Notion Calendar Is Here: Everything You Need to Know Notion Calendar will become your go-to calendar app. Switch now and start enjoying it today.   It is accessible from the app and the browser, it’s fast and comes with tons of powerful features. You’ll need a Google Account to log in as only supports Google (not Outlook or other) for now. Access it now from this link!   Google Calendar 2-way Integration: Connect Several Google Accounts and Manage It All from a Single Place Notion Calendar works side-to-side with Google. This means you can connect your Google Account and manage your calendar and appointments from the Notion Calendar app. Plus, you can connect various accounts, such as your work or personal account, and see it all from a single calendar. If you need to block time (i.e. doctor appointment in your personal account that you want to block in your work account), just block it. No more double bookings! So freaking useful.   Mac Toolbar for quick visualization & access: the feature that goes unnoticed but that I like the most You don’t need to open the calendar app to know what you should be working on or what’s coming next.     You’ll see in the Mac toolbar all the info you need: the current appointment + when it’s happening. And if you want to look into what’s coming, just click on it for a quick overview. Notion Calendar comes with tons of cool keyboard shortcuts to make it easy and fast to work with. Meeting starting? Just press Cmd + J to join!New meeting? C These are just some of them:     Notion 2-way Integration: View your Tasks, Projects & More from a single placeNow, this one is new! Notion acquired Cron a few years ago. Cron already existed as a calendar app and, if you were a previous Cron user, the prior two features would already be familiar. But the 2-way integration with Notion is a new, and powerful one!     Now, you can sync and visualize any Notion database (up to 10) that contains a Calendar or Timeline view. This means, if you have a tasks database, or a content database in Notion, you can visualize these from the Calendar itself! Incredibly useful for time-blocking! How does it work? Image your tasks database containing tasks with a date property. This task will appear at the top of the Calendar app, as no time has been specified. Now, every day you just open your Calendar app and drag-and-drop each task for effective day planning. Pretty cool, huh? If you don’t have a Notion account, create yours from this link!     Share availability through a link: no more back-and-forth emails to schedule a meeting Hear me out: if you’re still using emails to try to get a meeting scheduled, you’re living in 2023 With Notion Calendar you can select specific timeslots from your calendar and it will create a sharing link for you to share with those you want to meet with. They will be able to directly book a meeting with you from the link. Sharing availability with emails like doesn’t give a good look anymore and is a hustle. Plus, it’s totally fre If you are not convinced by now I don’t know what else I can say. Ok, just one more thing. Notion is a great tool and the team is continuously improving the product. So the same is just to be expected with Notion Calendar. Hi, I’m Triz! creator of bodegalaabs and I’m a Certified and Recommended Notion Creator.If you need help setting up your Notion Workspace for success.   If you’d like that

3 Steps To Stop Making It Hard For Your Customers To Work With You Streamline your Client Acquisition process so your potential customers stop buying from your competitors   Have you ever been a customer yourself? I bet you have. And of those times, I’m sure you have a few where you thought: “Damn, it seems like they don’t want me to buy from them” If you have a business to scale, you want to avoid this at ALL costs. I’ll share a few examples I recently encountered: A free lead magnet where you need to:1) Reply with an emoji to an Instagram story.2) Then you get a message telling you to DM a word to an Instagram account.3) Finally you get a link you need to enter, scroll down and, at some point, leave your data + email. A local business you can’t contact directly from the webpage. But you need to make a phone call. The business is in its closing hours so you need to wait for the next day. You forget about it and end up buying from a competitor.   Photo by Cova Software on Unsplash So if you’re wondering what process to improve, a good starting point is your client acquisition workflow.   Here are 3 steps to make it easy for your customers to buy from you:   1. Audit your current process: Get out of your head, forget everything you think you know about your current workflow, and imagine you are a new customer:– How do you find your business?– Does the copy match the services you’re looking for?