The biggest professional challenge I’ve faced the last year is discovering that what was once my main means of attracting new author clients — the fact that I had first-hand knowledge of working with big-name New York publishers — was something I was no longer interested in promoting.

I still enjoyed working with authors who had big ambitions, and immensely so. That wasn’t the issue. I’d always made clear to prospective clients that while I’d do my damnedest to make their books critically laudable and commercially viable, I couldn’t make any promises as regards landing a big book deal. This was true even before big-name New York publishers began placing bigger bets on fewer books, and landing said book deal got harder.

No, the main problem was that clients who had come to me with their book proposals who did wind up with fancy book deals from weren’t all that happy with the experience they had with those publishers. This was partly a function of expectations; they’d anticipated feeling like being welcomed into a cozy house, given a seat at the table, feeling recognized as a whole person and affirmed as a talent, and instead they more often than not felt in the way, as if the publisher respected them (somewhat) but mainly wanted to get their book out into the world with as little interference from, or interaction with, them, the author of said book, as possible.

Note I’m not talking about reality here, but people’s feelings. This survey wraps some interesting hard numbers around those feelings, however.

Why was this happening? Several reasons. Publishing house employees are being asked to do more in less time, with fewer resources. There have been so many waves of layoffs, so much restructuring that satisfies some C-suite conception of streamlining but to the outside world — and to many of the company’s own employees — seems utterly pointless and enervating. This trend shows no signs of it reversing, especially with rumors that Amazon is putting the screws on. (Amazon has been trying to put U.S. publishers out of business for 20 years now, but that’s another story.)

It’s also that the rise of self-publishing has shifted the emotional dynamic and the business calculations. This happened slowly, then suddenly all at once. But the upshot is that self-publishing is no longer just for those who couldn’t get a book deal, but simply another alternative that makes sense for authors who want to keep more control of the project management aspects of publishing, more creative control, and more of a say in everything from price to distribution channels. (This Farnam Street podcast with the author Hugh Howey has an interesting take on that subject.)

So for authors who land a book deal with a major publishing house who wind up disappointed, they now have to wonder if they should have gone a different route. That’s an entirely new problem; there never was a respectable other way before.

In my view, and I’ve been banging on about this in private conversations for years now, is that publishers have to rethink who their customer is. Their customer isn’t really the end user, that is to say, readers. It’s authors. And if authors aren’t happy, they should be more worried about that than they are about Amazon.

All this is a long way of prefacing why I was so glad to work on The Book of Beautiful Business these past six months, because for me it provided an opportunity to test a few theories on the new possibilities for books in an era when the options seem endless yet daunting, with so many more avenues for success but also bitter regret:

● We need to stop referring to self-publishing. It’s a wildly inaccurate term. The reality today is that authors hire developmental editors, copy editors, graphic designers, typesetters, and marketing professionals to help them “self-publish.” Let’s just call what they’re doing publishing.

● Email and cloud collaboration software are wonderful, life-changing products that we could exploit far more than we do, especially if we want to engage in work that has a global feel and process. For The Book of Beautiful Business, our editorial efforts were headquartered in New York, our layout designers were in Berlin, our printer and production manager in Riga, and our contributors wrote in from Cape Town to Stockholm. I had hoped to include a brilliant writer based in Shenzhen, but his schedule got in the way. Should there be a Vol 2, we’ll make it happen.

● The freedom to set one’s own production schedules (all we knew was that the books had to be in Lisbon by Nov. 2nd), and when working as author/producer/managing editor — or all three at once — to be the main point of contact with your vendors, is invaluable. This is especially true when you’re working with remote teams in different time zones.

● Anthologies should be more playful. Traditionally anthologies meant you had +/- 20 contributors who have all been given the same assignment, and who submitted pieces of roughly equal length. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it didn’t feel right for a community like the House, which is diverse in terms of where people lived and worked, diverse in native languages spoken, and most importantly, wonderfully varied in discipline and practice. An anthology today should reflect that diversity with pieces that vary greatly in length, tone, style, even in terms of commitment to “the cause,” whatever that might be.

● It’s important and fun to surface the names of people who contribute to a book project, and not only credit them in acknowledgments which few people outside the industry read anyway. Bring those experts and collaborators front and center. Run credits on the copyright page, perhaps. This transparency demystifies the process and also helps authors who are not well-connected, or who don’t have an idea of whom to turn to for help, with some solid leads. You could do a Google search for this help, of course. Or you could just flip open a book that’s been produced in a way you appreciate, and see who they credit.

I’ll close this post with a list of links to people who worked on The Book, so you can check out their work.

Garvin Hirt of FLOK Design

Livonia Print, with a special shout-out to our endlessly patient Production Manager Silga Čerpinska

our copyeditor Sarah Sarai

Eva Talmadge, proofreader and more

Morgwn Rimel

Ursula Damm

And of course Tim Leberecht, who came up with this crazy idea in the first place, and suggested I come along for the ride. I’m grateful.

