Hi!

You’ve asked and you shall receive! 😍 Let’s talk about creating a second brain in Notion. It’s mostly helping me in three major areas—organizing my tasks, archiving my work, and managing my relationships.

In this newsletter, I’ll explain how I’m thinking about it and I’ve also created a whiteboard with screenshots and notes explaining what you are looking at. You can find it here:

If you are unfamiliar with the whiteboard feature in Canva—you can use touchpad gestures or the looking glass to make it bigger and you can move around to see all of the content.

🗂️ Organizing Your Tasks

Having a to-do list decreases the everyday decision fatigue. You know what you plan to work on and you just sit down and do it.

In the past, this would seem incredibly boring and uninspiring to me as a creative person. I used to rely on what I felt like doing which worked well when creating was just a hobby.

Once I started to make a living creating and leading my creative business, learning to approach my work with structure and discipline was a game changer. It took years to get used to and only after burning out, I realized the real benefits of doing so. 🙏🏻

In Notion, I have a separate page that I call To-Do Today. On top of the page are my monthly and weekly goals reminding me what I’m working towards. Following that are days of the week with four quadrants. For details, please see the whiteboard.

🗄️ Archiving Your Work

Storing your creations inside tools and on social media can mean only one thing—a risk that you’ll lose it all should you lose access. Besides that, it makes repurposing your content more difficult than it needs to be. 🫠

If you archive it all in Notion, you can access it easily at any time. No need to go to your social media profiles to find your old posts only to get distracted in the process.

In Notion, I have pages for all of my projects—Creative Coffee and Lenka On The Run are shown on the whiteboard. I have a few work-in-progress ones that look the same.

I also created a page called Creative Biz where I gather all my thoughts on my mission, vision, phases of biz development, etc. Having things written down and laid out gives you clarity and invites you to regularly check in. 🫡

💆🏻‍♀️ Managing Relationships

Do you tend to attend events, meet people, connect on social media, maybe write a message or two and then you completely forget to maintain the relationship? You and me both! 😔

I decided to do better in this area because Your Network Is Your Net Worth. In the past, I’d get the ick reading that sentence and thinking of networking. I imagined having to be sleazy and shove my business card down people’s throats. That’s not how it’s done, though.

Every relationship requires work and shouldn’t be transactional. Genuine connections help us create a community around us, which is something very deeply rooted in humans. We all have that need deep inside even though we’ve been brought up in an individualistic society. 🤔

In Notion, I created a very basic CRM that allows me to keep track of my connections with fellow creators on the ConvertKit Recommendation Network.

I plan on creating a CRM for my consulting and mentoring clients as well. The whole point is to help my brain not having to carry all the information in my head and feeling guilty or embarrassed about forgetting important details about people.

💡 Tips for starting a second brain:

1. Your second brain is always a work in progress. Start with the most basic version and try to improve it little by little on a weekly or monthly basis. That is way more sustainable than trying to do it all at once.
2. Notion has a ton of free templates you can just download. Personally, I don’t like to use other people’s templates because I find myself more motivated to use the ones I’ve created myself. I guess it’s the IKEA effect of it all.
3. Be kind to yourself and don’t expect to be great at it from the get-go. Building and maintaining a second brain is more of a habit than a skill. A habit needs at least 30 days to form and a lifetime to imperfectly maintain.

Do you have any follow-up questions? Shoot me an email and I’m happy to answer.

Stay creative,

Lenka xx

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P.S.: Do you know of someone who'd benefit from reading Creative Coffee? Send them this page where they can check out my newsletters before subscribing to see if they like it. Thank you! 🥰

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