You’re Using Notion Wrong: How to Set up PM Software for Serious Project Work

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Galen Low: Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership.

Okay, today we're going to be talking about the popular productivity platform, Notion, and whether it's up to the task of managing complex digital projects that involve larger organizations. But even if you're not a Notion user, we're going to be covering some of the biggest mistakes people make when configuring and driving adoption around their project management tool, whether it's Notion or anything else.

Joining me today is Frances Odera Matthews, a Certified Notion Consultant and the founder of The Notion Bar. Over the past three years, she has helped over 150 global clients build cultures of intention and tell the story of their work through Notion. 

Frances, thanks for joining me on the show today!

Frances Odera Matthews: Hello, thank you for having me today. Really, really excited to chat. 

Galen Low: I'm excited to chat with you and thank you for joining me. You're in London. It's like late afternoon for you right now, but I'm happy that you are willing to nerd out a bit. I was saying in the green room that we don't get into tools as much here on the podcast.

So this is a bit of a new thing for us, but I know that there's a lot of folks in our community who are using Notion, who are curious about Notion, who have been avoiding Notion, and also just folks who are on a journey just with project management tooling, never quite landing on that perfect project management tool.

I'm searching for it, seeking out that holy grail, and I thought maybe we can shed some light on it in the conversation today. You're obviously someone who knows a lot about Notion. Caveat to the listeners, I am somebody who does not know a lot about Notion. So I will play that curious individual who is not in the know, and Frances is going to share her wealth of knowledge, because you are absolutely deep into Notion, and I'm excited to dive in.

Frances Odera Matthews: Absolutely. 

Galen Low: I thought maybe we could start with the basics actually. So for folks who are not in the know, for folks who are less in the know than I am, could you just tell us what is Notion and why is it something that you've decided to build your entire service offering around? 

Frances Odera Matthews: Sure, absolutely.

So I guess I'll start at the beginning and jump off of what you were just mentioning there as project manager is always seeking to find the perfect tool. Once upon a time, I was a project manager. Always seeking to find the perfect tool. I've been a project manager amongst a lot of different creative industries and agencies, including ecommerce and UX, and you are always switching from tool to tool.

And it was always a massive undertake to do this whole tool qualification and compare features and be like, well, this one has this, but this part that we need, but that one doesn't have that one. And then you're just trying to Frankenstein all of this stuff together. 

And so we were using a Notion internally, the last Shopify agency that I was working for, just for organizing internal things. And then one day I realized, wait a second, why have I got all of these client portals hanging around in Google Sheets? I've got these tasks lists half running a Notion, like why don't I just build everything in one place?

And so I literally halved my job as a project manager by building our client portals to manage the Shopify build from start to finish. I don't know if anyone's ever worked in the Shopify build, but it is incredibly involved and there are so many moving parts. And then I realized I'm bored because the exciting bit for me about a job was creating the system.

And all that was left was chasing the team and clients around. And I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. And I just it just so happened that Notion was gaining a lot of traction. And at the beginning of 2020, I was like, maybe I'll put myself onto Fiverr or something. Maybe someone wants to pay me for this random nerdy skill that I'm really good at.

Turns out a lot of people did, and I went full time in the summer of 2021, and I haven't looked back. And so there's a catchphrase or a tagline or a slogan that I always refer to in that, Notion isn't a productivity tool, it's a possibility tool. And what I was missing from all of those other project management tools, Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, Avaaz, or I could go on, was they were simply project management systems. That's all that they did. 

Whereas with Notion, you can really tell the story of your work, you can connect your project management system to that random, scrappy Excel database that you've got kicking about, and you can view the data in a way that's speaking to the rest of the system and is engaging. And actually, it looks nice, so you can literally build dashboards so you can see the information that you need to see, where you need to see it, and when you need to see it. And that kind of flexibility just isn't found in out of the box tools. Think of it as a create your own adventure. 