– Once you make a decision to buy, what does the process look like? Write down every single step you have to go through til payment (clicks, time, open new pages, go grab a credit card… everything). At this point, I’m sure you’ve already found a few bottlenecks you’d like to get rid of.   2. Simplify your process: Think of clicks, data, and time your customer needs to go through to finally get the service from you. In a fast-paced world, even the smallest things can make or break a decision. At this point, you might as well consider automating some tasks. Not only to save your time, but every moment your customer has made an action and hasn’t received a response, is waiting time for them and time they are looking at other competitors (who might be faster than you). You want to make it EASY for them. A no-brainer decision.   3. Implement the changes: <pta-selectable-paragraph=»»>Now that you have a clear understanding of where you’re at and where you want to be, work on making the necessary changes for your new client acquisition process.</pta-selectable-paragraph=»»> I highly suggest taking all three steps separately and treating them individually. If you scratch the surface and skip any of them, the probability is your new process will not be as good as you want it to be. Take the time now, so you don’t need to work on it again. Level up today and change the way you work forever! If you’re interested in trying it out, join the waitlist to get early access: Sign Up for Notion AI If you’re already a Notion AI user, you can get started today with Q&A already in your Notion workspace.  Hi, I’m Triz! creator of bodegalaabs and I’m a Certified and Recommended Notion Creator. If you need help setting up your Notion Workspace for success. If you’d like that

Notion Q&A: Your Second Brain like no other Have you heard? Notion just launched Notion Q&A! But, what is it? It’s a revolutionary feature that’s going to change the way you are using Notion. It’s your own, and the only one, Q&A assistant that can answer your questions by understanding your business, decisions, procedures, and meetings. Wait… what? Yes, you read that right. It has access to your Notion Workspace, so, if you keep your Business Strategy in Notion… it knows! If you had a meeting… it knows! It’s an AI tool ready to act as a Second Brain, which no other can do.   What does it mean for you and your team? Imagine the time (and money) savings it’ll provide by quickly retrieving information, reducing repetitive questions, and summarizing your docs. Not only you will be receiving relevant answers, but links to the Notion Pages in case you wanna dive in. IMPORTANT: Notion AI protects data privacy and only references pages users have access to.   Some examples of when this Q&A assistant is New Employee Onboarding: just when I think about this use case… Imagine joining a company and having an assistant to ask: How do I get a Microsoft Office account? How can I apply for a company credit card? How do I request holidays? If it’s documented, it knows. Personal Assistant: You wake up, have your coffee, open Notion, and ask: What were the action items coming out of my meeting with my manager last week? — see? You don’t even need to go and look for the meeting yourself! Knowledge Master: Now picture you having a customer support team, and you tracking customers’ issues on Notion. When a new issue arises, your employee doesn’t know how to answer. He can just ask the Q&A AI: Has this issue happened before? If so, how was it solved? And voilá! They get the answer instantly. Notion Q&A Screenshot Level up today and change the way you work forever! If you’re interested in trying it out, join the waitlist to get early access: Sign Up for Notion AI If you’re already a Notion AI user, you can get started today with Q&A already in your Notion workspace.   Hi, I’m Triz! creator of bodegalaabs and I’m a Certified and Recommended Notion Creator. If you need help setting up your Notion Workspace for success, book a free discovery call with me and save your time (and money)! If you’d like that

The One Thing Your Project Management System Might Be Missing Upgrade your Project Management with this simple yet overlooked strategy   Project Management is a core activity of every business. And making it effective is crucial for successful operations. You can have the best team in place, or the most disruptive technology, but without proper management, even the most promising projects can quickly run into roadblocks.   1. Common Pitfalls A common pitfall is failing to understand the role of the different stakeholders that participate in a project. Lots of businesses focus on having software that allows them to create and manage tasks, and that’s great! But, is this enough? Many stakeholders, especially those from the leadership team, will not have tasks assigned to them and want to avoid going through each task to understand how the project is developing. And as a project owner, you want to have them as engaged with the project as possible. In the end, if an important decision needs to be made, you’ll need them informed and by your side.   2. The Power of Effective Communication Again, the key aspect of successful projects is effective communication. Providing regular, clear, and concise information adapted to the needs of each stakeholder will ensure that everyone understands their part, role, and what’s needed from them.     3. The Missing Link Ok, understood, agreed. But, how can we ensure this? Apart from having projects and tasks defined? Super easy! -> Status Updates. Providing regular Status Updates for each project will ensure that everyone involved understands the project’s current status, challenges, achievements, and next steps. However many of the current project management tools don’t incorporate this ability. They give you the ability for great task management but just fall short in looking at the big picture of a project. And this hinders your decision-making process.     