New Organization Scheme: Part Two

Okay, so now here is the advanced organizational system. This is in Notion (as discussed yesterday). And it’s a way to not only track your repertoire, but also your performances.

The first step is to create a table called Friends or Contacts. In this table you can capture any information you want about the people in your life. At an absolute minimum I would have their name, the date you met (if that’s something you know), and the date of the last time you interacted. I like to keep track the last interaction, that way I can filter the spreadsheet to show me people I haven’t spoken to in the past 3 months or 6 months or whatever, and if they’re people I want to maintain a relationship with, that will be a cue to reach out to them

Then, within that person’s page (as discussed yesterday, every object in a spreadsheet in Notion can be opened to make its own page) you can put any other content you might want to capture about that person. Perhaps details about their family, their kid’s names, photographs, gift ideas for them. Whatever is important for you to capture about the people in your life.

So let’s say the Friends spreadsheet looks like this:

In reality, yours probably won’t be that simple. But the things I capture in my own personal “Friends” spreadsheet are the things that are important to me. So this is just a bare-bones look at what it might look like. You should have additional columns for the things that are important to you.

Okay, now we’re going to starting bringing it all together.

Create another spreadsheet. This one called “Performance History” or something like that.

This is where we’re going to start capturing the details of our performances.

In the first column, you will name the performance situation. I usually reference where it took place. (However if where you performed is very important for you to capture and search on, I would make that its own column.) So if I performed for some friends at McDonalds after dinner some night, I might name it: “Dinner at McDonalds.” If it was a unique performing situation then this name should remind you of it: “Christmas Eve at Mom’s,” “Kim’s Graduation Party,” “Afternoon Delight In the Park.” If it isn’t a unique performing situation, I just give it a sort of generic name and number it. For example, I have a lot of performances that happen at a coffee shop, not on any special occasion. So I might have an entry that is “Moe’s Coffeeshop #45,” the next one would be “Moe’s Coffeeshop #46.”

Also, I create a separate entry on the spreadsheet for each trick performed in a given situation. So if I did three tricks at McDonald’s that night (that would be sort of weird) I would have three rows, each with “Dinner at McDonald’s” in the first column.

Add a second column to capture the date of the performance.

Add a new column and name it Trick. Now we’re going to do something new with this column. In the place where it says “Property Type” choose Relation. What we’re going to start doing is cross referencing our multiple databases. It’s going to give you al little window that looks like this:

You’ll start typing in “Repertoire.” And then click on that page in order to link it in this column.

Now, once you’ve done that, you can click in any box in that column and select one of the items from your repertoire spreadsheet to populate that field.

Create another column. Call it Audience. And again choose Relation in the “Property Type.” And connect this column to your Friends/Contacts database.

Create another column called Reaction with a Property Type of “Number.” In this column you will rate the audience’s reaction to the effect (as best you can), on whatever scale you like. I just use 1-10.

Create a final column called Notes which is a text field for any quick notes on the performance. (Longer notes would be added on the page for each performance, which, again, you get to by clicking on anything in the first column of a spreadsheet and clicking open.)

When it’s all filled in, you’ll have something like this:

The Trick and Audience columns are being pulled from your Repertoire and Friends spreadsheet. So all these spreadsheets are connected now.

With just a few entries it’s not that helpful a tool. But think of how useful this is when you have dozens of tricks in your repertoire and dozens of people you perform for and 100s of performances. By clicking the Filter link near the top you can view the database in all sorts of different ways. If you’re meeting up with Anna that evening, you can filter the database so it shows you only the tricks you’ve performed for Anna that got a reaction of 8 or above so you can see what sort of thing she reacts strongly to.

Or you can add another field from a related spreadsheet (this is the property type called “Roll Up”). So you could, for example, bring in the tags field from your Repertoire spreadsheet into your Performance History spreadsheet and you could then filter it to show you tricks you did with a shuffled deck in the last three months of 2019 that got a reaction under four. Or whatever you may find useful.

One thing to note, once you link to spreadsheets with the “Relation” feature, you will now notice a column for that database in the other spreadsheet. So, not only is there a Repertoire column in the Performance History spreadsheet, but also vice versa. If you don’t want that column to show in the other database (or any column in any database) then just click the ellipses next to the button that says “New.” Then click Properties and you can turn off any columns you don’t want to see (but they’re still connected).

There you go. If you decide to pursue using Notion to organize your magic life, you’ll probably want to go on youtube and familiarize yourself with more of its features. You’ll find a ton of stuff there. I’ve barely scratched the surface. And you are likely going to modify what I’ve written to come up with your own system.

It may seem like overkill to track things like this if you’re just performing a couple times a month. With how much I perform (especially pre-Covid times) it’s a necessity, if only just to remind myself what I’ve shown people already. Even if you don’t perform a ton, I still think there are benefits to tracking your repertoire and keeping notes of your performance in some manner. This just happens to be the most efficient way I’ve found.