Notion As A Second Brain Full Recording

It's really good to see everyone here. My name is Justin. I'm Notion's, one of Notion's community ambassadors for Los Angeles, specifically for UCLA. I'm currently a student that's going to UCLA and Notion asked me to help organize this event with Thiago and Rita House. Thank you so much again Sarah and Rita House for having us here. It's really great to see everyone. We're gonna have a great event tonight. We have a talk given by Thiago Forte, as I'm sure you're all aware, followed by a shorter talk by Lauren Valdez. A little bit about myself. So I'm one of Notion's community ambassadors, as I mentioned. I help Notion get organized at UCLA and help students get on board with the product, as I'm sure many of you are aware. I'll let Thiago introduce himself and we can get this event started. Thanks Justin. Hey everyone. A lot of familiar faces actually. My name is Thiago Forte and I teach a course called Building a Second Brain. Has anyone here heard of Building a Second Brain by any chance? Can I see a show of hands? Okay, lots. Awesome. Building a Second Brain is a course, but it's also a methodology, a philosophy, some would even say a way of life. That teaches people to use technology in a certain way. Not just as a distraction, as an interruption, as a burden, but as an extension of their mind, an extension of their intellect, an extension of their intuition, an extension of their self. It's very deep stuff. And I've partnered with Notion to do this series of events to talk about the relationship between that methodology, which has a lot of interesting ideas and concepts and frameworks, and a very practical thing, which is the Notion software, the tool. So what I want to talk to you about tonight with Notion as a Second Brain, it's kind of self-explanatory in the title, but what would it look like, or could it look like, or should it look like to use Notion, a piece of productivity software, as something as grand and kind of profound as a second brain, as an extension of the most complex and amazing mechanism, machine in the universe, which is the human brain. Can I see a quick show of hands, how many of you use Notion or have used it? Okay, similar numbers. So that's the course I teach. I'm not going to really talk about it much. If you want to learn more, you can go to buildingasecondbrain.com. There's a form at the top of that page that if you enter your email address, I'll send you a series of seven emails that kind of has like my basic seven principles, one per day for a week. But I'm here to answer a different question, which is the question I receive day in and day out. Not are you switching to Notion, but when are you switching to Notion? The only question I receive more often is, are you Elon Musk? It's the only one. They're neck and neck though. And really, this is a question I've been slightly obsessively thinking about as we've been going to different cities and meeting some of the most passionate, smart, engaged people really we've seen anywhere. It's really incredible to see the movement, the community that Notion is building. And so I had to really go back to the beginning. We have to go back to a history of productivity apps, which may not sound like the most exciting topic ever, but I promise you it has a ton of relevance for what we talk about today. And what I saw was that it all started with email. Email was like the big bang of productivity software, right? I don't know if you remember, probably not everyone in here remembers the arrival of email in the 90s. Remember AOL? When you'd hear that sound and that you've got mail, that was like a world-changing thing. I mean, truly a singular moment in history. Before that, you had to, what, send telegrams, write letters, maybe make phone calls, and suddenly you could fire off an electronic message to any person with an email address in the world. And it's funny to think back. You'd hear that you've got mail, and it was like, oh my gosh, I'm so special. Someone thought of me. It was like this privilege. It was like you were the chosen recipient of this email. Now you see the red dot and the 50,000 number badge, and you're just like, oh, more emails. It's amazing how fast it's changed from the greatest blessing to the greatest curse. And that's a pattern we're going to see again and again. So what I started to see as I talked to different people, and that's the amazing thing, is the people who invented these things are still around, and some of them still working. There's people on those postcards out there that are still working, like Ted Nelson, right? So from reading, from talking to people, from just looking at different sources, I noticed that there's a pattern. And this isn't mine. This is from a company called, I think, Gartner, which is a research firm. It's very well-established, well-recognized, nothing controversial. And it talks about the hype cycle of how technologies enter the mainstream. So something happens. There's some invention, some breakthrough, some new kind of capability. Then it tends to get overhyped. Everyone says the characteristic here is this is going to change everything. The whole world will be different. We'll never be the same. Our daily life will be transformed. And it kind of goes way beyond any reasonable expectation of what a technology could do. And then, of course, nothing can fulfill those expectations. So it drops into the trough of disillusionment. But then it's not that bad either, right? It's just a tool. It's a technology. And it kind of goes up the slope of enlightenment. And I love the parallels here to meditation and stuff. And then it hits the plateau of productivity. And it's interesting because all through this roller coaster, it's not really having an effect on the way people work. Maybe some people, like the fringe nerds like you and me, but