Welcome to Digital Opsessions!

A brief moderately entertaining explanation on why you’re getting this email

Hi!

My name is Tem, and I run a digital ops agency called Optemization. You’re getting this email because at some point since March 4th 2020, you for some reason decided it’d be a good idea to subscribe to this wonderful “upcoming” newsletter called Automagic… or you subscribed on optemization.com.

Automagic hasn’t formally shipped, and will not, ever. But it has left its Product Hunt Ship cocoon and became this — that is a Substack called Digital Opssessions.

TL;DR

We spend most of our days on computers and phones — might as well learn how to use them really well.

Especially since we’re all going to be remote, probably forever. So this newsletter will show you how to do this through informative and hopefully entertaining guides, events, courses, templates and videos.

Problem

Designing the best processes and systems for our digital spaces is freakin’ hard. Not only does it takes a long time to settle on the right software — everything changes all the time. More data, new tools, new features, and unforeseen limitations demand constant adjustment. Who on Earth has the time to keep up?

Me

I’m obsessed with operations — not even just in the business context but more in the “figuring out how things and groups of things work, and how can it be done better” one. Odd, right? I don’t know, I’m just inexplicably drawn to this stuff.

It just happens to be that for the past five years, I channeled this obsession into mastering digital organization and productivity software. It all started with good ol’ Excel and over the years I worked through Drive, Trello, Asana, Evernote, Things, Sunsama, Flow, Airtable, and Todoist (in that order).

To no avail. Every tool was unsatisfactory. Until I found Notion. For me, it’s the all-in-one-everything software, and I actually LOVE it. In the coming posts, we’ll explore why it works for me — and how it can work for you. However, I don’t want this to be a “strictly Notion” newsletter.

Posts

In fact, my ambition for Optemization is to become a kickass media company focused on DOPE content. “DOPE” being “digital operations and productivity education” — please tell me now if it sucks. Right now. One way or another, we shall come up with a quirky acronym.

Anyway, Digital Opsessions will play a big role in Optemization. In the beginning, I’ll focus on designing digital operating systems without code. Hopefully, these will help people free up more time, energy and focus for things that are more fun or important. With any piece of content, that’s the goal.

To get a taste of the sweet, sweet content go here: optemization.com/writing — we just pained the website with a fresh coat of Notion blocks. I’ll also be re-sahring these later. Lastly, I will be concurrently running a newsletter about the BTS of Optemization (the company) but that’s another story for another time.

Before we go any further if a friend has this shared this rambling of a blog post, feel free to join the by pressing this button.

LifeOS

The first new project I want to share is a life operating system in Notion.

I am creating “follow along” posts, videos, and templates where we create one from scratch. I want a super easy to use dashboard, where I can track and draw insights from:

1. My reflections and thoughts
2. Meetings with friends, colleagues and clients
3. Food eaten (no calories, just a simple listing)
4. Exercise (tracked with apple watch)
5. Media consumed (mostly film and books)
6. Rewards for myself (snacks and substances)
7. Strain, recovery, sleep data from Whoop
8. Weight and body fat from Withings
9. Any negative health symptoms

I have an analogous all-in-one system set up for Optemization. It stores company-wide:

1. Notes
2. Tasks
3. Projects
4. Contacts
5. Companies
6. Writing
7. Timelines
8. Our websites
9. Decisions

and looks like this (prepare to be overwhelmed):

So yeah, adapting this strategy to a personal space is going to be interesting, fun, and perhaps maybe hopefully useful :)

At this point, you probably decided if you’re vibing with this content or nah…and if you are, share with a friend!

Thanks for reacing and byeeee! — Tem (@optemization)