[C3] Supercharge your productivity with Notion

Will you own the next decade?

Or will the next decade own you?

10 years is a long time. But it can fly by. Remember the fears of a Y2K armageddon?

That was 20 years ago. Two decades.

The question that compounds

One simple question can change the course of a decade. This question can accelerate our careers, grow our earnings, and calm our anxious minds.

Yet we forget to ask the question.

Therefore we never know the answer.

What's important in your life, but not urgent?

The answer is hiding in plain sight.

• Build your competitive moat by learning a new skill
• Unleash your latent creativity by decluttering your mind
• Create your own luck by anticipating the needs of a prospect
• Jump of the corporate treadmill by launching that side project

These are highest leverage activities that let you scale yourself.

But we hit snooze on this critical part of our lives.

I'll get to it tomorrow.

Ummm. Next quarter.... Umm next year.

(Then a decade goes by.)

In a sea of noise, we've lost the signal

Look at this matrix. Where are you spending most of your time?

As a coach to many high-performers, they consistently tell me that they spend 10% in the green quadrant and the remainder in the red one.

And in a world of information overload, that makes sense. Everything feels urgent, but it's just a lot of noise. Unread emails. Pocket and Instapaper queues bursting at the seams. A queue of podcasts that would take 6 months to listen to... even at 1.5x speed.

If your future self in ten year was watching you work today, it would be shaking its head in disapproval saying, "Really? That's how you're spending your time?"

You feel robbed of your own agency. You're always in "react" mode. Other people are dictating your priorities.

Other people are dictating your life.

Technology is our supposed savior, right?

Apps, automations, hacks and iPads. Lots of iPads.

Technology promises to snap these priorities into place AND free up more time.

But it fails to deliver.

And instead, your "tech stack" looks more like digital cesspool:

• Vacant Trello boards
• Zombie to-do lists
• Half-assed drafts in Google Docs
• A graveyard of barely-used Moleskines.

Meet Notion, productivity's best-kept secret

You can now double-down on the most important parts of your life thanks to a new platform called Notion. Notion is part of the "no-code" software movement, enabling non-technical (but smart 😉) folks like you to proactively combine all of your workflows into one unified system.

You read that right. All of your:

• Tasks
• Calendars
• Notes
• Reading lists
• Files
• Boards
• Spreadsheets

In one place.

Notion fixes the fatal flaw of these apps:

When you build for everyone, you build for no one.

Jake optimizes his CRM for closing leads, while Jane optimizes for serendipity. Sam uses GTD for task management, Sophie uses a Bullet Journal.

Notion gives us the components to build the damn thing ourselves.

Steep learning curves

Remember the first time you went snowboarding? Your tailbone definitely does.

But once you crossed the steep part of the learning curve, damn does it feel good to carve down the mountain.

Your experience with Notion will be similar. "No-code" requires you to understand the principles behind Information Management Systems, Macros and Databases.

But don't let the jargon scare you, in 4 short weeks you'll cross the chasm, become a competent and confident "no-coder" and watch your life's work come into focus.

Give Notion a week and it will feel like you've got an unfair advantage.

• You can onboard a new client in a few minutes
• Update your customer pipeline without calling IT
• Create a Team Wiki to capture your company's digital brain

And as you prepare to give that big talk, you'll watch in amazement as your outline, anecdotes, and speaker notes coalesce into a speech you knock out of the park.

Not to mention that your entire digital life - your reading notes, CRM, personal finances, vacation planning, habit tracking, kids' school information and even your bucket list will all live in a sleek and beautiful dashboard.

Notion saves me 5 hours a week

I've been using Notion for two years as a business owner, coach, community manager and our family's CFO (and Chief Administrative Officer). And as a fervent time tracker, I can show (with detailed accounting) that Notion saves me 5 hours each week:

Notion has given me the infrastructure (and confidence) to build RadReads into a 6-figure lifestyle business, grow an audience 30,000 readers and relocate my family to sunny California to fulfill one of my lifelong dreams: surfing every day.

Let's ride the wave together

I've got a track record of spotting game-changing productivity tools. Omnifocus in 2008. Evernote in 2010. Airtable in 2015.

When I discovered the GTD app Omnifocus and I immediately started teaching my finance colleagues how it could help them ascend the corporate ladder. A decade later (many of them now run their own firms), they still thank me for introducing them to this "secret weapon."

When I first tried Notion, I was in awe of its potential — but recognized that you still needed a sprinkle of technical chops to really capture the personal ROI. I scoured Reddit, Twitter, private Slack groups to understand how people were using it — and where they were getting stuck.

My obsession with your productivity has been featured in publications including Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Barron's, and Lifehacker.