Using the PARA method with Notion
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- Опубліковано 2 чер 2024
- Tiago Forte recently released his new book on the PARA method, so we thought it would be helpful to dig into what the PARA method is, why you might want to use it, some of the key challenges, and how to effectively apply it to your Notion workspace.
PARA is essentially a tool-agnostic system for organizing all the information in your life. PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.
00:00 Intro to PARA
00:56 Challenge of PARA
02:15 "Where does this go?" (in Notion) flowchart
07:41 Example Project page
09:27 Projects
11:26 Areas
15:46 Departments (Team Areas)
16:49 Resources
18:07 Archives
📰 Read the companion article:
notionmastery.com/using-the-p...
📘 Check out the PARA method book from Tiago Forte:
www.buildingasecondbrain.com/...
⚡️Go deeper on Notion with my online course, Notion Mastery:
notionmastery.com/program
⚡️Check out my Notion templates:
notionmastery.com/templates
☕️ Love this content and want to buy me a coffee?
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![How I Organize My Life + Work in Notion [2024]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kR49JHmf84c/mqdefault.jpg)
"tensions" database; what a great concept! Never lose track of open questions, ideas... just remember to regularly review and classify.
Hey Marie! 🌟 First of all, watching your Notion setup is like looking at the Sistine Chapel of productivity-pure artwork! 🎨
But let's be real, calling this PARA is like calling a triple-layer chocolate cake a "salad" because it has a strawberry on top. 🍓😂 PARA is all about that "keep it simple, sweetheart" life, and your setup is like 4D chess. 🤯
Maybe the video title should be "How to PARA-DROP Your Own Complexity into Notion" or something like "Flipping the PARA-digm: How to Build a Notion Cathedral!" 🏰
Still love it though! Keep being awesome! 👏👏👏
Came here to see if this comment was made already. This is a great alternate organization system but I clicked because I was looking for PARA specific tips that utilize Notion's non-database features since those are pretty rigid so this isn't for me.
Thanks for sharing your thought process, Marie! You are a great teacher and communicator. Wishing you a happy birthday!
Great video and explanation! Especially loved the decision tree in the beginning
Thank you so much for sharing this! This is exactly what I needed❤
Nice talk and presentation! Congrats! I am sure you are pretty good at it as well as Thiago forte with his methods, etc. But really, I have been following this productivity fever for quite a while and it turned to be a huge industry surrounded by new trends and hunts for the best method, apps, books and so on. It never ends and I think people loose themselves in it and at the end, take more time trying to setup the perfect productive model of life than focus on living. It reminds me the figure of the dog running in circles, trying to catch his tail. But what really creeps me out, is that so long after Gtd with David Allen and different other "mentors" of productivity, it is still a good niche and business. Anyway I appreciate you presentations and work.
Loved the concept of the "tensions database" that will usually end into actionable items after being solved!
Dammmnnn, that is one sleek workspace!
I love that you use diagrams
Love the new haircut! ❤
I think a lot of people, including myself, fall into the trap of thinking that theres is a magical, foolproof taxonomy for categoriezing things in our lives.
The world is chaotic and mutifaceted. Characteristics and context change over time, and thats ok!
This video was truly amazing - thank you for sharing! It's definitely motivating me to continue organizing my Notion workspace. However, it also highlights some reasons why I'm starting to feel a bit concerned about using Notion as a personal knowledge management tool. Don't get me wrong, Notion is an incredible app, and I've been using it for years, but I've begun to feel somewhat confined by it, and the app still has several limitations when it comes to organizing information and sharing it in different formats.
Curious to learn more about some of your perceived limitations? Can you tell me more?
Systems design, neuroemergence, PKM, and PM nerd here, really enjoying these videos! I'm curious, is your "databasement" something that you're able to do specifically because you turned the page into a wiki? I haven't tried that feature yet, since it seemed to just be for collaborative workspaces, but I'd LOVE to be able to list all the subpages of a page without those super annoying extra top-level sidebar links 😭
I never look at the sidebar links. EVER! :D
Loved this video! So excited to refresh some of my dashboards in Notion. 😍You mentioned using Zapier to create the actions task in Notion! I've been wanting to set something up like this. Do you keep a calendar for business and one for personal to differentiate the zap? For example, ensuring a doctor's appt is associated with the Health & Wellness dashboard is not a business project. Or are you using the filtering in Zapier to achieve this? Thank you again for another great video!
