Plan Like a Pro: Notion Annual Planning Guide

This week I'm going to go over the brand new notion template that I made for everyone. It's totally free so that you can do your annual planning just like I do. This is actually the exact method I use when I do my annual planning and I've broken it down into really simple, easy to follow template. You're just going to go step by step through it and there are some AI prompts to help you out as well. So if you're trying to dig into AI a little bit and understand how you might use this in your own workflows, you're going to learn a few tips and tricks and I am releasing this as a podcast. But this is also going to be a YouTube video. So if you would like to see how this works and not just hear about it, please head over to YouTube with the link in the description. I'm also going to link the notion template in the description and you should be able to if you want to grab that template and follow right along with this video. I'm also going to break this video up and actually put it into the template so that at each step you can refresh yourself on what you should be doing be but personally I like a full overview of something before I dig in and go step by step. So we're going to get this done efficiently. I'm going to show you everything and you are welcome to grab that notion template and I hope this is so helpful for you in 2025 and beyond. So let's jump in. I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees. So I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach PODC to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're in the right place. All right, so when you grab this notion template, you are going to land on a page that looks like this. This is just a landing page. You cannot edit it from here. You can click around in it and stuff like that, but you can't have it until you copy it for yourself. So the very first thing you're going to do is to head up here into the right top corner. And you'll see this little duplicate icon and you're going to hit duplicate. And when you press that button, it is going to take you to your very own copy of it. If you're signed into Notion. If you're not signed into Notion, no worries. You will be brought to the sign in form. And if you have a Notion account, you can sign right in. If you don't, it's totally free and you can get one. All right, so now I've got a brand new Notion account. There's going to be some onboarding stuff. If you've never done this and you do not need to pay for anything, you can hit no thanks, continue on a free plan. And this was the link here. So we're going to go back to this template since we had to sign in. Okay, now we're looking at again, we're signed in Notion and we can click duplicate. And now you're going to choose a workspace. So I only have one workspace in here, so that's pretty simple. And this is now my own template and I can edit it. So that's really important. You have to go through that first little process of copying that template, signing up for a Notion account. If you don't have one, and that's totally free. And if you do have one, you'll just log in as you are grabbing this Notion template. Okay, so it says the template's ready, it's been added to your workspace, and you can click C Template, although we're already on it, so I'll just click C Template. Here we are. Okay, Next thing is if you have never, ever, ever used Notion, I've included some tutorials here for you. Okay, so this is actually a playlist. If you go ahead and start this playlist that I have here, this is the welcome to Notion playlist from their YouTube. And it's just going to go one after another, some short videos to show you how to use Notion. It's a very intuitive tool once you understand it, but at first it can be a little bit overwhelming. That said, I'm going to run through this template and I'm going to show you the tips and tricks that I use for this template as I go. And you'll also see this video embedded here as well, so that you can always reference this video. And I will break up the video and put little pieces on each template page as well. So you, once you're very comfortable with all this, you can just highlight all of this and hit delete and get rid of it. You don't actually need these things in your template once you're comfortable with it. This mapping dashboard is just a navigation page. These are all of the pages and sort of the order you're going to use them as you go through. So I'm going to just take you through quickly in the Career development resources page. This is a link, so I'm going to click into here. This is just a link that is going to show you all of my resources that I have and so you can click through to here. This is an updated website page, so I didn't want to put a list of links in here because who knows, in the future this could change. So this is just a link to an external page and you can always head over here to see what new resources I have. My goal is to release a series of these notion templates so that you can quickly format your resume, work on your LinkedIn profile, worked on your interview skills, do your career development stuff after you get into that job. So I hope to have a really comprehensive list of resources for you. We obviously have some paid resources as well, some career coaching, our community, and you're welcome to check those out there and any deals we have right now. We have some New Year's specials, so those are all in this resource link as well. So this will be continually updated for you and you can come here anytime you have a new challenge in your career and see what I have for you. The first step in this process is journaling. So I invite you to revisit the podcast episode I did last. The latest podcast episode was all about that annual goal setting and reflecting on your previous year. And then I have two related biospace Career Coach articles. One is coming out this week and so it's probably live on the website by the time you're listening to this or watching this if you're on YouTube. And that is all about my goal setting process. So this template is for that column. And the previous column I did was all about reflecting on your year to set yourself up for goal setting. And that's really important. You have to look back in order to look forward. You have to understand what you