š notion tour | how I organize + plan my life
*FREE NOTION TEMPLATES BELOW*
Itās not lost on me that planning for the future right now is insanely daunting, unpredictable, and emotional. In fact, in any given ānormalā year I would typically take a few weeks to settle into a groove after the holidays, allowing any impulsive or misaligned goals I made in January to fall away. This year has been no different, if anything it has been a noisier January, making planning all the more difficult.
Now that itās February and the dust has settled, I want to introduce you to a system that has had my back the last few months, allowing me to track my wellbeing, my tasks, and my personal goals. Her name is Notion.
WHAT IS NOTION?
Notion is an extremely powerful software with seemingly no limits on customizability. I will preface this by saying that Notion comes with quite the learning curve, but for me, itās well worth it. After discovering this system back in October, I took a dive off the deep end exploring its functions and features, testing out what works for me and making daily tweaks. Iāve taken great care and a lot of time researching and designing my Notion hub and while it is still a work in progress, using this system truly brings a sense of calm to my task management.
I have directly adapted the general layout of my hub pages from Jules Acree, an Austin-based content creator, and have fine-tuned the many databases and functions to my liking. Please check out her content if youād like to see a more comprehensive look at the pages I have adapted.
Iāll give you a brief overview of my homepage, then explain in detail the templates Iāve shared. If you want an in-depth look at how these pages work in practice, make sure you watch my tour on YouTube.
FUNCTION AND LAYOUT OF MY HOMEPAGE
By using the forward slash ( / ), that is how you customize whether you want to write text, a header, a to-do list, bullet point, numbered list, table, divider... the list is endless. You can create an infinite amount of pages within pages as well, which is explained in my tutorial video. But for now, I have pages embedded within my life hub homepage and they are divided according to topic:
āØ My āDashboardsā are typically productivity / task related.
āØ My āPersonalā heading refers to areas of my life like gratitude practices, journaling, and fun personal stuff.
āØ On the far right I have a variety of lists.
āØ Iāve embedded my Spotify playlist I play each morning while having my morning coffee.
āØ āDocumentationā includes things like taxes, medical history, and important documents I need to keep on file.
āØ Lastly, I have my āGrowthā list, which includes my workout tracker (this page is still under construction), any courses Iām taking, and book notes.
āØ I do have a āWorkā list as well, to track contract agreements and other work documents.
Feel free to draw inspiration from these ideas as you design your own Notion hub. Think of this as looking at other peopleās bullet journals and using that to inform how you set up your own!
FREE SHARED TEMPLATES:
There are four templates I will be sharing with you, but as youāll see, each comes with many, many subpages embedded within. Play around with what works for you, what doesnāt... the most complicated pages might be too extravagant for your task management needs, and thatās A-ok! Go back to basics with a simple to-do checklist ā Notion supports simplicity as well š
š Click here to access my free shared templates.
For those wanting to try out my pages, hereās a detailed breakdown of each.
GETTING SHIT DONE DASHBOARD
Letās start with one of my favourite, most used pages!
The Getting Shit Done (or rather, the āGetting Things Doneā) dashboard is my adapted version from David Allenās method of scheduling and organizing. It essentially is a task manager with many at-a-glance views of your upcoming tasks. The way Iāve set this up is with a big master task table, which holds all my tasks, and then the GSD dashboard contains views of said table simply filtered in different ways.
Inbox
The first section is called the Inbox, which is for incoming tasks. Iāve heard it called a Brain Dump before, but itās essentially a dumping ground for tasks that come into your life. I will input new tasks here, assign it a database (aka an area of my life that it belongs to), a date, whether or not itās high energy, low energy or an errand, the estimated duration that task will take to complete, whether or not itās high priority, its status, any relevant notes, and then when Iām done writing everything for that task, I will ācaptureā it.
And usually I will fill this up quickly as tasks come to mind throughout the week, then fill in the nitty gritty details later, and capture it once everything is filled in. This is what is so great about Notion, since in Google Calendar I often donāt know where or even have time to schedule things that pop into my head at a momentās notice. So the inbox acts as a temporary home for tasks you know need completing, but maybe you donāt have all the details thought-through right now.
Youāve heard me say ācaptureā a few times now. What capturing does is file the task away where it belongs in the various views I have set up below. This is thanks to the filter Iāve set up for the inbox, which only allows items that have not yet been captured to live there. Capturing does not delete the task, but rather sorts it depending on the date that youāve set. As a result, what matters most when using this view is making sure you select a date before capturing, as this dashboard is date-oriented.
