As an extreme planner and organizer, you’d think that my life would be less stressful, but it often has the opposite effect. For me, not only does my life need to be planned well, but my inner perfectionist also requires that it’s aesthetically pleasing. I’ve bought the most beautiful planners, only to hate the way it turned out because my handwriting wasn’t perfect. I switched to google docs so my planning would always be electronically accessible, but it was so plain and boring. But now, I’ve finally found the solution — a Type A, aesthetic organizer’s dream, Notion. 

Notion isn’t just a school planner or a calendar, it’s the ultimate life organizer. And if they don’t have a template you like, you can design your own. Not only are there different formats, but you can customize anything and everything you could ever need. Here are some of my favorite ways to use Notion to organize my life. 

School

I mainly use Notion to organize all of my school work and activities. I made a page for each one of my classes that includes all assignments and I can keep track of deadlines. I also have another to-do list page that I update every morning with all the assignments I specifically need to do on that day. These are all fairly typical school planning materials but Notion makes it so that all of them are kept together and can be accessed easily at any time. The best part is that you can design these pages however you want with minimal effort!

Travel 

As someone who lives for planning a good trip, Notion is a dream. You can design beautiful pages to organize your entire travel itinerary and even keep tabs on multiple upcoming trips you may have planned. I love getting a jump start on planning my trips and working on them whenever I can to get excited for it. I have an upcoming winter break trip and then a large European summer vacation so I love having a research page for both where I can add any info or links I find. Notion has a format to document your entire trip itinerary, pages for packing lists, hotel and travel information, even embedded maps — really anything you could ever need to plan the best trip ever. I love that you can add beautiful cover images to each page as well of the travel location to make it all tie together.

Self-care
As someone who literally likes to plan every aspect of my life, I love using Notion for anything and everything including my health and personal care. Under this section I have pages for my fitness and nutrition such grocery lists, meal planning, fitness plans and a hydration tracker. I also have more adulting things to track like my budget, rent, doctors appointments and things I might normally be too overwhelmed to deal with, but since I get to design how I track these things, it makes it much more approachable. I also include more fun personal things in this category too; an ongoing list of clothes I like, makeup and hair products I want to try, my reading list for the year, my life goals and a journal. The possibilities are endless and you could truly plan, track or make a page for anything you could ever want. 

Notion was truly a game changer for me as an extreme planner. If you also have tendencies to organize your life all the time, Notion may be a great fit for you too. But really figuring out whatever works best for you to stay organized is the most important thing. Happy planning!