How notion can help you with productivity

How notion can help you with productivity

Alexander: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the effective statistician. And today I’m very excited to talk with Taina about productivity. Hi, how are you doing today? 

Taina: I’m doing great. Thank you, Alexander. I’m super excited to talk about this favorite topic of mine today. So yeah, can’t wait to get started. 

Alexander: Yeah, I’m, I’m super happy to talk about this because it just talked shortly before we hit the record button said well, my productivity systems are already okay, but well, that’s definitely always some, some kind of improvement possible.

And one of the things that I want to send to people before we dive into it, you’ll also have the opportunity to speak with Taina at the upcoming conference of the effective statistician. So if you have not registered yet please [00:01:00] do so she will run a workshop and lots of the things that you will.

Learn about today, you can then actually start it with inset. So before, and now, before we get a little bit more into this art, yeah, by the way, you need to premium version for the conference for that. So, so that’s, that’s one, one thing to have in mind. So let’s get started. What, what’s actually productivity for you?

Taina: Well, that’s a big question for sure. But to me, productivity is essentially about making the most of your time and getting the best outcomes in life and work that you possibly can. So it’s, it’s really the. Prerequisite for making the most out of what you have as a person, your skills, your time available, and making sure that [00:02:00] you, you’re putting your effort and your focus on the right things that are going to make the biggest impact in your life and in your work.

For me, what productivity is essentially about. 

Alexander: Yeah. And I think it’s also making it easy. Yeah. So that you don’t kind of spend a lot of time on things that are not creating any value. 

And the other thing is also the collaboration part is quite important. 

Taina: Yeah, absolutely. So to elaborate a little bit on that, when we’re going about our work and when we’re going about our lives it’s so easy to, to just like get bogged down in all kinds of unnecessary details.

You get distracted by different kinds of things and just waste a lot of time and effort on things that don’t truly [00:03:00] matter. We’re looking for lost items. And reinventing the wheel were not necessary. And also, as you mentioned, collaboration is really important as well. So often when we are doing things in work and life, we need to work together with others.

We need to be communicating statuses, communicating progress updates and that sort of thing. So unless we have. Good productivity systems in place, both process and tools wise, we’re not able to manage all of that effectively. We will find ourselves very inefficient and thus not really making the kind of progress towards our goals as we would like to.

Alexander: Yep. How did you get interested in this area personally? 

Taina: Good question. I think I’ve always been a very, I would say ambitious person and someone who like really wants to [00:04:00] figure out ways to get what I want and achieve those things that I find valuable in life. And then Being productive and having a good control over the things I work on and the things I need to manage.

I’ve always seen it as, as I mentioned, like something really fundamental in, in being able to make progress towards my goals and achieve great things in life. So, so that’s why I’ve been always very interested in different kinds of tricks and ways and tools to be more productive and be, be more effective with my time.

So, so that’s why I’ve, I’ve really looked into a lot of literature, a lot of different tools over the years and how I could make, make the most out of the time and resources I have. And yeah, that’s it. Previously I worked in the corporate and startup [00:05:00] world. It was really helpful even then. And, and now as an entrepreneur, I get to share a lot of that enthusiasm and also that experience with my own clients.

Alexander: Yeah. I am also driven by kind of the values that I create. That is really important for me. And of course we all have the same amount of time, you know, nobody has 24 hours a day. 

Taina: Unfortunately, just that much. Yeah. Yeah. 

Alexander: And so I’m, I really want to make the most of that and kind of Also, you know, if you’re working in regular job, you’re paid by the hour.

I still think it’s really important to make the most out of the hour so that you can actually get benefits like a promotion, better career opportunities. And also for me, it’s just, you know, Personal satisfaction, if, if I waste a lot of time on things [00:06:00] that are not really value adding, I think that’s really frustrating for me.

And so productivity is a, is a real thing, a big thing. And I’ve, I’ve also looked over the years and many, many different books. I think one of the first ones I looked into was by I’m blanking on the name. The standard book for productivity was, was this weekly review and all this, like 

Taina: getting things done, getting 

Alexander: things done. Exactly. 

Taina: One of my favorites. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Alexander: Getting things done. 

Taina: Cohesive, like systemized approach to staying productive and staying on top of things. I can also highly recommend that book, getting things done.

Alexander: Yeah, it has some very, very important features in it. And I don’t have it fully implemented because there’s quite a lot of lists in there. However, there’s some principles in there that are really, really great. Now there’s all these, [00:07:00] of course, these theories and things like that. But when it now comes to actually implementing them you need to have some Some tools.

And of course you can use a planner or things like this. I still see lots of people running around with paper sheets. And as I use all kinds of different tools out there. However, you got into notion. How, how, how did you step over notion? 

Taina: Yeah. So definitely, as you mentioned, lots of things can be managed on paper, even in the original versions of the getting things done book, David Allen is promoting this paper based method where you have a filing system and tickler files and all that.

But yeah, essentially, We’re still living in the 21st century, so I think we’re better than notebooks and paper these days, and we’re really missing out on a lot of things if we don’t use these digital tools. My own journey towards Notion, it started in 2018. [00:08:00] I had already before that been a big fan of digital tools for keeping myself and all the information and work organized.

I used to Well, I’ve always put myself in challenging positions, but in the already in the corporate world where I was managing lots, lots of moving pieces, I often struggled to like, keep things organized and Know what to prioritize and so on. So early on in my career, I started looking into digital tools that could help me do that.