Great Q! I send everything to the same shared Actions calendar, and I simply associate things with the appropriate project as I do my weekly review/planning :D
@@MariePoulin I'm rewatching the video as I make some Notion updates for 2024 and noticed that the Content Marketing Project (status ongoing) is a way to blend projects and areas together(min 14:00). I'm unclear on how that project/area differs from the department/area called Marketing + Sales? Thank you in advance!
I love this video Marie. Thanks for sharing.
I have one question about sub projects. I love the idea of the personal development catch all with courses I am taking/have taken under that. In your main dashboard which you showed on screen I noticed it is only the top level projects that show. Do you have a checkbox or something to differentiate sub projects from your main ones. Would you change anything about your approach to this if you were setting up again?
Thank you🙏
To differentiate sub projects from parent projects, i can filter by "parent project is not empty" or "is empty" if i want only parent projects :D
Intriguing twist on PARA which I'm just getting familiar with. Have looked at Ultimate Brain by Thomas J Frank but this video inspired me to buy the Knowledge Hub template. HoweverI feel it is only one piece of a puzzle on it's own. Curious about the other DBs in this video, will they be made available?
In my experience, providing people with all the databases without education, instruction, processes and systems leads to frustration. I walk people through the process (and databases) through my course, Notion Mastery, but for this reason I don't just sell it as an all in one template (because I strongly believe I'm setting people up for failure). Most of the students agree with this premise! Many of them start by downloading templates, then quickly realize that templates are not really a "system," and you're going to be much better off designing your own.
This is amazing. I am really curious on how you made your databasement. I am looking to make something like this for my own dashboard.
It's just a toggle where all the database pages are tucked into :D
Does this mean you have to manually link them if you want to add new pages? @@MariePoulin
@@hamzakamrankhawaja3032 There is no "manual linking", those are the source pages themselves!
Excellent template. Please tell me how to download this template?
Question:
If i have the same folder name at google drive and the same notebook name at evernote, do they have the same files inside like pdfs photos etc? Thanks for answering
Thanks, Marie! Awesome video. Just one thing I'm confused with:
You seem to be using the "OK Actions" DB for your personal stuff (e.g. "Haircut" action in your "Health and Wellness" area). This must be convenient for a small business owner managing their life in Notion too, but it also means all your OK team members can actually see your personal actions through the DB (even though they don't have access to your personal project dashboards).
Why this choice? Isn't that a problem when it comes to doctor appointments and other personal things like that?
Wouldn't you want to have a separate Actions DB dedicated to personal actions for Ben and you?
Not even mentioning the case where you'd have actions that you don't want Ben to see (e.g. bday surprises...)
Would love to know your take on this 🙏
As a very small team of 3, one being my Ops person and one being my husband, It's typically very advantageous for both persons to know what I have on my plate. It makes planning, coordinating, and checking in much easier for this information to be visible. For surprises, I would still put the item in the actions database, but I would scope out access to the individual page/task so its only visible to me. Those are rare, so I've designed for the generalities, not the exceptions. For anything even more private, I would just include that in my Personal HQ. BUT generally speaking as someone with ADHD i'm much more likely to do what I need to do if its all visible in the same place (the actions db)!
Lovely calm explain Marie, pleasure to watch you - PARA has changed my approach due to it's simplicity - for me it just created a base structure, for which I can customize as you have. With Notion or other tools it's great to link activities or items to various places as we need - but in the end for me Areas and Projects are such a great distinction that if i only have that, I still have something more than before. You mentioned all projects have an action, and all actions are associated with a project - do you not also link actions directly to Areas, that don't have a project? This may be a notion limitation, I use notion for notes and docs, but not tasks or projects -- OK I see your project fields are specific, and to keep that meta you have tasks aggregating into projects.
Great share thanks - your databasement very interesting to see ^^
I don't link Actions to a separate "areas" db at this moment. It's just another relation field to fill out that isn't the most helpful, since we have ongoing "projects" that act like Areas. Of course all of this is personal preference and based on what creates more ease for you! :D
has your notion mastery course been updated? i notice you have changed your notion style wondering if you teach this new style In the course?
Hey Marie, do you work for Notion? Sorry I'm new here and just curious of why they let us stucked with only 3 fonts
No, I do not work for Notion!
This is great and thanks for explaining. But it also seems incredibly complicated compared to Tiago's PARA. I suppose the trick with Notion is to get the added benefits from related databases etc. while also ensuring it's still quite simple to use.
I think whenever you're dealing with the complexities of team project management and knowledge bases, it's inherently complex, because you're no longer managing "files" or information, but you're managing workflows and people's experiences :)
@@MariePoulin Ah well said! And thanks. It would be good to see you do a video on how you would go about doing PARA in Notion for individuals.
