How I Plan my Weeks in Notion
👋 Hey friends,
Welcome back! It’s been a little while since I wrote anything so I figured I’d ease myself back into it by writing about some of my processes and task management stuff.
In this post we’re going to be talking about how I manage my weekly todos using a Notion “Sprints” template I’ve been tweaking for the past 3 years. We’ll talk about what prompted me to become such an insufferable control freak with my time, the iterations I went through with my task management, how I use this current version, and, if you’re interested, how you can use it too.
If you’d like to skip past all that non-sense, you can access the template for free here or support me via gumroad or stripe
Also if you hate reading and would rather watch the Notion Sprints Tutorial:
Story Time — “He just like me fr fr”
<aside> 💡 Heads up, skip to “The Notion Sprints Template” section if you just want to learn how my system works :D
</aside>
There are three things you need to know about me for all this to make sense:
- I’m a super anxious perfectionist
- I jump at every opportunity I can get my hands on
- I’m chaotic and disorganized by nature
This is a wicked combo for driving yourself nuts. In my first and second year of undergrad Computer Science, I took on more extra-curricular work than I had ever done before while also upholding the absurd expectation that I’d continue to ace every single one of my courses. All the while, I expected that I could manage every deadline and task in my head … I’m sure you can all guess how that went down.
I wasn’t used to the level of responsibility, the number of directions and projects my mind was suddenly split amongst, and how much fun it all was. That’s the tricky part — it was fun. That made me feel like I should be able to do it all. Unfortunately, that’s not how these things work. Just because you enjoy the work you’re doing, doesn’t mean you can fill every moment of your life with it and not do anything to organize it without consequences.
So, I found myself drowning in far too much of a good thing. I was letting people down by missing deadlines, tasks, and responsibilities. Worst of all, it turned the communities and hobbies that I loved contributing to extra weight on my already anxious shoulders.
I needed a solution and stubborn young me was determined to do it all
💡 Cue ✨ Time Management ✨
During my first co-op I was introduced to agile software development. I won’t get into the details, but the important part I took out of that were the notions of tickets, sprints, and the oh so glorious kanban board. For those of you unfamiliar, here’s what NotionAI drummed up when I asked it to describe them for you:
🏃 Sprints
In agile programming, a sprint is a time-boxed period of time, typically two weeks, during which a team works together to complete a specific set of tasks. During a sprint, all team members work towards a common goal and focus on completing tasks that are assigned to them. At the end of the sprint, the team reviews the tasks completed and how they worked together to achieve the goal. The sprint is then repeated, with the team moving onto a new set of goals and tasks.
🎟️ Tickets
In agile software development, tickets are tasks or pieces of work that are assigned to individual team members. They are usually organized into categories such as design, development, and testing, and are tracked in a task board. Tickets are usually assigned a priority level and timeline to complete, and are tracked throughout the sprint. At the end of the sprint, the tickets are reviewed and the progress is tracked.
📋 Kanban Boards
Kanban boards are a popular task management system used in agile software development. It is a visual representation of tasks and activities, organized into columns. Each column represents the stages of development, from “To Do” to “Done”. The columns are divided into tasks, which can be moved from one column to another as they are completed. This helps teams to easily track the progress of their tasks and make sure that nothing gets forgotten or delayed. Kanban boards are also useful for understanding how long tasks take to complete, so team members can better estimate the amount of time needed for future tasks.
Thanks NotionAI! You’re replacing us all one blog post at a time :D
🔄 The Sprint Iterations
After 8ish months of structured work, of finally seeing the light of Structure TM, I knew I had to come up with my own ways to prevent the mind-flailing that I’d been doing all my life. I started by adopting the sprint, kanban, ticket structure in Vim-Wiki (because of course it was Vim). I don’t have the original VimWiki on me anymore, but what I do have is a few examples I copied over to Notion back when I made the transition.
Here’s what it looked like:
This was my first attempt at structure and it worked pretty well for about a year. It was essentially a large markdown file broken into categories like: recurring tasks, extra-curriculars, Deliverables, etc.
