038: Tracking Progress Toward Finishing a Book (or Big Idea) with an Essay Tracker — Notion Walkthrough #3

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Hello friends. This is the third in my Notion Walkthrough series. As it relates to the book, there's plenty more I can share about notion, but for now, to recap, in the first walkthrough I talked about organizing the collection of random ideas and research. In episode 34 I talked about the Book board. So how I start to take all these disparate quotes, ideas, stories and harness them into a book board? A nonlinear way to start shaping the big idea. And now in this third walkthrough, I'm going to share with you the essay tracker how I take something from the book board where I'm just brainstorming categories of information into the actual structure of the book. In the last walkthrough called shaping your big Idea, we started to categorize quotes, anecdotes, concepts, experts, books to reference, and even brainstorming what would go under the columns. Because it's in board view, you can move things non linearly across a page. Columns for introduction, part one, Part two, Part three and conclusion. Once we get into those three main parts, as I shared in the last walkthrough, you start to ask the question how do I facilitate this transformation? How do you know what three parts for your big idea? Again, whether it's a book or a speech or a course or anything else you're working on, where you're trying to harness a lot of data and your own original thinking, it's how do I create transformation? What are the learning objectives for this? When people are done interacting with this or experiencing this, how do I want them to feel? What do I want them to know? What do I want them to do differently? What resources do I want to Refer them to where can they go? Learn more and what is the transformation that you're creating? I was just listening today to Malcolm Gladwell's masterclass and he said that if you don't transform or transport the reader, there's no point. So whatever it is that you're working on, this is about transformation and transportation, really taking them on a journey. So in this one, the Essay tracker and again, I'm recording this in audio. I'll describe everything to you if you're just here on the podcast. If you want to see the loom screen sharing videos that go with this, visit itsfreetime.comauthors and you can get free access to to the Author toolkit where the screen shares live. That's itsfreetime.com authors the book board is where there's just over a hundred, if not more little cards for little piecemeal concepts and ideas and quotes. As I mentioned in the intro, Part one, Part two, Part three, conclusion, you start to move those pieces into the relevant parts. The next stage of shaping a big idea comes in, really refining the process or what goes within those parts. I have a board where for each of the main parts of the FreeTime framework, align, design, assign, I have three sections and for one thing it was helpful for me to get this naming structure down so I knew there's the book, there are three parts and there are three sections per part. So that means that there are nine sections. In this case I have columns or sections called Values, Energy, Strengths. That goes with the Align stage in the design stage, Outcomes, Impact and Process. Those are three more columns in my board view and then in the Assign stage, who what when? I also have a column called sidebars because early on in the writing and organizing process I didn't know. I knew what essays were candidates for sidebars, but I didn't know exactly where they would go. I set up this board, what I call the Essay Tracker, so that I could also view it by part if I wanted to see. I have looks like 16 little cards in the Align part and originally it was Mind Time and team. I have 18 cards in the Design part and then or stage and I have 15 cards in the Assign part or stage. I also set up my own custom views where I could view the entire table of the whole book as a database what looks most like a Google spreadsheet. And in doing that I could create views where I actually sorted by word count what has the highest word count or I could sort by. I created a column called Order so I could actually Number what do I think is going to go where in the book? This allowed me to start organizing not only by part or stage, by section, by word count. I even created a view of this board by status so I could shift columns. What's interesting about notion is you can shift cards depending what view you're looking at. I can shift a card by status so my status columns were weak, needs major work in progress, nearly complete, ready for copy edit. So those are my four main status columns and as you move a card around, it assigns that status. So if I move a card from week, needs major work over into the nearly complete column, the label or the status automatically updates. All these views that I'm describing, whether by stage, by section, by word count, or even by status, rely on having custom fields within each card. So I'm going to view by section. This is what I ended up the view that I ended up using most often. And remember, this has nine columns within the section called values. There's an overview and then three chapters. So continuing my organizational structure in this case yours will likely be very different is that I had three chapters within each of the nine sections. So within the values section, the three chapters I have were Operating principles, externalized mind and systematized business values. These phrases are little shortcuts for me whether or not the chapter ended up being named this. These are two to three word catchphrases that remind me what the chapter is about. For example, in the Energy column or the Energy section, I can see that the three chapters are set purposeful intentions, let it be easy, let it be fun and golden hour.