I loved Notion and your videos, but I have to ask how you can have so many relations and roll-ups and keep Notion from running so slow it becomes unusable? I left notion a couple weeks ago because I could not handle how slow it was and I did not have near the number of relations that you use.
It has nothing to do with relations and rollups, and is mostly related to recent updates and features Notion made.
It’s usually temporary. I use it all day long and haven’t found any major debilitating effects personally. The slowness has been specific around feature updates and they usually follow w performance improvements, but I can understand your frustration if that’s your experience!
Thank you for sharing this. I love tension. I will add it to our organisation.
I'm surprised to see no "meeting reports" db. Is it deliberate? I could see a hardcore vision where you want collaborators to not just file notes and thoughts, but force them to push into actions, tensions or resources directly.
Our meetings happens in our actions database, so as we run the meetings, we generate actions in the moment. With only 2 (sometimes 3) of us, that is probably more than we need, but no reason why teams couldn't do it differently :D
Do you have a tutorial on how you created your updated personal areas? i don't understand if they are databases or pages? thank you
how did you create the data basements?
@@user-hz2qr1en2l The Databasement is a toggle with columns with pages inside them. Most of the links you see in the databasement are database pages.
can't wait to see how the new automations will influence these systems
thnx
pantry management? that’s next level control 😃
It's more because cooking is my nerdy passion/hobby, and I experiment with a lot of recipes, so it helps me track what I already have :D
I have an issue regarding duplicated tables and entire new pages (containing tables) that are synced. The first one is the one I would ideally solve because it would mean I could have all my material in the same "folder". When looking at my table, say my goals for "Week ending XX" and I want to duplicate this table (and edit it as neccesary) for the following week, so i click + to create a new table (or right click, and go duplicate), either way, which ever timetable is edited, effects the other in the exact same way. I understand from reading online, that this is merely a different "view" of the original database. But i don't want this, and I struggle to wrap my head around why anyone would? If they are always going to be exactly the same- why not look at the original? Anyway, my goal here is to unsync the tabs and their tables, I want to edit them independently from each other.
Has anyone considered periodically moving items to an archive database? I’m thinking of quarterly clearing out my tasks, hopefully or help the database run faster. I could easily accumulate 100 tasks in a quarter. I know it would lose its metadata, which could negate the point of keeping it but might be worth it?
I think its worth evaluating on a case by case basis. Nothing wrong with occasional archiving! We tend to do a big archive/cleanup yearly, but quarterly can work too! No right/wrong answer here. Definitely performance trade-offs that might be more helpful than the ability to store past information...
So AppointMents are not covered by PARA?
Appointments are events, which are part of Projects.
Great video! But it‘s a bit distracting when audio and video is not synchronized. Anyway, great job!
QUESTION: Where do you save your processes and procedures?
In our Documentation and Workflow databases, and within our various project/action templates
@@MariePoulin would love a video of your workflow DB in Notion ;)
Your system is not really PARA, It is so much more, and it is an awesome system that takes full advantage of the power of Notion over other systems like Evernote, Apple Notes, etc. PARA is meant to be simple. Your system is beautiful and sophisticated but hardly simple.
A bit terrifying to put all that sensitive info into a note app without e2e encryption
Databasement >>>>>>
Inspired Databasics
This video is mostly explaining how the Notion team works internally and how that could sort of be related to PARA.
I don't work for Notion, so this is not how the "Notion team" works, its how my small company works
12:49 Are you sure?💀
You can scope out a *page* inside a database by changing its permissions, yes (in this case, lifeadmin project is private even though it lives in a shared database). But you can't scope out *views* of databases, so any tasks I add to the database that are related to this project are shared with the team UNLESS I scope them each out individually at the task page level. (not tenable at scale)
Excellent video , i know people will hesitate to say this but PARA method is too rigid to be applied for many people , it might be a starting point for a person who doesn't have any structure and gradually depart from it as the complexity of your system progresses or it creates friction
Hey Marie , really nice video! I was wondering if I could help you edit your videos and also make a highly engaging Thumbnail which will help your video to reach to a wider audience .
Marie you are so beatiful and you look fresh❤so huge difference
Just for fun, Marie Poulin again but with the original orthography, ua-cam.com/video/MOuJ-5R0hkk/v-deo.html&pp=ygUWTUFSSUUgUE9VTEFJTiBDQUxPR0VSTw%3D%3D
looks like you need a degree in notion before start using notion and time a lot of it.
This is a workspace with 5+years of use. It didn't start like this, it grew as we used it more and more, understood our needs better, and learned more about what Notion can do.
this man would've been better off talking about the code method