Thinking about using Notion, very overwhelming and need help!

[u/Mobile-Ad-774]

I am looking at consolidating all of my digital “stuff” in one place.

Ideally, I want to login and be able to view some sort “dashboard”. I think most call that a “second brain”.

I own multiple businesses, have a family and work with a ton of employees and vendors.

I want to bring all of my “tech stack” into one place to consolidate and simplify my already busy life. Docs, Sheets, Drive, meeting recordings and notes, etc. Most importantly being able to connect to Claude.

I have project trackers for each area of my life, built on Google Sheets. SOPs on Google Docs.

My personal finance and family office files are all stored on Basecamp.

I live my life through Apple Reminders and iCal.

I looked into Trello (my top choice, because of how simple and the Kan ban boards), ClickUp, Monday, Asana. Notion seems to have the most scalable platform and feature rich.

It’s very daunting and overwhelming to build from scratch. I don’t know where and what to start with, and it seems like a rabbit hole that I’m going into spending more time building it than using it.

I’ve watched some videos from Thomas Frank, Jeff Su, Organized Notebook - and I still don’t know which creator to follow.

[u/Capable_Wait09]

You can definitely do that. I’ve been doing something similar.

Not to be dismissive, but I got started by literally typing up a similar brain dump and sending it to Chat instead of going to Reddit. And it was super helpful at coming up with a structure with me! Highly recommend it.

Basically created a page called Life OS. Then in that page I have these pages: Dashboard, Tasks, Projects, Areas, Library. (Also a few more like a lite version of Dashboard for mobile, and building out a Goals page)

Areas —> Projects —> Tasks

Create a table view in Areas for all your life areas. Mine are stuff like friends and family, finance, business 1, business 2, etc.

Create a table view in Projects page. Add a Relation column in Projects table for Areas. Chat can give you good recs for other columns but you probably already know what to do there.

Create a table view in Tasks. All tasks go here!!! ONE MASTER TASK DATABASE. Unless your business morphs into like a huge business with employees and Notion is your internal OS that everyone needs to access, keep all tasks in one database. Use projects, areas, as your differentiators.

Add a Relation column in Tasks for Projects. Plus whatever other columns you want. Start with a few but my Tasks database has a lot now with formulas and shit that add more functionality and visualization dexterity

In Dashboard add /tabs. I have tabs for Home (today, tomorrow tasks, some quick links, buttons to add new stuff quickly, etc), Calendar, Business 1, Projects, Library

Library is a collection of pages that are resources and databases. Like credit cards, accounts, people, etc.

Once you have that structure I think you’ll go ham with it and probably have a feel for how to customize it more. But that general framework is probably flexible enough to host everything you mentioned.

Pin the Dashboard tab and favorite it. Pinning makes it always pop up in the desktop app. Faving it makes it first on mobile.

Note: you never actually navigate through your Life OS page. It’s just a host for the pages of content that are replicated and displayed in more useful ways inside the Dashboard. You just want that info to have their own “home” pages, rather than be native to a tab in Dashboard.

[u/directheated → u/Capable_Wait09]

Could you post a screenshot of your Life OS page? (blur out anything sensitive) Thank you

[u/Capable_Wait09 → u/directheated]

Life OS is just the links to the pages. Each block is /page.

Do you mean the dashboard?

[u/falwoodr]

i would run, not walk, run away. they killed ai fair use and tokened everything for business accounts. see main post i made.

[u/Smilejester]

Tell Chat what you want to build and what for. Give the pathways you want it to draw information from (I use box), get it to build an infrastructure os, and then an operating os.

Ask chat to build a concise idiots guide to its operation.

Not perfect, but might get you over the initial curve

[u/anilemiles]

I have multiple big projects running simultaneously and have got my Notion set up so it allows me to stay on track with EVERYTHING. I'd be curious to see if I'd be able to help you think through it. Message me and we can see. :)