for most people, it hasn't entered the mainstream, hasn't become a part of normal kind of work culture. So what started to happen in the 1990s as we had this email explosion? What tends to happen is as the tool gets adopted, and as it becomes really mainstream, people start to stretch the use case. So email was started for a very simple thing, send and receive messages. But then as people spent more and more of their day in email, it became like another limb. They started going, oh, but we could use this for notifications. We could use this as a to-do list. We could use this as so many things. All these functions started being added onto email. If you think about it, though, that really is not ideal, right? How many of you use your email inbox? You can be honest. Use your email inbox as a to-do list sometimes. Even I do it sometimes. Come on. And that's really not ideal. That's not what it was invented for, right? How much sense does it make to have a to-do list that anyone in the whole world who has your email address can add something to at any time, day or night, and when they add it to that list, it goes right up at the very top? It doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So to kind of relieve that pressure, task managers were invented. Task managers are essentially digital to-do lists. It's a piece of software for managing the things you have to do, right? So how many of you use a task manager like OmniFocus, Things, Todoist, Wunderlist, any of these? A lot of us, right? Okay. And that was, again, a revolution. It really was kicked off in really the sort of explosion was 2001 with the publication of GTD, Getting Things Done, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, right? I mean, the reason GTD needed to exist was because of the incredible volume of what were called open loops, basically new things for you to think of and keep track of. But then the same thing happened, right? The percentage of the population who was ever going to adopt a task manager, which is not 100, it's never 100, they did, and they started going, oh, we could use this for more things. Does anyone have any guesses as to what we started using, still today, using task managers for? Any ideas? What's that? Notes. Yeah, right? You're already there. You're already writing things down in a list format. Why not write your grocery list and a note to self and a reminder and a quote from a book? All these things started going into your task manager, which, again, created that pressure because it's not ideal, right? When you're there in the midst of the chaos of your day and you're just needing to know the next action, next action, next action, you don't really want that Shakespearean Hamlet quote in there. You don't really want that passage from a, you know, cognitive psychology book. All these random notes that we take aren't really helpful in that context. So in the 2010s, really with the rise of smartphones, starting with the iPhone in 2007, we had what I call the digital notes revolution. And I don't know, how many of you remember this? Like the early days of Evernote, the fervor and the excitement was surreal, right? I mean, now we completely take it for granted. The ability to save text and different kinds of media and then to just have it show up on different devices and be completely synced was absolutely magical. And the big difference that digital notes had was that it could capture large volumes of notes. It wasn't just one line at a time like in a task manager. You could save thousands of words of text. You could save images. You could save links. You could save PDFs, attachments, GIFs, all that kind of stuff in a place that it didn't interfere with your day-to-day work. So it's now on the eve of 2020, an almost sci-fi-esque year still feels like. And I think this is where we're at right now. It's like the bubble of digital notes is in the process of popping. And this is what I want to explore and kind of look at more closely because I think it's really interesting and has big implications. So the question is, if Notion is this new layer, this kind of new level of the pyramid, what is the job that it's best suited for? And we have some clues from what we've just seen. It's probably the job that the previous generation of productivity software is not doing very well. So here's what I notice with digital notes. There's a small percentage of notes, maybe 2%, 3%, 5% at most that people access and relate to in a very different way. There's your book notes and your random, just static notes. But there are certain notes, for example, dashboards, documentation, dynamic lists, which I just mean lists that are more than just a list of 10 things that doesn't change, but lists that have more action and kind of change. Procedures, checklists, and templates. So things like standard operating procedures. How do we do this process in my business? Things like a list of goals that changes, that evolves. Things like checklists for, say, how you pack for when you travel, or checklists for how you publish a blog post. All sorts of different things. And I'm starting to think that this job is the one that Notion is primarily going to be taking over. And I'm trying to come up with a word for these. I'm very open to suggestions because I think these ones are not that great. But I am currently calling them dashboards. And I'll tell you in a minute why. Or working documents is a bit broader option. And I like the double meaning of working documents in that you're using them to work, but they're also working. They're working when you sleep. They have a certain intelligence. They have certain abilities beyond just a kind of static document. And here's some kind of characteristics, excuse me, that I picked out. They're essential for action, right? So these aren't just your notes on a textbook you read in college 15 years