Speaker 1: Hello friends, welcome back. If you're new here, I'm Jules Acree and I create videos on intentional living, productivity, and digital organization. Today's video I'm sharing all about how I plan my weeks using Google Calendar and Notion. You can consider this video kind of like a part two or a follow-up to my original Google Calendar video that I made over a year ago. So I'm gonna use this video as an opportunity to answer some of the frequently asked questions from that video while showing you how I integrate both Google Calendar and Notion into my weekly workflow to create my most efficient system. If you haven't seen that OG Calendar video, then definitely watch that video after this one so you can learn more about how I task batch, color code, and time block. All right, before we dive in, I just wanna say that you can find so many productivity tips and tools all over the internet if you search for it. But the one takeaway I would love for you to take home with you is to remember your why. I personally like to approach productivity from a place of self-care. I create these systems so that I can spend less time spending my wheels and more time connecting to what actually matters to me. So together, we can tap into a more sustainable flow of purposeful work, rest, ease, and everything in between. All righty, let's head into my screen share. Hello, I'm back in the bubble. Welcome into my Notion weekly planning dashboard. This is where I get started on planning my weeks. So I typically do this on the first hour of work on a Monday, or sometimes I'll do it on a Sunday morning, depending on how I'm feeling. If I have a lot of thoughts that have accumulated in my head over the weekend, then I might wanna sit down and type it out, brain dump. So I'll go through and do a weekly check-in. I ask, how am I feeling this week? So right now, I had a rough start. I had a lot of gluten last week, I've been eating out, so my stomach's not feeling great, my skin's not feeling great. So this week, I'm heading into that knowing that I might need to reel it back in and eat food that makes me feel good, stop eating things I'm allergic to, and just take care of my body so that I can be mentally focused. When I eat gluten, I get very foggy. So I had a rough start, but I'm actually feeling great today. Worked out, sweated it out, showered, the basics. So I check in, I ask myself, how am I feeling? And then I ask, what would make this week stellar? What would make this week super awesome? And for me, filming this calendar update video would make this week super awesome, so we're doing it, yay. And lastly, I ask, what am I working on this week to get closer to my goals? So I like to keep my goals front of mind and find a way to circle back to the big picture vision, the bigger things that I'm working towards. A couple wins from this week is that I finally hired a web designer, someone to completely rebrand my Omen the City blog website to Jules Acri, and it's so exciting, really scary, but exciting. We're gonna do a two-week intensive at the end of February, so I have a lot of things I wanna work through in my head to get to a place where I feel like I can make the most of this project and our time together. So stay tuned for that update. So I check in with myself, and then if I have any reminders or follow-ups, things that don't really need to be in my bigger to-do list, I'll just kinda jot them down here. They're usually more personal things, like buy more coffee filters, get some trash bags, nothing super urgent, just things that are on my mind that I might wanna quickly tick off. And then I have a little space for a sticky note. Usually I write a quote, or I'll be like, you can do this. Whenever I need words of affirmation, positive vibes, encouragement, all that good stuff. So then after I fill out this top section, then I start to brain dump. This is where I do a mind sweep of any tasks that I have on my mind this week, things that I really need to get done, things that I might wanna close the loop on, follow up on. I just brain dump. Then I go and categorize it, and then I would assign a due date, or maybe I don't assign a due date, and then put priority levels. If I wanna take the task and relate it back to a big picture goal, that's just part of my Design Your Year Notion Pack, if you're curious about that. In fact, you can get this exact template, this weekly planning system, in my Design Your Year Notion Pack. And you'll be supporting my work as a creator, which I appreciate so much. And then once I have organized it, categorized it, then I just click Capture, and then it gets moved down into the proper category. So these are all the same database, it's just filtered in many different ways. So this brain dump section is really just to capture those ideas, and then filter it through to the proper section. So when I'm looking at my to-do list for the week, I like to focus on my top priorities first. But if I'm short on time, and I'm not able to hit those big tasks, and I wanna just kinda knock off some other items in my list, then I would look down at some of the lower priority tasks that might be quicker. And then if you scroll down, we have my Sunday tasks. So these are things that I'll get to at some point. It's something that I'd like to do, but I don't have to do right now, or it's something that isn't something I need to focus on for a couple weeks. I personally love using this kind of task management system because it helps me stay focused on the task at hand. It's really easy to keep adding things to your to-do list, and your to-do list just gets longer and longer, and you're not sure what to focus on, which one to do first. And this way, it just categorizes it, organizes it in a way that you're able to look at in bite-sized pieces. Over on the right, we have my mood board for the year. If you did my chaos to calm challenge, then you might recognize it. So high level, that's how I go and brain dump my tasks. I categorize them, organize them, put them in my weekly planning system. Naturally, throughout the week, I'm gonna be adding more things to my to-do list, checking things off. My calendar's gonna change. The reason I love digital planning is because it's flexible. I can easily delete things, edit things, add things, whereas if I were bullet journaling or physically writing something down, it's just not as easy to automate and update. But that's okay, everyone has their own way of doing things. Key is to find what works great for you. We're gonna talk about Google Calendar next. Before I do, I wanna say that my task system is also synced up with my Teams tasks. So this database also lives in my Team Hub. So I'll just quickly show you what our Team Hub looks like. And if you all are curious about templates from an entrepreneur perspective, from a project planning, task management, as a group, let me know because that's something that I would be curious to dive into because we have a whole different universe of Notion templates from the small biz, entrepreneur side of things. So we click here and