Because Apple Notes is built into Apple devices, including iPhones, iPad, and MacBooks, it is handy for taking quick notes or keeping some notices handy for offline access. I recommend using its features, including folders, tagging, smart folders, locking, checklist, web sharing, and handwritten notes and sketches. Let's dive in. 

The folder has two benefits: grouping notes and protecting notes from accidental showing during screen sharing. 

Tagging and Smart Folder organize content with tags for prioritization and extended categorization after macOS Monterey.

Locking protects notes when keeping personal information handy, such as a digital copy of a driver's license, healthcare card, membership, and personal documents. 

The checklist is used for the to-do list which we can pin on the top.

Handwritten notes and sketches are used when on the iPad using Apple Pencil. We can easily convert to text with the Apple Pencil's scribble feature. ​

In summary, AppleNotes doesn't have a wealthy content format, advanced content structure, or indexing capabilities like Quip, Evernotes, and Notion. Therefore, notes on Apple Notes are mainly prompt notes that are then moved to Quip for workplace collaboration, EverNotes for personal content like contact and journals, and Notion for private knowledge systems. ​​

Email is helpful but can also be distracting. If we don't handle it properly, it can dominate our life and  impact our productivity by interrupts our concentration. Let me share some practices I have used to organize my emails. 

What worked was to keep your email process simple.

Create a simple folder structure. My favorite folders only have 8 folders: an Inbox, a Sent box, a Flagged folder, a Draft folder, a Templates folder, a Subscriptions folder, a Saved folder, and the Archived folder. Let's look at each of them: 

• Inbox and Sent are the default ones to hold emails coming in and out.
• Flagged as a smart folder lists all emails with a flag. I flag emails when they don't need immediate action or are better processed in batch.  
• Draft keeps email drafts. For important emails, I prefer to save them in Draft for one or two hours and do a second read before sending them out. One reason is to avoid emotional attachment and any apparent mistakes. 
• Template holds the frequently used email templates such as announcements and meeting minutes. 
• Saved folder keeps important emails containing valuable information.
• Subscriptions preserve all email subscriptions categorized automatically by the server-side rules and are used for batch process. This is after we unsubscribed unnecessary subscriptions. 
• Archived archives processed emails. I create a quarterly folder with a sent box for the archive folder, with the root folder taking all the incoming emails and the sent box capturing all the outgoing emails. That's it. The setup allows you to make easy decisions (or avoid decision fatigue) and easily clean up your inbox whenever needed. ​​Depending on your email volume, you may change the older to be yearly or monthly. 

Turn Off Email Notifications. You don't need them. Instead, plan when to check emails. I check email twice daily, at the beginning and end of the day, during my morning/afternoon review time. 
​
Apply the OHIO. ("Only Handle It Once,") method and 2-minute rule: process email once, and if you can respond to an email in 2 minutes, do it immediately. ​ 

The lesson learned is to avoid organizing your email per project. When we have many projects, handling every one of them to decide where the email should go can easily cause stress. It is realistic to clean up the inbox weekly rather than daily because some emails are not urgent for review or need batch processing per week.​

Enjoy your productive email handling. ​

Cleaning up an office with the team is a proven team-building activity to enhance collaboration. We share an example activity plan where we apply the concept to a virtual team-building event. 

Prepare the communication
We need to set a slack channel for the team to brainstorm and discuss solutions during the activity. We also need to schedule a kick-off and a review web conference for all team members to get together. 

Assigning the tasks 
First, we need to decide what we need to clean up. The host can create a wishlist and the desired outcome. An example list can include:  

• Meeting cleaning up - review all project meetings and give critiques as needed and any suggestions to improve.
• Documentation clean up- review project summary to confirm all critical information is included; ensure all the design documents are in the right place; organize user documents in the project folder. 
• Emails - Pullout critical emails into a separate folder
• Text Messages - Pin critical messages in the slack channel for future reference 
• Team pictures - collect team pictures and put them into a separate folder. 

During the kick-off, the host can encourage new ideas, discuss the workload, and assign at least two people per team per task. Each team then works offline to get things done. In general, we give a 1-hour timeline for the team to work to avoid overthinking or burnout.

Review the result 
The team demonstrates the results in the review meeting and discusses how they did it, the new finding, and any future suggestions.

Collaboration is encouraged, such as contacting content owns for permission of changes. You can see some exciting interplay and results. 

The visual clean-up can take one day or 1-week depending on the size of the tasks. We suggest you start with something simple and small to entertain the group.  

