My Cockpit: A new Notion App Template – A Life Wiki on steroids

In this article, I’m outlining a productivity system that was built using the Notion App. The method described in the post below has made me feel hyper-productive in the past two weeks.

I couldn’t measure my productivity output quantifiable, so I’m relying heavily on my personal feeling. It felt like I was more productive and efficient using this new system. That’s what I can base my observation on.

Disclaimer: The system is an emulsion of different tactics and habits from other authors and productivity guru’s, so nothing that you see here is original.
But the way it’s set up (in Notion and clunked together) is new and highly effective. And also, I’m not affiliated with the Notion App.

The key improvements to my productivity output lay in how the Notion app enables me to do multiple things on one page without switching between tools and apps. Some of the things I’ve been able to add in a single page are:

• A Weekly planning
• Task management
• Task archiving
• And, much much more

Please read on to find out how I operate the Godzilla of all productivity tools out there. Have fun!

An introduction to the Personal Cockpit Productivity System

Definitions:

• Productivity system: A system that is handed down by a productivity guru or a system designed by yourself that lets you be more effective at doing a particular thing. This “thing” is extensive and can mean anything from cooking to horseback riding to writing a blog post to plan your life, you name it.
  It mostly relates to tasks that you repeat during a specific period.
  For instance: planning your calendar for the week on Sunday.
• Cockpit: A place where Cockfights are held.  That’s a joke…
  A cockpit is an area at the front of a plane where pilots sit to manoeuvre the aircraft from location A to location B.

So why is the system called My Personal Cockpit?

Like a cockpit for pilots (see image above), your Personal Cockpit can help you to bring you from point A (where your goal is not reached yet) to point B (where you’ve reached your goal).
Just like the cockpit of a plane has all the functionalities to fly the aircraft from A to B.
Your personal Cockpit has all the features and tools to help you reach your yearly, monthly and micro goals. It basically helps you to bring your life from A to B.

It is that Powerful.

In short, it’s a single interface (designed and operated using the Notion App) to manage and plan out your life. In the end, it will make you more productive while not having to switch between loads of apps.

If you do not understand the basic concept by now, you can still read on, and you’ll get it later on.

I’ll try to show you most of the functionalities through a set of screenshots that I took from the Notion Page.

So what can I do with the Personal Cockpit?

Check out the screenshot below. In the screenshot, you’ll see an outline of the core functionalities of the Notion Page that was designed to function as the Personal Cockpit:

• Goal Priming
• Quote of the Day
• Note-taking (for my business)
• Weekly Agenda
• A task Backlog
• Task Archiving
• Goal setting
• Reviewing and planning your year
• Miscellaneous

Every morning this page inside my Notion app is automatically opened when I flip open my MacBook screen. There it is, ready to be utilised to make my day, week and month effective.

Just take a peek at the screenshots below. It will be hard to understand if you haven’t used the Notion App yet (which I recommend you do), but still, you’ll be able to understand the concept by reading along. I’m sure you’ll get inspired to download Notion during this article.

So which core functionalities do you see above? Does it look cluttered? Are you getting overwhelmed by all the menu’s and toggle windows??
Please do not panic, I’m your captain, and I’m saying to take off that life jacket, we are not plummeting into the sea!
All is well, and everything is under control. You’ll learn what everything means in a second a two. Please take a deep breath and let us start with the top of the page.

Goal Priming, Quote of the Day and Note-taking for business

This top section is divided between a left side and a right side:

• Left side: This is where I jot down my TOP THREE goals for the year.
  • They can be any goal that is part of any category. So it could be all business-related goals if that is my main focus for the year. You get the point.
  • I have this on the top left side of the screen because It unconsciously primes me visually every day and every moment that I’m looking at the page.
  • It functions as a subtle trigger in my everyday environment to influence me on a subconscious level to ultimately influence my behaviour. And we all know what positive behavioural change leads to Personal Growth!
  • If you do not know what priming yourself means, please read the following article from Tony Robbins or watch the next video about priming and the strength and effects of priming. 
• Right side: This is where I’ve positioned the following three functionalities:
  • A quote that I’m pondering upon that I want to learn by heart.
    1. It is a quote that I come across in a book or somewhere else that is dear to me and fits to what I’m learning or doing at the moment.
    2. This quote changes over time when I find a new quote that I want to memorise.
  • My Digital Parkeagle Notes
    1. These are mostly typed down on my phone when I don’t have my iPad Pro available, which happens a lot. I usually only use my iPad Pro for writing down notes during Parkeagle meetings or for sketching, doodling etc.
  • My Parkeagle Meeting Notes
    1. These are also digital, but they are notes taken on my iPad pro during my business meetings.
  • These business notes are located in my Personal Cockpit because I store my personal business notes that I do not want to have on the company wiki. Also, I’m not able to use the company wiki on my phone since the wiki’s app works like shit so I’m forced to use Notion for note-taking when I’m not at my laptop or iPad Pro, which is fine. But that’s why it’s there. I use those two spaces a lot, so they need to be in arms reach, which they are.
  • The right top side is also for priming and learning (learning the quote) and reaching relevant pages and often used pages quickly.