By Tim Leberecht

We spend the majority of our waking hours at work, but for the most part, we do it as disembodied brains that we carry from meeting to meeting. In assessing the performance of knowledge workers, we rave about bright minds and level heads. And recently it has become fashionable to be encouraged to bring our “full selves” to the workplace—but strangely we often exclude any consideration of our bodies, even though that is where our emotion and cognition are centered.

Sure, a growing number of companies offer daily sports or fitness activities, yoga or meditation classes, and tout their “mindfulness initiatives,” but most of them merely aim to prepare us for cognitive fitness at the workplace, in the sense of mens sana in corpore sano: fit mind in fit body. The idea is that we if invest in our bodies, we sharpen our intellectual abilities, and as a result, we not only make better decisions and are more productive, but we are also happier and healthier at work. As for the body’s role in management, at most, we analyze and improve our body language to be more persuasive or assertive.

Dancing and singing the body electric

Last week’s House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon, Portugal, an annual gathering focused on the humanization of work that I co-founded and co-curate, reminded me how insufficient our approach still is to a more holistic notion of business that engages the full range of our humanity — including the human body. We optimize and fine tune our bodies as enablers of productivity, but we fall short of using them as instruments of understanding, of discovery, and of learning. At our House event, we incorporated physical activities including morning raves, yoga, and running into the content-rich daily program, as well as improvisation, constellation work, and other presenting tools, but it was two other physical activities that were more revelatory.

One was an immersive performance created by two choreographers of the National Ballet of Portugal, Xavier Carmio and Henrietta Ventura. They staged an “installation” for 15 dancers in the former executive offices of a Portuguese bank that portrayed — with wild fervor and explicit expressions of violence — a fatal marriage of capitalism and the destruction of our planetary resources. Unleashed, uncontrolled, contorted bodies moved through the narrow hallways of this former corporate workplace. Not only were they in the faces of the 300 participants, but they also engaged their bodies, turning some audience members into ambivalent co-creators and accomplices of this “crime of the century.”

In their performance, the dancers embodied the dehumanizing effects of a market society that puts a number on everything in order to extract value from anything. Stripped of social fabric or civil protocol, they degraded each other to either mere data points or basic bodily instincts. They also projected that capitalism subjugates our bodies to the power structures of patriarchy. It was a heart-wrenching, visceral swan song of “late capitalism” that hit where it hurts. Provoking basic flight-or-fight responses of the limbic system, some attendees left, stunned and appalled.

The abstractions of the talks on stage the previous day had made way for something far more concrete than the most compelling story or detailed case study could ever provide: our own bodies consumed by an excessive parable on excessive consumerism. The performance deconstructed the façade of “smart” and “appropriate” at the workplace and laid bare the brute forces at work in our economies (of natural resources, human labor, attention, and data). It was a pivotal moment and fundamentally changed the vibe of the event over the ensuing days.

In contrast to the harshness of the dance performance, another, softer feature of the gathering was easier to embrace: every morning we convened attendees to sing together in a choir. In keeping with the theme of the conference, “The Battle for Beautiful Business,” we sang fight songs such as “Bella Ciao,” and it was a highlight for many. One CEO even told us that he canceled a dinner with a customer so he could join the choir’s final performance. The joy of attuning one’s voice to the voices of others, of experiencing the power of a harmonious collective, was an unexpected, simple pleasure for the singers.

Learning means practicing the uncomfortable

On the last day of the conference, Pete Hamill, an expert in embodied cognition and author of the book, Embodied Leadership, made sense of it all in his talk: “When we experience the threat response, neurons are activated, and hormones such as cortisol are released. However, the effects of these hormones and neural connections are felt in our bodies, below the chin, rather than as an abstract thought in the brain. Learning means practicing situations and experiences of discomfort until you become comfortable with them,” he concluded.

This is of course what high-performance athletes do, but as managers and leaders at the workplace we only rarely practice running a meeting, making a decision, or simply holding tension like we would practice a high-stakes theatrical performance or a 100-meter sprint.

As a communication and speaking coach, it’s often surprising to me how many executives I work with who think that they can simply “wing it” during a townhall with their employees or an analyst call, or think they are perfectly prepared simply because they’ve memorized the meeting agenda and practiced talking points. It just isn’t good enough. The truth is they are only able to fully embody their vision and message if they have put their bodies through the motions, if they’ve internalized not just the content but the corresponding movements, if they’ve felt what it feels like to perform an act, a task, a statement.

This is why it’s such a meaningful (and, quite frankly, stressful) exercise for managers to write, rehearse, and perform a short, six-minute talk — something I do with clients to help them find and articulate their leadership vision. The concise format leaves them with absolutely no wiggle room to ad lib a slide-to-slide voice-over. Instead, they have to impress the words and accompanying gestures and stage movements into their body memory. Only once they embody their intentions, will they be credible.

