Notion: How I Use This All-In-One Productivity Tool To Organize My Entire Life

Notion has become my second brain.

I have been using it every day for the past 2 years to help me organize every corner of my life.

And in all honesty, if Notion disappeared tomorrow, I would be lost without it.

Here is everything you need to know about Notion and how I use the all-in-one productivity tool to organize my entire life.

Let me start off by saying, I absolutely love Notion.

It has helped me organize my whole entire life in one place.

Pretty handy for a digital nomad!

I also no longer turn my nose up to digital planning. In fact, it might even be starting to become my preferred method of planning. But shh, don’t tell anyone I just said that!

Anyway, I hope this post provides you with enough information about Notion and you benefit from this nifty tool just as much as I have.

What is Notion?

Notion is a digital productivity and organization tool that keeps all of your ideas in one place so there’s no need for multiple tools.

In short, “It’s a workspace that adapts to your needs.” (MatchGroup)

With powerful features, the possibilities on Notion are quite simply endless.

You can customise your workspace to work for you with numerous templates or start from scratch and build your own pages with databases and “Lego-style” building blocks.

Building blocks are the pieces of content you add to a page. Your block can be text, a to-do list item, a toggle list, an image, or embedded file, etc.

And a database is the core of your organized workspace. All of the content you put into Notion can be grouped into a table, calendar, board, gallery, list or timeline.

“Notion is a workspace that adapts to your needs.”

Match Group

Why I use Notion

As I mentioned above, Notion is like my second brain. It is home to everything.

My many todo lists for both work and life, blog templates and schedule, email marketing schedule, content calendar, book quotes (yes, I’m an underliner), travel plans, notes, and so much more.

I also have somewhere to map out and track my yearly goals.

I also have the space to display my yearly vision board so I can be reminded of it every single day, along with my monthly goals and daily intentions.

In short, I use Notion to organize every inch of my life. Sure, I’m already a pretty organized person, but Notion takes things to a whole new level.

With Notion, I can keep everything all in one place and not have to worry about using multiple notebooks or losing random pieces of paper. Or frantically looking through my notebook to find out where I wrote down that idea.

Everything is stored within one powerful database.

Hot tip → Everything in your Notion database is completely searchable.

All you need to do is press CMD + F to search for something on a specific page, or CMD + K to search for something in your entire workspace.

For example, when I want to refer back to a blog post, I press CMD + K and search for the title of the post and add a filter to narrow down my search.

Notion vs Trello

When I first started my business, I was a Trello girl. Purely because I hadn’t heard of Notion yet, and I loved the simplicity of the tool.

But 3 years in, things have since changed.

I now prefer to use Notion over Trello because of its endless workspace possibilities.

Whereas Trello is just a Kanban-style board, Notion is so much more. I can organize my life into a table, calendar, board, gallery, list or even timeline.

I love to build things, I love doing jigsaw puzzles, and Notion allows you to create a unique workspace that works for you. It’s basically Lego for the ambitious adult.

It’s honestly the best productivity tool I use (aside from Momentum Plus) because if it disappeared tomorrow, I would literally be lost without it.

Notion highlights

• Free to start using
• Available on both iOS and Android, and Mac and Windows
• Customise your workspace with blocks, emojis, coloured or highlighted text, images, etc
• Personalise your space by adding stock or your own images to pages
• One tool for everything
• Formats text and headings, etc, for seamless copy and paste
• Simple and easy to use
• Offline mode
• Syncs between devices
• Work with your team with smooth and easy collaboration
• Supports integrations so you can connect your favourite apps

Doesn’t Notion sound awesome?

It’s crazy to think that this powerful productivity tool is entirely free to use (up to 5 MB of storage space).

If you’re like me and love to make your Notion board aesthetically pleasing and add your own images, you might need to upgrade to Notion Plus, which gives you unlimited storage space.

And even then, it’s only $8 per month! That’s less than your entire daily Starbucks order

How I organize my Notion workspace

How I organize my Notion workspace is probably one of the questions I get asked the most. So I thought it would be useful to put every single detail into a blog post. 

Here is everything you need to know about Notion and how to use it to organize every inch of your own life. I encourage you to bookmark this page so you can refer back to it whenever you need to.

So are you ready to become BFFs with Notion? Let’s dive right in…

1 | Dashboard

My Notion dashboard acts as the main hub of my workspace. It’s where I go when I first click on my Notion desktop icon at the beginning of the day.

It is home to my weekly schedule, lists for both work and life, quick links and tasks.

But it is also where I link my goals for each season, make a note of personal intentions and remind myself daily of my yearly vision.

Simply put, I am obsessed with my Notion dashboard. It is colourful, neat and personalised to suit me, my personality and my needs. It makes me feel excited to start the day.

In all honesty, my productivity skyrocketed when I started to use Notion as an organisational tool. And this all started with my dashboard.

Yes, the layout has changed since I first started using the app, but what remains consistent is that everything I need each day is easily accessible from this main page. No more flicking through countless pages in my notebook to find what I need.

Hot tip → Are you digging the style of my screenshots?

