how i organize my life (as a highschool student) | my notion setup

A high school student’s Notion setup turns everyday goals, schoolwork, and creative output into three tightly organized hubs—home, academics, and YouTube—so nothing important lives in scattered notes. The core idea is simple: separate life management from study tracking and from content planning, then subdivide each area into small, repeatable pages (checklists, databases, and reference notes) that make it easy to capture thoughts quickly and retrieve them later.

The homepage is built for everything outside school. It uses a minimal, blue-themed layout with a “mood board” that doubles as a Spotify playlist reference (not full playback, since premium isn’t used). From there, the homepage splits into six sections: Life, Business Ideas, Creative, Gaming, Movie Reviews, and a mood board. Under Life, the student keeps a self-development page organized by improvement categories like looks, relationships, and flaws—framing personal growth as a concrete list rather than vague intentions. A skincare routine page stores product notes to remember what to buy, while a bucket list page organizes long-term goals by category such as travel and academics, even including YouTube milestones. “Cloud9” functions as a scratchpad for random thoughts that can be saved for later, and a “2020 review” page acts as a year-in-review and a place to set new-year improvement goals.

Business Ideas includes an idea page with a self-made logo and a metadata page for account information—useful for a forgetful workflow. Creative is split into writing and music: writing becomes a hub for book-related ideas, while music acts like a database of songs, tracking whether tracks are published online and whether they’ve been mastered. Gaming and movie tracking lean into structured review: the game review page records games played, ranks them, and includes personal commentary (with a notable preference for Minesweeper over battle royale titles). Movie reviews are stored with fields like title, genres, episode count, and thoughts, aiming to keep opinions organized.

Academics is organized around the student’s high school timeline, with a main page for grade 11 study content and a database for off-curriculum notes learned in extra time. An “ankify” section becomes a checklist of topics to convert into flashcards, including biology items like the Krebs cycle and calvin cycle and brain anatomy. Separate exam pages hold notes and resources for specific tests, with the SAT example showing section-by-section notes and links to external materials. Extracurriculars track online competitions and certificates for portfolio building, while additional pages cover courses and books studied during earlier free time. For university planning, the setup includes a university tracker with manually entered admission requirements and a scholarship tracker for available opportunities.

Finally, the YouTube hub is treated as a production system. “Video core” stores video ideas, scripts, and the essentials for making content. A “brainstorming” page captures ideas without committing to a full concept yet. There’s also a sponsor tracking page (even though monetization eligibility is uncertain), milestone goals estimating that reaching 1,000 subscribers takes about 52 videos on average, and a checklist to monitor progress. Under miscellaneous, the student keeps practical templates and guides: filming tips, email templates, ideal links, a shooting guide, and description templates—plus an “idea palace” inspired by Sherlock for searching titles and terms. The setup ends with a caution: digital services can fail or data can be lost, so reliance on any single platform carries risk.