4. How ProjectOS Pro can help As an Operations Project Manager with over 7 years of experience working for companies like Amazon or Accenture, and a certified Notion Creator, I decided to leverage my knowledge to create the ultimate Project Management Notion Template. With ProjectOS Pro, it’s super easy to access and visualize every project status. As you can see in the image below, the latest status update date for each project is shown. So everyone knows when they need to update a project status. ProjectOS Pro screenshot — Project Management Notion Template But not only that, because UX and ease of use are also important for implementation. You can directly access the latest status update of a project just by clicking on the status link, and a new page will open up. ProjectOS Pro — Project Management Notion Template And this is just one of the cool features of this Project Management Tool. But there’s more: OKRs management, meetings, tasks, etc.   Hi, I’m Triz! creator of bodegalaabs and I’m a Certified and Recommended Notion Creator. If you need help setting up your Notion Workspace for success, book a free discovery call with me and save your time (and money)! If you’d like that

What Makes a Good Notion Workspace The reason many fail at building a growth companion tool and what to do instead. Notion is trending, everyone wants to give it a try, maybe even you did, but at some point it feels like… the relationship is not working anymore. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash I get you. There are some common mistakes that many beginners make when building their Notion Workspace and here I want to teach you how to successfully avoid them. Just so it helps you scale your business… instead of holding you back. 1. Too many top-level pages It doesn’t matter if you’re using Teamspaces or just pages to organize your content, but one of the most common mistakes is creating a main page for each and every new aspect you want to integrate into your Notion. Now think about it this way: if you were trying to build a mind map or a flowchart, you don’t position everything at the same level, right? You create a hierarchy that helps you navigate and find the correct box quickly. The same applies to your Notion Workspace. Think of the structure and hierarchy you want to achieve first, thank yourself later. 2. Abuse of Databases Notion Databases are so cool. I know, they are beautiful, their properties make everything look so organized, it’s just hard to resist the temptation. But you shouldn’t be using them to organize your pages. Why? Here’s how the sidebar looks when you create sub-pages from a parent page vs when you use a database to create new pages: Do you know what’s inside posts? No… you have to navigate to the page, and see the content inside each database page by opening it. With the use of sub-pages? Just at a glance! So make your life easier and use databases the correct way. 3. Same problem, different cause: Use of Inline Databases Look, I promise you, I’m a fan of databases, I really am! But they are tricky, and can easily make your workspace a nightmare to navigate if you don’t use them mindfully. And here’s the thing, I only use Inline Databases 1% of the time. On certain, super specific moments when I am 100% sure it will be a small database, without relations, allocated to a page that will not have any children, ever. Now my tip: for each top-level page, create a subpage called databases. Create all the databases you need there and use linked views to visualize the content you want in each of the pages. bodegalaabs Was I dramatic enough? I hope so. Remember, you want your Notion Workspace to grow with you, not against you. And this is a must if you don’t want to go crazy finding your stuff. It’s supposed to save you time! bodegalaabs.com So, what makes a good, scalable, Notion Workspace? Hierarchical Navigation Use of pages to create content inside them Use of full-page databases and placing them on a specific page. Hi, I’m Triz! I’m a Notion Creator with over 7 years of experience working as an Operations Project Manager. I’m an expert in optimizing workflows and business systems to foster growth and make them scalable.   If you’d like that

