Productivity Tools — Part 3 (Notion Pages and Databases)
Switching gears to my usage of Notion — I saw some Notion gurus on YouTube and their usage of Notion inspired me to clone the various thought components pertaining to my life and consolidate them all into dashboards. I primarily have 2 dashboards — Life Orbit and Work Orbit. Here is how my Life Orbit looks like:
Within each categories there, are pages, and each page has multiple pages (or databases) inside them. The best part of Notion is the customization. What you see above is a template called “Life Wiki” available in Notion template website. I downloaded it and changed it to suit my need. I decided to put together all the various aspects of my life (less personal stuff) that require some action from my end during a week or a month. And I formed clusters. Now the obvious question one might ask is: “What’s the point of jotting down everything?”. The point is not about jotting down everything. The point is looking at these pages every day, so that I can take care of at least few things without forgetting and also minimizing distractions in a day, to make it more productive. I don’t write in all the pages here every day. But the stuff that I do everyday, ends up in at least 2–3 pages here and over a period of time, it becomes this dashboard becomes a 2nd brain for most of the things in life (tasks, ideas, reflections, reminders, etc.). Organizing them into pages and databases brings in a certain structure and also the flexibility to link them.
So what is the difference between a page and a database? A page is just that — a page (blank piece of paper), in which you can create anything — text, a table (this is database), bullet points, add images etc. Depending on how you want the page to look, you can import any template into that page. A database is a table — similar to what you prepare in an excel sheet. The best example of a database is “Media” in the below page — “Read-Listen-Watch-list”.
Like in an excel sheet, you can customize the fields of this database by assigning the content type that you want to fill (Notion calls it ‘property’). For example: I can name the field as “Status” and can opt for the property to have single select between few options like “Ready to Start”, “Done”, “Doing”. And for the next column, I can name the field as Tags and choose the property to have multiple select, so that I can have more than 2 tags for something. This page here acts like a “bookmark” for me, when I come across something interesting on the internet. Since Notion has Google Chrome Plugins, I just save a link into this page and I come back to this page at leisure to explore everything I have bookmarked. And once I consume these pieces, I curate the ones which are good enough to be shared with the world — through LinkedIn or Twitter etc., based on the topic. I currently have a separate database (Stuff to share) for those curated pieces and I have linked the above database to that “stuff to share” database, which makes it easy for me to pull something there, from here.
This capability to link databases is a very powerful feature in Notion — something that is absent in many productivity tools. Roam Research is another tool that is becoming popular, with this feature. That one works like wikipedia, where you can hyperlink a word and it creates a page for that word. But more on Roam Research later. I will focus my next piece, which will be concluding piece on Notion on some of its templates and customizations.
to be continued…
