How I Used Notion in Grad/Anesthesia School
With all my free time waiting around for my knee to heal, I’ve been cleaning and organizing my laptop files, including old school stuff. I thought I’d share my Notion Template in case it’s useful to anyone. It’s totally free to download and make your own.
As an overview, my set up has 3 parts:
Intentions for the year
Quarterly goals based off those intentions
Task Station, which is where you’ll focus on most of the time (brain dump, daily/weekly planning, etc.)
Intentions for the Year
The intentions are broad and values-based. I choose 5 or fewer to keep it focused. What’s funny is that as I was digging back through my old Notion set ups from previous years, I noticed the yearly intentions were always generally the same. “Work hard.” “Practice kindness.”
It’s as if every year I never end up figuring out how to work hard or be kind, and have to roll it over to the next year lol.
Quarterly Goals
I choose 10 or fewer. Trying to accomplish 10 things within a 3 month time frame is extremely reasonable, and I like to set myself up for that kind of success lol. The quarterly goals are derived from the Intentions, and they are specific (e.g. instead of writing “improve pull ups,” I write “get to 8 pull ups.”)
Example
Intention: Work hard. Find ways to add 20% extra
Quarterly Goal: Gradually increase work session time from 25 minutes to 45 minutes.
By work sessions, I mean “deep work,” which is a term popularized by Cal Newport. It means INTENSE focus. And you try to have multiple deep work sessions per work day. If you’re not used to it, it can be exhausting to sustain such intense focus, which is why its a gradual process to constantly push how long you can go for.
Task Station
In the Task Station, there are 3 modes of viewing: “All,” “Month,” and “ASAP.”
Cycling through the 3 different views
View: All
This is where you brain dump. This shows ALL items.
Assign each item a Timeframe:
Someday
Year
Month
ASAP
I find those 4 timeframe options are enough to categorize most things. Getting more granular like “Today” and “Week” etc. causes unnecessary decision fatigue
“ASAP” means "now" to me, and I use it for things I need to get done within a couple weeks. My brain works in terms of 2 or 3 weeks at a time. Anything more future than that, my brain doesn’t take seriously. On the other hand, to use a shorter time frame makes me feel like my focus is too narrow, and I’m living juuust on the edge of being unprepared lol. Like living hand-to-mouth.
… But it could be different for you. Some people think a whole month at a time. So you choose what feels right given your occupation and workflow
Due date if there is a hard due date. Not soft due dates or when you “want” to do the item. Only use for true deadlines, appointments, etc.
View: Month
Pretty self explanatory and intuitive. Only shows you whats coming up in the month ahead. Useful to see what's coming up soon.
View: ASAP
Block means the block of time in which you want to do the item.
For days that I'm working in the hospital, I do not expect to get any work done, so I don’t concern myself with those days. On my off days, I generally fill my day from 6a-9p. It doesn’t mean I literally work 15 hours… it’s just to provide gentle structure.
The key here is I need a little structure, but I don’t want to waste energy or get decision fatigue by deciding exactly when I'm going to do my tasks, in what order I'll do them, how long each will take, etc. So I loosely group my tasks into 3-hr time blocks
That’s it. No fuss. No frill. All work. All day. Lol jk. If you’d like to try out my Notion set up, you can download the template here :)