Personal Productivity through data integration: PARA, notion, etc.
Is your information siloed and scattered around in different tools? Mine was, until I discovered PARA on notion. I made this article as short as possible so it will feel dry.
Benefits you can expect:
- CLARITY : Understand and explicit the the different parts of your life, mind and data (to do lists, projects, resources, insights, templates, notes, tools, etc.): you make new connections that were there, but too fuzzy.
- HEADSPACE : A lot of the connections between your different siloes are kept in your head, and it consumes your bandwidth. By linking the siloes in a tool, you free your brain!
- PRODUCTIVITY : Once your data integration is done, you have a platform to do more, faster and better. A lot of the value you create comes from the unique connections you identify/create.
Cost:
Financial : notion has a free plan that is sufficient to set up your infrastructure. The other plans are cheap ($4/month for personal pro, $8/month/team member if you use it for your business) vs the benefits. I upgraded after a week to upload my >5MB files. The resources I share below are free, each expert has more value to deliver through courses/templates. I am not getting anything for posting this by the way.
Time : This is not plug and play. You will end up with a tool that satisfies your unique needs, and because of that you need to create it. Of course, the tech (notion) will facilitate that task and you can build on existing concepts that will help you organize your own life/projects/mind/data (PARA and others). It will take you a few days of work depending on how much data you have all over the place, and how many workflows you want to manage with notion. I would recommend you start with a project that requires structure now and scale from there.
There are the three resources that convinced me, in that order, to start this data integration and efficiently gave me enough understanding to build my own system.
1) https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ : Tiago Forte (knowledge worker productivity expert) explains what is PARA, why it makes great sense and focuses a lot of the article explaining the importance getting projects vs areas clear, and how to tie resources to them. At that point, I wanted to try PARA but was not sure how to do it with my current stack. It gives you the foundations to start, implementation is not covered and requires subscription.
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebI3zExav2c : This video by Marie Poulin (she has a Mastery Course on info management and notion) fills the gap from Tiago’s article on how to operationalize PARA, using notion (which is a great tool to run a PARA infrastructure). This video convinced me to start using notion.
3) https://www.notion.vip/bulletproof-2/ : William offers notion templates. He details in this guide how his template works (built with the same PARA concepts), he adds missing elements (Objectives and Key Results for instance) to PARA and gives you great foundations to build your personal database/second brain.
Let me know your experience of notion and PARA goes!
Additional Notes:
- Tiago, Marie and Elliot offer services I have not tried but seem valuable and I trust them based on the content I have seen of them. Thank you Tiago Forte , Marie Poulin , William Nutt
- A friend I trust for productivity also recommended roam research for note taking : https://roamresearch.com/
- You can buy a template that will save you time but I would recommend you take the time to get a deeper understanding. This dialogue between the system you are building and your mind will deliver many insights.
- My intentions when approaching this topic: facilitate the processing of large quantities of information in order to organize insights and develop the noesun content more efficiently.
- As a tech lover, I have always tried new tools… A few of them that are relevant here: airtable, trello, atlassian (confluence, jira, trello, etc.), monday, asana, etc.
- As a Xoogler (especially as a Google Cloud & Gsuite employee), I have loved to use the Google stack. It powered so much of my professional and personal successes that I was reluctant to use a non-Google product as the backbone of my digital life.
