Hello All! There’s a Notion guru I’ve been a big fan of for a long time, and I’ve taken all his courses. His name is August Bradley, and he’s popularized a system for “life design” and knowledge management called PPV (Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults). I highly recommend his courses for anyone who is searching for a paved path for a super capable and resilient system for personal productivity and knowledge management (even if you don’t want to use Notion).
I’ve fallen in love with Coda over Notion as it’s much more capable in so many ways, but I’m struggling to adapt the PPV system to Coda. The main complication is that in Notion, every row is a page, which is fundamentally different than Coda (even with the addition of Coda’s new Canvas column). As well, doc performance is more of a consideration in Coda, so I’m unsure how to split up the mega databases that comprise PPV between different docs (I’ve been told that “mega docs” in coda are unwise for performance reasons).
Here’s a screenshot of the general PPV database structure. The main thing to note is that almost all of the master databases relate to one another. For example, a single project row will have a huge number of Relations to most of the other master databases (e.g. associated tasks, notes, media, courses, outcomes, etc).
Any ideas for how to efficiently adapt this to coda? Any and all recommendations are super appreciated. Thanks in advance!
[Update]
For anyone interested, here is a more expanded version of the system. It’s a little more clear how core databases relate to “dashboards”, which in Coda I suppose would just be a page.
Hi @Alexander_Gaeta1
What do you consider to be a mega doc? My office hub hover around 1 gig as reported by Chrome. It does take a few seconds to load initially, but after that its performance is very reasonable.
It doesn’t have all that many rows in the main table (+/- 1250, but everything is heavily cross-referenced, with sub-items, a few buttons too and many, many views.
P
Hi
Why do you say it is “fundamentally different”? I admit that I haven’t used Notion in a long time, but from what I remember there is little difference, in fact I find Coda’s canvas columns to be easier to understand.
P
Thanks for the reply @Piet_Strydom. I’ll admit that “mega-doc” is a bit ambiguous, so wondering if there’s any official or unofficial guidance on when to consider multiple docs over just one.
As for the Notion bit and it’s differences, I was perhaps overblowing it a bit. The main differences are in smaller details regarding how relations can be easily viewed and manipulated, and how rows and pages are interchangeable.
At any rate, I appreciate your input. Thanks for the reply!
The question about whether/when to use multiple documents has as many answers as doc makers. I err on the side of fewer docs and fewer tables.
I had a look at PPV a while back, it sure has passionate followers, but seems involved/ complicated. I prefer to build my own PKMs, I have a personal one, and one for the office. The large one I mentioned earlier is for the office.
I typically start with a single table for “thoughts” and then add thought types as needed: “todo”, “presentation”, “new habits”. Some have their own canvas templates that gets pulled in when a new row is created.
The office version has thought types for Functional Design Documents, technical design, etc. Columns on the right table are added as needed for the different thought types.
I then build views/ dashboards as needed. Everything develops organically from there .
I have not seen anybody attempt anything like PPV n Coda.
But it’s just a ramble
Rambling Pete.
Awesome! Sounds like a really interesting system. I always enjoy hearing about how other people design their PKMs. Thanks so much for sharing! Food for thought for sure.
