Pexels A dashboard acts essentially like the homepage of your Notion software, and what’s unique about it is that it should be custom to your specific needs and goals. If you’re really into books and want to quickly glance at your reading list, having an overview on your dashboard makes sense, so you can quickly check it. If you’re not, then it doesn’t make sense to have it. Typically they are an overview page where you can monitor the progress of certain tasks, see what it is that you need to do, reminders as well as pages to have links to all the different templates that you currently have going on. Again, a dashboard for a student might look very different to someone using Notion for their freelance business. However, here we are going to look into some of the very best foundational Notion dashboard templates that you can utilise as a base and then build off. So here are the templates we are going to review:
1. Thomas Frank’s Personal Dashboard
This dashboard template that you can actually download by duplicating it over on his site by searching for Thomas Frank and then looking for “How to Build a Personal Dashboard” is a great template to check out at the start, as you can essentially see and workout what a good dashboard template for you would be. You can see Tom walk through the process of creating the dashboard in the video above and talk you through the different aspects that he has included and why. What you should note is that the dashboard you build at first won’t be the one you end up with a few months down the line; it’s going to evolve as your goals and priorities change. This template shows you just how easy it is to do that, it’s simple, but it gets the job done.
2. Life Dashboard
This is a super minimalist dashboard template that lays out everything from your general life goals so that you are constantly reminded, what you need to do this week, what you need to do as a daily task, what are you doing on a time basis (per month, per quarter and so on). It very much lays out what your year looks like and the goals you’re setting up to achieve them and the tasks that you have broken down in order to achieve them. As you can see, it is a pretty clean aesthetic that can easily be customised, to what you need. It very much reminds me of the same sort of layout as the 12 Week book in The 12 Week Year. For those, who are looking for something that is pretty focused and offers a core set of productivity into the dashboard overall, this is a template certainly worth checking on. You can find the template by searching for “Life Dashboard” on Notion Everything.
3. The Productive Engineer’s Notion Dashboard
In a similar vein to the Thomas Frank dashboard, you can check out The Productive Engineer’s Notion dashboard here as well, which gives you more of a specific case of what a tailored dashboard can look like. You can see the example that he is using, is that the dashboard gives an overview of his YouTube channel, so it shows a bunch of tasks that he is needing to do for it as well as what his analytics are reporting. You can see that he makes prominent use of widgets that you can also integrate into Notion as well; although this is not potentially a template that you want to copy outright, it does show you the wide variety of dashboards that are out there and the potential widgets that you might want to use.
4. Blue Dashboard
You can find this template by simply heading over to the main Notion website and searching under templates for “Blue Dashboard,” and you will see the dashboard laid out. As you can probably gauge from the name, it has a blue aesthetic and is primarily set up to target students to start with study music along with certain sections for school. That said, you can easily adjust this to the different aspects that you might want from the dashboard with more tasks and progress bars on different tasks that you might be undertaking that you need to see how far along you are and what other tasks need work.
5. James Stuber’s Personal Dashboard
This is one of my favorite templates, as it is clear how James utilises this dashboard in his everyday workflow, and this is how you can really get the most out of Notion. It only needs to be glanced at quickly to understand where you are in the process and remind yourself of what needs to be done that day. Check out his dashboard in the video above as well as his site and look specifically for “How to Make a Personal Dashboard in Notion” and you can see exactly how he operates it as a central dashboard, a page to understand the project tracking without needing to get into the details as well as a collaborative document, where others can implement aspects and this gets notified on the dashboard too.
6. Notion Gardening Dashboard
This is a prime example of where a practical dashboard meets an aesthetic one, where they complement one another rather than hindering each other. It’s a great presentation and source of inspiration for what a good Notion dashboard template is all about. You can find it if you head to Gumroad and specifically search for “Gardening Dashboard”.
Utilise Notion to Help You Stay Organised
Have you created your own personal Notion dashboard before, or is this the first time looking? Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas and some templates that you can modify and adjust to suit any of your specific needs. Of course, make sure to reach out if you have questions about the dashboards featured here or if you need help with the Notion software. We are more than happy to try and help, and if you know of any dashboard templates that you think should be up here, please let us know. This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional. © 2021 Russel Garret
