I’ve been in a never-ending War with productivity ever since I left University, and since you clicked on this article too, I’m betting you are in the same battle. Always trying to keep on top of my never-ending to-do list, constantly prioritising and trying desperately to keep all of my notes organised. I’ve tried almost every system out there from physical notebooks, which only work when I’m sitting at my desk, to apps like Apple Reminders, ToDoist and Evernote but it was just never quite the silver bullet I needed to win the War.
The Eisenhower Matrix
That was until I came across the Eisenhower Matrix — A system to help you keep track and accurately prioritise your to-do list. Simply put, in this system you’ll divide your tasks into four separate categories, the tasks you’ll do first, the tasks you’ll schedule for later, the tasks you’ll delegate to someone else, and the tasks you’ll delete.
How I use the Matrix
Now knowing a system is all well and good, but the meat and potatoes are how we use the productivity system that makes it the best productivity tool I have ever implemented. I started out by following this system in a physical notebook. 1 page per day and I would reserve half the page for the Eisenhower Matrix and then the other half for notes I’ve taken from meetings and tasks throughout the day.
I loved this system but quickly found that scheduling items from one day to the next + looking back for tasks that are not yet completed or notes I took on a task I did a week ago quickly became very difficult, having to flip back and forth to set up a new day page or research old notes.
The Eisenhower Matrix but in Notion
Notion was like a supermassive Tank that rolled into battle at the exact moment of need. I created the system in Notion that let me create a Page for each day, just like I did in the notebooks, and implement the Eisenhower Matrix in each of those day pages. The kicker here is that any tasks that were not completed the previous days get brought into the next day you create. This eliminates the need to go through all the previous pages to find the tasks that were not completed. Tasks are now also able to be linked together to create a parent/child structure to help prioritise tasks even further. Now for the Notes side of the page, I created a system to keep track of the meetings had for each day (linking meetings with a day) and also added the ability to create action items (tasks) that would link back to meetings to help give me more context around them. On top of all this sits a nice home dashboard that acts as the entry point for each day.
Let me show you
This all sounds like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, so let me just show you what it looks like.
The Home dashboard
The day Dashboard:
A meeting:
I’ve loved using this system in Notion and it’s helped improve my productivity tenfold over the past few months. If you would like to use this system — you can download the free notion template here
