What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about Notion? Templates? Portfolio? Productivity? While Notion is a nearly perfect tool for all your professional needs, its features enable you to organize your personal life as well.
While you might already be using Notion for personal life, we hope to expand the scope with this guide. We will cover twelve ways to make your life easier with Notion.
Let’s get started.
1. Daily to-do list and planner
Balancing work and personal life can be a real challenge, especially when you're deep into your Notion tasks. It's like a vortex – work takes over, and personal things end up on the backburner.
By creating a todo list in Notion you can record everything that you plan to accomplish in the day on the personal front. Buying groceries, fixing things around the house – it all goes in there.
You can even set Notion reminders that send you a notification, say towards the end of the work day to remind you of the activity. As your workday winds down, Notion nudges you. Time to shift from work to personal.
So, whether it's dry cleaning or a DIY project, Notion helps you keep your personal life in check. It's not just organizing tasks; it's about taking charge of your time – at work and for the things that make life great.
2. Shopping list
Alright, Notion has reminded you that you have to buy groceries. But after a long workday, you have forgotten what you need to buy. Now, you don’t want to call home and ask for the grocery items for purchase after you promised that you won’t forget the list but that’s better than forgetting to buy groceries altogether.
To avoid this scenario the next time, consider creating a shopping list in Notion that records all the items that you need to purchase and in what quantity.
Alright, you set the reminders and at 8PM, Notion taps you on the shoulder – groceries, don't forget! But after a day of grinding at work, you no longer remembered what to buy. Now, you made a promise not to bug home with grocery inquiries, but the alternative of forgetting the shopping list altogether is worse.
To steer clear of this scenario in the future, consider creating a shopping list. This way you can have a memory bank for all the stuff you need to buy and how much of it. No more relying on a last-minute call home, just a smooth grocery run armed with your Notion shopping list.
3. Movie watchlist
It happens so often that you sit down with your family to watch a movie on a Saturday night but you can barely find anything interesting enough. You watch one preview after another on Netflix just to decide to watch yet another episode of Friends for the fifth time.
Now, what if you could remember the name of the new show that your coworker mentioned during the lunch hour? That would save so much time! However, it is possible to forget the name of the show just like the items in the grocery list. What would help is creating a watchlist in Notion.
You can quickly note down the name of the movie or series within a database and look it up later. You can record the genre of the show, where you can watch it, etc.
Here’s what your watchlist might look like:
4. Reading list
The moment you find a nice read online is never the right moment to read it somehow. There’s always that meeting that you need to attend, a presentation that you need to review, or another fire that needs to be put out.
What you might end up doing is opening the article in a new tab and letting it sit for ages without ever clicking on it again! Until one day you close the window by mistake and do not restore the tabs because you have lost interest in them by now.
And just like that a good read that could have helped you in some way gets buried under the debris of the internet.
However, if you could just take a minute longer, right before putting on your fireman’s suit, and added the URL of the article to your Notion reading list, you could have retained it forever and accessed it anytime that you wanted.
5. Budgeting and finances
Budgeting is a vast and extensive process. There are many avenues for income, expenses, and investments which means you need to add appropriate tags to identify not just the cash flow but also the reason for the cash flow.
Furthermore, you might also want to record the dates of the transaction. In addition to that, you should be able to find avenues to save more and invest in better instruments.
Notion provides the perfect ecosystem to record and maintain the monthly budget in a database. You can add tags and use the dropdown property to record all transaction types. For example, one column in Notion might record the type of transaction — investment, income, expense; another column can record the type of expenditure — rent, electricity bill, groceries, etc.
You can also employ the Notion reminder feature to remind you to make entries to the budget database towards the end of the day.
All these factors and features combined make Notion the perfect tool to maintain a budget record. Here are a few budget templates that you can use.
6. Travel planning
You could be a wanderlust or someone who wants to take a one off vacation to wind the year down, you would need a travel plan, an itinerary that records what you’ll do on any given vacation day — where you’ll stay, how you’ll travel, and which spots you’ll visit.
You can create the whole plan right inside Notion.
The below travel planner, for example, records the activities for each day of the trip. It also records the cost and the ideal amount of time one can spend at the tourist spot.
You can find some cool travel planning templates here.
7. Habit tracking
Whether it's sticking to a workout routine or making writing a daily thing, turning plans into habits is key. It's not easy, though. It takes determination to make an activity part of your daily routine until it becomes second nature.
Now, forming a habit means doing things even when you don't feel like it. That's where a reliable companion comes in handy – you need a tool to track and remind you of the activities that will eventually become habits. Notion fits the bill perfectly.
With features to create a habit tracker, see your progress, and measure success, Notion becomes, Notion becomes a great choice for building solid habits.
You can easily set up a habit tracker in Notion by using its database feature. Alternatively, you can use any of these templates to get started immediately.
8. Meal planning
Your meal planning almost completely depends on your grocery list. If you get your groceries right, you spend less time planning your meals. However, you need to maintain a complete list of all meals you will prepare throughout the week. Doing that ensures that you are not thinking too much about what to prepare which, let’s admit, ends up in you ordering food from Uber Eats.
You can not just prepare the meal plan within Notion but also add preparation to your daily tracker. You can also use Notion AI to get recipes by using the items in your store room and refrigerator.
You might find this list of Notion recipe templates quite handy.
9. Journaling
Journaling is like having a personal space for your thoughts, feelings, and memories. It's an effective way to understand yourself better and track your life journey. However, journaling is quite a personal endeavor and Notion’s privacy features enable you to journal without worry about others peeking in.
You can create a template to record your train of thoughts towards the end of the day. You can write, add pictures, and make it really yours. Want to talk about happy moments, vent about a tough day, or jot down goals? Notion's got you covered.
Furthermore, you can organize everything. Tag entries, sort them out easily.
