Today, I’m going to show you the secret to a lot of my work productivity: my Notion dashboard. It speeds me up, keeps me organised, and is crucial for reflecting on my own growth. And after this, you’ll be able to start your own (or download one of templates) to get the same out of it!

Let’s get into it.

☁️ Planning ahead and looking back.

A lot of productivity books and articles will talk about the importance of planning – blocking out your time, breaking down future work, and managing your tasks. And it’s definitely important, but they often leave out another awesome benefit of effective task management, which is that you can look back in time.

🌱 You can see your own growth.

Keeping track of everything you’ve done over time means you can actually visualise how far you’ve come. When you’re feeling stuck, in a rut, or work has slowed to a crawl, sometimes it just takes a moment to look through what you’ve accomplished over the last few weeks and months to recognise what you’ve achieved.

⭐️ Performance reviews are way faster – and more accurate.

No matter if you do your performance reviews quarterly, annually, or something in-between, odds are you’re leaving out some work that you did. If you keep track of everything you’ve accomplished with matching dates all in one place, you ensure you don’t forget anything that could impact your review.

(When I get to review time, I just scroll through all of my entries since the start of the period and I know I’ve got everything!)

💖 My work dashboard today.

My current dashboard is actually pretty simple, but it’s just right for me today. I plan in weekly increments (which I can see as a list or visually in a timeline), and then I also keep track of larger projects in a separate space.

Each week follows a simple template:

• What do I need to do this week?

• What did I accomplish this week?

• Notes

I have this Dashboard open all week and fill it in at the end of every day – moving tasks around, adding new ones, and adding links to work I’ve done for easy access in the future. I also always guard some time at the end of my Friday to start planning for the next week.

🧫 It’s always evolving.

I’ve had many work dashboards over the years, and they change with my needs. I originally started with Daily pages and moved to Weekly a couple of years ago, and the questions I use as prompts have changed a lot as the main categories of my role have changed.

Even though it’s changed in terms of format, having a consistent work dashboard has been critical for me at every job. I always have it open in a tab on my browser so that it’s easy to access.

🌟 Setting up your own dashboard.

When setting up your own dashboard, consider:

• Time period: should I be keeping every day or week separate? (I don’t recommend going bigger than a week, since it’ll get harder to manage your active tasks.)

• Task management: should I just use something simple like a bullet-point list, or should I integrate another kind of task management into my dashboard?

• Questions: what are the sorts of things I should use to prompt myself? (eg. if you’re a designer, you might have a section specifically dedicated to design files.)

• Complexity: how much complexity in the system am I willing to manage? Would I rather use a very smart but fiddly dashboard, or something a bit more basic and simple?