Weekly agenda

As you can see in the above screenshot, the weekly agenda section is divided into rows on top of each other:

The top row of the Weekly Agenda section has the following sections:

• Nr. 1 Goal of the week
  • Here I write down my most important goal for the week that I want to reach that week.
  • Just like the subliminal priming that happens at the TOP THREE Goals of the year section, this section primes me to focus on my most important goal for the week.
• INCOMING URGENT (tasks)
  • These are new tasks that come in during the current week that NEED TO BE DONE!
  • We all know what this is. You plan out your entire week, and you have all the right intentions, and then life hits you in the face like a brick.
    The same happens when you’re in business for yourself like I am.
    You plan to make the week as productive as possible, and once you get into the office on Monday, you walk into a building that trows unplanned shit at your face that you have to deal with instantly.
  • I needed this section in my life since I can fetch all the new things that are new and need to be done.
• Get it Done (tasks)
  • When you plan your week (on Saturday or Sundays before the week), these are the tasks that are marked down as the single most important tasks since they need to be done.
  • I use it for everything that is on a deadline for the coming week.
  • It’s a helpful section to have in your planning toolkit because it gives a lot of focus to your week. Once you’ve crossed off all of the tasks in ‘Get it Done’, you’ll feel productive and know that you’ve done the most relevant job(s).
• Burner (tasks)
  • I find it extremely hard to plan out my week correctly. I always have too much I want to get done, or I have too much of life throwing things at me. This sometimes makes it hard to finish all of your tasks. I guess you can relate.
  • Sometimes, a miracle happens, and it happens to be a week in which life is not trowing any curveballs at you and you just smooth sail through your tasks. So how do you stay motivated and productive once you’ve cleared all your responsibilities? You open up the burner section. This section holds some ‘not so high priority tasks’ in there that can be done if you have time to spare.
    I mostly throw in website design stuff or website copy pimping stuff.
    Things that do not take to much mental energy but are essential but not so important are set deadlines.
• OUTSTANDING (tasks)
  • Outstanding is a section that fetches all the todo’s that are not finished when the week is over.
  • For now know that at the end of the week when I haven’t finished specific tasks, I move them in here to be collected in a single place.
  • They can be transported to the archive system pretty easily for later reference to the work in this week. Or I move them to the new week if I still want to finish the tasks. This happens most often.

The bottom row of the Weekly Agenda section has the following section:

• Task log per day
  • This is pretty self-explanatory, I guess.
    When I plan my week, I put in the tasks in the day where I’m planning on doing the task. Sometimes I even put a time on the tasks once I feel for how long the job might take.
  • Tasks that go in here are not priority tasks that need to be done for the week because otherwise, they would be in the ‘Get it Done’ slot, but most of the tasks are still reasonably important and should be finished anyhow.
  • It is based on the same toggle feature that flips open when I click on it.
  • I drag and drop the tasks from one box to the other when needed. Notion makes task management very easy in this way. So it’s just easy to drag and drop tasks from the Task backlog, the Weekly agenda, and any other features in the weekly agenda.

Tasks Backlog

As you can see in the above image. The task backlog is also very self-explanatory.
This is where I collect all my tasks for a specific category that I want to work. I do not have a priority system set up yet. I will do so in the future. I’m thinking about using colours. I’ve split up my tasks into four categories:

• Parkeagle (my company)
• Side projects (other stuff I’m working on)
• My Life (self-explanatory)
• Administration (all simple tasks in life that need to be done, like filing taxes and that kind of stuff.)

Every Week I review these lists to see which things could be dragged into the weekly calendar. So it is an integral part of the entire system for me since I collect all my future tasks here.

Tasks Archive

In the former task manager that I used (Todoist), I was not fond of the task archive feature. For me, it always felt like a pain in the ass to make sense of the previous tasks that I had completed. For some reason, I have the feeling many tasks management tools pay to little attention to the archiving part.

