How We Simplified Internal Operations and Cut the Cross-House Yelling

It’s been a productive month for Andress Advisers! Erin has been busy with new client conversations (yipee!) which means she is overworked trying to juggle all the admin/ops work that goes along with new clients (un-yipee!). Great timing for someone who specializes in operational services to join the team.

I have been taking over a good chunk of the ops/admin work where it’s appropriate (billing support, drafting proposals/contracts). It’s been a great sandbox to test some of the operations services I offer, figuring out the biggest roadblocks and what process we need to set up first. The most glaring issue was the need for a task management system so we could stop loudly asking each other across the hallway who did what (I speak on behalf of all working relationships with a spouse when I say DON’T DO THIS).

I’ve used a few task management tools in the past (Basecamp, Trello) which we discussed. Erin had started to dabble in Notion and wanted to explore that platform to take advantage of multiple offerings like documentation, information sharing, the huge library of templates and task management and planning. So we signed up for a paid plan and I set off on creating our task management system!

If you are not familiar with Notion, check them out they have a free version of their platform with great features and lots of opportunity for creativity. I have used Evernote for the past couple of years for my personal note taking so the basic structure was easy to get the hang of, but the actual business of setting up a simple project/task management system was new. Luckily you don’t have to do the legwork on that as there are TONS of free templates to use as a starting point! And I mean tons literally, their site has 20,000+ templates you can choose from.

So I guess I should download every template and see which one is the best fit for our needs right? No I did not do this, I am not writing this post from the future via time machine. Instead I had a quick sync with Erin to boil down the most essential use cases for the task management system. Armed with a list of needs and wants I was ready to hit the internet and figure out how to use this platform!

First I found the Better Creating YouTube channel, Simon is truly a genius and the things he has built in Notion are incredible. I watched a lot of his videos, tested a lot of the workflows, but ultimately the systems weren’t the right fit for us.

Next, I decided to go back to the Notion Template database to test some of the available templates for myself. After a quick search I found they have already narrowed down a Top 10 list of free Client Management Templates. I went through all of these and found a couple other top template lists for task managements but none of them were quite right. I met with Erin again and we determined that the main priority for this task management system was one that could easily create recurring tasks (there are some native features in Notion but they weren’t working for our use case).

I took a minute to reflect on what I learned from my searches thus far. I loved the in-depth videos on the Better Creating channel, but those workflows were a bit too complex for our needs. I liked the simplicity of the Notion Templates, but was struggling to apply our use case without some guided direction.

Down but not defeated, I adjusted my search to prioritize content creators that highlight the most important use case for us, recurring tasks in Notion. I’d like to dramatize how I scrolled through countless more templates and videos, but it’s my experience in operations that the journey is finding the right question to ask. Once you have that, the solutions will often present themselves. And our answer came in the form of Notion content creator Thomas Frank. He has many excellent videos outlining specific workflows, along with very accessible templates to use for yourself. And the best part, a dedicated video series on the recurring task workflow he developed. And just like that, Andress Advisers Tasks is now live and usable.

Am I a Notion expert? Absolutely not. Would I recommend everyone switch their task management needs to Notion? Nope. What I did here was apply my experience setting up internal ops process using the tool preferred by the client to find a productive solution. The goal was to setup Andress Advisers for success, not for me to push a product/tool that I had experience with because it would be easier for me. Now we have a system that has streamlined our productivity, and most importantly reduced our cross house yelling the bare minimum (which is bringing attention to when one of our cats is being cute and needs to be looked at).

I hope you enjoyed this post! And if this sounds like something that could be useful to you or your team let’s connect :)