accomplished. So we are now on our journaling step and I have two prompts in here for you to work on. These I recommend doing in a regular cadence. So your reflection journaling you should be doing annually and quarterly. And there's a template in here for you. When you are ready to do a new journal, you're just going to click new page and it's going to automatically create A page with a template in it for you. And then you can rename it to, you know, let's say this is the end of Q1, so you can rename it to like 2025, Q1 reflection, something like that. Okay. And then when you open things in notion, they slide out on the right, which is really handy for you. But you can also make these full screen. So if you're ready to settle in and do some journaling, you can just click this open in full page and you can see the full thing, which is really handy. And then at the top of every page you're going to see these breadcrumbs. So it's easy for you to go back and look at things. And if you hover over a little ellipses, you can then look at the breadcrumbs there because sometimes they get quite long if you have lots of pages embedded into one another. All right, so on your journaling page, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to put the date of the journal, the year. So this is 2025. And if it's a quarterly journal, you're going to put the quarter as well. If it's your annual, you don't have to worry about that. And these are the prompts here. And you can do these any way you like. I like to sit down and do speech to text and just sort of talk through my journaling and then go back and edit it. That to me almost like interviewing myself. If you are more of a writer, that's great. But what I've included in each of these prompts is a why it matters, because I think it's important you understand the why. I've done a lot of research on goal setting, on journaling, on all of this, and there are distinct psychological reasons why we're doing these things. Okay, so here are the journal prompts for your annual and quarterly reflections. Number one, what are your three proudest accomplishments from the past quarter or year? And why does it matter? By defining these top accomplishments, we can see where we've grown and what we can bring to future projects or roles. So you're really defining your strengths here. Next, for each accomplishment, note any data or metrics like increased efficiency by 20% or manage a one million dollar budget or publish two peer reviewed articles. And this matters because consistently when I am chatting with my career development coaching students, they have failed to quantify their impact over the years. And so when it comes to updating their Resume or their LinkedIn, it's difficult to do because you forget, you get too far removed from things to really remember the impact you had. And when you're employed, you're going to want to have all of these statistics ready for when you have an annual review. It's really important that you advocate for yourself and this is going to make that step 1 million times easier. Track the numbers now to save time later. Next, we're going to take those things that you just listed out and do an exercise where you actually translate your accomplishments and your quantification of those accomplishments into resume or LinkedIn bullet points. Again, just to save time. So you can do this using AI. If you'd like to help yourself out, you can do this by just jotting down quick notes. But what you're going to want to end up with are bullet points that start with an action verb that talk about your impact. So as an example here, I have led a cross functional team of five to complete Project X two weeks ahead of schedule, reducing costs by 10%. And again, these are things you're going to grab directly next time you're going to be updating your resume or having a chat with your manager about your accomplishments. And you also are going to want to list out why these accomplishments matter to you personally and professionally. Understanding your why is going to help you articulate your motivations and strengths. When you have to do an interview next time or during your performance review, this is going to become a really handy tool for you to look back at and remember instantly what your impact was. Next, you're going to want to identify one to do challenges that really tested your resilience or your skill set and what made these obstacles difficult. So why does this matter? Because reflecting on challenges is just as important as celebrating your wins. And this is where you're going to find areas for growth. Next, you'll reflect on what did you learn from overcoming or attempting to overcome these challenges. Remember, some challenges may be ongoing and that's okay. Which skills or perspectives did you gain? Why does this matter? You're going to take these lessons to form the foundation of the goal setting and professional growth for your upcoming quarters and years. So this is going to be the base of what we do in our next steps. And looking back, what could you have done differently? How can you leverage these insights to improve your performance in the future? So why does this matter? Well, identifying solutions in hindsight, which is always 2020, is going to help you refine the strategies for dealing with these similar issues as you see them. Again, because you will. Here is a little chatgpt prompt to help you once you've completed this step, there's two ways to use this. First of all, anytime you see this sort of purplish and little robot, this is a ChatGPT prompt. Or you can use it in any large language model you like, or you can also use it directly here in Notion. Notion has actually integrated several LLMs so that you can chat with your notion directly without having to copy and paste things around. So I'm going to show you two ways to do this. First of all, when you are journaling, you can feel welcome to just click right into here and start writing. This is your journal and keep all of the context together because this is going to remind you in the future why you wrote what you wrote. Then once you finish writing out your journal, you can grab everything by just dragging your mouse. I'm holding down and I'm just dragging over the whole entire thing and you can copy this whole thing. So I'm going to do command C, I'm on a Mac and you can paste the whole thing right here below and then you can take this entire prompt which you can highlight by clicking these little buttons. I guess there's little six dots here and you can copy the entire thing. I just selected that I can Command C and now I can go over to a ChatGPT window and I can stick this whole thing in and just hit enter. Now the prompt is right here and the prompt is you are my career journaling coach. So I've given ChatGPT a specific role to play. I'm going to paste my journal entry below. Please read through it carefully and 1. Refine my responses. Suggest ways to clarify or expand my thoughts to capture specific accomplishments, metrics and lessons learned. 