I’m excited to introduce a new page that I’ve started in my workspace, which is the Weekend Dashboard.
If you’ve followed any of my other work, you probably know that I’m pretty adamant about having a master task database.
Now, my husband and I share our workspace, so all of our tasks, professionally, personally, are all inside of our workspace in a master task database.
What we noticed over time was that our work tasks and our life household tasks were really taking place in different contexts. Most of our household tasks, and things that we we’re doing around the house, all that was really happening on the weekend. So rather than having the household stuff get mixed up in our day to day, professional workspace, we decided to separate this out into a weekend dashboard.
Our household tasks now have their own master database, that has all of the gardening tasks and things to do around the house.
The more that you use Notion, the more you will realize where there’re friction points and where there’s room to improve it. We used to do all of this in one space and it just started to feel like we weren’t really making the best use of it.
So, this is one way that we adapted our space. We now have weekend meal planning, miscellaneous household, and garden activities housed here. S
Similarly we used to have our business and life projects all together in our projects database.
We realized the properties that we needed to track for the different household projects were really different than the stuff that we’re tracking at a professional level. The house projects are actually a lot simpler. We include a low budget, high budget, target date, priority and an inspiration database that again is specific to house ideas. We link it to an area and next steps and set owner, size and status. It’s a lot simpler and there’s much fewer templates than there were in our master task database. This is a lot more functional for us and has become a space that can inspire us.
On Saturday mornings one of us will have *Notion open on the laptop open and the other is making breakfast and coffee and we’ll chat through, what is it that we need to get done?
We start off asking what small things can we do that would make this weekend great? And make the house nicer.
We used to say ‘cleaning the house’ or ‘preparing meals’, but we realized that cleaning the house isn’t what makes the weekend awesome. Having a clean house by the end of the weekend is something that makes the weekend awesome. So we are trying to word those things in terms of what are the outcomes that we would want to have by the end of the weekend.
We also have a very quick ‘things to purchase database’ as well. So again, one of us is making coffeem one of us is here filling this out and we can say, Oh yeah, we need to ketchup or whatever it is, and the other can just very quickly add this stuff to the list.
I also have embedded our grocery list as well. I can look at the master list and go through and check off whatever we need and those are going to show up in the ‘need now’ view.
The buyer lists are things that we can favorite on our phone. So it’s super easy to access those when we’re out and about, or at the grocery store.
I have garden tasks included too and those are an embed of what is in my gardening dashboard. I can either go, jump in at the garden level when I’m ready to do gardening activities. Or I can also check some of these things off the list right here.
Lastly, we’ve got our journals so we can what happened this weekend. I can’t see Ben’s journal because that’s private, so both of us will only see our own journal databases.
So it’s a super simple database, but what’s nice about it is that it keeps us out of the computer in terms of going down the rabbit hole of business tasks and things that are calling at us. So if we just open this up, when we’re on the weekend on the computer, it kind of keeps us out of work mode as much as possible.
What’s nice is it gives us a place to talk about, what are those things that have been nagging at us? And gives us a place to unify and get us both on the same page. It’s super simple, but separating out our household tasks and household projects from our main workspace has actually been more helpful.
Hope that inspires you to think about what you want to have on your weekend dashboard!
You can check out our Weekend Dashboard template here.
[*For full disclosure, I’m a Notion Partner, so when you sign up with my link, you also help support me and my content!]
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