036: Shaping Big Ideas — Notion Walkthrough #2

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Hello friends. Welcome back to another Notion walkthrough. In episode 34 I shared the process for how I collect ideas and research what I call the harvesting phase. And today I'm going to walk you through how to start shaping a big idea. Again, not all of you are going to write a book. This is the process that I used within Notion to start crafting the shape of Free time. What became Free Time even though it started under a different title and if you are even not sure yet the format something is going to take, or you're trying to shape a speech, you're trying to shape a course, Any scenario where you're trying to harness a big idea and make sense of it, organize it and figure out how to communicate it. I hope that you'll find something valuable in today's walkthrough through. So again, this one is shaping your big idea. I encourage you to listen to episode 34 first if you haven't already. In that one I give an overview of Notion, why I love Notion and a little bit of the how to. And as a friendly reminder, if you want to learn more about ways you can use Notion in your business, I encourage you to check out Marie Poulain's Notion Office Hours so I'll be sure to link to that in the show. Notes. As I mentioned in episode 34, I'm also recording these as screen shares in case you want to see the visuals. Just sign up for the Free author toolkit@itsfreetime.com authors and that's where you can see the video version of this walkthrough. But I'll be narrating everything so that it's perfectly audio friendly even if you Never sign up for that toolkit. If you are interested in seeing the loom video Again, that's@itsfreetime.com Authors Today we're zooming in on one specific section or database in Notion that I call Book Board. This is set up as a Kanban style board, so to give you a little bit of the lingo in Notion, Board View is where you have columns that can show categories of information and the visual looks like little cards sitting in every stack or in every column that you can then move across the page. One handy way to think about this is a content production schedule. So, for example, we use Board View for managing podcast production. We can see a little card for a column called Scheduling, then one called interviewing or recording, audio editing, show notes, finalizing, and then live. Basically email the guest, tell them it's live, and archive. So you can see in that scenario, you're watching a day in the life of an episode travel in chronological sequence across a board. So it's nice to be able to look at the board based on status of any given episode. What are all the episodes that we're in the process of scheduling? What are all the ones that need audio editing? What are all the ones that need need show notes? And that allows us to batch, process, and get a sense for where everything is when you're juggling so much complexity. Because every single podcast episode has 30, if not 50 small, tiny steps that need to happen. The Board View for organizing and shaping a big idea is a little bit different. Let me give you a high level of the columns that I have, and of course you'll modify this to meet your needs. These columns are created by giving in notion what's called a select or a category. A select means that any card, once you have a select field, you're giving it one label, so it can only have one at any given time, which is a little different than tags. Tags or multi select mean that, let's say I write a little essay that could have five different tags or five related subtopics, but that essay might only have one status or one section of where it falls in the book at a high level. The columns that I ended up using for my book board, again, as a way to think nonlinearly and organize information in a horizontal, rhizomic, nonlinear way. The columns that I ended up creating are people and stories. That was where I could capture all the people who I might want to feature experts, let's say authors, or people who've given TED talks that I might want to source from books that I want to reference. So Books has its own complete column Concepts. I use the word concepts to refer to my own concepts that I create. So we'll get to some of these, but one of them is Truth while it's fresh. I didn't make up the concept of truth, but I named my own value around this Truth While it's Fresh. Snippets to add this actually came later in the process when I would be watching tv and for example, I'm watching a show based on the ladies who founded the Home Edit, I think it's called Get Organized on Netflix. And they said at the beginning of the show they said, rainbows are nature's system. So I thought, ooh, that's so good. I want to see if I can add that little snippet somewhere, even though it in and of itself is maybe not a complete essay or complete thought. I have a column called Essays to write, which if you look at this on the video, you'll see it's completely blank. But I think that can be a good inbox when you're working on shaping big ideas. There might be sections that you want to tee up next so that when you sit down to write, you actually already have a well that you're drawing from later in the process. So I would say phase two of shaping this book board. I started to work on a book proposal and I actually created different cards for every single section of the proposal. Proposals can sometimes be a 40 or 50 page document. It's basically like writing a business plan for a book and that's the document that you use to to land an agent and to pitch traditional publishers. There is a template for this that I