2. Identify areas for deeper reflection. Point out where I might dig deeper, add more detail or consider new perspectives. 3. Ask clarifying questions. Pose any follow up questions that will help me unpack my experiences and achievements more thoroughly. 4. Offer actionable insights. If you see clear next steps or opportunities for growth, please recommend them and then says here's my journal entry and of course we pasted it down below. This is going to help you dig deeper. You're going to get more insights. You can clarify your journal entry and it's going to set you up again to be able to articulate your value and your impact when it comes time to make a new resume or have your performance review or interview for a new position or anything, anything like that. So this is setting you up for future success and it's also helping you to organize your thoughts because you can't clearly create goals if you have not organized your thoughts and really reflected on what worked, what didn't work, what do you want to improve and put those into practice. My personal favorite thing to do is actually to do this directly within Notion. And here's how I do that. So I've got my journal. I would have filled this whole page out here and right here in the bottom it says Notion AI. So I can click this open here and I can ask about this page. And now it's going to be looking at this page for what I am going to ask. And so here I can say you're my career journaling coach. The only thing I would modify is I wouldn't say I'm going to paste the entry below, I would just grab this whole thing and pop it in here. And it's asking about the page and I don't have anything in here, but I'm going to go ahead and click Enter. It's going to read the page and it's actually saying, I noticed this is a blank template. Let me help guide you through making the most of this reflection exercise. And it's actually giving me tips for how to fill out this template, how to journal. It provides a really nice, easy, structured feedback on this page, even though there's nothing in it. And so this is the fastest, easiest way. And I think I pay $10 a month for Notion AI and I pay $20 a month for ChatGPT plus, which gives me the latest models. ChatGPT Basic is free. You can use, I think Most of the LLMs have a free version. They just limit usage during peak time. So you might not be able to do this during the middle of a workday. You might have to wait until a weekend or sometime when it's a little bit less busy. Whereas the paid versions give you priority access to the servers and maybe a more advanced language model. But for this I don't think you need a super advanced language model. You just need to give it a job and you need to ask for some clear feedback. And you can do that really in any of the tools. So that's just a disclaimer. You don't have to pay for anything if you find that you use this a lot and you're in notion, you're loving Notion. I think it's worth the $10 because I can chat with my entire database, my entire notion, everything in there, or I can chat with just one page and I can pull out insights from one page. So pretty powerful. Okay, so that is the quarterly reflection. So I'm gonna use my breadcrumbs and pop backward to my journaling reflections page here. And the next thing we wanna do is letters to future me. And I talked a lot about this in the podcast and the article. Letters to your future self are a really powerful way to crystallize your goals for the upcoming year. Sometimes we go into a year not knowing how to clearly articulate specific, discrete goals we want to work on, but all of us kind of have an idea of the end result, right? So I recommend writing three letters to your future self every year. The most important One is the one year letter. So you're going to date this December 31st of this year, so 2025 in this case, and then do a three year and a five year letter as well. The three and the five year letters, I typically do those a lot more vaguely and those are not quite as detailed. So the letter for this year is the one that you want to pay close attention to and make very detailed. So I have a specific template. All you're going to do is press new page here, or you can hit new here and it's going to create a letter for yourself and this is going to have a template in it. And again, I'm going to go ahead and make this for full page here. You're going to write a letter and you're going to be very specific about it. So number one, you're going to set the scene. You're going to imagine yourself on December 31st of this year, describe where you are, who you're with, and how you're celebrating your accomplishments. And this matters because this is a very well documented visualization technique that makes your goals and dreams feel very tangible and emotionally resonant, which makes you more committed to them. Next, you're going to celebrate specific achievements. So you're going to congratulate yourself on concrete milestones, like celebrating that you led a team of five to launch a new product that increased company revenue by 15%. You're going to get that specific. You really want to visualize the accomplishments that you have had. So if you're going for a promotion, you're going to talk about that promotion. Maybe you're planning a move, you're going to talk about how it feels to have accomplished that move and be in your new home. You're going to get really specific here. And this is going to help you in the next step as we create an actual roadmap for you to follow this year so that you make this dream come true. You're also going to want to highlight the growth skills you've