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You can watch the video for the last episode recorded on July 25, 2019, above, or you can review the transcript below.
In this episode we talked about:
- How to get around issues and to really stay until something is finished?
- How would you compare Evernote and Notion?
To find recommended tools and other great resources, check out the Productivity Academy Resource Toolkit: https://productivity.academy/resources
Alright, we are live Welcome everybody to Episode 92 of the productivity Academy Q and A, just thinking about switching up the title right there. I’m not sure why I started slow down and pick like, hmm, should I rename this on the fly? And the answer is no.
But anyways, just wanted to say, Hi, we got some good questions, we’re going to go over today, if anyone’s watching live in the group, you can go ahead and ask your questions and answer those as I have time, I’ll check the Facebook page here off to the side, from time to time. And other than that, just wanted to say if you’re watching the replay, that’s great. You can come join us a lot.
Come join us in the free Facebook group. You can find the link below if you’re checking this out on YouTube, you do have to answer some questions pretty tricky, like what’s your biggest productivity issue? And how did you hear about the group. But it would just want to make sure that we get people in the group are truly interested in productivity, time management, automation, all that sort of good stuff.
So with that said, let’s jump into it. Top over here on my other screen. And a couple of really good question. So what we’re going to talk about first is you know, having either yourself or knowing someone who’s never finishing or never finishing projects, you kind of jumping around and taking off or leaving things on finished.
So you know, as far as suggestions or techniques on how to do that, or how to get around those issues, and really stay until something’s finished. And I think that I look around and wrote some notes down before this. And I think that there’s some really good advice out there. And the one that I see a lot and I completely agree with, is to be very selective, right?
Instead of saying yes to everything, just working on saying no to more projects, and I think that that will help and whether you form your own filter, which you have to overtime, whether it’s mentally or you have something on paper, or in a spreadsheet, like I use my focus finder, where I just kind of do will do a brain dump every once in a while of everything, and then really score it and see what it is, that’s actually the most important of what I need to be doing.
This isn’t something I do on a daily basis. And if you’re interested in seeing it, just let me know, I’ve shared it before, I don’t have the link handy, but happy to share that as well. It’s a good way of just getting stuff out of your head, from time to time, maybe quarterly or monthly basis. And then seeing Okay, you know, truly what is the most important stuff I should be working on.
So going through that process, whatever it is for you, if it’s just mentally or if it’s like I said, writing it down. But starting off of that, so that you have less distractions, and you know, not so much maybe shiny project syndrome, where you want to go and do all these different things. But then not just stopping there, you know, not just narrowing it down to one or two things.
But then once you have the project you’re going to work on, tell yourself or literally list them out. Write them down, what are the benefits? Like what are you going to get out of this project? What is it that makes you want to do this so badly? And what made it so important on your list? You know, is it a revenue goal is it you know, getting something off your plate, because it’s going to remove a pain point, you know, whether it’s stress or commitment clients, whatever it is list those things out.
And then set yourself a reminder, to or if it’s a with a team, you know, this is part of Team reviews is going over, hey, what’s working, what’s not where we stuck, and review and hey, what are our goals? Why are we working on this stuff. And you can do this with yourself as well. And just reminding yourself, okay, when I finished this, this is like the payoff of what I’m going to get. So that you don’t just kind of spin your wheels, and find yourself, you know, hopping from thing to thing.
So that can be really helpful to remind yourself, you know, we’re all human, I assume. We all you know, have issues with longevity of being able to focus on a project for certain amount of time, it’s tough. And it can be easy to lose sight Are you get into the tough part. So that kind of, you know, the middle of a project kind of the law, and you see something else cool over here, like, ooh, I want to go start that, remind yourself what’s going to happen, what you’re going to get the benefit, and that will help you overcome that area.
Lastly, this is why I brought this up about working as a team or doing a team review. But if you’re working on your own, have some sort of accountability, this can be helpful, and you know, generally if this is going to work for yourself or not. And if you don’t, then I suggest trying it. This could be you know, maybe joining a little mastermind group, you know, people who do are doing are going after the similar type of goals.
I’m a part of one of these and not done them for years, I highly, highly recommend it and letting them know what you’re working on. And it’s just that, you know, in most cases, informal accountability of well, somebody else knows what I’m working on. I told them what I’m going to do. And you know, do I want to explain to them why I decided to just continue to drop these projects and move on.
And sometimes that can be enough, you know, that’s not the carrot, that’s the stick, right? That can be enough of a stick to keep us on path. And it’s also just another way of reviewing the project. And maybe the benefits because if you’re involved with other people, and you’re telling them and they know when they’re engaged and they understand what you’re doing, then you’re getting that accountability, you’re getting that feedback, and that will help you stay on track.
