Notion and Kanban Boards for Writers
As a writer, I’ve tried just about everything to stay organized. In college, my Day Runner was always in motion. Need a reminder? Lemme jot it down. What hours were I working at my side job hours? Right here. What were my deadlines for the school newspaper? Just a second.
In the corporate world, Outlook was king. Meetings, deadlines, blocking out project time. When my schedule migrated to my corporate phone, well, then it included my growing family’s needs, too.
The problem was, I missed paper. I’ve filled up dozens of notebooks, and bought binders, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets. I even tried a My PA Planner which was designed to help business owners. Nothing worked so I turned to online productivity trackers like Asana and Trello.
The harder I tried, the more frazzled I got. There had to be another way.
A few years ago, I was introduced to the idea of a physical Kanban board by Sarra Cannon in her HB90 Bootcamp. It was incredible. Identify three projects each quarter and each and every task that you need to work on to complete them. At the start of the quarter, you use sticky notes to capture individual tasks. Every week, you move items from the top row to the middle ‘Working’ row. When the task is complete it gets moved all the way down to ‘Done’.
Finally, I had a visible way of tracking your progress. It was rewarding . . . and a bit frustrating because sometimes projects didn’t neatly fall into a single quarter. I also found myself trying to add things like social media content and advertising events. Plus, if you are writing in VR, do you really have time to take off the headset and walk over to the board to update it?
Over time that board got very busy and I started to use it less and less. And then I found Notion.
The cool thing about Notion is that you can use your book launch goals to create individual project Kanban views. All you need to do is click on the plus sign next to your original table and choose ‘Board’. From there, you can give it a name and edit the property to look at specific projects. As you move items from ‘not started’ to ‘pending’ and ‘completed’ the boards move things accordingly.
If you’re like me, though you prefer to cut straight to the end. Putting together a template takes patience and a whole lot of determination. That’s why I shared my fiction book launch template with my readers. Target weeks can be easily updated, you can update projects and the underlying tasks, assign due dates and add a date filter so that you only focus on the items that are coming due. You can even add more tasks, if you need to!
So, join my email list and relax into your next book launch. Trust me, having a digital Kanban board is worth it!