In notion, you can select what data you want to show when you're looking at your board at a high level. So all I wanted to see when I was working on the book was the word count for every chapter and the status. So I can see here that operating principles has 1531 words and the status was nearly complete. Obviously, as you keep working on your project, the status, hopefully they all start to roll to complete or ready for copy edit. In this case, I left many of them as they were, including ones that say week or in progress, so you could get a sense for what the board looks like at a glance. Let's talk now about those specific custom fields. So if I click on Externalized Mind, this means opening a card into the full view to see all the data that goes in this card. I ended up writing in the Google Doc and then I came back and filled in a lot of these fields. So let me give you a high level and Then I'll dive into a few that were the most helpful. This is a long list. So for every single card, which means every single chapter in the book or big idea, I have what part of the freetime framework. So externalized mind goes under a line what section values, what order in that section are in the book. Word count Status in progress Status Explainer. This was helpful. So status is a drop down select, meaning I can only select one status at a time. It's either weak or it's ready for copy edit there. It can't be both of those at the same time. The Status Explainer was really helpful because as I was juggling at one point 33 main chapters. Then I narrowed it down to 27. At one point when I was juggling so many chapters, I would see a status that says weak. But I didn't know why. So I added the Status Explainer so I could say this one's missing anecdotes or this one's missing what I called brass tacks. Like give me the bulleted list of tactical brass tacks. Business advice. So the Status Explainer was helpful too. For my own commentary on why I chose that status, I wanted to include an opening quote for every chapter. So I have in notion this is just called a checkbox. So I have a checkbox that says quot question mark and the box is checked by who? In this case, Doug Kirkpatrick. Two Sentence Tweetable. I found it a good exercise to try to write a two sentence tweetable for every single chapter. Later that became part of the end chapter summaries, a two sentence summary. So I ended up using. But I wanted to distill every big idea of every single chapter into two sentences.

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It was also important to me that I use a lot of metaphor throughout the book. So next I have a checkbox called Metaphor. Do I have one for this chapter? So in the last walkthrough, I shared the metaphor. The floor is lava. For talking about Sisyphean systems like email that are never ending unless you work on the system, not just in the process. The floor is lava. Don't just dance around the lava floor. You gotta create furniture that allows you to jump from thing to thing at a higher level of working on the business, not just in it. So metaphor. There's a box to check. Do I have one or not? A powerful metaphor to illustrate this chapter or this big idea. Then I have a text field for meme or viral video. And I thought this would be kind of cool if I could match a current meme or something in pop culture like Ross, you know, with the book Pivot. It's like the Friends clip of Ross and Rachel and Chandler going, you know, Ross is yelling, pivot. Pivot. We have to pivot. I just butchered it. But you know, the meme, if you've seen that video, then I have a question. A checkbox for graphic. Does this chapter need a graphic or diagram? My mind does not think that way naturally, so I probably could have done even more with these. But if it did need a graphic, I would check that box and describe what that should be. I have a checkbox for brass tacks, question mark. Did I include some brass tacks business advice in every single chapter? Stats. I don't naturally think in statistics and research studies, so I had to add a checkbox for myself. Stats, question mark. Like, did I get some meaningful data that could support these ideas? And I have some open response below each check mark so that I could brainstorm even without being in the Google Doc. I could just brainstorm here in Notion and sort of dive in to all these little micro ingredients to what I felt would be a strong chapter. I could brainstorm them at any time. Again, even when I'm on the go. At one point, I had an opening summary at the start of every chapter. I called the opening box and I cut those out. So I pasted that. As you know from last time, I always recommended not using Bucket. Anywhere you're working, there's. It could be a not using category in Notion. There could be a not using Google Doc so that when you delete things, they have a home. You can easily reference them again. Business case study. If so, who or what, like, am I featuring someone in this chapter and then transcript tags. That was when I was tagging the chapter for big ideas, which is not mandatory. I didn't end up using it, but you can see I have lots of tags. This is called multi select when you're going to use tags. These tags alone will give you a sense for what the book is about. Automating Batching Big Break Body Business Model Communication Deep Work Delegating Energy Failure