However, donāt fret if you accidentally capture a task without assigning a date. Iāve made a āSomedayā view (this is not included in the video tutorial) which will capture tasks that have no date, saving you from needing to find it later. If you happen to completely lose a task, you can always click on the table name (āTasksā), which will bring you to the Master Task table where all tasks live.
When you add a new item to the table, Notion will create a page for this item. You can open up each item page by clicking the OPEN pop-up, which shows you every property on this card. Iāve chosen to hide some of these properties from the actual table view, as I donāt want to overcrowd the table and some of these properties may not be applicable to each task (i.e. I hide the ācapturedā property in most of the table views)
*One feature Iām testing right now is a recurring task formula, since at the moment Notion does not support recurring items. I wonāt go into too much detail, but essentially there are some tasks that I like to have repeating. To accommodate for that, I have a formula set up so that I have what I like to call a digital butler that will serve up the task at a certain frequency of days that I set. So for example, every 14 days, I want to plan a catch-up session with my friends and family, so Notion will serve up this task to me automatically.
Today
If you scroll down, I have an overdue view, which will grab any tasks not completed by the due date (this view will be explained shortly). I have a āTodayās Focusā view, which has a table filtered to show only tasks that have the due date set to today. This helps me look at whatās on my plate for the day and I also have it sorted by priority, so the items due today that are marked as high priority will appear first.
This Week
The āThis Weekā view ā you guessed it ā allows me to see whatās on this week. And youāll notice that there are duplicates between tasks on the Today table and This Week table, since I include todayās date in āThis Weekāās table. This is so that I can look at the week holistically without ignoring today. Anything with a green Scheduled status I have scheduled into my Google Calendar and I no longer have to worry about.
Overdue
Hopping back to the āOverdueā view: Anything that I may miss is always shown in my Overdue view. This is because this table is filtered in a way that catches any tasks I havenāt ticked off as āDoneā and that has a due date before today. I find this view is absolutely essential in jogging my memory and not forgetting things that I didnāt have the chance to complete. Ideally I donāt want anything landing in here, but it happens.
If I find that an item keeps ending up in the Overdue table, what Iāll often do is reassess if I have time to complete that task or if thereās anything I can do differently in my approach, and Iāll sometimes do what I like to call ābumpingā. This is when I clear the date. The task will then appear in the āSomedayā table.
On the Radar
Near the bottom, I have an āOn the Radarā view that will show me anything upcoming in the next month (excluding this week).
Someday - NEW, not shown in tutorial video
Any task with no due date set will appear here. These are things Iād like to complete, but havenāt fleshed out when I will complete them. Once you do set a date, it will vanish from this table and be filed away according to the date.
Completed
I have a completed task list hidden under a toggle, which shows many different views of the tasks Iāve ticked off as Done. You can switch between Past Week, Month, and Year views.
And now youāve glimpsed my techie insanity! You can imagine there are so many different ways to filter these tables depending on the properties you set up. Some people might want a view that shows only High Priority tasks, or tasks under 30 minutes in duration (I call these āknockoutsā). You can use these table filters to create robust systems that show what you want to see at a glance ā so play around with it! Feel out what works for you.
Personally, I depend on Notion to help with high-level planning and weekly breakdowns; itās a personal scheduling assistant that is always on top of things. I should mention that while this is wonderful for weekly scheduling, most of my daily scheduling I oversee in Google Calendar. Meaning on Sundays when I do my planning for the upcoming week, I cross-reference with my GCal, and once Iāve marked the status for my tasks in Notion as Scheduled, I will use Google Cal as my daily visual schedule in a calendar view. If I had it my way, scheduling within Notion would sync to my Google Calendar, and vice-versa, but unfortunately as of now, thereās no automatic 2-way integration with Notion and Google Cal yet. I do hope that is a new feature coming down the line.
YEARLY PLANNING
For My Yearly Planning you might wonder, how this is different than the GSD dashboard, and hereās how Iāll explain it. My GSD is my all-things week-to-week task manager. It allows me to task manage things on the fly, and is designed for capturing tasks as life happens. My Yearly Planning is more intentional planning that I visit on a monthly basis, and while my GSD dashboard will capture these tasks beautifully as well, my Yearly Planning dashboard is meant for high-level planning in alignment with my goals Iāve set up for the year. I will visit this page typically once per month.
