Tending My Own System

…Before I Could Tend Anyone Else's

Every morning, I open at least two apps just to figure out how to start my day. One for Notion, where all my knowledge and reference info lives. One for ByDesign, where my tasks live. It doesn't take long before I'm getting distracted moving from one to the other, trying to remember what I was actually doing in the first place.

A few weeks ago, in the middle of that same back and forth, I made a decision. Nothing dramatic. Just a choice to adjust my tools so I could stop the context switching and avoid the distraction that came with it.

I want to walk through the whole thing, not because switching tools is interesting on its own, but because the process I used on myself is the same one I use with clients. It's just easier to see the friction in someone else's systems than in your own. When you're standing inside something, it's harder to spot what's not working.

Where the friction actually started

When I first went out on my own, ByDesign was exactly what I needed. Simple, enough structure to just jump in and get moving, and genuinely good for time blocking, which mattered to me a lot once I had full control over my own time. I have used Asana and ClickUp over the years, but both felt too big for what I was actually building just for myself. Yes, I did a deep dive, looked at and tried out many options, and ByDesign was the one that seemed to fit. I have been using it for about a year and a half.

But as my business developed with more content, more resources, and different moving pieces. ByDesign's notes layout and search just couldn't keep up with my work. The fit changed. Not a breakdown. Just growing pains. Where do I put this so I will actually remember and come back to it? How do I connect with that? Finding information I knew I'd saved somewhere started taking longer than I wanted. Notion became my dumping ground.

This is the part that's easy to skip past, and it's the part where I always slow clients down. The friction isn't a sign you picked the wrong tool. It's a sign your practice has shifted past what that tool was built or set up to hold. That's not a personal failure. It's just structural. Your system needs tending, the same way anything living does as it develops.

What I actually needed to understand first

Before I touched a single thing, I had to get honest about what I was actually doing day to day and how my practice had shifted. Where was the specific moment of friction I was experiencing? What I was actually doing. Where my attention kept getting pulled. What information I needed at my fingertips, how often, and what I was doing at the time.

That's often the step people skip. They go looking for the tools that are trending in the top 10, with the most features, instead of asking what their own practice actually requires. Can the tools they already have provide what they need with a different setup? I don't skip it with clients, so I wasn't going to skip this step. Plus, I have learned over the years that there is no perfect tool. They all have their trade-offs.

So I took some time to reflect on my current stack and decided to investigate if some of my favourites could take over the job of task management while holding my knowledge. Capacities was a top choice, with the improvements they have made to tasks recently, and I love their concepts of objects for organizing information, but for me, what was missing from this tool was a dashboard. My brain needs a dashboard to ground me in all the pieces. This led me back to Notion. Notion and I have had an on-and-off relationship, mostly because you have to create the structure and design yourself, and this has led me to constant tinkering instead of focusing on what I was supposed to be using the tool for.

The move

Earlier in the year, I was inspired by Podge Thomas's workshop on building a Digital Garden. Podge reminded me that it is less about the tool and more about your practice around using the tool. A garden isn't a system you set once and leave alone. It's something you spend time with and keep tending, season by season, as it grows and changes shape. That's closer to how I actually think about systems than most productivity language gets, and I was enjoying my digital garden practice.

I had already sort of started a dashboard in Notion, and I had been adding resources needed for my businesses that I didn’t want in ByDesign in a piecemeal fashion. So I looked for templates to help inspire how the pieces should be built. I ended up combining my half-finished dashboard with one of Podge's templates as a base so I wasn't building every database and connection from scratch. That gave me structure fast. I kept what I needed, removed what I didn’t and added the components my practice required. I looked at each part of my business, and one by one created the components I needed. A daily ritual and practice, quick-reference links, projects, task management, CRM, and content management.

What it cost, what it gave back

I'll be honest: Notion's task management isn't as simple as ByDesign's, Asana or ClickUp. That trade-off is real, and though I was pleasantly surprised by some of the upgrades, I don't want to pretend it isn't. But having everything in one place, one system, one rhythm, has felt more grounding than I expected. I also figured out that my forms tool, Tally, has a direct integration allowing me to pull results directly into Notion. That means fewer tools, less switching. Fewer places to get distracted, and when I do, I have one spot to return to and start again.

Any tool adjustment has to start with understanding your own practice, not the tool's feature list. A system that isn't built around how you actually work will at some point create friction no matter how many bells and whistles it has. The right tool doesn't usually feel exciting when you find it. It feels like relief.

If you want support figuring out what actually fits how you work, I put together a checklist just for that. Is there an area of your business right now where you can feel the friction, but haven't stopped to ask why it's there?

Here's to imagining what's possible...

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