Here is an overview of the LANDER Media “Projects” database that’s based on Tiago Forte’s PARA system (Rather than projects, areas, resources, archive, we call it PAMA: projects, assets, missions, archive).
We have views for every type of page in this database that show us recent transcribed meetings, project-wide “missions” and productions multiple team members are working on.
Areas = Missions, any project without a specific completion date. Tiago’s definition is: a sphere of activity to be maintained over time. Any page that is NOT related to another mission, becomes its own mission, and that’s how this view is filtered.
Company-wide initiatives (like clients or long term builds like software products)
Missions
Here are all company-wide missions, which are tied to active tasks on our standups pages and automatically generate “progress” bars.
We also have asset/dashboard pages that allow us to go directly to database views like this by linking them as pages, for example Missions
Missions are top-level projects, so any page without a related mission (that isn’t archived/past its due date) shows up here.
Projects are any asset that has a goal state or deadline and can be moved toward that state, and they are organized by which Mission they are related to.
Projects
Our main database views shows all active projects accross all missions in a kanban board that tracks to our agile states.
Our projects has a “type” property, which is a formula that uses the Status property which this Kanban board displays interchangably with our “Timeline” deadline property to determine if something is a project.
The All Projects View, any page related to a mission with a Status shows up here.
If something doesn’t have a status or timeline, it’s an asset. Else, it’s a project!
Resources = Assets, any ongoing theme or interest related to a project or mission but with no estimated competion date or Status.
Dashboards & Assets
Every one of our Missionspages is broken down into sub-pages that are types of Projects:
Dashboards, assets, & meetings
Those are displayed in filtered database views on the missions page, complete with a default view tab to show you just the ones you’re a part of.
Assets are literally related to a project or mission, and so as you’d expect they are defined in our Projects databse as “any page which is literally related to a Missionsbut does not have a due date.”
All Missions
An example Mission dashboard broken down (thanks to Type, Timeline, and Status properties) into Assets, Projects, and Meetings.
If they’re a task or post, which require specific additional properties (like hours for tasks or post URL for social media posts) they go in ‣ or , but otherwise all pages default to the projects database and should be related to a Mission.
Using related databases for visibility and organization, and helping to support ongoing staff processes for a well-organized, integrated, comminicative fully remote team.
Maintaining Clean & Organized Operations
We track our standups through a relation between ‣ (tasks database) &
The tasks database pulls hourly pay info (for internal cost calculations & payroll), hourly billable rate (for external projects), from ‣ (our staff & job description database) and correlates it with projects the tasks are related to in .
This gives us many benefits: We have “status” bars on all projects, we can easily tell if a given project is profitable, or how much our average project makes. We can also easily tell how much any task costs & how much we can bill for it right from our bi-weekly All Standups
List of recent standups
An example standup page, with week opening & week closing templates generated by a template button.
Finally, the Projects database is self-organizing because it archives anything which has passed it’s timeline or hasn’t been edited in 2 weeks, clearing it from all filtered views, and keeping everything we’re currently working on front and center.
Referencing Archives & Operations Docs:
Meetings, Tutorials, Archive & Search
All tutorials, with neat cover images & details on who produced the tutorial & a transcribed video recap.
We have the benefit of using the database to be able to search ANY meeting we’ve ever had (they’re all transcribed with descript.com) and re-visit tutorials for ops & processes throughout the company.
All page types described here have an associated template, which means that all projects have a similar set of headings, and so do all meetings. In this case, you can see below that all meetings start with “Agenda” which is a timestamped list of what happened when according to the call recording video.
We can do that from Meetings OR from any Missions dashboard page in the meetings column. Or you can simply search for any page who’s content contains “meeting” which is related to a given mission.
A dozen of our recent meetings, searchable by transcript, showing which project it’s related to, who was there, when it happened, and a timestamped ordered preview of the agenda.
Here are the superpowers these tools combine to give us.
What if you could see when a given meeting definitely should have been an email?
Where it all comes together is when we list a meeting on our tasks list in standups.
With multiple people related to a single task, associated to a single page, it becomes VERY easy to see how much that meeting added to a given project’s overall cost, or how much benefit it brought through the revenue generated by the projects we advanced compared to the actual cost of the meeting.
For every crew member we track hourly pay as WELL as billable rate, so we know both our hard costs & the billable opportunity cost when that staff member is assigned to client work instead!
This way we can see easily via a few simple relations on a given task exactly how much our hard costs for our time during that meeting were, as WELL as the opportunity cost we incurred by tying up otherwise billable hours.
Here’s what that looks like! →