mastered. You're also going to want to highlight the growth and the skills you've mastered. So the new behaviors or mindsets, maybe tools, maybe you've had to take a new course, develop a technique, learn public speaking. All of these things are things that maybe you had to do in order to make your dream for the end of the year a reality. And this is going to again, help you to get really specific about what that roadmap looks like. And this matters because you're going to acknowledge that in order to get there, you have to have grown. And what does that look like? What growth habits, what continuous learning has made that possible. The next thing you'll do is reflect on personal and professional balance. We get really ambitious at the beginning of the year. Guilty. I do this all the time. When you are super excited and revved up about making goals, sometimes you make overly ambitious goals and we want to make sure that we are not getting too carried away with that. Make sure that you are putting your own personal life into these goals. Make some personal goals. Talk about how you have accomplished so much at the end of the year, but you've maintained your relationships, you've maintained balance, you have integrated your self care into this whole equation. You really have to take care of yourself and it's not possible if you overload your plate. So don't forget to acknowledge that. The next thing you will talk about in your letter is the support systems and the collaborations that played a role in your success. So you're gonna talk about your mentors, the colleagues, friends and family who inspired you or supported you along the way. This is important because it's going to remind you to strengthen those relationships now so that they are there for you along the way. Next you're going to express some gratitude and pride, really embody that celebration mindset because that is going to again crystallize your resolve to make this year happen. Make all of these goals a reality and finally you're going to envision the next steps. So just look out beyond this current year, or three years, or five years, and hint at what you might aspire to next. So if, for instance, this year you are going for a really big promotion, how will you continue building on your leadership skills for the future? And this is going to keep you forward thinking and it's going to allow you to just continue to dream big. So just like the last one, you're going to be able to type or dictate right into this space here and you're going to grab this entire thing. If you're using a large language model outside of notion and you are going to use this journaling prompt here, paste your entire letter and get it analyzed. This is going to help you dig just a little bit deeper and refine your letter. Because you want this letter, especially the one for this year, to be really good, really concrete, exceptionally detailed. Because we're going to use it to actually craft your goals. Next. So the prompt is you are my career journaling coach. I'm about to share a journal entry with prompts to create a letter for my Future Self for December 31st insert year here. Please read it carefully and one refine and clarify. Point out any areas where I can be more specific or descriptive. Suggest ways to quantify achievements or milestones and help me capture deeper feelings or motivations. 2. Ask probing questions. If you see vague or overly general statements, ask follow up questions that will encourage me to think more deeply about my goals and the steps I'll need to take. And three offer suggestions for expansion. Recommend any additional details, metrics or personal insights I could include that would make my letter more vivid and motivating. So again, you can do this directly here in Notion by going down to the bottom corner and clicking on Notion AI. Or you can take this into ChatGPT or Claude or wherever you like to go and just work on getting this letter really detailed and make the adjustments. Actually refine your letter because we're going to use it in the next step. Expect to spend some time on this. Enjoy it. Grab a cup of coffee, go to a coffee shop and do it. Put yourself into a place where you're really open to reflecting and being honest about your past achievements and your future goals, because this forms the whole foundation for your year. This step is so important. Next we're going to head back to our dashboard and we're going to go into the Goal Planner. And here in the Goal Planner I will have some video instructions and a written SOP for how to use this goal planner. This is where the magic happens. I have helpfully included a database with the letters to your future self, so you can just grab them here. Because maybe you're doing your journaling one day, but you're not goal planning until another day. So rather than having to go back and remember where that letter is, it's right here on this dashboard for you. So this is the one that I was just looking at. You can open it. It'll come up as a peek. You can grab it here, or you can grab it here and you can take it into your large language model of choice. Or you can do this totally manually. Up to you. We need you to come up with the key goals and milestones for each of the things you mention in your letter. All of those aspirations now need to become a roadmap. And this is hard. It's really hard work. We need to put this into a framework where things are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. That smart goal framework. We're going to want to capture all of that and put that into our annual planning. So here's the prompt that I really like. It says, you are my annual goal coach. I'm about to share a letter I wrote to my Future Self for December 31, 2025. Please read it carefully and help me identify key goals and milestones. Pull out each significant goal or aspiration mentioned and describe what success will look like. Break down into components for each goal. Detail the specific skills, projects, or resources I'll need to develop or acquire. Suggest realistic time horizons for each step. For example, which quarter of 2025 might each task be completed? Suggest learning and development initiatives. Recommend courses, certifications, or training programs that could be valuable. Map out quarterly benchmarks. Propose three to four main