Get the core elements of this streamlined project-management system in the template.
After knowledge management, Notion is most commonly used to streamline project management. Its unique combination of features allows you to view each project with its associated tasks, resources, notes, meetings and other useful information. Then, projects can be viewed on contextual dashboards, filtered by time, topic, team and other criteria.
This guide showcases a streamlined project-management system that leverages Notion's powerful capabilities.
As demonstrated in the Bulletproof methodology, my foremost recommendation for a Notion workspace is to:
I recommend a handful of master databases for every workspace; this guide focuses on three — Projects, Tasks and Resources — while referencing a few others.
Here's a brief overview of the Bulletproof approach to organizing your master databases:
A top-level Vault page stores master databases among three sub-pages:
The Buckets page is a database in itself. Your buckets are the high-level categories of your work, often including teams, departments and clients. If you're familiar with PARA, buckets are like areas. "Finance," "Marketing" and "Product Development" are common examples.
Databases within the Bolts page represent progress. They display and measure your work. Most notably, the master Projects and Tasks databases live here, but the Bolts page can also contain objectives and key results, meetings and events, notes, and databases of specific timeframes, such as Months and Quarters, for summarizing information.
The Bytes page stores information that supports your work; you reference its databases. That includes a master Resources databases that centralizes the bulk of your information. The Bytes page is also likely to include databases of contacts, companies, multimedia and other useful collections.
Below, I detail the Projects, Tasks and Resources databases. For the others mentioned, you'll find independent guides on Notion VIP and videos on YouTube. For this exercise, you're fine without the others, but you'll likely want the aforementioned Buckets database. Feel free to tweet @WilliamNutt with any specific questions.
Within Vault → Bolts, create your Projects database. Consider these properties:
Title)Date, with an end date)Person)Person)Relation, related to your Buckets or Areas database) Relation property within the related database.
Also within Vault → Bolts, create your Tasks database. Consider these properties:
Title)Person)Date)Date)Checkbox)
Your Resources database stores the bulk of the materials you use for your work — SOPs, policies, guides and guidelines, forms and agreements, client materials and much more. It will likely grow to be quite expansive, but you should only view it through filtered, contextual views. Create it within Vault → Bytes. Consider these properties:
Title)Text)File)URL)Relation, related to your Buckets database) Relation property within the related database.
Linking your master databases with the Relation property allows you to filter and summarize your information contextually.
Rollup property to the Projects database; name it "Progress." For the Relation, choose the Tasks database. For the Property, choose Complete (the Checkbox property). For Calculate, choose "Percent checked." (You may also want to create a visual progress bar.)
Relation properties blank.Relation) property, choose the project.Relation properties.
When you open a project as a page, you want a snapshot of all associated information. That includes filtered views of related databases — Tasks, Resources, Contacts, Meetings and Notes, among others.
What's more, you want this framework to be populated for each new project. Therefore, you'll apply them to a template:
Project Contains [Company] Project" (the current template).Each time you create a project with your template, it will automatically display its associated tasks, resources and other items. Tasks and resources created within the project will be automatically related to the project.
You'll rarely access your full databases of projects and tasks; instead, you'll view them in contextual dashboards. For each, you'll create a Linked Database, filtered to suite the page in which it appears. I recommend the Gallery format with the Timespan and Progress properties visible. (Display the progress bar, if you have it.)
Here are a few contextual views of your Projects database you might consider:
Questions? Tweet @WilliamNutt.