Similarly, humans need sociality for practical (transferring knowledge of immediate situations) and abstract (experiencing a sense of feeling understood and appreciated, keeping sanity, positive drive toward the future, and more) purposes.

With an awareness of this biological truth and some humility that you’re not special in some grandiose way, you may appreciate more the next chit-chat, if it has to happen, and even draw positive emotions and insights through it.

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Later in adulthood, the situation steadily reverses. The ones who care accrue the highest prestige. This is not universally true in all environments and peer groups, but it is true in most circumstances, particularly in “higher status” strata of society and in the context of work.

But this is not enough. There are different levels of caring, and one can be terrible, an all-star, or somewhere in between, as is the case in any endeavor.

Will Guidara, co-founder of Eleven Madison Park and other successful hospitality businesses, argues strongly in favor of “unreasonable hospitality”—the unwavering commitment to going above and beyond to provide excellent experiences to his customers.

This is a differentiator in business and life, and it has to do with care. You can’t be fully in service of others if you don’t care enough, or if you’re not invested in the practice of being of service to others toward something greater than yourself.

Uncompromising care can be applied to any business and aspect of life. It is the source of life itself. Consistent care makes life exist; it allows the garden to continue flourishing instead of becoming an unattended bush.

Not everything must be cared about with equal attention. A few things, done well, at least as a start. The way you do things bleeds through the final outcome, even if seemingly no one notices.

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Every day, you eat something, and it becomes part of you in some way. Over years, you take on a certain bodily and psychological organization and shape that are in part affected by what you have been ingesting.

What you pay attention to comes to the foreground. If you pay attention to eating and all the surrounding experiences and concepts, you can transform your “relationship” to it—how you relate to the topic of nutrition changes, hence impacting your persona (a term whose etymology means “mask”).

Your eating behaviors are also impacted by your psychological states. One day you perceive a sense of safety and peace, and you may eat less in quantity and more unprocessed foods; another day you are identified with anxiety and fear of losing your job, and you may rush through eating lots of food with a sense of hurry and lack of awareness.

It is always possible to observe your behaviors and states, and practice releasing them—softening around them instead of fiercely resisting or avoiding them with tension (which most often works the opposite way than you’d wish, especially with psycho-emotional states).

Regarding eating, here are some things you can practice consistently or sometimes. I keep them short and do not write unnecessary explanations on purpose. You may notice they share a common characteristic: they somewhat veer from the (current) default behaviors influenced by social forces, and some of them may sound difficult or stupid. They are meant to be observed and reflected upon as a way of opening up new perspectives and making space for transformation.

Here’s the list:

• Appreciate the importance of eating, both in its practical survival aspect (you need food to live well) and in its metaphorical/social components (gathering around food is a common communal, positive event across so many cultures and for so many centuries).
• As you’re about to start eating a meal, appreciate its nourishing nature, the people who prepared it, and its nutritional (and beyond) benefits.
• While you eat, do not do anything else (do not watch television, do not browse social media, do not listen to a podcast, do not read, etc.)—“merely” eat.
• Eat in different positions than usual (sitting at a table, sitting on the floor, squatting down with your back against a flat wall, etc.) and observe whether this changes anything.
• Do not use sauces—they’re often a crutch against your anxiety about eating (you fear eating real food; you want to indulge in candy but beat yourself up about it and do not do it, so you compensate with sauces on your salads).
• Restrict eating to a window of 6–8 hours during the day, and do not eat for the rest of the time—notice what effects this produces.
• Prepare and cook the meals you eat.
• As you’re about to start eating, imagine (feel) the sensations and qualities the food will give you (for example, wisdom, strength, aliveness, calmness); then start eating.
• Before eating or preparing the food you will eat, do a meditation practice.

There are some people (a small percentage in my observations) who instead will benefit from different practices, almost opposite to the above, because they are somewhat obsessed with control, routine, and eating the same things in the same ways at the same time every day.

These people, who may also have a distorted self-image regarding their physical shape and health, dread the possibility of eating junk food, changing meal timing, ingredients, or portion sizes. Therefore, they can find some of these useful and important:

• Eat only when hungry, without watching what time it is. Can you sense hunger, really, or have you forgotten? You may be surprised by how difficult it is just to recognize hunger in its pure manifestation, despite you may have taken it for granted your whole adult life. You can always resensitize to it through attention.
• Eat out and, instead of ordering food, order whatever the chef/waiter recommends.
• Eat every meal out.
• Buy items you’ve never bought before at the supermarket, and change your usual meals with these new foods.
• Eat ice cream (not the one labeled as healthy or high protein—I mean ice-cream ice cream).

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The adventure can be seen as the drive to discover something new: to be on a journey and gather insights, competence, and a valid position in society. Therefore, the camel wants responsibility in order to gain competence and sojourn on an upward trajectory of the spirit.

At some point, this approach of addition becomes obsolete and ineffective. The camel becomes the lion while journeying in the now more familiar desert. The lion gets rid of everything to create the space for voluntary transformation—from “I should” to “I will”, a testament to its readiness to lead and transform itself and others.

The preying lion must become a child, the final stage of metamorphosis. The child is “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, …, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying.” These capacities are required for deep personal transformation.

This metaphor can be applied at a macro and micro level.

A person can go through the three metamorphoses throughout life, marinating in each stage until some realization occurs, allowing the next stage to happen. I don’t think this is true for everyone, but only for those people who are invested in the journey to understand everything more deeply than what’s given.

Similarly, the three stages can occur at a micro level within a specific context—for example, in the context of relationships, work, or spiritual or physical practice. In fact, I believe this is more common—you can achieve great realizations in one area of life while being oblivious to the same level of depth present in other areas.

But once you can see the process happening, it becomes a meta-skill that you can apply in any domain.

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In Notion, you can build custom agents that perform actions across your Notion workspace and other connected tools. The advantage of using Notion is that it is a one-stop solution not just for agent orchestration but also for data management and team collaboration. You can store your documentation, projects, contacts, and other systems to run your business or life. All of these systems can be accessed by the AI agents when they run, which keeps them up to date and alive in a single software tool.

Take this Notion custom agent demo, for example, which researches and enriches contact data in your CRM so you can attend meetings well prepared and foster connections with people in your circles.

In n8n or Make, the experience is more customizable and optimized for automations, rather than data management (there are tables and data stores, but not pages or databases like in Notion). You can bring your own AI model’s keys and build AI agents connected to any tool that has an API or MCP server.

So, the key difference is in the amount of flexibility. Notion tends to be less technical and flexible than n8n or Make, with the advantage of providing one of the most elegant interfaces for knowledge work. n8n and Make are more developer-oriented and provide the best no-code tools and interfaces for building automations and AI agents at scale.

The Notion interface and overall user experience make it very appealing to me and many of the companies I work with. It doesn’t feel like an isolated technical system that’s hardly accessible, but a single interface with multiple layers and ways of interfacing with it (pages, databases, AI chat).

If there’s clarity in the underlying systems and how you use them, the experience can be delightful and crafty because you can shape the tool around your preferences and needs, while having third-party integrations and AI agents easily configurable even if you don’t understand their underlying tech.

For most people, in my opinion Notion is the way to go. If you operate in an enterprise environment or prefer maintaining more control over how you build automations and AI agents, n8n or Make may be your best choice as part of the broader tech infrastructure at the foundation of your business.

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Yet thoughts are not reality itself, and we can practice the capacity to return to a rather more central, uninterrupted, and neutral state that doesn’t require swaying.

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Take hospitality, for example, as illustrated by Will Guidara in the book “Unreasonable Hospitality”. You can do bad or mediocre hospitality and blend in by being just good enough, or you can obsess over the concept of hospitality itself and how to make the experience of guests excellent.

To develop greatness in something, there must be constant practice and a deep willingness to examine, experiment, course-correct, and continue without being swayed by temporary outcomes, bad or good. It’s a mindset of a practitioner, a lifetime student.

This attitude of refining the how can be applied to all areas, and it naturally bleeds through all aspects of life when practiced consistently and lightly, drawing energy from the process itself.

It also seems an increasingly important skill—to do something with high quality and care—in the current and future society, where standardization and lack of effort are very common.

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Say, you’ve trained boxing for many years and you stumble upon a street fight one night. You immediately invoke your boxing skills to protect your friend.

Similarly, Notion AI has skills: different abilities invoked when suitable. You create those skills and make them available to Notion AI.

For example, you ask Notion AI to review and correct an essay you’ve written. To do so, instead of starting from scratch or following random methods, Notion AI can automatically use the Review skill (in this case, a tool call in software speak) you carefully created to follow your preferred approach of hiding insecurities in your writing (joking).

You can also select text or a block on any Notion page and quickly invoke a skill. For example, you select a paragraph in your essay and invoke the “Analyst” skill to get a detailed, customized report on all the hidden psychological knots behind each word. This enables precise and fast interactions with AI, rather than chat-based, verbose conversations.

For a visual overview of how to create and use AI Skills in Notion, watch the video.

What’s the difference between Notion AI Skills and Instructions?

Instructions can be defined as the personality: the preferences and values that shape everything you do. Skills are context-dependent abilities you invoke at the right moment, like your boxing skills in a fight.

In Notion, both are pages. Skills can be used automatically by Notion AI Agent and Custom Agents, while instructions are set by you in the Notion AI Agent customization settings.

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There are ongoing improvements to this feature, so what you currently see in Notion may differ from what I show in the video and screenshots. The concepts are the same though, and that’s what matters.

Take the task you re-explain to AI most often, and turn your explanation into a skill. Next time, invoke it instead of typing it.

Skills give Notion AI your methods and standards encoded once and invoked in the right context whenever needed.

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But there is more to the story. If you go deeper, you can practice doing that behavior in the opposite situation—when it’s hard to do it and there are no affordances, or even anti-affordances.

This means establishing a habit, or more accurately, changing something deeper in the whole organization of the self.

Say you stopped smoking by removing all cigarettes from the house. Now can you continue not smoking with a pack of cigarettes in the house? Further, can you one day smoke one cigarette from that new pack and then never smoke again?

If you can’t do this, you’ve built a castle of sand, ready to be destroyed at any time by your multiplicity of emotions, facets of personality, and behaviors regaining their prominence after being masked away instead of transformed deeply.

Deep transformation can happen, and it can take time. This is part of the process, which must be somewhat playful in its nature to allow the reorganization to occur.

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It’s easy to take them seriously, or not even be aware of this background state. We are inevitably shaped by the people around us, especially while growing up. Our current preferences, choices, and situations stem to a significant degree from what close people have modeled for us over time.

We are, among other things, a collection of multiple people. Who woke up today—and who will wake up tomorrow?

Since these constant conversations are mere appearances in consciousness—like thoughts or any other sensations—they need not dictate our every choice.

We can continue to practice recognizing and clarifying reality, spacious and unspoiled as it is.

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While working on a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming investor meeting, John—the CEO of a fast-growing U.K. scale-up—let a Notion Custom Agent use all the notes in the company’s Notion workspace to craft the presentation. Minutes later, the deck was ready for review.

Fantasy or reality? More reality than fantasy, since AI sometimes crashes or produces outputs far below your desires; and at the same time the story above is real and feasible.

We call the ability of Notion AI to manipulate, analyze, or generate any file (and more) computer access.

Computer access allows Notion Custom Agents to create files (for example, PDF, PPT, and Word documents) that you can easily download, among other things. This is part of the agent‑orchestration paradigm I have explored previously.

Computer access means that AI can use an isolated Linux sandbox (a remote virtual machine) to run code and generate artifacts. This includes creating files of any kind, doing data analysis, writing code, and more. It doesn’t have access to your local files—only to the files it generates, plus your Notion workspace and any third‑party connections you add.

In Notion, this capability is inherent to both Notion AI Agent (the chat always available at the bottom-right corner) and Notion Custom Agents (running on a schedule or specific triggers), so you don’t have to set up anything.

You can chat with the agent and request what you want done, or let it run automatically based on triggers or a schedule; computer tools are invoked whenever suitable. I covered Notion Custom Agents in detail in this essay and this video.

What it can do:

• Run code — “Take this file, run data analysis on it, and save the result here.”
• Create files — for example, generate a .pptx, .xlsx, .pdf, charts, or images
• Process files you upload into the chat (read, parse, edit)
• Do data analysis
• Let you download any file it generates
• Use MCP tools

What it can't do:

• See or touch your local Mac or PC (no access to your Downloads, Desktop, and so on)
• Control your browser or apps on your machine

The friction of keeping data updated across systems has been an important blocker in software tool adoption. Agentic artificial intelligence is bridging that gap, allowing you to manage and do work in the same surface: a place where writing and maintaining documentation becomes increasingly valuable.

Those documents feed the agents the context they need, and the agents feed them back with updates. The first 60% of John’s work was done in minutes, and John could now refine it to completion.

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AI systems have been proving helpful in providing information even more easily than in the times of Google search and earlier. You ask questions to a chat or automate a research workflow overnight, and you get answers, citations, links to resources, and anything you might ask for, in seconds to minutes.

