Notion starter kit: Make it easy to start
Make it personal to find use cases everywhere
Too many people drop-off way too quickly when using Notion for the first time. I know because I was one of them.
But after using it for the past several years, I’m convinced that simpler alternatives like OneNote or even pen and paper are severely limiting our potential.
I think most people start small. With a to-do list or a simple tracker. Then they see other Notion users and their impressive setups. They realize they’re barely scratching the surface. They hear power users talk about how transformative their systems are and wonder how much more they could be getting out of Notion. But they have no idea where to start.
The best place to start, in my opinion, is by thinking deeply about our specific use cases.
We need to spend more time thinking about our pains and frictions, as opposed to thinking about the capability of our tools. Once we start looking for problems or opportunities in our life, we will find use cases everywhere. And, in my experience, once we’ve made things personal, our resourcefulness will skyrocket to a point where we’ll find creative ways of making our apps more capable.
In this eighth edition of my Notion Starter Kit series, I want to offer some of my favourite use cases for Notion as inspiration for entry points you might want to explore.
Retrospect: How to remember your life
When you’re sitting on your rocking chair and reminiscing about your life at the ripe age of 95, how much of it will you actually remember?
Let’s be honest, if you were to try walking your way back through last week’s memory lane, you’d struggle to recall a single interesting thing about each day. So how many experiences will you have forgotten by 95?
Most of us were fully on board when Robin Williams declared carpe diem in the Dead Poets Society. We want to make each day count. But the problem is that even if we do, eventually, we won’t remember that we did.
That’s why I choose to title my days. It’s a small intervention to make life more memorable.
Every day, I open my Retrospective Calendar in Notion, create a new page, and title it with the most unique thing that happened to me that day.
If we want to remember our life, we must make it easy to index. Each new day needs to be treated like an episode of Friends… you know, The one where they did that thing.
List your goals: Don’t rely on motivation
Imagine if we could see a list of all the goals we’ve ever attempted in life.
How often did we make the same New Year’s resolution? How many times have we attempted the same dream in the same way?
Those occasional waves of motivation we get can feel incredible. When we’re gifted with a brief period of lucidity and fresh energy for goal we’ve decided to revisit.
Sometimes the fresh start effect can fee so powerful that we convince ourselves that it’s because of our new-found energy that we’ll succeed this time around.
But really… we were mostly likely just as motivated the first time and it would be just as fickle for us to rely on it this time too.
I think that a better strategy for accomplishing our goals involves retracing our previous steps. Understanding where we went wrong the first time, what obstacles we encountered, and how we would avert them this time.
As part of my Level up database in Notion, I’ve found it helpful to record my goals for these very reasons. The more we monitor where we’ve been, the better we’ll be able to see where we’re going.
Align core drivers: How to juggle all the things that matter
There are two types of people in this world: clowns and mimes.
Successful people, and I mean truly successful people, are clowns. They’re the ones who find a way to juggle all the important balls in their life while sustaining a smile on their face.
But then there are the mimes. The ones constantly fighting against the wind, pulling desperately at ropes attached to nothing, and trapping themselves in boxes of their own creation.
Unfortunately, too many of us are mimes.
We romanticize a vibrant and colourful world where we can balance all our balls with ease. A world where we thrive at work, are attentive in our relationships, and run a well-kept home. One where we exercise our bodies, and minds, and creativity on the daily. One where all of our life balls are in motion and within reach.
In reality, juggling is hard. We often put down a couple of balls because it’s easier to juggle three than five. We avert our gaze upward at the three balls in the air, and the two we left on the ground disappear from sight.
Where are your balls right now? Do you have any that’ve been grounded for too long? Your relationship? Your body? Your mind?
If we want to be clowns, then we can start by aligning our daily dos with our drives.
My inner clown likes to jot down in his daily journal a status update for each of his 5 balls: body, environment, mind, operations, social.
In Notion, I can use my AI pal to then help me study how I’m progressing and contributing to the vision of the life I want to live.