ago. It's like something you need to do your work each day. But they also change frequently. So there's an updating. There's a dynamic. There's a responsive element that they need. They're much more sharing friendly than in the past. They're designed with the assumption that you'll share instead of sharing being this like backdoor kind of contingency plan. Multiple views needed, right? You need more than one way of seeing that data. Sometimes it needs to be in a calendar, sometimes in a checklist, sometimes in a template. It's the same data, just needs different views. It's kind of similar. It's multi-dimensional, has more than just one kind of way of sorting it. And modular blocks, right? And I think the analogy to dashboards is interesting because if you think of a dashboard, it has to be accurate and informative, right? Your life depends, your safety and the safety of others depends on the dashboard. So it has to be accurate, it has to be correct, but it also has to be, it also has to change constantly, right? Think about when you're driving and you see someone come out onto the road, you have to be able to glance in just a moment for a second at your dashboard and get just the information that you need to take the action to sort of. And it's interesting if you look at often the predecessors to these things have started business, right? There's not a startup in San Francisco where we lived, my wife Lauren and I lived up until a year ago. You can't walk into a startup office in San Francisco without seeing dashboards. It's kind of like a trend of the past few years, right? There's sales metrics, there's revenue metrics, there's customer metrics, usage metrics, all these kinds of things. Until now you had to be an engineer or have an engineer, a ton of APIs, a ton of training, back end access, a designer, a UX designer, all these things to be able to create these. And now it's sort of like they're filtering down potentially to consumers. There's a movement called the no code movement. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe not. Notion is part of it, other apps like Airtable, Webflow, that basically allow the creation of interfaces, the creation of software to a certain extent without the use of code, right? It's like drag and drop stuff. It's things that you can not exactly create from scratch, but you can configure, you can customize, you can sort of build on your own using very user-friendly tools. So maybe this new generation, this new layer of the pyramid can be working documents. If that's the case, there's three patterns that we should look for. Three patterns that we saw in each of the previous generations. The first one is that the new generation of apps, productivity apps, takes over primarily the most sophisticated, complex, higher order jobs, right? They don't take over the whole thing. They don't even want to actually, because most of the old jobs are kind of boring, they're not very sexy, they're not very trendy. They want to do like the new cutting edge, the frontier stuff. Second, and this is really kind of unexpected and counterintuitive, the previous generation doesn't become unnecessary, right? Think of after all these generations, is email obsolete in any way? I'd say it's more important than ever. It's the one platform that doesn't change constantly every few years, right? The previous generation doesn't become unnecessary. In fact, it actually becomes better than ever because it no longer has to constantly keep innovating and trying to be something it's not. It can just refocus on its original use case and especially efficiency in that use case. So you look at what is the other hot kind of up and coming productivity app alongside Notion right now is superhuman, right? What is superhuman? It's going back to that first generation, reinventing it with an insane focus on efficiency, right? Like they have in the corner, they show the number of like milliseconds, microseconds it takes to delete a message or to send a message, all these things. It's like they've removed all the cruff of Gmail. Gmail's become this really kind of monster and they're helping you do that one thing with extreme speed. And third, each new generation provokes a massive explosion in the volume of the thing it helps people create. So you see this again and again. Think about email. Who would have guessed if you went back 30, 40 years, who would have guessed that the average knowledge worker, the average professional needed to receive hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails per week? Like who would have thought? We had no idea. I mean, how many letters did you get a week before email? It's not even in the ballpark. It's like two order, two, three orders of magnitude more. Same thing with tasks, right? When the first task managers came out, it was like, oh, what are your 10 tasks? Now they have to be able to track hundreds, if not thousands of tasks, right? It's normal to have hundreds of tasks. Anyone who does GTD knows that hundreds is normal as modern humans. Same thing with notes. Who would have guessed these Evernote collections of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 are normal, right? If you've been using these apps for any period of time, they make it so fast to create whatever the thing is that the volume just explodes. So if these repeat, and I think they will, here's what we should see over the next few years. That Notion, specifically for Notion, Notion will fulfill the demand primarily. It will be used for other things. Some people will use it for tasks, some people for notes, but its core use case, the most interesting thing, the most innovative thing, the thing that really allows it to start a new paradigm will be working documents, will be documents that are essential for action and also need to change quickly and have different ways of interacting