Productivity Series

“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail”

~ Benjamin Franklin

Have you ever looked at high achievers and wondered how they accomplish so much more than you in the same 24 hours that we all have?

Having a list of tasks you want to complete during the day right in front of you provides leverage for clearly stated actionables, which aids in doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. PLANNING, my friend, is what’s enabling people just like you to achieve 10X or even 50X more than you’re achieving.

Innumerable apps are present in the market which promise to enhance productivity, but my personal favorite is Notion. Almost a year ago, I heard one of my colleagues talk about how handy the Notion app is and how its usage saves tonnes of his time. This led me to experiment with this app, and I must say it has helped me big time.

In this blog piece, my aim is to help you out with using Notion in your everyday life, which will definitely boost your productivity. You might wanna be wary of the complexity of the app, which can develop resistance to using it due to the multiple features it offers. So, my intention here is to make the usage of Notion damn simple for you.

I will talk about 3 simple steps to using the app, which can surely add to your work output.

Overview of the Notion App

Go ahead and download Notion to your mobile devices. Trust me, you’ll not regret it. As you log in to the app, you’ll have to enter your basic details. The gif added below will give you a fair idea of what the app interface looks like on your laptop. You can personalize the name of your space as well. For example, if your name is Mark, you can call it “Mark’s Notion”.

It consists of inbuilt pages like Quick Note, Task List, Journal, etc. Along with this, you can create new pages and name them anything at your convenience. Let’s say you have a wishlist of books or Youtube videos you want to watch. You can name the pages accordingly. I’ve added a snapshot below as to how to create a new page and start adding stuff to it.

Templates-

The Notions gallery supports dozens of templates, out of which my personal favorite is Habit Tracker. It provides a super detailed and user-friendly dashboard to track your daily goals. This supports various views like table/list/calendar/gallery/board/timeline. Hence, enabling you to track your regular habits. Additionally, new goals can be added to the tracker as and when you’re trying to adopt a new habit.

How to use the in-built Notion Templates-Habit Tracker?

Note Taking-

This feature is my personal favorite, in which the Notion App allows you to add the Quick Note page or any other page of your choice as a widget on the main screen of your mobile device.

Similarly, while working on the desktop, you can use the Notion Clipper extension in your web browser to clip any interesting stuff that you find online and add it to the respective page.

Who all agrees with me that during a day we come across tonnes of interesting things which we might forget, if not noted there and then? That’s where the Quick Notes page comes in handy. Add anything that you find gripping, or use it to make to-do lists using checkboxes. Another super cool feature is that Notion allows you to embed interesting article links, tweets, videos, PDFs, images, and a plethora of other things. Just a click and it will redirect you to the link you’ve embedded.

This gif explains the steps to add Notion as a widget on your main screen and use it to refrain from memorizing the tasks which you need to attend to in a day’s time.

Closing Note:

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. — Mark Twain”

Make a daily to-do list. We must make a plan for the day and carry it out; planning should take no more than 10–15 minutes per day. Only planning leaves us procrastinating and ultimately feeling worthless.

If Planning is the KING, Execution is the QUEEN and both together will help you build your empire!

Spend approximately 2.5% of your daily working hours planning, i.e., if you work 10 hours a day, your planning should not exceed 15 minutes. Sometimes, planning might get overwhelming, eventually making you hem and haw, thus leaving most of the work unfinished. Remember — you need to have 5–10 bullet points and strike them off your Notion checklist.

Additionally, use the Google Calendar or any calendar app that you’re fond of to block and dedicate time to respective activities, and stay disciplined. Free your brain from memorizing redundant stuff; it’s supposed to be a place where creativity takes birth, not a storehouse of your daily chores.

In the end, go through your Quick Notes page of Notion and check off all the tasks you’ve completed( try finishing your daily goals without fail); followed by reflecting upon everything you learned throughout the day.

Have daily goals and accomplish them, then see for yourself how your weekly, monthly, short-term, and long-term goals get fulfilled.

Hi friend, if you like this article, do share it with your friends and let them benefit from it. Also, feel free to suggest your opinions in the comment section.

Happy Living! 🙂

Check out other Blog posts from the author here.