Four years ago August Bradley burst onto the YouTube screen and took the Notion (& productivity) community by storm. In a short space of time he unleashed an plethora of videos providing viewers with a detailed and step by step guide to a new system that he called PPV. BUT – was this worth the hype? I have to say – I love the idea behind the name of this system. Every system under the sun focusses on the bog standard Projects, Areas and such and such. PPV is original in this regard and so I love this. So here it is. PPV (Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults) – Productivity System Review.
What is PPV?
PPV is a productivity system designed by August Bradly. Actually it is billed ass much more than that. This is a life operating system. PPV therefore promises to help you organise and manage every single aspect of your entire life – not just your work and your to do list.
It is a system that is 100% based around Notion. August Bradley talks a lot about systems thinking and therefore, the system is key and not the specific app.
In theory.
Therefore, it should be possible to harness the ideas and concepts and replicate this system in any set of applications you want, or indeed with pen and paper.
That said, as you watch the videos you will see that a lot of how this system works requires functionality that is fairly unique to Notion. I suspect if you tried to replicate this elsewhere, you would need to take the basic concepts and then design a whole new way of managing the system. So, if PPV interests you – probably stick to Notion.
As the name suggests, the system focuses on your Pillars, your Pipelines and your Vaults.
Pillars
Pillar are the KEY areas of your life. These are the things that support everything else. That is what a pillar does!
What August does in this system is fairly astute and helpful. Too often when we consider ‘areas’ we end up just listing a few vague and generic buckets of our life such as ‘Personal’, ‘Family’ and ‘Work’. In reality, this isn’t all that helpful as there is little focus to it all.
Pillars in this PPV system are expected to be much more specific. They would include things like:
- Skills
- Character Traits/Personal Traits
- Things to develop and build
The way I have come to understand Pillars is to think of them as ‘values in action’. I cannot remember if that is something August has said or if that one is from me. So, some of the kind of things you might put here would be ‘Personal Finance’ or ‘Health & Fitness’ or ‘Product Development’.
Pipelines
In this system your pipelines are the things that carry stuff to a destination. Again – this is what a pipeline does! These therefore are all about processes for moving things through different stages to a point of completion. You might therefore have multiple different pipelines that incorporate everything that might you reasonably want to do:
- Content to produce
- Books to read
- Projects
- Goals
Vaults
This is effectively a library of all of your accumulated knowledge and information. A bit like a vault in real life – this is about retention and storage, with a view to recall things as needed.
Why this is a great system
It is innovative
Other systems give you Areas and Goals and Projects that are all kind of either holding pens for stuff or they just sit there dependent on something else (e.g. a Goal is completed via a series of projects). In PPV, Pillars are the things/areas/values/outcomes/characteristics that you define as important in your life. Everything you focus on therefore relates to one of these. The Pipelines are not related to the Pillars but the are the delivery mechanisms for everything that does relate to the Pillars.
E.G. In car manufacturing, the Pillars would be the design features the finished car needs to embody. The production line is not directly linked to that but is the mechanism by which the finished article delivers on those Pillars. So the pipelines are active systems designed to allow you to focus on your pillars.
It is intentional
The first step in this system is to define the pillars. This is where you take time out to establish and commit to all of the different values and things that are important. Once you have done this, then everything else revolves around them. In effect, you define the pillars that support your life and then from that your system works to maintain, strengthen and build those particular pillars.
Too many other systems are much more reactive and focussed around dealing with incoming things without ever taking a proactive step to define what matters. Too many other systems are far too vague in how stuff gets organised and so a whole multitude of things get allocated to an area without really being able to determine what value they actually have.
PPV can name intentionality amongst its main strengths.
It is focussed
The system that this approach provides is simply a mechanism for the delivering on the pillars, not an end in itself. At least that is the idea! The Pipelines serve as a delivery system for the thing and not the thing in and of itself.
Things I do not like about it
Honestly, I think this an excellent system with some really strong things going for it. That said, I do find fault with it in a number of different ways. So….in no particular order:
Dating every task
Part of the PPV system is that EVERY single task gets given a DO date. A date on which you will actually DO the task. In the particular video where August outlines this, there are tasks that are given DO dates, months in advance of the date itself. In fact, as you watch it becomes clear that every day, several months out, has a nearly full complement of tasks allocated to it.
This I consider to be hugely problematic.
For many of us, our work is far too fluid to plan in that level of detail, that far in advance.
I appreciate the desire to get ahead of things and establish some intentional control but if I planned out tasks for every single day, 2-3 months in advance, I would end up rescheduling 75% of them, at least, multiple times over. This is a waste of time.
This is why Carl Pullein’s Time Sector System is so good. You only give specific dates for the coming week but you put all tasks in a future Time Sector to make sure that as you process your tasks, you come to some kind of decision over when exactly you will tackle things. For me, this is a very healthy middle ground.
The Complexity of how it is set up
I appreciate the essence of the system a lot. But the actual mechanism of the system itself is very complex. There will therefore be a high set up cost, a high maintenance cost and a high risk of procrastination.
The system in Notion requires multiple different databases to be set up and then relations and roll ups configured between everything. It then requires establishing multiple dashboards to harness all of that and make it all useable.
Therefore, the investment required to get this up and running is pretty huge.
This also brings with it a relatively high maintenance cost. As I said, there is dating every task ( and likely rescheduling) but also updating numerous different fields and relationships every single time you need to change anything.
And with all of this comes the potential for procrastination. The system is incredibly comprehensive and thorough. This appeals to a certain type of person more than others. Like me! I think that means therefore that we like the idea of the system, potentially, more than we actually like the idea of what the system enables us to do. So, whilst in theory your focus is supposed to be directed to your Pillars…. some of us will struggle to not have our focus directed to the system itself.
As Notion introduces new features and changes others, new possibilities for ever greater efficiency open up and old ways of doing things either get broken or become obviously obsolete. Keeping everything working and in an optimum way, can be become a near full time endeavour. This is a version of procrastination that makes us feel super productive.
Reliance on Notion
A good productivity system is not reliant on one application to work. First, that suggests it is more about the app than the system, second as the app changes or gets shut down, then things get stuck.
I think some of the principles can be extrapolated out to a different set of tools but the system itself is pretty reliant on Notion. It may not be easy to translate to a different application set.
But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!
I don’t use this system but I have learned a lot from it and so I do not want to get rid of everything.
Here is a short list of what I encourage you to keep, whoever you are:
- keep the focus
- keep the intentionality
- define your pillars
- see everything else as a system for delivering on those pillars.
The PPV system is great to focus you on what is important and then set up everything else as a mechanism for delivering it. SO – DO spend time defining your Pillars and then consider a delivery mechanism for them. This maintains the intentionality and focus of PPV without necessarily adopting the whole Notion set up and template and opening yourself up to the potential problems with this.
In summary, the PPV videos that August produces were great …. and they continue to be great as new ones come out. I watched most of them in sequence and I learned a lot. I think I am more effective in life because of this. But I do not use PPV in the pure sense. For me that is far too complex to actually help me. If you have the time, I would recommend the videos in this playlist. Be warned, there are a lot and they are about 30 minutes long on average. Quite a time endeavour but valuable if you can make it work. I watched them whilst loading the dishwasher and cleaning up the kitchen – try that!
If you want an alternative, I have my own playlist of videos showing how to set up the Building a Second Brain system in simpler application called UpNote – Building a Second Brain in UpNote
