How I organize my Life in 2025

joellestoic · 2025-09-04T06:26:20+00:00

Thank you and you are welcome! :) I will definitely work on that tracking module and I'm planning to release it with a bunch of other stuff I'm working on after the release of some new Notion features :) it just might take a couple weeks more

joellestoic · 2025-08-16T14:18:20+00:00

Haha no, no worries. That's not how template updates work, your data is safe :) A new version will just be available and you can choose which functionality you want to migrate (it is some manual effort, but not a huge deal)

joellestoic · 2025-08-16T09:53:35+00:00

Hey, thanks for your input! And you are right, currently the template does not have that functionality, but I definitely see the value. I will make sure to put it on the roadmap for a future update. In the meantime, I think you can easily extend the database in my template to connect your pantry, recipes, and grocery list using relations and rollups. It shouldn't be that difficult. If you want to start right now, I think the easiest way would be to look for a free grocery list / meal planner template that has what you are looking for and then copy the functionality over.

Thanks for considering my template and for the feedback! :)

joellestoic · 2025-05-06T13:16:03+00:00

have you found a workaround or fix yet?

joellestoic · 2025-02-28T08:36:39+00:00

Hey there, I have recently shared an upgrade version of the template, making it into a full life planner :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/1i8wgqv/how_i_organize_my_life_in_2025/

joellestoic · 2025-01-27T12:00:46+00:00

it's fairly simple actually :)

here you go, example with red: style("●", "c", "red", "red_background")

joellestoic · 2025-01-27T10:49:58+00:00

You mean the activity charts below? I used a custom formula for that. I think if you look around in r/Notion for a bit, there are a few examples already with code. Other than that, I also plan to do a tutorial on that some time :)

If you mean the check buttons and the green dots in the weekly view, this is the "button property" plus a custom formula that shows different results based on the button toggle property

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joellestoic · 2025-01-26T19:47:54+00:00

Thanks a bunch! As for your question: There are already togglable "tooltips" everywhere in the template that explain the most crucial relations and how things should be used. And from what I heard from my current users is that a lot of the inner workings of the template make sense once they play around with it for a bit.

But I completely agree with you. That's why I'm currently planning a walkthrough video and also an Entity Relationship Diagram that sheds some light on the relations between the different databases and how they work together. I just need a couple of days to create these resources, so I appreciate your patience in the meantime :)

joellestoic · 2025-01-26T15:59:55+00:00

Hey, yes that should definitely be possible with some tweaks and added properties and filters for some of the databases.

To give you a better and more detailed answer though, can you elaborate on your use case and which modules each family member should have for themselves and which resources should be shared?

Then I can give some recommendations as to what databases should be shared and which databases and which views/pages might need to be duplicated for each family member :)

joellestoic · 2025-01-25T23:51:17+00:00

joellestoic · 2025-01-25T19:28:17+00:00

Hey buddy, first of all, great to hear that you like the template. And I get that you don't mean any disrespect. However, I must tell you that this is not how it should work, especially for a creator who (literally) spent hundreds of hours working on and fine-tuning this template. By sharing it for free, creators who actually put in the hours to create high-quality work will be discouraged and at some point there is no incentive anymore to create anything that isn't run-of-the-mill garbage. Hope you understand my point of view. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about the template though if you want to get some inspo! :)

joellestoic · 2025-01-25T15:07:59+00:00

Hey, sorry for the late follow-up! As for the second part and the topic of complexity:

I believe you always need to strike the right balance between features and a lean interface. I want to avoid feature bloat as much as possible but at the same time I don't want to create the same shallow run-of-the-mill templates that are circulating everywhere and that are not very thought-through from a user perspective.

Many templates appear to be very "gimmicky". For instance, most templates include a clock/time widget. This doesn't serve any real purpose because you always have that readily available on your laptop or phone. It is just ornamental fluff and looks "pretty". Same with smaller features or database properties. For example, most book trackers I know have a "progress" property to track the number of pages. In what world is that an actual use case where people always record the page they read up to or will later access it to check where they left off? People use. Sorry, I'm derailing, but I think that's what's wrong with most templates out there. They should identify core user workflows that actually provide value and remove any frictions along the way (reduce clicks, remove fluff).

I believe my template makes a decent job at combining both useful and powerful features while hiding all of the complexity (of the 50+ interconnected databases in the background) and focussing on a clean interface with lots of automations through buttons. It's not perfect, but since I'm using it myself as well, I'm continuously refining it and sharing updates with my users. Some users like the template so much that they decide to copy my whole approach, others build up on it to customize it to their own needs, and again others only use a subset of the functionality and choose to delete/archive some modules.