and kind of viewing them. Second, and this is definitely controversial if you follow the digital note controversies on Twitter, as I'm sure you all do, the digital note taking apps will survive and will thrive. Everyone's predicting the imminent demise of Evernote. I don't think that's going to happen. I think that whole generation of apps, and there's so many of them. I mean, you have Microsoft OneNote, kind of the old dinosaur. There's Google Keep on the sidelines. There's Simple Note. There's a whole group of note taking apps for the iPad that are kind of reinventing digital notes, almost in the original way of drawing and kind of sketching. And they'll be better than ever because they'll be able to focus on really the one thing that they were always destined for, which is just taking notes. Think about a Moleskine, right? A Moleskine, a paper notebook just takes notes. That's it, right? It captures, it saves, it sort of pulls things from the physical world into the digital world. And that's enough. That's a big enough job, I think, to support an entire category of software. And third, there will be an explosion. It's hard for us to imagine now, I think, just like with the other ones. But working documents are going to explode. Dashboards are going to explode. Think about if you had as much information on your productivity as you did about your car, or your computer, or some device that has a dashboard, right? Imagine if you had a dashboard for your health that interrelated and showed you the relationships between your cholesterol and blood pressure, and your exercise and your sleep. Imagine if you had dashboards for your relationships, you kept track, you had a personal CRM, customer relationship manager, that kept track of your different relationships, how strong they were when you had checked in, what plans you're making with them. Imagine if you had a dashboard for your finances, one that you created, not just some software someone gave you, but you could customize. What do you want to see about your finances? What do you want to know? Imagine what would happen if we had the ability to create these working documents, anyone did, with whatever data they wanted, with whatever data they could get their hands on. It's really a powerful future, I think, that we are looking at. So, some of you came here, I know, to answer this question, which is, should I switch to Notion? And I hope by seeing this kind of more complex history, that you now see that that is a really overly simplistic notion. It really doesn't take into account that our productivity, as you saw with the pyramid, is multi-layered. It's not just one thing, it's not one dimension. Your productivity itself is this multi-dimensional stack of interrelated capabilities, some of which are always there, have been there a long time, maybe will always be there. Other ones that are much more advanced, that maybe not everyone in the world needs, only the most kind of advanced knowledge workers who work with the highest volumes of information, or the most complex information. But what I encourage you, oh that's not yet actually, okay. So, I think it's not about switching, it's more about layering. It's about layering the new generation onto the top of what you're already doing. So, let's get a little more practical. This is a note. This is a note from Evernote. I picked it at random from a recent Black Friday sale that I did. It was my notes on making an analogy of the second brain idea to the Pensieve in Harry Potter, which is this magical dish that you can sort of see your old, you can pour your memories into it, and then relive your memories. It's a very cool analogy. I have a post on it. If you search Pensieve on my blog, you can find the post. But this was just some simple notes pulling from, I think, a quote from one of the books that I saw online, a couple forums, and maybe some social media, just a few sources, that I essentially used to write this blog post for this promotion. And I discarded it, essentially. It's essentially a disposable note. I mean, I'll keep it in the archives, but it's super unlikely that I would refer to this note in the future. I'll refer to the blog post, right? And to me, this is a perfect note, right? This is a note that doesn't benefit from more structure, doesn't benefit from headings and toggles and tables and interlinked databases and all these things. Structure would be not an improvement on this. But then you look at something. So this is my notion. This is how we manage the blog workflow. Praxis is my blog. And it's really central to our business because everything goes through the blog. Every announcement, every promotion, every new product, every interview, every partnership, every event like this one. It's almost like the pipeline of all things that are happening in the business. And we use this kind of Kanban columns view of the workflow. Each one of these cards is a post. So they start as ideas, then they have some notes attached. You can see some links here to Evernote. Then they become outlines, and they become drafts, and then posts, and then social media, and then email, and then finally they're archived. And this, I think, is a really great use case for notion, right? You think about what's happening here. There's a dynamic quality, right? Things are moving in non-linear ways. Something might move forward, but then I realize, oh, it's not ready. It has to come back. Two posts might get combined if I realize they're similar. One post might get split up. There's a lot of different ways that they move. And then, of course, by clicking here and creating a different view, I could see these in a different way. I could see them in a calendar view. So if I want to know, what are we going to be publishing six weeks from now, right? What announcement with that new blog post that's coming out in six