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This is a weekly agenda template I used when I first downloaded Notion years ago. This is how it looked after my first major upgrade, and this is a current template I’m using to plan my life one day at a time. In this blog, real state seo experts go through formatting tricks I used to make this look pretty yet practical, and my daily five minute workflow that I’ve adhered to for the past two years.

Let’s dive right to the formatting because come on, what’s the point of a super practical, well organized potentially life changing agenda planner if it just looks like crap. Starting up top, if you want to change the cover image, the dimensions, for some reason, is actually 1536 by 614 pixels. 

Use Canva, A Free Online Tool

You can simply use Canva, a free online tool. I’ve made many blogs about this platform, links down below. Create a design, custom size, 1536 by 614. Create a new design and go nuts. For the icon here, I didn’t wanna use a default emoji. So I used another free online platform, Flaticon, and selected a material design calendar icon because I’m just that much of a special snowflake. 

Now, this next part, these weekday headers. I’m particularly proud of this because usually you’re limited to the default colors provided by Notion. For example /color, and this is what you have to work with. But if you click into these headers, you’ll see I use an inline equation to change the colors of the word and the background. If you wanna try this yourself, simply copy this. Find an empty row /equation, enter, paste the equation. 

Six FS

Let’s say I change this to six Fs because that is pure white. I can change the background color box if I wanted to, and changing where here to let’s say hello, and click done. Pro tip. I’m so proud of myself for this. You can change the size of this as well. Forward slash turn into heading one. Or you can move the cursor to the beginning of the word, command left on a Mac.

 You can’t really see it, but it’s there. The shortcut for heading to hashtag hashtag or pound space. Boom. So I get to the workflow and what reflect means here in a little bit, but I just want to point out that I flipped the colors here because as you progress through the week, you’re going forward. And when you reflect on that week, you’re going back, right. 

Flipped Colors

It’s like you flipped it and the colors are flipped. You get it. You see what I did there? You see how clear I am. You get, ah, ah, okay. Exact same idea down here. I like this color scheme. If you want to pick your own, you can simply go to Color Hunt, or My Color Space to generate and find color palette inspirations. 

Lastly, I’m not sure how to change the font of these equation words without using a third party tool or plugin. So I’ve paired this with the Serif font as opposed to the default or Mono because this combination looks a bit weird. Onto the workflow. For those of you who are new here, I’m a huge fan of the book Make Time by ex Googlers Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. 

When I Wake Up 

Every morning when I wake up, I start the day by writing down one highlight, one thing I’m grateful for. And one thing I wanna let go. The highlight is the one thing I’m gonna get done today for sure. The key thing to note here is that the highlight doesn’t have to be something quote on quote, productive. It could literally be take two hours off and play Horizon Forbidden West. 

The only requirement here is that you have to figure out when you’re gonna do this today and block that time off on your calendar like this. I’m not a huge calendar blocker. So this habit is a very healthy middle ground I can consistently stick with. I’ve included the instructions here. You can obviously delete this once you get the hang of it. And as Ali Abdaal always says it’s totally okay to skip a day or two. 

Reflect Section

There will be those days as you can see in this week, one of many examples, by the way, where you wake up late, you forget to make time. Totally fine. Just get back into it as soon as you can. Two reasons I added the reflect section here. One, it fills out the second row very nicely. And as we have already established, if it doesn’t look good, it ain’t good. And second I’ve recently come across a lot of literature talking about the benefits of self reflection. 

Benefits Of Self Reflection 

One that stood out is the Don’t Underestimate the Power of Self-Reflection published in Harvard Business Review. Actually let me know down in the comments if you have any books or articles you’d recommend on this topic. There are obviously no right or wrong ways to reflect, but I found these three prompts to be very helpful. 

One win from the week, one learning from a failure, and one memory I like to you retain. At the risk of sounding very preachy, I think the ability to admit mistakes and learn from your failures is very important, not just for personal growth, but also for like healthy relationships with your partner, your friends, and especially colleagues in the workplace. 

Psychological Safety

It’s essential for something called psychological safety. And that’s a topic I really wanna make a blog on in the future. Anyways, these three prompts are very self explanatory. The only pro tip is that I’ve added a toggle for the memory prompt. So I have the option to add a photo, totally optional of course. Moving down and starting with daily to dos. One cool thing I’ve added is this template button. 

If I click it two action items I complete every day pops up. Make time, which we just went over and social media. This is just a reminder for me to reply to all of your YouTube comments, because you know, I’m an angel. And if you wanted to make changes to this template button, you can click the settings icon here and make this whatever you want. 

Add Empty Check Boxes

If I wanted to add empty check boxes, I would just use the shortcut left bracket, right bracket like so, and at the end of the day I would move all the completed action items or check boxes to this empty blank archive page, and leave the unfinished ones for the next day. Moving over to the left. Work streams are basically projects that span multiple days or multiple weeks. Some may be recurring. 

YouTube Blog 

For example, I upload one YouTube blog at least once a week and one weekly tip for my newsletter, linked down below. Some work streams I add as needed. For example, I’ve been working on my website for the last month or so, and as you can probably tell, I moved to a new place. 

I’ve been experimenting with a few new setups. These action items can obviously fall under daily to-dos, but it makes more sense to like bucket them together. Right. And once I finish all the action items within a work stream, I actually close the toggle, and this tells me the work stream has been completed.

Open Toggles, Empty Check Boxes 

I start the week with like open toggles, empty check boxes, and hopefully at the end of a week, some of these are closed. Okay, let’s say now it’s Sunday evening and there’s one work stream I haven’t completed, which is totally okay because some of these are supposed to take multiple weeks, right? I select it, command C to copy, go back to the agenda master page. 

Weekly Agenda Planner

I made a template for this as well, linked down below. I move the current week page to the bottom here, click this button to generate next week’s weekly agenda planner, and I simply paste that uncompleted work stream down here and open it. 

Also Read: What is a Network Specialist and What Responsibilities do they Perform?

Very simple. As you play around with this template and customize it to suit your planning needs, one recommendation I have is to minimize friction for yourself. For example, I could require myself to reflect every night, but I know I’m not gonna do that. So I’d rather reflect once a week than not at all. If you found this template helpful, you might enjoy my Notion tips and tricks blog where I go over a lot more cool stuff.