Knack or Airtable? What to choose when you’re extracting yourself from a disarray of spreadsheets.

Three tips for getting control of your shared drive back!

Where’s the best place for an agency, team or freelancer to manage their projects and to perform at their best?

Benefits from managing our information with Notion:

• Less time lost in Google Drive

• We go to Slack to ask where something is AFTER we’ve had a look in Notion

• It’s not perfect, but finding things is easier now we can use complex search and browsing. eg: Go to the meeting minutes and click through to the tasks

• Go to the project and find the connected resources

• Page templates save us heaps of time!

Tools like Notion can increase productivity and improve collaboration. But, with so much power and flexibility, it can be hard to know where to start and how to keep things simple, and easy to get distracted from fuelling your impact and decisions with good information! That’s why we created this guide. We’ll show you some proven methods and best practices for using Notion and similar tools effectively.

Across our work with over 60 organisations we’ve noticed a lack of simple knowledge management systems that can reduce painful manual admin by a lot. Many agencies use 1.) Google Drive, great at storing files; doesn’t allow you to relate knowledge together, and 2.) Slack… only works if you allow the distraction of synchronous chat. Search is painful in both. But what can you do instead?

We improve systems that can otherwise cause big headaches to people-centric orgs like us. We use off-the-shelf apps to optimise for adaptivity, resilience, effectiveness and efficiency, and solve common problems for ourselves to learn the best practices to share with others. One common problem is storing sales information. There’s a myriad of CRM’s to choose from… how to move forward?

Malcolm (corporate refugee, Optimi founder) has now spent 10 years living and working in environments that care about the social and emotional dimensions of collaboration and are succeeding. It’s evident that culture is one of the biggest leverage points, and putting it first requires us to rethink how we optimise our systems. The ‘golden circle’ says to “start with why”. In a similar way, processes and systems start with culture and we think there’s a natural overlap between that model and the culture, processes and systems of decentralised organisations. The four lessons help foster an organisation that’s effective AND efficient.