Who is August Bradley?
Course creator and performance systems coach. Known for Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults (PPV), the Notion life operating system he has taught on YouTube and in a paid program since 2020.
This page recognises August Bradley for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“PPV comes up every time somebody mentions a Notion Life OS, and I want to know who built it before I spend money on the program.”
This page traces what August Bradley did for a living before Notion, when the Notion videos actually started, and how the free series relates to the paid program and its current price. It does not review PPV, compare it with other Life OS templates, or tell you whether the system will suit the way you work.
In February 2019 his YouTube channel had 513 subscribers and the videos on its front page were behind-the-scenes reels from shoots: a Korn music video, the making of Filter's Happy Together clip, television spots for the Fisker Karma. The channel had existed since January 2009 and was, at that point, a portfolio. His own about page describes the career behind it as 25 years of startup and major brand work combined with Harvard MBA training, with creative and strategic projects for Coke, Xbox, Kia, Gap, J.Crew and Banana Republic, and a stint as COO of the VC-backed mixed reality studio Kite & Lightning.
By April 2020 the same channel was called August Bradley : Notion Productivity, had around 1,700 subscribers, and led with titles like "Systems Thinking Intro", "How The Notion Productivity App Changes Everything" and "My Notion Life Operating System Overview". On 3 October 2020 he announced a paid Notion course built on Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults along with an online community he called the Year Zero Collective. Two weeks before that, he had closed out the 68-episode run of his Mind & Machine podcast with an interview featuring Notion COO Akshay Kothari.
That series became the thing he is known for. His about page now puts the channel above 70,000 subscribers and the newsletter above 40,000, both by his own count, and the course page reports more than 2,000 people through the program. Notion's two co-founders are quoted on that page: Ivan Zhao saying the early videos "had the potential to really change people's lives", Akshay Kothari calling him "a leading pioneer in his holistic approach to using Notion". In the spring of 2026 the business behind it stopped being Year Zero Inc. and became Mission Drive.
The channel was a production reel before it was a productivity show
Nothing on the channel in early 2019 suggested where it was heading. The uploads were commercial and music video work, plus a live stream, and the links panel pointed at a separate YouTube channel for Mind & Machine, the interview show he started in August 2017. That show ran for 68 episodes and had nothing to do with note-taking software: guests talked about virtual reality characters, pandemic response technology, Dyson spheres, Nir Eyal on the psychology of attention. He described it as a weekly interview show about artificial intelligence, robotics, space exploration, life extension, biotech and transhumanism. The through line to what came later is the framing he kept using, which he calls a systems thinking approach. Writing in the first person on the Year Zero site, he also said he had turned his business knowledge plus his own experience overcoming a health crisis into a program for people who had plateaued.
The first videos in the Notion series were not about Notion
When the channel turned toward Notion in early 2020, the opening videos were "Systems Thinking Intro" and "Notion Design with Systems Thinking Approach", and the software came second to the argument for building one connected structure instead of several disconnected apps. What followed over the next months was a walkthrough of an entire life system, database by database: a task database wired for dependent parent and child tasks, a daily "Action Zone" dashboard, daily data tracking, flow charts for laying out the design, widget embeds. The playlist he keeps for that material now holds 55 videos. It made him a recognisable name fast enough that Mac Power Users brought him on in March 2021 for an episode simply titled "Getting to Know Notion", where the job was to explain the platform and the systems thinking behind his use of it to an audience that mostly had not touched it.
The free videos taught the method, the paid program hands over the finished system
The October 2020 announcement paired a course with a members' community, and the pairing has stayed. What is sold today under the name Notion Life Design is presented by Jane and August Bradley, runs as a three-month program at $1,250 with a $25 monthly membership afterwards billed quarterly, and hands over a pre-built PPV template instead of asking members to construct one. Around the template sit live and recorded training, workshops on customisation, a group coaching element, a Life Fundamentals mini-course, a FastTrack course on the Notion platform itself, and AI coaches trained on the PPV material. PPV is trademarked. The business side has been slower: a Teams and Businesses edition is still listed as in development, and Mission Drive says that kind of work has previously only been available through company consulting engagements in the $15,000 to $35,000 range.
Rebuilding PPV from scratch because Notion changed underneath it
The 2025 videos read as a system being taken apart in public. In August 2025 he covered 18 new Notion features and what they meant for a Life OS. In September he replaced the monthly and quarterly review cycle with something he calls DuoCycles, and reworked Pillars into what he describes as a compass for life direction. In November 2025 he posted "Notion PPV Pro: reinventing the original Notion Life OS for 2026". The argument on the course page is that Notion's foundational building blocks have shifted substantially and that PPV Pro is rebuilt from the ground up on the newer ones, described as the culmination of six years of refinement. The company rename followed: Year Zero was still live in March 2026, Mission Drive was up by April, the newsletter went out under the new name, and yearzero.io now forwards there.
Why August Bradley is on this list
He put a complete, opinionated life management system on YouTube for free in 2020 and kept going for 55 videos, showing the task dependencies, the linked databases and the dashboard logic holding it together, at a point when someone in the Notion community wanting that level of depth had very little to read. The messages he publishes from viewers are mostly from people who were setting up their first real Notion system while watching. Both of Notion's co-founders are quoted on his course page about what the videos did for people learning the platform.
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