I tried a bunch of them like Asana, Trello, different kinds of spreadsheets, systems, Monday, you name it. And then in 2018, I was working in a tech startup. I again, had a lot of things on my plate. And One colleague of mine gave me a tip that, Hey, have you heard about this tool Notion? I find it pretty cool.

It [00:09:00] kind of combines this note taking with relational databases, and you can kind of turn it into what kind of productivity system you want yourself. So I decided to give it a try. And as soon I found myself really, really Going deep in it and I, I just really got so fascinated by the flexibility and versatility of that tool and how I could really like turn it into my all in one workspace for keeping all the areas of work and business life, hobbies, whatever, organized in one place and never like need to figure out what to do.

Where to find that and and what to do next and could, could, that made my life just so much easier. So that was my initial like introduction to notion. And then I I’ve, I’ve been using it ever since. And now, of course on a daily basis with my team to help [00:10:00] clients achieve the similar kinds of amazing benefits that it can offer.

Alexander: Okay. So you mentioned, you know, all kinds of private stuff and business stuff. 

Taina: Yeah, 

Alexander: it’s pretty cool. This is kind of integrates everything. I probably have for business things, different stuff and for, for private. And I have a combination of many, many different tools to kind of achieve. That but of course, all these tools don’t necessarily talk to each other.

So, so in the business life, what, what do you actually do in a notion? So, so can you give a couple of examples of, of what you do in there? 

Taina: Well, yeah, this is a very difficult question because there are so many answers, but to not spend the whole hour talking listing the different kinds of possibilities.

To name a few common ways me and also our [00:11:00] clients use Notion. When it comes to your personal life, you can use no and personal productivity. You can use Notion to, for example, keep all of your notes and all of your knowledge and learnings organized in one place as well as documents. So, so, That’s one great way to use Notion and also very many people find Notion really helpful in tracking tasks like keeping a list of your to do’s, categorizing them in different ways so you can easily find what you need to do for this area of your life or that project and plan and prioritize for the upcoming month or week and so on.

Okay. Another personal. Okay. 

Alexander: I need to directly ask. So, so you mentioned two things in there. So documents. So you also kind of write documents like you know, others would [00:12:00] use Google docs or Word or whatsoever. You also write documents in there. And if you, yeah. Okay. 

Taina: Yeah. So, so you, you can, you can use notion to write text create different kinds of pages with multi multimedia.

to bring in photos and video and audio, even build websites. So you can definitely create many different kinds of documents using Notion. And then it has these built in relational databases, which is a little bit like a, not exactly, but a little bit like a spreadsheet where you can start putting in different kinds of data, and then you can filter and look at it in Different ways in the right context.

So, so yes, Notion has very flexible features in creating documents for text and other types of content and then databases that you can use to store and organize pretty much any kind of [00:13:00] information. So, so 

Alexander: that’s interesting. So you basically not just have a usual document, you basically have something that also can pull in information from other sources.

So, so unlike, I don’t know whether that’s possible in Google Docs or in Word. Yeah, maybe. But in Notion, you could, for example, pull in, don’t know, updated information that comes from this database and these kinds of things as well. 

Taina: Yes. Yes. You can, you can store a lot of almost any kind of information in these Notion databases, and then you can make it automatically show you the right, right data and right information.

In whatever context you’re working on. So, for example, if you have a projects database, you could open that project and inside it automatically see the list of those relevant tasks list of those meeting notes and documents that are [00:14:00] relating to that project. Projects context. So yeah, you can definitely do that.

And it also integrates with a lot of external tools. So, so with many other tools you might be using, you can be pulling stuff into notion automatically as well. So that’s, that can be really, really helpful. 

Alexander: That’s pretty cool I’m just thinking about that, you know, very often you would reuse certain text parts again and again, and if you use them in different documents, you basically can just, you know, pull them in.

And if you update them centrally, then they’ll update it in all kinds of different documents, automatically. 

Taina: There’s even this little feature called like synced block. Everything in Notion is essentially a block that you can use to build. So there is this concept called synced block, which could be a piece of text and you could automatically make it update wherever in your system you’re [00:15:00] using that same block.

Snippet of text. 

Alexander: The other thing that you mentioned was kind of tasks. So one of the things that I always struggle with is tasks and then my calendar. Yeah. So I find it really, really difficult to make sure that kind of, you know, the task and the time, the calendar that, you know, there’s always kind of a, You know, inconsistency between when I need to do things, how much time I have, blocking that in my calendar updating it, changing it.

It’s a huge hassle. 

Taina: It is. It is. That’s definitely a common pain points of people I talk to face and notion does have a. pretty cool solution to that as well. So last year they launched this notion calendar. So it’s a calendar tool that you can use with your Google calendar so that you can see in one place in your same calendar, [00:16:00] you can see your different kinds of meeting events.

And you can also see Any things that you might have in a notion database. So you could, for example, use that to like plan your daily tasks right next to your calendar events and see all of that in one place or. Take notes of your meetings so that they automatically go and get categorized, even AI summarized in the Notion meetings database.

So that can be quite powerful in solving the issue of having your calendar in one place and then having all of the other information and tasks in another place. So Notion also nicely can bring these together with the Notion calendar. 

Alexander: All done. Notion integrate with generative AI. 

Taina: Notion has its own built in AI functionality, which is.It’s extremely cool. So basically if you enable notion AI in your workspace, you can do things such as [00:17:00] summarize documents or meeting notes automatically edit text with the help of AI without having to copy paste between chat GPT, but just working in the same tool and having all the benefits of AI, like Editing and translating proofreading in the same place.