It starts at a yearly view. Here is where Iāll think hard about what I want to focus on this year. I think about my values and what I currently have, what Iām longing for, or perhaps lacking. In 2021, my word for the year that I kept coming back to was community. I felt as though, especially during a pandemic and moving across the country, nurturing a sense of community is what kept my spirits high during my lows. I did everything in my power to build a small community of friends in Kelowna when I moved there. When I came home to Nova Scotia later in the year, I felt held and supported by my family and friends and rekindled a lot of distant relationships. So it made sense that community was my word of the year, and although I didnāt have Notion back at the start of the year to plan out my word, I knew on some level that community was my grounding point.
That brings us to my word for 2022, which is alignment. I want every small thing that I do to be aligned with my values and with my true self. I want to be selfish in the pursuit of what aligns my actions with my beliefs. Now that Iāve chosen my word, this can help to inform the goals for the year I set for myself.
I can set my goals for the year and assigned quarters in which Iād like to accomplish these goals. Iāve also assigned the goalās status and whether the goal is personal or professional. The āSupporting tasksā column are tasks Iāve created that will support the pursuit of this goal.
Now that Iāve assigned quarters for each goal, I can go into each quarter and break down in which months I want to work towards the goals. I have a synced block that shows the goals Iāve assigned to this quarter, as well as some extras (I like to call these my nice-to-have goals). Based on my quarterly goals, I will create slightly smaller goals within each month. Say my goal is getting back to exercising 4-5 times per week. I want to break that down into smaller sub-goals. That means within the month of January, Iām going to create a task to reach out to my barre studio to get back into my energy exchange program, so that I can be taking classes throughout the week. I also want to complete an online HUSTL challenge this month. These tasks directly support me in working towards my goal. This gets more and more granular.
I can turn these priorities into tasks that I can then sort into my weekly views Iāve set up, which are essentially the same tables that exist on my Getting Shit Done page. I can drag-and-drop the task into its respective week that I want to complete it. You can drag, but personally, I like to duplicate it and then drag the duplicate, so that I can keep the monthly priority as a checkbox item as well, instead of it getting lost in my task manager.
Once itās in my weekly task manager view, I can fill out the relevant information and capture it here, or I can capture it later in my GSD inbox. But basically, this is how I break down goals into smaller tasks to ensure Iām hitting them. And if I go back to my GSD dashboard, these tasks have been filed into my task manager alongside my day-to-day tasks that I think of on the fly, so itās a very seamless process.
GRATITUDE REFLECTIONS
Letās move on to something a bit more fun. Under the āPersonalā tab, I have a page where I keep my gratitude practices. Each morning, I like to start my day by writing down what Iām grateful for. I have a template set up so that my pre-made questions are laid out for me when I sit down at my computer first thing. Sometimes I still prefer writing them by hand, but this has been much quicker for me in the mornings and sometimes I donāt feel like picking up a pen. I write the date, set my mood so that I can track my feelings day-in and day-out, and Iāll typically also set a reminder so that I donāt forget to fill in my P.M. assessment once the day is done. Itās a wonderful way to keep myself grounded, reflect on the day, and pinpoint what could have gone better.
RECIPES
If youāve seen my video about my digital recipe book, I recently moved my recipe list over from my Trello board, since Notion offers a similar Kanban-style board. Iām still testing out this page, but essentially everything is divided by category, whether it be Breakfast, Salads, Drinks, Entrees, Desserts, Sauces, etc. The function Iām testing is the āAdd to Grocery Listā checkbox. This triggers the recipeās respective ingredients to be added to a grocery list, where itās sorted by aisle, making the grocery shopping experience much easier. As I said, there are still some things to smooth out but Iāll be happy to share a grocery list template in the future.
So as you can see, the potential of this software is far-reaching. There are so many creators out there who have explored the more in-depth intricacies of Notion, but this has been my adapted approach thanks to so many of these creators.
I believe that having a system to rely on when you donāt have the brain space to task manage is key to driving success in reaching your goals and maintaining a balance in your life. They say that the human brain can only remember 7 things at a time. SEVEN. Having this system brings me peace of mind that if I write it down, it wonāt allow me to forget. Notion will always catch it for me so that I can reschedule the tasks around my ever-changing life, rather than the other way around.
Stay real,
āK. JO
