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A Notion setup for productivity

At Monzo, we use Notion as an internal knowledge base and a simpler alternative to JIRA. I was inspired by GoSquared's recent post about how they use it at work.

I took a few of the ideas, and started applying them to how I work. I've been using it for the past month, and have been really happy with how it's working it out. As such, I thought I'd share with the rest of the internet.

I want to highlight that I'm not the sort of person that is obsessed with personal productivity or any of that stuff. I've never stuck with any to do apps, always falling back to text files. As such, I hope this opinion carries a little more weight.

Personal homepage 👨🏻‍💻

My personal homepage allows me to see various important things at a glance. Plus, a photo of Polignano a Mare to keep up the hope that I can go on holiday at some point (thanks COVID-19).

• Actions: both from meetings, and things I generally need to do and not forget about. These are directly linked to the meeting that the action originated from through Linked Databases. I go through this in more detail below.
• Docs & links: various databases focused on personal development. These might be useful bits of feedback I've received, documents that I'm working on that aren't ready to be shared publicly yet, or a list of things that I've done that I'm proud of.
• Product & engineering: these are databases focused on day-to-day work, such as meeting notes, what my squads are currently working on, or what's up next. I'm terrible at remembering deadlines, so I explicitly have a calendar of dates so I don't forget them. I keep all meeting notes in the same place, with the same format. More below.
• Goals: these contain my personal goals for the year. These are hoisted up to the main page so I remember them more easily.

Squad spaces 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

I'm currently product managing two squads, and have applied this setup to both of them. Key things in here:

• An introduction to who's in the squad!
• A 'Projects' database that contains all of the projects that the squad has, is, and will work on.
• Databases of weekly planning meetings, and our goals for the week.
• Rotas for engineering floaters: an engineer that will pick up ad-hoc reactive tasks.
• What we're currently working on, populated from the Projects database.
• Our longer term goals and strategy

Things that I particularly like about it:

• High-level vision and strategy: It's clear what our quarterly goals are, and whether we think we're on track, off track, or have already achieved them. This is helpful if you want to get a vibe for what the squad is working on, and how they're getting on against goals.
• Day-to-day work tracking: It's easy to see what we're currently working on, and who's accountable for the project. Each project we're working on has a dedicated page that we can use as a homepage and individual work tracker, with associated start dates and deadlines.
• Definition between internal and external: it's clear which parts of the homepage should be used by the squad to make their lives easier, and which parts of the homepage are an external interface to the rest of the business.

Meeting notes ✍️

I keep all meeting notes in the same database. When I start a new meeting, I use a template to create a document that looks very similar to the above. By default, this is private to me, but can be shared company-wide very easily.

There's an Actions section at the bottom that directly links the action to this particular meeting. This then feeds up into the 'Actions' section of my personal homepage so I know what I have to do off the back of it.

How to achieve this

I'm currently a little too lazy to expose the above as templates. I'm sorry about that. Extending an olive branch, I'll tell you some of the fundamentals that these build on, such that you can apply them yourself.

Structured data and properties

Where possible, go for structured data over text. This means liberally adding properties to pages. This allows you to filter, group and sort by various interesting properties. If these are baked in as text (e.g. "we need to do this project by the 2nd of May"), then you can't do any of this.

Templates

Use templates liberally to ensure consistency and quality. This soothes my brain: it's faster to read documents of a similar style for things like meeting notes and proposals.

Databases

Databases are a home for structured information in Notion. I try and keep as many pages as possible in a database. This allows you to keep structured data alongside it such as tags, deadlines and so on. This isn't possible with a normal Page.

Linked databases

Linked Databases allow you to see a different view (sort, filter, grouping) of another database. This is very powerful: it allows many different use cases off a single home. This negates the need to duplicate and copy the same document everywhere.

I use this for the 'Projects' section of the squad space. We have a single Projects database in our squad space. The squad homepage then filters to projects that we're currently working on (where the Status is 'Actively Scoping' or 'Working on'). I also link to this database in my Personal Homepage so I can see the work of both of my squads in a single view.

Another use case is having a single company-wide database (e.g. Projects, Proposals). You can then use Select properties and filters to filter it down: for example, to the squad that wrote the proposal.

Relations

Relations allow you to express relations between two databases. For example, my 'Actions' database links with the 'Meeting Notes' database. This allows me to see all actions, and the meeting that the action originated from.

Summary

Your workflow is very personal to you. This one works really well for me. Why? First, I always want to know how what I'm working on links up into some wider goal. Using relations allows you to build this graph of tasks, to projects, to squad goals, to company wide goals.

Second, I have an eternal paranoia that I'm forgetting about some important deadline that is coming up. Ascribing deadlines to projects and being able to see them all on a calendar helps assuage this.

I hope this was useful to you. If it was, let me know on Twitter!