it would be. But because I'm using an app like Notion to do this, having so many things going at once actually frees me. It allows me to choose what I work on each day to match how I'm feeling that day. You know on some days I feel like writing something very detailed and very technical. Other days I feel like writing something more whimsical, more exploratory. Sometimes a particular post or article will stall for weeks even months at a time and that's perfectly fine. That just means I have more thinking and research to do before it's ready. Nothing kills the creative spirit like self judgment. I trust that my natural curiosity, natural imagination will lead me to interesting places and the reason I have that confidence is I have a support system called a second brain and I have Notion to make sure that I'll never ever forget the ideas and the information that is most important to me. For more details on how to manage your creative business and life projects in Notion or really any second brain app, subscribe to the YouTube channel. I want to thank you for watching and I hope you'll join us on your own journey of building a second brain.