Having dived into productivity porn, I now know that the best system is the one you stick to. Similar to habits. A good tip I’ve learned over time is to have “loose” systems. Ones that are a little broken. Trying to build a perfect system will leave you more stressed than before, and you’ll end up working on the system instead of working in it.

Systems and technology are meant to remove cognitive load from humans and support us in achieving bigger and greater things. This is my system.

Notion is by far the powerhouse of my setup. The core of Notion for me is a calendar database called “Daily Notes” that has a single property called “Date” representing today’s date. Almost every day I’ll create a page for today. At the top of the page I use a list of checkboxes representing the tasks I plan on doing that day. The rest of the page is notes. Anything. Drafts for emails, interview preparation, random thoughts, journaling, etc. What’s nice about a calendar database is that I can create pages in the future and write down tasks or notes for those days.

My next most visited page in Notion is a page called “Ethan Catzel”. This is a me page. The contents include persistent information: weekly goals, yearly goals, my values, a holiday agenda, finances, TV shows I’m watching, books I want to read, and more. I structure it however I feel like it. If I’m unsure or keep changing it, I ask Claude to rearrange it in the most logical way and stick to that.

That’s basically it for Notion. Other use cases might involve persistent projects such as learning Mandarin or building a calisthenics mobile app. These are usually subpages in “Ethan Catzel” or in a database called “Projects” or “Ideas”. I haven’t fully figured out the best way to store ideas or projects yet, but this messy setup works fine since I always know my way around my workspace.

Notion Calendar is the calendar product I use. I chose it because it has slightly better UX than Google Calendar. Most of what I do in Notion Calendar can be applied to any other calendar product. However, I do use the “8 days” view, which is a weekly view spanning 8 days. I like 8 days because it lets me see just past the current week, giving me context for anything happening on the following Monday that I should prepare for.

A calendar is obviously used for events, but it’s also a great place for recurring tasks and reminders. Recurring tasks are hard to manage in my existing Notion setup, so they live as events in the calendar. Tasks like “take out bins” are perfect for this. Reminders work the same way. If I need to be notified of something, the calendar already does that well, so I put reminders there too. Things like “cancel subscription” or “book GP”.

The next product in my setup is Gmail. I use the multiple inboxes setup so I can archive all my emails while still viewing the ones I need to action, am waiting on a reply from, or have scheduled. This makes it easy to get to inbox zero. It’s critical that I proactively unsubscribe from emails I don’t want so I don’t wake up every morning to 10+ of them. Here’s how to set it up: go to Settings, General, and scroll down to “Stars”. Mark “red-bang”, “purple-question”, and “purple-star” as “In use” in that order. Save changes. Then go to Settings, Inbox, and change “Inbox type” to “Multiple Inboxes”. I have 3 sections: “has:red-bang” labelled “Needs Action”, “has:purple-question” labelled “Awaiting Reply”, and “has:purple-star” labelled “Scheduled”. I also use the “Right of the inbox” option for the multiple inbox position. That’s it for Gmail.

The last thing worth mentioning is Raycast. It’s a Spotlight alternative with a lot more functionality than the Mac default. My two biggest use cases are the clipboard manager, with “⌘+Shift+V” as the shortcut, and an emoji selector aliased to “e”.

That’s essentially my system. I’ve used it for years now and it’s been working really well.