The Founder's Second Brain

The Dashboard

Below is a screenshot of the Founder Second Brain dashboard. This is your central hub for running your startup, team, and life.

From Top to Bottom

Get Things Done

• Focus - This is your daily work station, including your daily routine and daily tasks
• Planning - This is your master calendar to view your tasks, goals, and any other events
• Manage - This your project dashboard to ensure you are on track
• Reflect - This page shows you what you’ve accomplished and what’s coming next

Areas

Segment your work and life into categories. Each area has its own workstation, complete with project flow, goals, notes, and more.

Pinned Pages

Have a Resource or Note you keep returning to? Pin it to the dashboard for easy access

Sidebar

Quick Capture

Need to quickly remind yourself about a Task, Project, or Note? Create them quickly with this widget.

Dashboards

Can’t locate a file? Or, want to add some custom integrations and automations to a particular database? The archives live in this widget.

Areas

Let’s start with Areas. Here, you can segment your work and life into as many areas as you’d like. We started with a few general areas, but here are some other areas you could create:

Life:

• Budget and Finances
• Personal CRM
• Personal Goals

Business

• Sales
• Product
• Marketing

The list goes on and on. Whatever you need to keep track of, you can do so here.

Create a New Area

When you creating a new area, make sure to click “Area Template.”

The template splits your area into four categories: Projects, Area Resources, Area Goals, and Area Notes. We’ll cover each one in turn:

Projects

When creating a new project, you can either click the “New Project” button, or the “+ New” button within the Area Project Section. As we did with creating a new area, be sure to click the “New Project” template.

From there, the project template is split into two categories: Tasks and Notes

Tasks:

Use this widget to create sub tasks for this project. Make sure to use the page fields to designate:

• Due Date
• Priority
• Status

If your team has access to this Workspace, you can also assign tasks to a particular teammate.

Pro Tip: You can integrate automation software like Zapier or Make to notify teammates when they’ve been assigned a task. For example, we have an automation that sends a Slack message to the teammate responsible for a task.

We’ve added a progress bar which updates every time you clear a Project Task

Project Notes

Use this widget to add notes necessary for completing this project. Some examples of notes could be:

1. Instructions
2. Helpful Links
3. Database

Area Resources

Similar to the Project Notes section, use this widget to add resources for the whole area. When creating a new Resource, be sure to click the “Resource Template.” This will segment the page into Notes and Bookmarks

Area Goals

Use this widget to track the goals associated with this area. Just like with Project Tasks, checking the box removes the Goal from your area and archives it.

Note: Any goals you set within an area will also be visible in the Reflect page.

Area Notes

The Area Notes widget is my favorite aspect of the area template. In true “Second Brain” fashion, this is where I keep all the information I can’t keep in my head. What I do is create two pages within this widget: Web Captures and Social Media Captures

Here’s how it works: Make sure the Notion mobile app is downloaded on your phone. When you come across an article or social post, hit the “Share” or “Share via” button, search or select “Web Capture” or “Social Media Capture,” name the source, hit “Save” and voilá– the resource will appear in this Area.

Note: I’m an iPhone user, so these are iPhone instructions. But, I believe the process is quite similar for android.

Focus

The Focus tab is your daily dashboard. This page is split into two categories: Routine and Action Plan

Routine

This widget is for the tasks you want to accomplish every day. Add to the generic tasks we’ve created, or make your own list! Check them off one-by-one. At the beginning of each day, click “New Day” to regenerate this list.

Action Plan

This widget is for everything you need to get done today, besides the recurring tasks from your Routine section. When adding a new task, use the buttons in the upper lefthand corner to assign them a priority level: P1 for Priority 1, P2 for Priority 2, P3 for Priority 3.

We’ve built some cool automation features here. When you’ve filled up your To-Do list, you can que the tasks by priority. To get started on all Priority 1 tasks, click “Que P1” to move them to the “In Progress” column. When you’re done with those, you can move them to the “Complete” column with a click of a button. From there, you can Archive them with a click of a button as well.

Pro Tip: This is a great opportunity to automate! For example, I always have Slack open to communicate with my team. Through a Zapier automation, I can send myself a message in Slack, and that message adds a task to my to-do list. If you try something similar, make sure to select the Database and input the date the message is sent into the Start and End Time within Zapier.

The remaining headers do not have their own functionality. Rather, they are different ways of viewing your progress across tasks, projects, and areas. A summary of each header is below.

Planning

The Planning section is your place to view all uncompleted but planned tasks in a monthly calendar. Once you archive a completed task, they will no longer appear in this calendar.

Additionally, if you have moved any tasks to “Back-Burner” or “Stuck,” you can view them by clicking the relevant button.

Manage

The Manage section gives you a detailed breakdown of all outstanding projects and tasks:

1. View the tasks that are overdue or have yet to be scheduled.
2. View a visual kanban board of the projects that haven’t started, are up next, are in progress, and those that are completed
3. View how each project is progressing on a task-by-task basis
4. A timeline of tasks in the pipeline

Reflect

The Reflect section shows you how far you’ve come:

1. Keep the big picture in mind by viewing your goals
2. View the tasks you completed today and yesterday
3. View a monthly calendar of the Tasks and Projects you have accomplished over the last month

That’s a wrap!

🙏 Thanks again for trusting us with your workflow! We hope it supercharges your work and helps you achieve your goals.