How I Finally Stopped Losing Notes Across Too Many Projects

Every few weeks, a thread appears somewhere on the internet asking whether a Notion Life OS is actually useful or just a very elaborate form of procrastination.

I have thoughts.

I’ve been using Notion as my main system for a few years now, but my first attempt at a “Life OS” wasn’t great. This was because I built everything exactly the way I wanted it to look, with nice images and all, but I still used my phone’s app to capture notes I’d do nothing with. So I had a cute Notion workspace with a knowledge bank, bookmarks, projects, reading lists, and whatnot, and then also 200 random notes saved on my phone to never be touched again.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what helped me:

The problem with most Life OS templates

They’re built for someone who already has their life organised.

You download this gorgeous, colour-coded, cross-linked masterpiece of a template, and it has a section for your goals, your habits, your projects, your reading list, your finances, your meal plan, and your five-year vision. And you look at it and think: I need to fill all of this in before I can start using it. Well, at least this is how my brain works.

This is also the reason why I don’t use anyone’s templates and just build my own.

I place quick capture buttons exactly where I know I will click them, I organise projects in the exact way I know I will manage them, and I split content across the exact areas I know I organise them in my own mind.

Templates don’t give that. They are created based on how someone else’s brain works. This means that what’s helpful to the creator can be absolutely unhelpful to you.

So you spend a weekend filling it in. You figure out how to use it. It feels productive. And then Monday arrives, you open it, you use it, but… it’s just strangely not that helpful. You don’t like where certain pages are saved, where certain buttons are placed, you can’t easily find specific notes you saved, and when something breaks, you have no clue how to fix it.

You could adjust the template to make it work for you, but you don’t. It feels like a job you can’t be bothered to do, so you just get another template. Maybe this one is the one!

I’m an organised person. Or chaotic. I’m really not sure; it depends on whom I speak with. Regardless, I have too many projects, interests, notes, and things to hold in my head comfortably, so I use very elaborate Notion workspaces to keep things organised and out of my head.

And yet… even if I had everything on Notion, the old note-capturing habit was the hardest thing for me to get rid of.

But I made it work for me, and hopefully it will help you too.

How to Capture Notes With Notion (For Real This Time)

As I said, I have multiple projects I need to keep track of on Notion. That means I think about multiple things and have notes I need to save for said multiple things.

Here’s the structure I used:

• Name (so I’d know what the note is about if I needed to find it later)

• Type - Quick note / reminder / thought (because these seemed to be the main things I’d save in my old notes app)

• Project - personal / project 1 / project 2 / project 3 (this is important because I want to have only one database for this and have a view of the relevant notes for each project in each project’s workspace)

• Status - to review / to keep / complete

That’s it. I’d also create separate views on the main database to view quick notes, reminders, and thoughts separately.

Now, you might think that it’s quite a few things to click and select just to save a note each time.

And I did think the exact same!

So I created buttons for each type of capture and saved them at the top of the page. When I click each of them, it automatically populates the status and the type for me. I only need to write the actual note, name it if I want to find it more easily later, and select the project (which, for most people, might not be that relevant).

How I Organise Them

So I have a system to capture notes, but how do I organise them so that I don’t turn it into a dumpster of 200 random notes, as I had in my phone app before?

Good question. For a while, I didn’t.

But I do now and here’s how:

I set a date and time to clean up my Notion on the last Sunday of each month. It’s a date when I want to refresh things a little bit. I use it to clean up all pages on Notion, notes included.

It works brilliantly for me. I have a nice cup of coffee in the morning and go page by page to check if there are no random pages saved in the wrong places, update my finances, goals, projects, and, you guessed it, notes!

For notes specifically, I go through each one with a status of “to review”. I read them and decide what to do with each. Some of them will be just “to keep”, so I update the status to that and keep them there. Some of them will be actual ideas about something I need to action, or save somewhere else (e.g., maybe I was cooking one day and realised that it somehow turned out pretty awesome and then drafted a super quick recipe so that I don’t forget how to do it again). This means that I need to move this note to my recipe database (I feel that I need to explain why I don’t add this kind of thing there directly - this is because I want to have a gallery view there with nice pics, and sometimes it’s just too much work for me to do it in the moment).

If I capture reminders, there is a trick I use, as reviewing them once a month can cause problems. In the name, I add @Remind me action and set a date when I want to be reminded to check it. Notion then pushes a reminder notification, so I don’t need to think about it (I use this trick everywhere on Notion, by the way, especially when I need to be reminded to cancel subscriptions).

When I action my notes, I mark them as “complete” or delete them altogether.

The Tiny Habit

So far, it sounds very organised. Very smooth. Almost gives the I-have-my-life-together vibe.

I had the system for a while, but I’d still use my notes app on the phone to save notes if I was in a hurry!

I’d end up having notes on Notion and notes on my phone app.

Frustrating, to say the least.

But no problem, I solved this eventually, too.

Here’s what I knew: it’s important that I capture notes with as few clicks as possible, or I won’t do it.

As I needed to click something three times to capture notes on my phone, I figured that if I make it the same number of clicks maximum on Notion, then I should technically be able to change my habit and save them there instead.

Very simple solution: I added my notes page to favourites, so when I open the Notion app on my phone, the only other thing I need to do is click “+” and add it. So I can now do it in the same number of clicks.

But this is not the end.

I’d still use my old notes app if I were in a hurry and wanted to add something without thinking about it much. Eventually, I just removed the old Notes app from my phone screen altogether and replaced it with the Notion app instead. Now saving notes into the old app simply made no sense whatsoever.

But there are Notion widgets you can use on your phone to make it even quicker for you.

• Favourites widget - you can have a whole section of pages that you favourited in Notion on your screen and click whatever you want there and be sent to that page directly (in this case, the notes page). I’d probably use it myself if I liked how it looked, but it doesn’t match my screen vibe, and that bothers me. :))

• Quick note - it’s literally just an icon of a plus sign. You click it, and a note opens and saves in the directory you select, so you can select the notes page there. But it doesn’t work for me personally, as I want to tag my notes for different projects, and I can’t do it if I save them this way.

So, Does a Life OS Actually Help?

Yes. But only if you build your system, not someone else’s.

The templates that look incredible on YouTube are somebody else’s brain. They work for that person because they built them around how they actually think and behave. They might have a brilliant system, but it doesn’t mean that the same system will work for you. Look how many steps it took me to save a damn note in the right place! I bet it’s super easy for someone else.

And the truth is, even though I have a proper system that I use, I still keep improving it, optimising it, making it work a little bit better for me each time.

And here’s a simplified list of things I did to help myself with note-taking specifically, in case you need the inspiration for your own:

• Create a database that allows organising notes based on project and status

• Dedicate a date and time to review the notes and action them (for personal stuff, I do it monthly, but for work, a daily review is the answer!)

• Save the notes database to your favourites so it’s easy to access and is the first thing you see when you open the app

• Replace the notes app you no longer want to use with the Notion app. Make it extra hard for yourself to do the “wrong” thing.

Thanks for reading!

Lina