How a Messy System (and a Strong Coffee) Led Us to Notion
Back in 2024—when I created Process Architect—it was just me working from my tiny home office. You know how it goes—you start small, thinking "this works fine for now," and somehow end up with fifteen tabs and apps open at once. And honestly? For a while, that chaotic system (if you could call it that) worked okay for me—until it really didn’t.
Everything changed when I hired Jade, my assistant. Within her first week, we began to realize that this “system” would not work for us.
I remember sitting with Jade over coffee, both of us frustrated and overwhelmed, trying to figure out how to stop dropping balls. We had Slack notifications pinging constantly, Zoho entries that never quite captured the full picture, and important client notes scattered across …at least three different platforms. It was giving us both headaches.
The irony is not missed on me that we preach to our clients not to overcomplicate things, while we have been doing it ourselves. I sat on that thought during this entire process. What can we do to simplify this all, and get our time back? That's when I found Notion. I'll be honest—at first, I was skeptical. The last thing we needed was yet another tool to manage. But we were desperate enough to try anything, so we started small, just building a few basic pages to test it out.
Those first few weeks were... interesting. We'd build something, realize it wasn't quite right, tear it down, and start over. Some days it felt like we were making things more complicated instead of better. But we kept at it, taking it one step at a time, learning from our mistakes.
Now? It's like we're running a completely different business. Almost everything lives in Notion—our project timelines, team contact info, client database, even our coffee order preferences (yes, really!). The only thing we don't manage there is payroll, though I'm sure someone out there has figured out how to do that too.
The best part isn't even the organization—it's how much mental space it's freed up. No more lying awake at night wondering if we forgot something important. No more frantic searching through message histories trying to find that one crucial detail a client mentioned three weeks ago.
Instead of playing digital hide-and-seek with information across five different platforms, everything has its home. New team members can find what they need without having to interrupt someone else's workflow. We're not just more organized—we're actually collaborating better, catching issues before they become problems, and spending more time on what matters: helping our clients.
Notion bends to fit our weird and wonderful ways of working, not the other way around. We've built our own quirky system that perfectly matches how our brains work and how we like to get things done. Plus, it plays nice with all our other favorite tools through Zapier, which means we can automate a lot of the boring stuff.
This month, we brought on our newest team member, Saul, and it’s amazing to see how quickly he is getting up to speed. We'd learned from our earlier struggles and had worked hard to refine everything we currently have—so that anyone could come in and figure it out. Sure, we're still tweaking things—probably always will be. As we all know, I am constantly “breaking shit”. But now we have this living, breathing system that grows and changes right along with us. Our CRM especially has become this beautiful, customized powerhouse that actually makes sense for how we work.
I'll be sharing a series detailing how our system works—not to show off, but to gather feedback for making it even better. We're always eager to improve, and I'd love to hear what others think about our setup.
Stay tuned for more. 🤙🏻
