How to Use Notion to Organize Your Life (with templates)

If you’ve been on the productivity side of Youtube, then you might have heard about the Web-App called “Notion”. This is my now new favorite place to plan, organize, and schedule my life. Now I am no expert on Notion, there are so many things you can do with it. But I did want to share with you all some simple tips and show you how I set up my “Life Hub”. In this post, I will show you a step to step tutorial on how to use notion to organize your life, and provide you with some of my favorite templates!

Setting up an account

The first thing you need to do is to create an account on Notion. Start off by going to Notion.So or searching Notion on Google. Once you are on the website, sin up with your email and create a password. Make sure you are signing up for an individual or personal account. Once your account is created, you are ready to start!

The Basics

Start a new “hub”

In the left column, if you hover over Private, a “plus” sign will appear. Click on it to add a page. This will bring up an empty page but also show a list of grey words as a guide. At the top, you will see a grey word that says “Untitled”. Here you can type any title you want. In my case, I choose “My Life Hub”. If you hover over the title, you will see 3 options: Add Icon, Add Cover, and Add Comment. When you click on Add Icon, you can pick an emoji of your choice. If you click, Add Cover, you can upload or choose an image to add to go on top of your “hub”.

Adding a title, icons, covers, and comments

Adding items

If you go to type in the blank area of your page, there is a Plus sign. Clicking on that will create a drop-down menu. There are tons of options to choose from. Most of the options are pretty self-explanatory. A “Page” is a sub-page inside of your “hub”. This means it create a new link where you can add even more stuff.

Add a heading

The first thing we are going to start with adding a heading. Click on the Plus sign again and go to any heading type that you want. Type what your heading is. If you highlight the heading that you just made, a tool bar will pop up. If you go to the 3 dots to the right, and go to “color” you can highlight the text or change the color of it. This is a great way to create headings and sections.

Making columns

To make columns, or different sections, add another heading under the one you just added. If you hover over that title, there will be two options to the left. The plus sign, and a little vertical bar with dots. If you hover over that bar, there will be directions, but basically you can click and hold down, and use your mouse to move the text around the page. To create the column, drag your second title all the way to the end of your first title, and a small blue line will appear. Once that box appears, you can then release and you will see 2 distinct columns.

Creating a sub-page

Hit the plus sign again and hit “page”. This will pop up a new blank page. Here you can again add titles, icons, covers, and more information. If you go back to your main hub page, you can then see the title of your new page and then be able to click on it.

Adding Notion templates

If you want to add a Notion created template, click “templates” and then it will bring up a menu of options for different templates. These are sorted into categories and ways to organize your information. Once you’ve picked the one you like, click the blue “use this template” button and it will add it to your page. These are really fun to mess around with and there are a ton of templates to choose from.

Downloading outside templates

Notion can be confusing at first since there are so many things that you can do. One thing that has made my set-up on Notion so much easier, is by being able to download templates. I am going to link a few of my favorites below if you want to check them out!

Templates:

Yearly Planning: https://www.notion.so/Yearly-Planning-af2204eeabac475889358e721fb24bda

Yearly Template: https://www.notion.so/2020-Template-bcda95b019fc400bbce91155eb7d9a46

Life Hub: https://www.notion.so/Notion-Pages-1ef3eac24f954c69afc30edf76679935

Bullet Journal: https://www.notion.so/Bullet-Journal-Template-fa25920496f140e28b828aa123887747

Daily Log: https://www.notion.so/The-Daily-Log-Template-bf9df432007b4c5d8d43db57387b8fa5

Adding templates

To add a template to your “hub”, click “add page” and it will open up a blank page. Here you can add a title, we’re just going to name this one Templates. Using one of the template links that I have listed above, or one that you have found online, copy that link and paste it into the blank document. When you paste the link, there will be 3 options in a menu: Dismiss, Mention Page, or Link to Page.

Click “Link to page”. Once that is done you will see that it turns into a titled link where you can click it. Click on what you just created and then go into the corner at the top right and click “duplicate”. This will duplicate the template onto your account instead of just being a page that you cannot edit. On the left menu, you can see your new template and now you can edit it as you want.

My Notion Tour

And here it is! My beautiful Notion “Hub”. It took me a while to set up, but I love how it turned out! As you can see here, I have a few different sections. Under each of these sections, there are pages that open up into more organizational places. So if you click on, for example, the task list, it opens up a page where I can add things to a list, put them into different categories, and more.

Wrap Up

I know this was probably a little confusing, but I did want to share the basics of Notion because once you get the hang of it, you can have everything you need in one place. It’s a great way to stay organized and increase your productivity. If you’re looking to go more in depth with Notion or you need more tutorials, here are some great Youtube videos that helped me!

Julia Crist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjlJcvqoXAY

Revisign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7zW8KOgbEQ

Kristy Lin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExI3An_Ec-Y&t=8s