Galen Low: I love the origin story because honestly, I think there's a lot of folks there who dread setting up software, in general - project management, software, anything. Anything where you're like going through and you're building foundational architecture for something pretty important, like they don't love that.

So actually, in a way, I'm like, I'm not surprised that there is demand for someone like yourself who just loves it. And I love that we live in a world where this is a thing where you could sort of say, you know what? This is what I want to do. Not necessarily all the project management stuff, like running the project, but getting it set up for success.

And then also just this idea that, yeah, the tools these days can do a lot of things. I think, in a way, we have sort of rigid thinking about what different types of software ought to do and look like and be. And we'll get into it later, but I think there's a lot of folks who are just like, it needs to be turnkey, right?

I need to be able to like, just log in and go because, we've got projects to run. Nobody got time for, like setting things up, configuring things, thinking hard about what we want it to do. So in a way, I think this is it's a perfect snapshot of where we're at with software today, where a lot of people work differently, to your point, like people are using different tools in an agency environment or any kind of client services context.

You have the client's tool, right? They're like, well, we use this or we have this spreadsheet over here and we need to report into the spreadsheet and it needs to plug together more than it needs to be the be all end all, we said, holy grail, I get at the beginning, right? The sort of nirvana of project management tool maybe doesn't exist. 

Maybe it's about careful configuration. But overall, I love that because I think it's sort of relating to a lot of the challenges and the pain that people are feeling around running projects, using software, like driving collaboration and making it all work with different people's style of working.

So I think that's super cool. I led with it at the top that, there are some folks who are not anti-Notion. But maybe they're like, yeah, Notion is not for me. But I'm just wondering, from where you stand, who should use Notion? And maybe, who shouldn't? Like, how do you help your clients understand when Notion is the answer, and like, when it's not?

Frances Odera Matthews: So, first off, I would say there is definitely a mindset element to it. I use the analogy of, you could get your clothes tailored, or you could buy them off the rack. Buying something off the rack might be fine, but if you spend that little bit of effort and go to the tailor and get measured and all of that, you're going to be 20 times happier with the end result than something you've just bought off the rack.

Especially if this is something that you're going to use every single day of your life and it's pretty much the crux of what you do and how you facilitate your days and your work. And so you have to be in a mental position to be like, okay, I'm going to be forced to sit down and actually think, wait, what do I actually do every day? 

And you'll be surprised about how many people have not thought through that question and we're in this junk productivity diet where we just want to go go go go and no one's taking the time to pause and figure out what on earth is going on. So first of all, you need to be in a mindset where you're okay with causing and figuring out like this part of my workflow doesn't serve me, this part of my workflow does serve me.

I do care about tracking this thing, I don't care about tracking that thing. So, first of all, the mindset is everything. And then just from a pragmatic view, if you've got a bunch of spreadsheets that you've got floating around and you would love, those spreadsheets to speak to each other, Notion is probably the place for you. You'll be surprised at how much time you'll save by not having to do, manual data entry, like, across the system or across spreadsheets.

So that's definitely a pragmatic view. And so I mentioned earlier, about me literally halving my workloads as a project manager with creating client portals in Nation. I've worked with people across all kind of industries. I've worked with VCs to create really niche and it's actually a really cool build.

It was a blind deal rating mechanism where it was all one big database, but different VCs had different views of the databases. So they were rating the same, like, portfolio company in the same database, but they couldn't see what the other person was scoring. But there was a, an end score. That was really cool.

I've done all kinds of things. I've worked with, 60 to 70 person ecommerce brands to completely overhaul and rebuild their systems in Notion. Again, that was mainly a taking all the floating Excel spreadsheets and just bringing them into one place so that everyone has oversight as well on what's going on.

A big issue that I see with a lot of businesses is just transparency. People don't understand how data is moving around the company and with Notion because everything is on the cloud. When you update something, it updates it for everyone in real time, wherever it's mentioned across the ecosystem. 

