Three free tools to organize your life and achieve your goals
The only three tools you need to get organized and achieve your goals this year
TLDR; I use these three free-to-use tools to organize my life:
- Todoist
- Google Calendar
- Notion
These play different roles in helping me organize my life so that I have to remember less, stay on top of my tasks, and prioritize what is important to me.
Todoist
This is easily the best app that has allowed me to remember everything that I need to do. I have a memory of a goldfish and cannot retain information that I don’t deem essential for too long. With the Todoist app, whenever I notice a task I need to do, I immediately open it up and make an entry. It gets added to my tasks list that I can later sort or offload into more permanent retention mediums (Notion). So when I’m making my overnight oats and realize that I’m running out of milk soon, I note it in Todoist and tag it with Shopping. You can also add a time and date, “Buy milk Mon #shopping” and this will automatically remind you on Monday to buy milk and add it to your shopping category. It also allows me to write down ideas that pop up for books to read, applications to build, and articles to write.
Todoist integrates with my Google calendar. This ensures that tasks I have set up will be visible at the appropriate time and date in my Google calendar. I don’t have to worry about having time blocked out for these tasks separately.
I also use Todoist for habit tracking with the streak feature. You can read more about that here. This allows me to stay on top of daily and weekly goals/tasks that I need to get done and keep track of habits that I want to build. Todoist is free to use and works well for me but any other Todo-ish application works just as well.
Google Calendar
Google Calendar has been my go-to for organizing my daily life. I can time block the things I need to do (work, gym, cook, read, etc) and visualize the free time I have to organize further activities like meeting up with friends over lunch or dinner. This allows me to have complete control over where I am spending time and block out periods where I need to be productive. There is not much more to say about Google Calendar but any other calendar tool that you feel provides an easy way to time-block should be good.
Notion
Notion is used by many productivity gurus and they swear that it changes your life. I have only properly started using Notion this year and so far it has allowed me to have a broader view of my life for more long-term planning and direction.
I set up this minimalistic Notion template that you can use for free. In this template, I have separated areas of my life that are important to me and created goals that align with these areas of my life. I can tag these goals to my life areas and the period in which I want to achieve these goals so that I can track progress.
A key aspect of tracking my goals is the Planning and Review section. Here, I do weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews. So far, I have done weekly reviews that have been going great. It allows me to reflect on what went well, how I managed to get things done, things I didn’t get done, and how to deal with life getting in the way of things.
It also holds me accountable because I need to reflect on the progress I made towards my goals which in turn drives me to action them more.
These three tools are all that I’m using to organize my life and goals this year. It may seem like a lot but once you slowly start integrating these one by one into your life, it will help to alleviate a lot of stress and tension that comes from the feeling of losing control in your life.
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