used to successfully sell the Pivot proposal to Portfolio Penguin Random House in. Well, I sold it in 2014. So if you want that proposal template, it's in a Google Doc available from the Author toolkit. So just go to that link in the show notes and in Notion, what I ended up doing while I was working on this proposal, because even though I ended up going with an independent publisher, I still did create a proposal. I just wanted to be able to work on that document again, just like I shared in episode 34 in a nonlinear Way. So I like having different cards in Notion for things like who is it for? Why me? Why this book? Why now? Every single one of those could be a different card. So I could easily click in to any part of the proposal that I was in the mood to work on in any given day. Then as the idea for the book started to come Together I I created columns for intro three parts of the book at the time. Originally it was mind time and team conclusion, appendix and then I have a not using column. I'll go through the book structure in the second half of this podcast episode. But the reason I like having a not using column and I do this a lot. So in notion I have a not using. And then in Google Docs, even once I'm working on the manuscript, I I don't delete any text. I cut and paste it into a not using doc so the text never disappears. It's never gone forever for one. This helps me cut it without too much remorse. And sometimes I do go back and pull things back in. We've all probably had the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night going, oh gosh, I need to add that back in or I shouldn't have cut that or I need to reference something that already took out. Think of if you've ever gone wine tasting and you're it's not the first stop that you've made. So let's say you don't want to get too tipsy or you don't like the wine. They have those buckets that you dump out the remainder from your glass so that they can pour you the next in the flight. I think of the not using column in Notion or the not using Doc in Google Docs like that. It's like you need to kind of dump your wine somewhere. You need to dump those ideas somewhere, but it's nice to know they're not lost forever. So as I'm working, I'm always moving things over into the not using section of Notion or the Google Doc in terms of shaping your big idea, it depends. Not all of you are going to be writing a nonfiction book like I was, but I find it really helpful. Almost anything you're going to do, even if you're giving a speech, teaching a course, there's almost always an intro and a conclusion. So you kind of know you're going to need to set something up and you're going to need to close something out. With book writing, I also find it helpful to think in three parts. Plays have often three acts. Movies have, you know, three main sections of action. So there are different structures that you can use for storytelling and for book writing. I like to start with three as a default just because I think we can wrap our minds around it. You know, a method that has three stages instead of seven or 17 is easier for people to remember. Goldilocks and the three bears three stoplights. There's all kinds of patterns in the world that rely on three parts. When you're initially starting to shape your idea, it's not a bad thing to in addition to having categories like people, experts, books, concepts, you know, short snippets, you can also start to shape by having columns for Intro Part one, Part two, Part three Conclusion that can help you start to harness a great big pile of ideas and segments and snippets and narrow them into okay, are you generally going toward the beginning? Are you generally going toward the middle? Are you generally going toward the end?

We'll be right back just after this.

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Now let's take a look and dive in. Even if you're here on audio, let's let's check out what I what fields of information go in every card. And the reason that I like cards is that I can visually shuffle them around. One of the most challenging things of shaping a big idea is the complexity of it. And when it's done in a linear way, like a Word document, it is very, very hard to move things around easily. You have to cut, copy, paste, scroll. It's hard to get a sense of the scope and the big picture all at once. So what I like about cards is that they allow you like physical index cards, which I have also used especially early on, to just shuffle them around. Where do these belong? Where do these ideas fit? What ideas can be grouped together? I actually created the book board in Notion first, then I created index cards, then I mapped it back to Notion. So you can really work with both. I think both are good in their own ways. I'm going to click on a card that I created called the Floor is Lava. So I started this book board in October of 2020. And in December of 2020 my friend MBS and I decided to hold each other accountable for writing 100 words every day in order to track my progress and in order to collect ideas on the go from anywhere. I always love using cloud based software. That's why I like something like notion. Within the card I have an emoji. So I have a volcano emoji for the Floor is Lava. I have this section now. Right now this is categorized as people and stories. That's different from experts because experts are experts in their field. Whereas people and stories might be friends, clients, people who illustrate the day to day of a concept or of a principle. I'm actually going to call the Floor is Lava in my categorization here I'm going to select concepts because it's really more of a concept