I've been on a Notion hack kick for some time now. Over the past 5 months I have been logging what I did everyday while at work. Initially, I created a bulleted list where I would bulleted daily activities bucketed beneath a month. It is a very simple process. The whole idea was to have a simple system of logging my work so that if I need to refer back to what I did, I would have a way to review.

After 5 months, my bulleted list become massive. Each month has roughly 30 daily entries with many items inside of those. I felt accomplished, but now found myself building a system that wasn't very intuitive for efficiently search through my logs to find something of value.

Notion has a very powerful and adaptable tool called a data base. I explored what these were and tried to understand their capabilities. Once I had my head wrapped around the technical jargon, I was able to build upon that to create a data base that would pull things I logged daily into a what I call my Work Dashboard.

The goal was to have a dashboard that captured everything in three main buckets.

The value is that I could create daily, weekly, and monthly views of this data so I can review key data and begin to get insights into my work habits to answer questions like, how much time do I spend doing X? Where do I spend most of my time? How much work am I actually doing? What are my remaining To Dos? You can see how this can be helpful when wanting trying to identify and communicate ones capacity or give an account of the work they have done in an X amount of time.

My central repository of my daily activities. I can go here to review all the things. For now, I have created a few different views I can toggle through for each bucket. I can review all incomplete To Do's, see stuff that is only due today. Review the notes I logged this week or for the past month.

I can see adding more things to this in the future. I may want to have quick on ramps to resources that I constantly refer to. Access account and password information. The sky really is the limit.

For now, I have a solid foundation that is simple. I'm already seeing a positive return on my investment gaining clear insights to the type of work i'm doing and how much time I'm spending on certain things.

I've setup a template for my daily logs. From this template, I linked my data bases from my dashboard and filtered their views for Today Only. This means, they look fresh everyday without yesterdays clutter or info while all the while syncing with the rest of the data so nothing gets isolated.

I've included a property that allows me to tag my day with a "Vibe". At the end of everyday, I reflect and assign my mood for the day. Was it a good day? Did I feel overloaded? Was it just a bad day? These vibes can eventually be used to provide insights to how am I feeling about my work. If a see a trend of bad days for the past month, I can look inside each log and review the work or things I accomplished. I may be able to discover that I did a lot of admin task and felt really out of my comfort zone. Or maybe I was switching between a ton of different design task and was on my way to burning out.

Again, I'm still learning. But so far this has greatly improved how I approach my work. I feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of everyday. I also feel a since of closer and connectedness to my work. Instead of ending a day feeling disconnected and wondering what did I do today and was the work valuable. Thanks for reading. I hope this inspires you to create your own system!

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