Show Notes
Stop treating Notion like a digital filing cabinet and start building an engine that thinks for you.
In this episode, Tim Jeffries and Jerwin Parker move beyond basic note-taking to explore the high-level architecture of AI Playbooks.
Jerwin shares his journey from being a "OneNote nerd" and Microsoft to building a "Second Brain" in Notion that tracks his entire Wheel of Life from cybersecurity marketing to personal book learnings.
Jerwin reveals how he navigated a six-month "digital nomad" journey across Europe and Korea using a custom-built AI Travel Agent that had access to his bucket list and financial data to make travel decisions with confidence.
Tim breaks down his proprietary framework for AI Playbooks repeatable, structured workflows that automate complex tasks like meeting follow-ups, drafting proposals, and qualifying leads.
Key Topics Discussed: Jerwins Click Moment: Transitioning from fragmented apps (OneNote, Apple Notes, Word) to a centralized Notion ecosystem. The Wheel of Life: Using Notion for weekly reflection on finance, health, and bucket list goals. Building AI Agents: How Jerwin built a work timezone agent to manage time zones and a travel agent to replace guidebooks. The Playbook Anatomy: Tim's step-by-step guide to defining scoping triggers, inputs, steps, and guardrails for AI. The "Dial-Up" Phase of AI: Why we are currently in an awkward but transformative period of AI history.
Chapters: 00:00 | Introduction to Notion in Practice 03:00 | From Microsoft to Notion Ambassador 09:00 | The Wheel of Life: Notion as a Reflection Tool 15:00 | AI Travel Agents & Managing Life on the Road 21:00 | Deep Dive: The Anatomy of a Tim’s AI Playbooks 28:00 | Iteration & Governance: Managing Playbooks for Teams
✅ Three Action Takeaways Stop Chatting, Start Engineering: Use Tim’s "Playbook Anatomy" for repeatable tasks. Instead of a raw prompt, define the scoping trigger (when it should run), the inputs (what data it needs), and the guardrails (what it is forbidden to do).
Centralize for "Contextual AI": AI is only as powerful as the data it can access. Follow Jerwin’s lead by consolidating your "fragmented brains" study notes, fitness logs, and work projects into a single Notion workspace so your AI agent understands your whole "Wheel of Life".
The 4-Iteration Rule: Don’t expect an AI Playbook to be perfect immediately. Treat your workflows like "dial-up internet" they will be clunky at first. Plan to "hack it down" and refine your instructions 3 to 4 times based on real-world results until the automation is trustable. Key Episode Resources AI Playbook Instructions & Template: Tim Jeffries shared a set of instructions and a template designed to help users and Notion AI build repeatable workflows. Link: smoothops.consulting/ai-instructions Wheel of Life Concept & Template: Jerwin Parker Roberto discussed his "Wheel of Life" database, which he uses for personal reflection and tracking goals across finance, health, and more. Link: Jerwin's Wheel of Life Template
More from Notion in Practice
Flight Centre Travel Group's Matt Upton explains how his automation team uses Notion, Notion Workers and Notion AI skills at enterprise scale, and why nothing gets automated until the process behind it is fixed. Matt is Head of Automation and Innovation for Flight Centre's Asia Pacific corporate brands, leading a team of around 30 across five brands from India and the Middle East to Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Inside a 12,500-person business, the work ranges from multi-step customer onboarding automations to five-minute tasks done 500 times a day. He joins Tim Jeffries and Jerwin Parker on Notion in Practice to walk through how his part of the business made Notion its single source of truth. Information used to be spread across Confluence, Azure DevOps, SharePoint, OneDrive and local files, and nothing joined up. Flight Centre's corporate technology teams now have roughly 1,000 Notion seats. "I tell people if it's not in Notion, it doesn't exist," Matt says, and that rule is what made the change stick. Who this is for Operations, automation and technology leaders fitting Notion, Workers and Notion AI into an existing enterprise stack, and smaller teams who want the same discipline without the headcount. Why can't you automate a bad process? Because automation speeds up whatever process it runs on. Matt's team won't automate anything until it has been through a continuous improvement pass. As Tim puts it, automating a bad process just makes the chaos go faster and the mess grow quicker. How did Notion take hold at Flight Centre? Microsoft Loop opened the door. Notion had been in the business for years with only a handful of real users, and once teams saw collaborative documents working in Loop, a few people pointed out that Notion already did this at scale. How does Matt's team sync Smartsheet and Azure DevOps with Notion? With Notion Workers, small pieces of code deployed to Notion. Matt has seven or eight Smartsheets plus Azure DevOps syncing into Notion databases this way, set up in a short conversation with a coding tool and left to run without babysitting. Most Workers do one plain job like this. How do you build a Notion Worker? Start with a brief. Tim gets clear on the problem with Notion AI, then hands the brief and the Worker docs to Claude Code. His Worker was deployed and working within an hour. Do you have to migrate everything into Notion? No. Smartsheet and Azure DevOps stay where they are as the data layer, Notion becomes the context and reporting layer on top, and Workers keep the two in sync. The episode also covers Notion as "the Switzerland of AI", connecting different models and tools. Three actionable takeaways Run a continuous improvement pass before you automate anything. Leave your system of record where it is and use Notion Workers to sync the data into Notion. Start every Worker with a brief from Notion AI, then point a coding tool at the brief and the Worker docs. Resources mentioned Tim's article "You already have a digital operating system": https://smoothopsconsulting.substack.com/p/you-already-have-a-digital-operating
AI doesn't run in a vacuum. It runs inside a world: the platforms your work lives on, the records that hold the truth, the rules about what happens next. Most AI disappointment isn't a model problem. It's that there was never a world built around it.
Tokens don't grow on trees. So what are you actually paying for when you pay for AI agents?
In Episode 9 of Notion in Practice, Tim Jeffries and Jerwin Parker tackle the question on every Notion power user's mind: what will custom agents actually cost and is it worth it?
What happens when a former lawyer becomes Head of Operations at a scaling startup and decides to build an entire ops function using Notion agents?