Productivity Tactics Archives - Page 33 of 38

Create a simple linked database with your tasks

Honestly, if your workspace already has a cluttered vibe — like mine usually does — the idea of weekly planning probably feels like more overhead. But this one thing helped: I made a basic table in Notion called Tasks Hub. Literally just a table. Minimal properties. No filters. Just somewhere to trap everything.

Then inside my weekly page, I paste a linked database view of Tasks Hub and filter it to only show tasks where the Week property (which is a relation back to the weekly page) matches the current week. Instant weekly planning. No queries, no automations, no fancy rollups. Just manual linking. Which, turns out, is the only thing that survives when Notion quietly changes what “dynamic date filters” do again 😐.

What broke once: I tried using the “This week” filter in the database view. Looked neat on Monday. On Thursday, it was suddenly empty. I thought I’d deleted something. Nope, it just quietly decided this week now meant something else. Notion loves to silently break date filters. So yeah — manual relations are boring but stable.

So what’s in my Tasks Hub?

That’s it. Keep it simple. You can always add properties later once you’re not overwhelmed anymore 🙂

Use a weekly template with an auto-dated title

I kept forgetting to make a new page each Monday. So I finally made a Notion template button that builds a new page titled something like “Weekly Plan May 13–19”. You can do this with a button block using the “Template” feature, but be warned: if the week number uses a formula, half the time it’ll show next week instead of this week. Especially early Monday mornings. Why? Ask the Notion gremlins.

Instead, I now use an old-school workaround: duplicate last week’s page, rename it manually, and update the filters by hand. I know that sounds silly, but every time I’ve tried to automate the naming with formulas or fancy templates, something has broken.

What worked once but then failed for no reason — I used a date property and a few formula properties to auto-generate the week title using `formatDate(start(prop(“Week Start”)), “MMM D”) + “–” + formatDate(end(prop(“Week End”)), “D”)`. Great, right? I used this to update the page title too. And then out of nowhere, the formula started returning “Invalid Date” until I toggled the page open and closed again. I’m still mad about that one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Set up a “This Week” view that doesn’t break

This sounds like it should be easy. But like I said earlier, filters like “This week” are wildly unreliable, especially when you change time zones (hello remote teams!) or work past midnight. I stopped using any relative time filters after Notion decided to hide all my tasks on Sunday night once.

Instead, use a property that ties tasks to the actual Weekly Planning page via a relation-select combo. Here’s how I do it:

1. On each task in Tasks Hub, add a relation to the weekly planning page it belongs to.
2. Then in your view inside the weekly page, filter where “Week” is the current page.
3. Done. Notion treats “Current Page” as a stable reference. That means you won’t wake up one day to all your checkboxes gone.

This is one of those places where doing the “manual” way actually saves you more automation effort in the long run.

Don’t force daily pages unless you need them

I used to think I needed daily pages nested under every weekly page. Monday Planning, Tuesday Planning, etc. It felt like the right thing to do. But the friction of making seven pages, and then never opening them, made the whole system collapse within a week.

Now I just use a simple checklist inside the weekly page — one checkbox per day — and jot down 2–3 quick notes under each. This is fast, and if I don’t have time, I skip a day and don’t feel guilty about it. The whole point is tracking week-level progress, not micromanaging your own thoughts into tiny pages you’ll never revisit.

Here’s how I structure it:

“`
✅ Monday – Client meeting + inbox zero
✅ Tuesday – Wrote draft + scheduled 2 posts
🔲 Wednesday – (did not write anything lol)
🔲 Thursday
🔲 Friday
“`

This genuinely kept me more consistent than anything else I tried. Big planning systems always broke. This held up, even when I was half-asleep.

Add a quick weekly review section at the bottom

There’s a moment every Sunday where I think: what just happened this week? All I remember is a blur of meetings and copying Google Drive links. So I built a tiny review space at the bottom of my weekly Notion page.

• What worked this week?
• What felt stressful?
• What should I ignore more next week?

That last one is weirdly helpful. It’s like the opposite of goals—just listing the things I should NOT worry about anymore. Like tweaking automations that only save 4 seconds.

I always start this review with a checkbox that says “Did I actually read this?” because otherwise I never look at what I wrote last week. Sometimes I copy a bullet point from the previous week as a reminder not to fix something that isn’t broken.

Temporarily hide overdue tasks once a week

Okay, unpopular opinion — don’t delete or reschedule overdue tasks immediately. That habit trains your brain to believe nothing is urgent. Instead, I keep all overdue tasks visible until Friday afternoon. Every week, I have a separate view in Tasks Hub called “Overdues I’m Ignoring On Purpose” that just filters by due date past today and status still open.

On Friday at 4 PM, I open that view and do a brutal cleanup:
– If I’m still ignoring it, archive it with a 💤 tag.
– If it actually matters, drag it into next week and link to the upcoming weekly page.
– If I don’t even remember what it is, it goes into a Past Me Folder of Regret that I check maybe once a year.

This little ritual kept me from getting emotionally buried under half-done blog posts and automations I don’t want to admit never worked.

Use toggle lists for context, not extra pages

At one point I had pages for everything. “Launch Plan – June,” “Q2 Idea Dump,” “Evernote Migration Diary” (yep). But I never opened them again. What I do now is use toggle blocks for those contexts.

Inside my weekly page, I’ll add:

“`
▶ Blog Stuff This Week
– Finish Notion article draft
– Decide whether AI-generated outlines are worth anything 🤔

▶ Client Projects
– Prep Zapier + Slack demo for Tuesday
– QA tests keep triggering even when “run only once” is set
“`

This way, the context stays right in the same scroll view. I don’t have to go chase another linked page. It’s all there. Feels more like a notes app than a complicated wiki.

Why simplicity always wins the bug war

Every time I tried syncing fancy templates with conditional filters or hidden blocks for timing, they glitched halfway. One day it was hidden. The next day, everything was fully expanded and collapsed weirdly when I clicked it. I got tired of inspecting why they weren’t loading properly.

What helped was just deciding: my weekly page is a one-scroll dashboard. Every task, note, and win is readable in 5 seconds. No more inline embeds of other Notion pages that never load properly in the mobile app. Just plain text, checkboxes, and drag-and-drop blocks.

I do miss the polish of a beautiful setup. But I enjoy way more the feeling of knowing it won’t silently delete something while I’m sleeping 🙂