As a productivity junky, you want to improve every week, every month and every year. So you want to be able to review how you’re doing. You want to analyse what went great on weeks where you live, and breath constant hyperfocus/flow and you want to analyse everything carefully when you have weeks where things feel sluggish.

So that’s why I’ve tried to incorporate this archiving system in the system.
It is a fundamental collection overview of all the months and all the weeks in the month.

Once it’s the end of the week and I’ve analysed the week, and I’ve updated all to checkboxes, and I’ve cleaned up all the todo’s of the week, I copy the entire weekly calendar and add to the archive of the correct week and month.
Its stays there forever, and it makes it easy to reference a specific week in the future.

12 Month Goals

Every year in November and December, I review the previous year.
For every previous year, I have jotted out some goals and things I want to achieve.
And for every new year that comes up, I have a list of questions that I walk through to guides me with my objectives for the next year. I found these questions online, and I’ve changed them up a bit to fit my taste.
I might make a post on those later to link to those questions.

But long story long, these questions guide me into thinking about what I want to achieve every month. Once I have the significant steps cut up into little pieces, I put them into their corresponding months. For me, this archive shows me what I need to accomplish in a particular month if I want to achieve my yearly goals and stay on track. Going from the Macro (annual goals) to the micro (monthly, weekly and daily tasks) helps me stay on track without losing much focus.

Reviewing and Planning the Year

In the above image, you see two sections. The section on the left is the yearly reviewing section. This where I keep my files and questions for reviewing the previous year. Some examples of the questions I ask myself are the following:

• What sums up the past year, describe it in 5 words?
• How have you been radically open-minded, give at least one example?
• What was my most common mental state for the year?
• How did I grow emotionally this year?

The right-sided section is the yearly plan section. This is the place where I collect all the documents that help me plan out the new year. So when I want to reflect on how I want to start and run the year, I look at this document to ground me again. I also use questions to plan out the new year. Some examples of these planning questions are:

• What does a perfect weekday look like in your new year?
• What does a perfect mental health wellness day look like in the next year?
• What will not keep you up at night anymore, and why not?
• How am I going to mitigate and relieve myself from stress this year?

Miscellaneous

First, before you continue, thanks for reading so far into this article. I know it is incredibly long (3k+ words). I apologise. My upcoming posts will be way shorter, I promise.

The above-displayed section is where I collect information on the following subjects:

• Daily affirmations
  • I’ve been a firm believer in Think and Grow Rich from Napoleon Hill and the use of daily affirmations. I use these daily affirmations in the morning and evening. I like to collect strong daily affirmations I find on the web, and sometimes I come up with new once. I collect all my affirmations that I use in this year here.
• Routines
  • I have many morning, evening and weekend routines that I like to mix and match. Sometimes I’m lazy, and I go with the flow, and sometimes I love to be structured from beginning to end on a day. It depends on what type of day it is and how I feel about the upcoming day.
  • But I use this log to store all my different types of routines, and I tend to come up with new variations every so often, so I collect those in this small archive.
• Health
  • I track multiple things:
    • My sleep with a FitBit and an Oura Ring.
    • I track my weight with the iHealth Smart Scale.
    • I track my Resting Heart Rate and my Heart Rithm Variability.
    • And many many other for health.
  • I log all of these things in this section.
  • And at the end of the year, I analyse the logs and try to come up with insight and conclusion.
• Quitting Contracts
  • Often I use the conclusions from the health section to make a new Quitting contract with myself.
  • This section is where I make and collect all new quitting contracts. These quitting contracts are a method I learned from Seth Godin in his Book the Dip. I love this book and read it when I’m in doubt about continuing a project or venture. The ideas in this book have saved me from doing stupid, impulsive stuff many times.

To Sum it all up

The Notion App is a personal CRM/ productivity Hub. This is how I use it, and this is where its strengths lay. In a short period, I’ve been able to use it to manage my life more effectively, and for that reason, I’m digging into it even more profound. I just found out that you can use java code to do even more complicated things. I am going to check that out in the future.

I have many ideas to utilise Notion for many different other things in my life. The possibilities are endless, and that is what makes it a lot of fun.

I think that is an important thing. When you love working on a tool, you forget about time and want to make it work. You wish to create something new. I love that feeling.

I’ll be coming out with more reviews and ideas on Notion in de coming weeks so check it out and let me know what you think.

Have an amazing day!

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