After 2 years in Notion, I still somehow found myself struggling with being on top of my goals, projects and tasks. When the new year started, and after I finished my Core 10 template (which took so many months), I committed to, once and for all, nail down that Notion productivity design that would alleviate my major stressors around projects and task management, and reduce the confusion and overwhelm around daily productivity in general. Back in January, I started designing a template which I then called Advanced Goal Tracker. From the name itself, you could guess that the scope was much smaller, focusing only on goals and tasks. I was on track on finishing it late January and was very optimistic that it will help me get organized for the year ahead. However, when I started using the template to manage my projects, I found myself missing a lot of pieces. I still felt overwhelmed and I did not feel helped as much as I initially hoped. Little did I know that I would spend the next 4 months figuring out a much bigger design that would become the Ultimate Productivity Planner. From a template mainly focused on Goals, it expanded to 7 major themes which I listed down below. I essentially combined what could be maybe 5 separate templates into one holistic and streamlined experience.
The final missing big pieces turned out to be my Life Planner and Timeboxing Notion designs which I got inspired by through two separate occasions. The latter was meeting a university student (Hi Mia!) through my Core 10 product who I helped and she was using the Shovel app to manage her hours. That app got me very interested with the idea of Timeboxing. Another factor that completed the whole, was discovering a new podcast called, Redeeming Productivity (Shout out to Reagan Rose 🙌) **because it solidified and enriched the concept of Weekly Reviews for me. This episode inspired my Weekly Review design. The Advanced Metrics is a natural tendency of mine since I am in the Business Intelligence space and that's essentially what I do for work. And the Gamification piece was a concept that I already explored and have designed for last year.
I would say the trickiest part for me in designing Notion templates is knowing when to stop. Knowing that point in time when you can honestly say that the template is now finally 99% whole, 99% useful, 99% seamless and a 100% joy to use. When it comes to sharing templates, I want to make sure it's the best version I could possibly produce because I understand that once a template is duplicated, I can no longer push fixes and upgrades without being a burden to the users.
The key reason, I think, that this new template has finally become effective for me is because it provided for that end-to-end solution that is necessary but unfortunately not available in any other tool. These 7 aspects combined is a perfect example of that scenario where the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Each aspect removed from each other is just not as effective. Tasks linked to Goals is common sense but without Timeboxing, execution becomes difficult and our tendency to overcommit and be overoptimistic about our day could lead to burnout. Timeboxing and task execution without Weekly Reviews robs us of the much needed respite and opportunity to celebrate our progress and to routinely align to our values and goals. While Goals, ****even if you complete a lot, by themselves, could not be fully enjoyed if you don't see them somehow fit the bigger picture (Life Plan). Finally, Metrics and Gamification just enhances the whole process by providing the needed insights and making the whole experience fun. ✨