goals per quarter, taking into account that I have regular work responsibilities Hey, I just want to cut in to say that if you are enjoying this podcast, you may enjoy the Building Biotechs podcast from our sister company recru Consulting, which is a talent acquisition strategy firm that specializes in helping small biotechs hire exceptional talent. In that podcast, we interview amazing people who are building biotechs. They are industry leaders in all different verticals and it will allow you to explore career paths in biotech and to get to know companies that maybe you've never heard about. So if you are a biotech fan, you are exploring careers in biotech, I highly recommend the Building Biotechs podcast. We'll link that in the show notes or you can search for it on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right, back to our show. I just want you to note that I'm double clicking on Hey, I am still working here. I'm going to also work toward goals, but these need to be reasonable. We need to be able to achieve these in the time that we actually have in our day. Next, check Ambition versus Realism. Let me know if any timelines or milestones seem overly ambitious or if they can be spaced more efficiently and provide motivational tips. Offer simple strategies to maintain momentum and avoid early burnout. And then you're going to go ahead and paste that letter in after this prompt, or if you're in notion AI, you can take this prompt right onto the page with the letter for your future self, and you can chat with that page right there. When I did this, I got a really great roadmap. Now I tweaked it. There were some things in there I didn't need to do. One of my goals is really to dig into automation for one of my companies to really get super serious about automating things that my team does. And I know there are tools that will take that off of our plate. So it suggested a certification in AI, which I am not going to get. I don't need that because I absolutely love AI and I'm really good at studying on my own. So I do need to add to my AI knowledge and toolkit, but I don't think I need to pay to do it. So take what it says with a grain of salt. Look at these goals, these milestones, these little pieces that it's going to chunk up for you and make sure they work for you. And the cool thing about a large language model is you can just chat with it and refine them and say, I don't really need to do that, suggest something else. Or, I already have this skill set. How could I go deeper? Or whatever little tweaks you want to have, treat this like a really intelligent colleague that you can sort of bounce things around with. And at the end you're going to get a really good set of goals. Now, you can absolutely do this manually as well. I find that ChatGPT actually comes up with a better plan because it's a little bit more thorough. And I have had really good success goal planning in the past two years using large language models as my sidekick, as opposed to previously just doing it on my own, which I get great results. I've been doing this for years now. I just feel more empowered and I feel more thorough with the current set of tools I have. All right, now if you scroll on down, I have created a handy space for you to capture your annual goals. And this is where the magic happens. So when you have your framework, whether you've made it yourself or you've worked with a large language model to get it, all you have to do is click new page and you're going to have an exciting annual goal template come up and you can do this as many times as you want. I suggest not creating more than five annual Goals. And personally, the magic for me has been three professional goals and two personal goals. So I'm going to walk through how to use this goal template. So you're going to first rename it and you can rename it anything you want. So let's call this professional goal one. Now, I suggest being pretty specific with these goals. So get creative with your title and make sure that it makes sense to you. And it's something that resonates that you're going to be excited to look at every day. You can then change your cover photo here. You can change the icon, whatever you want to do. I've just auto filled this little rocket ship for you, which is kind of fun. If you want to change your cover, you just click change cover. You can go to unsplash and you can search for anything you want. So I'm going to do cookies. So here, this is my cookie gong. And I am going to put in a deadline of the end of this year, since it's an annual goal. Now, sometimes annual goals are going to have sooner deadlines. Maybe you're planning a big move and you actually are going to be moving by the end of August. So that's a big annual goal. It's split into multiple quarters, really three quarters. Right. Because August ends in the third quarter. But your deadline is going to be August 31 instead of December 31. So you get to choose when you're annual goal deadline is. And then you're going to put the type, is it work or personal? I'm going to do a work goal for this one. And then you're going to scroll on down and you're going to add those quarterly goals in here. And now you have a new template. And this is attainable quarterly goal. You can rename this anything you want. Eat 1,000 cookies. All right, that's the goal that I have here. And let's say for quarter two, my attainable goal would be make new cookie recipe. Apparently I run a cookie company. And quarter three might be launch cookie website. And quarter four, let's say, generate $10,000 in cookie sales. Okay, there's my goal. I'm going to rename to launch cookie business. So a silly example, but you get the, you get the gist. Your goals may be that you want to get a promotion. Your goal may be to get a new job. It may be to relocate. Whatever your goal is, this is how you map it. Okay, so now you've got your quarterly goals here. And the cool thing about these templates is that you're Going to be able to see things really clearly. You can collapse these top pieces here so that you're just right onto your goals. Your roadmap is going to show you the quarterly goals and then we're going to next move on to the milestones. So we're breaking this down, right? We're chunking it out. You've got your annual goal. It's big. We're going to launch a cookie