Hamill’s approach is derived from somatic coaching, a field of learning and development popularized by, among others, the Strozzi Institute, that moves the body forward. The term “somatics” stems from the Greek word somatikos, which means “the living.”

As leaders, we will only come fully alive and can make others come alive, if we mean what we say — or in other words (acts!): if we fully embody what we believe in.

Practice is the goal

The same is true for change management initiatives, all of which are by design massive learning experiences in which workers are asked to acquire new knowledge and skills in a record amount of time. It’s naïve to assume this can happen by simply asking them to glance at PowerPoint slides, browse through manuals, or repeat a new language that they have learned by heart. Rather, they should role-play, enact, and experience the new reality.

Or sing it! I firmly contend that if a workforce forms a choir to sing the new company strategy every morning, adoption rates would go through the roof.

Ultimately, though, if we begin to practice in earnest and make practice our daily routine, we may realize that the deep work we all have to do is not meant to improve the outcome, after all, but lies in the very act of practice itself.

With the wise words of Alan Watts: “We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end…But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

Tim Leberecht is co-founder of The House of Beautiful Business and author of The Business Romantic.

This article first appeared on Psychology Today.

Bodies at Work was originally published in Journal of Beautiful Business on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s might be easier than ever to write everything down, but I swear it’s harder than ever to find anything.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, and over that time I’ve stumbled across so many tools that promise to make me more productive, better organized, or ultimately, a better writer.

Despite all of those promises, I’ve struggled to cobble together a workflow that actually made me more productive without it falling over itself, and until recently, just wrote straight into a CMS out of frustration.

I make a living from crafting sentences, from both writing posts like this one, to UX copywriting, so I’m writing constantly but actually organizing my digital brain has been impossible until recently because it was slathered across four different tools, each with their own prescribed workflow.

Switching to Notion changed everything for me.

I realize the irony that comes from writing something about how another tool in my workflow has helped organize my life, but it’s impacted the entire way I write, do business, plan my day and so much more.

Here’s how I’m using Notion, and a look at why it’s been transformative for how I write — and think — on a daily basis. I hope it helps you get started, and provides a way to jump off for your own sweet setup.

Where I’ve come from

Being organized isn’t natural for me, so I’m a sucker for tools as a way to workaround my own limitations and hack my brain into getting stuff done. Before I switched to Notion as an all-in tool for both writing and organizing my life, I used a dizzying array of tools that didn’t really work with one another.

Here’s my original workflow, which I’ve now replaced entirely with Notion:

Minimal writing: Dropbox Paper / iA Writer
Discovering distraction-free writing tools was something of a holy moment for me; for years writing apps were covered in buttons and features that didn’t really add much value, and made you write in a layout that looked just like an A4 piece of paper.

Before switching from Mac to Windows, I wrote directly into iA Writer, particularly because I loved that it was able to handle Markdown natively. While this was great, it had some flaws: it was inherently not shareable with my writing clients, and I’d forget to save all the time.

After switching from Mac to Windows I used Dropbox Paper because it’s superb at just getting out of the way of the writing process, it helped me focus on just the piece at hand and it didn’t require remembering to hit the save button all the time.

Planning/task management: Trello / Todoist
Kanban is the new cool, and Trello was go-to app for organizing my workload, writing ideas, phases of projects and whatever else I could think of. Trello’s workflow focuses only on Kanban, which I used heavily to track the phases of projects, including what’s in the backlog, due dates and comments about the project itself.

To track thoughts or ideas relating to the task, I just commented on the card directly. The only problem? Actually remembering to check it and keep it up to date.

As for the everyday tedium of life, which certainly needs basic checklists, I would use Todoist to manage these with my partner. Shopping lists, books I wanted to read, house chores and more lived there, with no particular rhyme or reason to them.

Notes, research and more: Google Keep
For random scribbles, ideas and whatever didn’t fit anywhere else, Google Keep was a perfectly fine place to brain dump. If I had a random thought that needed a place to live, it would go right into Google Keep, probably to be lost forever.

Meet Notion

As you can tell, my brain was scattered across a bunch of disparate tools. If you’re in Trello, you get Kanban, and you’re going to be using that forever. Notion is different because it’s the only tool with a philosophy of allowing you to mold it into whatever you need it to be.

Notion is made up of an array of ‘blocks’ that are broad in both purpose and complexity, and are what make it special.

There’s a block for everything from the ability to embed a Figma prototype to instead creating a database, and having entries from that database appear on another page in a different format, such as a calendar view. Alternatively, just throw in some markdown text.

Think of Notion as similar to a box of Lego: you’ve got everything you need to make something — you just need to decide what it is you’ll create. You can either follow the example on the box, or create something for yourself.

