How To Stoic (ft. Focus & Meaning OS Notion Template)

This system will ensure your long-term growth.

Two weeks ago, we launched a Notion template called Focus & Meaning OS on Product Hunt and made 4th place on Product Of The Day. 🎉

It has been designed to give yourself structure in everyday life, based on Stoic principles and life lessons we acquired on the way. It’s a distillation of systems the 4 nichemat.es founders use to organize themselves on a daily basis, merged into one!

We tried to make it as accessible as possible, so you can spend your entire day on one page, and order things later. The given structure should lend itself to moving things around quickly and easily.

In this post, I’d like to show you how it works and where Stoicism comes into play.

Since we wanted to reflect the state of “Your Life in One Page-Scroll” this post follows the course of your day:

• You get up and start with your morning routine
• You check your tasks for the day (preferably set the night before 🤓)
• Add quick notes and reminders throughout the day and add them to the different sections of your life (e.g. Second Brain)
• Reflect on Stoic virtues and principles at the end of the day
• Write a journal entry / plan tomorrow

Let’s start!

We start out with quick links to all the sections, so you may jump to whichever part you need right away. All this is also accessible via the sidebar.

If you think of anything that need doing, don’t lose sight of it! Just add it to the page and set yourself a reminder in Notion. Then come back later to clear it or maybe even move it to your weekly stash.

To live a Stoic life, we want to be virtuous and live in accordance with nature. To make sure we can do that on a daily basis, we added a “Start your day here” section where you can add and review daily habits. Hold yourself accountable by checking in every day. There is a little reminder attached to the section that will help you find your way back here tomorrow.

But hold on! Daily habits are good and all, but not enough to get you where you want to go and who you want to become. After all, we want to practice Memento Mori and live our life in a way that we’ll be proud of to look back on at the end of it.

That’s where the Weekly Stash comes in. It will help you set tasks for the week that are manageable, but broad enough that you don’t get lost in the details. The idea is that every one of us has multiple roles to play during our life. And chances are, we use each role at least once a week. So, at the end of each week, when you are reflecting back on it, take some time to think what you want to do in each role for the coming week.

There are templates for all your periodic notes and reflections. Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. PLUS, we added a bunch of extra reflection templates. Keep reading to learn about Stoic Exercises at the end of this.

Let’s come back to the Weekly Stash real quick. To be aligned with ourselves, we need to make sure that we are working towards our goals, that in turn feed into our self-image.

To make sure of that, each task in the Weekly Stash links to one of our Monthly Goals. Therefore, while planning our week, we will derive weekly tasks not only from our roles in life, but also the goals we set for ourselves. Monthly Goals in turn relate to Yearly Goals, and those to Life and Long-term Goals.

All of your goals are aggregated on their own page in their respective databases, so you can have a simple dashboard view of all the things you want to do this year, and how it is going. We found it useful to come back here during weekly, monthly, and yearly planning to gain a birds-eye perspective.

At the end of each day, the Focus & Meaning OS will prompt you to write a short journal entry and think about how your day went. If you accomplished all you set out to do, in which areas you did great, what you are grateful for, and what you learned.

And that’s already the gist of it on a daily basis. If you do this consistently, you are already ahead of the curve. Introspection is a rare find in the modern society, and if you are here, chances are you are only getting started. 🚀

In that case, we have a few more things in the package for you. 👇

At the bottom of Focus & Meaning OS, you will find this overview.

Just now, we talked about the Essentials, the first 3 points.

There are a few more things in here for you 😏

A Second Brain databases. One for all your contacts. One for all the learnings of your life (SOPs). And, of course, as promised, Stoic Exercises.

The Stoic Exercises page is a collection of psychological tools to prepare yourself for hardship (Premeditatio Malorum style), reflect on the good things that happened to you already (Gratitude meditation), and more.

Here is an example of me going through the exercise of Negative Visualization. It greatly enhances the chance of you reacting the way you want in high-stress, high-stakes situations, since you already went through the mental effort of dealing with it preemptively. 👇

If you liked what you saw so far, there is a lot more to discover in the template. I recorded a quick walkthrough for you guys. That will give you an even better impression of the whole system.

Head over to our product page (on Gumroad) now to watch it + the first 100 people to buy get 75% off the purchase! 😳

Stay Stoic 🏛

With ❤️ from Francisco at nichemat.es