business. You've got your quarterly goals. Okay, what's feasible this quarter? Quarter two, quarter three, quarter four milestones are going to be the chunks of each of these quarterly goals. So three to four milestones that help you to get to your next quarterly goals. And so down here you can click on to a new milestone. There's a couple ways to add milestones. So I've really leveled this up. So if you click on new, you're going to get a manageable milestone template. Okay. And maybe your first milestone is for. So you're going to have a due date. When do you want this due? Well, I want this due. My first milestone. I think I can do it by the end of next week. And it's going to be a simple milestone. The related quarterly goal is going to be that first quarter. And when you click on the quarterly goal, it's going to automatically fill in the annual goal. So you don't have to worry about that. I haven't started it yet, but I'm going to start it now. So let's, we're going to put this in progress. The goal is going to be eat 250 cookies. So I could split this into four milestones of 250 cookies each. All right, and then we've got some tasks here. What are the mini milestones? Okay, well, let's do 8, 10 cookies. I think I can do that by tomorrow. Okay, so now you're really chunking out these goals and you're going to get deeper and deeper in the layers and I'm gonna show you how this all fits together. But every time you go and define a goal, you're going to go layers deeper. The cool thing is, as you want to, you can back out by just going back to this page here. You're going to look at your goals. Okay, we've got our cookie goal. And now look at this. We've got this filled out. We've got some quarterly goals and some milestones. You can click into things right here. You can navigate really easily. We can see our quarterly goals. So let's add one new goal. I'M going to add a personal goal here. This is a real personal goal for me. So it's going to be get my bronze medal in dressage. So a bronze medal, it's not like the Olympics or anything fancy like that. But if I complete what's called third level dressage with scores that are above a certain level, I will get recognized that I have done first, second and third level dressage with relevant scores. It's just kind of a milestone within my sport of dressage. So this is an actual goal I plan to do. The deadline for this is actually going to be October 31, because the last show of the season where I could conceivably do this is in October. So if I don't make it by then, I'm not going to make it. So I really only have part of the year to do this. And this is a personal goal. And I'm gonna change my cover because I love changing covers. Let's go see if I can have horse photo. I'll just pop this one in there. It's a nice little horse photo and you can reposition photos by the way, if you want to. I might actually put a photo of my own in there. And so next, my quarterly goals. Well, I need to get back in a lesson cadence. So take a weekly. How about get in a habit of taking a weekly lesson? I kind of got out of that habit cause I was at a barn where there wasn't a trainer. But luckily I'm now at a barn where there is a trainer and I did start up weekly lessons. Again, those are really key for me to be able to do this. The next thing would be to commit to a show schedule and register. Okay. So I know that by the end of quarter two, which is June, the first show actually happens in June, but then we've got shows in July, August, et cetera. So I really need to have registered for everything. And there's going to be some sub goals that have some date sensitive tasks like to register for a certain show by the deadline of registration. So this I can then keep track of. And then quarter three is going to be compete in three shows. Okay. So this is going to get me hopefully to that goal in quarter three, compete in two additional shows. And that's only if necessary. If I've gotten my scores. I'm all done in quarter three. All right, so this is my little board here. Now I can click into a goal, I can change the COVID again if I want to. Something just color, whatever. And I can then change into the milestones that I need to achieve for this. So let's say schedule lessons for the entire quarter. Okay, so that could be a milestone. And what might a mini milestone look like for that? Well, by tomorrow, look at my calendar and block off lesson times. That could be something I want to get done by tomorrow to actually facilitate this. And I'm going to say that's a really high priority. Okay, we're going to go through that in a moment. So now I've got two annual goals. This is. And I've got some milestones and mini milestones and tasks and all of that good stuff. This is how you're going to go about it. And you're just going to go goal by goal, quarter by quarter, milestone by milestone, and break it in two chunks. This will take several hours. I will be transparent. You need to spend half a day doing this. By the end, you're going to have an entire roadmap. You're going to know when things need to be done, and it's going to be very simple for you to just follow the plan. And that's what you want. You want to take the thinking out of this. After you've done the thinking, this is the time to think. Once that's done, you are doing, you're executing. All right, I'm going to go back to our goal planning dashboard. The next step here is our goal tracker. So you're in it now. You've done the planning, you are ready to just execute. This goal tracker is going to be a place you're going to come weekly. And so I suggest a review, just a quick review of your annual goals so you can take a look at them here. And I've got these nice little dropdowns that already show them. Next, you're going to review your quarterly goals. And once they're done, they're going to go away. Okay, but you can see them here, which is really nice. It's a clear view of what bigger goals you have each quarter. Next, you're going to review your upcoming milestones and mini milestones. So these are the things that you are going to do to make them happen. So this is just a task list, but it is organized with the milestones in it as well. So that you can see, okay, this task is for the lessons. And so here is where you're going to start to prioritize things. You're going to want to look