Brainstorming Exercise Using Kanban Boards | Unleash Your Creativity with Notion

Do you need to outline something, such as an essay, a presentation, or maybe even a book, but you're struggling with the brainstorming and outlining process? By the end of this video, you'll know a simple four-step process using free tools that can turn you into a brainstorming and outlining wizard.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript. (Note: this video contains a screenschare tutorial inside Notion and is probably best seen instead of read. So I recommend watching the video for this one.)

Brainstorming Exercise Using Kanban Boards | Unleash Your Creativity with Notion // Do you struggle with brainstorming or outlining? Whether it's for an essa...

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I was recently in the process of developing a new workshop for my coaching membership Accountability Muse, and while I'm someone who has extensive experience brainstorming and outlining (for example, I have done so much writing - both professional and on spec), this time around I was really itching to try something new. And because I have been so OBSESSED with Notion recently, I thought I would give it a shot in adding it to my outlining process. And holy cow do I love it! Having your information in a kanban board format is so conducive to creative thinking and problem solving. I truly attest this process to why my workshop turned out so amazing.

Step one: brainstorm using Anytime Pages. Anytime Pages is a type of journaling exercise that I explained in detail in this video, and I highly recommend you go watch it.

That being said, in that video Anytime Pages is highly tailored towards processing tough emotions and experiences that you've been having. When you use Anytime Pages to brainstorm, instead of stream of consciousness journaling about the thing that you experience that you're trying to process, you instead stream of consciousness journal about the topic of your project and the project itself. You just let your brain explore all the nooks and crannies of that project and don't try to be neat. Please be as messy as possible. Start adding random diagrams if you need to. I know that helps me. But just keep the pen moving. And by the time the timer goes off, you will have discovered probably a lot of really interesting information about your project. It's a really great way to brainstorm.

So after you've finished your brainstorm using Anytime Pages, the next step is to actually go into Notion and set up your kanban style database. So I'm going to send it over to screenshare Cassie right now to teach you how to do that.

All right, so here we are in Notion. All I have done to get us started is opened up a blank page and titled it. And now, as you can see when you have a blank page inside Notion, it gives you all of these options from which to choose. (When I did this myself I made it an empty one and then I added an inline database, but to make this a little bit simpler I'm just going to show you how to make a database from scratch.) So we're going to go down here and instead of clicking 'table' we're going to click 'board,' and automatically it gives us a kanban board with three different categories and a 'no status' category.

So now that we have a board database in Notion, what on earth do we do with it?

First of all, we want to change the names of the boards and add or subtract as many as we need to to account for our project. (And hopefully through the process of your brainstorm you have a better idea of how you want to divide up your outline.) So to keep things simple, I'm just going to show you how to rename these boards. First, so if you click on 'not started' you'll see that it opens up a text editing box, and the text is highlighted so you can simply replace it. And for our purposes today, I'm just gonna pretend I am outlining a book and we're gonna add chapters. So 'Chapter 1' enter, and so now this is called 'Chapter 1.' Let's make this one 'Chapter 2,' 'Chapter 3,' and now for demonstration purposes let's add an extra so you know how to do that: 'Chapter 4.' So every time you want to add one, all you have to do is go to this button, click 'add group,' add the label of the section you want, and so on and so forth.

If you ever want to delete one, all you have to do is go to these three dots and click 'delete.' But be careful, that might delete everything that you have in that section, so make sure it's empty first before you do that.

So for the workshop I was designing my sections ended up corresponding to the points on a compass (because the workshop was called "Design Your Compass") so I had a section titled "South," I had a section titled "East," a section titled "West," a section titled "North," so on and so forth. I also had sections at the beginning and end for introduction and summary. And that was a really easy way for me to structure my workshop and then I went from there.

So that was how to do step two. Before we move on to step three, let me know down in the comments if you're using Notion yet, and if not why. I'm really curious to know.

Now it's time for step three, where we take everything that we discovered in our brainstorm doing Anytime Pages in step one and add it to our Notion database.

