This is the fourth 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

I am wary of pretty much every task management software/system out there. They may work for some personalities, but for me they always seem to go as follows:

• Tasks added, feels new, looks good
• A few tasks slide by and are overdue, but that's okay
• More and more slide by, the list becomes unwieldy and out-of-date
• List becomes irrelevant clutter, goes unused

This has happened in Trello, Asana, Todoist, pretty much any system you can think of. So my goal for my customized solution in Notion was to avoid this!

This should be obvious, but there are two main types of tasks I consider: recurring (and generally lower-weight) tasks, and one-time, often heavier tasks. To me, these should be treated very differently. While your intuition may say "yeah, I want one single list for everything," quick recurring tasks simply clutter the list and make it appear more overwhelming than it actually is. And oh by the way, do you know what an easy mental shortcut is in this case? You simply do a couple of the easy recurring tasks, tell yourself you are making progress, and don't do any of the bigger more meaningful work.

So with that said, I functionally have two different task management systems that I'll overview here. The rule is this: if it is something done on a regular daily/weekly/monthly cadence, then it goes to the recurring system. If not, it goes to the one-time system.

Recurring Task Management

My recurring tasks appear exclusively on my dashboard, and are managed using Notion's neat "templated blocks" feature. Basically, I have a weekly and monthly template that are all simple checklists. Here's what the weekly template looks like:

The default weekly schedule is sparse, but is adjusted from time to time. So when I click "create new week", this template is populated on my main dashboard.

As you can see here, each day has a task or two generally, and these can be flagged off throughout the week. And it includes many of the mundane realities of everyday life: mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, filing expenses, etc. Once the week is done, this whole block is archived, and I just click the "create new week" box to make a new one.

In addition to recurring tasks, I tend to use this to schedule some other easy-but-one-off tasks, or to "schedule" when I need to do a real task (the system for which I'll get to in a minute). But the goal of this section is kind of a zero backlog, 100% complete list.