Achieving My 2023 Creative Business and Life Goals using Notion

Quick Summary:

The end of a year generally gets people thinking about what they want to accomplish in the new year, but if you’re anything like me, that could be overwhelming. Goals are an important way to give your life direction and help you accomplish your dreams, but without a specific plan in place on how to reach them, they can quickly be pushed to the side. In an attempt to remedy this, I have created a system thanks to Notion to help me identify and achieve my creative and life goals for 2023 and I thought I’d share it in case it might be helpful to someone. (It also keeps me accountable.)

Jumping On and Off the Goal-Making Train

The beginning of a new year usually means it’s time to make new goals and honestly, I gave up on creating goals for a while. In the past, I’d start the year with pages and pages of goals but never felt like I achieved them so I gave up because I was discouraged. However, I’ve been slowly getting back on the goal-making train because there are a lot of things I’d like to achieve and goals help to give my life direction.

Building My Dream Creative Career and Using Notion

I’ll spare you the gruesome details of my graphic design career since I got my degree in 2019 but like many, I’ve gone through a lot of ups and downs. In the beginning, I was happy to simply be working in my field and took whatever design job came my way after a couple of years of that, however, I realized I didn’t feel fulfilled as a designer and my portfolio was becoming stale since it didn’t reflect the creative work that I wanted to do.

This past October, my husband and I took an amazing 3 week long trip to Europe, and as cheesy as it sounds- it felt like my creativity was reignited there (more on that later…). We returned home with memories to last a lifetime and a nearly drained bank account. With little money, few clients, and a lot of bills, I needed to come up with a plan to grow my business. The problem was I didn’t know what direction I wanted to take my business in.

I’ve been dabbling with Notion and wanted to utilize it more especially when creating my goals for the upcoming new year. I found a fantastic video with a Notion template to write down and organize my goals for the new year, which I started using immediately. What I like about this template is it breaks down your goals into sections (business, personal, etc.), then into quarters, months, weeks, and days. I also love it because it only has 5 main goals so I can prioritize what’s important to me while also having space to brainstorm more ideas on an additional page. It’s so important for me to have space to “brain dump” for those moments when I just want to do all the things, but I keep those pages separate from my dashboard so I can keep focused.

a screenshot of my notion goal setting dashboard — My 2023 Dashboard Using Jule Acree’s Notion Template

This template helped me organize and prioritize aspects of my life and identify what I want to achieve and I cannot recommend it enough.

I created 4 sections of overall goals for the year: my personal goals, my husband’s goals, our combined family goals, and business goals. We also want to focus more on our finances for the upcoming year so I created another dashboard for that following the same template and linked it to my 2023 dashboard.

a screenshot of my personal finance notion dashboard — My Notion Financial Dashboard

This template also has “check-in” sections which are incredibly helpful. I’ve learned from the past that without a system in place to check in on how you’re doing with goals you set, they can easily be forgotten. It’s also important to give yourself a pat on the back when you have achieved a goal.

a screenshot of my quarterly goal breakdown with notion — The quarterly breakdown with the end-of-quarter review

I filled out my personal, financial, and family goals fairly quickly but was drawing a blank on my business goals. I knew that I wanted to continue being a designer and working for myself but I wasn’t sure what that looked like specifically because up to this point I had just been taking any job that came along.

So I let that section sit blank for a few days and then I came across Ohn Mar Win’s skillshare class about making goals, which inspired me and gave me the tools I needed to create my dream creative career.

I don’t want to repeat everything she said in her class because she explains it so well, but she encouraged her students to visualize a day in their perfect creative career and create specific goals based on that.

Envisioning a day in my ideal creative career helped me reconnect with what inspires me creatively because my design work up to this point wasn’t it.

a collage of images as a visual representation of my creative business goals for 2023 — My 2023 Vision Board for My Business

This perfect day is still a long way off and I’ll still be taking on as many design jobs as I can until we’re in a more stable place financially, but now I have specific goals in place to get me closer to that dream career.

My Organizational Systems for 2023 and How I’m Planning to Keep on Track

Long-term/big picture: Notion dashboard
Day to day: my planner, the Habit App, my Google and Apple Calendar, a whiteboard, and lots of lists

My routine is to review my long-term goals before creating my weekly or daily to-do lists so I’m making sure my day-to-day routine includes something that works towards those. Also, using habit tracking to create daily routines to help move me toward those long-term goals as well.

Some Tips on Goal Setting:

To avoid getting discouraged, make your goals “SMART”: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Make your goals challenging, but not impossible
A year is a long time so break your goals down into manageable chunks: quarterly, monthly, weekly, etc.
Schedule time to check in on your progress and have some reflection questions ready
Don’t overthink it and keep it simple by having goals that are important to you (KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid)
Make sure your day-to-day routine supports your long-term goals

Resources that helped me set my 2023 Goals:

Goals can be very personal but it’s nice to share a few in order to keep yourself accountable, so if you’re comfortable sharing, I’d love to hear a few of your creative and life goals for 2023.

Until next time,