weeks can I align? There's all sorts of strategic things. Some things have to be published before other things. Some things can't be published until something else is published. And really, that dynamic kind of behavior is captured well in notion. And just in case you're curious, there's a few other things we're currently, I'm currently using notion for. Running my online course, building a second brain. So if you think about it, that's something that repeats, but is also different each time, right? So there's kind of a template quality. And then, this is now called Forte Labs HQ, is our operations. We have standard operating procedures. How to set a meeting, how to organize a meetup, how to publish a blog post, all that kind of stuff. And they all interlink. So all the actions in these two that have to be done more than a couple times have links to the standard operating procedures. And of course, this is all all shared with the team. I think what's going to happen with digital notes apps, such as my beloved Evernote, is that they're going to be, as I said before, they're going to revert back to their true nature and become like a universal inbox. Imagine an app that was a universal inbox. You knew that you could capture anything from any source, in any format, for any purpose. That is an important job. And it's one that still to this day, Evernote does much better than Notion. And not for technological reasons, like, oh, they did better code, but for architectural reasons. Evernote is like a black box with a slot in it. You can just drop things in it. Because each note is the same, each note exists on the same level, each note is sort of interchangeable. The fact that it's kind of dumb, and it doesn't offer that same level of capability and intelligence is actually a feature, not necessarily a bug. So I'm going to leave you with just a thought to think about your holistic productivity stack. And to not necessarily have FOMO about jumping on the Notion bandwagon just because others are, or just because it seems cool. But to think about what is really at the peak of that pyramid, which is your goals. It's a perfect time of year. We're on the eve of 2020. Everyone's doing New Year's resolutions. I myself running a two-day online annual review workshop, January 4th and 5th. We do it via Zoom. I encourage you guys to join. It's going to be super fun. But when people ask, like, which app should I use? How should I use them? All these kind of questions, it depends on your goals. And I really encourage you to start there and work backwards. What is that thing that pops up every year at the beginning of the year that you go, I'll do that next year? What is that unicorn that you find yourself dreaming about, daydreaming about? That's always there kind of at the back of your mind that you want, that it calls to you, that moves you, that touches you, that you know is in some way related to your purpose, related to what really matters to you in this world. And then to work kind of downwards from there into what are the pieces of infrastructure that you need, not that you want, that you need to accomplish that. Because if you don't, productivity software even can just be another distraction. If it's just an excuse to keep making things and keep trying things, rather than the thing that really matters in the end, which is action. A couple notes. Notion has programs for education. I believe if you're a student or teacher, right, you can get the personal individual plan for free. Okay. If you have an EDU email address. And also for startups. I think you have to apply and kind of go through some things, but you can potentially get it for free or discounted if you're a startup. So I encourage you to take advantage of that. And if you have any, not just questions, but anything to offer, really this is like the beginning, these events are the beginning of an R&D process of potentially one day, I don't know, offering a course, doing more workshops, writing a book, who knows. But if there's anything that you saw in this presentation that you have thoughts on, that you think you can add some clarity to, that you have some personal experience with, because I always just have my own, primarily my own experience, reach out. That's my website. You can find from there my email address, my Twitter. I may take some time to get back to you, but I will get back to you. And that's the talk. And I'm going to now introduce my partner Lauren. So she's going to do a talk on how she uses Notion, on how we use Notion for those customers and clients. And she has a different take just because she's kind of honestly working closer with people, kind of on more specific and customized issues, which is what we do with our coaching and consulting. And she's going to have an interesting perspective to share with you. Okay, so we're going to switch out computers here, and I'm just going to get started chatting while Thiago sets us up. So I am the polar opposite of Thiago. We're married, but opposites attract. So he was born super organized, like thinking in structures. I come from a big giant Latina family where we just do everything by how we feel, not based on apps and what's next. I got through college writing things on my hand, and then a professor would say, like, the paper's due this week. And I'm like, oh, we have to do that? But I've trained myself to be organized because I've needed to survive as a knowledge worker. But because of that, I think I have a very different take on these sort of apps and things like this, because I work with a lot of people who really struggle with getting productive and getting organized. So I'd love to hear from people in this room who here has downloaded Notion but hasn't really, like, touched it that much. Raise your hand. All right. Okay, cool. So I'm in your guys' camp. So I'm someone who I downloaded