at these. They're organized by priority and date. You're going to want to add a priority to each thing and change it so if something's not important right now, you don't need to do it for several weeks. You can put not a priority. But let's say things are now moving forward and they're getting closer to the due date, you're going to want to add them up the list. If it's important, great. If it's an mit, the most important thing that you have to get done above all else, when you click mit, it's going to move it to the top of your list. So this is a quick, easy visualization of what you need to be doing. And you can add views on here and make it your own. So one of my favorite views to add is a calendar view. So you can hit calendar and you'll be able to link it to those mini milestones and tasks. It's the same thing. Maybe I'll do this for you. And I'm going to have it now. You have your due dates of things and it's really easy. If you're like, oh, I'm just not gonna be able to eat those 10 cookies by tomorrow, just move it. And it's an easy way to quickly look at your to do list and shuffle things around. So I love a good calendar view. That is how on a weekly basis you can choose your priorities and then all you have to do is schedule that time onto your calendar and get it done. This is execution time. Just do it. The last thing I have in here is really important. And this is your manager check in notes. I always say have a weekly check in with your manager if possible. Get that cadence down. If you don't have a manager like me, I have a business coach. This is analogous to that. I still do this exercise with my business coach. So it is totally possible for you to fit it into whatever framework you have. You need accountability. You need somebody who is looking over your shoulder a little bit and helping you to continue to move forward. Kind of checking that you're on track, making sure that you are reasonable. You're biting off the right amount. This is all part of it. All right, so the manager weekly check in notes are going to be here and I have created a nice little database with templates for you. So you can either click new page here or new here. When you click new page, you're going to get a beautiful template. And I put balloons here just because it's fun. But you can of course change your cover any way you like. A couple of things here, you're going to put the check in date, which often you're going to be doing this day of it might be tomorrow if you're preparing a little early. So I'm going to put the date. What are your feelings before the check in? Now, if you hover over here, you see this little eye? This is information about this property that I've entered. Just added a little color for you here. How are you feeling going into this meeting? And then feel welcome to add your own options. So to add your own options, it's really simple. You're going to come in here and you can just select. I put a whole bunch of emotions and feelings in here, but if you don't see one you want, you're just going to type new feeling, for example, and hit create. And that will create whatever you want in here. So if you have your own unique feeling, you can put it in there, but you're going to choose a couple of things. Maybe two to three feelings that you're feeling before the meeting and then check in with yourself afterward and do it again. And how are you feeling after the meeting? Are you feeling better? Are you feeling worse? These are important for you to track. You're going to get a lot out of this if you document how you're feeling before and after meetings. I have done this exercise with several of my career development students who have realized that their manager actually adds a lot of anxiety to their workload. And I've had two students actually at this point decide to think about maybe a new job because that manager is not supporting them in the way they need to be supported. And they come out of these meetings way more anxious, frustrated, etc. And that's not a good thing. So track it. If you come out of your meetings feeling energized and encouraged, that's a really good sign. So it's good to note and for the same reason, note the overall tone of the meeting. Was it positive, neutral or negative? Over time, this is going to give you insights into your relationship with your manager, your coach, whoever. All right, a couple of things here. In this template, the preparation is important. You're going to want to think deeply about what you have accomplished since your last check in. And I give a few examples. You're going to want to note what you'd like to celebrate and again, some examples like receive positive feedback from so and so or such and such department. And you're going to want to note down the challenges or blockers. Did you not accomplish something because you were blocked by something that's important to document so that you can address it in your manager meeting? And next are the actual meeting notes. I have four sections here. These should be a little bit like the journaling prompts. You're going to want to look back, you're going to want to review what you've done, review the annual goals and your quarterly goals, how are they going? You're going to want to think about which priorities and milestones are upcoming, what are the immediate tasks, what are the upcoming quarterly tasks and what support do you need? What blockers exist that will keep you from getting those things done? You're going to want to spend a few minutes just recalibrating. Sometimes you need to move a date. Sometimes something comes up with the company that your manager informs you of that is going to change your plan. This is a really good way to, on a very regular basis, just shift your trajectory a little bit. I know a coach who calls this tacking. If you know anything about sailing, you don't get there in a straight line because you actually use the wind and zig and zag as you go. And so understanding things that are coming up allows you to adjust your tack because it's never going to be a straight line. But we want to make sure we're going generally in the right direction. You might need to steer around some obstacles and you might need to change direction to accommodate the headwinds. Right. And finally you're going to want to have additional discussion points. Just