There are a number of ways to literally do that inside Notion, and I'm going to show you those real quick. So as you can see when you start a Notion board, it automatically gives you three items. All you have to do to edit them is to click on one and you can change the title, and so on and so forth. As you can see, Notion also gives you an 'assignee' property inside any database, so you can delete that - it's really easy. Just click those dots, 'delete property,' 'delete.'

So now all we're left with is the 'status' property, which actually happens to be our sections, so while we're here let's go ahead and rename 'status' to 'sections.' So we click on 'status' and again it comes up with this text dialog box, and we can rename it to 'sections' and hit enter. There you go. So now those make sense.

So the first way to add an item to this database is just to go directly under one of your sections and add one to it. So let's say you wanted to add a scene called 'XYZ' in 'Chapter 2.' You click 'new,' you type 'XYZ,' and hit enter, and now it is something that you can click on and it opens up as a page.

Another way to add an item to a database is to go up here to this 'new' button and just click 'new,' and then it opens up a blank page and you can title it 'ZYX.' Why not?

Now as you can see, that one we just added from over here ended up over here in the 'no sections' part because we didn't add a label. So now there are two ways that you can add a label. One is you can click and drag this to the section you want. (This is the magic of using Notion to outline because it's so easy to rearrange things just by clicking and dragging, and you can do that with your section headers as well. You can click and drag two to go before one - and I'll talk more about that once we get to step four.)

The other way to change what section a page falls under is to open that page, click here, and then select which one it wants to be. So if 'XYZ' belonged in 'Chapter 1' instead, you would just click 'Chapter 1' and now when you click out of it, boom the card's over here! Awesome right?

When we made this page we made this page solely a database. We can add views. We can add a table view for instance. And then we have a table view. And then we can go back to the board view. But we can't click down here and add more things, like we can for instance in one of these pages for example.

I'm going to remedy this I'm going to go back to my templates folder now. We're gonna start another page actually. And I'm going to type "/" and see how this dialog box comes up? I can either go and click on 'page' or I can type "page" and this will automatically highlight. Now we have a new page. 'How To Outline In Notion (Part Two).' This time I'm just going to hit enter and you'll notice how all of these disappear.

Now it's just a page, so I am now going to insert the database we just made into this page as an inline database. (And this is not a duplication of that database. It's just another instance of it. So if you make adjustments to that database here, it will update the database in its original place and vice versa.) I'm going to hit slash and then type in the word "link." So we're going to choose 'create linked database' and now I'm going to search for the database we just made. Tada! And I click it. Et voila! C'est ici!

However, as you can see it doesn't show the beautiful board view we made, so we have to add that back in. 'Add view,' 'board,' and 'create.' And doesn't this look familiar?

Now it's all shifted to the right and that's just because it's not set to full page. So you go up to these buttons in the upper right and you click 'full width' and now it's back.

Now the magic is, remember when we were in the database itself I could not click down here to make anything happen? But now that we're in this '(Part Two)' and this is now an inline database, I can click down here. "Hello. I can add things here. Mwahahahaha!"

Now I can show you my favorite way to add things into the board. The first way was to click a 'new' button in one of the sections, the second one was to click this 'new' button and then it'll pop out over here, and then you can drag it to wherever you want.

Third way is to go down here and literally just type. "List item." "Thing from my brainstorm." And you just make a long rambling list of all of the elements you discovered through your brainstorm that need to be a part of your outline. "Thingy." "Thingamajig." And I'm just making a whole bunch of mess down here, but here is where the magic happens. If I go and I hover my mouse cursor over one of these blocks (they're called blocks in Notion) and then I hover over these two columns of dots, and see how it says "drag to move"? I'm going to click, and I'm going to drag, and I'm going to put it in 'Chapter 4.'

Boom!

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So now what had been just a line of text below the inline database is now an item inside your database, and you can change it here as well. But this is how you can really quickly start going, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, thingamajig. That's chapter four. List item, that's chapter three." And you're not worrying about ordering them, you're just worrying about spitting all of the things out here, and then clicking and dragging them to their appropriate sections.

As you're doing this, you'll likely discover you'll have even more ideas that come up and don't worry about that. Just write them down in here. "New idea." "New idea." And click and drag them to the appropriate section.

