How I Stay Productive as an Online Entrepreneur
How I use Notion to run online businesses more effectively as a creator and founder
As 2023 approaches, I'd like to use this opportunity to help my readers set the tone for the upcoming year, i.e. How to be more productive as a digital business owner.
As a creator and founder myself, I write business insights, consult with startups, and build Notion products for a living. For fun, I build article tool, event app, meal box app, SaaS tracker, Notion portfolio, and more.
One of the most common questions I get is, “How do you manage your time across different domains and expertise?" I thought it would be helpful to share my “inner mind” on how I used Notion as my digital HQ to succeed as a full-time creator & founder.
1: Structure your Notion workspace
As someone who’s running digital-based businesses, content creation and personal branding are central to my day-to-day activities because it helps me reach my potential customers.
The number of tasks, projects, and to-dos that I have to keep track of can be overwhelming at times. To avoid burnout, I decided I needed a better system for executing my ideas and centralizing content creation, consumption, promotion, and project management in one place.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. — James Clear
Ideally, I wanted a Notion dashboard for:
Go from content ideation to production to promotion in one place.
Able to consistently create and publish high-quality materials.
A place to keep track of content inspiration using an idea bank.
Reduce time searching for online documents — the killer of productivity.
A place to manage media assets, screenshots, and inserts.
Connect everything — new tasks, notes, files, links, etc., will automatically populate into other relevant places.
Next, I split my Notion dashboard into multiple sections:
Creation. Organize content creation, drafts, daily tasks, to-dos, projects, notes, resources, and ideas.
Promotion. Specific Notion trackers for managing social media platforms, content inspiration, and content promotion tasks.
Consumption. Track books, podcasts, videos, courses, movies, and articles in Notion.
Fun personal stuff. Track daily routine, sleep, habits, exercise, meal, etc. Plan trips, parties, guest lists, itineraries, people you want to connect with, etc.
Visioning. Tools to get clear on visions, set goals, break them down into sub-goals/tasks, and display goal progress visually.
👉 Check out my 35+ Notion templates :
2: Organize your projects
You might have a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, online course, community, etc. that requires ongoing project management.
A Project Dashboard can help you keep track of your work, resources, status, and progress in one place:
Integrate Project, Resource & To-dos
You can create a Project folder for your online course project. Then, create a linked folder to group all related resources (files, links, bookmarks, screenshots, etc) for a specific project folder.
You might also want to connect your daily to-dos that are specific to each project — and automatically count your project progress (in percentage %) as you check off each task on a daily basis.
3: Daily task planning
The place to plan a new task and stay on top of all to-do lists, and view them on a calendar to see when they are scheduled.
You can also break down a task into main task groups and subtasks, so you can keep track of each individual task within a larger group.
Integrate to-dos from other places into a Master Calendar
Each planned to-do will show up on the master calendar. For example, my master calendar contains to-do for these specific views: ‘Project Task’ ‘Content Task’ ‘Promo Task’ and ‘Travel Task’.
4: Content creation
Create a specific Notion ‘hub’ to manage all your content creation process in one place.
Ideally, this template should help you manage all the social media platforms, capture new post ideas, create new drafts, and monitor progress, and publishing date.
5: Distribute and promote
Distribution will 10x the impact of your content.
You may want to promote each published article, video, TikTok short, or single post to other social platforms or repurpose the content into other formats.
This ‘Promotion’ dashboard does exactly that. You can:
Add a content piece that you want to promote
Specify the caption title for each content piece
Display related properties such as the content’s URL, social channel, and related media assets (e,g, image inserts, GIF, banner, etc.)
Attach a promo cover for each promo content
Never run out of marketing ideas
I often collect Twitter threads, web design ideas, and social media captions for marketing inspiration.
In Notion, I made a ‘Swipe File Tracker’ to create my idea bank. Each collected inspiration is further connected to a specific swipe file folder, social media platform, or specific project folder.
6: Managing content consumption
Ideas in, ideas out. Great business creators understand the importance of diligent consumption and selective learning on a daily basis.
This includes constantly sourcing new ideas from books, articles, essays, videos, podcasts, movies, etc.
I like to organize the different types of content I want to consume by making a folder for each.
Each folder is linked to a goal item where I can check on the progress (i.e. Books folder connects to the ‘Read 40 books’ goal item).
I can track, manage and prioritize my content consumption. I also organize my learning notes for each learning resource:
If you want the full Notion templates that I’m currently using, you can get it from the link below: