Make with Notion 2024: Building a meaningful life in Notion (Mike Kenny, Matty Kenny)

A “meaningful life” doesn’t come from finishing tasks—it comes from running life like a game with saved progress. Mike and Maddie Kenny frame personal growth as a level-based system: each stage of adulthood gets harder, but people stall when they start the next challenge as if it’s brand new. Their core claim is that Notion can prevent that reset-by-default chaos by turning vague problems into structured projects, then using priorities and focus routines to move “duties” forward consistently.

The system begins with a simple workflow for projects: clarify priorities and track progress. They argue that confusion creates chaos, while clarity creates focus—an idea tied to cognitive load theory (the mental effort required to think). When life is treated as a pile of problems—“How do I get a job?” “Where do I find one?”—the next step stays unclear and productivity collapses. When life is treated as projects, the next action becomes obvious. Their project framework is the “4 Ds”: deliverables (what “done” looks like), deadlines (when it must happen), documentation (where information lives), and to-dos (the concrete next steps). In Notion, they implement this using databases and linked views so projects can connect to related work instead of being buried in linear folders.

A personal story illustrates the cost of not having a system. During medical school, Maddie prepared for a summer internship interview but found her workspace in disarray—untitled documents everywhere, no clear structure, and an hour wasted searching. The stress compounded, she missed the chance, and the experience became a warning: leaving chaos behind after you “get the job done” eventually traps people in the same loop—stuck jobs, stalled businesses, and repeated cycles of effort without progress.

Next comes prioritization. The Kennys say time is equal for everyone, but focus determines outcomes. They use a “needs and duties” model: needs keep life running (sleep, work, bills), while duties are the non-urgent actions that level people up (learning skills, building relationships, exercising, improving credentials). They apply the 80/20 rule to this distinction: most effort goes to survival, but the 20% directed at duties is what moves careers, businesses, and personal growth.

In Notion, they demonstrate how to operationalize needs and duties with a dashboard and calendar integration. Needs and duties are tagged in the same to-do database, then pulled into Notion Calendar as separate linked calendar views for color-coded clarity. Meetings scheduled via Zoom or email can populate automatically, letting duties be planned without losing context.

Finally, they lay out a progress routine for duties: (1) pick one duty each day, (2) find a “pocket of focus” using ultradian rhythms—roughly a cycle of higher focus every 90 minutes—and (3) work uninterrupted for 60–90 minutes to avoid diminishing returns. They recommend scheduling focus blocks in Notion Calendar and using an “auto decline meetings during this time” setting to protect deep work.

After years of using the system, they add a fourth step: reuse and share the process. Their business examples include a “study scheduler” used by over 300,000 students and an “extended brain” collaboration workflow used by more than a thousand creators. The message ends with an invitation to download their free “focus log” system and treat growth as a multiplayer game—where beating levels is easier when the playbook is shared.