Before diving straight into evaluating your current habits, it’s important to understand what over-organizing and micro-management mean to you. Broadly speaking, over-organizing refers to excessive planning and organization that can leave little room for flexibility. Micro-management is an excessive level of control over your daily tasks, which can cause unnecessary stress and anxiety.
Examples of over-organizing include creating excessively detailed schedules, focusing on minor details instead of prioritizing important tasks, and obsessing over making it perfect or getting everything right. Examples of micro-management include refusing to delegate tasks to others, feeling stressed when plans change, and checking and rechecking work obsessively.
The best way to build your dream organization system is to assess the one you already have. While starting from scratch can be appealing, having a starting point for your preferences is helpful. What’s currently working for you? What isn’t? What parts are cluttered, or even completely unnecessary for your everyday needs? Do you enjoy tracking every type of media you consume, or the food you eat, or the hours you sleep? Or does it leave you feeling overwhelmed—as if you’ve turned your daily habits into yet another task that must be checked off before the end of the day?
It’s important to remember that not everyone requires the same amount of self-management, and overwhelming yourself with to-do list after to-do list can be just as detrimental to your productivity as being under-organized can. As you continue through this chapter and the rest of this book, strive to reflect honestly on what’s most important to you, what must stay, and what can go.
Self-management through tools like Notion and other digital systems, physical planners, and bullet journals is incredibly useful when it comes to helping you achieve your goals and live a productive life. However, managing yourself can be overwhelming and confusing, especially when that system hasn’t been specifically tailored to you. Just as one size does not fit all, neither does a template. This is where identifying your individual needs and patterns comes in handy.
Understanding your current self-management system is beneficial in several ways. Firstly, it allows you to see what is working well and what needs improvement. By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your current system, you can create a more effective and efficient system that is tailored to your needs. This will save you time and energy in the long run and make self-management less stressful.
Secondly, understanding your current system can help you identify areas for improvement. You may notice that certain tasks take longer than they should or that you are constantly struggling to complete certain tasks. By identifying these areas, you can create a plan to improve your productivity and make self-management more, well, manageable.
Finally, understanding your current system can help you identify patterns that may be causing overwhelm, anxiety, or confusion. For example, you may notice that you tend to procrastinate when faced with a certain task or that you become overwhelmed when you have too many tasks to complete. By recognizing these patterns, you can develop strategies to overcome them and improve your self-management skills.
It is important to note that identifying your current system is not about judging yourself or feeling ashamed of your current habits. Instead, it is about taking an objective look at your habits and identifying areas where you can improve. This requires honesty and self-awareness, but the benefits are well worth the effort.
While this book could be used to follow along and improve any kind of organizational system, we’ll focus primarily on Notion. It’s truly an all-in-one tool, complete with task management, notes, collaboration, calendars, databases, and more. However, it’s easy to get lost in the numerous methods of keeping yourself productive rather than effectively streamlining your workflow.
Before you can make any improvements to your self-management system, you need to know what you’re working with. Take some time to review your Notion workspace and evaluate your current setup. Consider the following questions:
As you answer these questions, take note of any areas that you want to improve or change. For example, you may realize that you’re not utilizing Notion’s database filtering options enough, or that you need to adjust how you’re categorizing tasks in your to-do lists.
Continue taking notes as you work through your analysis of your self-management system on Notion. Whether you’re jotting down notes in a journal or creating a new page in Notion to document your findings, having a record of your analysis will help you make informed decisions about how to improve your system. Additionally, taking notes can help you identify patterns or trends in your current habits that you might not have noticed otherwise.