- Today, I wanna show you how I use Notion
for my side hustles to keep everything organized.
People often ask me how I managed to fit in
so much content production and like side hustle work
alongside my full-time job as a creative director,
and staying organized is a big part of how I do that.
Notion is my go-to hub for storing ideas for content,
for future projects, for drafting scripts,
for keeping track of the status of things with my VA,
so let's dive in and I'll give you a tour
through my Notion workspace.
(upbeat music)
A huge thanks to Notion for sponsoring this video.
I've been using the tool for years,
and so it was exciting when they reached out
and wanted to partner in a video.
If you haven't heard of Notion,
it's a tool for team collaboration
but it works just as well if you're just like a team of one
working on your side hustles and needing something
for a better project management.
I used it by myself as a team of one for years,
and then in the past year,
I've been working in a shared workspace with my VA, Chloe
who helps me with content management and production.
And the way I would describe Notion is,
it's a mix between Google Doc/Dropbox Paper
and Trello or Asana.
So, you can create documents and write things
and share them with people,
but you can also track tasks and check the status of things
and create workflows and things like that.
So, it's like all in one tool which is very handy.
The whole point of it is that it's very customizable.
So you can set it up in a way that suits you
or suits a project,
because different projects have different needs
and different people like to work in different ways.
So, let's jump in and I'll show you how I use it personally.
So like I said, Notion is the hub
for all of my side hustle work.
So I have a section for my videos.
I have a section for my newsletter.
I have a section for Shorts and Reels,
this is like a fairly new content stream for me.
Also have a section for Inside Marketing Design,
which is my interview series,
as well as pages where I keep track of my stats
for YouTube and Instagram
and all of this stuff here is within the shared workspace
that I have with Chloe, so she can access them all too,
she can update them or add things to it at any time.
Chloe set up this kanban board
for my Shorts and Reels workflow,
because how it works is I create it
and then she handles uploading and getting them published.
So we have here, this first section is ideas,
which you'll notice is a common theme
throughout many of my Notion databases.
I really like it to keep track of my ideas.
Before I started using Notion, I would just like
jot down ideas in the Notes app on my phone,
and then they would get lost
amongst all of the other notes in the Notes app on my phone.
And so, I like here that I have a clear place to go
and leave them anytime a new idea comes up
and I can add a new one in here just by clicking.
Let's say we'll do a Notion in 60 seconds, Short or Reel,
and now on the list for me to tackle when I want to.
When I've made the video and it's ready for Chloe to tackle,
I just move it over here into the ready to go section.
And then when she has it uploaded and scheduled,
she moves it over and through this workflow.
And as you can see,
she tags it with whether it's a short or a real too.
So I really like this.
I can see what she's up to and what she's planning
and I can step in and like leave comments too
for her to make changes if I want to,
but it works really well for us.
The video database works a little differently.
I have this arranged in lists
just because I feel like I prefer it for some reason,
but the great thing about Notion
is you can essentially view all of these items
in different ways.
So, if I wanted to add a kanban board to move through
which would honestly be pretty helpful,
I can come in here and click Add a View,
I can click Board and we'll just call it Progress I guess,
and we'll create that.
And now we see here,
I'm just gonna hide the no status column.
Now we can see it goes from idea to planning,
to production, to uploaded,
and we can see that workflow viewed in this way,
or I could see it in my different lists that I had set up.
I used to keep all of my video ideas in a Google Sheet,
which wasn't ideal 'cause it wasn't as like malleable,
it wasn't as flexible,
and also I just prefer how visual Notion is.
I don't know, I could just never get my head
around complex spreadsheet things
but Notion feels really intuitive to me.
I also like that any of these ideas here
that I just added into the list,
I can open it as a page
and I can start typing my script in here if I want to,
which is how I prefer to do it.
I like to keep the plan for the video as well as the like,
schedule for the video in one place.
It works out really well for me.
I have three different table views for my videos.
Upcoming is where I will add in new ideas,
this is kind of like my dumping ground,
and then when I really wanna act on an idea
and when I have it like planned,
when I think it should go up, I'll add an upload date to it.
And any idea that has an upload date added
gets added to the schedule,
which is arraigned in like chronological order,
so you can see sneak peek
of some videos that I have coming up, and then once a video,
once the status on it is changed to uploaded
it moves over here to the uploaded board,
and I've done this just by filtering.
This board, it just shows anything
where the status is uploaded.
This one only shows things that have an upload date,
so in upload is not empty, and status is not uploaded
'cause I wanna keep this just the upcoming schedule.
Upcoming, the ideas dumping ground,
filters out anything that is set to the status of uploaded.
See it, much better than the spreadsheet that I had before,
where it was just like one long never ending list of things.
It was really hard to like move it around
if I wanted to change the date of a video coming up.
Yeah, much prefer this.
But let's move on, and let me show you
how I handle my newsletter workflow in Notion
'cause this was key for me and Chloe
to keep up with the regular Monday cadence
of releasing the Marketing Design Dispatch,
which is my newsletter.
Sign up at the link in the description
if you're not already.
So this looks really empty,
and that is because I have filters set up here as well.