get some coaching from your manager. That's what they're there for. What specific feedback do you want? Are there any things that you'd like help with and maybe give a little bit of a team or a company update for them as well? This is just a nice little template to steer your meeting, to take notes during your meeting and to make sure that you're making the most out of your time with your manager. Very efficient and it serves as a look back. You can always go back to these notes and think about what you've accomplished. And very few people document things this thoroughly. You will be way ahead of the game if you are. All right, that is the template. I want to go over a few tips and tricks for notion because you can make this your own. There's a lot you can do in here and I want to make sure you're not overwhelmed by notion. So I'm going to show you a few automations I've put in here just to make these really, really easy. I want to go back to the goal tracker. The goal of this whole thing is for you to knock goals right off the list. Right? How do you do that? Well, as you are looking through your goals, you are going to only see the things that are upcoming. So as you click things off, let's say you've got your cookies. Oh, I started eating my cookies. This is going well. I am going to expand both of these. I've got some quarterly goals here. I've got to eat the cookies. I'm going to start that now. Okay, I'm starting to eat. So I've got my quarterly goal in Progress. I'm eating 10 cookies. This is going well and I'm done. So I'm going to click done. And this is going to magically do a few things. I'm actually going to open it up so that you can see when I click done, there's a couple things I can either click done here or I can set it to done here. I love the click. It's really quick. So I'm going to click done. That is going to automatically update the completion date to today and it's going to change the status to done. And it's going to remove it from this dashboard because I don't need it cluttering up my brain space anymore. The cookies are eaten. That is done. And let's say here that I have knocked off all of the mini milestones that are associated with my cookie goal. So let's say I ate all the 10 cookies. Those are done. The next milestone was that I wanted to eat the 250 cookies. So that's done. That's super. That's gonna complete it all out. I'm done with that. That's amazing. I'm done with my quarterly goal. I did it. I've worked through. I ate 10 cookies. Then I upped it to 30 cookies. Then I upped it To 100 cookies. I'm like a cookie eating machine now. I'm really good. This is done. I've done all my things and of course I'd have more stuff in here. When this is done, I can click this off and again, it's going to update the status to done. The completion date to today, and it's going to remove it from my outstanding quarterly goals list so that I know that's knocked off the list. The goal is to just keep getting rid of stuff on this list so that by the end of the year it is empty, it's clean. Your brain is completely drained of all of this stuff because it's done. This will serve as sort of a dashboard for you to just get things done, to organize your priorities on a weekly basis. A monthly quarterly basis. So that is one beautiful thing about notion. The automations exist in here. You can edit these automations if you'd like. The filtering exists here. I have these filtered and sorted in certain ways. Enjoy figuring that out. You can change this. They don't have to stay the same. You can add new views to your databases. And one thing I want to show you quickly here is that I do have this databases page. This is not something you need to visit often, but if you want a holistic view of all the databases that I've put together for you, they exist here. So this is just a unified space where all of your goal related databases are. You can see all of them in here. I haven't sorted them or filtered them in any way. So it's going to get overwhelming. There's going to be a lot of stuff here. But if you ever need to dive in and really look at things, you can and this is where you will do it. They're organized into annual goals, quarterly goals, milestones and mini milestones or tasks. Some people like to call them tasks. You can also change the way. If you want to think of these as tasks, just edit it. This database can now just simply be called tasks if you don't like the word milestones. I know some people like to make these sort of fun like games. You can call these adventures. You can change these any way you want. Make this space your own. You can change all of the COVID images, the icons. This is your space and that's why I created these as templates. I don't want to be in control of what your space looks like. You get to do that. You get to use the terminology you like, you get to use the colors you like the photos. This is all for you. So I hope you really enjoy this. This will be, I hope, a resource that you use for years to come. It's really flexible. You just keep adding to it and it should be something that simplifies your life. It makes things very clear. You know the roadmap. All you have to do is follow it and check in with your manager so that you get the accountability you need to keep moving forward so that on December 31, 2025 you are reflecting back on that future letter and you realize not only did you kill it, you got all that stuff done, but you also got more done because you were so organized and efficient. That is my hope for you. I hope this is helpful. Give me feedback on this template. I will be iterating this so it might look a little different. When you get it. So know that. But always, always love feedback. I always like to make things better for you. That is all for now. I will see you all soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach Podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub. To join our free Slack group and to get access to other great free resources and materials, head over to CollaboratoryCareerHub.com and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn Pro Tip. When you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. And if you leave us an honest review, screenshot that review and send it to to how hello, at collaboratorycareerhub. 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