So many of us continue indulging in gathering information, seeking intellectual understanding, knowledge, and insights in order to reduce the noise of ruminating thoughts, feel at peace with oneself and the world, make more money, attain more social capital and higher ranks, etc., etc.

Yet, it seems apparent that more information and intellectual understanding doesn’t lead to such outcomes without an experiential understanding; one that involves both body and mind.

We often seem to forget: there’s a body. And the body is far more “intelligent” than we propose, yet we don’t treat it with the same multi-level approach as we do with the mind. Not many people develop body skills at different levels of difficulty in multiple disciplines, allowing adaptations to happen throughout the nervous system.

The gap between prescriptions and actions remains despite all the technological evolutions human civilization has seemingly been undertaking. The doctor prescribes a medication; you don’t take it at the prescribed frequency, but stop beforehand or never start. ChatGPT lays out a plan for finding a girlfriend, and you discard it.

That is fine if there is a choice not to follow the prescription. It may be less fine if you ask for the prescription and for help, announcing how important this is for you, but then you don’t follow the prescription and keep complaining about your situation, the world, doctors, engineers, and how awful it is being you.

The gap stems from a lack of wanting to “face the dragons”; to soften up and allow the required execution to occur, however slowly it might, untying all the knots accumulated over a lifetime. Such an attitude is one of humility and inquiry into all the things (made up and not) standing in the way.

Therefore, there is no need for elaborate systems to plan, define, track, and review your objectives in the short, medium, and long term. This practice can be useful for some people at some point in time, because no practice is to be discarded completely; it is individual and context dependent.

At some point, there is no other choice but to do the next thing that there is to do; to soften up and take a small action that’s driven by a full-body knowledge that this is the right, and maybe the only, thing to do. Then there can be more money, higher social ranking, and all those things you seek—because they tend to come the most when you’re busy doing something else, not chasing and not running away.

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When you use Notion for business, understanding permissions and access management can be confusing but important for maintaining a sufficient degree of order in the workspace, allowing you and everyone else to do good work.

In a sense, a digital workspace is the same as a physical one. It is a place where something happens, and as such, its setting and configuration impact the people occupying that space. Therefore, a certain care and attention to how you organize and use your workspace is important.

Having worked with many medium and large companies using Notion daily, here are some facts and discoveries you may find useful for understanding how to best manage permissions in Notion.

• There are two broad types of users in Notion: members (paid) and guests (free). Members have a full seat in the workspace, including the ability to create private pages and use Notion AI. Guests can only access the pages shared with them, and can’t use Notion AI. So, usually, a member is your full-time employee, and a guest is your external marketing consultant or contractor.

• You can automate workspace access via the Notion SCIM API, or by setting up SSO (single-sign-on) to enable everyone with a @your-domain email address to log in to the Notion workspace. Learn more here.

• Workspace permissions are managed via the dedicated tab in the workspace settings.

• There are multiple types of members: workspace owners, members, membership admins, and restricted members. Each role provides different powers of workspace management.

  Workspace owners can manage the workspace settings (including billing and permissions).

  Members can’t manage workspace settings.

  Membership admins can’t manage workspace settings besides adding and removing members and guests.

  Restricted members can only access the pages shared with them (like guests) and can also use Notion AI.

• You can add an unlimited number of members and guests.

• You invite guests via the “Share” menu at the top right corner of any Notion page or database.

• To help organize access across the workspace, you can create user groups in the dedicated settings menu. Groups often correspond to your teams (a “Marketing” group including all your marketing team members, a “Product” group for your product team members, etc.).

• You can use Groups to provide bulk access to Teamspaces, and also on person-type properties across data sources in Notion and on @ mentions on pages.

• Each teamspace access is independent from each other. Don’t assume that if someone is a workspace member, they can see the same things you see. It is good practice to maintain a clean management of teamspace access to foster a clean user experience for everyone in your company.

• Each page can have independent permissions overriding its parent or teamspace permissions. These can be managed via the page’s “Share” menu at the top right corner.

• You can use page-level access to automate access to a subset of data source pages to members and guests. This is the best solution for implementing partner or client portals inside of Notion, providing restricted access within centralized data sources. Learn more about this feature here.

Those are the essentials about managing permissions and access in Notion. I kept each point short on purpose, even though they could be explained in depth in dedicated essays of their own.

I have noticed a consistent correlation between the attention placed on workspace management and the adoption of Notion (or any other tool for that matter) across teams and companies.

Workspace management is an essential underlying component of digital work, even though under the radar and seemingly boring. The foundations remain the most important part of a house and everything else we build.

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Charisma is often sought after as a mechanism for getting more money, higher social rank, admiration, love, and more. By having charisma, you can attract people, appear trustworthy, and feel in control, you think. Yet charisma seems elusive, evaporating through your fingers as soon as it is touched.

You build charisma—a quality of existential confidence in your ability to weather any situation—by experiencing many daily events and observing your place in them. Who is there throughout the experience? What remains, and what changes?

Then any situation becomes a game of observing and allowing it to unfold with some playfulness. You develop an ability to see and speak the objective and subjective reality as it appears, without collapsing into (be carried away with) anger, shame, guilt, pride, and other emotional states.

As a consequence of such a desirable yet frightening demeanor, you are calm and connected, which draws people’s interest and attention.

You never cared about charisma itself, yet it arose as a consequence of your being busy researching, exploring, and understanding.

“[…] It’s important that in the process you bring some playfulness, some relaxation, some deep choice — I want to do this.”

— Ido Portal

There are multiple ways to do something, especially something you don’t want to do.

You can muster up discipline and power through the activity with a certain attitude of tension.

You can evoke the dopaminergic nature of motivation to carry you through the task, maybe playing some music or watching something motivating.

You can allow the activity to start itself through will—which is not doing nor not doing—a certain quality that is not developed or improved, but that is always present and ready to be noticed.

Will, which is not willpower, has a certain quiet and honest quality to it. Maybe that’s why it goes unnoticed despite its always being there. When leveraged, will can make any experience more pleasant than expected.

This is important to know and experience. You can do anything through will, and it carries with it transformation.

It elegantly integrates structured (tables) and unstructured (documents) data in one platform with agentic AI built in.

I recently worked with a large enterprise to support the implementation of the project and resource management systems for two of their departments in Superhuman Docs. The buy-in from leadership was relatively easy, partly because products in the Superhuman suite were already established and used by many companies worldwide.

There are three main layers that make it relatively simple to build custom management systems in Superhuman Docs:

1. The Database is where tables (structured data) are stored and managed.
2. The Doc is the user-facing application, composed of views of tables and other rich content (text, images, formulas, and more).
3. AI Agents can run automations and tasks autonomously, or when prompted by a user in a doc.

You can manage access to tables granularly, allowing users to view or edit only the table data that appears in a filtered view within a doc, without exposing the whole database/table.

In the video below, I explore Superhuman Docs and its key features as of July 2026.

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We often do something while wishing to be doing something else. “Now I write; oh wait, this is boring, and I wish I was outside walking.” “Now I am outside walking; I wish I was at the fight event in that venue by the beach.”

Such constant wondering, wishing, and lying to oneself leads nowhere, except through a self-reinforcing spiral of not wanting to be here but wanting to be there instead—never ending.

So, assuming you can see through this situation and its insignificance, there is a way “out”, even though this concept itself is a lie, but useful for explanatory purposes.

A way out is to continue practicing bringing attention back to the task at hand, whatever arises in the thoughts or emotional domains.

“Now I write; it’s boring and I wish I was outside walking; ah, let’s remember: now I am writing; oh, there is the trash can collection the day after tomorrow, and I must remember; ah, back to writing; …” (and so on indefinitely).

Bringing attention back to the task at hand is done through softening, releasing the tension often generated by interruptions.

What else is there to do, if not the current thing there is to do? If you’re here, you’re not there, so why want to be there?

Imagine you’re delegating creating a a first draft of a Power Point presentation for your next board meeting, using the information on the Projects, Tasks, Meetings, and Strategy sessions tracked with your team in your Notion workspace. You create a task and write up the specs inside the page, assign it to Claude Agent, and it works on it and reports back once done, so you can review, iterate, and complete the task.

With Claude external agents in Notion, it’s as if you use Claude Cowork, but access is bounded to the Notion workspace and any connected tools. It still has the ability to create Microsoft Suite and other document types you can download.

When I spoke with some of my CEO clients about this feature, there was lots of curiosity especially because this is safer than opening up access to local files on the computer. Since Notion is the primary surface of work, it is easy to set and maintain access boundaries while working with Claude agents (you must explicitly share pages with the agent via the dedicated settings).

A Claude agent in Notion is a custom agent and consumes Notion AI credits. You can chat with it or assign tasks like any team member, and it will work on them and report back via comments. For a practical demonstration, watch this video.

This makes it easy to manage AI agents in a single workspace, using a Kanban board and other structured and unstructured data to “collaborate” with AI agents just like you would with your human team members.

Except AI agents can work on many tasks at the same time, at any time of the day, which fosters a compelling vision of superhuman productivity, significantly augmenting your output capacity, like a shoemaker moving from manually assembling each piece to using an industrial machine.

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You do something you wanted to do for a long time, only to find out, after doing it a few times, that you don’t want to do it anymore, and that it is not your dream.

So what? It’s good that you found out and can move on.

To know your dreams doesn’t matter. To know that you’re not caught in someone else’s dream does, and it is easier to assess if you pay attention.

In cartography, a map has no start and no end. The same is true for the process of living.

So far, using Cursor, Claude Code, or other AI coding platforms, the main surface area for interacting with the AI agents has been the chat. Using chat is akin to constantly messaging with your teammates on Slack all day—draining, ineffective, and unnecessary for the most part.

There are more effective ways to organize work asynchronously, as often noted by Cal Newport and others. Methods that require little live interaction, while boosting one’s ability to work with focus on tasks uninterrupted.

Similarly, effective AI agent orchestration follows a clear work system; one where projects, tasks, specs, and statuses are clear to everyone involved, and things move across a pipeline to completion. You primarily oversee and quality-check the artefacts generated by the AI agents.

You could build a custom system for this purpose using MCP servers and API calls, or use Notion External Agents, which are built out of the box for this purpose while maintaining the customizability of the Notion platform.

Notion External Agents allow you to use Claude*, Cursor**, and other AI platforms without leaving the Notion workspace, effectively managing agents and your team in a single platform.

I can connect my Tasks data source and delegate some action items to Cursor/Claude or a chain of multiple agents, which will comment on and update the status in Notion. There’s access to all my documentation and context around the project, and the agents can easily read and write content directly in Notion to keep docs up to date.

To create an external agent in Notion, add a new custom agent in the dedicated sidebar section, and select the external agent option. Then follow the on-screen prompts to set it up, and customize triggers, instructions, and connections as in any custom agent. In this video I show the setup and usage of a Notion external agent.

The human work in software appears increasingly abstracted away from the building ground, moving into choices of what to build, its design, functionalities, and (especially) lack thereof. A clear work system provides the foundation for consistent clarity of choices, which in this paradigm matters a lot.

*Claude external agents consume Notion credits.

**Cursor external agents are billed in Cursor and do not consume Notion credits.

• Most primates (us included) organize themselves in groups
• Groups composed of primates have hierarchies
• Hierarchies (in humans) are explicit to different degrees, depending on culture and other contextual elements
• Groups think in “us vs. them” - we do this, they do that; we have good manners, they don’t; we are good, they are bad; and so on
• This “us vs. them” mentality helps establish the group’s identity and reinforces its existence
• Each individual (human) in the group may also be part of other unrelated groups
• The hierarchical position of the same individual may differ greatly within each group he’s part of
• Each individual within the group acts in his/her self-interest first and foremost
• Individual interests include increased rank in the hierarchy
• Higher hierarchical rank relative to other in-group members provides access to more, better resources
• Resources include choice of sexual partners, food, shelter, esteem from others, money, and more
• When primates bond, oxytocin gets released, often eliciting sensations of warmth and safety
• When primates experience something unexpected, scary, the amygdala is primarily activated and in charge of immediate reactions
• The pre-frontal cortex in humans is responsible for longer-term, culturally-influenced thinking and decision-making
• The skin is the largest organ in the human body

Sometimes you may choose that now is not a good time instead. That’s equally as powerful. You are fully behind that choice, not hiding, but standing behind it.

You are really motivated to practice playing the guitar today. That’s a good time to choose not to play it and do something else instead. Can you choose to play the guitar when the motivation is not there? What is required to do so?

This infinite process of investigation may be all there is.

This is a small realization in meditation practices, for example, as posited by teachers such as Adyashanti, Joseph Goldstein, and many others. While formally meditating, you may place your attention on an object of focus so that it becomes easier to experience the aforementioned realization. The object of focus is not the point but a vessel to experience reality as it is—a trick to momentarily diminish your identification with thoughts.