As a project manager, you have many things to take care of. Productivity is a much-have skill. We will share tools to help you gain productivity, and one of them is the iPad. We will use iPad Pro 12.9" as an example to show our practices. We would recommend this model because it has a large screen, and it is easier for you to review documents, read and manage notes. If you do have another model, many suggestions still apply. 

Setup 
The first setup is to use the Home Screen to include helpful widgets. Our favorite ones are the weather, calendar, world clock, Podcast, Siri Shortcuts, and Motivation quotes. Do you think the following staring screen gives you an informative start to the day? ​

The second setup is to group less frequently used applications into folders. With Home Screen, now you have four places to access your favorite apps quickly: the Home Screen, short access bar, the bottom access bar, and the first screen page. Our goal is not duplicate use these display assets. For example, after adding Podcast into Home Screen as a Widgets, we can access Podcast from there. I then will move the apps into a folder rather than leave the icon on the screen. For the screen shot, photo and calculator we add them to the short access bar. 

Another important setup is multi-task setup. You would enable it and then you can have two application running side by side by dragging one application to the side of an existing running appellation. 

Project management coaches work with project managers to help them face and overcome challenges in their projects and careers. This leadership role is translated to assisting project managers in discovering the capability within themselves to be organized in project planning, be confident in project control, be strategic in building relationships with clients, and be creative in problem-solving. The coaching subjects vary from person to person. We list some common ones. 

Organize the work. Project managers deal with many things: meetings, follow-ups, tasks, stakeholders, etc. The first action of any project management coaching is to make sure we have time to work on the improvement. Organizing the work makes the time for consecutive steps. The best way is to help project managers understand the PMO standard and follow their project's established structure and control. The exercise should start with 1-2 weeks of shadowing their work to understand the process. The typical errors include too many meetings, team members are not engaged, no clear timeline for tasks, and a lack of proper tracking and reporting tools. The process setup and adequate time management can also boost the project manager's confidence in interacting with the team because they have a sense of control and a clear path of where the project he should direct the project to go next.

Drive action based on values. Project managers have to know-how to focus on the most valuable tasks to an organization. That means the functions that drive results. 

Build relationship. PMO is a people organization. Therefore, people connections are essential for project management success. The foundation of healthy project management relations should start with a good master of project schedule, task, goal, and stakeholders, set up in the "Organized the Work" steps. With this, the next step is to understand your audience. This is about what they are good at, what matters to them, what's their challenges, and how you can help. A relationship is essentially a Give and Take situation. A project manager needs to give help first and take the trust and Support back. 

Mitigate risks. Risk mitigation requires experience and tools. PMO should set up the Risk migration practices. It will be easier for project managers to follow and see the results with minimum effort/ ​

Ultimately, the coaching should help project managers demonstrate their value by delivering successful results and advancing their careers with a promotion and raise. ​

References 

• Susanne Madsen, The Project Management Coaching Workbook, Feb 2012

PARA is a knowledge management method. PARA stands for the Project, the Area (of interests), the Resource, and the Archive. A project comprises a series of tasks, has to complete with a limited time, and links to one or multiple areas of interest. An area (of interest) establishes the meaning of a project called a goal or scope of demands. A resource is an idea, a topic, or a theme of interest. An archive is used to mark inactive items.
We can implement the PARA method to build our personal knowledge management system in Notion. In our example project, we created the five databases:

• Mission (→ Area) lists the envied achievements. When people use goals to describe the same concept, defining missions is called a goal-setting process or creating a goal chart.
• Project (→ Project) contains a list of tasks to achieve a mission within a limited time. Note that we have to set both the Start Date and Due Date for each project.
• Task tracks the detailed actions in a project which requires Start Date and Due Date property**.**
• Notes (→ Resources) captures resources.
• Tag tracks topics or themes of interest.

In each project, task and note, we add an "Archive" property to mark inactiveness.
The primary benefit of the PARA method is introducing the structure of a knowledge management system, with a hierarchal relationship is between the actionable elements, including missions, projects, and tasks, and a correlation relationship between notes and other components. PARA also introduces the archiving workflow to differentiate active vs. inactive content, creating spotlights in the knowledge management system for better focus.

Notion is free software for personal use and can be extended to its pro version that supports team collaboration at a low cost ($4/month). Unless your company security policy prevents you from using it, we recommend Notion for your note-taking system, rather than EverNote, MS OneNote, and AppleNotes. This blog will discuss the basic concept of taking notes and how Notion can help you achieve your goals. Our discussion includes the following content: planning your content, organizing content in Notion, and some incredible Notion features that you don't want to miss.

