One day a few months ago, I happened upon a YouTube video that changed my daily routine, twirlingpage’s “how I organize my life (notion tour + free template).” I was immediately intrigued. What is Notion? How did this girl organize her life with it? Where do I sign up? Needless to say, I signed up and I’m hooked!
With Notion, your best bet is to watch a Notion tour to understand what it is. To me, Notion is an extension of my brain. I have also heard of others explaining that it’s your own personal Wikipedia. I use it to plan my day, organize my thoughts, and manage tasks. It’s almost like a mind map, as you can effortlessly connect pages, and there’s unlimited nesting.
So far, it seems like any other note-taking website. Yet, it doesn’t sort things in notebooks or folders as usual, Notion acts like a functioning website homepage. Notion is fully customizable. You can add music, playlists, photos, different colors, and fonts, and you can even control the layout of your website. For creative types with lots of time on their hands, Notion is perfect to mess around with to get a completely custom design. For those that find this clean-slate overwhelming, there are unlimited templates to choose from to get you started.
I have split my Notion into two different main pages: home, and school. My home page is dedicated to personal enrichment, and tasks in my daily life. My school page is minimal but acts as a quick reference to basic information for my classes.
On my homepage, I have created a habit and mood tracker, goals, and weekly agendas, which are pretty self-explanatory. I’ve also created many pages to keep track of my thoughts, such as gift ideas, wishlists, activities to do with friends, and spending records. I also created long, long lists of movies and shows I want to watch, and books I want to read. Within these pages, I have areas to rate the movies/shows I watched and books I read. I want to diversify my reading list; and Notion makes that easy, allowing me to tag each book with information about the author and content. My favorite things that I have added to my Notion are a seasonal bucket list and different recipes to try.
My school page is a bit more minimal. I have links to useful websites like Moodle, the Student Center, virtual textbooks, and class Zoom links. I have also attached my syllabi and a spreadsheet of my upcoming assignments, as they are the documents I find myself looking for the most. Finally, I have pages dedicated to recording my past courses and GPA, as well as requirements for graduation.
Notion has helped me organize and stay diligent about my work. Opening my page motivates me just a bit more to “do great work.” If you’ve found yourself losing a bit of steam so far, I cannot recommend Notion enough!