A good meditation practice is one where you bring your attention back to the task at hand hundreds of times, recognizing that you’re doing so. Instead, it is often thought that a good meditation session is one where you need to bring your attention back to the task at hand only a few times. In most cases, this is an illusion, and it reflects a complete lack of recognition that you were distracted and all over the place throughout the session.

Notion is becoming increasingly flexible, not just for using directly, but also for building tools on Notion via the developer platform (Agents SDK, Workers, External Agents, and more).

As a consequence, the left sidebar and workspace settings are increasingly crowded. There is a drastic potential increase in data flowing through and within Notion, either natively or from connected third-party tools and AI agents.

So, how do you maintain governance of the Notion ecosystem without hindering the platform’s utility to you and your team?

As I continue working with teams through the ever-evolving situation, here are a few observations I can offer.

• Build the Notion workspace foundations to make the space a place where you and AI agents can find what’s needed to do work elegantly. This means starting with a few key data sources, possibly focused on a narrow use case (e.g., Marketing Campaigns management and/or Knowledge Base). One situation teams often face in Notion over time is that outdated information remains searchable and orphaned in the workspace, which creates noise in the system. If you maintain a humble, focused approach to the workspace, you can avoid this pitfall and make the platform work in your favor.
• Appoint one person responsible for the ongoing Notion workspace governance and evolution for each team. If you use Notion with other people, there must be a shared effort to leverage the platform to everyone’s advantage. Responsible individuals help make this possible. Tying the Notion workspace (work management) efforts to Objectives/Key Results is also important to ensure there is a tangible review and incentives system. Otherwise, responsibility remains theoretical and fake, which fosters neglect.
• Establish your principles of the Notion platform usage. There are many workspace settings you can adjust, and it is a good idea to do so, instead of going with the defaults. For example, you can set a monthly limit on AI credits consumption, restrict MCP access, restrict URLs in AI search, and more. If you do this strategic work upfront and review it once per quarter/trimester, you set yourself up for success because you make your workspace your own instead of following the defaults blindly.
• Establish a review system for Custom Agents. It is easy in Notion for everyone to build custom agents. Since they consume paid credits at the workspace level, it is a good idea to have a clear review and approval system for custom agents, to avoid uncontrolled costs, duplicates, or agents that should be a deterministic automation instead of AI-driven. Practically, this means appointing at least one responsible person to manage custom agents at the workspace level via the dedicated workspace admin settings. There can be a regular review and approval process from there.
• Do some training with all Notion users in your team. Allow them to be owners of the tool and truly use it to do their best work. Especially due to the many features and frequent new launches, ongoing upskilling and training make a difference. For one, it shows that you care about the way you do the work; second, everyone is given the chance to explore how they can work best, which positively trickles down all areas of the business and produces value for the whole ecosystem, all the way to the final customer.

These considerations can help you leverage Notion as the single platform to organize all your work. I’ve seen them directly influence the success of Notion usage across teams, and as the platform keeps evolving, these principles enable you to continue being in the driver’s seat and taking advantage of your tools.

For collaboration inquiries, contact me here.

According to the Weber–Fechner law, we notice changes in proportion to what’s already there, rather than as absolutes.

This applies to internal and external changes. The context of the change has greater relevance than the degree of the change itself in absolute terms. Small changes stand out when the baseline is small, and you need bigger changes when the baseline is big.

At the personal level, this law helps inform which practices you do and at what level of intensity, allowing saturation and establishing lasting change in the system.

You show up at the workshop bringing your whole cabinet with you, because who knows you may have forgotten something, or maybe you need something you hadn’t thought about, god forbid you were found unprepared.

The whole session there is a thick barrier between “you” and everything else that’s not “you”. You leave the event with a certain sense of disattisfaction and victimhood; maybe you’re just not made for this and are destined to be as you are.

An outside observer notices your internal posture of identification with fear, closure, the fear of fear. This is the thing that prevents anything to happen at all. If you notice it and choose to surrender to it, something may start to blossom by itself.

You realize the things you wish to do, you can merely do - no stories, excuses, narrations, essays needed (they could be present if you wish, because ultimately they don’t define the experiences but they have practical utility when interacting with the rest of the world).

You can engage with anything, no matter how scary or threatening to your sense of self it appears to be. Anything is interesting if you offer a posture of interest towards it. At the same time, there doesn’t have to be an interest in everything.

Light and ready, all the time.

One of the perils of building AI agents is that the quality of output can vary widely across runs. Variance is often welcome in creative tasks and it is a bug in structured work. Notion Workers give you more control over custom agents output accuracy. In addition, they allow syncing data from external tools into Notion, replacing Make, Zapier, or n8n for many automations.

Workers are tools that run TypeScript code, providing deterministic execution within an AI-orchestrated flow or as a standalone automation. They are hosted in Notion’s infrastructure (Node.js environment), so you just write the code and deploy it, while all the backend is managed by Notion.

When deployed as custom agent tools, they don't make the whole workflow deterministic, but only the parts that need to be (calculations, API calls, data transformations), while letting the AI handle the components that benefit from reasoning (for example, context interpretation and decision-making).

There are two types of Notion Workers, each one with a dedicated syntax, so before building a worker you get to decide which type you will create.

• Tools: deterministic code connected to one or multiple custom agents as a tool. Tools are apps and functions the agent can use when it runs in order to achieve the objective and provide quality output. You can connect a Worker like any other tool in the settings of Custom Agents.
• Sync: traditional (deterministic) automation to sync data from external tools into Notion. This doesn’t have to do with AI (unless you decide so), and it can replace automation tools such as Zapier, Make, or n8n. Sync workers can run on a schedule or immediately when receiving a webhook from an external tool.

Practical Examples

Worker as Custom Agent Tool

You run a construction firm whose work involves complex project management. You track the status of your projects in Notion, leveraging dependencies and sub-items. But there is no clear way to run calculations on entire projects or to easily shift dates when there is a change of plans.

By creating a Notion custom agent that leverages a Notion Worker, you can automate part of the project management process and keep data up to date for everyone on your team.

Worker as Sync

You want to sync your Google Contacts to a Notion data source so you can manage your CRM data (meetings, contacts, interactions, and so on) in one place. You can build a Notion Worker to sync new, updated, and deleted contacts from Google into Notion. The Worker can run on a schedule you define (for example, every 30 minutes) and keep your data in Notion up to date.

Check out the sample code here.

How to Build a Notion Worker

In this demo, I am building a Notion Worker that syncs the top 10 stories from Hacker News to Notion every three hours. Hacker News has an open API that doesn’t need any authentication. Most other tools you’d sync for real use cases (for example, Jira, Google Workspace, Outlook) require authentication, and you will follow their official API documentation to find out how to implement it in your Worker code.

First, I installed the Notion CLI in my terminal via curl -fsSL https://ntn.dev | bash (you may use other available installation methods; see here).

Next, I logged into Notion via the CLI to authenticate and select the workspace where I want the Hacker News stories to sync. For this, I used the command ntn login, which opened a browser tab with the screen shown below. Once the authentication is done, a Personal Access Token (PAT) was auto generated in the dedicated section.

Then I used Cursor (an AI tool to generate code) to create and iterate on the Notion Worker, syncing the code in a GitHub repo. Once deployed via ntn workers deploy, the Worker showed up in my Developer Platform account, and a new database for the sync was automatically created in Notion. This database will be used for all future runs to upsert the top 10 Hacker News stories every three hours.

Additional Things to Know

You can check the status of Workers and their historical runs in the dedicated section within the Developer Platform, where you can also disable or remove Workers.

Notion Workers are part of the Business and Enterprise plans and must be opted in by a Notion workspace owner via the dedicated settings under the Workers tab.

Workers are billed as an add-on. They consume Notion Credits, just like custom agents, and are generally significantly cheaper. Find out details about pricing here.

Since Notion Workers are TypeScript code, you can store them in GitHub repositories, which act as an archive of the code and facilitate collaboration and migration to other tools. This makes Workers easily portable to other tools if needed as part of a migration.

Conclusion

Many people argue that we are in the AI orchestration era - a world where the main job of knowledge workers is to set up and oversee the work of many AI Agents. Notion is one of the leading platform for work and agents management, increasingly introducing features that make this paradigm tangible. Workers are one of those forward-looking features.

Many questions remain unanswered, especially with regards to runtime reliability, AI outputs, and principles of effective AI work orchestration. Many of these worries will get resolved as more people adopt these new ways of working. I remain observant of the landscape and skeptical about idealistic claims, continuing to test the tools out for myself and progressively shape my vision of work and life.

Featured products

• 24 Assets - Business Operating System
• The Great CEO Within

Resources

• Notion Workers Official Docs

Affiliate Links

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• Sign up for Airtable
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• Build powerful automations with n8n
• Build custom business apps with Softr

Entropy is the inevitable force of destruction and death. All organisms are subject to it, including humans: our bodies, minds, organs, and cells. Everything moves toward death at different speeds depending on the attention placed on it.

Where you place attention slows down entropy in some ways, and even injects life into the object of attention in new ways. Attention is never-ending, and so is interest. Everything is interesting if you choose to be interested. This is a constant choice of engaging and paying attention to the internal and external, because one doesn’t exist without the other.

You can attend to the breath and notice its rising and falling, supported by and supporting the entire body; you can attend to your mother needing or asking for help in a specific circumstance; the garden; the house; and everything else possible.

This is the practice of “cultivating one’s own garden”, which ultimately has ripple effects on everyone else you interact with, which is a byproduct and not the objective of the game. The practice itself has no objective, yet objectives are sometimes useful as containers to develop certain skills.

Note that many things ask for attention, and few of them deserve it. You shape what you attend to, and with the same token, what you attend to shapes you.

You can build tools with a flexible, modern architecture. The systems can be alive, fluid, adaptable, and centered around your specific workflows instead of rigid in their data structure. You build and you use, you learn and you iterate.

It’s akin to owning a house versus renting a house. Not taking into account financial implications, owning a house provides greater freedom than renting a house.

When you own a house, you can tinker with it, build small features, and work on small projects that make the house fit your vision increasingly more, providing a sense of joy and fulfillment. Similarly, owning software opens up space for such tinkering, playing, and experimenting to a greater degree than “renting” software from a SaaS (software as a service) company, where you are constrained by someone else’s functional and stylistic choices.

To make this concrete, I will build a local, personal tool to manage my work based on a workflow I have been refining and using for a few years. So far, I have built and implemented this workflow in Notion, which does a great job of providing building blocks for building tools. But what if I wish to make the app look and feel exactly as I desire, or go local and keep all the data on my local machine?

Workflows

Year Manifesto

The first viable scope for the app is a system to track and manage daily activities aligned with the broader life vision and objectives.

First, there is a Year Manifesto, detailing the vision for the year and for life. A year manifesto is a set of prompts I answer at the start of each year to reassess and crystallize where I am and where I want to go. Writing about your past, present, and future is a well-established method for increasing your chances of living the life you envision.

The process of writing itself is valuable for reflecting and clarifying what it is that you want. When you know what you want and lay out a vision for getting it, you significantly increase the chances of reaching the objective because you have now brought the thoughts and visions into life.

A manifesto is unlike a goal. A goal tends to be rigid and can become an obstacle to change. A manifesto is a work-in-progress draft of key principles for how you intend to live. It enables transformation. It doesn’t define milestones or set expectations. Rather, it sets the foundations for living in choiceless awareness, a state where you are in the driver’s seat, steering the boat that is your life.

Weekly Review

Every week, there is a process that consists of a review of the year manifesto, some questions to reflect on the week that passed, and some steps to lightly plan the week ahead. This weekly review is a tangible and frequent reminder of the vision for life, ensuring alignment remains between the direction of pursuit and the actions you undertake each week.

If you were to only do the year manifesto or goal-setting exercises, it is likely that a few weeks or months later, you'll have forgotten and fallen back to behaviours that don't align with the vision. So a weekly review is the frequent reminder that keeps vision and action aligned.

Projects and Tasks

These are work and life initiatives. Projects are “containers” of tasks. Tasks are single action items; small milestones to complete in the achievement of the project and, over time, of the year manifesto, if the projects are well-aligned with it.

A project-based approach to life and work provides space for experimentation and flexibility, as opposed to focusing excessively on following long-term goals. Once you know the general principles and direction, you can do the next smallest possible thing via a project. A project can be designing a website for a client, drafting a marketing assessment, finishing the 10 candles ordered by a customer, learning to juggle three balls, or learning basic plumbing.

There is a system of quick capture that allows you to easily add tasks from anywhere at any time, for later or immediate processing. This follows the quick capture concept popularized by Getting Things Done (GTD by David Allen).

Daily Activities

Each day, there is a constrained system for selecting projects and tasks (a maximum of 5 per day) to focus on that day. Throughout the day, that list stays front and center. You mark those activities as done along the way, so you gain useful insights over time. The next day, the list empties and a new selection occurs. This facilitates deep work and progress on all fronts of life, using a proactive rather than reactive approach for most of the day.