Audit current routines: How can you do what you do even better
Who among us doesn’t have a long list of bad habits we’re still clinging onto?
We’re conscious of some of our vices. Some of us still smoke or binge content we later regret. Some of us get too easily frustrated at work or with loved ones. And we actively work toward changing for the better.
But then there are the sneakier bad habits. The ones we don’t even notice we’re doing. The ones that slip under our radar every day.
The moment’s late at night when we’re exhausted, but we try to stay up a little bit longer to get one more thing done, even though we know that we would be ten times more effective if we did that same task in the morning. The second midweek stop into the grocery store because we didn’t properly plan our meals for the week ahead. The wish that we had more time to read, in spite of the fact that we don’t remember how we spent our breaks throughout the day.
These are the death by a thousand cuts. The habits slowly killing us until we notice our systems are all out of whack without any idea why.
The best band-aid that I use for these cuts is my Level up database in Notion. It’s where I record and outline all of the evolving routines in my life. Having a space to track those gives me an occasion to review my systems with a more critical eye.
Learn something: Own your learning
Are we still learning as much as we did back then? When we were in school cramming for tests and struggling through projects?
It’s a painful experience to applaud yourself for watching so much educational YouTube, only to look back through your viewing history and realize that you don’t remember a single word that was said or lesson that was taught.
Jean Piaget, the child development psychologist who essentially clarified the science behind why babies get so much joy out of peek-a-boo, explored our relationship with object permanence. How there’s a point in our infancy when we are able to internalize that something continues to exist even though we aren’t looking at it anymore.
A lot of us have regressed to that state by falling into the trap of passive learning. We’ve successfully levelled up to the point of consuming high-quality content, but even though our feeds now feel insightful, once a new learning is out of sight, it’s also out of mind.
To turn learning into an active process again, we need to more fully engage with the things that’ve sparked our interest. Which is why I like to convert my notes into Notion flashcards and have them automatically surfaced when there’s been a long enough gap since the last time they were reviewed.
Collect something: Start your own curation
We all want to be curators, but I worry that most of us are just hoarders in denial.
Maybe you’ve noticed it too, taste is the new buzzword. It’s now zeitgeist to propose that people who’ve curated their tastes are the ones who are going to succeed through this AI shift. They are the ones who are going to stand out among a sea of sameness resulting from AI-aided content.
The key to refining our tastes? To curate our inputs.
We might pay a little more attention to what we consume. Or be more selective about when we click the heart or bookmark icon on a post.
But we know that’s not quite enough, is it? What exactly do we do with all the things that we like on the internet? Do we revisit them? Do we look back and question what we liked about what we like?
Because I think that’s the way to develop taste. Questioning what we curate and why we curated it.
In Notion, I love to track the things I consume. I rate movies, shows, books, games, candy, teas… I have a treasure trove of my favourite things and, every so often, I’ll try to understand them on a deeper level so that I can better focus my attention in the future.
Track something: Notice when you’re circling your bowl
There’s an old business quote: “What gets measured gets managed.” And our lives are no different.
An employee who doesn’t track their successes scrambles to justify their positioning for a raise. The hopeful gym rat who starts their new routine on January 1st quits by the start of February because they have no evidence of how much they’ve improved in a month.
In my case, one of the most jarring wake-up calls I had recently was at the start of this year when I was reviewing my Friction Reflections from 2025. I was remiss to discover that in December I was complaining about frictions that felt completely novel to me, only to realize that I had already complained about the exact same frictions at the start of the year.
There used to be a time when one of my biggest fears in life was being stagnant. But that experience unlocked a new fear for me: becoming a goldfish.
Swimming around in circles. Lamenting through each lap about the boring journey, only to reach my original starting point and forget the journey I had just completed. Blissfully unaware of the same journey awaiting me ahead.
If I didn’t track my frictions in Notion, I don’t think I would’ve ever noticed. I would have been stuck in a sad little loop.
We’ve reached the end of the road for today, but stay tuned for next time when I explore the lessons I’ve collected for making my Notion space more aesthetic.
See you there 👋😁