How to organize your workspace once, then never again

I'm five folders deep in Google Drive, scrolling past three different versions of the same file, and I still can't find the one I need.

I back out, try again, and get the same result, except now I’m lost.

Eventually I stop clicking around and try to search bar instead, which helps sometimes, as long as I’m looking for something I know is there. But I still don’t know what else is in there. I still don’t really know what I have and what I don’t or whether the thing I’m picturing even exists, or if I only think I wrote it down somewhere.

All my documents feel like this big giant blob floating out in space somewhere, and I can only to find what I need when I need it.

You know the feeling if you’ve ever been there.

But that was ten years ago.

I could live with it while running my construction business. Permits, invoices, estimates, mostly out of sight, mostly just a few extra minutes of clicking around and trying to find something.

Now I’m doing knowledge work.

So the blob is the whole business. And if all your notes, drafts, ideas, threads, an emails live in an indiscernible pile on the internet, that becomes and expensive problem.

So I moved to Notion.

For a while, it felt like the fix.

You can start small. Just treat it like a basic notes app, and then come back re-organize the whole thing visually until it looks like a real dashboard. Even easier now with Notion AI. It will do it for you if you ask.

Inevitably though, that pretty dashboard gets disheveled again.

Once a week, or sometimes more, I’d lose two or three hours just to sorting it. I told myself it was worth it though. I told myself, “I’m a knowledge worker now, organizing is just part of the job.”

But it’s not really. Creating knowledge is the job.

And organizing quickly becomes a seductive form of procrastination.

Other people noticed before I did. They’d say, “Gee Kevin, you really spend a lot of time organizing things in Notion.” And honestly, I got fed up with it myself too. So I stopped trying to figure it out alone and searched for someone else who already had it figured.

That’s how I found Tiago Forte’s PARA method.

Never read his book, but watched a handful of videos and found a few people adapting his methods to Notion, and I thought, maybe these people are on to something here.

The idea is really simple, everything is organized a little bit like folders, but you can see everything you need in once place, all visually laid out, on a single page. And by using something called “related databases”, you can set it up so you never have to organize anything ever again.

It’s pretty much just organized by default.

I remember when I first mapped out the whole system I planned to implement by hand on the yellow legal pad I keep right here sitting beside my desk.

I let the drawing sit out for a few days while my brain circled around it..

“Is this really going to make my life easier?” I thought… “or is this just another form of productive procrastination that’s going to keep me stuck spending more time organizing than actually writing and creating.”

I think I even had a dream about it that night.

Well, in the end I rebuilt my entire workspace around it, and it took a few weeks to figure out how to handle all the edge cases right, but then… nothing.

No more Saturday re-organizing sessions.

No more hours lost to hunting for things I’d already written. Notion was finally helping me run my business instead of distracting me from it.

Then AI showed up.

I barely used it.

It felt dumb, clunky, it didn’t know what I knew. It wasn’t worth the effort.

But then I started asking questions.

“Does the way I organize my workspace make it easier or harder for agents to find what they need?”

Every time, the response was “leave it”, “yes”, “it’s actually better”.

But I didn’t stop there, I started asking how to make it even better. Together, me and my agents designed a simple context structure to make simple tasks more efficient, and deeper tasks more effective.

The more I asked, the more I realized that the way you organize things for humans is really the same way you should organize them for machines.

And as along as you’re willing to teach the way you think about those things to your agents, then, step by step, they can start to take the tedious, time consuming tasks you don’t like to do, off your plate. And you can take that time and use it to be more human.

Write more stories.

Connect with more people.

Spend more time laying around in the sun on the beach.

Etc.. so on and so forth. Ultimately, I don’t think there’s any one right tool for all of this. It could be Notion, it could be a pile of folders on your computer somewhere, it doesn’t matter really. What matters is the structure underneath.

Build your knowledge system once, around a philosophy, your philosophy.

Or a combination of yours and other people’s philosophies, and once you nail down that shape, you never really have to touch it again. It starts becoming a self-organizing system that just makes every single task you do more efficient the next time you do it.

So that’s just something I’ve been thinking I could share more about inside the community.

Does that sound useful to you?

Reply back and let me know.

Does your knowledge system feel like a structured map where everything is always in the right place? Or does it feel more like a mysterious blob floating around in outer space?

Look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Kevin Hood