Time management system with Notion and n8n - Daniel Barra

we are we have daniel who is the co-founder and ceo of nirvana technologies and he's going to share with us how they use ntn to unite a user-friendly notion kanban board experience for the team now at the same time how the metrics are generated and represented automatically for the upper management in a bi tool before uh handing it over to daniel a small reminder i am collecting your questions and will be asking them after this talk so if you have any questions don't forget to put them in the chat daniel giving you the permission take it away thank you hershell uh i'm trusting everybody's hearing me well uh it's really a pleasure to be here thank you very much for the nda team um i'm gonna share my screen just a second yeah so i have five really quick slides just give context and we'll go right into the workflows um so my name is daniel barrow i'm the ceo and co-founder of novartec we're a small startup based in brazil developing financial solutions for the electricity market and basically my life goes around three main things that are my main objectives which is nevarra my company i'm also a digital nomad i'm currently living in costa rica until sunday when i'm moving to colombia and i also work a lot on fitness also uh i am a person that has two um uh strange attributes to be together i am a very ambitious person and i'm also very lazy person and the outcome of those two things the only way they can work together is if you have really good time management optimization so that's why i built my system for time management also i am not a developer uh i'm kind of excel savvy from working in finance but i am not a full-time developer so basically i built my time management optimization system around four tools which are notion google sheets google calendar and nan and i'm going to show a bit of the workflows that i use to do that but first uh what is a task for me so in

notion you can set a lot of different um properties inside of an item uh this is what a task is for me so as you can see there are a lot of

things you can have the day of the week oh my workflows are in portuguese so i'm sorry about that um but i think it will be clear for everyone so i have the day of the week i have the date and time that it's actually scheduled if it's professional or personal i have a tag so it could be deep work it could be a personal task it could be all types of things personal or professional if it's recurring and how long does it take in hours because i really like to matrify everything that i do and i'm going to show how i do that in a second uh okay so where did tasks come from and where does any end come into this to this process so i have three main

i mean sources of tasks one of them are recurring tasks which are things that i do every week which is like gym meditation aerobics journaling my daily sprint with the team answering email all types of things that we do regularly that i do every week so i'm gonna have tasks for that every week the second source is google calendar meetings it can be either myself scheduling with someone else or someone else scheduling with me that could be clients service providers or all types of things and non-recurring tasks which are tested

basically i'm talking here to you in a meeting you i have a follow up with you i'll just write them down and allocate them to a specific time maybe later or maybe on the spot so that could be book my ticket to columbia that could be review marketing's new article or all sorts of things so let's get into it uh my notion

dashboard is basically uh allocated between to-do monday tuesday wednesday thursday and until sunday uh i've configured it so that i only see what is in my current week i can also see change to see other weeks but it's configured so that i only use the task from the current week and basically i have among those properties they done or discarded so for example i've done my training session today i'll just come here and finalize it i've done journaling i've done my robes i'm currently in the n88 meeting um so basically in a month i'll have around 400 cards like these so creating them from zero with all those properties is a lot of work and that's where nadine comes in so i spoke a bit about recurring tasks

so i'm going to show that first and for that i use google sheets as my backend i use a lot of that since i don't know how to code

and i'm going to show you the workflow that i use for that so basically i have a spreadsheet oh sorry wrong one with all the tasks and they have google sheets formulas where i just change the date of the beginning of the week it will update all of the dates that i can have it correctly for that specific week once i have done that process which really doesn't change a lot from week to week i might add one thing or reduce one thing i will use a very simple workflow just to read the information on google sheets and insert it into my notion database since i have the time as well and i sort it by time it already comes in the order that i'm going to do them so that helps me a lot and the second part is

the google calendar meetings that show up so for that i have a different workflow which is a bit more complex maybe more complex than it needed to be but basically what i'm doing is i'm kind of doing a polling here i'm every minute checking and getting all of my events in my calendar checking if there's anything new from the last time that we ran it then i'm going to calculate the beginning and the end how long it takes and all sorts of things most of these dating times are just date conversions i will check on this function node which day of the week it is and then depending on which day it is i'll use the if statements to place it on the correct uh place so i'm gonna do a quick example here yeah just to show you like test one and while we iterate uh i hit the one minute cron uh i'm gonna show you something else so at the end of the day what i do is i have a workflow that every minute or so it's going to take some of my databases from notion and it's going to place it into a google sheets uh that is this dashboard here just a second i need to change this uh so basically it is just going to throw everyone every data from those databases here so this is my database that i was showing like which is my time management system like my kanban board is going to throw it here i'm gonna do a few calculations in my back end um and it's gonna show up here so basically i can without any work like the only work i have is finalizing the task when it's done or discarding it in case i know i'm not gonna do it at all so like maybe i had to like drink enough water for it today and i didn't do it so i have to it's not something that i can reallocate so i'm just going to discard it and it's going to calculate for me for each tag that i have how much was my target and how much i actually did how much i did in total i can change this to be just recurring or just professional or just one tag and i kind of calculate a few metrics for myself uh based on that i do pretty much the same thing for fitness um this for sure could be done with a postgres database or an sql database that could be on a bi tool that's what we do for like company things um but since this was personal i just prefer to have it in a easier in an easier solution so let's go back here and the test that we have is here it was allocated for 4 45 local time in costa rica uh it has already put it to friday because it detected that was on a friday uh since it's a meeting in my business calendar it's gonna throw it to professional uh it's gonna have the tag meeting and since i only booked half an hour it's gonna put here 0. 5 so that's pretty much an overall of my time management system i wanted to make it into a way that it had almost no work but that at the same time it would generate automated metrics so that's pretty much how i follow my schedule and that i can seek to reach my ambitious goals without working too hard i hope you guys liked it and i'll pass it back to her show