4 Tools for Brainstorming and Mind-Mapping that Integrate with Notion One of the many Notion superpowers is to be able to seamlessly integrate with other great software. Today I’ll show you four different mind-mapping tools that have a generous free plan, run directly on the browser, and are super easy to integrate into your Notion pages. 1. Coggle Coggle is an easy-to-use and free mind-mapping tool. It allows real-time collaboration among different team members and the resulting charts can be directly embedded into Notion. It allows for different customization options such as colors, and shapes and it includes a library with pictures and icons ready to use. 2. FigJam FigJam is a Figma tool. It’s super easy to use and offers LOTS of customization options. You can include shapes, colors, icons, post-its, images, and anything you can imagine. It offers a collaborative workspace to work as a team and comes with some ads-on as this little widget with a timer, ambient sound, and a voting system. 3. Miro Miro is another great tool for creating your flowcharts and mind-maps, among other features. It comes packaged with lots of beautiful and useful templates for a quick start and allows easy sharing and real-time collaboration. Offers lots of customization options and it definitely should be among your selected tools for mind-mapping or schematizing, whether you are working alone or in a team. 4. Whimsical Whimsical — How We Built Whimsical Whimsical is my favorite (). You can create beautiful flowcharts with everything you need really quickly. It is just super easy to use and while it offers lots of customization options, you don’t get lost and find them in one click. I choose Whimsical 80% of the time, as it’s perfect when I want to build something functional, but not super complex. Their embeds on Notion also look perfect. Have you tried any of these tools? Would you add any other one to the list? Let me know in the comments! Hi, I’m Triz! I’m a Notion Creator with over 7 years of experience working as an Operations Project Manager. I’m an expert in optimizing workflows and business systems to foster growth and make them scalable.   If you’d like that

Stop Sending Emails for Your Business Incidents When we talk about a Ticket Management System, most companies directly link them to customer service. Definitely, your Customer Operations team needs a ticketing system to manage, track, and answer all of your clients’ requests. But if such a system does wonders on that specific team’s efficiency, why are most businesses stopping there? This is one of the first questions I asked myself when I started working in a company without such a system. I remember I had a maintenance issue I wanted to report and so I asked my colleague: how do I open a new ticket? — A ticket? We don’t do that. — Yes, I want to let the maintenance team know about it so they can work on it. — Just send them an email — An email? Ok… who should I send it to? — Send it to this specific person. And so I did. Just a few minutes after I got a reply: I’m no longer working in such team. Try reaching out to another specific person. And so I tried. But an OOO message popped up: I will not be answering back. I retired. And so it took me way too many questions to way too many people to get the right email to write to. Do you see all of the issues here? Processes depend on individual people. Emails that need to be known (making it harder for new hires) to solve recurrent issues. Workers stopping their daily tasks to answer back emails they don’t really need to know about. And all of this can be solved with a simple ticket management system. I (or no one) don’t need to know who I should write to. I just open a new request, assign it to the relevant team and that’s it. The team receives a request and answers back when appropriate. I can easily track progress (everyone can), so no duplicate requests are being made. Process for new hires is just as easy as selecting the appropriate department. No loss, no complexity, no inefficiencies. Yet so many businesses overcomplicate it. An HR question? A ticket. An IT issue? A ticket. A product request? A ticket. Simple and straightforward.   If you want to implement such an effective method to manage all your business requests and issues, grab now one of my best sellers: the Ticket Management System, and fix several processes at once. Hi, I’m Triz! I’m a business automation expert, Make and Notion certified, and with 7+ years of experience working on Operations and Project Management. I help entrepreneurs and businesses build systems that help them grow and scale (and stop holding them back).   If you’d like that

Your Business Goals and Why Everyone Should Know About Them A misused quick win that keeps being overlooked   It’s pretty common. When I ask: Do you know the business goals of the company you are working for? The usual answer is: Why should I? But that’s not the ugly part. When I ask the owner or manager: Are your company’s goals shared across the teams? Two possible scenarios come in: “We don’t set up specific goals per se. You know, it’s all about keeping growth.” “Of course! We have a webpage so everyone can see them.” I’m sorry to break it to you, but both answers are wrong.   Why you need specific goals. By tomorrow. Running a business is pretty hard. The pile of to-dos just keeps growing and growing and there’s no actual end to it. Always something to improve, always a market change. By establishing clear objectives, you are already prioritizing. Not only you’re taking away wasting time on everyday decision-making or unaligned teams working on different priorities. But you are giving a clear path to your vision. “In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” You own the company’s mission, but how are you translating that into daily tasks? There is no other way. You need to set your goals. Here’s a 5 step framework to do so: List your company’s pain points. Pro tip: don’t do this on your own. Talk to your teams, they know better. Place them into an Impact vs. Complexity matrix. 