How I use Notion to organise my ideas/blogs?
or as I would like to call it my obsession with notion.
I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that I am practically obsessed with notion. Even though it's an all in one productivity app I feel like I still push it too far sometimes. The ability to create new pages in the same page and databases and —well basically it feels like an extension of my thinking process. So here is a small insight on how I use notion to organise my thoughts/blogs/ideas—everything.
I generally write blogs, notes about any cool tangible idea that I come across. This helps with putting things down in words instead of keeping them in my head which is a junkyard of random ideas.
The template I created is available here, you can duplicate it and customise it accordingly.
Starting off, any new idea is added to a database of pages using the gallery view with tags, expected dates, status and everything that I think would be relevant. I think the most important thing is that I want to see is the contrast of the “tentative date” on which I would like to publish a blog and the actual date on which I end up doing it (or never end up doing it)
Statuses: I have broken down the process into seven parts for myself (overkill, I know). Generally would like to use this to give me an idea on what to do next. These are also really useful if you want to change the view to kanban which notion allows.
And then there are these elements in the template that I use a lot. To-do list and Do you have this in your blog. The do you have this in your blog comes from what a typical structure of news looks like. I thought why not use the same guideline for the blogs that I want to write. All the things that are in the do you have this in your blog don't really have to be there in the blog, in fact, if there are just 4-5 things it is more than enough. This just gives me an idea on how to fill in the missing pieces in the narrative whenever I am stuck. You can refer to Writing and Reporting News: A Coaching Method by Carole Rich to get a complete idea if you find this interesting.
— An example from Writing and Reporting News: A Coaching Method by Carole Rich.
Using bookmarks as references helps to keep track of the links that I am going through and also add comments/quotes and useful information from them on the right.
Now let’s talk about stickyes (Yes, that’s not the right spelling. Yes, I wanna still keep it that way. It looks better. idk, can’t describe it.)
Notion lets you can create an inline databases of pages and this one is in gallery view. It has a template which makes it easy to see what's the content in the page.
Here is an example of them in use
They will have three components, status, summary and problems. Now that we have some structure about what to do when an idea pops up — put it on notion!
So to summarise,
Yes, this is extremely overwhelming and too complicated for its own good. It however works for me and just wanted to share it. Also this is me going in overkill mode with Notion.