I’ve been juggling with 2022 setup planning for more than a month since the beginning of November, and now I think this is the “enough” setup that I think would work out for 2022. There are no other purpose in this writing other than to keep myself accountable toward this setup. This year I’ve been struggling a lot in keeping consistency of using any setup, so I guess it’s time to commit to one setup for one whole upcoming year.

It’s gonna be a long long post (another essay with some images, if I could say), so take yourself a cup of coffee or tea and happy reading!

After observing my own preferences in using Notion since several recent years, I’d like to use only one page that contain everything. I want that one page to be as simple as possible, as pretty as possible. I don’t want to put any complex database as it would burden myself to update any progress or tracking, so I try my best to limit only the important properties but still covering what I want to record and track. I decided to name this page “Dashboard”.

The top part of Dashboard consists of “reminders”. First reminder is a life progress bar widget from Indify, which I only put year, month, and week. Under that, there is a second reminder about 2022 keywords, which I think is important to impose my major purposes for 2022. And then, there is a guide on how to play with this toy.

Next to it, there is this pretty image that I considered important to ease my eyes, and a Dec 2021 toggle that I would change it later to 2021 and consists of important things to note from 2021. And then alongside with it, there is this simple database titled Key Results, which consists of monthly key results that I’ve established in my personal OKRs.

Yes. I decided to change my goals-system into OKR system after reading this post. Actually, in the recent years I just created yearly goals and didn’t track how those were progressing as long as those goals were achieved.

In my OKRs origin page, I created 3 databases for month, objectives, and key results. I would work on this OKRs on monthly basis, so the planning and evaluation for the actions needed would be done every month. For me personally, one month is long enough to see how my objectives would be progressing as all this time I also derived my yearly goals into monthly goals.

The middle part of Dashboard consists of space that I would use to put any kind of task into my calendar. Any task can directly put into the calendar, I planned to use this mechanism for trivial tasks or project tasks. Or, I could obtain any planned tasks from several template buttons that I put alongside the calendar. There are 3 types of these planned tasks. First, daily, which is derived from monthly key results that I can do in daily basis. Second, weekly, which is still derived from monthly key results but in weekly basis. Then routines, which is daily habits that I considered important, but not related to my OKRs.

I created several properties that I thought ‘important enough’ to know the details but not that complicated to fill in the fields. All of tasks are categorized into 4 types : goals, routine, project task and task. Goals are tasks that related to OKRs. Routines are tasks that not related to OKRs. Project tasks are sub-tasks that fall within some personal project. Meanwhile tasks are daily unique tasks that do not belong anywhere.

The bottom part of the dashboard is where I would use to to check in other areas other than tasks. There are 3 areas. Brain Dump to store any form of information and knowledge. This brain dump database would only view the “not processed” information, while the completed view is stored in different page named Resources. Daily basis are all of the things I have to check daily, whether I have to check in something, or just view how my day look like, such as time blocking. The right side navigation consists of linked pages and linked databases in simpler view that can be updated occasionally.

Resources page basically is the second brain database, where I can put just everything. It could be related to other databases such as books, blogs or spaced repetition, or not at all. I am a forgetful person, so this is really helpful to recall any info or knowledge I had learned in the past.

The very first benefit I got from Notion was I got to know my personal financial situation and could improve it. The expenses tracker is consists of 13 views, default view for one full year expenses view and views for every month. My previous expenses tracker didn’t look like this tho. Now that I already have my own income, I want to know where would those money goes.

I created a complete properties view of calendar in task master page. Here I would put all of types of tasks, whether it is completed or not. Those tasks can be identified by date and day it is completed, the time blocking it is executed, type of task, or whether it is related to any objective or project. I also created property point to spice up the game, but I am still contemplating on how should I do the marking.

In dashboard, I have several views of calendar too, to get more specific view of tasks based on their type on daily basis. Tasks is “today” checklist view that I have to complete based on its priority. Goals tracker is a view that only consists of OKRs actionable tasks, that can be viewed in daily or weekly basis. Routines is daily habits view, and time blocking is all of tasks view based on the time it is done.

Spaced repetition is a tracker for learning. This is probably would be the greatest challenge I have to conquer because all this time, I always failed to keep being consistent in doing the repetitions. The furthest I ever did only until repetition 2 :”).

I decided to do weekly review and evaluation after doing some testing toward myself in the first 2 weeks of this December. Daily review takes lots of effort and I decided not to do it. I am planning to do 3 types of weekly review in 3 different times because hmm I don’t know why, usually it took me 3-4 hours to do a whole weekly review.

• Friday night : processing and reviewing professional work performance.
• Saturday night : (yea I know I am a no-life person <3) processing and reviewing personal performance.
• Sunday morning : planning for upcoming week.

Last page is future inspo where I would put future plan and brainstorming ideas for several areas of my life that I considered relevant to my needs. This page is somehow unstructured, those sub-pages currently are blank pages. I am planning to migrate some ideas and plans from my bucket list into this page.

I’ve been testing this setup for the last 2 weeks and it works well enough so far. Tasks tracker work smoothly along with brain dump and expenses tracker. The most difficult ones are spaced repetition and weekly review. I would not expecting myself to track all these things all the time successfully, as I am still struggling in overcoming boredom. There would be definitely changes here and there, but I put expectation to myself that no major changes would be done toward this setup as I have committed to be consistent starting from now.

As for OKRs, of course I would not expect myself to achieve all those objectives 100% successfully, but I think I would put the success rate around 60-70% for each objective. By the end of the expected year, I hope this setup would be helpful to get to know more of myself and to implement small improvements along the time pass.