My simple "work on what I want" system
You could summarize my 2022 as "overwhelming". I want 2023 to be "simple and effective"
To say that 2022 has been overwhelming for me is an understatement. It was a year full of pressure, loaded with projects, thousands of commitments, delusions, and struggles. I think I never faced a year so challenging. I burned myself out. My workflows broke. My to-do’s piled up. I was working on a lot of stuff, mostly stuff I didn’t like doing, and making little to no progress at all on my goals.
As the year was coming to an end, I was feeling the urge to change my approach. My career didn’t move forward the way I wanted it to, and I was losing track of projects and missing deadlines. So I sat down: I wanted to dump everything that I needed to do into a sortable list.
I didn’t mean to create a new system or something I would’ve used for a long period of time — but it worked way better than I thought, and I came back to it the day after. And then, the day after that. In just a few days, I was back on track, working on projects I liked, making progress, and overall feeling much better.
In this article, I will explain this little system of mine, as I believe it might come in handy to other busy creatives. I will also provide a link to a Notion template — the same thing I’m using these days, but ready to be filled in by you.
Overview
I won’t introduce Notion, you’ve surely heard of the app by now, and if you didn’t, just Google it up. It’s an app for note-taking and organizing projects, basically. And it’s cross-platform. I use it a lot.
My template takes advantage of Notion’s database features to list, group, and sort all the projects I want to work on. I kept it as simple and barebones as I could, as I usually go way overboard with this kind of productivity thing and I end up forgetting how to use my own schemes in a week or so.
Each item in my list is also a Notion page, so if I open one up, I’ll be able to take notes on that particular project too.
I’m keeping track of the project name (duh), its deadline (if any), its importance, and also its “type” (more on this later). I’m also keeping track of the last time I worked on each project.
It took me 30 minutes to fill in mine, and I had more than 100 entries. I’m sure you could do it in less time!
Once filled in, the list will split itself into two groups, one for recurring or “maintenance” tasks (stuff like my social media routine), and one for projects that can actually be completed and can disappear from the list one day.
I’m then sorting the list using something called the Eisenhower Method. I can mark some tasks as important — meaning they hold some sort of significance to me — which makes them appear before other rows. If a project has a deadline, the database will automatically flag it as urgent too. Urgent and important projects will linger at the top of the list.
Workflow
It’s really as simple as braindumping all my to-do’s and projects into the database and reviewing them once every couple of weeks. I give each project a recognizable name, I assign it a deadline if it has any, I mark it as important if it actually is, and I assign it a type between recurring or one off.
When I first filled the thing in, projects didn’t have a “last worked on” date field, so I set that to the beginning of last year so the system knew it was just very old.
Now, almost every time I sit down to do work, I open up my list and scroll through it until I find something that inspires me. I then double-click the date field and put today so the system can move the item down the list. It will resurface when a few days are passed and a few more items have been worked on.
When a project is complete, I check the completed checkbox, and the item is hidden from the main view. Finally, if something is no longer relevant, I just delete it. Screw data hoarding.
This system is far from perfect, and I still need to work on stuff that is urgent and I may not feel like doing at a particular moment. But after using it for over a month, I can say it greatly reduced my stress levels and, most importantly, made me do some pretty great progress over multiple projects — and I needed those wins.
How to
If you want to give this system a try, I made the template in Notion to share with you. I didn’t really know how to name this section, but you really don’t have to do anything apart from cloning my template into your own Notion workspace.
When opening the link, you’ll see a duplicate button in the top right. You’ll have to delete my dummy projects once you’ll be inside the database, but that’s it.
Now just sit and braindump your list.
I hope you found this article helpful in understanding my new approach to simplifying my work in 2023. I'm excited to give it a go and see how it helps me stay on top of my projects and tasks. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to hit me up. I'll be back soon with more tips and tricks on staying organized and productive. Thanks for reading!
Thanks for the template! It is helping me organize the endless stream of projects in a way that makes sense. Easy to personalize (and I have) and makes me feel more organized. Thanks for sharing!