User Experience and Interface (UX and UI)

After using software tools for a long time, I notice some essential features that make a software tool worth using/investing in for me. Here are some of the main ones:

• Fast and lightweight. It will load instantly and stay out of your way, facilitating focused work instead of hindering it.
• Spacious and minimalistic, presenting one thing at a time, without any clutter on the screen. This reinforces the philosophy of focus and craftsmanship behind the workflows involved.
• Flexible and scalable, also leveraging the latest tech (AI, vector DBs, local LLMs, embeddings) at its foundation for great flexibility and adaptability as the workflows evolve over time and the app gets shaped by them.
• All the data stays private and easily exportable in bulk.
• The app supports dark and light mode, allowing me to switch across modes easily.
• The app works offline.

Implementation

As a first pass, I will build this app using Cursor, with a SQL + JSON approach for the backend (database). Cursor is a powerful ai-based programming tool, but I could use similar alternatives just as effectively (e.g., Claude Code, Antigravity). The SQL + JSON backend fosters flexibility in the data structure and it makes it easy to export data.

The app will only run locally when the computer is turned on, which I consider desirable because the nature of work remains context-dependent, like the craftsman’s workbench that lives in the workshop.

The SQL file will be stored in a Google Drive folder (indeed, this is an exception to going fully local), and the whole codebase will be synced to GitHub. This makes it easy to re-spin the app whenever I change computers.

Conclusion

Building your own custom software is possible now. The barriers to entry to this paradigm are increasingly low, and the whole software industry is shifting toward developer-grade tools that anyone can use. The question becomes: what are you building?

Want to build custom apps for you and your team? Submit an enquiry here.

Resources

• Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166.
• King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 798–807.
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.
• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.
• Matthews, G. (2007). The impact of commitment, accountability, and written goals on goal achievement. Dominican University of California.
• Duckworth, A. L., Kirby, T. A., Gollwitzer, A., & Oettingen, G. (2013). From fantasy to action: Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) improves academic performance in children. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
• Schippers, M. C., Scheepers, A. W. A., & Peterson, J. B. (2015). A scalable goal-setting intervention closes both the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap. Palgrave Communications.

Everything is left; there is everything left in a seeming lack of control. Control is often used as a mechanism to avoid certain emotions and states that underly one’s existence. Yet, avoiding something often amplifies its yearn for consideration.

It doesn’t have to be like that. You don’t have to cling to your past and present way of living just because it’s all you know. Quite the opposite. You don’t know, and in that not knowing there is a certain characteristic of space and relaxation that open up the possibility of continuous plasticity, renewal, and discoveries.

Experimentation is always available, and it is your choice to engage in play.

Neurologically, the amygdala (the fear center, impulsive system) activates in both scenarios. In scenario 2, the amygdala is then overridden by the frontal cortex (the “logical,” composed brain system), which intervenes to shape experience through thoughts.

We are constantly shaping our perceptions through thoughts. We do it to ourselves and to others. We establish limiting beliefs about something, even if unconsciously, and continue living with the brake strongly held down. We do this to each other, too. Due to our social nature, we’re inevitably influenced by the thoughts of the people around us, and we internalize all sorts of stories that may make our existence easier or harder.

The teacher told me I’m a good writer and it’s exam day. This essay topic seems challenging (scary), but the teacher told me I’m a good writer—I can handle this. The teacher told me I’m a bad writer and it’s exam day. This essay topic seems scary; there is identification with fear, and I don’t think I will pass the exam.

You can see how this concept applies to how we make choices and perceive our life. It is one of the most powerful systems to ever exist for humans, because it can shape entire life trajectories and every choice we make.

So, what to do about it? Merely notice the existence of belief effects in each moment during the day, and choose what to do with them. There are choices available at all times. You have the opportunity to be promoted as vice president of the company, being offered more money and status. You think ‘this opportunity is not what i want in life, but it’s good money and i don’t have enough’, so you accept the offer. Alternatively, you think ‘this opportunity is one of many, the status and money offers look great, but it’s not aligned with what i want in life’, so you decline the offer. Behind your choices are underlying beliefs (antecedent reappraisals).

I instructed Softr AI Cobuilder to build a system based on Priestley’s 24 Assets, and it was done in a few minutes, including setting up the backend, frontend, user groups and permission settings. A build that would have taken multiple days a year ago. The tradeoff between using SaaS tools and building custom apps is increasingly collapsing.

For operators, this enables innovation at scale, even without the in-depth technical knowledge of software engineers. It is possible to build software tools and iterate very fast via natural language prompts.

The video shows an example of building an internal tool with Softr AI Cobuilder.

Softr AI Cobuilder

AI in Softr is embedded in the building experience in two primary ways:

• The Cobuilder can build an entire app from scratch and iterate on it based on your prompts. First, you can send the initial prompt to start the app building process. Once the app is live, the cobuilder is available via the dedicated icon on the top left corner, where you can chat with it to make changes.
• The AI block allows you to build custom app sections (blocks) with AI, and you can also modify the code generated by ai. You can learn more about it here.

Using AI consumes credits/tokens. In Softr, you can track credit consumption in the dedicated menu, and each plan has a set amount of ai credits that can be topped up.

Using AI in Softr is not the only path to building apps and components, though. The no-code building capabilities are always available and remain the primary surface in the app-building interface.

Even apps generated by the AI Cobuilder can be edited manually in the no-code interface, which makes Softr a compelling tool for non-technical builders who want to maintain control and flexibility over access to data (via Softr Databases) and apps. The artefacts generated by the AI don’t stay “gated” behind code that feels like a black box, but are visually editable on the canvas at any time.

Conclusion

Knowing what to build becomes increasingly crucial. That’s always been one of the major roadblocks in software development. Many software projects fail because of behavioral reasons - the “users” end up not using the systems for several possible reasons: a lack of tangible value, a lack of clear usage guidelines, a lack of enough incentives to switch to the new system, and more. These are mostly behavioral causes, which remain a reality for humans and one of the core areas of intervention for success in any domain when introducing change. It is now increasingly possible to focus more on such behavioral intervention and less on building tools.

I have worked with hundreds of teams to implement systems that stay. Do you wish to build tailored software for you and your team? Submit an enquiry.

Featured products

• Personal Training OS - Softr
• 24 Assets - Notion
• The Great CEO Within - Notion

Affiliate Links

• Build custom business apps with Softr
• Get 3 months free of Notion Business with unlimited AI (for startups)
• Sign up for Coda
• Sign up for Airtable
• Get one free month on the pro plan in Make (automation software)
• Build powerful automations with n8n

Most systems people build for their teams are dead within two months. Change doesn’t come naturally for most people, and for valid reasons.

Existing habits and routines interact to keep the status quo, and it is our job to apply enough commitment consistently to make the change we wish to see occur. An important concept in facilitating change and adoption of something new is to make the desired action easy—an idea known as ‘affordance’ in design, or ‘scaffolding’ in education. If I want more people to throw garbage in dedicated bins, I place multiple trash cans near the lavatory in the public toilet, maybe accompanied by funny or informational signs.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been evolving to increase the scaffolding available to non-technical users to interact with software tools. Building an automation doesn’t require writing and deploying scripts. It is instead possible simply using natural language instructions via a chat interface. Updating data in a system doesn’t have to involve learning how to navigate and interact with it but can be done via the same chat interface.

What if the adoption problem shrinks when people can use systems wherever they already work? You could keep the AI chat open, and ask questions about your data and add, update, or delete records — all through the chat interface.

That’s one opportunity that the Coda MCP provides. This is a plug-and-play connector for any AI tools into your systems in Coda. It lets you read, update, and manage your Coda data by simply asking your AI assistant, or automating the process.

*Such increases in convenience and affordances that we have been developing for so many decades may also contribute to atrophying human cognitive skills, because many actions that used to require effort to learn and practice have now become seemingly effortless, no longer requiring cognitive or physical resources to be consumed in the process. This is an interesting area of learning, and I have written a bit about it here. There are some practical implications for the choices we can make, and we are lucky to have such vast choices. We can choose to do hard things, and this increasingly becomes a valued *status-signaling trait.

How to Connect the Coda MCP

You can connect the Coda MCP to any tool that supports HTTP streamable MCP connections. This includes ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Antigravity, Notion, n8n, Make, Pipedream, etc. In the video, I show how to connect the Coda MCP in Notion Custom Agents. The same steps and principles apply to other similar tools where you can build ai agents connected to MCP servers.

Here is the standard connection snippet you can use. The token (to be kept secret) can be generated here.

{  
   "mcpServers": {    
      "Coda": {
        "url": "https://coda.io/apis/mcp",
        "headers": {
          "Authorization": "Bearer Your-Coda-Auth-Token"
      }
    }
  }
}

Coda MCP Tools

Once connected, you will see a list of tools you can use via the AI interface. Find the official list of all available tools here. Tools are actions the AI can take across your Coda docs. Some of them involve manipulating data (adding/updating/deleting), and others only reading data.

For example, here are some prominent tools in the Coda MCP:

• search: searches for content across Coda docs. You can ask the AI a question, and by using the Coda MCP search tool, you can get an accurate answer based on the data in Coda.
• document_create: creates a new Coda doc, which could be duplicated from a template or further populated with data through additional tool calls.
• page_create: creates a new page within an existing Coda doc.
• table_rows_manage: adds/updates/deletes table rows.

Notice how these are typical actions you would take in Coda as a user, say, updating your project management system or CRM. They can be done via the MCP to facilitate efficiency and ease of use, so you don’t have to open the Coda doc at all, if that’s what you want.

Coda MCP Use Cases

1. Capture financial transactions: you can use your ai tool of choice to instruct creating transactions in your Finances doc for financial tracking. This could be also a shortcut or widget on your phone where you can quickly type or dictate the transaction details, and the Coda MCP runs in the background to properly store the data in the doc.
2. Answer team questions via a chat: your team can use an LLM to ask questions about your docs, policies, data stored across Coda docs, and get accurate answers without leaving the chat interface.
3. Use Coda as AI agent memory: you can save AI interactions agent outputs in a Coda doc to use as “memory” and improvement mechanism for your AI agents.

Once you better understand the concept of MCP, you can ideate and refine your use cases for what would make this tool valuable for you because the workflows and options it unlocks are vast and customizable.

Want to build custom AI Agents and workflows in Coda? Submit an enquiry.

Featured products

• Personal Finance System
• The Great CEO
• 24 Assets

Affiliate Links

• Build custom business apps with Softr
• Get 3 months free of Notion Business with unlimited AI (for startups)
• Sign up for Coda
• Sign up for Airtable
• Get one free month on the pro plan in Make (automation software)
• Build powerful automations with n8n

There is a face we show externally, and a face we keep to our close circle and ourselves. And many other faces for different circumstances. Like the concepts of Sekala (one for the tourist gaze) and Niskala (one for the collective self) in Balinese culture. We play hide and seek with ourselves and each other.

There can be cynicism that all humans are fake, portraying themselves favorably depending on the situation, and one can never know the full truth behind the masks. There can be relief because one knows that humans adapt and morph into any circumstance, and they can change shape depending on the context. Both views coexist and exist because of each other.

It is useful and practical to know that human interactions are not to take too seriously. Everyone is making it up along the way, with layers of socialization applied to our behaviors. We can loosen the grip on life and relationships and inject more lightness and humor into how we live daily.

We utilize the frontal cortex to do the harder thing in social contexts—we praise the hosts for the incredible dinner; refrain from hitting the infuriating coworker; don’t make sexual advances to someone, despite our fantasies; don’t belch loudly during the eulogy.

During REM sleep, when dreaming occurs, the frontal cortex goes off-line, and dream scriptwriters run wild. Moreover, if the frontal cortex is stimulated while people are dreaming, the dreams become less dreamlike, with more self-awareness.

Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—”How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind.

— Behave, Robert Sapolsky

We often believe “gut feelings” and rationality are opposed, and that our smartness is so advanced that of course we make rational decisions and we have studied a long time to polish such a hard-earned, prestigious skill!

Biology tells otherwise, and don’t forget, biology is true, unlike thoughts (stories). The amygdala (the more impulsive, primitive part of the brain) and the frontal cortex (the more rational, socialized part) do not operate as opposites from each other. Rather, they each do their job at the same time, exchanging signals.

If you have been taught and firmly believe that the frontal cortex must always prevail, you are missing the point, and it may be valuable to review biology with humility. When choices are aligned across biological systems, much of the suffering most people take for granted fades away, because there is more alignment between behaviors and biological inputs and responses.

If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

— Behave, Robert Sapolsky

Joy, pleasure, and satisfaction don’t stem from the achievement of something (unless it was unexpected). Instead, they happen primarily in anticipation of a reward, particularly if the reward is intermittent and you know the rules of the game.