And yeah, I outed some project management names earlier, but the most common tools that people come to me from are like ClickUp and Monday, again, because those are purely project management tools. But what people are looking for are holistic ecosystems, where everything in their workflow is speaking to each other. They can come in and have a really nice home page where they can see what everyone's working on, what's due.

Maybe some cool announcements, and it's really nicely branded. And so, yeah, if you're looking for any of that, Notion is probably worth looking at. Again, there are drawbacks. it, is a time investment. So what I was saying there, you have to be ready and have that mindset and say, I am ready to take streamlining my workflow seriously.

And with that, there is a learning curve and there is some set up. But to be honest, there's a learning curve and set up for any tool. 

Galen Low: Fair, right? 

Frances Odera Matthews: So this is, this has a longer term payoff because this is something you can customize and grow with you in the long run. So as your processes change, you just switch up your Notions and switching to another tool.

Galen Low: I like that notion of assembling the work. It's not necessarily project management, especially the people using the platform might not see it as project management. So to pigeonhole it into project management, and I know a lot of the sort of platforms you mentioned are trying to broaden into just being about getting work done.

But I like that notion of just like people just want it in one place because we're wasting so much time doing data entry or wondering when this bit of information is going to come in or when so and so is going to update a thing so that we know what's going on over here. Whereas actually work is more fluid than that.

It's not all this kind of these rigid Oh, Wednesday status report day. What if I want to know how this product's doing on Tuesday? I should be able to know that. So I do like that. I also really can I just say, I really like the tailored suit analogy. And I think it's really apt and not to take it too far, not to dive too deep into it.

But I'm like, yeah, you know what? I would say like a suit. Okay. So like you get your tailored suit or like buying a wedding dress. Right? And that's something you're coming with that mindset and you've had that thought. You're like, I want it to look like this. Here's what I need it for. Here's the sort of theme of the day.

I'm going to invest the time, because it's something that I want tailored to me. And then I'm like, okay, I'm not the kind of person, I know there's people out there who do, but I'm like, I will buy a t shirt off the rack. I'll buy a polo off the rack, like I'm wearing now, right, and I'm like, and that's okay, I don't plan to go and get this tailored. And that's alright, because it's like my day to day shirt, it's not like the thing I'm going, I'm staking my entire life on. You know what I mean? It's not for that big, whatever, business pitch, or job interview, or, wedding, or whatever. It's just, I'm gonna wear it, a couple of days a week.

Yeah, it's whatever. And I think software can be like that too. And I think, I had all these questions here about this notion of getting set up versus rushing in versus figuring it out as you go. But I think that analogy, like really crisply, tells a story of, yeah, some of your tools are t-shirts, and that's okay. you don't need to go, hire a consultant to figure out how you're gonna use your, whatever, instant messaging tool, Slack, or, Teams, or whatever.

Sometimes, that'll just unfold, and it'll be a little more fluid. And yes, you use it every day, but at the same time, it's not it's not like everything needs to be perfect around it for it to work. Whereas, project management software is something that you're going to use as the sort of central focus of your collaboration.

That should be a possibility tool, right? It's not just about moving, a widget from A to B. It's about people collaborating together, sharing information, knowing what's going on, being on the same page. And usually the stakes are high in project management because usually it's some kind of, push initiative or like transformation, has a lot riding on it.

And that's important. And therefore, that, actually, there's nothing wrong with, I guess, buying a suit off the shelf and, wearing it to your wedding. I'm sure it happens. But also, it's worth having that thought in your head to be like, is this something where I should have the mindset of tailoring, right?

Like, where it's worth it, where I do want to, have my inseam measured no matter how awkward it actually is, at the actual tailor. And just yes, because I want it to fit and I want it to look great and I want it to last a long time. I think that's a really, really apt analogy. 

Frances Odera Matthews: Yeah, I think it's good also what you said there with the stakes being high.

