How To Run Your Life Inside of Notion

Quick note: do you want the templates Marie mentions in this post? You can find them here.

Drop into any piece of her system, and you can see her life reflected as a series of linked database entries. She has a Daily Journal which links to her Quarterly Goals. She has a Quarterly Goals database which links to her Yearly Vision. She has a Yearly Vision which links to notes on books she’s read and projects she’s completed.

She weaves and knots these elements together to create one of the most complex, and compelling systems I’ve ever seen. Each page pulls and remixes data from every other part of her system, to show her everything she needs when and how she needs it.

As each aspect of her life changes and evolves her Notion shapeshifts to display it.

If it seems like she organizes her Notion like it’s her job, that’s because it is.

For over a decade she’s been helping business owners launch digital products and get organized to reach their goals. And, most recently, she’s been doing it all using Notion — becoming an official Notion Pro and teaching workshops and courses to help her students get the most out of the tool.

“I just think it has improved my life in so many ways,” she says. And you can count them: she tracks everything from her todos, to her goals for the week, quarter, and year, to her workouts, to her meals, to notes on every class she’s ever taken.

Most impressive of all, is that she never gets tired of it either. “I get pure joy from doing it all the time. Notion is the only thing that’s worked, because I feel like I’ve made it fun.”

If you ever wondered how to keep your entire life organized inside of Notion then this is the interview for you. Let’s get started.

She always starts her day off by looking at Marie HQ

I have a Personal Dashboard page that I look at every morning. I call it Marie HQ.

It has a bunch of components including:

My journal for the day
My weekly agenda
A list of my quarterly goals
A list of my most important upcoming tasks
Links to my active personal and client projects
Personal resources like my notes, reading, and courses I’m taking

She journals every day

One thing I interact with every day inside of my Marie HQ is my journal. I track everything in there including my effectiveness, my energy, my happiness, my exercise, my reading, and more. It’s a lot.

My Marie HQ page is set up to only show me the three most important parts of my journal each day:

My highlight of the day
A planned physical activity
An area of study

These are things I actually pre-populate every Sunday for the week ahead. Then I’ll continue to fill out the rest of the journal as I get into my day.

Her Journal view helps her track every aspect of her life

If I leave my Marie HQ page, and click in to my Journal itself, it shows me a really good overview of how I’ve been spending my days for the last week or two. You’ll notice that it has a lot more details than the Marie HQ page does:

If I click into any given entry, you can see how many things I track on a given day:

Every day I’m marking down everything from my effectiveness, to my energy, to my happiness, to what I read, and what I eat.

I also created a view of my Journal that lets me see my days sorted by my emotions.

This view is super helpful because I can find out what works well for me and what doesn’t.

For example, in the beginning of the year I kept seeing “overcommitted” and “tired” come up a lot. Just by glancing at this view, I could see something was wrong. The words were telling me I was fried — crispy.

I realized that I was overcommitting to my clients and that was causing me to burn out.

Once I realized that, I ended up letting two clients go. That was really hard, but very necessary. When I did that, things instantly improved.

My journaling in Notion helped me realize it and take action on it.

She spends most of her time in her weekly agenda

I probably spend the most amount of time in my weekly agenda.

Each week gets an entry, and each entry lets me track a bunch of important things like: my project focus for the week, my most important tasks, and the goals I’m currently working towards.

You’ll see that just like my Marie HQ page, my weekly agenda also has an embedded view of my Journal database, filtered to show only the entries for the current week.

I then also embed my main task database inside of it, and this is where I spend most of my time managing my tasks and commitments.

I find that doing this helps me stay out of autopilot mode, and gets me reflecting on what needs to change, or how I can do better. This helps me move from reactive to proactive, and keeps my intentions top of mind.