The past two years have been extremely difficult. Thankfully, I'm drawing closer to the resolution or conclusion to some of the biggest challenges I'm facing.
As the year ends, I’ve been reassessing and planning for life (wow big word!) using Notion. It’s about 95% ready and I gained better clarity by doing this.
The process itself is awakening.
Disclaimer: I watched several tutorials to put everything here together, from guides on how to do the technical stuff (e.g. databases, linking, etc), to guides on what to write or plan for. For reference, search for keywords on Google or Youtube like “notion life planner”.
I first used Notion for note-taking and keeping tracks of courses/modules, but I thought it’s so powerful and can be used for maybe more than just that. I still use Excel for my daily expenses and financial tracking, though, Notion has its own capability. If I'm to describe it, it’s like creating your life’s website.
My Notion: Life Hub
The goal of creating this Notion is to have a one-place for nearly everything that’s going on in my life. I read or heard somewhere that we shouldn’t trust our brain and should write things down. But paper is obviously or can’t be as dynamic as Notion or any other note-taking software/applications.
Enough of the intro, here’s how I created my Notion “Life Hub”.
Life Hub
Note that there’s a Life Hub as the first page on the sidebar. This will be done towards the last part. It’s just basically a dashboard or a main landing page for quick access.
Retrospective
Start by creating a Retrospective. It can be done as simple as a straight-up write-up, or be a little extra using the different modes (table, gallery). The goal is to look at the year that passed (or about to).
Look at what went well, what caught you off-guard, and the likes. This will help put things in perspective.
Areas of Life
After assessing the year that passed (or about to end), it would be prudent to also reassess the areas of your life. What are the things you use most of your time and energy for? What needs more attention? What needs less? Categorize your life. This will also be used to make clearer goals.
I created a gallery view to sort of like a visual view of the areas of my life, and below it are my thoughts about each areas.
I started by thinking about what I do within a day, what my time and my mental and physical energy are consumed by. The text part are some sort of justification and validation that this area should remain and flourish in my life.
And at the end of each area, there’s is always the question, “What are the goals related to [Area of Life] that I want to achieve?” to make it a bit more compelling. After all, the purpose is to make action plans, right?
Here’s a sample. It is me, really, talking to myself. So, do it the same way: talk to yourself.
Hobbies and Recreation
Life is meant to be lived.
Balance between life and work (or goals) for me is a myth and I would die trying to achieve it.
An all-goal, mostly-work life for me is detrimental, not to mention boring.
A balance, if there really is (and for the lack of a better term), is to be aware when you are lacking effort or progress with work or your goals and dosing down on the happy pills. And conversely, dialing up the play button when you’re starting to get burnt down (burned, burnded, burdened) chasing your goals or working on your goals.
A quote from the great Jim Rohn:
💡 “When you work, work. When you play, play. Don’t mix the two.”
I fail at this sometimes, tbh, but it’s a rule I try to follow although it doesn’t apply at all times.
Still not a fan of YOLO, though.
Grind, ‘burn the midnight oil’, render overtime, but bike, read and write (for fun), travel, cook, eat, watch, laugh, love.
What are the goals related to Hobbies and Recreation that I want to achieve?
Daily Routine
Now that you’ve identified the areas of your life, it is time to look at your actual daily routines. There’s no need to be accurate, but be truthful.
The goal of this part is to cross-check whether certain areas of your life is eating up time and energy more than it should, or the opposite, should have more space in your daily life.
This page will start with whatever your current daily activities are and update it along the way.
Goals and Tasks
The most exciting part!
Now that you’ve seen your current daily routines and identified the Areas of Life, it’s time to make goals! I combined goals and tasks in one database. I want a single database, and regardless, I am bound to do them. Filters will do the trick of identifying and classifying them.
Other Sections
Trading
The rest of the items in the sidebar (other areas of life) are just separate pages that have a ‘life’ of their own, meaning, they can contain anything as long as it's related to that area.
Trading for example, contains all my notes in different ZFT courses.
The Trading section is the most densed part since, as I’ve mentioned, I inially used Notion to take notes.
Vacation
Vacation is currently my main focus and planning it makes me feel somehow optimistic and excited.
Some of the sections are empty for now. But if something comes up, I would know where to put them.
The Life Hub Dashboard
So, after setting up each section, the final touch is to create the first page. I named it Life Hub. (I think I heard it from one of the Youtube videos).
The Life Hub is just basically a front page. I added a quick link section for the most frequently used items, and a quote from Mr. Jim Rohn and a bible verse.
There are also linked view of the tables that I use most often including tables for my book notes and Youtube links which are practically empty because I just actually finished all of these last night and I here I am acting like it changed my life, sharing it through this post.
But as I’ve told you, I gained clarity.
There it is!
Final Words of Wisdom
Leaving you with these two quotations:
“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail” — Benjamin Franklin
and
“Just always ask yourself, what do you want? Then go from there.” — HG