Some take-aways from this format were:
- 2 weeks is too long in school. When a semester is only 12 weeks (give or take) trying to plan out 2 weeks at a time wasn’t feasible for me. I quickly reduced it to one week plans
- I desperately missed the effort metric in tickets. I had no idea how m uch work I was setting up for myself aside from “wow that’s a biiiiig markdown file”. I needed to reintegrate that
- Vim-Wiki was only set up on my laptop. I really wanted a way to check my tasks on my phone as well.
About a year or two of vim-wiki and markdown is when I finally switched to Notion. I will say, if you’re a heavy vim user and have always wanted something like emacs-org-mode, vim-wiki does a pretty good impression.
https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
✅ How I use my Sprints
📖 Here’s the TLDR;
The Sprints Template has 3 major sections:
- Todos — for small tasks I get assigned and can fit in throughout the day
- Deliverables — Concrete, defined things that need to be handed in/delivered/completed by the end of the week
- Weekly calendar — Loosely schedules tasks for each day of the week
✅ Todos
The Todos section serves as a reminder list for small tasks I assign myself or am assigned throughout the day. It is loosely structured to enable me to fit in these brief tasks whenever it is convenient. This category should be reserved for tasks that are not time-sensitive, reminders, and miscellaneous to-dos.
📦 Deliverables
I use the Deliverables section to set concrete goals for the week. During my Sprint Planning, I select 2–3 goals that require multiple days of work and clearly define what it means for them to be “done” by the end of the week. This provides structure and helps me avoid activities that make me feel busy without making progress on my longer-term projects.
📅 Weekly calendar
The Weekly Calendar section is how I track all of my tasks and activities for each day. I keep meetings, work periods, and errands for each day here. During my Sprint Planning, I try to assign a reasonable balance of work for each day. If one day ends up too packed, I try to make the following day a little lighter. Tracking all my tasks helps me see in advance if I’m overloading myself, if I can handle more work, and where I’m putting my time and effort. This way I can try to align what I perceive as my priorities with the most time and effort throughout the week. I can also look back and review: was I right about how much I could handle? could I have done more? Am I delivering on the projects that matter to me?
🏗️ Task Structure
The tasks themselves have a simple structure that helps me with the review I talked about above.
Title
I give each task a quick description/title so I can glance at what I’m up to.
Effort
Instead of measuring time (which I find is not a very meaningful gauge of how much work something is), I measure my perceived level of effort. This could be how effortful it is intellectually (how much energy do I have left after for other focused work), emotionally (sometimes you get emotionally invested in a project OR therapy is on the task list for that day and that can be emotionally exhausting), physically (workouts hit hard). From here I try to set reasonable goals for how much effort I can exert throughout the day.
Project
I try to link each task back to a particular project I’m currently working on. This let’s me see what my allocation of effort to each project is. It also helps provide context.
🔆 The Daily Highlight
The last concept I use to ground my day comes from the book Make Time. For each day, I select a highlight task. This is the task that, if I accomplish nothing else for the day, moves me most meaningfully toward my goals. I usually try to tie commit each daily highlight to a deliverable, and preferably the same deliverable. For my highlights I do 2 hours of work in the mornings (usually from 7am to 9am) before checking email, work chats, etc. This helps me do focused work before my head is flooded with random todos and busy-work.
Conclusion
My Notion sprints template has been an essential tool for me to stay organized, motivated, and on top of all of my tasks. It allows me to set clear weekly goals, track my progress, and stay on top of all of my responsibilities. By taking the time to review and update my template each week, I have been able to stay organized and enjoy a healthy work-life balance. If you’re interested in checking out the template for yourself, you can access it for free here or you can support me via gumroad or stripe. I highly recommend you give it a try, and see if it helps you stay organized and motivated like it has helped me.
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry
Join my Email Newsletter #GuidingQuestions here
If you liked this post you may like my previous 2:
