There are some excellent tools for organizing all aspects of an entity, whether it’s a single person, a hobby project, or an entire business. Services like Notion have come into vogue as trendy startups available to the masses, with a promise for greater expansion. I got into the world of Notion last year when I accepted a new role at work, which required greater coordination of people and projects. While my resulting setup was vital to my success, it’s put me in a bummer of a position nearly a year later.
Here’s the issue: Within a company, other people have a tendency to be interested in your work, and much of what happens needs to be visible and accessible to everyone.
This flies in the face of my personal project management setup with Notion. While you can set pages as public (using a “security through long-string obscurity” approach), letting others know about this entirely separate tool is problematic.
Recently, I’ve started offloading my Notion workspace into a series of markdown files in Obsidian. This is less accessible than Notion.
Because I’ve been pretty effective in my current position, this private setup has flown under the company radar thus far. Yet there are always two nagging issues in the back of my mind: Those who could actually benefit from the information I compile don’t have easy access to it, and nothing that I’m doing in these programs is scalable or sustainable if I’m not the one doing the work. In short, there is no process for the team.
I’m moving to a new position over the next few months to accommodate my newly remote status. Much to my dismay, this led to the natural result of shutting down these private operations for anything I couldn’t consider private. While the setup is still useful, there is now an extra step.
What I’ve settled on is maintaining my way of tracking projects and meetings in my personal way, which gives me the freedom to process information in a way that makes sense. Then, I sanitize and summarize what I write and put it inside our company’s Google Drive structure so it is available to everyone interested.
My hope is that as the company grows, we start implementing better solutions than a tower of Google Docs to manage all of our processes. I’m a fan of Wikis (particularly now that I’ve gone all-in on Obsidian). While most of the company uses Phabricator to track tasks and projects in a kan-ban system, there is a push by others to adopt ClickUp which is more modern, and should hopefully help those a little less eager to learn the rough edges of an open-source, self-hosted tool.
As I move into my new role, I’ll be fascinated to see how I can contribute systemic organization to the team I’m working in. It’s a strange problem, because you need more buy-in and work to establish a tool within a team than is required as an individual. Right now, my money is on me diving head-first into the coolest personal tools to make up for my lack of control over having better ways of managing things at work. We all need to compensate somewhere.