My question to you fellow productivity enthusiasts: How do you handle your projects when it starts in your notes app and then evolve into a team project?
Context:
I don’t really know what to do in this scenario: When I start a project (In Evernote) I often need to do the research and distill the information for my team.
When I have all the information and the key results ready, I’m continuing the work in Notion with my team.
I follow the PARA framework and in this scenario, I have some projects in Evernote and some in Notion. It’s not optimal because it gets so fragmented, I’m juggling between apps and I need 'One source of truth.
I have tried using Notion for everything but it… doesn’t feel right.
I use plain text myself, and work is all cloud collaboration. I just make sure the file structures are similar. Where needed I include links to the cloud folder in notes to move around. But usually the similar folder structure does the trick for me.
Is this a personal project that has evolved into needing a bigger team?
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to have more than one ‘source of truth’. Different teams often need systems and tools specific to their processes, and the trick is identifying when and how these teams should plug into each other.
Personal example: my day job is producing commercial animation. The “New Business” team uses very different tools to pitch for and win (and lose!) a project than the animators use to actually create the commercial itself. At some high level both teams are engaging with key facts like Job Number, Schedule Dates, Budget, etc – but the tasks inherent to each group will be considerably different from each other, and their tools & systems will reflect that. In fact, there’s a lot of information that’s actively withheld from each respective team so as to improve efficiency and mental health.
IMHO these organisational paradigms work best on the personal level, but struggle to scale for a variety of reasons. Sometimes you don’t have say over how files/comms are dealt with at a company. Or you’ve perhaps been hired to work on someone else’s project and they are in charge of how stuff’s being saved. But even when you do have influence here, one must always contend with other people’s professed and/or actual capacity for technical ‘stuff’. Very Important People are usually the worst at learning out in the open, and it can therefore be more advantageous to focus on the synapse points, where YOU plug into THEM, and vice versa.
Totally depends on what your projects are, of course.
We just moved the entire company to Notion (Google Work) for better collaboration. I’m the co-owner of the company with means that I have many different hats. Sometimes I need to help our marketing team and other days it’s a management meeting or something else.
80% of my projects are team projects. It usually starts out like this (this is an example):
We need to increase the company’s LinkedIn activity, gain more followers, and create10% more MQLs.
Before I take this to the Marketing team I need to research how LinkedIn’s algorithm works, what kind of LinkedIn posts we can create, how often we need to post, find examples of campaigns that have been successful and so on…
When I have all this in my Evernote I need to compile everything before I move it to Notion, sp the marketing team have all the information they need. Then I educate them, talk about our goals, and then we have a sit down to discuss what content we need to create.
This is where it gets messy for me because now we are working on this in Notion. My project in Evernote won’t be updated because now it’s a team project and I’m involved in this project.
So I have one project that’s not accurate anymore (My Evernote) and one Project that is the new Truth, Notion.
In struggling to find the right mindset or workflow on how to approach this because I use the PARA framework in Evernote.
While I left Evernote anyway, I don’t think that it is really a meaningful tool, if it comes to cooperations.
It is just too difficult to get things out again, and while I could share a notebook with somebody, it is still not a useful tool for that, in my eyes. This was also the reason why my wife and I cx the subscription, as we were not really able to use it in a productive way.
The larger the group involved, the larger are the related problems.
There were a larger topic during the last month, where I got the impression from reading, that the majority of the contributing MPU-Members left, or where about to leave Evernote for various reasons.
I really like Evernote. I know that everything I put in Evernote I can find, the search I excellent I have used it a long time. It has had its ups and downs since it released v10. My only issue is that middle area where a project becomes a team project and that’s not Evernotes “fault”
I think Evernote is nice and useful, but the way I structure my thinking I need to have arbitrarily nested folders/notebooks, which is not really an option with EN. Efficient tagging and liberal usage of the “Jump to…” shortcut can overcome this.
I have several notebooks shared with my SO and sync worked even better than sharing Apple notes between us, but clearly it is not a “collaboration tool”.
The main reason I am staying away of Evernote for everything is not owning the storage of my stuff, not for security of confidentiality issues but what if Evernote closes business and I have a few days to download everything? Anyway I am retaining my subscription maybe out of nostalgia.
Seems like at this point your Evernote project should be moved to the Archive folder according to PARA. Any further research or updates would then happen in Notion, which now houses the active project.
I also use PARA. My main workhorse has moved to Craft, which has been very pleasant and easy to work in. I have PARA set up on all my devices. I also have a PARA database in DEVONthink, but am using that less and less. I use OF, but sparingly. Each project only gets one next action. At the start of each week I pull out all the tasks for that week which I write in an A5 Black n’ Red. I then use that list to time block my days, which I do in the same A5 notebook. Then rinse and repeat.
This is the way to do it. It makes more sense to define the project as “prepare assets for marketing teams” and when it’s done i move it to archive and then continue to work with the team in Notion.