Notion.io: A Life Organiser

Welcome to my productivity system with Notion.io, it may and is probably not going to be perfect for you, but it works quite well for me.

I hope to include here concepts and suggestions for you to work with and mould into your own system, not a blueprint to copy. The beauty of Notion, is that it can be adapted to whatever you want, but this ability to change everything invariably means that I tinker and change things over time and I think that is ok as long as you spend most of your time completing the tasks within.

The Inbox

Every system needs a notepad, the Notion mobile app allows you to save things quickly, so do that. Save to your inbox and sort it out later when you are at a computer, maybe once a week empty your inbox — delete things that are irrelevant and save things that have actual value to you.

The Dashboard

This is the homepage, the place that look at the most to get an overview of what I have to do.

In my mind have separated the areas of my life into work, coding, property and personal as these are the different areas where I have tasks. You could have more or less areas, maybe you don’t care about property and include the tasks I have in there and include them in your personal task list, or you have children and need an area to keep track of what they have going on?

The Tasklist

My current implementation is as follows. I have two views for each tasklist, one for Kanban and one for Todo.

Todo

The todo list filters away all the things i don’t care about, i.e. it only show things here were there is a due date of today or before.

Kanban

Is a pretty traditional Kanban board, with Backlog, In Progress, Completed and with a twist… repeating. I find that it is impossible to manage tasks on Kanban without a repeating column for those chores like car maintenance / renewing insurance etc.

It is a good idea to regularly schedule some time to run through the columns and push as much out of your in progress column. Everything in progress should have a date, if it doesn’t well… it’s not in progress.

When you feel like your tasks are under control you can move tasks over from from your backlog to in progress and schedule them. In my opinion it is a feeling, there is no set rule when to pick up more work.

Task

This as an example of a completed task, using Notion i effectively have a CRM system where I can track what and when I completed a task so i have a log if there are any future disputes with companies i have a record of it. Here I noted when i posted this coat back to Fatface and that i had the money back, task then has it’s status updated to complete (or is deleted) and due date is removed.

And that is pretty much it, the beauty of separating the areas of your life into different sections allows you to create different columns, so you can create a different custom task list if you choose. I have found four main columns, but there are 5 for coding where i have a lot more tasks to do!

1. Due date: self explanatory, a date that I should take some action. I only start working on the task at this point in time, if it is a solid fixed date / appointment I will go in my calendar.
2. Labels: may not actually be necessary, but are quite useful to search by. I think of them like tags, a reminder that this task is about something. i.e. Node or React or Chocolate or Cake.
3. Status: No Status, Backlog, In Progress, Complete, Repeating
4. Why is this important: It is very easy to add a huge amount of tasks to your task list that are completely unimportant. When writing a short sentence about why you should do this task you can often find yourself realising that this is irrelevant and then feel free to delete the task.
5. Type: I have an endless amount of articles that i intend to read, projects i intend to build, tech tests that i intend to complete, courses that i intend to complete. I try to combine the elements of Kanban with Type to keep one project in progress and one article in progress and one tech test in progress at any one time. So on my Code task list I also have a Kanban view for each Type, and can select my most important project to work on instead of being overwhelmed by hundreds of articles i want to read.

The Areas / Archives

I used to follow the PARA method of organising my files and I may return to this one day, but it wasn’t perfect for me. I subscribe to the idea of areas and archives, each area of my life — say recipes may be considered a resource in PARA, but I just have a page / area for food and in that an area for recipes, or an area for finance and in that an area for my SIPP or ISA. Career may have an area for job hunting, an area for each job i have worked at and resources for getting a job like CVs and interview prep.

TLDR: Create Areas and remove as much as you can

My method follows a more object oriented approach to create areas which can be nested. The more naturally / off hand you think about it the better it becomes (associations should be natural), the more complexity the harder it becomes to find what you need, equally you don’t need to keep everything, delete as much as you can.

If you are saving things to an archive as yourself do you really need it or are you just hoarding?

Ps a mini scanner like this fujitsu is a lifesaver if you are saving a lot of paper to Notion.