Notion maybe at the beginning of this year, and then it was, like, too much, and I just closed it, and I didn't open it again for many months. And so my talk is about how I kind of got into what I think is, like, the minimum level of getting the maximum value of Notion for me and what I do. And so my talk is about the lazy person guide to Notion. Because I really see myself as a highly lazy person. Tiago jokes that the amount of creativity I put into being lazy is, like, astonishing, because I really try to do a little bit of everything. But I am highly ambitious, and I do and achieve a lot, and I do that by making sure I invest the minimum amount of energy that I can in all the different things that I am interested in. And so I want to give you guys that kind of, like, base level, here's the way we bring ourselves into Notion. All right. So Notion's been, you know, been promoted as this all-in-one workspace, the thing that replaces everything and becomes this thing that now you can get rid of the rest of your apps, because now you have Notion. And that sounds amazing. If you guys follow the GTD principles, there's the idea that having a universal inbox is this, like, amazing thing, right? Everything goes in one place, and then you're not searching across all your devices, you're finding everything in one place. That's an amazing principle in theory, and as Thiago's talked about with our, the holistic stack of productivity apps, that it's hard when your information is split everywhere, but there's reasons why our information is split, because each application serves a different purpose. So when I started playing with Notion and watching YouTube videos about it, I've seen people who've basically made Notion like an end-all, be-all for their task manager, they're uploading files, they're basically recreating, like, Instapaper or their Pinterest boards, like, in Notion. It's pretty intense, the amount of things that people have used Notion for. It's really phenomenal and it's inspirational, and I watched these videos and I was like, that is too much. Like, I just, I don't have time for that right now. Doing a transition of all my things seems really hard and complex, so I just quickly gave up, because I'm an all-or-nothing person. Like, if I can't do something perfect, I don't do it at all. And so what I have had to find is that entry-level point that allows me to get something out of Notion without having to go all in, diving into the deep and replacing all my apps that actually have a really great function and workflow for me. So this is my productivity principle, that what is simple is sustainable. I spent many years trying to perfect my GTD system and trying to do things to the complex level at which Tiago is organized, but that doesn't work for me, because like I said, I'm pretty lazy. I can't spend so many hours tracking things and inputting information and adding tags. Like, that does not work for me. Those systems quickly break down as soon as I make them too complex. And I know plenty of productivity nerds like Tiago who love all those details, and when you love doing something, then please do it, which is my second productivity principle, which is what is pleasurable is motivating. So if something gives you pleasure, if you get really excited, like creating the most beautiful Notion board that is the wiki of your life, then do it and keep doing it. If you have no breakdowns with that system, do it. You have to find those things that are good for you, and that's something we pull into the courses that we do and the coaching that we do is helping people find that balance of what is the level of system that gets you the outcomes you want to do and achieve in your life, as well as what makes you excited. Like, how do you like to organize and do things? Like, my productivity principles are very embodied. They're a lot less outside of the apps. If I was to add to that productivity app triangle that you just showed, I would call that the digital productivity pyramid because I work in a side that's all embodied. My way of organizing is in the morning, I wake up and I do a meditation and I feel like what is the most important thing, and I do that before I check my email because if I don't do that, then I will get stuck in other people's priorities. So I have to like feel and journal right in the morning. So my method is very different, but that is pleasurable and motivating for me to sit and meditate rather than sit and look at my to-do list and be like overwhelmed by my day. I do that first so that I feel excited about my day. So I encourage you all to really find for you what is sustainable and how you do your setup and your system. And this is something I'm finding as we are doing this Notion tour right now. This is our third stop. We did Mexico City and Sao Paulo and we're talking to these people who are like all gung-ho about Notion and they have these like insane dashboards and then they have these breakdowns because you have to input all of that information physically and that's exhausting. And so as soon as you have a breakdown and not updating all your habits, trackers and those sort of things, then the whole system is broken. And so if you have to create a really complex system and it has to be perfect to work, then that system doesn't work. That's a breakdown. And so I encourage you all as you're moving into Notion to really understand what is the simple level that you can sustain and then what is pleasurable and motivating to you and do that and stick to that because that's going to be what pulls you through your own personal productivity. All right. So if any of you have taken our Building a Second Brain course, this is something we talk about is that most people when it comes to knowledge management are in level one and two of this little pyramid right here where there's the part of