So hopefully, that helps. I think that any of these can be helpful, but when you put them together, it’s really, you know, really raises your likelihood of finishing, or at least getting better about you know, moving towards completion of a project. Alright, second question for today. Let’s see here, had a good question, which I really liked, because I just started while I’d say just a few months ago started using notion.
So you know, the question is, how would you compare Evernote notion? And this is can be a very in depth question, but I’ll keep it real, relatively simple based on what I’ve seen. And I’m now moving towards moving more into notion and and certainly recognizing that there’s some limitations. And then I’m a longtime Evernote user.
So that’s kind of my bias for answering this. And I’ll start with Evernote. I think that, you know, the advantages is history. It’s been around a long time, there’s certainly things that aren’t perfect about it. But it’s been very well designed, it works fairly well, most of the time on on all platforms.
And you’ve got, you know, tons of info for people who have used it to set up different organizational systems, it’s got tags, you know, with the notebook, setup it, there’s people out there who have made entire courses about this. So I think that that is definitely a plus it’s got the history, it’s got the legacy information, you search for something, I guarantee you somebody probably already done it never know.
Getting started is really simple. I’ve never like re downloaded, I guess I started over with Evernote in the last couple of years. So I don’t know, like what their kind of walk through is, but I would imagine at this point is probably pretty polished, in terms of, you know, getting you in there, but I just remember opening it up and being like, well, this is pretty simple.
I get it, I have an inbox, I can do some things. You know, and obviously you want to go further than that. But like, you know, in integrating something like getting things done, I think, you know, a lot of that was based around using Evernote. And again, there’s a lot of other courses that use that. Something that I liked about it was the ability to annotate PDFs that is in the one of the paid versions.
But you can import a PDF, open it annotated draw, highlight, do whatever, save it in there. That’s pretty handy. I know a lot of people really like that with notion. And what I’ve started using this for and just to give a little bit more background was I saw the power of like a bit of a wiki as well as being potentially an Evernote replacement.
And then mixing in some ideas from reading Tiago forte, his blog, haven’t checked it out. Just Google his name and practice, I think is the name of his blog. It’s got some great ideas, especially for like progressive summarization. As far as how to get the most out of your notes and you know, content you take in without spending a lot of time up front, and then his para organizational system.
So I was looking at that and thinking, Okay, how can I do this, he lays it out in Evernote. But I started looking at this and realizing I kind of wanted something more powerful where I can I can use, I need to have more layers basically. So notion came up, I forget who recommended it to me.
But I started digging into that right away I saw this could definitely be solution because one of its positives are its advantages is it is extremely flexible, there’s a lot you can do with it, you know, you can have a page with a database of other pages that are interlinked. And like there’s all sorts of crazy stuff you can do. You could also just write a blog post in the ocean, right? You could copy and paste an image.
So it’s all over, it’s what you want it to be, which is a great and can be a really daunting thing. When you start digging into it, you realize how much power there is. And so for myself, kind of gotta put the blinders on a little bit and be like, okay, what’s like the one thing I want to do in notion today? Or like maybe I want to learn like one new thing, instead of like going down the rabbit hole of learning, like trying to do 50 different things.
So I think that that could be a disadvantage, depending on how you view it is there’s definitely can be a steep learning curve, if you decided to really try to. I don’t think you could figure out everything at once. But you know, if you try to take it all on. And I’ll just leave it at that and say that I think that there’s a it’s worth checking out regardless of where you’re at right now.
You know, if you’ve used notion and not Evernote used Evernote, not notion. My guess is most people have at least tried both of them. And I would say that there’s very few deal killers with either. I think it depends a lot of what you want to do. What I’m hearing from a lot of people is like the wiki sort of a setup is working really well with notion.
And their ability to work really well with tables and databases is also huge. So maybe you’re setting up a content calendar, or anything like that, and where you want to have yourself or your team involved in that that’s working really well and notion I really enjoy it. I like it. Evernote definitely legacy solution, it’s great at what it does is very simple to use.
And again, there’s a lot of information about their How are out there, how to put it to you. So that’s just my quick opinion. I think as I get deeper into notion, I’ll definitely get some more detailed data via the productivity Academy about how I’m using it, how I see it being useful to other people, and how that either may help people transition from Evernote or use them both.
I think that there’s nothing wrong with using using both so long as you’re not getting, you know, overwhelmed from having so many apps and stuff. So anyways, let’s see, check real quick, see if there’s any questions. don’t see anything from the group. So I think that’s going to do it for this week. appreciate everyone watching and i’ll be back I think next week is already going to be the first of August.
Wow. Alright, so it’s going to be August. Next week. I will see you then. And if you want to again, if you’re checking the replay and you’re not in the group, you can find the link below or even hit subscribe on YouTube, stay up to date, obviously with these videos, as well as videos about team building automation app reviews, all that sort of good stuff. Alright, have a good one.