You fast for 18 hours on an intermittent fasting diet. You know at the end of those 18 hours you get to eat! You have done this for a few weeks already and have become familiar with how this works and how you feel. Say, in a first scenario, you prepare your own food and so you know what you will eat, and it’s pretty much always the same meal with simple ingredients you have habituated to over time. The dopamine response (driving joy/pleasure) will be quite low, peaking in anticipation of the reward (the meal), and again raising when the reward happens (you eat). In a second scenario, you break the fast by eating a surprise meal prepared by your private chef. You don’t know the meal in advance, you only know that you’re hungry and that in the past the chef always cooked delicious and novel meals. Dopamine peaks very high in anticipation of the reward, and then peaks again a bit less once you’re delivered the meal and are eating it. After a few months of doing this every day, you habituate to the situation, and the dopamine peaks are globally lower.

This knowledge has practical implications in your life: you can introduce intermittent rewards as a way to incentivize certain behaviors for yourself and others, which eventually can change a whole system (your nervous system, your habits, your family dynamics, etc.). Dopamine is addictive (it is one of the main neurochemicals behind gambling for the same reasons discussed above, after all), and its manipulation can be incredibly effective, for good and bad.

NOTE: Notion Mail is now deprecated.

As Brian starts the day, he checks the calendar and the inbox to define the most important work to be done. During the night, his “team of agents” scheduled focused work sessions for the day and processed incoming emails, drafting replies and creating tasks when appropriate. Brian reviews the agents' output and makes adjustments to match his judgments, and then begins the work day.

The inbox and calendar are two of the foundational pieces of knowledge work, standing the test of time and remaining prominent in the ever-changing technological environment. The email inbox enables direct interactions one-to-one or one-to-many. The calendar allows coordinating and scheduling time with other people without the need to rely on memory alone.

Over time, ideas around their use have developed, emerging and fading away depending on historical and cultural contexts. A relatively modern concept concerning emails and calendar management revolves around the importance of protecting your time and energy to ensure you don’t spend all day reactively monitoring the inbox, but safeguard it to allow space for focused work on important projects that lead to desired progress in some areas of your business and life.

Depending on the stage of your life and your current beliefs, you may find the concepts of time blocking, inbox 0, and other tactical approaches attractive, impractical, or somewhere in between. Regardless, the concept of time/energy management applies to everyone.

Strategy is not tactics. There are many tactics (short-term approaches/methods) to inbox and calendar management, but what determines which tactics you try or discard is your strategy (the underlying philosophy behind how you behave in the domain of inbox and calendar management).

For example, believing that your energy and time are to be protected from random external requests in favor of working deeply on important projects is a strategy. Because of this strategy/belief, you may implement the tactic of checking the inbox only twice per day, blocking focused work sessions on the calendar, and not working for more than 6 hours each day.

Importantly, if there are no underlying beliefs/strategy, tactics won’t matter and your energy and time investments will be primarily dictated by other people’s requests. In the absence of a cohesive belief system, we default to activities that appear to produce the most instant gratification, which rarely coincide with those that are most impactful.

What Notion AI Can Do

Notion AI Agents can directly interact with your Notion Mail and Notion Calendar accounts (or Gmail and Google Calendar). This means retrieving, creating, organizing, updating, and deleting calendar events and emails on your behalf. This can be automated via Custom Agents or coordinated manually by chatting with custom agents or Notion AI Agent.

Notion Calendar and Notion Mail are distinct products in the Notion suite. The advantage of using Notion Calendar and Mail, if you use Notion, is that they integrate effectively in the ecosystem. You can also use AI Agent(s) to directly interact with those Notion products without leaving your Notion workspace, which has the potential to consolidate and clarify your entire workflows.

This consolidation can reduce context switching across tools, which frees up cognitive real estate, allowing for more space to innovate and reflect. Context switching is the practice of switching across different tools (and contexts) multiple times per day/hour, which drains energy because each context switch requires “loading” all the relevant resources, which differ across contexts.

That’s one step in the direction of implementing the concept of deep work. You can choose to engage in “deep” work instead of hyperactively reacting to other people’s requests all day. And the current tech tools can make implementation much easier to start and iterate on.

To use calendar and email connections with Notion AI Agent (the ever-present chat), you must connect your accounts via Settings > Notion AI > AI connectors. This allows you to select the connected accounts in the available sources when chatting with AI Agent.

To use calendar and email connections with custom agents, you must connect your calendar and email accounts on each agent that uses them, in the agent trigger/actions. If you already connected your accounts at the workspace level (as explained in the previous paragraph), you can just select those accounts (no need to re-connect).

Rethinking the Inbox

As Choudary argues in this essay, Agentic AI can be the railroads to canals—the advent of something completely new that reshuffles entire systems. To take full advantage of the technology, we must reconsider systems from first principles: What needs to be removed? Which workflows can be collapsed? How should the AI Agent Governance system work (guidelines, traces, evals, principles, human in the loop, etc.)?

In this context, AI can become an interesting playground to experiment and reshuffle your way of working. Consider emails as an example. You check your inbox at least once daily. It contains messages from people and companies—direct messages, promotional emails, broadcasts, and other categories. Direct emails matter most because they're personally addressed to you as part of ongoing conversations about specific projects or topics. Other email types are usually less important.

Your most critical email task is replying to people in ongoing conversations—understanding, reassuring, and taking other human actions in dialogue. However, the inbox can become a place of escape: checking emails because actual work is daunting and demands concentration and narrow focus. Plus, the anticipation of what might be in the inbox (similar to social media) is dopaminergic. Its intermittently rewarding (dopaminergic) nature causes a certain addiction rooted in the hope that you are indeed someone who has something to contribute to society, whose attention is requested by people, who has the influence to help others. So you check the inbox frequently because the feelings of validation, affiliation, and status that subtly transpire through this means of communication are addictive.

AI Agents can help establish systems (”railroads”, using Choudary’s analogy referenced previously) that raise and maintain behavioral standards, making new principles and behaviors easier to follow. Regardless, your behaviors around your work depend on your mindsets, no matter how agentic, powerful, modern, shiny the latest tools appear to be. Your mindsets are malleable and trainable to facilitate a life worth living for you, and this might be the most important investment you’ll ever make. As with most anything, this is a work in progress without an end state.

There is often a general psychological posture of resistance to emails, seeing them as an evil that has to be done and that creates anxiety because they contain so many requests from other people, whom we don’t want to let down primarily because of evolutionary reasons (wanting to belong, feel accepted and safe, respected and useful). Yet, the way you “feel” when processing emails is your decision, and it can be changed at any time with a simple shift in perspective or glimpse practiced many times, such as “what would I need to do to make this moment 10% more enjoyable?" (source: Joe Hudson).

Depending on where you are in your life, the last statement above may sound like total bullshit, or maybe you find it compelling and experience a small sense of spaciousness and calm within you upon reading the glimpse. Ultimately, emails are not a life or death situation; in fact, quite the opposite—one of the least dangerous things you do in your whole day. It is possible to apply a certain sense of lightness and craftsmanship to each email you process and reply to.

Practical Use Cases

Cal Newport popularized the concepts of deep work and time blocking—ideas that permeated the minds of many knowledge workers who lacked clear principles on how to do work, not just what to do. Notion AI Agents with calendar and email integrations can facilitate the applications of such principles, for example.

You can keep your initiatives and tasks in Notion, and work with AI Agents to time block your day or week following your preferences (which you can define in the prompt, and/or in one or multiple Notion pages) and your actual availability (based on your calendar events). This can be done as part of a Weekly Review, and/or at the start of each day (with this process, for example).

At a philosophical level, depending on where you are in your life, time blocking can be useful to gauge how you spend your time and direct your energy according to your vision, or it may not serve you any longer (if you have done it for a long time and maybe there is a sense of being trapped in it due to the fear of the consequences that you imagine stem from dropping it). This is an exciting part of living—that there is always room for evolution, change, new experiments, if you observe with curiosity and an action-oriented attitude.

Another concept popularized by Newport in A World Without Email is the idea that most emails require processing like any other task. Emails often contain implications of needed research or implementation/production. As such, they require energy and time, like any other task. So, one can treat the inbox as a means of task processing, where you receive inputs that often need to be turned into tasks to be done.

You can automate such processing by connecting Notion Mail with your Notion workspace and saving emails in a data source, which you use as a task tracking system to monitor statuses and other information about your emails that require action. You can give visibility to your team, so they are aware of your workload and progress.

Notion AI can also draft and send emails, if you give it permissions to do so. I am not yet sure about the value of this aspect, while I do find the process of saving emails to Notion compelling for facilitating task processing or simply tracking conversations as part of a CRM.

Alternatively, you can use Notion Mail or any other email service, and save emails into your data sources ad hoc using the browser extension or Flylighter. I currently prefer using a browser extension, as it is intentional and clear what I want to save, how, and where. This way, the email inbox is for reading emails, some of which are action items that I save in Notion as tasks, which I process when I decide, before replying to the email thread conveniently linked on the task as a URL property.

Conclusion

Experimenting with different strategies and tactics to organize your email inbox and calendar is a never-ending process. Your mindset and behaviors around work dictate what you do, and more importantly, how you do it. What you used to do doesn’t matter as much as what you currently experiment with. AI can serve as a modern tool to facilitate your work processes; a playground for reflections and experimentations that enhance your personal capabilities.

Evolutionarily, the ability to bear stress can be a sign of fitness and health, signaling one’s emotional stability (the capacity for stillness even in the most dire conditions), which is a desirable trait for attracting mates and increasing the chances of spreading genes. This may be one of the reasons behind stress as status signaling.

The aforementioned people may complain about stress and how stressed they are, yet not change anything or seek any change. That’s what signaling is: acquiring social status by directly or indirectly raising the flag and shouting, “Look at poor me, how stressed and hard-working I am,” as if that’s all there is and all that will ever matter in life.

Chronic stress may end up burning the emotional energy out of life until the end of your days, unless there is an intentional shift in mindset and behavior. You become what you attend to, and to make a change, there must be a change in attention in favor of where you want to go. To begin change, one must start to move in the desired direction and stop ruminating in thoughts about how to. A good starting point is to write down the vision for a good life in detail. If money didn’t matter at all, how would you live your life?

This reminds me of the argument that, as the Industrial Revolution unfolded and led many people to move away from agricultural lifestyles embedded in nature and requiring great physical effort to do even the activities we consider most basic today into cities and the comfort of modern life, we became less physically active, incapable of manual work, and out of touch with our physicality and the environment all around us.

There is truth to these situations. If you don’t use something, you “lose” it, until you practice again and can gain it back over time. The use of LLMs for writing, for example, significantly decreases activity in germane cognitive load, which is the process responsible for turning short-term information into long-term skill.

According to Cognitive Load Theory, there are three types of cognitive load: intrinsic (the intrinsic complexity of the information), extraneous (superfluous elements to learning the topic of interest), and germane (the effort required to transfer short-term information into long-term knowledge). All of these “consume” cognitive/mental effort whenever you are learning something or in a novel situation.

Germane cognitive load is particularly negatively affected when you use LLMs to aid writing and other tasks that require a high degree of cognitive effort. From the study’s abstract: “EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use.”

This is interesting to know. At first sight, it may seem like an undesirable result of the increasing use of and reliance on LLMs. Maybe it is so. We don’t know for sure until we discover whether there are also any positive effects resulting from LLM use that may overturn such shrinkage in cognitive load. Maybe the chance for higher volume of deliberate practice, or the faster feedback loops.

Most people don’t care about negative effects discussed in niche scientific publications that they don’t directly experience themselves in some significant manner that impacts daily life. We are addicted to convenience, and continue to vow for convenience with our choices every minute. Yet, convenience comes with downsides and long-term consequences hidden in plain sight.

A human is foremost an animal, an ape, a mammal, not to be confused with an artificial creation made in a tech lab. Animals like us have some fundamental biological truths that don’t go away if we pretend they don’t exist. Instead, they roar to be seen and acknowledged, increasingly strongly, until some kind of explosion occurs (whether internally or externally, large or small and incremental).

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (arXiv)

Strategy is the set of choices a business makes to stand out and thrive in the long term. It involves systems and games.

Systems are the underlying external and internal mechanisms that compose your business. This includes people, teams, leadership principles, culture (how you do things), external players, market dynamics, and many more elements. All these systems are interdependent to varying degrees and form the complex environment where you play. The longer a system has been standing, the deeper its influence and power, and the more difficult it is to change it. Bureaucratic red tape is a system; the way the media and entertainment industry works is a system; the set of mindsets and behaviors within your family or team are part of a system.

Within those systems, there are games constantly being played. Games include dominance vs. affiliation dynamics, zero-sum vs. cooperation, and choosing which game to play at all. Business is an iterative game because it constantly requires shifting moves and adapting to the slight or significant changes of rules (the environment). Playing the game productively means choosing customers, positioning, and creating the conditions for change to occur.

If you serve people, psychosocial components are one of the most important aspects you must consider. We seek status, affiliation, safety as primary biological desires. Your products must fulfill at least one of those desires to be successful and adopted by people. iPhone users gain status and affiliation by owning the product. The same is valid for introducing systemic change. A system exists because it provides important human needs to the people involved. You can’t replace a system without keeping or enhancing the meeting of those needs.