concept. Then the fields that I have are notes. Just quick highlights about this idea if I'm on the go. Examples Sources I have a box, a checkbox called Draft copy. That means did I draft the mini micro essay that goes with this concept yet? Word count Time spent writing it. That was early on when I was curious about how long it would take me to turn out 100 words or 500 or a thousand tags. I have in my list of tags, things like accountability, permission, delight, serendipity. I didn't end up using them too early on in this process. I have the date that the card was created, assignee if there's any task associated. Although this is not really necessary on a book board because I don't share it with anyone. And then placed. So the placed checkbox comes in later once you want to start moving things off of notion into. For me it was a Google Doc with headings so that I had a really clear hyperlinked table of contents. It's helpful to have a placed checkbox so that you know what essays have been placed or not. Then you can view your book board by filtering out any cards that have the placed box checked. Meaning I could see, okay, what else is left that I need to figure out a home for it within the manuscript the way that I use the card lower down. So there's two areas below all those metadata fields that I just walked you through. There's comments and then there's actually just open writing space. So for every open writing area I would put the start time, the end time and the word count. In this particular note, I must have started writing at 7:25am and I ended at 7:37am so it was just a little more than 10 minutes. 500 words I say quick, the floor is lava. Hop to nearest furniture for safety. Do you remember playing this game as a kid? Perhaps Netflix's 2020 game show jogged your memory. Adults hop across oversized furniture props while bubbling lava threatens them from below. The team that reaches the opposite side of the room fastest wins. And then I say I woke up in the middle of the night with an aha as it relates to systems thinking, especially when it comes to particularly vexing areas like email. The floor is lava. Emails are never ending and inherently reactive. They represent everyone else's agenda, save for the rare few that you've initiated yourself to support your own strategic projects. For 10, if not 15 years, email was my biggest source of low grade stress and micro guilt. I don't want to complain to you too much here on this podcast because this was an early draft, but I say that email is a system comprising many, many types of tasks. Calling email a task and showing up woefully unprepared for it day after day from a systems perspective is the equivalent of writing down run business as a discrete task. And I say back to the hot lava bubbling below. The best way to clear your mind and free up time is to treat the weeds of your business like that lava floor. As the owner or team leader, your job is not to simply react and respond. The floor is lava. You are the observer, the conductor, the one creating that next piece of furniture, a system or a process that you and your team can jump to. Even better, ask your team to help create the furniture with you. So that was my little writing snippet. I didn't read you the whole thing, but you could see it's kind of just rough thoughts about a concept that I find it very helpful, especially for a book that's the book is basically about systems thinking, but a lot of people cringe at the word systems. So my goal is how do I make systems delightful and fit fun? How do I use metaphors and even pop culture? I use a lot of food metaphors in the book because I want it to be tactile and sensory. Something like the floor is lava can help us go from a vague conceptual understanding. Oh yeah, email is overwhelming. You know, this is as far as I took it for a long time. And when I realized the floor is lava. I can't just be in email. I need to work on email. I need to create processes and systems much like I talked about in the interview with Cal Newport in the launch batch of the Free Time podcast. So you can go back to those early episodes. That was an early immediate favorite. I'm not surprised where Cal talks about that too. He says your job is not answering email. Your job is working on the processes around answering email so that you get less email moving forward, or so that it automatically gets filtered and sent to other people to help you manage this as the business owner. So this is an example of how I've used a card and expanded not just metadata labels at the top, but the comments section that I can add to it later as I'm on the go. And maybe I learned something new or have a new thought or observation. What I like about adding it as a comment not to the original text is I can see the date that that follow up thought was added. Or sometimes I would write comments when it was just background context that I didn't necessarily need to use, but just for me to know. Sometimes in this case I included some stuff from Wikipedia. So now I could write the word count, the total word count. And in notion you can actually click on these. There's these dots in the upper right hand corner and in very faint writing at the very bottom of the menu that pops up, it says word count. And so that's how you can just automatically get the word count for something. In this case, my word count that I have listed is inaccurate. So I have to. I would change it back and that's it. So I could, I could check the box now that, okay, the Flores lava is drafted. And I also wrote in the title. I wrote Placed because it was just easier for me to keep track. And I could check the box