So yeah, if the stakes are high to you, and your process is that involved and that important to you, then yeah, you probably should get it tailored at some point. You might start off the rack and you're like, you know what? This is really an important crux of my workflow. Let's see how I can make this tailored to me.

Galen Low: I like that. And actually, that was where I was gonna go in the next question too, because I'm like, at the same time, can Notion be a t-shirt off the rack at first? And what are some of the I don't know, limitations or drawbacks of that versus what you've seen actually work quite well? if someone goes in and they're like, yes, Notion, that's fine, but I'm going to tailor it later. Let's just go. what does that experience look like? 

Frances Odera Matthews: So there are a couple of ways that Notion can be a t-shirt off the rack. The first way is that you can find a bunch of templates from across the internet. if you typed in X template in Google, something is gonna come up. I will say, not all templates are created equal.

As someone who spends a lot of time reverse engineering and improving templates out there. a lot of, don't be fooled by the prettiness of things. I'm someone who puts a lot of work into the aesthetics of my work, purely because I wanted to use it. I first focused on the functionality of it, and a lot of templates out there, unfortunately, they're really pretty, but they're like a nightmare to use, because the databases aren't speaking to each other properly, the user experience hasn't been optimized so many things. 

So just take a little caution with what you pick up, and also don't fall into the junk template diet where you just buy like 20 templates and you're like, yeah, this is going to be great for me. You should always take inspiration from templates and, take what you need from them and see how you can merge it into your workflow.

Other way that Notion can be a t-shirt off the rack, apart from just that many templates are out there, is that Notion does have a starter project management kit with the tasks and projects, I believe. It's okay. Again, it's basic for a reason because they want you to build on top of it, essentially. so that's just getting you used to the functionality of Notion, and then you're like, okay, this is great, but in an idea world, I actually want to be able to add tasks directly from my meeting note template, which is actually a fan favorite feature of mine.

There are people like, oh my goodness, I don't have to like, go write it down and then spend half an hour adding it into monday.com, this is crazy. So yeah, you've got your t-shirts off the rack, but most importantly with the process, I follow a very intentional bottom up approach for a reason. So the first stage is discovery, it's figuring out what on earth do we do?

again, most people haven't sat down to answer that question, like what software do we use? What could we possibly replace the Notion? What could we connect to Notion? What do we need to track, store and share? Essentially, that's what Notion is good for. And then you say, okay, well, how can we reverse engineer this into databases?

And how can we connect those databases to each other so that it's efficient and we're not doing double data entry all the time and wasting time. Then we go into, well, how can we template out our pages? what would a perfect project dashboard look like for us? Do we want to see tasks? Do we want to see meetings?

Do we want to see client information? Do we want to have space for files? Do we want those files to be standalone or do you want them to be seen in perpetuity, along with all of the other projects files, like there is a deep art form to database building, but ultimately you want to get the database and database template bit right.

And then from there you can build your views. And then once that's done, you can just plug and play your dream dashboards. Essentially, you can pull views of, let's say you had a big old task database. You can have a due task view on your task home page, but you could also have a due task view on your main home page where people are just figuring out what's going on.

You could also have that in the marketing section, but just filtered for marketing, but. So you've got those three snapshots of that database in three separate spaces of the workspace, but they're all speaking to each other. So unlike spreadsheets, again, which you're manually updating and wasting so much time, everything is just updating in real time, which is it's just invaluable.

Galen Low: At least for me, I don't know about for our listeners, but templates these days, that word doesn't quite do it justice. And to hear you say that, yeah, there's a template for this, and it, it's got some kind of vanilla database set up for, basic connectivity to other tools. My mind's I was like, no, I thought it was just gonna be like, a table with some labels, on the columns, and that's how you do status reporting, but I think it's important to yeah, for folks to understand that there's a lot going on behind the scenes.

Notion is one of those things, I've used it on a couple of projects, mostly as a client, not as a project manager. But you know, it's simplicity on the front end masks what can happen in the back end in terms of surfacing information and tying things together. And that's actually, that's quite exciting.