This system means that Notion is infinitely customizable, and allows you to mold it to fit both your own workflow and any future adjustments you might make to the way you work and write: all you need to do is drag and drop the blocks to move them somewhere else, or re-arrange your new digital brain.

Because it’s both minimal and powerful, you get the simplicity and full Markdown support you’d find in iA Writer and the collaboration features of Dropbox Paper in a single tool.

Notion is simple on the surface but deeply powerful as you get familiar with it, so it might take some time to adjust.

Evernote is just for taking notes, so it’s easy to grasp just writing things down. Dropbox Paper is just for writing, and Trello is just for task management. Notion can be all of these things or just one of them; it’s really up to you how far you take it, but it doesn’t have to be all at once.

The magic is all in finding your flow, then optimizing it over time as you become more comfortable with the core concepts. Here’s all of the great things I use as a writer on a daily basis, and how to get yourself set up for each different use case.

Writing experience, without limits

When I was a full-time journalist, I would write my content straight into the CMS — it’s disturbingly common among writers and the amount of lost work that happens behind the scenes, lost to a lack of autosave, on a daily basis is mind boggling.

I now write straight into Notion and use it as the single source of truth for my entire writing, editing and publishing process. Notion saves your work, online or offline, and makes sure it’s safe without having to remember to hit save, so it’s finally time to break the habit.

When writing a piece like this one, I always start with a simple blank page to focus on the task at hand. The writing experience you get is minimal and beautiful, thanks to Notion’s monospaced font, and just like iA Writer, the interface stays out of the way until I need to dive in and start formatting or insert a different block.

Markdown + shortcuts
With full Markdown support you can write however you’re accustomed to, either with all the manual parameters you’re used to, or just use the interface to format and export to markdown later.

I love using Markdown and tend to habitually write it by hand, but if it’s not your cup of tea you can use the visual interface instead by selecting it, then using the pop-over menu.

As with other tools, the usual shortcuts for text formatting work, like CMD + B to bolden, but there’s one key improvement worth knowing about: inline linking.

When adding links to your writing, just remember that CMD + K is your friend — this shortcut instantly drops an inline link onto the text you’ve highlighted without a need to use your mouse or deal with clicking through a dialog box or typing the right markdown.

There’s a full suite of keyboard shortcuts available for the full array of Markdown features, from bullet-point lists to code blocks, so keep this link handy and you’ll be a pro in no time.

Word count

Sooner or later you’ll find yourself needing a word count, which you’ll find close at hand.

To see how you’re tracking to that word limit, click the three dots on the top right and it’s right there at the bottom of the page’s settings menu.

Organization and editing power

Simple, easy reorganization

During the writing process you’ll inevitably end up needing to move something around, delete it, or save it for later.

This is simple in Notion, and helps with rearranging your narrative as you’re editing, or even just during the writing process itself.

To rearrange a paragraph — or many block types at once — just grab them all by holding down the mouse and dragging over them. Once you’ve got them all highlighted you can take all of the selected blocks with you by grabbing the dotted menu at the top, then moving it around, or just using cut and paste like normal.

This is a complete revelation for those who are accustomed to traditional text editors, which either make a complete mess of your text, or leave bits behind when you try to move them.

Notion treats each block as unique, and it’ll safely bring them all in the exact layout you chose before moving them. It makes the editing process a lot easier, especially if you’ve written something particularly long and later want to move it all around.

Nested pages
To really get the most out of Notion nesting your pages is a key concept to wrap your head around, and decide how you’ll use.

I use nested pages to organize everything relating to a topic and create a master page at the top level to act as a sort of ‘contents’ for what’s found below.

For example, if I was writing a piece about how to use Notion, I’d create a top-level page, then a document called ‘Draft #1’ inside of that and start writing there. As I collect references, create to-dos or other material, I create that below the page, since it’s all related to what I’m working on.

This practice offers focus, and organizes my space around what I’m working on, which hacks my process in order to hone in on the specific piece I’m working on, avoiding distraction while keeping references close at hand when needed. No context shifting is required, because I’m staying in one tool.

Your own preference for nesting will dictate how you organize Notion, but my one piece of advice is this: try to nest, and organize as soon as possible — it’s easier to organize later as your workspace grows.

Toggles and highlights

Sometimes you’ll find yourself needing less text or a way to draw attention to something, but it isn’t enough to deserve an entire page.

Toggle blocks are your secret weapon for keeping useful information right where you’re working, without switching between pages.

Basically, toggles do what they say and let you hide anything away beneath a sub-header, but while retaining them inline for later.

I use these all the time because they’re a great way to add reference information to a document without needing to see it all the time. This is especially useful, for example, when you need the outline for a story close at hand, but don’t want to stare at it the whole time you’re working on it.

To make a block collapsible using toggle blocks, just insert a new block by hovering in the left margin of your page then choose Toggle List from the dropdown. You’ll get a new, empty toggle that you can drag any amount of blocks into for collapsing.