Doing strategy requires constant attention and adaptation to the environment—both internal and external—that’s always shifting due to many factors (some within your control, others not). So, strategy is a long-term, infinite game. It is iterative by nature and it never ends. To effectively do strategy is to practice being at ease with the unknown, because you can’t know in advance whether your strategic choices will turn out effective at keeping your business healthy and in the game.

Strategy does not equal tactics. Tactics can be a subset of the strategy - short-term experiments that help achieve the strategy and that you can clearly measure and evaluate. Tactics are pragmatic and tangible, much less unknown than strategy. That’s why it is considered easier and most common to work on tactics than strategy. Yet, it’s the strategic choices that make a long-term difference. Running a Facebook ad campaign is a tactic; deciding that your brand will only serve a niche audience of 500 people and not chase mass appeal is a strategy.

Strategy involves all functions of your business. It’s an all-encompassing container that feeds and is fed by all the components within and without your business. Strategy isn’t just for leadership; it shapes how your support team responds, how your product team prioritizes, how your marketing speaks.

To do strategy well, you must continue remaining curious, open, receptive, and asking questions that make you reflect and adjust course when needed. If you are overwhelmed by managing daily operations or micromanaging people, it is very difficult to take the time and energy required to analyze the big picture and make strategic choices. You need open space and thoughtful questions.

When asked with precision and answered with sincerity, questions can place you in the most effective place to define your strategy. That’s why having a strategic thinking partner can definitely help, even if it’s a LLM (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT) that you train to ask thoughtful questions to help you hone strategy. Questions such as (just a few of them below, many more are in the book):

• Who is this project for? Who is my smallest viable audience?
• What systems would need to change for my project to succeed? How can I create the conditions for that change?
• Where will I cause tension? What resistance should I anticipate from others (and myself)?
• How does my project tap into existing social desires for status, affiliation, and/or security to help propel its adoption and spread?
• Am I building the scaffolding people will need to adopt and move forward?
• How can I avoid becoming trapped by sunk costs if my initial strategy proves ill-fated? When should I pivot vs. persist? Where's the dip?
• How will I resist the social gravity and "pull to the center" over time as my project matures and faces pressure to conform?

You reflect on these questions iteratively—often enough to catch necessary transition points, but not so often that you never commit to a plan long enough for it to work. This is an ongoing practice, an unfinished project, a work in progress - and it is an enjoyable process.

Many of us go through our days (and lives) oblivious to the underlying systems that give and take life, often detached from them, seeing them as something out there and disconnected from ourselves, which we can’t consciously sense. But this is not true. We can sense many of them if we choose so and practice.

One of the core systems of our body is the lymphatic system, a deep web of vessels running throughout the body and cleaning up “waste”, contributing to overall well-being (vitality, reduction of sickness), proper digestion, beauty, including the appearance of clear skin, no swelling, youthfulness*.

*all qualities that evolutionarily signal health and fertility, a great mix for reproductive attraction, which is very much sought after at magnified scale in many personal accounts on social media for understandable (to some degree) evolutionary reasons.

Since the lymphatic system doesn’t have an inherent “pump” that drives its activation and movement (like the cardiovascular system does, where the heart is the “pump”), its activation and circulation rely on movement—both “internal” (e.g., breathing), and “external”.

How It Works

There are specific areas of the body where lymph nodes are located to facilitate and direct the flow of fluids toward the heart space (around the clavicles), where lymph drains back into the bloodstream. Lymph nodes sometimes swell when there is sickness (e.g., in the throat, armpits, inner thigh, and many other areas) because they are the spots where the immune system “checks” for possible external threats acting on the body and producing illness (bacteria, viruses, fungi). We can conceptualize lymph nodes as “security checkpoints”.

As lymph moves through the lymphatic vessels, it gets checked-up by the “local lymph police” at each lymph node, to ensure there are no prohibited substances smuggled in. If there are such substances, the battle to remove them begins. For example, a swollen knee after an injury is a sign of inflammation in the area, with lymph fluid accumulating as part of that inflammatory response. Movement is key in removing swelling and inflammation, despite common advice being to refrain from movement when there is an injury.

Lymph fluid is essentially filtered blood plasma — the clear, watery part of blood — that has seeped out of your capillaries into the spaces between your cells (the interstitial space). Once outside the bloodstream, this fluid picks up cellular waste (ammonia, CO₂, debris from normal cell activity), proteins that are too large to re-enter blood capillaries directly, immune cells (white blood cells), fats absorbed from the gut (via specialized lymphatic vessels called lacteals).

At that point, it's called lymph. It's slightly viscous — not as fluid as water, not a gel either — because of all the stuff it's carrying.

The lymphatic system is the plumbing that collects and moves this fluid:

1. Lymphatic capillaries (tiny, one-cell-thick vessels in your tissues) absorb the excess interstitial fluid
2. It flows through progressively larger lymphatic vessels — all one-way, using valves to prevent backflow
3. Along the way, it passes through lymph nodes, where immune cells inspect it for bacteria, viruses, or other threats
4. Eventually, the cleaned-up lymph drains back into your bloodstream at the subclavian veins near the clavicles

The Role of Movement

Regular exercise (zone 2 cardio, resistance training, etc.) does naturally activate the lymphatic system by boosting muscle contractions, joint motion, breathing and cardiovascular output (De Oliveira et al., 2018). Muscle contractions squeeze lymph vessels, breathing creates pressure differentials in the thoracic cavity that pull lymph upward, joint motion opens and closes valves.

Human and animal data show exercise alone can raise lymph clearance 3-6× compared with rest, and increase lymphatic contraction frequency and flow (De Oliveira et al., 2018). The most effective investment in your lymphatic system health is to keep moving. Exercise is the foundation, but you can go deeper in the practice.

To experiment further and directly target the lymphatic system, you can perform specific practices listed below. These practices let you target lymph flow directly and deliberately, the way a stretching practice targets flexibility beyond what running alone provides.

Activation Practices

Conscious lymphatic system activation means intentionally using movement or touch to stimulate lymph flow, rather than just relying on automatic function. You’re targeting lymph flow the way you’d target a specific muscle group in a resistance training session.

Conscious lymphatic system activation requires specific movements that aid the natural flow of lymphatic fluid, which flows one-way (up towards the clavicles). Here is an overview of some practices targeting the lymphatic system.

• The Vertical Shake (Ido Portal): continuous gentle bouncing paired with scanning the body and releasing tensions. The rhythmic vertical compression pumps lymph through vessels with full-body coverage.

• Manual lymphatic drainage (MLD): a specific, gentle massage designed to enhance lymph vessel filling and emptying and improve lymph drainage (Nahar et al., 2024; Thompson et al., 2020; Palmer, 2024; Choi et al., 2019). The logic is:** open central, less‑congested territories first, then bring peripheral fluid toward them** (“proximal‑to‑distal, then distal‑to‑proximal”). Read this short guide and watch this video to learn more about how to do MLD.

  MLD works by mechanically stimulating lymph capillaries and collectors with precise, gentle, skin‑stretching movements that open more lymphatic pathways, boost lymph pumping, and redirect fluid from congested areas to functioning territories

NOTE

When you're sick, the checkpoints are actively processing threats. Stimulating flow bypasses or overwhelms that checkpoint process. It's a situation where it is best NOT TO perform manual lymphatic drainage and other lymphatic activation practices, because doing so would foster the spread of the infection.

• Lymphatic pump techniques: hands‑on rhythmic pumping (e.g., thoracic or pedal pump) that augments the body’s inherent lymphatic pumping and immune responses (Franzini et al., 2018; Scallan et al., 2016). Watch this video for an example.
• Diaphragmatic breathing: the inhale travels through the entire respiratory system, driven by the diaphragm, which sits at the base of the ribcage, separating the thoracic cavity (lungs, heart) from the abdominal cavity. The diaphragm contracts and flattens downward on the inhale (creating negative pressure that pulls air in), and relaxes and domes upward on the exhale. Each breath cycle acts as one pump stroke. Deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing maximizes the excursion (how far the diaphragm moves), which maximizes the pressure differential, which maximizes the “pumping” effect. Shallow chest breathing barely moves the diaphragm and produces a much weaker “pump”.

These practices target lymph flow while you're awake. But the lymphatic system does some of its most critical work while you sleep — particularly in the brain.

The Role of Sleep

The lymphatic system pathway that operates in the brain is called glymphatics. This system clears brain waste during sleep, provided you get enough quality sleep. When sleep is not sufficient, you may notice a sensation of fogginess. That’s a sign of insufficient waste clearance during the night.

During sleep, especially non‑REM deep sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)* flow through the glymphatic system increases, enhancing clearance of metabolic waste—proteins like amyloid-β and tau that, when they build up, are linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's—from brain tissue (Reddy & Van Der Werf, 2020; Hauglund & Pavan, 2020; Rasmussen et al., 2018; Lundgaard et al., 2017).

When you're awake, your brain cells are swollen with activity. When you fall into deep sleep, noradrenaline** levels drop, your brain cells shrink slightly, and the gaps between them widen, creating more room for cerebrospinal fluid to flush through and carry waste away (Reddy & Van Der Werf, 2020; Voumvourakis et al., 2023; Li et al., 2022).

*Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is the clear liquid that surrounds and cushions the brain and spinal cord, akin to a shock absorber. During deep sleep, CSF flows through the brain more actively to wash away metabolic waste (like proteins that build up during waking hours), which is why long-term good sleep is so important for brain health.

**Noradrenaline (also called norepinephrine) is a chemical messenger in the brain that keeps you alert and focused when you're awake.

Poor glymphatic clearance is associated with increased risk of neurodegenerative disease. This makes sleep as essential as movement for maintaining a healthy lymphatic system.

Conclusion

For someone who already “moves” (i.e., practices some sports/exercise), conscious lymphatic system activation practices are an additional tool in the kit. Combined with quality sleep, which clears brain waste through the glymphatic system, these three pillars form a complete picture of lymphatic health. For someone who moves very little or has chronic illness, lymphatic system activation is a great accessible entry point to greater well-being. It is low-impact and doesn’t take much time.

Movement alone stimulates lymphatic system activation significantly, and it can be enough for healthy people. There is more to conscious lymphatics practices than the research captures. They can be a portal to a greater connection with the entire body, which is missing in many of us. Yet, there is a body, and it can be a major portal to the peace, spaciousness, and silence that’s always present, if you are willing to notice it. That quality of spaciousness Jack noticed on the floor? It is always there.

Resources

De Oliveira, M., Gurgel, M., Amorim, B., Ramos, C., Derchain, S., Furlan-Santos, N., Santos, C., & Sarian, L. (2018). Long term effects of manual lymphatic drainage and active exercises on physical morbidities, lymphoscintigraphy parameters and lymphedema formation in patients operated due to breast cancer: A clinical trial. PLoS ONE, 13. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189176

Thompson, B., Gaitatzis, K., De Jonge, X., Blackwell, R., & Koelmeyer, L. (2020). Manual lymphatic drainage treatment for lymphedema: a systematic review of the literature. Journal of Cancer Survivorship, 15, 244 - 258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11764-020-00928-1

Nahar, H., Al-Dossari, B., Shamsi, S., & Keridis, O. (2024). Manual Lymphatic Drainage and Exercises in Management of Secondary Lymphedema Following Mastectomy-Systemic Review. International Journal of Recent Innovations in Medicine and Clinical Research. https://doi.org/10.18231/j.ijrimcr.2024.028

Palmer, S. (2024). An overview of manual lymphatic drainage.. British journal of community nursing, 29 9, 438-440. https://doi.org/10.12968/bjcn.2024.0101

Franzini, D., Cuny, L., & Pierce-Talsma, S. (2018). Osteopathic Lymphatic Pump Techniques. Journal of Osteopathic Medicine Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, 118, e43 - e44. https://doi.org/10.7556/jaoa.2018.112

Choi, D., Park, E., Jung, E., Cha, B., Lee, S., Yu, J., Kim, P., Lee, S., Hong, Y., Koh, C., Cho, C., Wu, Y., Jeon, N., Wong, A., Shin, L., Kumar, R., Bermejo-Moreno, I., Srinivasan, R., Cho, I., & Hong, Y. (2019). Piezo1 incorporates mechanical force signals into the genetic program that governs lymphatic valve development and maintenance.. JCI insight, 4 5. https://doi.org/10.1172/jci.insight.125068

Scallan, J., Zawieja, S., Castorena-Gonzalez, J., & Davis, M. (2016). Lymphatic pumping: mechanics, mechanisms and malfunction. The Journal of Physiology, 594. https://doi.org/10.1113/jp272088

Reddy, O., & Van Der Werf, Y. (2020). The Sleeping Brain: Harnessing the Power of the Glymphatic System through Lifestyle Choices. Brain Sciences, 10. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10110868

Hauglund, N., & Pavan, C. (2020). Cleaning the sleeping brain – the potential restorative function of the glymphatic system. Current Opinion in Physiology, 15, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cophys.2019.10.020

Rasmussen, M., Mestre, H., & Nedergaard, M. (2018). The glymphatic pathway in neurological disorders. The Lancet Neurology, 17, 1016-1024. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1474-4422(18)30318-1

Voumvourakis, K., Sideri, E., Papadimitropoulos, G., Tsantzali, I., Hewlett, P., Kitsos, D., Stefanou, M., Bonakis, A., Giannopoulos, S., Tsivgoulis, G., & Paraskevas, G. (2023). The Dynamic Relationship between the Glymphatic System, Aging, Memory, and Sleep. Biomedicines, 11. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines11082092

Li, W., Chen, D., Liu, N., Luan, Y., Zhu, S., & Wang, H. (2022). Modulation of lymphatic transport in the central nervous system. Theranostics, 12, 1117 - 1131. https://doi.org/10.7150/thno.66026

Lundgaard, I., Lu, M., Yang, E., Peng, W., Mestre, H., Hitomi, E., Deane, R., & Nedergaard, M. (2017). Glymphatic clearance controls state-dependent changes in brain lactate concentration. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, 37, 2112 - 2124. https://doi.org/10.1177/0271678x16661202

Freedom is a choice that unfolds itself when there is a cage that constrains all other possible choices. We think freedom is the abundance of optionality—and it is, at first sight. After a certain point, we may understand that freedom only exists because its opposite does.