3. Start by selecting those pain points with the higher impact and lower complexity. Why? Those are the quick wins. 4. Once you have no less than three and no more than six, write out those goals. 5. Now you need to make them measurable. A goal that can’t be measured is just a dream. Get your data out and clearly define it. You can have more than one KPI for each goal, but I would advise not having more than three. You got it! You’ve got your first OKR! Here’s an example of how that could look like. Why having a webpage is not enough. Seriously it’s not. Ok ok, you are doing good, I’m not trying to be mean! But, if after doing a whole, incredible exercise of establishing goals for your company, all you do is put them out on a webpage no one is looking at… you’re just halfway there. I’ve seen it, I’ve been there. A company’s goals url is shared with every new hire on their first day. “And here’s our quarter goals. These are guiding our vision” says the HR presenter to a group of new joiners. After those 10 seconds, a bunch of other links are shared with the team: benefits, holidays, tools… As days go by, no one mentions the goals webpage anymore. After a few weeks, it’s just forgotten. A sunken webpage in the sea of links.   But there is another way! Easy, straightforward, logical even! Link your projects to your goals. A one, unique project management tool that not only allows you to track projects, tasks, and team efforts essentially, but so that those projects are directly linked to your company’s goals and their progress. Wouldn’t that be cool? Your employees, every time they log in to see their daily tasks, first get a glance at your business objectives. Whenever a new project pops up, it’s easy to establish its priority: does it contribute to our current goals? If so, how? Let’s link them directly. Something like that is what you should be aiming for. Oh! And no one will be answering “why should I?” anymore.   As there is a lack of similar tools in the market, I created ProjectOS Pro. A tool for Project Management and OKRs. This is a screenshot of how a project would look like. As you can see, it’s linked to its OKR. And if you look at the goal, all projects contributing to it are visible as well. If your company can benefit from it: here’s ProjectOS Pro link. Would you like to know more about my services? Here’s my webpage. Hi, I’m Triz! I’m a business automation expert, Make and Notion certified, and with 7+ years of experience working on Operations and Project Management. I help entrepreneurs and businesses build systems that help them grow and scale (and stop holding them back).   If you’d like that

No, you don’t need another software for your company I’ve faced this many times. Your company needs a new feature, wants to improve some specific process, build a new offer. And there you go again: “Let’s take a look at the market, see what software we can get”. Excellent, as if working with 19 open tabs and apps wasn’t enough, let’s go get another one. And no, I’m betting they are not even integrated with each other. This leads to LOTS of admin work and human errors. Why? Because at some point, someone will need to: Transfer information from one tool to another Explain to their coworkers, new hires, and the other departments where to find the files and how this new other tool works This other department will not like it, so they’ll keep updating you on their tool where you have to go and copy-paste, or even worse, they’ll update you via… email. You don’t want that, do you? Listen, I am not saying you shouldn’t use technology in your company. Not at all! But there’s a difference between what you have, and what you want. Not only efficiency is obviously better in the second solution, but imagine: now you want to integrate a new process, or improve an existing one. What scenario do you prefer to work with? Exactly! Some processes will get a little messy, in the end… a picture can hold anything. But that second structure should be your goal. And, every time you need to add an outsider dot, ask yourself, is it really worth it?   As said before, we LOVE technology. We LOVE automation. So what can you do? Choose ONE app to hold your business’ core processes. Think of: Recruiting Project Management CRM Wiki & Documentation Meetings … And here’s my take: Notion. Notion is a no-code app, highly customizable, with a very generous free plan that can be adapted to be your central core circle. It integrates with automation tools like Zapier or Make to automatically update with those dots around it.     Sounds good? Start with a Project Management Notion template. Ready for use, will hold your goals, projects, tasks, status updates and meeting notes. All connected, in a single place, one click away. And if you want a custom solution, book a free discovery call. Let’s discuss how I can help you.  Hi, I’m Triz! I’m a business automation expert, Make and Notion certified, and with 7+ years of experience working on Operations and Project Management. I help entrepreneurs and businesses build systems that help them grow and scale (and stop holding them back).   If you’d like that