I use these in a variety of ways: for comments and context, for references about a piece or just to keep the outline handy without seeing it all the time.

Toggle blocks basically give you instant clarity, and I’m a big advocate for using them liberally.

Highlights are great for the opposite: drawing more attention to something for remembering later or highlighting to a collaborator.

Like here on Medium, you can choose a block to be highlighted and make it stand out. Just select the section you wish to highlight and click the three-dot menu in the formatting bar that appears, then choose your favorite color.

The bigger picture
The sidebar, and the way in which your organize your Notion space, is a great way to get the bigger picture at a glance.

Once things are nested, you can easily see where you’re at, and jump between tasks, pieces or clients in general.

During the writing process itself I prefer to reduce distraction as much as possible, so I collape the sidebar and work with a minimal interface.

To do this, click the two arrows on the top left, near your workspace name, and it’ll tuck away for later — but you can still access the context of where you are at the top of your screen with the breadcrumb menu.

To get the sidebar back just hover near the left edge of the screen or click the hamburger menu on the top left.

External workflows

Collaboration
When I’m at the draft stage, I’ll invite one of my editors into the page to provide feedback with inline comments.

To collaborate you can let anyone into a Notion document , even if they don’t have a Notion account. Everyone has their own tool preferences, but Notion lets your collaborators sign in with a Google account, rather than making them sign up for Notion from scratch — a refreshing change of pace.

To share your document, hover near the top of Notion to reveal the share button, click that, then hit Invite a person to choose who you’ll share with and how much access they’ll receive. If you prefer they just jump in an edit, you can throw on public link sharing, which lets them immediately open it in the browser.

Collaborators can comment on your document, tag you and set reminders, just like in other tools. I’ve found inviting writing clients into a client space, and having various iterations of your draft there, to be a much more open process than I’m used to which has helped with actually writing the piece itself.

On the go
There’s an app for basically everything you care about, now that Notion’s available on Android.

You can use the entire feature set of Notion on mobile, on the web or on the Mac and Windows apps for editing or note-taking on the go. It’s great for quickly taking notes, correcting a mistake, or brainstorming an idea!

Portability and exports

When I’m done working and ready to publish, it’s just as flexible to get content out of Notion as it is to get it in — there aren’t any proprietary file formats here.

Generally, I export the page directly to Markdown or PDF from Notion and upload that into whatever CMS we’re publishing in (personally I use Jekyll, so this makes it super easy). For visual CMS’ like Wordpress, copy and paste works too.

Research, ideation and more

Ideation in one place
If you’re a writer you probably have a ton of ideas circling around in your head for a piece at any given time, and know that only some of them are going to make the cut. I’m constantly dreaming up ideas for pieces but tend to forget once the moment passes.

Writing these moments of inspiration down as soon as they pop up helps with this dramatically, so I’ve created a simple workflow for keeping the ideas I like around until I have time to write them, rather than a series incoherent series of notes that I never look at.

To do this, I use a combination of Notion’s clipping tools, columns and whatever other types of blocks take my fancy, like videos or other embeds if needed. Below, there’s an example of my ideation board in its current form, on a weekend.

In this ideas board, I just store whatever I’ve been inspired by, thinking about, or just things I would like to write about one day. Eventually, if they grow into an idea for a piece, like this one, I’ll drag them out into a new document, underneath the page I’m writing in, to clear away the clutter.

This board uses two types of block, combined Notion’s flexible column support. To get started, grab any block that you’ve created, then move it to the right until you see a little blue bar appear. Release your mouse when you’re happy, and you’ll have a nice fresh column.

You can do this as many times as you like — if it starts getting messy, flip the page over to a full width document by pressing the three dots on the top right of your page, then choosing full width.

If you’re adding rich content, like a webpage or image, you can create a nice scannable embed with the web bookmark block. Just hover on the left of your page, hit the plus icon and scroll until you find the web bookmark type, then paste your URL in.

A block for everything

Notion’s block-based layout system allows you to embed a wide array of rich media in one place.

Embed a Figma prototype you’re talking about, YouTube videos and attach PDFs to your documents — it all works.

There isn’t much to say here beyond that the core set will keep you happy for a long time and constantly surprises me with how many different types of media it supports.

Long-term storage
One of the biggest problems I’ve faced as a writer is how short-lived content tends to be. The internet feels like it’s forever, but the reality is that lots of great writing is lost to time — be it a publisher going out of business, a domain name expiring or just an inability to figure out where something lives five years later.

In my Notion workspace, I’ve now taken to storing both the original draft, and ultimate published piece for the long haul. When the piece is published online, I print it to PDF using Chrome’s printing features, then upload that into the client workspace for long-term storage — there’s a special attachment block for this.

