Notion’s blank canvas approach can be incredibly liberating—letting us create our very own task and to-do list apps, however we want them to appear… the only trouble is, this freedom can be a little overwhelming at times.

And while I encourage everyone to experiment with their own custom workspaces and solutions, it can actually be quite difficult to land on a Notion setup for day-to-day use that’s:

• Simple;
• Clean;
• Powerful; and
• Elegant

After a whole lot of experimentation, this Notion Daily & Weekly Planner template is the simplest solution I’ve been able to develop that still lets you:

• Quickly create Daily Entries (from templates);
• Create tasks within a Daily timeline;
• Plan your week using Weekly Views;
• Track your Daily & Weekly progress on tasks;
• Review past performance;
• Create recurring tasks; and
• Quickly drag tasks from one workspace to another, as needed.

Let’s dive in.

Notion Daily Planner Template

Let’s start with the ‘Today’ view, which gives us a timeline of our day’s tasks, broken down by hours.

From the timeline,  we can:

• Add new tasks
• Reorder existing tasks
• Check off tasks as we complete them
• Edit the details of each task
• Drag & drop tasks to reschedule them

Creating a new 'Daily Entry'

Daily entries are how we get started with this Notion planner. By default, you Daily Entry title will be set to '@Now', which just means whatever time and day you make the entry will be the title.

This will be handy for searching for old entries later on, and ranking performance of past days and weeks.

Inside the Daily Entry template, you'll find:

• An Archive checkbox;
• A select dropdown to give a 'Day Rating' at day's end;
• A Progress Bar, tracking the % of tasks complete; and
• A Relational Tasks property to link your tasks to this day.

You'll also see that the Daily Entry page itself provides some prompt to help you reflect on what you're focused on for the day, what you're grateful for, and what your no. 1 priority is (the thing that, if nothing else, simply must get done).

Configuring the Daily Entry Timeline

Inside the template itself, you'll find a 'Click-through' guide (made in Scribe) that outlines the exact steps for setting up your Daily View, and which filters to set before adding tasks to the timeline.

Notion Weekly Planner Template

This section of the template is all about planning your week.  

The weekly view contains:

• A weekly timeline view;
• A progress bar property calculating the percentages of tasks completed for the week; and
• A few preset filtered views to help you prioritize and visualize your week in full.

The weekly calendar is a great way to see, at-a-glance, what days you have free and which are already filling up with tasks. It's also a really simple way to delegate tasks to future days, so that if you know you'd like to get something done, just 'not right now', that task won't slip away into the ether... it can be assigned to a later day, and either completed or moved again later :)

Note: You can also use this weekly calendar to schedule in non-work events, like social plans, doctor's appointments, and so on. It doesn't all need to be about business, and you can tag your social and health-related activities accordingly as suits using the 'Tags' section for your Tasks.

Just like with Daily Plans, you'll be able to review your Weekly progress in the 'All Weeks' section of this workspace. Over time, as weeks are logged in the system, you'll be able to get a neat overview of how things have been tracking month over month.

Adding Tasks To Your Planner

As mentioned in earlier sections, you can add tasks directly where they need to go from various timeline and filtered views throughout this workspace.

However, there's also a tasks section that's dedicated to listing all of your active tasks, along with a Priority Tasks Board that lets you sort and view your tasks sorted by priority and status.

By default, whenever you create a new Task in the database (which really means from anywhere in your planner template), the Task will be given a few properties by default:

• Its Priority will be set to P1;
• The Status will be set to 'Not Started'; and
• A target date will be added, so that it can appear on date-related views (like timelines and calendars).

Reviewing your daily and weekly entries

One of the advantages of creating 'Daily' and 'Weekly' entries as items in a database is that it makes it incredibly simple to review and look over past performance, thoughts and notes from days and weeks that may have passed a long time ago.

Over time, this workspace could hold weekly and daily entries from over a year ago--giving you a direct look into what you were thinking about, working on and achieving back then.

Give each day a Day Rating to ensure you get the most out of this review section,  and you may want to weekly review items as well.  

Adding Recurring Tasks

This workspace also allows you to assign and re-use tasks you create as 'recurring'--which is really just a fancy word for 'repeat'. These are the tasks you might do every day, or regularly, and don't want to have to create anew each and every time.

For example, 'Meditate', 'Read', 'Workout' might all be repeat tasks that you'd like to set a reminder for each day, but don't want  to have to manually create each time.

The 'Recurring Tasks' section actually lives inside your Weekly Planner menu.

When you create a new task inside that dropdown section, it will automatically be set as 'Recurring', which means it will behave slightly differently to your other tasks.

You can drag recurring tasks into your 'Today' view like any other task, but heads up: Recurring tasks won't show up in your weekly planner, since it's filtered to not show them (to avoid cluttering up your timeline with repeat tasks!).

Does Notion have its own daily planner?

By default, there's no single-database way to create a daily planner which keeps track of 'days' as their own records (as you can do in this template).  

However, with a bit of creativity, you can easily create your own daily planner by combining various Notion features.

How do you make a daily routine on Notion?

1. Create a 'To-Do List' from Notion's '/' menu;
2. List the items you'd like to repeat, daily (e.g. 'Read', 'Meditate', 'Workout');
3. Create a 'Template button' from the '/' menu;
4. Configure the template button by dragging your to-do list into the relevant section, then give your new template button a name (e.g. 'Daily Routine');
5. And voila! Whenever you hit that button, you'll be given a fresh checklist with your daily routine listed;
6. Bonus: Give your list a little more life by adding emojis next to each item (e.g. '📚Read', '🧘‍♂️Yoga')

Does Notion have an hourly planner?

You can also filter the timeline to show an hour-by-hour view of your tasks and day. By default, again, Notion doesn't have a 'template' hourly planner in-built in--but you can create it for yourself from this template by simply hitting the dropdown menu on the timeline and selecting 'Hours' as your measure.

Typically, however, the hourly view is a little too zoomed in and you can plan your day by the hour simply using the 'Day' timeline.

Does Notion have a weekly planner?

Notion's calendar view is set to show a full calendar month by default; so to get a weekly planner view, you'll need to use the timeline view, then set the period to 'Week'. This will let you scroll through each week, and you can add tasks to the relevant days as you go and plan ahead.

In our Weekly Planner template, your 'Week' and 'Daily' views and tasks are linked to each other through filtered views--so that when you add a task to 'Today', it will automatically show up in your Weekly plan, too :)

Get started with this Weekly, Daily & Hourly Notion Planner Template by hitting the 'Download' or 'Copy' button on this page while logged into your Pro account. If you don't have Pro, you can also hit 'Preview' to take a full tour of the setup, and spark some ideas to recreate in your own Notion workspaces :)