How my Notion System keep my Productivity up

The habit-building process can be difficult. You may find yourself getting bored with your routine and struggling to stay motivated. Especially if you're not sure how effective each day's efforts were in achieving the desired result for that week or month – but this is where Notion comes into play!

The Problem ⚠

I wanted to find a solution that would help me keep both my lifestyle and health in mind. As I can't really eat many carbs, sugar or have any processed foods due to some issues with my intestine, so this was important for me too! Plus, since lockdown we haven’t gone out much either, which means workouts are even more necessary than ever before.

The Resolution: ROI ✅

I started journaling my habits on Notion back in June 2020. My goal was to count how many tasks I was doing and how much I was reading, as well as counting the meals containing carbs I was eating.
(Basically every meal that I consume with refined carbs in the long run is almost poison to me.)

To solve this conundrum, I created the ROI system.

The return on investment, or ROI, is a performance metric that calculates the benefit of an investment against the cost. The higher the ROI, the more beneficial the investment is.

To calculate my points, I use the following point system:

Every tasks that I accomplish is 1 point, each task that is marked as “High Effort” is 2 points.
Every meal that I consume is 1 point.
Reading, learn a new language, meditation, Yoga and following the diet, give me 1 point each. You can see already that, if you would create something like that yourself, you can assign whatever you want.
Since one of my major goals is writing, writing notes gives me 1 point, Index Cards is 5 points (Index cards is more or less “ordering your thoughts”) and revisiting notes is 2 points.

As a reference, this is my “Daily Points” formula, that you can get if you are brave enough 😄

toNumber(prop("🧘‍♂️Meditation")) + toNumber(prop("🧘Yoga")) + toNumber(prop("💪Exercise")) * prop("Exercise Reward") + toNumber(prop("Followed the current diet")) + toNumber(prop("📚Read")) + prop("Number of Zettelkasten") - (prop("Number of Meals") - if(prop("Diet F") != "Carnivore", 3, 2)) + prop("Number of Tasks") + toNumber(prop("🇹🇷 🇩🇪 Learn new language")) - toNumber(prop("🍷🚫Alchool")) - if(prop("Diet F") == "Serena Missori", 0, toNumber(prop("Meals with Carbs"))) + toNumber(prop("Number of index cards")) * 5 + toNumber(prop("Tasks with lots of effort")) + toNumber(prop("📝Notes Revisited")) * 2 + prop("😷Sickness Level (1-10)") + toNumber(prop("🌳🌲Go Outside!")) + toNumber(prop("Reading Tags")) + toNumber(prop("Read for Teaching")) - if(prop("Diet F") != "Carnivore", 0, prop("Points Low Carb")) + toNumber(prop("Did I breath?"))

These points are counted towards a monthly goal, which is being 1% better compared to myself the previous month.

In order to achieve my goals, it's important that you are constantly striving for more than what was accomplished in the past. The 1% monthly improvement will help me continue making changes and transformations throughout my life, so I can stay on top of things!

The check on the right is checked when I actually surpass the goal:

This year hasn't been particularly great.

In addition to regular month-to-month progress, I work hard every week in order to properly grow as a professional. For this reason, I give myself some rewards at the end of every week.

These are the 3 rewards: ordering out, drinking a glass of wine or eating a bit of refined carbs (I'm Italian after all), and buy some game related stuff. The rewards are reached when I respectively reach 34 54 69 points.

The rewards are “located” in the weekly view: that's where I can check if I reached my goal, which is to be 1% better:

Notion is an amazing app that can help you track your habits, goals, and progress. I created my template using Notion, and I decided to share this template with you.

You can use the ROI system I used and described to create a point system that works for you, and then track your monthly or weekly progress towards rewards. I've created a template for Notion that you can download and use yourself – just enter in your own goals, tasks, and points values!

You can check and duplicate ROI here:

Thanks for reading!