Project Management with Notion (and Big Help from Second Brain)
Today’s job market requires understanding how to use technology to move more efficiently through your work. That’s not always easy because technology is just a series of tools, and those tools don’t automatically make you more efficient. I know this because I have a garage full of power tools, and a flower planter building project I wanted to finish for Christmas 2024. (Yeah, I’m that behind.)
Understanding your problem and how you might use technology tools to consolidate the steps in a process or increase the speed of your work makes you more efficient. It sounds simple, but it’s not always simple. (You can see how I use Claude.ai to help summarize information and find patterns.)
As a Managing Editor, I have two roles: writing and editing all the content for our exhibit team and shepherding projects. (Or, as a former colleague used to say: You have all the responsibility with none of the power.)
Today, I want to discuss the tools I use to help me move those things along.
The Project Team & Tools
The team consists of three people: me, my boss, the Associate Dean of Distinctive Collections, and the Creative & Art Director. We are a small but mighty team, yet we are responsible for building all of the university exhibits, all the publications that accompany them, all the social content associated with them, and all the accompanying work that comes before and after them. This group also handles our oral history program.
At the moment, this includes 25 different projects. That’s a lot of work to keep track of, and not much time left to divert to tracking project processes. To keep the operation running and to make sure we’re working with the internal and external stakeholders for each of these projects, we have to rely on technology.
In my case, I use Notion, an intuitive collaborative workspace that isn’t as intimidating as other project management software, which is often designed around product development instead of process tracking. (You can read that as super intimidating for regular, non-project-manager people.)
The Project Charter in Notion
The first is very straightforward. PMI’s Project Charter document allows me to get all the relevant kickoff and charter information. I use this to track all the information you’d expect—stakeholders, budgets, milestones, scope, risk, and responsibilities—and I keep a change log here to keep a running list of who made what changes to our project. When it’s time for the post-mortem, I have the original information and all the changes.
Program and Project Tracking
The second template is when I start cooking with gas. This template allows me to create program buckets. Within those programs, I can have as many projects as I want, each with task lists, budgets, notes, etc. And each project can show me various views (and integrate with my work calendar).
The topper is that all that data is pulled into a home page that allows me to see what needs to be done immediately that week, in the next two weeks, or in the month. I can see all my notes. I can quickly arrange program and project stand-ups. Plus, Notion is a database, which means I can easily create buttons on these projects where I can create a ticketing system for each project!
The best part is that this tool allows you to set up Life Buckets, which are similar to program management, where you’d have several projects within. I use Life Buckets to designate the different types of work I do. I don’t really use the Journal (I have GoodNotes—my third tool, which I’ll talk about in just a bit), and I use the Completed Life Bucket to keep track of all finished projects.
Diving a layer down, I can create projects within those Life Buckets that allow you to track daily tasks, notes, budgets, and such. You can visualize those in various ways: lists, calendars, and charts. Choose whatever best suits what you are trying to do. (You can also add dependencies and tie tasks together, but I have always preferred to do that by hand.)
I can also include notes in each of these tasks, which you can access through the individual project or through the Life Bucket that the project is in. I use this GoodNotes meeting-taking tool to capture all my notes and then attach the PDF to each of them. I do that so that when a project is finished and I’m creating an archive of the work, I have all the relevant documents in one place. (The export function is great on Notion.)
But I keep the minutes in GoodNotes because I can quickly search through every meeting I’ve ever had.
Managing Multiple Projects
The superpower of this Notion template is that it pulls all the tasks from all the projects into one place for you. This allows me to see my daily task list, which has my work and the work of the team I work with.
The customizable buttons along the top allow you to easily add tasks, notes, and resources. (At her job, my partner added a button for people to send her questions, which are stored in a database, allowing her to track issues that arise on projects like a ticketing system. It was a brilliant hack, one that I plan to steal. This again points to the idea that once you know how to use a tool, you can deploy it in novel ways to solve specific problems!)
You can also generate calendar views, which I use to help visualize what will happen over the next two weeks. You can customize the view by using filters and sorts. For instance, I like to see all the tasks we’re doing, even those that are completed.
I can also create a master task list, which I use to see what I need to do for the month. But you can also change the timeframe. I use this function to generate the kickoff meeting our team has each week. In minutes, I can pull up everything that we need to do and organize it by project. I can also quickly add tasks that have come up during that meeting, so we have an up-to-date list.
The bottom line is this: managing 25 projects with a three-person team isn’t magic—it’s about finding the right tools and actually understanding how to use them. The Headquarters template didn’t just give me a place to dump information; it gave me a system that thinks the way I think. And that’s made all the difference between drowning in project chaos and actually getting those planters built. (Well, maybe next Christmas.)
AI use in this post
I used Claude.ai Projects to help copyedit this piece. I pasted what I wrote, asked it to identify any Chicago Manual of Style errors, corrected them in bold in an artifact, and then created a Style Guide of changes so I could make them by hand. (Some I didn’t change because…style, man.) I also used Grammarly to copyedit, using its Chicago Manual of Style setting and my style guide additions, which I’ve made over the last few years.
Photo Credits:
Feature Image: Photo by Zach Graves on Unsplash
Screenshots: Me and my MacBook Pro