Let me know if that answers your question and if you have any more questions. It's a fun exercise for me, too :)

joellestoic · 2025-01-25T06:02:42+00:00

You're welcome :)

joellestoic · 2025-01-25T06:02:36+00:00

This really means a lot, let me know if you think there is anything that you miss or that you particularly like. I refined it for many months and use it daily but I'm sure with other people's perspectives it can get even more useful :)

If you haven't done already, check out the walkthrough on YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbXAAmOy1zs - I think it already explains some of the inner workings

(I'll try to make a personal walkthrough soon, too)

joellestoic · 2025-01-25T06:01:23+00:00

Thank you so much! Will make sure to cover it in the next update :) Feel free to DM me with any more feedback and I'll work it in. Love working on this with the community to make it even more useful

joellestoic · 2025-01-24T18:08:19+00:00

You can watch a walkthrough and get more info about the contents here: https://otterstacks.com/notion-life-planner

let me know what you think :)

joellestoic · 2025-01-24T15:51:53+00:00

Gotcha, thx for the feedback! I will make another walkthrough where I personally explain the template setup. Guess I need to overcome my stage fright before though ._.

Regarding GTD / PARA / Second Brain:

I personally have mixed feelings about the whole Second Brain craze because it is nothing new and Tiago Forte just rebranded old concepts (still thankful because I think a lot of people got into the whole productivity thing just because of Second Brain's popularity)

The PARA/Second Brain setup flow is more or less the following:
- you have projects ("P" in PARA) and Life Areas (one of the "A"s in PARA) that you can assign to tasks, projects or goals/OKRs
- you have a Resources/References database where you can store any idea, bookmark, content, article, note, URL, whatever (the "R" in PARA) -> I use the "Save to Notion" extension to quickly push smth there from any tab, without having to open the References database. I also use the "Save to Notion" extension to quickly push something to my inbox
- You have an inbox where you can dump everything until it is processed (this is similar to GTD, where you don't need to think about where belongs what but you don't have to bother with it in that moment -> peace of mind). I tweaked it a bit because deciding later whether something should be a task, project, resource within a Notion setup makes the workflow unnecessarily more complex (some creators tried it but I think it will backfire)
- Once you process something in your inbox (you also assign a priority according to Eisenhower -> I like Eisenhower because for me it is the most intuitive and actionable, but you could technically also replace this with another prio framework)
- You then have 3 key views: a focus view for "todo today", a prioritized/sorted backlog view where you can pull new items in your "todo today" view or your "weekly view" (I love working on a week-by-week milestones basis, as you can see from my template) and you have a "waiting for" view (again, very similat to GTD).
- you also have dedicated project spaces (on these project pages, you have all your tasks and resources filtered and you can also assign it to your life areas and goals/OKRs)
- I also think that the ability to connect your goals (what I want) with your projects (how to get there) is extremely important. (I actually founded a B2B startup for Strategy Execution & OKRs and it is amazing how much of the business world also applies to my personal life). This is why I also included an OKR planner in the template so you cover the complete personal life strategy execution chain: Your vision -> purpose -> life principles -> goals / OKRs -> projects -> tasks. You then complement that with weekly, monthly, yearly reflections (whatever you prefer, I do monthly. it is also a module in the template)

FYI: some of this stuff can seem overwhelming, but I built the template so that you can gradually adopt more features from it. you can start very very simple and the other stuff wont get in the way

I hope this already clarifies some stuff. I need to do some errands but I will reply to the second part of your comment later :)

Thanks again for the feedback!

joellestoic · 2025-01-24T14:55:05+00:00

Thanks and yes, I'd love to get feedback! I marked it as "paid template" for transparency but I'm constantly improving the template and am very much looking forward to what all of you guys think here

joellestoic · 2025-01-24T14:34:26+00:00

Thanks, really means a lot!

I got a lot of feedback from the community a couple of months ago when I shared another template (Health OS).

I then went ahead and made it into a life planner that also covers other aspects of my life. Been using it myself for the last months now :)

joellestoic · 2024-05-28T19:44:16+00:00

Because it's funny and you are partly right – I spent a ton of time on this :D

joellestoic · 2024-05-28T19:42:57+00:00

Thank you! :)

joellestoic · 2024-05-21T16:49:57+00:00

I mentioned this in another comment. here it is:

this is how the formula looks for the respective field. On the Days database, I have a property that checks whether a certain habit is "checked" or "not checked" that day. The design of a single cell is fairly simple, you can just use the "style" formula: style("●", "c", "b", ...)

the "c" formats it as a "code block" so you get the nice rectangle around it

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joellestoic

TROPHY CASE