you can see our Team Tasks. And so these tasks that I'm tagged in are also populating in my own personal weekly planning dashboard. But for this particular database, we have Team Projects and then we have our Team Tasks. I don't wanna go too granular to this because it's gonna be very confusing, but I did wanna show you just so you can see how it integrates. Keep in mind, this is the first hour of my Monday before I start my week. So this is me writing down my high level, all the things that are on my mind. Once I write these things down, then we would move over to my Google Calendar. So here we are. I'm going to just push us over to a fresh week. Let's just pretend like it's the future. If you've never seen my calendar video, definitely watch that and you can understand how I got these colors, what all these blocks are, what it means, all that breakdown is in that original video. A big question I got was how do I get these labels up top? These are simply events that are just checked as all day. So if this were a regular event during a specific confined time, then you would update the time and it would show up on your calendar from 10 to 10.30. But I chose potato day as all day because potato day is an all day thing. And I choose the calendar that I want it to show up under. And so for potato day, it means computer stuff. Potato days are when I do my computer work. I'm editing a video, I'm writing. I am just totally yoga pantsing it out, not worrying about being seen or being on camera. It just really takes the pressure off. Creation days are where I'm filming. So today is Tuesday. I have makeup on, I'm filming this video. My face is on camera. I am still wearing yoga pants, but you can't see that. I'm camera ready. So you can learn more about that in my original Google calendar video. Another question I've been getting is how do I add emojis? It's really simple. If you have a Mac, just hit control, command, space, and the character viewer will pop up. And then you just click on the emoji that you want. And that is it. Emojis just make things more fun and personalized. Now, how do I use Google calendar with Notion? Notion is the database that holds all of the tasks. It holds all the things that I need to do. It is my second brain. Google calendar is when I'm gonna do those tasks. So I don't necessarily need to jot down every single task on my to-do list in my Google calendar, but I do like to mark certain tasks for different time slots. So I'm able to keep on track with my day and better manage my time. Because if I just have an open day and I don't really plan when I'm gonna do these specific tasks, then I might not allocate the right amount of time for the task. And then next thing you know, it's 4 p.m. and I've barely made a dent in my to-do list. So what I essentially do is I'll have my calendar up and then I'll also have my Notion window up. I downloaded something from the App Store called Magnet. And so it allows me to just drag this into a screen here. And then I can take my Notion and drag it into that block here. So now I've got two screens up and it's really simple. Like I said, we're just starting on a fresh week just to make things simple. So let's pretend like some of these tasks are things that I'm gonna do during this week. I would look over here and be like, oh, I need to shoot my athletic TikTok. And so typically I would shoot that on a Tuesday or a Thursday. So on Tuesday, I would say, okay, 10 a.m. I have a block to shoot content from 10 to 12.30. And so I would click here and I would click Tasks and I would just write down shoot athletic TikTok. So that is slotted in here. And it's probably gonna take me longer than 30 minutes. It's probably gonna take me till 11 o'clock. So I know to just kind of give myself some space here. The next thing I'll wanna do is to plan my TikTok content for the next few weeks. I think a good time for me to do that is on a Monday or a Wednesday, because that's my potato day. So I'm gonna hit Tasks, Plan TikTok Content and hit Save. So I would just go through my list and kind of just pinpoint a time, a block for when I'm gonna do those things. Upload shorts to YouTube. So that's a good computer workday task. So I'm gonna put that in as a task on Wednesday. So you get the gist. I basically just plug in when I think I can do that task. And the great thing about digital planning is that if something needs to be moved, I can easily take it and slide it around and move it. And then as I finish the task, I can click on it and I can hit Mark Completed. And then boom, it's done. And so as you move throughout your day, these tasks here are gonna start to just kind of fade out and then it'll be more emphasis on the remaining tasks for the day. All right, so just to recap, my notion is my literal second brain. It's what holds my tasks, big, small, everything in between. It holds my projects. It's my weekly planning, my yearly planning, my goal setting, quarterly planning. I store my recipes in there, date night ideas. I track which Korean dramas I'm watching. Literally anything I care about, it's in my notion. My Google Calendar is what helps me manage my time. It helps me see what my day is looking like, who I'm meeting with, what task am I doing during this time block? How am I staying on track and making the most of my day? I find that when I time block, I'm able to get so much more done because I'm staying in that lane of focus. I don't have to sit here with a notebook looking at a long to-do list thinking, oh, what should I work on first? When should I do that? Oh, I don't really feel like doing that. I'm able to reflect on how I'm feeling that day. Am I feeling creative? Am I feeling low energy, high energy? And then I go plot it on my calendar and do what's realistic and sustainable for me. I hope that helps. This is just how my brain works. The way I do things may be completely different from how you do things, but the cool thing is that you've got Google Calendar. You've got Notion. It's free for personal use. There's so many tools you can grab that can change your life. You can free up more time, free up more energy, just create more space in your day because you're doing things more efficiently. Productive systems is a means to giving me back more freedom in my day and in my life. So last year, I consider it to be one of my most productive years because I was finally able to take Fridays off. I shifted into a four-day work week and I'm still doing that today. I made friendship and community a priority. I watched a shiz ton of Korean dramas to cope with the anxiety of this crazy world. And with all of that, I was still able to hit my biggest financial milestone yet. All in all, I made a lot more impact with a lot more focused energy and I felt more free. I hope these productivity tips, systems, solutions can help you get your time and energy back so you can go out there and live your life. All right, thank you all so much for tuning in for this video. Let me know what you'd like to see next. And as always, I will see you in the next video. Bye for now. Bye.