The System

About this Template

The System is the complete work management tool made specifically for busy professionals. I am sure in your search so far you have seen a lot of Notion content made for students and hobbyists, but everything at Notion Guide is made strictly for using Notion at a work place.

The System is made up of 4 distinct objects:

1. Tasks
2. Notes
3. Projects
4. Sprints

When combined, this let’s you view everything you need in one place. Much of my task setup is taken from my background in Product Management at a software company, but can be utilized for any type of task or project management. Feel free to read more about my approach here.

How to use this Template

Create a Dashboard

You can use the The System Template homepage as your Dashboard, it’s setup exactly for that purpose! Once you duplicate the template, go ahead and rename it to something like “Dashboard” or “Home”. You can also favorite this page in the top right to make sure you have quick and easy access to it.

Everything else is setup to go, you will stay on this page for all remaining work.

Create a Sprint

First and foremost, you’ll want to establish a sprint and planning schedule. You can set this up to whatever frequency works best for you, but I work under weeklong sprints. I review and plan my week every Monday morning.

You can use the template “New Sprint” to setup your week easily. You’ll want to setup your sprint dates, and your sprint status.

You can also use the page content of your sprint to highlight things like your weekly focus, weekly goal, key events, or any other important things to keep an eye on during the week.

You only need a single sprint to get started, but feel free to create 1 or 2 in the future if you are planning on creating tasks for in the future. You can also use the “Backlog” or the section of No Sprint when you have tasks you know you want to do, but aren’t sure when you want to do them.

Create Notes

One of Notions most powerful features is it’s text editor. Writing in Notion is an absolute delight. I’d recommend learning all the aspects of Notion's Markdown in this guide:

Learn writing and editing basics in Notion – Notion Help Center

When you create notes, you are automatically given a section where you can add Action Items. This is super helpful because these tasks are automatically assigned to the note you are working on. When viewing the note from the dashboard you will see the progress of your action items.

Notes have two statuses, Open and Archived. When you want to hide a note out of your dashboard view, set it to Archived. Alternatively, you can snooze a note to a future date by setting a date in the “Snoozed” property. This will hide the note from your main view until that future date.

Create Tasks

In your Tasks section, head to the Inbox view. Start adding all the tasks that come to mind. You can add these according to their status if you want at this point, but normally new tasks you haven’t started should go into the Backlog status.

Don’t stress too much about which sprint these tasks should go into at this point, we’ll take care of that during your first planning session. Feel free to add priority, any deadlines, and any other details you might want. It’s easy to add long descriptions to tasks in the page content.

If you start seeing a trend in your tasks, that is an indication you should probably group them into a project.

Create Projects

Projects can either be Perpetual, or have a start and end date. Use the Project Status to set where you are at along the project’s journey.

Projects are already all setup to link between tasks and notes. When working on a tasks or note, you can easily assign it to a project using the Property “Project”.

Projects are a great place to save all information related to an areas or group of tasks. It will already automatically show you all Notes and Tasks, but you can add additional information like key stakeholders, project files, and any other important information.