The first type of content is a task that requires us to take action, such as a work assignment, a social activity, a family duty, or simply something we'd like to do. When grouping a set of tasks, we call it a project. With this concept, you can create a database for each project and one page per task. When you need multiple projects to achieve a goal, you can arrange them as linked databases in Notion. We can call it a mission. With the described concepts, we can introduce the task-project-mission concept, where you can create a set of missions that include one or multiple projects, and each project contains groups of tasks. We will utilize this concept to organize our note-taking system. 

Task Management (TA) 
Every task needs the following details: 

• What to do - is specified in task Name and optionally with a Description listing the detailed objectives. 
• Whom to work on - is referred to as Assigned To. For personal use, this is optional. 
• Status of the task - typically has three Status: Not Started, In Progress, and Completed. You would like to make the status simple and consistent across all your tasks for easy tracking and analysis. 
• When to start and due - this is the scheduling and time management consideration. You would avoid procrastination to start tasks quickly and complete them with a reasonable amount of time. In Notion, because it has a function to specify start/due date in one field, we don't need to set Start Date and End Date as we did in other tools. 
• Notes - include notes taken during the task such as ideas, records of actions, and references. Notes usually is a free-text field, and it's a good practice to form the notes in the composition as DATE: <Who> has done <what >with <what details>. You can modify to set up your format, but you definitely would like to follow a consistent disposition to stay organized. 

There could be more content to add to a task, but we usually can use Notes as the container to capture them. You would avoid creating too many properties on a task because it complicates your task tracking and handling. The golden organizing principle is: make things simple. 

Project Management (PR)
Project management fundamentally introduces prioritizing, scheduling, and workflow control. Notion allows you to manage projects via databases. We recommend the following database views for projects (shown in order of our preferences): 

• The default spreadsheet-based view is efficient for adding tasks and changing properties. 
• The Kanban board view is excellent for showing the task workflow. 
• The calendar view attached assignments to the calendar for scheduling and time management 
• The gallery view show list of tasks in tiles for fun observations 

We don't like to use the list view because it lacks the structure for organized management. However, we recommend creating a database with a list view for task backlog or new requests. We call it the Inbox, which serves as a temporary parking lot for new ideas and requests. We can transfer the task from Inbox to mission and projects later.

Mission Planning (MI) 
Mission planning answers the fundamental questions of who we are and where we want to go. It's very subjective, so you have to make your own decisions. The essence is a wishlist that you want to achieve in your life to be filled with intentional or meaningful moments.

Documentation (DOC) 
Documentation is needed for project execution and management. You can use Notion templates to capture the best practices in what document to create and in which format. 

The described task-project-mission notes are operational. Next, we will talk bout some content capturing emotions, feels and knowledge on our journey. 

Journaling (JO) 
A journal document records occasions, memorable moments, or experiences.  Journal deserves a standalone project which starts with a journal database and a set of journals pages organized by date by default. We like applying the concept of journaling as a daily reflection which typically includes intent, grateful for, happenings, and action items. We can use daily or weekly reviews to be mindful and calibrate our actions to our purposes. 

We recommend adding links to your tasks in the action section of a journal. The links allow all actions to run in the context of a mission or a project. We also recommend you link journal documents to a task/project or assignment to record experiences. 

​The famous bullet journal concept has been adopted by many to keep track of to-do lists. Because Notion provides excellent task management using databases, you can skip tracking the to-dos in the journal section but focus on esthetic and emotional exploration.

Notion Template is excellent for creating journal documents with a harmonious setup.

Knowledge Base (KB) 
Knowledge base documents are special journals that capture the information and thoughts that can be impersonal and published for others to consume. We add some common categories, including reading notes, how-to, and FAQ documents. Each category needs a Notion template. 

Content planning is an essential step to prepare for successful note-taking.

Using Formula, Relation property types can create ugoal chart and automatics tracking progress.

In summary, note-taking tools like Notion are beneficial nowadays, but it heavily relies on our master of productivity and organizing concepts. We still recommend keeping a notebook and pencil handy for all project managers because it is ideal for quick notes and easy flip through to fresh your mind. Instead of calling it a notebook, we now call it the "idea book." The messages in an idea book are quick and short. We will then move it to our note-taking system for long-term administration. 

Highlights for Members

• (Basic) How prioritize tasks with The Eisenhower Matrix
• (Intermediate) How to use the Zettelkasten Note-taking Methods in Notion
• (Advanced) How to auto create grocery shopping list with Notion