called Placed. This was super helpful for early ideating and just writing down ideas as they came to me, writing down books that I either wanted to read or wanted to synthesize. So when there was a book like let's Go to the Making of a Manager, I would actually jot down in the notes, maybe some photos from the book that I found helpful. I also included a quote, a key quote, and maybe a concept that I knew I might want to include in the book that was really helpful for starting to collect the ideas. Now in episode 34, I talked about creating an entire database called Reading Record, where I would note the books with their proper citation. And I also talked about my synthesis box, my virtual box that mirrors a commonplace book or slip box Zettelkasten, where imagine if every time you finished a book, you already did the synthesis, you already said what's most memorable from this or what do you want to take? What do you want to build on? What do you disagree with that would make it even easier to port concepts over to this book board at some point. After brainstorming people, experts, books, concepts, you can start writing essays and snippets. So I knew when I had the introduction, I actually, I have put current word count at the top and then I created cards for concepts that I knew I would want to add to the intro. So my intro has 21 cards. Even though of course in the final, final draft of the book, it's not like there's 21 parts to the introduction. One card is solely for options for the opening epigraph to the book. I have a card that says radical reimagining. Everything is up for grabs. That was my 2020 mantra that many of you heard me say over and over. I have a card called Money, Fame, Power, and in parentheses time. I have a card called the Factory Shoe Doesn't Fit Anymore. What is heart Based business? Quote from the Dalai Lama I didn't end up using. Quote from Nikola Tesla. Didn't end up using Here I have a card. The myth of Meritocracy and bootstrapping. Well, when the book started to come together, the myth of meritocracy got a very brief mention at the start of a section on language, being mindful of what language we're using. So this is it. I just, nothing has to be perfect. As you start shaping your big idea, you just, you will be on the go and you will think to yourself, or you can sit down with your cup of coffee and go, what is really important to me to convey at the beginning of my speech or my course or my book. And you create cards for little micro concepts in any order that you just know you want to touch on. So whether it's a quote, your own original idea mentioning someone else, you can start to shape your idea by moving your cards across these columns into the section where you have a hypothesis, where they belong. Another way to think about how to craft and shape your big idea is what kind of transformation you're trying to create. When it comes to how do you define what those parts are? It's. It's really about learning objectives. And this is what I did at Google for five years was learning and development. And anything we created, any course design or curriculum design, starts out with the end. What transformation am I trying to create and inspire among my students? Same thing among my readers, among my audience, whoever it is that you are creating for this is a path, a big idea. Maybe this is different with fiction, although I would say that even with fiction, you're trying to maybe entertain, educate, inspire, give someone, take them out of the stressors of their day to day. There are still very many parallel aims. But the question becomes, how do I hold someone's hand along a path of this transformation? And what are the main chunks? So again, if we look at those intro three parts and conclusion, what are the steps to that transformation? And then within each part you can ask now, what are the steps to achieve this part? So I'll give you an example. With Free Time, I ended up that the three parts are called. The Free Time framework is Align, design, assign. And yes, it rhymes so that it's handy so you can remember it. But anytime you're experiencing friction in your business, you can go through the Free Time framework. Align, design, assign. Well, what does it mean to align? What does that mean? How does one align? Even before you're assigning the work, I need to tell you what that means. So the align part of the book has three sections to it. Values, energy and strength. The order can shift. But if you want to align with a project or anything you're working on or thinking of creating, then for me, this boiled down to three parts. Values, energy and strengths. As you're shaping your big idea, you can go part by part and say, now how do I achieve this part? Okay, how do we achieve alignment? You look at your values, your energy and your strengths. Okay, then within aligning your energy. Well, what does that mean? How do you align your energy? And that can start to inform what essays you need to write or what little micro snippets or anecdotes. Later in a future walkthrough, I will get into more of the actual essay tracker where the big parts of the book had been shaped. And then I needed to figure out, okay, how do I best communicate this and create clarity? And that does come from synthesis, and that does come from including enough personal stories, enough stories or case studies of other people, which I'm not really good at. That's kind of my writing Achilles heel. It includes some method or methodology I like very tactical, kind of bulleted lists, checklists, ways to break down the how of something. It can include referencing other people. So there are a lot of ways and