I’ll also keep a raw text format version of the document in Notion by either copying the final product back into Notion, or just storing the final version in the same client workspace. Because you can always export from Notion in PDF or Markdown, this is a practical way to store these documents and not worry about what file format they’re in.

Notion’s roadmap has a web clipper on it, which would make this even easier, and I’m eagerly awaiting its release!

Task and project management

Get stuff done
With a simple Kanban board I manage my workload, deadlines and other phases of projects with my writing clients.

First, I create a series of lists based on tags for each phase of a project: backlog, scheduled, in progress, in review and done, then move them between each column as they progress.

Each task is attached to a client and has a field with the deadline as well as comments with other information about the job, such as story outline, attached. Finally, a URL field on the card is kept empty until published, at which point I’ll drop the public URL in for long-term storage.

This Kanban board is more than meets the eye. Notion allows you to create separate views for the data underneath, including either a table layout or a calendar view to get a different perspective on your data.

My workload board contains two views right now: GTD (Getting Things Done), pictured above, and a Calendar overview for quickly parsing due dates. Switching to calendar view means I get a quick peek at my upcoming deadlines and the stage the project is in, rather than a giant list of to-dos.

Relational CRM
I’m a freelance writer so keeping things organized while dealing with an array of vastly different clients is difficult and time consuming.

One of the most powerful features of Notion is that everything is inherently relational — and made up of ‘blocks’ — so you can organize pieces of information by linking them together and pulling them into a different page.

An example of this is a simple CRM I keep in Notion; it’s just a list of my writing clients, who they are, the tasks due for them, workload, and the current status of our relationship. I created this document by choosing the full page table block, then defining custom columns for each customer with the above labels.

The workload column is where it gets crazy once it’s set up and you wrap your head around how you can link everything together. Instead of repeating information, just enter it in one place and grab it wherever is relevant.

When I add a new task, and type a client’s name in, the field on the task itself looks up what clients I have in the CRM and auto-completes them so I don’t have to write them repeatedly.

When I add a client, like Notion, it’s attached on both ends so I can click through from the task itself, or view all of the relevant posts in the workload column of my CRM. By doing this, I get an overview of everything related to a client by just clicking on their name and getting a list filtered by that property.

There are a number of other ways to use this that I won’t get into here, but by storing data in tables you’re able to reference it repeatedly and pull it into other pages at any time. Behold, the result:

If you have lots of things that live in a similar category, such as a list of ideas, or clients, tables are the way to store them so you can pull them up in other pages.

Trust me, these are going to change your life.

Bring it all together: the homepage

Deep breath — that was a lot of great stuff, but probably felt a little overwhelming! I’ve only got one last hack for you that you’ll want to use for yourself: creating the ultimate dashboard for your day.

With all of the above done, I can now reference a bunch of great data and pull it from any table into another page to get an overview in one place. Basically, you can build yourself a page that you check into first thing to launch off from and quickly get to either writing, taking notes or ideation — but you’re free to add as much information as you like here!

@ow yes this is my entire life now

 — @davegershgorn

To set up your home page, just choose the top level of your organization (or your personal instance), and create new blocks right there. On my homepage, shown above, I have quick insights into tasks, currently active clients and stories with deadlines.

This page is created using the linked database block so we don’t need to type in any information again and saves us from duplicating information into two different spots.

Just add the block to the top-level page, then choose the database you want to show, then create a view to hide (or show) as much information as you’d like.

I keep mine tidy by only showing a sliver of the information that I have that’s most relevant like “tasks due this week” from my Kanban board, and click on the titles of the tables when I need to jump in and see everything at once.

There are hundreds of ways you can make this page useful, so I recommend arranging it in a way that makes sense to you and helps get you right into the work you need to be doing.

Feel free to ask away in the comments if you have any requests for advice here, I’m happy to help!

Make it your own

What makes Notion so magic is how flexible it is, and how many different ways there are to actually use it. I hope that this helped convince you that it can help drop a whole bunch of tools you’re using to combine your workflow into a single, unified place.

Notion is, in essence, as simple or complex as you need it to be. It’s up to you to imagine how you’d like to arrange your information, and for the first time you can arrange a tool around your brain rather than the other way around, and I adore how simple it makes my life now that I’ve taken the time to truly invest in using it regularly.

Because Notion gives you a set of building blocks to build and design the way you want to, there’s no rush: just take your time, get comfortable, and start using it every day.

It might seem daunting at first, but with the powerful array of block types and simple interface, I promise you’ll be hooked in no time and won’t be able to use an old-school editor ever again.

This post was sponsored by Notion, which generously paid for my time to document my pre-existing workflow — I was already a happy customer when they approached me and am excited to share how I use it with you!

Before Notion, we were using a lot of different apps to do a lot of different things. We used Basecamp to assign tasks to team members and keep track of their progress, we used Google Drive to make documents and spreadsheets, and we used Spark to collaborate on email drafts. None of these are bad tools — in fact, they’re some of our favorites — but we were ready for something new.