I do want to dive into it later on just about like how it plugs into other things, but one thing that kind of strikes me here is that, we've been using this analogy of a tailored suit or, a wedding dress, something that will need to have alterations done. And in that analogy, it's okay, usually it's one person or a handful of people, but in your role as a consultant, who are you talking to, to figure out things like, oh, do we want task due on personal dashboards and on the roll up view on the homepage?

is this quite an orchestration of individuals or who are you usually dealing with to make these decisions about how dashboards work and how the tool itself works? 

Frances Odera Matthews: Yeah, I mainly work with the project managers and the chief of people or equivalent, because they're really the people who are taking the culture of work flow into their hands for the organization.

So they come to me and say, we're having trouble seeing this or doing this, and we would love our workforce to be more like this. And I go, okay, well, I can reverse engineer notions to match those needs. Outside of project management, even simple things like we would love our employees to have more of a culture of praising their teammates.

Okay, let's build a praise button on the homepage where they were just using behavior psychology as well, because this is the place that they're going to log into every day. Let's put a button where they're going to see every day of like, where they're encouraged to, shout out team members into this, praise database and you can see what people have said before and things like that.

So, there are so many things that can go into it just, even just outside of project management. Again, you're, it's not just project management. It's all of the holistic things that surround work that need to be tracked, stored, or shared.

Galen Low: I love that, sort of, tracked, stored, or shared, sort of, distillation.

But what I like even more is this notion of, who you're dealing with. In my head, I was like, okay, yeah, probably, also the executives who need some kind of rollout from Notion and probably like some other key stakeholders, internal or external. But what I love is this other layer of yeah, of course, people who have a stake in the culture of the workflow, right?

Like the people in, people ops, operations and project management. Because it's more than just like task management. And I think a lot of folks like immediately go there. They're like project management software, status reports, timelines, minding budget, some kind of burndown view and tasks, tasks, tasks, tasks.

And, where are they at? But actually it's about people working together and like feeling good about the work that they're doing and understanding the value of the work that they're doing and understanding how it rolls up to goals. And to your point, yeah, if the culture that you want to build and the values that you uphold have to do with like praise and, like being supportive and, serving leadership, then you can build that into the tool.

Not every tool, but clearly like it's something that you have the ability to customize in Notion. Other tools as well, I'm sure, where you can actually make it reflect the culture that either does exist or you want to, aspire towards. It's not just, when is task a due? And, every project management software will do that.

But what's gonna let you build, the culture of intention and the workflows that you want. You mentioned it in your intro, right? It's like telling the story of the work. And, I'll be honest with you, I was like, ha, yeah, okay, that's, a good tagline. But I started thinking about it, I'm like, now, I mean, this is the thing, like you said, we spend so much time working, right?

We spend so much effort and put so much stake in, a project, yes, it is important to, have that story told and be part of that story day in and day out. More than it is about necessarily, understanding the exact percentage of, utilization for this resource number, that's important too, but what does it actually all mean?

And I love that notion of what you said about pausing to think about what it is that we're doing, yes, about like the work itself, but like even just, the nature of that organization, business, or team, like why have we come together? What are we about? And how do we want this to work? And I think that's, it's like the inspiring side of the coin, where the other side of that coin is easily just does it do the features that we want?

Okay, well, what's it cost? Okay, well, let's plug it in and turn it on and go from there. When you put those two side by side, you're like, yeah, one's kind of better than the other, right? 

Frances Odera Matthews: Totally. And on the other side of the coin that you just mentioned there is all that plug and play, you are forcing yourself to work in a way that a software has told you, instead of telling a software how you actually work. 

And, obviously the first option is going to give you a lot more of a resistance and friction and feel a lot more unnatural, whereas when things are just set up for the way that your brain needs to, happen and the way your team needs to flow naturally, it just becomes a lot easier.

And that's actually one reason why Notion attracts a lot of people from the neurodivergent community as well, because all of a sudden there's an opportunity to like, build things for literally how your brain needs to see them. 

Galen Low: Yeah, I agree. I think there's some, I mentioned it up top, like there's some rigidity in the way we think that software ought to be.

And I'm glad you sort of mentioned that about neurodiversity and the fact that, yeah, you know what, we need to start recognizing that we all work differently. We all think differently. And there's a way to not necessarily force ourselves into a square hole when we could actually make one that fits us better.

Frances Odera Matthews: Totally. And like the most common way I see that come up in my work is some people hate the Kanban view and some people love the table view, or hate the table view and just only work on Kanbans and but you can just create both in Notion. It's the same data, it's just flipped in a different way. 

Galen Low: It's a different view. I think it's actually, in some ways a good segue because I wanted to get into the meat of some of the tough stuff around Notion. And we've been talking around it throughout but I think you know the big thing for me and especially when I'm like having conversations with people or trawling through forums.

the, sort of main theme that I see is just okay, well, Notion is something we're going to outgrow. It's a bit too, bohemian. It's too difficult to manage or, it's somehow underpowered in some way. And I see it get dismissed a lot, especially at, the enterprise level.

They're like, it might be good for small teams and like, you know, independence and micro agencies and things like that, but we're, we're 250 people, we can't use Notion. Is that true? is Notion like serious software that can play at an enterprise level as well? Or what are some of the challenges that folks might encounter that might trigger some of these, ideas or opinions about it at that level?

Frances Odera Matthews: Yeah, I think the bigger you grow, the more you're going to have to worry about permissions. So you're just going to have to have someone on your team or hire someone like me to take on that job and figuring out what your permissions architecture is and making sure that people are assigned to the correct team space, essentially, and it might just be someone's job.

You might have to hire someone to take on Notion, like their job is literally Notion maintenance, and that's not uncommon. We see that with other tools. We, with, for example, Salesforce administrators within companies. So it's, this is a thing that lots of people have many touchpoints on, you're gonna, have to go in and, clean things up.

I do offer, a fractional service to that for smaller teams who want that stage yet, but you're just gonna have to figure out the permission levels and make sure that it's built in the right way and make sure it looks nice, but it can definitely play. 

Galen Low: I know I've focused in on the configuration, initial configuration, onboarding, adoption.

But to your point, right? again, I'm gonna take this analogy far too far, but right? listen, if your tailored suit, gets damaged, has a stain, has a hole in it, you're not gonna be like, oh, this is garbage, I'm gonna throw it away. You'll probably go and get it fixed, and you're gonna probably have a person, or you will, find a person who's yeah, I trust you enough, and you know me enough that you can repair this, or you can make it do something that it didn't do before.

I, definitely not the same weight as I was when I got married. So, can we, let this out and, make it fit better? Because it is that thing that is important, ongoing work. It's the business. It's the beating art. Of course, if you, and I know a lot of listeners might be like, yeah, but I can't afford to have a, a staffer who is in charge of Notion.

Maybe not even fractionally. Maybe, that's something that will be difficult to budget for. Well, when you think about the stakes and you think about the pace of technology, and yes, people are working differently, every day they're working differently and there's new tools and you will need to integrate things. 

And actually, it is worthwhile because of the thing that you said, which is you actually halved your sort of admin time and that's across the board, yes, for the project manager, but also for anyone doing data entry, like everything from, if you have to track your time in two different places and you have a way where you could just do it in one place.

there's an ROI there, I guess is what I'm trying to say, that if you can look at it that way, the investment of having someone who is responsible for Notion or whatever tool, there is an ROI to it. 

Frances Odera Matthews: A hundred percent. It's really funny to me, because I'll see companies spend six figures on an office renovation and it's Oh, look, we've got a new coffee machine.

