I Changed My Personal Task Management in Notion from Todo List to Projects & Tasks
Do you use Notion? I use it for personal task management and as a wiki. In particular, its quality as a tool for aggregating information into a wiki is excellent, and for my knowledge management it feels like I have reached a temporary completion point. However, for task management, while I felt it was 90% okay, I was still uncertain.
What I had been using until now was the Todo List, the checkbox text you can create by typing brackets [] on a wiki page.
This is extremely flexible and convenient, because you can quickly create a Todo list anywhere in the wiki. Then, if you operate it chronologically like a daily journal, you can manage daily tasks. Strangely, I write a journal every day, 365 days a year, and have continued doing so for several years. Before I encountered Notion, I never did this.
I Have No Complaints, But Still
I have operated this way for several years, and I reached the point where the Todo List approach was not a problem. However, as I wrote at the beginning, I still had about 10% dissatisfaction. One of those points was how to handle the metadata each task potentially has.
For example, tasks have rough types such as "development" and "writing," but it is difficult to operate those in an easy-to-understand way. Adding icons is one possible trick, and writing labels in text is another. But if you want to filter and display tasks by those metadata types, this operation becomes tough.
If you want to make things a little more systematic in that situation, you end up using a Notion database. By stopping Todo List and creating a database, you can attach many kinds of information to a single task.
However, once you start doing that, you gradually build up a database structure with your own schema. It may be comfortable in the short term, but if you later want to renew it, it will probably be quite difficult to create another similar structure. To put it another way, it becomes like an old inn that has been extended again and again until the structure is complicated.
Personally, I felt that if the structure is given to some extent and you accept from the beginning that you will only extend it within that range, it is less likely to become tangled in the long run. That led me to Notion templates.
Project Management Frameworks Sink In Differently Each Time
Notion templates are fairly complete database and wiki templates. Looking through the gallery, you can see templates in many different styles. I tried introducing and testing various templates for a while, but in the end I chose the very simple Projects & Tasks.
Because of my work, I often work according to the project management methods of many different teams. Sometimes it is Scrum, and sometimes it is some other unique method.
I tend to adapt fairly well to each team, so if I made my personal task management Scrum or Kanban, I expected that even if it fit at one point, once I adapted to another project management tool in a different project, my personal task management might conversely start to feel hard to use.
That is why I concluded that this template, which has no units like sprints and simply defines projects and their tasks, seemed the flattest and easiest to use.
So far it has been working well, but I will update this if I find something else I want to change.