We started out just wanting a space where we could collaborate on various documents — meeting notes, email drafts, blog posts, and other short, simple things that don’t generally need any sort of special formatting. As an experiment, we gave Notion a try, starting with a “Documents” page for lightweight spreadsheets and company policy docs, and an “Email Scratchpad” to keep track of and collaborate on emails together.

Notion is supposed to be an “all-in-one workspace” that can replace seemingly every tool you’re already using at work every day. So, as our experiment went on, we started moving more and more of our work into Notion. We made a “To Do” page to assign and keep track of company tasks, we added an easy-to-use meeting template for our weekly team meetings, and we made a “Home Base” with quick links to all of our new pages.

Eventually, the experiment with Notion had to come to a conclusion. Could it replace all of our other tools completely? No. But could it replace some of them and become a really useful workspace? For sure. So far, we’ve said goodbye to Basecamp and started using Notion for all of our task management. We no longer use Spark for email collaboration (though some people in the office still love it!) and use our Email Scratchpad in Notion instead. And aside from legal papers and contracts, a lot of our docs and spreadsheets are now created and stored in Notion rather than Google Drive. (For example, this blog post? Drafted and edited in Notion.)

No tool is perfect, of course. Notion isn’t as powerful as other apps for keeping track of to-dos, formatting with markdown and the built-in slash commands can be tricky if you aren’t used to it, and the iOS app needs some work (@notion, hire us 😉). But so far, Notion has definitely proven itself worthy of being the all-in-one tool we didn’t know we needed. It’s beautiful, it’s flexible, and it’s intuitive. It’s also extremely emoji-friendly, which is always a plus.

As Notion continues to grow and we continue to experiment with different ways of using it, our workspace will likely adapt and change over time. It’s important that we are as flexible as the tools we use. That’s why we encourage you to give Notion a try for yourself — if you need a little help getting started, check out the live demo on their website, and their “Getting started with templates” post. Happy Notion-ing! 🥳

If you haven’t already, we recommend giving Notion a try. You can sign up here to get $10 in credit when you set up an account using our referral link.

Jillian Meehan is an Operations Associate at Lickability and the mother of SNAX, a zine-in-progress about all things snacks. She loves good pizza and bad tweets.

Switching to Notion was originally published in Lickability Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Nina Kruschwitz

Elaine Kasket, a psychologist with a practice based in London, is an expert on the digital afterlife. Her recent book All the Ghosts in the Machine looks at the psychosocial, legal, ethical and practical implications of being mortal in the digital age. She recently sat down with the Journal to talk about death, life, and how to balance issues of privacy and legacy.

How many dead people really are on Facebook, and how do you know?

I’ve seen research done by the Oxford Internet Institute. If Facebook were to continue growing at its current rate, which is about 13 percent per year, by the end of century it would include 4.9 billion dead people. Various projections say the tipping point for more dead people being on Facebook than live ones would be reached mid-century.

So, slightly creepy, but why does it matter?

When I spoke with Jed Brubaker at Facebook he said, “Well, there’s more money to be made in amusement parks than cemeteries.”

The point is we are entrusting huge amounts of data and memorabilia and artifacts from our lives to formats that we can not control or make decisions about. These big behemoth tech platforms are not historians or archivists or humanitarians. They’re profit making companies. And when it does become more cemetery than amusement park and the financial incentives lessen, they will jettison that data because it’s so expensive to store.

And then my concern is both at an individual or family level and a historical level. What are the short term and longer term consequences of having a kind of early 21st century digital dark ages where huge swathes of the citizenry leave behind very little because of changes in hardware or software coding and the rise or fall of various companies? Everybody has this conceit that online is forever and the cloud is infinite and binary code will always be retrievable and it is simply not the case.

Is that happening now? What would happen to your Facebook account if you died tomorrow?

Flickr started culling its free accounts back in February with very little fanfare. And if you say, oh well let’s just migrate everything — stuff gets lost, as happened with MySpace in May.

Facebook now uses AI to figure out which profiles are dead people’s accounts, and they memorialize profiles so that, as Brubaker put is, “we can stop doing things that are pain points for the bereaved.” That’s fascinating to me because they’ve decided in a kind of nannying, top-down way what is and is not good for us, whether we should or should not experience pain and bereavement, and what will cause that pain for people. It’s a supremely powerful move that takes us into new territory.

It’s a strange idea, but it seems in keeping with the current cultural aversion to death.

Which is relatively recent. The sociologist Phillipe Aries named four stages or ages of death: the first one in the Middle Ages was “tamed death” when you were sort of cheek by jowl with death, it was familiar. There were no individual accountings of life or inscriptions on tombstones and the like. Then came the era of one’s own death, when it became very personal and individual, you made an accounting to God of your life. After that there was an age where there was a tremendous amount of sorrow for the deaths of the other, a kind of romanticized, fetishized perspective, a non-acceptance of death and a longing to maintain communication with the dead. And that led to the age of forbidden death, where death is kind of privatized and denied, it’s this horrible event we want to prevent at all costs, and yet avoid even discussing.