Faith Feedback Friend Tours Health Hiring Ideal Clients Intuition Language Listening Manager Manual Metrics Money Nonlinear Breakthrough or NLB Outcomes Perfectionism Pricing Scale Serendipity shoulds Strengths Success Surrender Systems Team Time Values Vision Software and these didn't get alphabetized Learning and Hungry oh Hungry Ghosts Hungry Ghosts so what I thought would be cool with having tags is that by tagging the concepts the main ideas of any chapter, I could also see where I wanted to cross reference things or the most common themes I could you could even sort by tags and create a view in notion to sort by tags at some point. And then I have a checkbox story integrated so I remember now the reason these are all grouped together but Business Case study I did send out a survey to my community to ask some questions where I wanted to fill out some of the chapters. So if somebody submitted a story I would note who they are, what concepts came up in their interview. So that's where the transcripts transcript tags came in. And then I checked the box story integrated where that came in most handy was that I at one point created a view by story. I ended up using the by status view quite a lot and in addition to week in progress, nearly complete and ready for copy edit. One column I had was sidebars that I mentioned. I had 12 cards in this column and then I also had stories. So my weakness, my Achilles heel as a as a writer of nonfiction now business books is I don't think in stories, I think more in frameworks and even metaphors, just kind of quick ways and what's the bottom line of what a person needs to do. However, I consistently get feedback that the stories are what are most memorable. It's what bring the concepts to life and it's what people end up enjoying when they read or experience the book. So I have to go out of my way to collect stories, synthesize them, process them, get them into the book. I have to this is something, not something that comes as naturally to me as certain friends I know who are just totally natural storytellers. And this is something I did close to the end because I also wanted to collect and integrate stories. Once I knew the structure of the book and the structure of each of the three parts and the nine sections and the three chapters within each section. So then at the very end in the progress dropdown, I created one just called Stories, which is a little. Doesn't quite fit, but you get why. So that I could view all the stories in one column. So I had tagged Lee's story team scale and time, and then now I could check the box. Yes, his story has been integrated. And in notion you can also sort that. If I wanted to eliminate everything I had already integrated, I could add a sort to this view. So I would be adding a filter that said where. So within the status view, I would go to a filter and I would say story integrated and making sure that it's not checked. That would show me how much else I had to still work into the book. And you could do that for any of those fields. So that's why having all those checkboxes ended up being really helpful, because then you can create different filters as you view things. Not only can I view a board by status, but I could filter by how many things still need stats, how many things still need brss, tacks, advice, and things like that. This might sound overwhelming, and maybe your mind doesn't like to work like this, but I found it much less overwhelming than having to go into the Google Doc, this huge behemoth document that at one point was 130,000 words. And then my book is still longer than it should be. But it's. It's now I got it down to, I think 80,000 words. Typical nonfiction business book is usually 50,000 words. And then the kind of shorter, punchier nonfiction books could be even 30,000 words. So my book was long and complex, and this allowed me to track my progress and know where I needed to fill in gaps in information within the overall structure. And it also allowed me to view the progress of the book without just this ambiguous scroll through a Google Doc. By mapping things to the Google Doc back to this essay tracker, I was able to sort my by which sections of the book need the most work and need the most attention right now. What is still missing a statistic. What's still missing an opening quote. I was constantly able to go back in layer by layer by layer and track in this notion board in the essay tracker what I needed to do. And it meant that when I only had a couple moments or my I was fatigued from sitting in front of the computer, it meant that I could actually go look at my notion board and just try to fill in the blanks wherever I felt called to in the moment. So I hope you found this helpful. I know these walkthroughs can be a little bit overwhelming, but even if you just take one idea or one strategy or one way to filter or view information, I hope that you find it helpful. Because my goal here is not to confuse you or overwhelm you, but rather to take the confusion and overwhelm out of shaping and harnessing your big idea. Again, you can see all these walkthroughs and resources for this@itsfreetime.com authors to get the free toolkit and if you have a follow up question on any of these walkthroughs, let me know. Visit itsfreetime.com ask thanks so much everybody.

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