A Productive Notion Daily Planner!
About this video
Jeff walks through his Notion daily planner homepage. At the top is an Indify weather widget showing a three-day forecast. Below it sits a Make Time database for the day’s highlight, one thing he’s grateful for, and one thing he wants to let go, alongside a projects database and a seven-day view of upcoming tasks — the two databases are related, an approach he credits to Thomas Frank. Daily tasks and a ‘for tomorrow’ section are deliberately kept outside a database so tasks can be dragged around flexibly. Each morning he drags yesterday’s completed tasks to a completed page, clicks a new-day template button that populates four default to-dos (a Make Time entry, replying to social media comments, reviewing his content calendar, and creating tasks from the seven-day view and Todoist), then plans from there. Todoist serves only as a quick-capture tool; Notion’s all-tasks database holds project-related and recurring tasks. The highlight method comes from the book Make Time by ex-Googlers Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky: the highlight need not be productive, just something he will make time for, and he advises creating a calendar event for it immediately. On Monday mornings he switches the Make Time database to table view to archive the previous week’s entries. After using the system for half a year, his tips are: tasks can be standalone with no linked project; review projects for 10 minutes every Sunday at 8:00 AM (he previously created more projects than he could handle); and the best planner is the one you consistently stick to.
Key takeaways
- Keep daily tasks outside a database so they can be dragged and reordered flexibly; unfinished items move to a ‘for tomorrow’ section to reduce stress
- Use Todoist only for quick capture and Notion’s all-tasks database for project-related and recurring tasks, avoiding duplication
- Start each day with a Make Time entry — a highlight, one gratitude, one thing to let go — and immediately create a calendar event for the highlight
- Archive the previous week’s Make Time entries on Monday morning by switching to table view and checking off entries, enabled by a filter showing only unchecked pages
- Review projects weekly (he spends 10 minutes every Sunday at 8:00 AM) so projects get prioritized instead of only chasing tasks
Episode details: published January 10, 2023 · 8:06 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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