To be free is the realization that despite all the possible options available, this is it. And it’s not unspoiled, perfect, free from riddles—far from it. That may be the enjoyable part of the journey - to experience all those seeming bugs in the system, and continue exploring.

Freedom is this, as deep and profound as you want it to be, taking a lifetime to explore and unfold with curiosity, despite all the other possible options.

Dashboards are metrics-driven visualizations that help you and your team make choices based on data, or simply consult analytics about your work and life endeavors. Insights based on real data are valuable because they present the truth of the past and current situations, which are otherwise obfuscated by cognitive distortions and biases. You can see the truth more clearly and make new choices accordingly.

A dashboard is only as useful as the metrics chosen and the quality of the underlying data. The Notion Dashboard block uses data sources in your Notion workspace. So, there must be an underlying solid and well-maintained structure in order to surface the data you wish to visualize.

The famous saying in data science fields applies: “garbage in, garbage out”. With inaccurate/corrupted/non-relevant data (garbage in), you can’t get meaningful visualizations representing the truth (garbage out). So, you must work on the foundations first before embellishing the surface area — just like the foundations of a house are the first and one of the most important things that determine the house’s structural integrity over decades.

That said, AI is shifting this equation. Because of the text-based retrieval of LLMs and their increased accuracy of output, the degree of rigor of the data infrastructure can be lower, as long as there is data somewhere that is retrievable. For example, an AI agent can query a messy database and sometimes still return useful insights, whereas a chart view of the same data would be unreadable.

Many teams struggle to build useful dashboards because they focus on visuals before defining what matters. Define and agree on the key questions and metrics first, which will evolve as your strategy does.

Then check whether the data you need already exists — and where — or if groundwork is needed first. At that point, you build the necessary data sources to store the data, possibly connected across multiple software tools via their APIs (application programming interface) or MCPs (model context protocol).

Notion is a workspace many teams already use for project management, documentation, and collaboration. Native dashboards to gain insights about internal operations can be powerful if you don’t already have them, or if what you have is broken. You could track team members’ capacity to take on additional projects/tasks, team productivity, or use Notion as a KPI tracker for your business, where every week, each team member responsible for specific KPIs (key performance indicators) tracks them (or this process could be automated). Over time, you get a wealth of historical insights to inform your decisions and strategy.

How It Works

The native Dashboard block in Notion is available on the Business plan and above. You can find out more about Notion pricing plans here. If you are a startup, you are eligible for a 3-month free trial on the Business plan by using this link.

Dashboard is a block and a data source view in Notion. This means you can create a Dashboard on any page via the dedicated slash command, or as a view in any database or data source page layout. Notion AI Agent can also create and edit dashboard views based on your written instructions via chat.

The dashboard block supports multi-column layouts with metric cards, charts, and all other available Notion data source views. One dashboard view can contain visualizations from multiple data sources. A data source in Notion is a table as part of a database (i.e., a container of tables). You can only include data source views in a dashboard. It is not possible (currently) to include text and any other block that is not a data source view.

There is an edit mode, and a view mode, separate from each other and applicable via a dedicated button at the top right corner of the dashboard. Edit mode allows you to make edits to the dashboard, while view mode “locks” the dashboard so that you can only view and filter/sort the whole dashboard or specific views, but are not overwhelmed by all the editing options. This is a great feature, in my opinion, because often I just want to view the data and not face all the available editing options and popup menus.

Here is an example: a team dashboard combining sales data and project status in one place.

Conclusion

Dashboards shape the stories you tell yourself about the past, present, and future. Start with the right questions — What's our capacity? Are we on track? — and build the infrastructure to answer them.

I specialize in building dashboards and scalable data infrastructure. To learn more and inquire about how we can work together, visit my business site.

This is Schumpeter’s law. It explains why the business that scales to thousands of employees often loses touch with its customer base, who start complaining and reminiscing of the old days when customer support felt personal and responsive.

Change happens constantly, and the business must not remain “stuck” in old ways of thought and behavior which would create stasis (losing quality, momentum, and market share) in the new paradigm. But it needs to acknowledge and accept the changes and adapt the strategy accordingly.

Strategy is the set of choices on how to play the game of business, which varies over time because the game’s rules and landscape are constantly shifting due to internal and external factors.

In private life, say you made a lot of money and buy a huge property with a house and other amenities. Such a purchase has implications for your lifestyle. You’ll likely consider hiring a team of people to take care of the lawn, the swimming pool, clean the facilities, install security mechanisms to prevent unwanted visitors, and more.

Choices, especially when “scaled” (something that becomes more complex, with many interconnected elements at play), have multiple order effects and implications that have to be confronted. Some effects are desirable to you, others less so. All real effects nonetheless.

Disruption happens all the time, whether you cause it or something else does. If you think you want to scale, grow, increase impact, are you onboard with the implications of such a choice?

With such fading, the care you take when you sweep the floor in the morning or serve a customer in the afternoon may fade too. And each small decrease in care and engagement adds up, until the shop is no more.

Change happens all the time and it is fine to choose to change profession, lifestyle, or anything else. It is also fine, and can be most rewarding, to take care of something; to maintain something with a certain degree of engagement and love that is needed for it to stay, continue to exist and evolve with you.

Maintenance doesn’t require much effort, but it doesn’t happen by itself. And lack of maintenance corresponds to abandonment, making the abandoned thing disappear, at first slowly and then all of a sudden. This applies to businesses, bodies, minds, relationships, roads, houses, buildings of all sorts, and maybe your life too. That woodwork shop is all you need, then and now, if you resolve to maintain it with care.

Once returned from grocery shopping and having organized the kitchen, Ryan sat at his desk and opened the laptop. During the time he was outside, what he often refers to as his “ai team” had parsed through his inbox, replied to some emails, and generated action items for more complicated requests that required his analysis. Pleased by the outcome, he began to analyze the ai reports and continued his work. When queried about his thoughts on this new way of working, Ryan mentions time and cost savings, as well as the gains in effectiveness at his work, because he can focus on the most high-impact action items on his list.

While Ryan is a fictional character (drawn from personal observation and experience working with many CEOs), the narrative is one rooted in the current reality of tech and ai tools evolution (McKinsey, 2025). This is the core premise behind Notion AI Custom Agents — semi-autonomous AIs that can connect to any of your tools (plus all the data you store in Notion) and conduct work. Not a chat-based LLM (large language model), but an agentic one (one that can take action across tools as a user).

Notion AI Custom Agents are AI-based automated workflows that run by themselves on a schedule, when mentioned, via chat, or when triggered by specific actions in third-party tools (Slack, Mail, Calendar, and more). They consume Notion credits. Custom because they are customizable to your and your team’s needs; Agents because they can take actions across your Notion workspace and connected third-party tools, if you allow so. This adds an automation layer to your Notion workspace and work life.

Custom Agents can make edits across the Notion workspace, connect with third-party tools via their MCP (Model Context Protocol, a standardized protocol for automated AI interactions with software tools), and use context from any native and third-party connections (e.g., Google Drive, GitHub, Slack, and any other tool that exposes an MCP server).

If you use Notion with your team, you can share custom agents across the whole team, only some people, or keep it private. Custom agents respect user permission levels set across the workspace and account for all the context you share with them. They are an add-on for the Business and Enterprise plans and consume credits (consumption depends on task complexity and can be monitored at the workspace level). For pricing info about custom agents, see Notion pricing.

Use Cases

Say you want to automate a daily report on your or your team’s activities into Slack, or as a dedicated Notion page created daily. You can create a Custom Agent that does that every day at 5 PM. Same for a weekly report. Or you wish to get a daily report in the morning with the top 3 priorities that need your focus for the day, also considering all the emails received overnight. You can create a Custom Agent for that.

There needs to be an underlying system in Notion or connected third-party tools with the data you need. Custom Agents don’t magically tell you what you did or will do by reading your mind. The underlying system and the precision of your instructions will determine the quality of the output. The system is the set of connected data sources, pages, and documentation within your Notion workspace and other connected tools. The simpler and clearer a data structure, the easier it is to work with it, both for humans and artificial intelligence.

The precision of your instructions refers to the clarity of your writing in expressing the desired outcome and output. It often requires multiple iterations of writing as you test the ai output, determine its quality against your specs, and adjust the instructions accordingly. This is a generally-applicable principle in AI and life: be comprehensive, explicit, and ask for what you want, and you shall receive it. Play overt games instead of covert ones.

There are refinements needed to make Custom Agents work well and meet your expectations. Do not expect to effortlessly spend a few minutes setting up an AI Agent and everything to work, at least at this stage. Iterations are important and a key part of the game of building something worth using. Be patient and accept short-term effort for longer-term benefits, as it is often the case with many worthy pursuits. There is a clear feedback mechanism in building a custom agent (i.e., the quality of the ai output compared to your expectations), which can make the process of iterations productive and enjoyable.

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Beyond the practical applications, agents raise a deeper question about how we relate to our work.

How Knowledge Work Changes

The interesting thing about ai agents is that they represent a new paradigm in knowledge work. Cal Newport defines knowledge work as 'the economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort' (Newport, 2024). AI agents are shifting both the methods and the conception of this work. When some of your responsibilities can be automated via ai agents that are always-on and follow your requests precisely, what is the cost of continuing to do those responsibilities by yourself instead of focusing your energy on something with higher leverage?

Logically, this makes sense — outsourcing some tasks to ai agents in order to free up time in favor of high-impact activities appears a no-brainer. Practically, reality is nuanced. There are emotions involved, and ingrained concepts about what work is and what it “should” be that permeate our society. Therefore, we often cling to our profession because it is a source of identity, because it provides money to pay the bills, because this is all we have done and the idea of doing something else feels overwhelmingly ambitious, because what would my parents think, and many more reasons (Skorikov & Vondracek, 2011).

Change always happens regardless of our identification with the past and present conditions, though. This can be frightening and liberating at the same time, upon further inspection. What if ai agents open up new possibilities instead of closing them down? What if I can better understand this new technology and figure out a way to productively integrate it into the way I operate daily?

Mindsets drive outcomes in a manner that’s more disproportionate than you may think, because they shape your beliefs and actions at all times (Dweck & Yeager, 2019). Analyzing an innovation with curiosity and openness appears to be a key element of ongoing success and well-being, as defined by an overall sensation of peace and enjoyment. Avoidance very often causes the compounding of the thing you avoid. That’s why, for example, one of the most effective ways to resolve phobias is the progressive exposure to the object of fear under controlled conditions, until the phobia diminishes and vanishes (American Psychological Association).

This doesn’t imply that you “should” use ai agents or forever be dead. Rather, it implies that a curious and open attitude toward them can be advantageous for you to better understand whether you wish to use them, wait, discard them, or whatever other option you imagine. Then the choice is made by you rather than for you by someone else, which likely creates resentment and bitterness.

To a significant degree, the tech industry and society are making this choice for us. Look at how ubiquitous ai has become in software, and how media outlets report about ai. The stories we tell ourselves shape the reality we live, and inevitably so at the societal level.

By the same token, when everyone’s staring at something, it means there is a large opportunity somewhere else too. You don’t have to follow the herd and suddenly be an ai supporter arguing for its incredible benefits all over social media. Rather, you can choose to disengage and find opportunities in a different or parallel field of research or practice that is still emerging and gaining prominence (e.g., in-person experiences, human privacy, human connections, and more).

The way you work and conceptualize your work can change into something new with ai agents. From offloading non-important tasks to enhancing the quality of your work and your systems, this can be your playground for reinvention and innovation, until the next thing comes, and then the next one, and the next one…

Reference

Features Overview

Watch the video for an in-depth visual overview.

