Building a more productive life with Notion personal dashboard
At this point, I’ve been obsessively telling my friends about how great Notion is although to be fair I’ve only been actively using it for the past 2 years or so — a bit too late to the party I’d say!
I’m going to be honest with you, this post is yet another attempt of mine to get more people to start using Notion! :)
Why dashboard?
First of all, I hate wasting my time having to find the information or documents that I need because it’s all scattered around different apps and platforms. I’m that type of person who keeps gazillion tabs opened on my browser just because I want it to be accessible anytime to a point where my mobile browser refused to open a new tab because I’ve opened too many tabs!
I love bookmarks and I’ve been using that a lot on my Google chrome but to be honest it’s not really a scalable solution for me. So instead, I created my personal and work dashboard that aggregates different pages and links to things that I have to frequently access.
I keep my personal dashboard super simple with only four main buckets that I care about. I link most of my personal information, life trackers, and project documentation to this dashboard so it’s super accessible. I also did the same thing for my work where I have my work dashboard that I will check every morning before I start my day.
My work dashboard looks slightly more comprehensive because my work requires me to navigate through different tools, pages, and trackers. This arrangement is still pretty much a work in progress and I’ve been iterating the structure that works better with how my brain process information.
Why Notion?
I have a long list of why I think Notion would be the best tool to build a personal dashboard or personal page, but here are my top two reasons why Notion:
Highly customizable
Being able to put different elements in one document is one of the most powerful things in Notion in my opinion. One of the platforms that people usually compare Notion with is Google docs and the thing about Google docs is that it can only support very limited types of elements, ie: text, images, table while Notion gives you the ability to links pages, insert a table that acts as a database, images/videos, and even embed other applications that can be accessed within the Notion page. This means, that when you build your Dashboard and link it to another Google docs or Google sheet, you don’t have to get redirected to another app or browser and just simple access them within the Notion app.
Works slightly better offline
If you’re like me and you live in areas where your internet connection can be unstable sometimes, having to wait for your Google drive to load until the internet’s back on or having to stop typing because your internet suddenly cuts out can be very frustrating. I found that Notion mobile and browser app cache system works way better to handle this exact situation compared to Google docs at least. I think it’s important to have all my personal information easily accessible anytime I need them so I’d say that this is a pretty important consideration for me. I said “slightly” here because I know that Notion and most of the note-taking apps are built for online editing and none of them are doing a perfect job of handling offline editing until now.
Building Notion dashboard that works out for you
By now I hope you’re already convinced that you’d want to give a Notion dashboard a try, so then the next question would be: “how to start building my personal Notion dashboard?”. Before we move forward, it’s important to note that people have different ways of processing information and therefore I encourage you to build your own customized dashboard. You can easily find a lot of personal dashboard Notion templates available online but I think you should try to restructure it so that it fits your workflow better.
To make it simple, I’ll break down the things that we should think about when designing our own dashboard into three sections: structure — blocks — aesthetics.
Structure
Creating your first Notion page from scratch could be challenging but I encourage everyone to do it once at least because this can be a practice for you to structure your thought better. If you don’t know how to start, I’d say start by asking some guiding questions to help you list down things that you care about on day to day basis:
- What are the tops 3–5 things that I think of every day? It could be family, work, school, or maybe planning your wedding. Those answers are good enough to start and this helps to give the main structure to your dashboard.
- What information/images/documents that I need to access frequently? For example my vaccination cards, my ID cards, my daily expenses spreadsheet, etc.
Now try to categorize all the list of things you have from question #2 into the 3–5 buckets you wrote on question #1 and you should have your main structure. You should periodically improve the page structure as you go to make sure that it still fits your workflow.
Blocks
I realized that Notion can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning because it has a lot of different features and customizations. Before you get overwhelmed, I’d suggest you to start exploring the main blocks: text, page, to-do list, table, and gallery. I won’t be explaining each of the blocks because I think Notion already did a great job on doing so on the tutorial here.
Aesthetics
I need to be honest that I’m sometimes guilty of spending too much time making my Notion look pretty instead of structured. In the beginning, try to optimize for the structure instead of the aesthetics. We want to have a dashboard that helps us be more productive and efficient and having them look pretty would be a bonus point. I’ve compiled some of my favorite Notion aesthetics on this Pinterest board.
I like trying out different productivity hacks and tools, so if you know any hacks or tools that you’ve tried or you want to try but don’t have time to do it, I’d be happy to try it out so please reach out to me on twitter @beahemian ! :)