We filter out anything that is marked as sent.
I have two different views here.
I have not sent yet, and then I have sent.
So, this is kind of like an archive
of all of the past issues.
And I tend to write the newsletter in Notion,
and then once the content is ready,
I will mark it as ready to send,
and that will be in this not sent yet list.
So let me show you it in here.
So, if I was finished with this issue,
we would mark it as ready to send,
and Chloe would then know that this is ready
for her to copy and paste it into ConvertKit
and get it all set up and ready to send as a broadcast.
I can also like inline,
like say, if there was a note I wanted to make about this,
I can highlight and leave a comment to Chloe about it
which is really helpful.
But it's handy having it in here
in a place we can both access
because it means she always knows what's coming up,
and if it's not marked as ready to send,
she knows that I'm still making tweaks to it
so she shouldn't copy and paste it yet.
And so, it's really good at workflow for us together
instead of like, I don't know,
me having to send her a doc each week
and be like, it's ready.
She just knows where to find it,
and it's always in the same place.
And then yeah, we keep this view here really tidy.
So it's just the upcoming stuff or ideas for upcoming stuff.
And then this is our archive of the sent ones.
I've been really leaning on Notion
for inside marketing design lately as well.
That interview series,
actually episode one of season two
would have just launched when this video is going out.
So yes, you should go on over and watch that
on the Inside Marketing Design channel.
This series has been a lot of work
especially in tracking my outreach to guests
and then like the scheduling of it and all of that.
Like just keeping on top of where each episode is
in the pipeline, and this has been my flow for it.
Is I've added each company that I've reached out to,
or like investigated into this Season 2 Episodes table,
and then I move it through all these various statuses
of where it's at
so that I know these are the ones are recorded,
these ones I have booked an interview,
I've sent questions to these people,
I haven't booked yet so I need to follow up
and make that happen.
Yeah, it's been super helpful, such a lifesaver
for walking through this like honestly,
much more complicated than I thought process
of running an interview series.
I don't think I've shared you templates yet, have I?
So, let's go on and do this for Looms
because my initial call with Stu is this week.
So, when I open up a page from this item,
I just have to click here into episode template
for something that I set up previously,
and it generates this list of questions
and like a structure for me, pre-show call,
the interview and then any notes for editing.
So, this is for me to make sure I get this information
during the pre-show call.
This is my base template
for questions that I will then tweak for each episode.
So I have this open while I'm doing the interview
and running through it.
I also make notes during the call for editing
and for the intro and outro.
So, everything to do with the content for this episode
is here in one place.
And for the series in particular,
like it makes sense just to have one template,
but you can always in any database in Notion,
add a new template.
Just click here, go New Template,
and whatever I type in here in this page or set up
will become an option to have as a template
for any new items that we add which is very helpful.
Speaking of templates too,
there is lots of database template options
that I highly recommend you look through
if you're new to Notion.
I did when I was first getting started
and it really helped give me an idea of what was possible,
how other people are using it,
hopefully this video is helpful for you
in doing that as well, but yeah,
highly recommend you take a look at that.
A few last smaller things.
So as well as this shared workspace that I have with Chloe
where she has access to all these things,
I also have my own private workspace.
Most of this stuff is just things that I already had set up
before I started working with Chloe,
but there's also things that Chloe isn't working on
so I like to keep it separate
so she knows everything in here
is what she should pay attention to and this stuff isn't.
And this is really like my ideas dumping ground.
Every time I have an idea for a new project,
like in this case, this Portfolio course,
doesn't exist, there's no real plan for it to exist
and happen at the moment,
but every time I wanna think about it,
I like to come in and be able to jot down my ideas for it.
You know, like I said, Notion is my hub for all of my ideas,
and like for diving in and working on things
when I feel like it.
I have this one here for my book
where I've got some little bits of writings,
some ideas of things that I wanna talk about,
research that I've done reading other non-fiction books,
and like taking notes, getting advice.
This is also where I jotted down notes
for different talks and workshops that I've run.
Yeah, it's really like my ideas space.
I think it's really important
when you're working on side hustles
to be able to capture an idea
and be able to come back to it later,
to flesh it out whenever like the mood strikes.
So, keeping ideas organized
is really an important thing for me.
So that's an overview of how I'm using Notion
as my side hustle hub,
lots of idea capturing and scheduling, status tracking,
brushing, all happening in one place.
So, if you wanna try it out for your own side hustles,
or maybe even for your team at work,
then you can create an account
using the link in the description.
It's free to try it out, so check it out.
Let me know what you think.
Hope this video was useful and it gave you some ideas
for ways you could set up your own Notion workspace
to manage your side hustles.
It's just really important when you're working on things
on the side of a full-time job,
that you can stay productive with it
and always know what to work on next,
and this setup helps me do that.
Thanks for watching everyone.
If you're new around here and you stuck around to the end
then please make sure you hit the subscribe button.
You might as well and then you'll see more videos from me.
I make videos about life as a designer
and creative director and side hustler,
and talk about design projects productivity,
lots of good things like that.
So, I hope you'll stick around
and that I'll see you in the next video.
Bye.
(upbeat music)