it's nice to give variety of how you're going to walk somebody through the before and after of transformation, both within the book or the speech or the course itself at a high level. And then within every segment that you're working someone through to achieve that higher level purpose or transformation. This is how I take things from synthesis and reading and my quote collection buckets and start to place them in again. In this case, I've called it a book board, but I'm using a Kanban style board. Every idea gets a card and then I can write the micro essay or paragraph, whether it's 100 words or 500 words for these cards in any order as the mood strikes, which helps reduce the intimidation of calling something like creating a whole book or a whole course instead you always just get to click on what looks interesting and write a little snippet. And over time it does start to accumulate. And by the time I compiled my first draft after working solely in notion, I had almost a full book draft already. It was incredible to me that just working on writing the minimum was 100 words a day. But sometimes I would be on a roll, sometimes I would record them as voice dictation while I was out on the go. And there it was. It all came together way faster than I thought. Quick note on voice dictation, I like where I'll be in a notion note and instead of typing on the keyboard, if I'm on the go, I just hit the microphone within the keyboard view and I speak to text. This is a little bit different than just recording a voice memo. I know a lot of people who said they've written books by either recording a voice memo or transcribing long interviews or even podcasts. I just have to tell you, from observing all the different ways that I wrote this last time around, transcribing voice to text worked for me because I never went overboard. It was always still pretty contained and concise. The parts of the book where I pulled in a transcript from, let's say a solo podcast episode. There was one pivot podcast I did called what's yous Job Today? And that made it into the book that was a nightmare. So when I pulled in the transcript, it was so long, it was so wordy, it was so rambling that needed constant working and reworking and cutting to whip that part, that essay into shape. Once that transcript had been placed, it was way longer, it was 10 times longer than it should have been of what got placed into my Google Doc. And it was just horrible. It was honestly, it was so difficult to try to reign in spoken transcript from something like a solo episode compared to voice to text dictation that I could have just summarized that idea at a very high level in just a few sentences. So although it sounds like it does work for some people to record lengthy audio and then they get transcriptions and they compile that as their first draft of the book, I found that actually super difficult to clean up later on. So that's just my experience. I'll be curious what you try and how you like to shape your big ideas. The last thing I'll say is sometimes even a notion board can get overwhelming. So again, you can look at it and you could even create columns of what you want to transport over to index cards. And what I like about doing that. So let's say you, you could even duplicate your board and create different filters, create different views. But what I like about having the details and the actual writing in Notion, but then mapping them to paper index cards so I can shuffle them around, is that the index cards then only need a keyword or two because all the context and the writing that supports those keywords still live in Notion. So while I'm able to move the concepts around and see what goes where. And the way that I did this with Free Time is that I wrote the keywords on the index card and then I wrote the current section that I thought they would be in like Mind Time and Team. But then I moved them into different columns. And when I created, when I landed on the FreeTime framework, align design Assign, they did not map exactly. So in some cases I was moving index cards across so they had the original label in the lower right hand corner of where they originally were placed mindtime and Team. But then visually I could move them into Align Design Assign and that helped a lot. Things got really shuffled up when I did that. I took a photo with my phone and then I looked. I created a new board in Notion that mirrored that new structure. But I had to go from digital to analog back to a new board. And that's what we'll talk about in the next Notion walkthrough solo episode will be. Once your idea has taken its broad shape, how do you really track the writing process and the nuances of conveying each facet of that idea? So I'll talk to you about the essay tracker next time. I hope this was helpful. Sorry if it's confusing or a bit of a rambler. You have to give me some grace because I only sent the book to print less than a week ago. And the just total and utter, even if it's proud and happy exhaustion and just mental fatigue of the level of attention to detail of the last few weeks, my brain is. Is like, I'm done I'm on vacation now. I'll be really curious to hear how it goes if you try a board in Notion or any other app. Some people like to use Trello. I just like Notion because it's so zoomed out like there's so much more you can do with it than just something like Board View. But again, if you want to see the visuals to all of this as I walked through, you can go to itsfreetime.com authors. Thank you so much for listening everybody. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

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