storing information. If you have Evernote and use a task manager and using Notion, there's a lot of focus on getting information into those systems. And as you become a more advanced user, you start being able to organize that information a lot better and creating a system and containers and figuring out your best next action and all those things. But what we focus on in our Building a Second Brain course is organizing your information in a way that is enabling action. And so if any of you follow our para system, the whole system is about organizing your information for action. And something I see a lot in people who get really tripped up in their productivity methods and have a lot of breakdowns is they organize to organize. I don't know if there's any of those people in here. I like to think of it as procrastination a lot of time for the action we know we need to take. A lot of time we know the most important action we need to take and it's a scary action. And because it's scary, we avoid it and then we make plans and we project plan and we organize and we add tags because we're actually afraid to just pick up the phone and make the phone call. We're afraid to make or to go sell and market the thing. We have to sell and market and we hate marketing so we're just going to keep fiddling and organizing things in our Todoist or our Evernote or whatnot. And so what we like to focus on in our course in our courses is what are the actions and the outcomes and the goals you're trying to achieve and then organize that information so that you can you can do and achieve those things. And this is something like people like are always shocked to know this about me. I'm so organized when it comes to work and then if you come into my house like my closets are like a disaster and I will only organize my closets when I can't find something. I'm like oh I'm like looking for something really important so then I reorganize my entire closet and that's because the goal or the action then becomes important when I need to find something so then I get organized. And I think that needs to apply a lot more to people's lives. Like there's no reason you need to perfectly organize your Evernote because most of the things in your Evernote they're just not that important. They're like little clips and ideas and quotes and things like that so they like why should they be organized. So with Notion something I think is really critical about it that makes it really impactful is that it is a great space to organize when you have a really clear goal and objective and reason to use Notion. And what we're hearing and seeing from a lot of people is they're using Notion to then replace every system they have. And the first thing I want to ask you all to question before you do that is to think about what is the purpose and the outcome of that. What is the purpose or outcome of tracking your habits? I used many habit trackers and I finally gave up on them because I realized checking the habit tracker makes no difference on whether or not I do the habit so I gave up tracking them. So I like I really like that serves no purpose. So for you all I want to encourage you to think about what is the purpose and the outcome you want to achieve and how does Notion or whatever specific app or method you're using actually help you do and achieve that thing. So because I'm super lazy I try to put in as low effort as possible but the bigger a pain gets the more effort it's worth. So something like Todoist is what I use for my task manager. Todoist is a good amount of effort to organize well for me and for me to stay on top of it but there's very little pain in my Todoist system. Evernote very very little effort to capture. It's not as great as being organized like my Todoist but it works for me. But then recently I've had some projects and some systems that just have been huge pains for me. One of them has been consulting and working with clients and if any of you guys work with partners there's huge barriers when people work on very different systems. So when you have clients and everyone uses like one group's on Trello, one group's on Asana, some of them are old school and they don't even have any sort of joint shared task managers. Like I work with some clients and they don't even have Google Docs and you're like oh my gosh. And then you have access level issues so working with clients and partners who use different systems is always a huge pain for me. And then another problem I've been having lately is some overly complex web systems that don't actually serve a purpose. And so I want to show you some case studies on how I've addressed some of these pain points with Notion. So I told you guys earlier that I opened up Notion earlier this year and then I didn't touch it again. But then at some point my pain got too much and then I reached this tipping point. And the tipping point occurred and I was like okay now I have to get over my laziness because the pain is too great. And that's how I started using Notion just recently. So once the pain is greater than my effort I start getting organized. But for me the solution has to be greater than the amount of time I input into a system. And Notion could very easily take a lot of time to set up properly. And so for me Notion has to solve a really big problem if I'm going to spend the time organizing the information I need to in Notion. All right so this is kind of how a lot of my like this is how my closet looks. And this is how my Evernote inbox looks. But as soon as I have a goal in mind then I have to then I have to get things in order. And this is kind of what I've done with Notion. I have a lot of information in Dropbox folders, in my Evernote folders, across different systems I'm using for different clients. And I've taken all that information that's spread across so many different systems and I've turned