That's going to improve our productivity. Look at us, we've got a foosball table now. Your team is spending 1% of their time at the coffee machine and the foosball table. They're spending 97% plus of their time in these data entry points. Why not invest the time and resources to make sure they actually work properly and look nice and efficient?

I'm a bit of a design buff myself and I would love a world where there's a bit more of a hybrid approach to a physical office design and a virtual office design so you could make the Notion interior match the office interior, make QR codes about the place, which link to different Notion setups.

Like we are entering this hybrid era, so why not actually make it hybrid? 

Galen Low: Oh my gosh. That's a whole nother episode right there. I would love to dig into that because I also am huge on that as well. I mean, we're seeing so many hybrid workplaces. And yes, we are still seeing a lot of sometimes to incentivize folks to come back to the office they've done a kitchen right now. You know what I mean? 

Frances Odera Matthews: It's have you got a spreadsheet with it? 

Galen Low: Yeah. Right? that would actually be great. Do the reverse. We'll just have a spreadsheet themed kitchen and then it should be fine. Speaking of something that could be a tone episode. I'm just going to jet this right in at the end here.

we're talking about Notion. We're talking about it being a tool of possibility. We're talking about how it can be sort of scaled and how it can plug into a more enterprise context. And I think the other thing that's sort of top of mind, in addition to like hybrid workplaces is the notion of AI.

And I know that Notion like was actually one of the like first tools that I noticed that actually had rolled out an AI driven set of features. And I was doing a bit of research and I, know there was this big sort of spike in interest, of course, because I think it was, at least from my perspective, it looked like an early adopter or at least first some, amongst the first to market with an AI powered feature set.

I'm just wondering, you talk to a lot of people about Notion, are people really using, Notion's AI capabilities in their work? Is it still more of a curiosity? Is there a hesitancy? Or are some folks actually, really using it in their day to day, at scale to increase that benefit of, saving time and doing less data entry? Like, how has the adoption been feeling and where have you seen it been a bit challenging for some of your clients?

Frances Odera Matthews: Yeah, I would say the biggest new feature that people are loving with Notion AI is the Q&A feature. Where as long as your processes are documented correctly and think just data is generally entered correctly across the system, you can ask Notion Q&A anything like, What are we working on this month?

And it will pull up an answer for you based on what's in the system or based on the types of clients we've worked with last year, how would you recommend we do X, Y, Z? I don't know. It's anything like that. it becomes truly a second brain, which is a term you'll hear a lot if you start going down the notion rabbit hole.

The other one is to do really practical things, especially within databases. in my own personal workflow, I use Notion AI as a database property to help me format links for my newsletter, The Notion Zeitgeist, which everyone should go follow. 

Galen Low: There you go. I'll add the link in the notes. 

Frances Odera Matthews: I literally web clip things to this database and then I have a Notion AI prompt as a property, which is get the title of this database page and hyperlink it with the URL of this page and also add an emoji at the beginning of it based on the title.

And that saves me like 30 seconds per thing, which is incredibly valuable, because I would have had to format that link by hand, which is no. 

Galen Low: No, absolutely. I, even in my day to day work, I'm like, I'm sending emails with like links in them. And yeah, it's adding time. Like I feel it adding time. Go grab the URL.

Okay. Make sure it's right, highlight the text, click the link button, blah, blah, blah. that's actually a very good use of AI.

Frances Odera Matthews: Not Notion related, but I don't know if anyone's using magic or, it's just Magical I think, that's like a great tech expander for repeat report things. 

Galen Low: Oh, okay.

Frances Odera Matthews: But going back to Notion AI, yeah, it's just any kind of manual work, turn this into a table for me. I've just word vomited, tidied, it up. Notion AI can do that. yeah, lots of really cool things, but my favorite is definitely, the replacing manual formatting a moment, because no one has time for that.

Galen Low: Honestly, even what you said about, action items and meeting minutes and notes and things, because, overall, yeah, I know we're, the project managers, who are listening, like we, we do get labeled as being very organized and like nothing, nothing's messy in your world.

