How I organise my life with Notion (and why you should do it too)
What is Notion
Well if you are reading this I will assume you are aware of what Notion does but I’d still like to share what more it is capable of. I discovered Notion a year back and the change it has brought to my daily life is phenomenon.
A little backdrop, I was still in college when the pandemic began. I was stuck at home with nothing much to do just stare at the walls turn white to yellow. Mostly I would either study for my tests, make projects, read a couple of books or binge-watch anime but that life become mundane. Soon I saw a pattern — that I was becoming lazier and it took a bad toll on me. I was studying but I was not keeping a proper note structure. Whatever hobbies I tried picking on like drawing or knitting were lost in the dark since I could not make time to practice them daily, I lost track of the number of hours I was spending binge-watching and procrastinating.
So as most cinephiles would realise, this is where the drumrolls would come in. I started watching youtube videos and stumbled upon Notion. I consider myself to be an organised person so I try to keep things labelled and on track. Earlier the most I would do is journal things in a small notebook but even that was not helping me in the best way possible.
Notion, being a one-stop solution to most of my workflows came in handy in this situation. Be it managing your personal life, tracking finance, or just having a small safe space.
Other tools I used
I started using quite a few told before making Notion my primary stop. Todoist is something that I still use but that is only for work-related tracking. Todoist sends me emails for the deadlines of work I set and it is pretty easy to have all resources in one place as well. Google keeps was. pretty decent when it came to writing down grocery lists and on-spot poetries but I didn’t stick to it for long. It is a decent app to have on the phone for keeping a track of all on-the-spot thoughts but it had its limits.
Why Notion stuck with me
To keep it simple — it was easy and minimal. I don’t like seeing clusters and different colour themes. Notion offers a ton of templates that I was able to use as it is. Once I got a hang of it I started playing around with creating my own pages and organizing things the way I like. I added widgets to my Spotify playlist and clocks too.
Honestly, seeing a pretty neat and aesthetic board in front of me really calmed me down. It might not seem like a huge change, but for someone who likes to track a ton of things, Notion does its best to not make it feel like a chore. Where planning my work week and penning down the finances used to feel like such a huge task, with Notion I added icons, some anime theme pictures, I added my favourite quotes and widgets which made the board come to life.
I work as a product analyst and all I do is play around with data. Notion has a powerful database system that is amazing at creating lists, tables, and kanbans. These databases can be efficiently sorted and filtered. Not only that, but it was also easy to perform basic maths like sums, averages, and percentages.
How I utilise Notion in my daily life
My work requires a lot of tracking the time and activities. The product deadlines need to be met and I also have to make sure the analytics is being done at a uniform time. For that it becomes paramount to sit down in the morning and write down the things that are a priority for me.
It helps me work in a more efficient manner as I pick the tasks according to the priority and then work my way to lighter tasks, I make notes of what is to be done and also strike off the letters once the task has been completed. I always felt that I am not being productive enough but ticking a task and pushing it from ‘to be done’ to ‘completed’ make me happier than anything.
Money does not come in easy but it flows within a blink of an eyes. In college I was trying to make my own money by freelancing and also managing things with the allowance I get. I needed to keep a track of the clients I was taking, the money flow from those channels and also divide my allowance in such a way that I have enough of saving too.
With tracking my expense on Notion I was able to see how my I was spending on an average. It was also surprising to see that I can filter the data on the basis of categories which means I was able to see where I was spending the most.
3. Tracking my habits
Habit tracker is amazing if you want to keep a note of all the things you’re learning. You can track the languages you are learning, skills like knitting, drawing, journaling and even small habits like going on a run or drinking water. at the end of the week when you see the colourful board I am sure you’ll feel more confident in those skills.
You can use this ready-to-use free template from Notion and change the titles of the habits. The aim not to have many new habits in the chart but to be consistent with the few that we have. Mental wellbeing is important but not at a cost where someone is burned out. A healthy mind will think healthy.
4. Organising my lifestyle
At last when I have planned my day, tracked the habits and written my expenses, I come down to just listing down my long term and short term goals, the shows that I am watching, the movies that I want to watch along with books that at in my to-be-read.
I like keeping a journal of the things I watch so that I can come and see the impact that they had on me.
In this personal home I have also added widgets to my pinterest boards and my favourite youtube channels. This is my own personal space which I like maintaining and updates frequently.
Hope it was a good read for you. Much more such content is on the way! It’ll be great if you stuck around for it. Thank you!
Check out my templates: https://moulshree.gumroad.com/
Mail: moulshreee@gmail.com
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