Ever since my midterm prep made me extremely busy and stressed, and I realised that life wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to go; I decided that I wanted to make some changes in my life to try and make life a little more fun and a little less exhausting.

I want to work on things sustainably, so I’ve been trying to make shifts to try and reduce the chance of burnout as well.

So far, there have been a couple of changes that I’ve made that has helped my happiness and stress levels immensely, and there’s one change I want to introduce soon (which I’m sure will make a big difference too!).

Changing my Notion system

In the past, my Notion system would consist almost exclusively on a ton of individual pages with different pieces of information that I would use for different purposes. While this did get the job done, I decided to make a sea change in how I use Notion for two main reasons.

1. I didn’t feel like I was taking advantage of Notion’s capabilities of filtering and sorting.
2. Having a ton of pages on my sidebar would stress me out.

So, I decided to condense all of my pages down into three main pages: a “Project Manager” page, a “My Notebook” page, and a “Studying” page.

These pages are differentiated by the kind of information they hold: the “Project Manager” contains information about the projects I’m working on and the tasks associated with these projects, “My Notebook” consists of everything I’ve noted down (no matter what it’s about), and “Studying” has all my revision material.

I took slightly different approaches to design each of these pages, but something all of them have in common is the fact that they all have a wide variety of information in them. “Project Manager”, for example, contains my YouTube stuff as well as music-related projects; and it contains everything: ideas, ongoing projects, and completed ones.

The main way I use these pages is using views that I set up using sorts and filtering; I have a view for each type of project (i.e. blogs, videos etc). This keeps everything in the same place, while allowing me to get to the information I want to get to quickly too

Switching up how I work during time-blocks

In the past, I would determine whether or not I worked enough that day based on the amount of time I spent on a project. While this does work for some people, I figured out that it was a massive cause of stress for me; time goals got me really exhausted and made me burn out much quicker.

So, I decided to switch it up; I started to introduce daily, output-based goals to replace the time-based goals of the past.

So far, this has been instrumental in me having a much more sustainable lifestyle. Even though my calendar is full to the brim, I have enough time in between time-blocks (especially because I tend to achieve my goals before time) to just recuperate and chill. In the future, I want to start working on tiny tasks in these pieces of “time confetti”.

I’d initially started doing this using post-it notes on my computer monitor, but more recently, I’ve switched to a “daily tasks” database on Notion, just to save some paper (even though the digital version is infinitely less satisfying).

An additional benefit of this is that studying has become a lot more efficient, especially after I introduced interleaving (the process where you work on multiple subjects in the same session) to my study habits. Having output-based goals, I’ve realised, has made me achieve a lot more when studying in the same amount of time. I guess that’s just Parkinson’s Law in motion!

Bonus: Sleeping with my phone in another room

I’d like to think my relationship with my phone has improved substantially (at least compared to how it was in the pandemic). I think I use it a lot more intentionally nowadays, too, although there’s still a lot of scope for improvement!

One of the main ways I want to do this is by starting to sleep with my phone in another room. The main reason for this is not because I tend to use my phone at night, but because I tend to use it as soon as I wake up.

I think by distancing myself a little bit from the phone, I could allow myself to have five minutes-ish in the morning to just… exist. And then I could do stuff like check my email and do the Wordle.

To do this, though, I need a more reliable alarm clock!

Thank you so much for reading!

If you have any subtle workflow changes that you’ve made that have improved your life, drop it in the comments! I’d love to hear from you.

Additionally, if you’re interested in the idea of using Notion but don’t know where to start, check out Thomas Frank Explains. He has a playlist on the channel called Notion Fundamentals, which is great at explaining the functionality of Notion and how you can use it in your own system.