Small business owners I admire, each answering the same few questions in their own words.
If Notion has ever felt like a tool you can’t quite get to work for you, I know that feeling. For a long time, I could never seem to stick with Notion, and I couldn’t tell you why. What changed it was learning from Podge Thomas.
I don’t remember how I first found her newsletter, but I remember it resonating with me. Podge shares small bites of her experiences and decolonizing learning, metacognitive learning design, and educational trauma. I’ve studied Adult Education and instructional design, and I think of myself as a lifelong learner, but I’ve never felt fully at home in traditional education spaces. Her newsletter felt like it was speaking to my experience.
So I followed my curiosity into her program, Digital Gardening: the Curiosity Comeback. I came out with my own digital garden, a renewed appreciation for what Notion can do, and a reminder of something I always tell my clients but had forgotten for myself. Our systems need to support how our brains work. As a result, my Notion dashboard is now part of my daily practice, and you can read more about how that happened in my Tending My Systems post.
She doesn’t know it, but Podge’s teaching helped shape the current design of my business's backend, which is a big part of why she is the first person I wanted to feature. If Notion has been a struggle for you, her warmth and her understanding of how metacognition meets the tool will help you build both knowledge and confidence.
Let’s learn a little more about Podge.
What's the most "you" thing about how you run your business, something only you would do quite this way?
When I have an idea for a workshop or group program, rather than outlining it, I’ll skip straight to building it in Notion. It’s helpful to see it take shape in this way because even though I’m using this digital platform, to me it becomes 3 dimensional when I can see how I’ll run it on the back end and how my students will move through the curriculum. Developing an idea this way also allows me to see any pieces of the program that will require more attention.
What's a tool, habit, or ritual that has nothing to do with "business" but is essential to how you run yours?
My practice of digital gardening where I collect information and document experiments isn’t directly connected to my business but doing it helps me foster my curiosity and desire for learning, something I lost due to educational trauma. For me, digital gardening is a bit like exercising and eating well — it provides balance and a healthy outlet for expressing myself. Something from my digital garden might end up in a piece of content or a workshop but that’s not its primary purpose.
What's a compliment or piece of feedback you got that you still think about to this day?
Over the summer, I ran a group called Notion Summer Camp. I designed it as a low-pressure environment to explore and learn how to use Notion through short and fun tutorials. Twice a week I hosted these long co-working sessions on Zoom where folks could drop in as time allowed to work on their Notion projects and ask me questions when they needed extra support.
One student came regularly over the summer. She was completely new to my work and she shared with me something that I’ve heard many times: she had downloaded Notion and about a year prior but then didn’t really do anything with it. She had grabbed some templates that looked like what she needed but she couldn’t figure out how to use them because she didn’t really understand yet how Notion worked.
After going through a handful of the mini-tutorials I had made for Notion Summer Camp, she gathered enough understanding about Notion’s functions that she was able to recreate one of the templates she bought, tweaking it here and there to suit her specific needs.
When she shared this with me I was elated. I had watched people really struggle with templates and I knew that deconstructing or recreating one would reinforce learning for someone new to Notion.
What does your business give back to the people or place around it, beyond what people pay for?
My students come to learn how to use Notion but they leave with confidence. Yes, they take this to learn how to do more complex things in Notion but it impacts other aspects of their businesses and lives as well. Many of my students come to my workshops skeptical that they can accomplish what I’ve promised. And then I watch them get excited in real time as they surprise themselves and I know that confidence helps to propel them in ways that have nothing to do with Notion.
Learn More…
Podge Thomas teaches people how to reclaim their curiosity and leverage Notion to build intuitive and supportive systems.
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