How we solved our information management needs
If Google drive (and Slack) are not knowledge management systems, what do you use instead?
Why we chose Notion
It’s popular
Our wider circle were/are using it so there’s more opportunities to learn it.
You can keep the cost down by mostly using the “guest” option
It scored 4.95/5 on our feels-nice-to-use-ometer ;)
There are plenty of other collaborative workspaces to choose from too, but I preferred to give this one a go (due to points 1. and 2.) rather than spend ages trying to find the “perfect” tool. If it didn’t work out, we could always move later.
Benefits from managing our information with Notion
Less time lost in Google Drive
We go to Slack to ask where something is AFTER we’ve had a look in Notion
It’s not perfect, but finding things is easier now we can use complex search and browsing. eg:
Go to the meeting minutes and click through to the tasks
Go to the project and find the connected resources
Page templates save us heaps of time! eg:
Open a meeting page, click on your sales call template.
Open a task page, click on your standard task handoff template
With the right workspace template* that presents everything in a simple dashboard, our work day looks less overwhelming - our brains can only focus on 4 things, so lets build that in to our system!
Red flags to look out for:
The underlying structure is really important and it’s definitely NOT intuitive how to create it.
In our first eight months or so we created a spaghetti monster 🍝 that was no better than Google Drive + Slack!. 😬 (Pages > sub pages > sub-sub-pages 🤪). We spent a LOT of time on it.
Get a pre made workspace template
A template + a few key principles makes a massive difference to how valuable the tool is but what you still need to look out for:
The template: We started with Bulletproof which cost about $150 USD, that helped us get the underlying structure in place very quickly
Unfortunately, we had to migrate all of our spaghetti monster into the new template which was quite onerous. So, look out! Don’t start from scratch, it’ll cost you later
Keep in mind that most Notion templates are built for Personal Knowledge Management not for organisations. Managing knowledge as an individual is quite different to managing it as an org.
Even with a template, if you don’t have the template creator on hand to tell you how to best use it, you can still spend a lot of time wondering where to put things unless they’ve got really good methods and practises that are easy to learn.
A key principle we learnt from Bulletproof: EVERY page should be in a database (except the top level dashboard). Then its much simpler to relate data together to create a second brain like knowledge management tool
A few key tips
Learn Forte Labs PARA methodology. It’s a simple but profound way to orient your work and make your use of Notion far more effective.
Experiment with one internal area of your organisation first (rather than diving in head first, it’s more of a toes first approach).
This will allow some of your team to get up to speed with how to use it without slowing down the whole org.
Internal areas are less time critical than client projects. eg. Finance or marketing. Even if you’re a small organisation and only have one or two people in this area, using the tool “live” is a far more effective way to learn.
As you’re working on that area, start to move important documents over to Notion. Notable exceptions:
Google docs that you’re sharing externally
Important / financial spreadsheets, you can link to them from Notion but Notion isn’t trying to do spreadsheets. What it can replace: spreadsheets that are pretending to be databases.
Any other Notion users got tips and tricks?
Or did you go with a different tool and how is it working out? I’d love to hear pros and cons of other tools.
*Find our template on Gumroad over here.