Hello everyone and welcome back to another feature here on the Keep Productive YouTube channel, my name is Francesco
And today we've got David Pierce from The Wall Street Journal on me and David just finished up doing a feature for the tools
They use podcast
Which will be available on YouTube as well for you to go and enjoy because we did a video with it
But David is going to take us through a really exciting application that were both pretty interested at which is notion
And David did a great piece in
Wsj?
Maybe it was at March wasn't it? I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. It was a great piece. I'll include it below for everyone
Who's listening along?
all about how he uses notion and I guess progressively how notion is
Changing the space. So David's actually gonna share his notion account for us today
So, I think it's gonna be quite exciting. So I'll pass over to you David to give you a call
alright
First I'm going to figure out how to share my screen which we will we will see
See how this goes
Yeah
Yes, okay, this is very exciting, okay, so this is my notion
It's relatively straightforward the I don't know if you feel this way Francesco, but I find myself spending
Way too much time doing things like adding icons and covers to every page that I have that sound right to you. Okay?
Yes, I have yeah, I'm totally with you and so I have
basically three things
I'll walk you through how I do my to-do list in a minute because that's where I've spent most of my time trying to figure
things out but basically the the setup is trying to
Bring all of my personal stuff and all of my work stuff kind of into one place. So the personal stuff is
Relatively straightforward. That's that's me. That's little David emoji, I guess and this is basically just a
Rough list of sort of all the things going on in my life. This is like stuff I want to do in 2018
This is like a links for a Flipboard magazine. I have that I keep forgetting to add stuff to this is like
I
Travel a lot for work. So I actually I don't know if this is
Updated or not? It should be I need to put more things in the packing list
This is so
like things that I want to do in, California
And a lot of this I'm still sort of in the process of moving over from Evernote
But one of the things I really like about this is that instead of just pasting links
It actually gives you this kind of stuff so I can be like, oh, right. I do want to go to the Big Sur hotels
And then I just got married. So this is a mercifully short list now
But it used to be much longer and much more full of things
And that was my vows, which I will not show you
and then I have this is things like my loyalty numbers for
Hotels and airlines and one things I really like about it is I can just from any page just go in and like type
Delta which and then it'll show my Delta number
This is where I have tried so many times to keep something like a bullet journal in Evernote and then again in notion and
In either case it hasn't really stuck
But I've always kind of liked the idea of having I don't even know what's gonna be actually yes
So this was like there was a while especially when I was writing the piece where I was trying to keep sort of a day-to-day
This is actually the wrote about notion
Okay, so this is actually good example. So this is
what I do for work is I have
one of these pages for every story I write basically and so it's
Like these are this is notes from a story or notes from something. I read about business apps
These are notes from interviews that I did for it. This is
Information about different apps and the fact that you can have these toggles in notion is one of my absolute favorite things
This sort of collapsible bullets is just wildly helpful
And I have this set up as a template. So it'll give it'll give me the these colors and these headers for everyone
So I can plan the video I can plan I can outline the piece
I've gotten these have gotten more full in in pieces after that. I got better and better at notion as time went on
so it's my personal stuff and it's
sort of increasingly
filling up with with
Recipes and things that I like and I can just sort of jump into here anytime. I need anything
by the one thing that I try to be good at on the internet is
Anytime I see something I like just saving it and then eventually it'll come back and be useful to me again
And so that's not always true
But just having a place in here where I can dump stuff has been great and the place where I dump stuff
Is this this is the inbox?
So this is a portlet poorly spelled version of somebody told me I need to watch the show Person of Interest
I'm going to and then these are like links that are interesting or people that I think I should talk to you and
We're having a party on July 28th. Everyone's invited. Um
So, yeah, so that's that and then this is actually
For a column and writing right now with oh, yeah. Well I have interviewed for
This is like I I'm writing about streaming music. And so this is a photo I spent way too long getting for the cover and
Basically, like stories and stats and notes that I've taken and people I interviewed and stuff like that
so
Yeah, this inbox part is really important to me though, and it's setting up templates
Like this has been the best thing for me about notion
I don't know if this has been your experience
But it's been it's a little weird when you're just on a page to know where to put stuff. Mmm
So I'm having a thing, especially on mobile that I can just click and be like don't forget to call dad
Sort of sets it up as like it just makes it easier to put new things in there
My favorite part where I spend too much time, what's up?