Something that I discovered when I was in this part of the process when outlining my workshop was that I discovered my sections themselves were not in the best order they could be to teach the material. So I actually ended up part way through this step three, what I thought was this section should really be over here, and I clicked and dragged it over here and everything that was associated with that went with it! I didn't have to completely start over. I was just dragging and dropping and that helped so much.

So that was step three. Now let's move on to step four, where we rearrange and iterate our kanban board. We are now using what we have put into our Notion database to flesh out our outline and to cement the first draft. If we look at what we have so far (which makes no logical sense because it's a bunch of random words, but that's okay, you will not have random words, you will have actual ideas in your sections and your sections will be in a specific order) the first thing to think about is: Are your sections in the best order they can be, or could they be rearranged?

For example, let's say I finished step three and it was in this state, and I was looking at my sections as like, "Oh no! This really is 'Chapter 1.' 'Chapter 2.' This is 'Chapter 3.'" (This is just a dumb example, but hopefully that explains what I'm trying to convey.) You rearrange the sections first.

And you can always play with it if you feel stumped and you don't have strong feelings either way. just click and drag one somewhere and see what it does to your brain. that can help you be a little bit more creative by just trying it on in a different arrangement

And then after that you then rearrange the cards inside the sections. Let's say you've decided that these are the things in 'Chapter 3' but they're not in the right order. Let's say 'list item' one is actually the first thing and 'ZYX' is actually the last thing. You can click and drag the cards inside the sections themselves.

Step four is about playing with the order of everything and continuing to mold it to your purposes.

Just like in step three, in step four you may find yourself having even more ideas and things that you can add to your outline as you go, or even ideas of things that you can leave out because it doesn't quite fit in with the whole point of your project. And that's okay. This is about playing with the order of things, playing with what goes where, playing with what you can toss out, what you can add. And you just keep iterating in this really helpful visual way where you can just drag and drop, and it just makes it so much easier to flesh out a really detailed, really organized outline.

Once you've gotten really pretty darn satisfied with it you move on. The goal isn't to get a perfect outline. The goal is to get a USEABLE outline so you can move on with the project. And then you'll likely find that when you're actually building out the project, you'll need to make even more changes to make it that much better, and you'll be able to reflect that in your outline because of how easy it is to manipulate and to edit an outline built in a Notion database in board view. It's so great.

That's it for the tutorial portion. I'm gonna throw it on back to full-size Cassie.

There you have it. Now you know my simple four-step process using Anytime Pages and Notion boards to outline. I hope it unleashes your creativity like it has mine.

If once you finish your outline, even if you're super proud of it you're somehow still struggling to move forward with the project and to actually take the next steps to bring it to life, I highly recommend checking out my free Masterclass on what I call "Butt In Chair Time." In it you'll learn three incredible mindset shifts along with a simple three-step process to actually get you being productive and consistent with your productivity, so finishing your project becomes inevitable. If you're interested, you can sign up by going to this link. I really hope you go and check it out.

If you liked this video, hit that like button and be sure to subscribe. And please share it with someone you know.

I'll be back next week with another video. Talk to you then. Bye.

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OUTTAKES: Now let's move on to step 4- [TRUCK BEEPING OUTSIDE] Gives you - [SIGH] BLUR BLUR BLUR BLUR BLUR! [SIGH AGAIN] Can you hear the crinkling? [CRACK] [SUDDEN NASALY INHALE] By the end of this video you'll know a f- BLEH!!! Iterate and expand- [TRUCK BEEPING OUTSIDE] [CASSIE SLAMS HER DESK] [CAR DRIVING BY] Why are there so many cars? [ALEXA NOTIFICATION SOUND] [CASSIE GROANS] Alexa. Notification. The best workshop I have taught in my membership thus far, like glowing reviews- Yeah. Why am I tooting my own horn? It's gross. Stop that. [TRUCK BEEPING OUTSIDE] Why? Why?! Separate board- [PROLONGED GROAN/GROWL] [TRUCK BEEPING OUTSIDE]