1. The sidebar section as access point. If Custom Agents are included in your plan, you can create and access them quickly via the dedicated section on the left sidebar. You can place the “Agents” section anywhere on the left sidebar via drag and drop, as you can do with any sidebar section. You can create a new Custom Agent via the dedicated “+” button on the right-hand side of the section title, as well as define how many custom agents you want to display on the sidebar via the three-dot menu.

2. Creating a custom agent. You can set the agent name, description, icon, and cover image. Then navigate to the “Settings” tab to customize the agent with web search restrictions, triggers, instructions, connected tools, and the chosen AI model (optional). You can start from scratch, let the AI-cobuilder help you set up the agent, or use a starter template. You then configure the custom agent with all the options explained below.

3. Triggers. Custom agents start their tasks when they are triggered to do so. A custom agent can have as many triggers as you like. There are three types of triggers available for custom agents:

   • When you chat with the agent: each agent has a chat interface you can use to trigger and interact with the agent at any time, like you are used to doing with the popular LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.).

   • On a schedule: the custom agent runs regularly at the specified schedule (e.g., every day at 8 AM; every Sunday at 6 pm, etc.). This trigger is useful for automations you would like to happen regularly (e.g., daily report generation, weekly activities summary, etc.).

   • When agent is mentioned: whenever you mention the agent (you can mention an agent like any other user in Notion by typing “@agent_name” (e.g., ) on any page, person property, or comment section within a page.

   • App triggers: whenever a specific event happens in Notion, Notion Mail, Notion Calendar, Slack (and more), the agent is triggered. You can think of these as webhook-like triggers that start the custom agent immediately after (a few seconds after) the specific event occurs in the app of choice. For example, selecting the Notion Mail “new email received” trigger starts the custom agent immediately upon new emails. The custom agent then runs following its instructions. For the third-party tools (Notion Mail, Slack, etc.) triggers to work, you must connect them to your Notion workspace. You can do so via “Settings” > “Notion AI” > “AI Connectors” (this may change in the future, as Notion sometimes edits the settings menu, but the concept remains — look for “Connections” or “Notion AI” settings).

4. Instructions. Instructions tell the custom agent what to do. What is the task that must be accomplished? Focus more on the “what to do” (desired outcome) and less on the “how to do it” (the process to achieve the outcome). Unless you want to provide the exact steps to follow for the agent to “be” more deterministic, which is ok. Use examples whenever possible to provide standards. Instructions can include any context from the Notion workspace, since they are a Notion page where you can use all the available commands in Notion. You can mention pages, create linked data source views, etc. You can use Notion AI Agent (the sidebar chat) to iterate on the instructions and make them as clear and well-pointed with regard to the desired outcome as possible.

   *NOTE: Linking to Notion pages in the Instructions doesn’t automatically add them to the connected Tools and Access.

5. Tools & access. In this section, you will define the tools available to the custom agent. In ai agents, tools are used to achieve the desired outcome. In the same way someone in your marketing team may draft campaign ideas (the desired outcome) by doing web research (tool 1), reading up on the latest marketing trends (tool 2), and analyzing past data from your previous campaigns (tool 3), ai agents need tools to do their job.

   The first tool you can enable is web access. This allows the custom agent to search the web, similar to how you would do a Google search to find out information about something you’re working on. If web access is enabled, you can restrict access to specific web domains or leave web access unrestricted. Restricting web domain access is useful for use cases where the agent only needs to find data from a few websites (e.g., your website, your competitors’ websites) or if you want to minimize security threats.

   Secondly, you can define the custom agent’s access to your Notion workspace. Just like you would define access for a Notion user. You can provide view-only, commenting, or editing access to Notion custom agents on any Notion page/database in your workspace. It is best to share only the relevant pages/databases with custom agents, rather than the whole workspace, in order to keep the context focused and relevant with regard to the agent’s goal (signal), instead of consisting of lots of noise.

   Finally, you can add Connections. These are the MCP servers of third-party tools (and also Notion Mail and Calendar) that you wish the custom agent to have access to during its runs. For example, in the marketing campaign brainstorming example above, you could connect the Hubspot MCP to provide access to your CRM and sales data for analysis/creation purposes, and your Google Analytics MCP for specific data analysis on your past campaign performances. To connect to a custom MCP server, you need to search its official documentation to find the server URL and the authentication method. Notion custom agents MCP connections support Oauth, Bearer Token, Basic, and API Key authorization methods. When you connect an MCP server, you will select which MCP tools (actions available in the MCP server) are enabled, which ones can run automatically, and which ones require user consent before running. You can turn off MCP connections via the dedicated setting (available under Settings > Notion AI > AI Connectors).

6. Model. You can leave the default model (Auto) or select a specific LLM for the custom agent (available options include the latest models of OpenAI/ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini). So far, I have found the Claude (Anthropic) models to be the best performing.

7. Advanced. Here, you can set external URLs that the agent can always scrape without your consent. That’s because agents will sometimes ask for your permission before scraping external URLs. If you set your website/other URLs you know are safe and needed, you can add them here to ensure the agent doesn’t request your permission.

8. Recent Activity. Below the agent chat, you can find its recent activity, which can be filtered by success/failure, and exported as a CSV.

9. Chat. This is where you can chat with the custom agent. You can add context to the chat in the form of Notion page/databases mentions and file uploads. It is possible to do other things in the Notion workspace while the agent is performing actions in a chat. You can also have multiple chats running at the same time, across different agents or the same one.

Custom Agents Sharing/Permissions

If you use Notion with your team, you may want some custom agents to be accessible to multiple team members, and others to remain private to you. The sharing settings of custom agents follow the same sharing principles applicable across the whole Notion workspace.

To share a custom agent:

1. Open the Custom Agent page.
2. Click Share** **on the top right
3. Add people, groups, or the entire workspace.

When shared, custom agents appear in the sidebar under the** **Agents section, in search results, and in any workspace area that lists or references agents. You can give other people one of these access levels to Notion custom agents:

• Full access

  • Configure instructions, triggers, access, and models.

  • View and manage activity logs.

  • Run and interact with the agent.

• Can edit

  • Modify instructions and configuration.

  • Review activity.

• Can view and interact

  • Run the agent and chat with it.

  • View the Settings page (Triggers, Instructions, Tools & Access) in read-only mode.

  • Cannot edit or share.

Users without access may still trigger or interact with agents configured to respond to events like Slack messages in accessible channels.

You can also manage custom agents (with limitations if your Notion workspace is not Enterprise) on the dedicated “Agents” tab within “Settings” > “Notion AI”. Here, you can view and manage all custom agents in the Notion workspace, with the ability to filter by specific parameters (e.g., status, integrations used, created by, and more).

FAQs

Want to build your connected workspace with custom agents? Submit your interest here.

Yoyu is a Japanese concept that encapsulates such an approach to living, when analyzed philosophically, while it has a practical meaning in daily conversations (e.g., enough energy/time/money to do something). Yo (surplus) and Yu (affluence). Enough space for emotionally caring about something or someone. Space for doing things with calm and ease. More than enough capacity and patience for learning.

Is there space right now? If not, where is it?

What is yoyu? | Marci Kobayashi

Things Become Other Things | Craig Mod

But what is beyond fear, ever present and choiceless? It's the choice you know you must make in order to live in alignment with what is true. When we ruminate on a "decision," we often expend time and effort to create seemingly rational explanations for doing the thing that our intuition most wants us to do. Elaborate webs of convenient narratives that of course make sense! (see confirmation bias).

Then we convince ourselves of such stories, and we tell them to our parents, and the friend, and the waitress who served us so lovingly the other day at the local restaurant. Now the decision is really real indeed!

There is a certain general need for fewer words and more choices born out of choicelessness — real and, perhaps for this reason, not necessitating much explanation.

If you’re rolling out Notion (or any new system in general) across your team(s), you're probably wondering: is anyone actually using it?

Implementing Notion across a team of 10+ people is an exercise in change management. This means that adopting Notion as a new tool—or expanding its use across the team—requires system-level evolution, which is met with friction and resistance, as is typical for any change in humans. Resistance itself is not an issue—rather a natural response to a reshuffle, no matter how small it may seem to you. Resisting the resistance can create unnecessary leakages and energy loss throughout the system. Instead, we can understand the source of the resistance and proceed with patience, assuming the new systems are useful and aligned with the overall strategy.

Research shows that most tool rollouts fail not because of the technology but because of leadership factors such as poor communication and resistance to change (Greenhalgh et al., 2017). Change management is a vast topic with many layers in business literature, and for valid reasons. Change always happens, yet is often opposed, especially when introduced within a group of people with specific ways of “doing things around here.”

One thing is true when it comes to making a system change, as Seth Godin often underlines in “This Is Strategy”: for evolution to happen, the incentives must be aligned with the desired system change. That is, there must be clear incentives for adopting the new tool, and everyone’s (the majority’s) interest must be aligned instead of siloed.

Incentives can mostly take the form of money, status, or affiliation—all fundamental human desires that drive most of our actions, especially when operating in a group environment. Money incentives are bonuses or specific monetary rewards linked to the new tool usage/adoption. Status incentives can include badges, seniority level increases, more decision-making power, public prizes, and other rewards that put the person in a positive light in front of other people.

Each person in a system will always act in their self-interest. … A healthy system is organized in a way that self-interest leads to behavior that’s in the common good. People sign up for the systems that give them what they seek, and they stay as long as their needs are being met. […]

The work of change-making is to help people decide that changing their actions is exactly what they want to do. Not because it’s important to us, but because it’s important to them. […]

— Seth Godin, This Is Strategy

Notion Workspace Analytics Overview

This is where workspace analytics become useful: they give you the data to design and measure those incentives. They are one component to shed light on the actual system change status.

Workspace analytics (available on the Enterprise plan) let you measure adoption across the Notion workspace and Notion AI features. There is a dedicated tab for Analytics accessible under the workspace settings, visible to workspace owners, organization owners, and membership admins (learn more about workspace roles here). This tab is further split into sub-tabs that highlight workspace and AI analytics. The design and functionalities of workspace analytics are often evolving, so you may find new metrics not mentioned in this essay by the time you read this. The fundamental concept of analytics remains the same.

There are two types of analytics for the Notion workspace (both can be accessed under Settings > Analytics in any Enterprise workspace): general usage analytics and AI usage analytics. General usage analytics show active users (those who viewed a page), which pages are most used, and how engagement trends over time. You can adjust the timeframe for the last 7, 30, 90, or 365 days. There are four workspace analytics tabs:

1. Overview: here, you can visualize high-level metrics about active members, guests, and content engagement.
2. Members: In this tab, you can drill down into active members and guests, including a chart showing active members over the selected period, and an exportable table displaying each user’s engagement across the Notion workspace (page views, edits, last active, teamspace access). Find out more about the differences between a member and a guest here.
3. Content: This is where you can see content engagement metrics (page views and unique views across any page in the workspace, including private ones). The list of page views and audience (whether a page is private, public, or shared) is filterable and exportable in CSV format.
4. Search: as the official documentation reads:* “In the Search tab, you can understand what workspace members are searching for, the number of times and the click-through rate of each query. These metrics can help you identify potential gaps in your documentation as well as help you make changes to content to improve discovery.”*

AI usage analytics show whether workspace members are using Notion AI. Here you can see AI Utilization percentage (the percentage of active members who used AI in the selected period), a chart of AI actions (connectors, Agent, Meeting Notes, …), and exportable CSVs of total AI actions by user and top pages returned by AI responses.

Conclusion

Data gives you leverage: you can dig into the actual numbers instead of defending the tool qualitatively. This provides you with tangible feedback (the truth) that can inform your change strategy toward the desired outcome. Certainly, it takes patience, especially if the new tool represents a significant novelty in your system. Seeing unsatisfactory numbers after only a few weeks is not a sign of failure, since, as mentioned earlier, system change takes time, effort, and sticking with the strategy long-term. By the same token, ignoring the data in favor of confirmation and sunk cost biases is counterproductive. But if your interest is the common interest, you can see through your short-sightedness and course-correct accordingly.

If you wish to build your custom workflows with intention, submit your interest here.

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“To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one we’ve defaulted into. When technology shifted, Nintendo stopped making playing cards and built a video game company. And yet, when the telephone arrived, Western Union decided to simply make better telegrams.

Strategy is often an unseen option, apparently too sophisticated, expensive, or elitist for most of us. But once we see it, our next steps become clear. We have what we need to make better plans.”

— Seth Godin

This applies to business and other aspects of life. When you make a choice, there are options. There are the underlying beliefs and behaviors that guide your actions and affect decision-making (your strategy), as well as a space of novel possibilities, unexplored territory, and creative pathways.

To make aligned (truthful) choices, in business or life, you must keep a broad vision and be willing to explore novelty and unseen options, because the truth and the best way forward is not necessarily this or that, clear-cut, black and white. It can be a mix of multiple options that create a totally new opportunity that’s filled with excitement and joy, until the next one comes and sweeps it away.

Once we see it, once we connect with the truth of what we want, the next steps become clear and light.