Successful Project Management Strategies The key role of leadership in communicating clear goals The link between leadership and project management The project leader is the central piece of a project. A leader will build the project plan, oversee its execution, and make critical decisions based on new inputs. But besides all these technical actions, even more importantly, they will set up the project tone. If an obstacle comes up in the middle of a project, or if the company’s priorities get changed, a leader will not only need to adapt and redo the project plan, but they’ll need to communicate it to the team members. They need to make sure that everyone understands the end goal, how the team will get there, and what the desired outcome is. Nowadays, Data Analysis is a top tool for every project leader. Whenever a challenge comes up, or a risk is materialized, it is crucial for the leader to make fast and accurate decisions. With more data being in our hands every day, sometimes these decisions come easy to the leader, but these not only need to be right, they need to be communicated properly too. And this is one of the main struggles for project leaders. If a leader lacks communication with their team, imagine this example: their project gets abridged because it has a high impact. But the message the team receives is “We will have to complete all tasks in less time” without any context, or explaining how they will achieve this, the expected reaction is, well, negative. But, if the message the team receives is “our project has been prioritized over other ones because it will make a high impact on customer satisfaction. We will have additional resources joining the team and this will contribute to the company’s main goals”. See the difference? In this situation, the expected reaction is quite the opposite: motivational and positive.   Key leadership skills for project success As we mentioned above, technical key skills for success for any project leader are: Organization and prioritization Data Analysis Financial Management Risk Management But soft skills are not important, they are indispensable for the success of the project. In the end, there will be a team who will be actually doing the job, so their morale, their motivation, and their knowledge of what needs to be done are crucial. Thus, a leader should develop as well these skills: Negotiation Problem Solving Decision Making Communication Communicate Vision and Objectives Now we’ll focus on a single skill, for which thousands of articles have been written as it’s one of the hardest to sharpen: communication. As a project leader, you’ll be responsible for communicating all progress, risks, and statuses with different stakeholders that might or might not have different goals in mind. You’ll need to bring everyone on the same page to continue with the good progress. Additionally, you’ll need to communicate with your team. Your team members will update you on their progress and the challenges they are facing, hoping you’ll be able to assist them. This is why it’s so important to foster an honest and positive relationship among team members. But you’ll also need to communicate to them new updates or changes done to the project, maybe decided outside of the team itself. This is what presents a real challenge. You need to communicate the same information to every team member and let them know about the updated goal and scope in a timely basis and how this will affect the whole project. This is why I created ProjectOS Pro — it’s a Notion tool that allows businesses to create and track Objective and Key Results and here comes the crucial part: link them directly to projects. This way, communicating the company’s vision and goals comes in handy and is easy for project leaders. But not only to the team. Stakeholders will be able to visualize project status, and goal progression and see any relevant changes. As the project evolves, every team member will see to which objectives and how the project they’re working on is contributing to the priority of such objectives and their progress. I’m sharing the link at the end of the article.     Conclusion As we went through the article, we focused on the importance of not only developing hard skills but especially, as a project manager, on the importance of team alignment and communication in the role of a leader for a project success. Having a clear vision, shared goals, and understanding the contribution of each project to these objectives can bring the company’s vision to every team member and make the prioritization and communication process smooth and clear to everyone involved. Here’s the link to get ProjectOS Pro if you’re interested in setting OKRs and seamlessly managing projects in your business: https://bodegalaabs.gumroad.com/l/projectos-pro Hi, I’m Triz! I’m a business automation expert, Make and Notion certified, and with 7+ years of experience working on Operations and Project Management. I help entrepreneurs and businesses build systems that help them grow and scale (and stop holding them back).   If you’d like that