This is the second entry in a series on my Notion architecture for various life management systems. To see the full series, please visit the home page, Productivity In Notion .

So I wanted to follow-up on my piece praising Notion (Notion Notion Notion!) with a few pieces about some of the architecture I've done to make Notion work for me.

If you are trying out Notion, you'll be able to find a bunch of pre-built templates that you can use, and various videos where people discuss their Notion system. These are great resources for you to get ideas, but ultimately you will be best served by creating a system catered to your life and your way of thinking.

Thus, I want start a series outlining my current approach. If I may brag a little: it's a pretty sweet system. I've always given a lot of thought to how to design what I consider "life management systems" as a former co-founder of a software platform designed for just that.

So with that said, let me explain the overall framework for the core of things, which is projects. What is a project in my system? A project is anything that I focus on. They can be one-time efforts (e.g. building cornhole boards) or ongoing efforts (e.g. running).

These all exist as a row within my Projects Database. The database contains meta information about each project: a category or "area" of life it relates to, how complete the page is, whether it is one-time or on-going, et cetera. Here's what that looks like:

A few of my 94 projects that make up what I'm trying to do here!

How many projects do I have? 94. That sounds like a lot - and is a lot. But this includes a whole bunch of things: some are simply ideas I want to think about doing, some are projects that I've put on the backburner or haven't even started yet, etc. But the idea behind each is that as soon as you make an entry for a project, it has a home.

The beauty of giving each project a home is that you know exactly where new things should go. As I come across useful information online, hear a recommendation, or have a useful thought, I know exactly where to put that. There's one app for it, one interface, one tap away.

Now looking at the projects themselves, each project has its own page (this is done by default for entries in a database within Notion). So this page is the home hub for that project. This can look radically different for each project - the idea here is that it should be purpose-built for that project. Some projects are really just aggregations for to-do list items while other projects are expansive spaces with many databases held within. It just depends on the use case.