The Notion Template Behind One of Our Most Popular Posts
TLDR: Marie Poulin is the Notion Pro we profiled two weeks ago, and she’s graciously shared her life planning template for Notion with us. Click the button below to get this template (and much more) as a Superorganizers Premium subscriber! Or read on to see the template in action.
One reason I feel like I don’t get enough done is that sometimes I feel like I’m sleepwalking through my life.
It’s not that I’m not working enough. I work a lot.
It’s actually that I’m not working enough on the right things. I’m getting sidetracked by what’s in my face, what’s distracting and seems urgent. And I’m losing sight of the bigger things that are important to me in my life.
And, sometimes, I don’t even have a clear idea of what those big things are. I bet you feel that way sometimes too.
When I feel this way, I usually need something that I’ll call top-down productivity: I need to be able to go from the highest level of abstraction — a clear sense of who I am, and what I want to accomplish — down to the lowest level of abstraction, the daily items on my todo list.
And then I make sure the low-level todos align correctly with my high-level goals.
That’s what Marie Poulin has built in her life planning template. It’s an incredibly well-thought out and detailed template with sections to track everything from your Goals, to your Todos, to your daily journal. And it’s very easy to use.
Sound useful? Read on for a detailed walkthrough.
Template Teardown
There’s a LOT in here. And I’ll be honest with you. I’m not using this template for myself as-is. But it has so many components that I saved it to my Notion immediately — and I’m going to be picking and choosing pieces to add to my system over the next couple of weeks.
The template is organized in a top-down way: starting with a Personal Manifesto section, moving into a Vision for the year, and continuing down the ladder of abstraction until it gets to your todo list.
Here’s what it does:
- You start by writing your Personal Manifesto to help you think about what’s most important in your life
- Then you can create a Vision to help you think about how you want your year to go
- The Goals section helps you get more granular on your Vision, by setting specific and measurable goals to measure your projects
- There’s a Projects section that will let you track all of the things you’re working on
- There’s even a task database that lets you keep track of all your todos and link them to your goals so you know you’re working on the right things.
- And that’s not even the whole template!
It’s gigantic and impressive. Marie is amazing. Read on to see it in action!
Personal Manifesto
The top section of the template is a page for writing a personal manifesto. It asks a few questions that can help you think about who you are, what you stand for, and what you want out of life.
This piece of the template is fairly simple. But I think it asks some intriguing questions — I found myself feeling some surprise at what I was writing as I filled it out.
Even if you don’t use the template, I recommend taking 10 minutes to write these questions out.
Vision
The Vision section is structured as a database with each entry representing one year.
If you click into 2020, you’ll be presented with a database entry that lets you link your Vision as a relation to a Goals database:
You can also write in tags, and a theme for your year if you want to.
Below that, Marie has added a bunch of really helpful sections to fill out for this year: a Year In Review, a Forecast, and a Declaration:
Below that, she has space for a vision statement, a word of the year, and even links up the Goals, Outcomes, and Projects portion of this template so that you can see everything at a glance inside your year:
Goals
After the Vision section Marie has a Goals section made up of two databases that are related to each other: Goals and Outcomes.
For Goals you can fill out a target for each Goal and it will automatically calculate how close you are to achieving it. Each Goal is also linked to a quarter so you can keep track of them.
Projects
Below Goals is a Projects section.
The top Projects are shown as a gallery view. Each project can be assigned to a person, given a status, given a date, and linked to a quarter.
Tasks
This template also includes a task database that’s organized in a handy kanban view so you can see what’s planned for today, and what’s coming up in the near future:
Each task has a status, as well as an effort and impact rating that automatically determines its priority (it’s a similar concept to what we talked about in the Self-Organizing todo list):
Startup Routine
Finally, Marie has a Startup Routine section that gives you trackers for:
- Win the Day
- Win the Week
- A Weekly Review
- A Monthly Review
- A Content Calendar.
If you open up the Win the Day you’ll see that it’s a fully fleshed out Journal database that allows you to track everything from your mood to what you’re reading:
Get More from Marie
If you want more templates and pearls of productivity wisdom, I highly recommend that you check out Marie’s stuff over at MariePoulin.com. She also has a waitlist for her Notion course, which you can sign up for here. We’ll cover that when it’s live.
Finally, you can see her do her own very detailed walkthrough of this template on YouTube here.
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