​

There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and it sometimes feels a little too easy to slip into despair. I've been putting off writing this newsletter for weeks... months?

But today, I’m sitting on the patio, watching bees bumble around the flowers and listening to the birds in my garden. There’s a baby deer with the zoomies and its mama prancing around the yard (they’re actually pretty stinkin’ cute now that we have an enclosure for our veggie and flower garden they can’t get into).

It’s funny—I spent so many years feeling angry at the deer for all the destruction they caused. As a brand new gardener, I had no idea what I was in for that first growing season! “Rats with hooves!”, my friend would call them, and I quickly understood why.

But now that we finally have an enclosure, I am strangely appreciating their presence.

But I digress… this newsletter isn’t really about gardening (ok maybe a little bit). It’s about finding joy, even when things feel hard.

So this week I’m sharing a few ways that I’ve been using Notion for use cases that have been bringing me joy!

Garden Journal, Planner, Automated Harvest + Maintenance Schedule

In the early years of gardening, I was building up my database of crops, and figuring out what properties to use, and what databases would be most helpful to me as I was learning.

These days I’m focused on a few fun use cases:

• A garden journal for tracking progress, notes, and observations in the garden. I added Notion’s new feed view to create a visual/browsable update feed:

• A simple planner to help me track what’s growing in each of the beds.

• The pièce de résistance: a dynamic and semi-automated engine for recommending maintenance activities and planting schedules based on the existing month. This is incredibly helpful for an ADHD brain where “maintenance” activities always tend to get forgotten! I’m still learning, but these lists get added to each year.

• The “In Season” view automatically displays all crops that will be available for harvest in the current month.

While I haven’t updated my old gardening template to reflect these changes, you can take a look at the simpler Seasonal Eating template to look at the mechanism under the hood if you’re curious! The idea is that you can assign harvest “months” (A relation property) while still having the ability to see the items in a calendar view, without having to change the dates each year/season.

Kitchen Renovation

If you’ve ever done a kitchen renovation before, you might be quick to ask, OKAY MARIE BUT HOW IS THAT FUN??

Holy moly there are so many moving parts, steps, decisions, purchases, considerations, research to do, etc. It's enough to make your head spin.

This renovation is one of the biggest and most intense design projects I have ever undertaken. But also, design is my JAM! While I’m not an interior designer, I do have a design background, and greatly appreciate how the design of an environment has the ability to transform how we feel. And after my hip injury last year, I realized how important it was to design a kitchen that would still be functional as I age.

It was equal parts challenge and delight. And what better place to do all the messy project planning than in Notion?

It started with using Notion to first collect inspiration, grouped by the type of inspiration: cabinets, lighting, layout styles, color, backsplash etc.

It then evolved to include a wishlist of products, where I could tag items, track prices, and make choices while seeing how items would fit together as a whole.

Once I got closer to finalizing the design using IKEA’s online planner, I used Notion to plan out the base cabinets, custom cabinet fronts, and even things like what handles each cabinet would need.

I pasted screenshots from the Ikea planner into my Notion page so I could quickly reference everything in one place.

I’m not sure how others manage to plan projects of this scale, but I can’t imagine tackling this kind of planning without combining visual aids and databases.

I then created an inventory of all the existing items in the kitchen, which was something kitchen designers recommended, so you design your cabinets based on what you actually need/use most often (Permaculture Zone analysis anyone?). I categorized these based on how often I use them, which helped me consider the kitchen triangle and my daily workflow.

I created a task database specifically for this project, separate from our main task database. This helps keep both databases highly focused and allows us to share these databases with our contractor without worrying about them seeing other tasks from our workspace.

I used Notion for estimating budget, note-taking and learning, planning and tracking purchases, planning hardware, and all other details relating to the project.

The actual demo starts next month, so… I think the FUN part of this project is probably over until we’re on the other side 😅.

A Friendly Softball Guide

I’ve been playing softball for the last 4-5 years or so, and before that I played as a kid, but I still find there are things to learn about the game as I pick it back up again as an adult.

We often recruit new players each year who are athletic but have never played softball before, and I've noticed that many coaches and experienced players tend to use a lot of jargon, and get impatient with the new players.

They forget just how much "softball intelligence" there is to learn, and how long it takes to integrate that learning.

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after a challenging few games where some players made some seemingly obvious errors, and I could see the coach’s frustration building.

At the same time, I don’t think the coach knew how to explain the errors and gameplay to a beginner in a way that could be well received, and without relying on pre-existing softball IQ.

Things like yelling “tag up!” when a player doesn't know what that means, or assume a new player should know when to stay on the bag, when to lead off, or when to run full speed. Giving frustrated feedback in the heat of the moment doesn't necessarily help information translate.

Feeling for my newbie players (and the coach!), I created a softball guide to help de-personalize some of the critical feedback. I hope it can be something we point players to such that they can explore different scenarios, and even look at skills they may want to improve as it relates to their current position.

I then used an LLM to generate scenarios to help explain what next action should be taken depending on the runners on base, and where the ball is hit. These scenarios are some of the hardest for beginners to learn until they encounter them, but I created is as a jumping off point to help the coach explain scenarios to newer players.

Yes, it’s very nerdy, but doing the work to lay information out like this is how I learn, and if it helps anyone else out, even just one other person, then I figure it’s worth it! Building databases helps me learn and be creative, and ultimately, brings me a little bit of joy.

So there you have it—just some of the more fun use cases I’ve been using Notion for on the personal side of things.

Have you been playing with Notion's new feed view?
How are you enjoying the new UI updates? 👀

---

PODCASTS

People watching

A few months ago I had the pleasure of chatting with my hair twin, Megan J. Robinson from the People Watching podcast! We covered a lot of topics in this multi-past podcast episode, but notably:

• My experience getting diagnosed with ADHD
• Cooking and culinary adventures as creative exploration
• Entrepreneurship as the ultimate self-discovery mechanism
• Building personal authority and a values-aligned business

​Listen here​

Grief + Pizza

Two great episodes to share with you this week:

Building Beautiful Communities Alex Hillman shares his journey from web developer to co-founder of Indy Hall, one of the first co-working spaces in the United States, exploring how community building, meaningful relationships, and iterative learning have shaped his entrepreneurial path. LISTEN

Enabling Autonomous Creatives Jessica Abel shares her journey as a creative, starting as a cartoonist and evolving into a business coach for creatives. We also talk about the need for creatives to adapt their business models and find ways to support their artistic practices while navigating the complexities of the creator economy. LISTEN

​

Phew, that's a lot! Thanks for being here with me.

Stay tuned for some new Youtube videos walking through some of Notion's freshly launched UI changes.

In the meantime, wishing you a joyful week.