Managing my time as a Data Scientist — Part 2
Hello and welcome to this mini-series on time-management.
I am passionate about getting people into time management in a way that is more than just blocking out time periods. I’ve started this mini-series for Data Scientists but really anyone can benefit from the ideas and tools offered in these articles. The first part of this series focused on a streamlined and powerful GitHub feature called Projects, you can read it here.
In this article, I focus on Notion:
- Using Templates
- Adding Team Members
- Tips and Tricks
Notion gained popularity quickly over the last two years and has quickly become the workspace of choice for many individuals teams and companies. Notion is currently free for individuals so let's jump in and get an account set up before we start.
Notion Templates
Notion lets you play around with notes almost like lego. You can build a page out of a sentence and put another page within that page ad infinitum. This kind of versatility is one of the reasons Notion is so useful. Notes you make feel natural and more personal.
Another great feature in Notion is its templates. I highly recommend you explore these at some point. For the start of my Data Science course, I opened a workspace and made a syllabus template. This came with handy organisational tools for coach details, lesson schedules, weekly schedules. I was able to make a place for all my school-related details in little time!
Here are some examples of what you might find in the Syllabus template:
A list of Modules. Within each module is a list of subjects, handy.
A course Schedule
A Reading Table
Other templates can be found online and in particular, the most useful ones I’ve found for managing my time are:
- Weekly Agenda
- Content Calendar
- Issues and Tasks
Adding a Team Member
It might be useful for you and a teammate to use a shared space to take notes when managing a project. Notion can provide this space and does so fairly well.
I urge you at this point to explore some of the freely available templates built-in to Notion for project management. For now, select the Engineering category of templates and choose either To-Do or Roadmap. Select use this template
When you are ready click Share in the top right of the notion window and you will be given a number of options.
For now, we will Invite people by pressing the Add people button
Search for your teammate via the email they used to sign up for Notion and click invite.
Or add teammates you’ve already worked with from the select a person list.
Tips and Tricks
Taking notes with Notion:
In my opinion, taking notes with Notion couldn’t be better. Try the Cornell notes system template when you open a new page for note-taking. You can also use code blocks that can be language-specific.
Try the following command anywhere on a notion page:
/codeNow select Code
When the box appears press the bottom right button to select your coding language.
Now all the code you write in the box will be colour coded as per your languages formatting.
But you cannot run the code from within Notion. :)
Tips and Tricks
Quick Find
When you’ve made extensive notes and are running many projects using notion for management support, you can access content or notes with the quick find feature.
Quick find rests at the top left under your notion account name. It’s an intelligent search feature
For example if I wanted to find notes on classifiers algorithms I just search for classifier and it presents me with 36 results of Best matches:
I can choose to add a filter with a number of options:
Summary
With Notion you can track your notes, weekly agenda, Interviews Job applications, subscriptions and much much more! Work with teams or just have your own personal workspace that can help you manage your time all in one space.
