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For any aspect of your business or idea, create a project—even for elements that don't fit the traditional definition of a "project," such as "staff." By creating these as projects in the database, you'll automatically get all the necessary fields, including the ability to link them to tasks.
However, exceptions can be made when you have numerous similar pages, such as for . In these cases, it's often clearer and more efficient to create a separate, dedicated database.
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Remember to replace "[BUSINESS NAME]" in the database names with your actual business name.
Why not just remove "[BUSINESS NAME]" instead? If you later use this template again for another business idea, having the name in the databases makes it more clear which one belongs to the right idea.
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In the database, you'll find tabs for daily, weekly, monthly, and other time-based views. It's a good practice to start each new period (day, week, month, etc.) by opening the respective view and setting all tasks to "Not started." For instance, you might do this on the first working day of each week for the weekly view.
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When you've completed a task, remember to remove all "Is blocking" relations. This action automatically removes that taskfrom the other linked tasks as well.
In the "Blocked" tab of the database, you can regularly check tasks that have no remaining relations in the "Blocked by" field and update their status to unblock them. Update: It's actually better to use the "Blocked" status only if a task is blocked by something other than another task (e.g., waiting for a response from someone). This way, tasks will automatically move out of the "Blocked" filter if they're only blocked based on their "Blocked by" property, significantly reducing the need for manual updates.
Using the "Is blocked" fields and the "Blocked" status has two main benefits: it makes your "Open tasks" view less overwhelming and ensures you keep your priorities straight.
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The table of contents was intentionally disabled in all notions of this template. I find the one provided by the Notion Boost Chrome extension (which is mostly free) much more convenient.
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Also don’t forget to look at the Draft notes and Archive notions.
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Go to ChatGPT (or an alternative) and explain your idea to give it some context. Ask it a few times for improvements, anything to add, the viability, etc. so at the end you come with a good description of the idea.
For example, you can use prompts like "Provide five unique angles to approach this idea" or "What market research methods could validate this concept?”
For each valuable conversation you had with ChatGPT, make sure to link to that conversation in the relevant notion page. That way, you don’t have to rewrite long prompts if you later have to get back to that step for revising it.
Once all important details are included and you’re happy with it, ask ChatGPT to create a problem statement from it. You can do this in the same chat, or paste the final outcome of the conversation for step 1 in a new conversation if there was a lot of noise.
Review it, tweak it a bit if needed (or ask ChatGPT to improve it) and paste it into your MVP notion. You can mark Define the problem statement as done! When doing so, don’t forget to remove all of its “Is blocking” relations.
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Similarly, you can use ChatGPT to generate the Ideal customer profile (ICP) and mark Define the ICP as done. Make sure to pass both the starting context and the problem statement to ChatGPT so it doesn’t miss anything important.
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It’s also good practice to include user stories like "As a [customer type], I want [solution] so that I can [benefit]." These help make the ICP relatable.