You're a project manager, but like actually doing project management, like in the collaboration and you're in a meeting and you're just like people just throwing ideas at the wall and yeah, it's messy. And if there is a lot of time spent, like unmessifying that, to make it make sense, to make it look organized, so that you look like an organized project manager, but that's not the skill.

The skill is that you brought people together, and people were throwing ideas at the wall, and then you need to get it into a state where it makes sense to other people who weren't in the room. that's the skill, not the like, copying and pasting these words into a thing and formatting links.

I love that. I love that it's kind of like that additional tool for efficiency. But also what you said about the second brain, like I think, we've been sort of delving a bit into AI tools and how AI tools can be used for project management, but a lot of what we have been sort of dealing with are, more on the LLM side, ChatGPT.

help me do a thing, not necessarily connected to the database of information, like the project data, whereas what you had said is just like this Q&A feature that's gonna grab the insights, I guess not unlike, something like analytics, like in GA4 where it's a prompt to question interface. 

But I love the idea that yeah, it can gather some insights because it's looking at the data from your databases in Notion, maybe across projects, maybe across your business to give you some quick answers that a tool that's not connected to that data will never be able to do. That's actually really interesting to me. 

Frances Odera Matthews: 100% and that only really works when you documented your processes correctly. And that's another point where I see companies lose efficiency. So they don't have anywhere written down this is how we do X. This is how we do Y. This is what Y looks like in this kind of setting.

And that's where you're also losing time. It's like people are just scrambling to figure out how to do things. 

Galen Low: Yeah, the machine can't learn something if you haven't written it down. 

Frances Odera Matthews: Exactly. 

Galen Low: I mean, it ties it all back, really, right? Is that, it takes some intentionality. I think a lot of work these days is very chaotic, seat of the pants.

And I think in a lot of businesses, not all businesses, but a lot of businesses, that is valued. that is a good thing. Oh, yeah, we fail fast and chaos is okay because, we get to the answer more quickly. And sure, I buy into that as well. But at some point, it needs to have this pause and this intentional thought to be like, what is it that we're doing?

We need to be deliberate about this. We need to document stuff. We need to have our data in order. And that is, it's worth the investment. Running, running, running. Chaos, chaos, chaos. dog in a fiery room mean, it doesn't always have to be like that. It's worth it to sit down and have that mindset to pause and think about it intentionally about what it is that we're actually doing.

Frances Odera Matthews: Yeah, and ultimately there is a cost to chaos and that chaos is high employee turnover rates because people don't want to work in chaos for longer than a few months. And so I used to being working in the ecommerce world, which is arguably one of the most chaotic industries out there. I'd be working on a project and I'd have one person as my stakeholder and in a few months time it'd be someone else and in a few months time it'd be someone else because they just moved on because everything was so chaotic internally that they were like, they're like, I'm not doing this anymore.

And so you've got recruiting fees as well as the inefficiency of having to train someone else up with a role, every six months when if you just pause to set things out correctly the first time, you wouldn't have to go through all that. 

Galen Low: I love that. There's a cost to chaos. Brilliant. Frances, thanks so much for being on the show. I think this was a really juicy conversation. I think there's three more episodes hiding in some of the things that we just glossed over in the past 10 minutes, which will absolutely do it. 

In the meantime, if folks want to learn more about you and, sign up to that newsletter, like where can they find you?

Frances Odera Matthews: You can find me at The Notion Bar on all platforms. I hang out on LinkedIn a lot these days. So, Frances Odera Matthews. Yeah, follow my newsletter where you'll, The Notion Zetgeist, where you'll also see updates about what's going on in my course community, as well as just inspiring snippets and news from the IT community curate from across the Notions I geist for you each week. 

Galen Low: I'll add all those links in the notes. And again, thank you for spending some time with me today. 

Frances Odera Matthews: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Galen. This has been great. 

Galen Low: Alright folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come join our collective! Head over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.