I was really gonna I was gonna say I really like the way that you're using the
Sort of emojis and also the the colors of the headers. Do you change the colors of the headers then I
I do. I don't know if I do for all of them probably like a template or something of that
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's about right
Let's see. What's a good example? So this is this I spend a lot of time. Do you know this website unsplash.com I do
Yeah, I spent a lot of time on that site looking for the pictures
Look great, and and I like them very much. So this is like shopping list for different things
I need from different places and then whenever I go somewhere and buy stuff it all goes into there
And then eventually I'll just delete this page and start another one because I found that keeping completed things is not useful. Yeah
so then I also have a page for
All the stuff I want to get to and so this is I think my favorite one is probably this one
These are like books that I would like to read and so anytime somebody recommends a book it goes in here
Yes, and then I can drop it into okay. I need to read this
and
yeah, it's to read and it's nonfiction and
Then it goes out of this list and sometimes if I'm feeling really ambitious. I'll put a like an Amazon link. I
Finished this one so that can go in there
and so this this becomes sort of the tracker for everything I want to and am reading and
It's been incredibly handy because often I'll be like I don't feel like reading something and then wind up just reading old books or watching
old movies that I've already seen
Yeah, so it's it's been nice to have something. That's like, oh no, here are the new things they usually be yeah
Which I like a lot. I really like that. That's
To be honest like mine. My read one is so much like I don't include the recommendations in there
But I think that's something that I've taken away from that straightaway just to include the recommendations. It's really neat
Yeah, it's been really helpful for me. I mean even the ones I don't end up taking I delete stuff from this list without
Actually reading it all the time but having just being able to be like, oh, right
That was that book that that person was talking about and it's back to sort of the same thing
just having this one place where everything that has been on my mind at one point or another is
Even if I get decide to get rid of it and never care about it again
Just like yeah that idea of like what was that thing? The answer is always it's in notion somewhere. Yeah
I
think and then the last thing I don't know how much of this I should actually show you but this is this is where at
this is the this is my
Sort of to-do list and I have changed this a million times I have used
Notion has this great
uh
Agenda thing that I really like is one which I have tried to use many times
But it has some awkward things and doesn't work super well for me
So I wind it back on something like this, which is more work to manage
but does the job and this is always nice to do today and
Later this week. Luckily. This list is starting to get short. These are like big projects. I'm working on and
Yeah, and then having these reminders
That have started to show up in notion where it can actually like ping your phone when something is due
yeah has been a big change for me because it's one of the tricky things just like
I've always thought about this with
with
Productivity apps is like where do I put pay rent?
because I need to remember to do it and you remember to do it every week and technically it's
You know a thing it is a task to do. Yeah
And so having reminders for it has been has been huge
They they haven't released the recurring have they yet, but that's that would just round it off will now
Yeah, I'm told it's coming if they do recurring and then improve the calendar thing so it can actually integrate your calendar
I will just never leave notion ever again. They're looking at in the API right next. Yes
Change things when they're yeah when I when I met with them a while ago, he was talking about doing like a two-way
google, calendar sync and I sort of freaked out sitting in their office just listening to them talk about it, but
So so yeah, I mean that's kind of the that's kind of the run of it
It's relatively. This is sort of a similar version of all the stuff I have for for work different meeting notes
And and this is like I went to a sonís event and this is just like all the notes all the notes
I took sitting there
And all of it is searchable. All of it is
Easily available. I can share individual pages. It's it's extremely handy. I love it. I love it
And so I can delete that
You've you've gone like much further than I expected
Like I mean, I've saw some of the screenshots in your article, but was like, actually this has made my notion. You look really weak
It's all our games
No, that's that's really really insightful. Thank you. David. My pleasure and I will say can I offer one tip?
oh, yeah, my the absolute best thing to me about notion has been the different views of
these
boards and tables and I feel like I'm only just starting to
Experiment with them and understand them
so like I have this one table of all of my tasks and I can group them in any way I need to and
move stuff around and see it all in totally different ways and
It's just this like incredibly
Powerful tool kind of unlike anything I've ever seen
before and you can like change how it's grouped and how you what what shows up and
I was when I was with the notion crew
They they were showing me the the how they do
tasks and they have like 50 different views and it was just the wildest most impressive thing I've ever seen so
That would be anybody wants to like really go pro with the notion start messing with that stuff. I love it. That's amazing
Thank you David. Where can everyone find you? I'm just is this round off name? Sure
I am a personal tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal so you can find me at wsj.com and in the Wall Street Journal
I'm also on Twitter @pierce and I am always always always on Twitter so you can find me there lovely jubbly
Thank you David coming on I'll include some timestamps as well. So that people can skip forward
But it's been absolutely wonderful having you both on the podcast and on YouTube. So, thank you David. Thank you. Appreciate it. Cheers
You