it into Notion pages that then take all that information and organize it and hyperlink it in a way where I can quickly get that glance of everything I need to see that's important and then share that in a way that's really easy. So Notion for those of you who are just getting into it, Notion's capabilities that make it really impactful and that make it the new thing that everyone's really excited about are being able to synthesize lots of information. For me taking notes in Notion and changing bullets to toggles that's already too hard. That's already harder than an Evernote document. But where Notion is really groundbreaking is being able to synthesize lots of information like Tiago was talking about. And then the other thing that I think is super impactful is just creating your own custom structure and creating custom web pages that you can easily share. And then the linked databases. The linked database features are really incredible. Being able to put information in one place and have it show up somewhere else. So I'm going to show you guys a case study of how I've recently used Notion. So this is a program that I am mentoring in. It's the Clinton Global Initiative University and there's over 700 students across the globe in this program and this is their back-end website which is so terrible and hard to find information in. And I work a lot with non-profits and non-profits are always having these like terrible ancient systems. And so what I did, my students in the program were like where do I find this? I don't know how to do this. And I went through this whole system and I also struggled to find the important information. And so I took this website and I took all the information they need to know about the program and I just turned it into a Notion page. And I'm going to show you that very quickly. I took the website and rather than having all the information for the whole program, every month I just update this Notion page. It looks terrible right now but it looks prettier on the app. And I just put the exact information that the students need to to find so that they're not emailing me all the time. And if any of you guys work with students, Justin, this is like part of my mission for you. Teaching students how to organize their information is a super critical thing for the future youth because a lot of times they ask you like 10,000 times for the same pdf you've already attached for them in like 15 emails. So now here I keep it all in one place where they have everything they need to do synced in one place where they just go through the five steps rather than having to find all this information on the Notion website. And then the other thing I'm using Notion for is for our coaching clients and our personal clients we use where we create a page for them and the page has everything we work on. The goals we set, the next actions, all the call recordings, everything we cover as well as like relevant resources we guide them to. And so everything in the project is saved in one place rather than them having to go find it and that this also serves as our final deliverable for the projects that we work on. Everything we've touched, everything we worked on is like hyperlinked here so it's an easy way for them to stay on top of everything. So this is just a couple really quick use cases. I know many of you in here are using Notion in far superior ways and I encourage those of you to start making YouTube videos about this because there really is very little information on how to use Notion well and all the people who are new Notion YouTubers they're all blowing up. So I encourage you to make more videos and show people how do you actually get into these programs. I know Harvey over here is doing some interesting APIs with his gaming company so you guys can go talk to him. And I really encourage you all to be those leaders and people showing and demonstrating here's how you use this program. And I just want to leave you with one thing. So the last thing I want to leave you with for those of you who follow the para method that we teach which is organizing all of your information in the same hierarchy across all your programs is to think of Notion as another layer that's part of your para system. So we teach this to people is naming your projects the same exact way and having the same hierarchy across every system. So the same way you name your projects in Google Drive, your task manager, your notes apps, do the same thing in Notion. And that's how you start to create consistency across all of your programs and that's the way you're able to find what you need to find across all your programs even if you're not moving everything into Notion. This is the way that you stay consistent across all your things. And my last quote I want to leave you with is something we like to live by that systems that must be perfect to be reliable are deeply flawed. So really keep it simple because that's what's going to be sustainable for you. But this is a great point for everyone is call to action here because I think we should probably finish up. There's an enormous opportunity right now. There's a powerful vacuum for thought leadership around Notion and the whole no code movement. I mean, it's rare that you can see the next paradigm coming from so far away in such an almost predictable way. And there's just incredible demand. So many new people coming onto this and related platforms. And if you have a niche, which it's super interesting, it sounds like you have, or you have an interest in blogging or creating YouTube videos or teaching online courses. I'm a huge evangelist for online courses. Now is the time. If this is your thing, there's just it's like this green grass, this beautiful pasture of opportunity open. So I would I'd really step into it and tag me on Twitter and I'll retweet it. Thank you so much, everyone.