Hey friend,

Feeling overwhelmed trying to keep track of your writing ideas and notes?

As a coach or consultant, sharing your thought leadership online is critical to build your reputation, brand and improve your thinking (because writing is thinking).

In the past, I’ve shared how having a content system makes it 10x easier to turn thoughtful ideas into content you actually publish online.

Whether it’s a newsletter, social media content or blog posts.

I’ve been using Notion for the last 5 years and it’s my tool-of-choice for doing just that (and it’s completely free to use).

This week I’ll be sharing 4 tips to help you get started doing just that.

Before we dive in:

Do you struggle to get engagement on social media?

You’re not alone. Most writers do.

But not anymore. My friend Dave helps online educators write compelling content to build their brand and online business.

As an ex-teacher who turned online writer, he knows what he’s talking about.

In his free e-book, Dave reveals the 7 deadly writing sins that can kill your engagement—and how to avoid them.

Grab his free guide here

Generating endless ideas and honing the skill of writing engaging content for your emails or social media is a must.

But without a system to keep track of your ideas, the thought of creating helpful or valuable content to attract clients can feel stressful and overwhelming.

A quick story

For the last 2.5 years, I’ve been writing online about Notion, productivity and self-development.

I started on X / Twitter.

Then this weekly newsletter a year later.

And then added LinkedIn a year later.

Over this time, I’ve built a library of content of 380 published pieces of content across three platforms.

As I’m writing this newsletter, I’ve got 351 ideas just sitting there in my idea vault, waiting to be worked on.

I call this system my Writer’s Hub.

This system has led me to:

• Finding my niche in the Notion and productivity space.

• Create products and services based on signals I got from my readers.

• Clients hiring me to build their Notion setup that works for them. (Here’s what a client shared)

The Writer’s Hub is just one of a handful of systems I’ve built in Notion that I would be lost without it.

Four tips to build your own writing system

1. Store your ideas in a database

Notion is made up of pages and databases.

If you don’t know the difference between the two, here’s a crash course on Notion Databases and Pages. Understanding the differences is the first step in preventing your Notion setup from falling into chaos and disorganisation.

Takeaway: Databases are Notion’s superpower.

Put your writing ideas into a database so you can quickly and easily resurface these ideas through a feature called Linked Views in Notion. These views can be in the form of kanban boards, calendars, lists, tables, timelines or charts.

Creating custom views of your content database means you can design a writing workflow and dashboard that works for you.

Here’s an example of my personal Writer’s Hub in Notion:

2. Create a section or page solely for quick idea capture

Ideas can be fleeting.

You want to quickly capture an idea into your content database before it floats away. The simplest way is to have a section or a page solely dedicated to idea capture.

This reduces the friction of putting an idea onto (digital) paper.

When you’re capturing your ideas, it’s all about capturing quick notes and key concepts. Don’t try to elaborate or strategise your ideas right then and there.

Your daily or weekly writing blocks is when you review your ideas and expand them into publishable content.

Here’s my quick capture page in Notion.

This page is permanently pinned to my Notion sidebar.

Notion buttons make it super easy to capture new tasks, content ideas, notes, shopping items etc. on the go, straight into the right databases.

Auto-magically sorting the right information into the right places in my Notion workspace.

3. Add properties to your content database for easy filtering

The ability to assign properties to Notion databases makes it easy to track and organise your ideas in Notion.

At a minimum, here are the database properties you should add to a Library of Content database:

• Title

• Publish date

• Publishing Platform

• Content buckets or topics

• URL link to the published content

• Status of your content (e.g. Idea, Next Up, Writing, Scheduled, Published)

If you want to take it to the next level, add columns into your database to track the analytics of your content pieces.

This allows you to analyse the signals you’re getting from your content and truly understand what your readers resonate with.

(Btw, if you don’t want to spend hours DIY-ing your own writing system in Notion, save yourself some time and get the a done-for-you Writer’s Hub template system in Notion that you can start using now.

It also includes a how-to video and a mini-course covering the mistakes to avoid and the best practices to use when building systems in Notion)

4. A kanban board is the simplest and easiest way to track your your content creation progress

If you’re not familiar, a kanban board helps you visualise your workflow and the status of your content ideas.

If you want to narrow down it all down to just one custom database view, create a kanban board view of your Library of Content database and group your ideas by status.

Here’s a live snapshot of what mine looks like as I’m writing this issue of the newsletter.

That’s it for today, thanks for reading!

Do you struggle with having an organised system to track your ideas?—reply to this email and I’ll get back to your with some specific tips and advice.

See you next week!

Janice CK

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