Michael Hvid Jacobsen has proposed a fifth stage that says we’re in the age of spectacular death. It’s a spectacle: close and visible and available to us, partly because the dead are all over the online world. At the same time death is further from us because it’s mediated through our devices.

Which started with television probably, right?

Yes, I think about the Vietnam War, where you were suddenly seeing film clips of people getting blown up on TV. That’s just continued. You can have this weird experience of sitting in your room drinking your tea and watching a terrorist attack.

The spectacle isn’t just about the gruesome terror and fear inducing thing that we’re talking about, but the fact that you encounter the dead easily on the same platforms, by the same devices, by the same means, and in the same digital places and spaces that you interacted with them before they died. They stay there for an indeterminate period of time because as you know, there are no virtual carrion beetles or digital worms that go around nibbling away all traces of you after you’re not around.

In the exercise you’re conducting at the House of Beautiful Business this year, people will write eulogies for strangers based on what they find online. At this point, I’m guessing they’ll find a lot.

Exactly. You’re not the only one responsible for your digital reflection. People will tag you on Facebook, on LinkedIn, all kinds of organizations have records of you — it’s stunning how much is out there. But it’s all mediated by technology. And at this point, the question for me is, when we sign up for a platform like Facebook, we are essentially entrusting them with our memories, our personal identifiable data — in essence we’re appointing them to manage our estates. If you’ve ever been the executor of an estate you know how complex it can get. Historically the dead have not been granted rights to privacy. But right now platforms can freely use the data of the deceased for their own purposes, for market insight mining, or training a new AI, or whatever. They can dissolve a contract with the deceased person when it suits them, and keep it when it does. The law is a lot more sluggish than technology, and there are no clear solutions right now.

Can you give me an example of when the law itself — or lack thereof — has caused grief to the bereaved?

There are many of them. I spoke with one woman whose daughter’s page had been memorialized by Facebook, who said “I gave birth to her, it’s still her birthday, and I still want to get reminders that she was born on this day.” She wasn’t given the choice.

There was a young woman in her early 20s, a hairdresser, who died tragically at a young age. She’d been very active in a raft of issues that were important to her, and her page gave a vivid reflection of her. There were thousands of photos on her site, and many expressions of condolence. But 72 of those pictures were of her ex-boyfriend, her killer. Her parents were wanted to sort out her Facebook page and deal with those photos. When they tried to, the site had been memorialized and locked down. Even though her sister had the password, they couldn’t use it.

What have you changed in your own life in light of what your book research uncovered?

I became very cynical. I tried to limit my Facebook presence. But I live far from my point of origin; most of my family is across the Atlantic, and I have a young daughter and I want her to know them. Facebook is what they use. There are other mechanisms, but family members still post photos I share through other channels, like a shared photo album, and tag them on Facebook.

A few months ago I sat down with my daughter and asked her how she felt about my “sharenting” practices. Not only did she want me to make changes in what I do going forward, but there were many historical posts that she wanted to go through and delete. For example, she had once seen a photo I posted of a sign she had made, and she got very upset, which prompted a whole deep discussion. She feels like lots of posts about her have been posted without her permission, or before she could give informed permission. It’s hard to go back through and edit privacy settings when there are thousands of posts to consider — there’s currently no way of reverting all past posts to specific audiences.

What bothers you most about that lack of control?

Two things. First is the kind of expectations we set up for children in what we share and what gets reinforced by others who see those photos. For example, when we visited relatives one of them asked my daughter what her favorite song was, and when she answered he was disappointed and said “Oh, I thought you were a [David] Bowie girl.” It was like she’d given the wrong answer. And you know, children who have access to all those photos and posts later see what their parents’ hopes and expectations or assumptions were for them. It can be pretty powerful.

A friend of mine has been posting all kinds of photos of his baby son, and someone suggested he give him his own Facebook page. That’s just enabling facial recognition and marketing preferences for your child from the word go. And when they graduate to having a profile of their own, that identity will be linked through facial recognition and there will be continuity of all of their preferences. We’re basically laying our children open to the future manipulations of extremely sophisticated AI, which is a completely razor sharp marketing focus on just one person. That is what’s coming.

Nina Kruschwitz is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Beautiful Business.

The Journal is a production of The Business Romantic Society, hosts of the House of Beautiful Business. Sign up for the monthly newsletter at https://www.beautifulbusinessletters.com/

The House can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram, but most importantly in Lisbon, Portugal from November 2–6, 2019. Request an invitation at houseofbeautifulbusiness.com.

The Digital Dead was originally published in Journal of Beautiful Business on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.