Then you’ll definitely like the app I use. It’s called CleanShot X and it’s available within this ultimate subscription service from Setapp, along with 240+ apps for your Mac.

2 | Weekly schedule

Halfway through 2021 after many days of feeling unproductive and unfocused, I decided to ditch my “go with the flow” attitude and theme each day of my week.

This was a huge productivity booster for me and allowed me to manage my time more efficiently as each day had its own set of tasks and this was consistent each week.

I could finally wake up in the morning knowing exactly what I needed to get done.

My focus improved by 100% and my procrastination decreased by 80% (because hey, I’m only human). And this all came down to syncing my workload with my energy levels.

So how did I use Notion to organize my entire weekly schedule?

On a piece of paper, I first brain-dumped every single thing I do in a week. I then organized each task into a group with other similar or relevant tasks and then allocated each group to a day of the week.

Everything on this piece of paper was then transferred over to Notion. I used a “table” block to note down my general weekly tasks from Monday through Sunday. I also create a subcategory for anything to do with content.

My organized weekly schedule now sits within a toggle bar on my Notion dashboard so I can refer back to it whenever I need or when I need to update how I spend my time.

3 | Lists

Notion has become my go-to tool for keeping track of work tasks, life admin and general lists of things I want to watch, read and do.

Thanks to the easy-to-use “to-do list” block, I can create a to-do list on any page and joyfully tick the box when I’ve completed something on that list. (hello, dopamine hit.)

I also make sure I keep tasks separate so I can easily keep track of them. In one column, I have “business tasks” which get broken down into different lists: priority, brand + blog, website and miscellaneous.

I use a “toggle heading” building block to show and hide my tasks when I need to. Because if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a complete neat freak, and everything on my Notion board needs to look aesthetically pleasing.

In the second column, sits my personal life corner.

This is home to random lists I make, like shopping, movies I want to watch, books I want to read and places I want to travel to. These are organized into pages so they are neatly hidden away, and I don’t get distracted by them.

I’ve included a screenshot below of what my page looks like within the “Reading list”. This is the page where I rate the books I’ve read and track yearly reading goals.

4 | Goals

I was never someone who wrote down their goals, let alone even set them in the first place. But using Notion changed my entire outlook on goal-setting.

I now happily map out my goals every year and quarter and track them using the “timeline” block.

I even drag finished goals into a “completed” column once I’ve achieved them. This allows me to take a step back from jumping onto the next goal and celebrate my win. I’ve also chosen to keep my completed goals from the previous years on my Notion board for this same reason.

And my goal tracker goes even further than this as I’ve also used this page to make a note of the things I would like to achieve in the next 5 and 10 years in work, life, travel and health.

I haven’t included the whole of my goal tracker in the image as they remain personal to me, but I hope you can get an idea of how I organize this area of my life from the example below. Each goal opens up to a page with all the specific details on that goal and the actions I need to take to reach it.

Notion is built on building blocks, and the possibilities are endless. You can add and open new pages within another page, which is on another page, etc. Kinda like a Russian doll.

5 | Content calendar

Before I moved over to Notion, I was working off a long list of content ideas in my head. I wouldn’t plan ahead, and I would leave creating content to the last minute.

It was a stressful and overwhelming way to do things, and I regularly would not post.

My social media went from being a disorganized mess to a curated masterpiece. The glow-up was real.

Putting a content calendar together on Notion changed the game for me and tripled my presence on social media. I continue to use Notion to plan my content as I can visually see my ideas and what I’m going to post each week on Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and TikTok.

I originally used the Kanban-style board that Notion offers as it allowed me to see each graphic preview, publish date and the type of content I was posting. But after a while, I found it became too messy, so I now choose the “calendar” block.

Because my content schedule works so well with Notion, I also use it to organize my blog posts and weekly emails. While everyone else is using Google Docs or Word to create templates for their written work, I’m doing the same thing but in Notion.

Because I like to keep everything in one place. Plus, Notion allows you to format your headings and text so you can easily copy and paste anywhere. Yup, that’s right before I pressed publish on this blog post, it was written up in Notion first.

Final thoughts

And that’s Notion in a nutshell.

I know getting started on a new productivity tool and exploring its capabilities can seem rather daunting, but I hope this blog post has helped ease the overwhelm and provided you with inspo.

When I first heard about Notion, I was originally put off by the blank space.

Earlier, I mentioned that I was originally put off by Notion because the blank space scared me. But after 2 amazing years, Notion’s blank space approach is the most valuable thing about the tool.

You can start from scratch and go with the flow with anything you do. Writing, typing or moodboarding, you can do whatever suits you best in that moment.

I also believe blank space simplifies things. There are no overwhelming features to get distracted by. Notion’s workspace is simple and breathable.

So don’t worry if you can’t get the hang of the building blocks just yet. Simply use the blank space to make notes. Type out your thoughts.

And when you’re ready, type forward slash and click on something from the list of options. It could be a heading, bullet point, to-do list or other building block. The choice is yours.

Start small and play around with the features. But most importantly, have fun organizing your Notion workspace.

You’ve got this.

Thalia xx

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