Why I had this thought?

You know, sometimes people don’t even care about productivity. They just sit at their desk waiting for time to pass so they can leave work and go home. I am not judging as we all know everyone is responsible for their own life. But I have to say that I can't imagine myself being like that, I left my job and country because I wasn't productive.

Anyway, this is more about me being more productive now, and the reason I am writing this blog post is that a couple of weeks ago, I felt again that I am not productive, but for a totally different reason. This time I was productive at work, but I wasn't productive at all in my free time. You know, I tried so hard to get into this field and I know as a self-taught developer I have to try a lot to improve and be able to compete with other people with much more experience and certificates than me. So, I told myself that there is no time to lose and I have to take advantage of every minute.

At the moment I am working as a Front end developer with React, but I saw that the company I work for is struggling a lot to find Node.js developers, and also I wanted so much to work as a Full-Stack. Then, I started studying Node.js and got a great book.

Node.js Design Patterns Third Edition by Mario Casciaro and Luciano Mammino

I started reading the book and I was so excited about that but after some time I stopped, I had a feeling that I wanted to read but something was holding me back. Then I realized that I had to do something to be more productive and if I have to also push myself sometimes.

The solution for all that

This might sound a bit crazy, but I found the solution I was looking for in an app, and that worked perfectly for me. So, before I give you more information about the app, let me explain why it helped me a lot. I am an organizing freak, I want everything to be organized and perfect, the problem was that I wanted everything to be organized and perfect in a place that I can carry on with me all the time, and to be able to write down anything that comes to my mind. So, most of the time when I can't organize my stuff I simply can't start or finish anything. That's why this app solved my productivity problem.

The app name is Notion, trust me it has so many use cases that can help you with but I am not able to cover every use case in one blog post. I will walk you through my experience and which use cases it covers for me.

Goals list

After a lot of thinking, reading, and researching I found that when you see your goals every day written but unfinished it kinda motivates you to tick that box ✅ . What I found also really important is that I do not add things I HAVE to do, but only things I WANT to do, and the reason is that if you add things that you have to do it will make you nervous to finish them but not productive, and that's wrong.

Notion has a template that is more than a simple to-do list.

This is a demo Goals template I created, and you can see in the picture that it gives you a beautiful UI, where you can see what tasks you have To Do, Doing and Done, also it gives you the ability to add status, tags, and priority to help you organize them better. It's also really easy to create a goal by just clicking the New button and add the relevant info about your goal.

I am watching my goals every single day and I am motivated to move everything I have on the Doing column to Done and start working on new stuff.

Blog posts

You know everyone has their own explanation for productivity, for me, a person who couldn't find time to study but had plenty of time to watch Netflix, being able to find time to write blog posts and tell my story is a really big thing.

So, how Notion helped me with my blog posts. There were a lot of times that I was working on something or maybe read an interesting article, and I wanted to share this knowledge but I said "I will do it later" and then poof... I had forgotten and even if I remember that I wanted to write something, it would be hard to remember what it was, what made me so excited, and what I wanted to write.

Notion comes to the rescue, once I have this thought about a blog post the first thing I do is open Notion -> create a new page -> Select Blog Post template -> start writing. Yes, it has a blog post template 🙌 , this template includes blog title, details, and what to write about. By doing I do not lose any thought and as soon as I return home from work or have free time, I see all my quick notes on this post and now I have free time to rewrite them with a better one way and in more detail.

Reading list

As I mentioned before reading books became a really important thing to me, and it was difficult to catch up. So, I created a Reading list using the template Notion provides and started adding books I wanted to read. First, the list was too short (just 1 book on the list 🤓) but then while I started being more productive I found more interesting stuff and books to add to the list. Also, to push me more on that I keep adding to my goals 👆 each book I start to read, so every day I see that the book is on the Doing column and I have to move it to Done.

Projects roadmaps

Last but definitely not least, I had to find something in order to help me work more on side projects. There were a lot of times that I had a cool idea for a project and wanted to start but I never did because I kept forgetting. Now once I have a good idea I immediately create a project roadmap on Notion with a couple of details about the project and then revisit it when I have more time to write more. Thankfully there was a template for that too, and it has everything you need to plan a project.

This is exactly like having an agile dashboard for your app and it's perfect 👌 . As you see in the picture above it has an amazing UI, when you can have the tasks arranged based on the status, and also you can view each task title, type, status, sprint, and priority. You can easily add new tasks by just clicking the New button and then you can write all the information for the ticket.

Conclusion

I will agree with many people that will say, there are a lot of apps out there to organize your stuff, but I personally saw myself improving with this app and I am really happy that there is one app that can do all the things for my personal and work life. So, if you are the type of guy like me and want to push yourself and be more productive, then give it a try.

Thank you for reading 📖

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