Starting a weekly schedule in Notion
I used to think a weekly planner template in Notion would be easy. You just pick one, duplicate it, and drop your to dos in. Except half the ones I found were either too pretty to actually use or were designed for someone with a completely different life than me. Like, I don’t run a design agency with three interns and morning yoga blocks. I just needed a place to see what has to be done this week without fifteen layers of tags. So the first thing I did was start with the simplest blank page possible and then drag in a database. Notion calls it a table by default, but it is really just a spreadsheet with superpowers. I named my columns Day, Task, and Status, and only after testing it for an hour did I realize there was no quick way to actually see the week ahead unless I switched it to a board view. This was my first moment of, ‘oh, the template looked good but clicking through actually breaks my focus.’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Making tasks show in the right day
The part that drove me crazy early on was date fields. I kept assigning tasks a due date but unlike a normal calendar they didn’t slide neatly into Monday Tuesday etc. Instead, everything clumped up. The fix I stumbled on was setting the view to Group by Date and forcing the database to stack tasks under each day. Now it sort of looked like the week. I created a weekly filter to only show dates within seven days of today, which Notion allows if you fiddle around in the filter panel. At first I accidentally set it to only show tasks where date is exactly today, so each morning my whole planner looked empty. I almost threw my laptop, honestly. Once that was fixed, I could finally open Notion and just see this week laid out. The small win actually felt bigger than it should have. 🙂
Trying out premade student templates
I did a short experiment where I duplicated popular Notion templates meant for students. Every single one of them had five dashboards just to get to a homework list. They looked cool but the problem was speed. I do not need a homepage that says good morning and shows me a weather widget, I need to see Wednesday’s assignments. The templates had color coded tags for urgency, multiple relation databases for professors or classes, and sometimes a little motivational quote block that just slowed the scroll. The only part I kept was the habit tracker section that some of them had at the bottom. Checking off boring habits like drink water three times a day actually gave me a bit of momentum, and oddly enough it made me open the page more often. But in the end I went back to my custom weekly table because it actually loaded faster.
Adding recurring weekly tasks
This was where the rabbit hole deepened. Notion does not natively handle recurring tasks. When I realized that, I sat there wondering why my “do laundry every Saturday” note just vanished after completion. The hack I use now is duplicating a blank recurring task template. I made a row with “Recurring Base” as the title, marked it with a different status, and every week I duplicate it and drop it under the right day. It sounds silly but it takes five seconds, and avoids me forgetting repetitive chores. Some folks suggest adding automation through Zapier or Make, but the truth is every time I set that up it broke within a week with cryptic errors like ‘Webhook fired twice’. So manual duplication wins here, even if it feels retro.
Color coding and visual shortcuts
I noticed that staring at a black and white table just killed my motivation to check it. So I tested color coding by using select properties. For example, Green for Completed, Yellow for In Progress, Red for Waiting. The first time I applied it I overdid it and almost every column turned rainbow, so I cut back to three simple categories. A neat little bonus is adding an icon next to day names in board view. I use a coffee cup icon for Monday, a sun for Friday, and it cues my brain that the week is moving. Dumb trick, but it weirdly works.
Linking the schedule to a calendar view
When I finally needed a top down view, I switched the same database into calendar mode. Now I could see the same data in two ways. Dragging tasks in calendar view to a different day changed their date property automatically, which was way faster than editing each row in the table. The only glitch I hit was that sometimes dragging caused the date to reset to last Monday instead of the new spot. After some testing it turned out I was dragging to the week number header instead of the day block. Once I realized that little quirk, things behaved properly.
Combining personal and work schedules
At first I had two separate weekly planners, one for personal stuff and one for projects. After about two weeks, it was chaos because I never knew which one I had updated. So I merged them into a single database and added a Category property with just two options Personal and Work. Now all tasks surface in the same weekly view, but I can toggle off whichever context I do not want to see. It sounds obvious but it took me several tries to accept the clutter of mixing worlds. The only downside is that now my Monday list sometimes frightens me because it looks so long. But at least everything is in one place instead of hidden in tabs.
When templates overcomplicate everything
The funniest part is that after weeks of trying every pretty Notion template out there, my working one is extremely bare bones. It looks almost embarrassingly simple: one board view grouped by day, a category property to separate life and work, and a basic status label. That’s it. Every time I tried to beautify it with progress bars or subtasks, I spent more time fixing the formulas than actually checking off things. It reinforced a lesson I should have learned earlier—just because Notion can do twenty things, does not mean my weekly schedule should try to use them all. Sometimes too much structure kills the point, and nothing makes you stare at empty boxes wondering what went wrong faster than an overengineered template.