You can't start with perfect.

Don’t look outside. Ice is falling from the sky. Kids are home (again). And I just need some fresh spring air.

It’s not all doom and gloom. I’m pretty excited for the week to come. I have new projects to start, content to write, and ideas that are bursting at the seams.

This. This is what I’ve been working towards.

How are you? Do your plans include kicking ass this week too?

The Messy Process

My Notion was a mess. So, this week, I took too many a few hours to clean it up. Filing clients, prospects, tools, and writings in the right place. (Notion newbie? I’ll share more on it below.)

But I’m not annoyed with the fact that it was messy. This is how I work.

Write something down and start to file it. A link here and there. To-do lists where ever they fit. This is the Messy Process.

Do that, over and over, until I start to see a pattern.

When the pattern reveals itself, I stop, dive in, and find the Not-So-Messy Process.

Here’s what it looked like as I started to build my Sales CRM in Notion.

• Made a Dream 100 list of people I’d love to connect with and work for.

• I had a list of people I’ve talked to about my services and their business. Labeled them leads, but no proposals yet.

• Then I wrote a proposal. Uhm, where does that go?

• And I have my list of current clients and projects we’re working on.

It was all here, the building blocks to a custom CRM, but a little bit everywhere and a lot not in sync.

I paused and reshuffled. Instead of having a Dream 100 list, a Leads list, and a Proposals list, I merged them together in a board-style table. Now I can just slide them over as I make progress.

But, for now, I decided to keep active clients and projects separate. Why? Because it doesn’t fit yet. And that’s ok.

Processes take time to work out, but you have to start somewhere.

If we are stressing about making the perfect process in the beginning, it can lead to doing nothing at all. Taking imperfect action is all about moving forward, finding any momentum and doing it again and again until the wheel starts turning.

I’m lucky to say processes comes naturally to me. But it’s because I don’t fret about it being perfect the first time and am aware that changes come as we grow.

Notion? What the heck is that?

Notion is a tool that is so flexible you can make it your all-in-one workspace. I’ve used it as a project management tool, document alternative, to-do lists, and now a customer tool. There are countless ways to structure it and numerous ways to view it.

For example, I have a table that tracks my 50x experiments. It started out as a table with columns I can track what I did and when. I added tags, so I can filter what action I took. Quickly, I turned it into a calendar view so I could see at a glance my progress. It’s a full, customizable database.

I was never big into Evernote or Trello, but to me, this is a better solution. I practically have the tracking of my growing business in here. (Yep, writing the draft to this email in Notion too. Goodbye, Google Docs.)

No, you don’t need it. But it’s free.

✌🏼Things About ✌🏼Things

I’m trialing Fastmail. ✉️ Using it for my domain email address (yay!). Huge on privacy and out of the Google and Microsoft ecosystem.

📕 I’m reading Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck. When handed a free book with an old cover, it’s ok to read it. This is way out of anything I’ve read before, and enjoying it.

February is coming to a close. The notorious short month that would have me spending hours trying desperately to force impressions on campaigns so we lived up to monthly contracts. Ah, advertising.

Enjoy your week, and talk soon.

Lyndee

P.S. New blog post all about how to use Keywords Everywhere for your SEO and content research. Lots of screenshots!