How I use Notion cards to write modular content
To me the hardest part of writing isn't actually writing—it's organizing ten million ideas and actually committing to completing one piece of content instead of thinking about how ten pieces will fit together.
It's definitely my biggest work weakness, but as I've moved into product marketing management I've really needed to rein in my workflows and move to consistent production instead of winging it.
Notion is easily the best addition to my work toolkit this year. I've embraced it for everything, from personal writing (like this!) and side projects to the several areas of creation I need for my day job.
If you haven't used Notion before, it's basically Confluence but good. You get the structure of page hierarchies to organize lots of different groups of writing with rich editing, but you can also easily add modules like tables, galleries, calendars and boards to enhance whatever you're building.
It's really that last module—kanban boards—that I absolutely love. Maybe I've just worked too closely to technical folks and product managers over the last several years, but I love me a goddamn ticketing system.
And yes, there are many ticket-based tools out there, like Trello. I've tried to use them for marketing but they often come up short (more on this later.) In this post I'm simply going to break down my writing workflow using kanban boards in Notion. How meta—writing a post about how to write posts.
Building cards as I research
Most kanban boards for marketing will involve creating a single ticket for a single piece of content, like a blog post. Maybe if you're thinking about reproducing it into several assets, you might make tickets for those if you're wildin' on the project management (like one ticket for an infographic, one for a string of social posts, etc.)
Instead, I make a board for the entire topic category (think: HubSpot's pillar structure) or long-form piece of content (like an ebook) I want to develop, and then I generate a ticket for each piece of that content asset. Piece is maybe a strong word and to me is more granular than "chapter" or "blog post".
So what counts as a piece?
A specific question I want to answer, like something that was asked by a customer
A piece of writing that a competitor has written that I want to improve on
A keyword or SERP feature I want to capture
A transitional piece of writing, like an introduction
A call-to-action or activation point
A visual asset, like a chart or diagram
So now I have a single board with many cards in it. It will look something like this:
Moving to modular writing
The real benefit to using cards is that your writing becomes modular, in that you can focus on starting and completing one specific train of thought at a time. This is especially helpful if you can't complete the writing in one sitting, like with long-form pieces of content that hit several thousand words.
In the past, I'd commit to writing an ebook or guide and have to restart several times because I'd brain dump 3000 words, then get distracted with other projects, then return days if not weeks later. With modular content, I complete portions that can survive on their own, and when I'm able to return I simply pick up another card. Similarly, this can help if you have multiple people contributing to one piece of content.
Part of this organization is helped by the use of columns. I personally use three status columns for "Not Started", "In Progress", and "Completed"—those are self explanation.
My "No Status" column is where I dump ideas as I'm researching that I want to vet later. Maybe I hear a customer question, or a Sales team member gives me an idea, or I see a headline in a tweet; I'll add those cards, then revisit them later to see if they're actually worth writing about.
My last column "Published as Blog" really speaks to why I love Notion's cards more than other card-based tools—more on that in the next section.
Finally, I often use the cards to organize the layout of a long-form piece. If one topic should come before another topic in a final piece, I'll put that card above the other one. Just another simple way to keep my story line in check.
The big downside with this method is that modular writing can't just click together into a finished product; sometimes I will duplicate my thoughts in two different cards, and sometimes they won't flow together properly without additional writing. The editing function is so much important when writing this way because you need someone to look at the whole instead of the parts and make them flow together.
How Notion cards make this happen
I briefly mentioned earlier that Notion cards beat out other ticket-based productivity tools. There are a few reasons for this, but the core reason is that Notion is designed for content development, whereas other tools like Confluence and Trello are designed for project management.
A Trello card is meant to hold meta-information about the ticket itself. If the ticket represents a blog post, then the information includes things like who is working on the post, when it is due, and what comments have been made. Worst of all, the content isn't developed in the card itself, it's linked to another page or as an attachment.
This seems like a tiny detail, but that extra click or download is a massive mental hurdle for me. I don't want to screw around with version control somewhere else. I don't want to move to another tool. If my brain is ready to do the writing, I want to do it right there and then.
By building content directly on the board itself, I sometimes discover that a piece should actually be a stand-alone content asset like a blog post (this is where that "Published as Blog" column comes in.) Sometimes my card is extremely short, like a "What is..." question that is simply a few sentences and aimed at capturing a SERP feature. But sometimes my card turns into a thousand-word thought that needs to become its own post. When I'm done writing I move the card into that column as I publish it—then I can revisit it when I need to connect it back to a pillar page or inject a part of it into an ebook.
There's a few more features I like that help me from an organization standpoint, largely because I'm an SEO-focused writer. I create additional fields to help me understand and prioritize where that piece of writing is coming from, or what additional considerations I should have when writing it.
For example, I often include keyword research notes directly onto the ticket, such as keyword volume and SERP features—this links back right to my research phase, because I'm often generating these tickets from SEO research in the first place. These go farther when I create alternate views for my board, like a table that is easily sorted based on all those fields (for example, I can quickly sort all my cards by keyword search volume if I’m prioritizing SEO work.)
There are a ton of tiny details that really emphasize how Notion is designed for creation, and I'm really just scratching the tip of the iceberg. If you want a detailed breakdown on how writers can use Notion, check out Owen William's defacto bible on this topic.
But really, that's it. Cards help me organize large ideas into the chunks that are needed to make it happen, so I don't get paralyzed with the thought of a long page. And instead of jumping between different pages and documents, the magic happens right there in the card. It's the only way I can consistently ship big ideas.
