The Cockpit Life OS is a Notion template created by the young Notionpreneur Nandu Ashok.
Nandu is creating Notion Templates to help everyone live a happy and productive life at very minimal or no cost. He believes that happy and productive people can make our world a better place to live for all living entities.
When he first started out at the age of 16, after creating a Notion template for himself, he got inspired to share it with the world and quickly generated his first sale.
His Cockpit Life attempts to help you organize, track and review everything from your day-to-day life.
Can it meet its requirements? Let’s have a look at the template:
First Impression:
I like the minimal but still aesthetic layout of the template, which makes it easy to navigate to the different dashboards. The graphics give the template a sci-fi-look, which I appreciate a lot.
The template is divided into three areas, each containing 4 dashboards:
- Personal
- Notes
- Health
- Journal
- Finances
- Productivity
- Task
- Projects
- Schedule
- Habits to Goals
- Tools
- Learn
- Resume
- Curate
- Workflows
You can also switch between a dark theme and a light theme version of the template. Although Nandu prefers the dark theme, I am using the light theme for this review.
Creating a Notion system that tries to organize all aspects of your life always comes with the danger that the dashboards can’t keep up with more specialized templates. On the other hand, many templates overcomplicate things. Simpler solutions are often superior to more complicated workflows because users can more easily stick to them.
Now let’s take a look inside Nandu’s template and see how he managed this balancing act.
A look inside this Notion template:
Notes
This is basically an easy note-taking system.
You simply create a quick note and later drag it to the respective notebook. Don’t expect a second-brain or Zettelkasten, still, it should work well enough for the majority of people, who don’t wish to build a complicated knowledge system.
Health
“Health is wealth” is the motto of this dashboard. Can this dashboard help you to become healthier and wealthier?
This dashboard allows you to calculate your fat loss, track your sleep and schedule your workouts.
When planning your workouts you can simply drag the “day of the week†into the calendar view. Now a checkbox with different exercises will appear.
I like this approach because it is simple and intuitive
However, in my opinion, it might be better to name the properties: Leg-Day, Biceps, or Cardio instead of Monday, Tuesday, and so on. This would allow you to plan the specific workout routine that you want to do on any given day.
Journal
The journaling dashboard is doing a solid job as a journal. It is not inventing anything new, but why should it? It is simple, straightforward and comes in a format every Notioneer can understand with ease.
You simply create a new day and answer 2 daily questions:
- The best thing that happened?
- What are you thankful for?
In addition to that, you have a third property for “Dumping your thoughts†and a fourth for rating your daily happiness level.
Finances
The finance dashboard allows you to track your monthly savings. Each month, you simply put your monthly earnings into a row and enter your expenditures into a database.
The template calculates in the following your monthly savings. The only weakness I recognized was that I need to transfer the expenditures manually into the “Monthly-Review-and-Savings-Databaseâ€.
Learn
This dashboard allows you to organize your classes at school or university
In the gallery view, create a new course and enter the respective tags. To visualize and adjust the dates, use the calendar on the right side. You can also use the New Course template inside the course pages to create notes.
Unfortunately, this cannot be linked to the “Notes†dashboard. I would also love to see the option to see specific classes in the calendar view.
Resume
You can use this page to create your resume in Notion. Either link prospective employers to this page or export it as a PDF.
Curate
This dashboard attempts to help you to prioritize ideas by using of the Rice method which takes into account:
- Reach
- Impact
- Confidence
- Effort
The idea seems to be very good; however, the guide could better explain how to use the methode. For example, I don’t know what the rice number 84 would mean for the validity of my idea.
Workflow
This dashboard helps you to visualize daily workflows. E.g. the number of times you are interacting with people on Twitter, or check your email inbox.
It is a simple dashboard without databases.
Tasks
This is a straightforward task management system.
Create new tasks in the inbox database and drag the tasks you want to accomplish on the current day into the task checklist database.
This task system is good for beginners due to its simplicity. However, there exist much more advanced task management systems for Notion.
If you want to manage your business or different employees in Notion have a look at the following list of curated Notion Templates for freelancers and small businesses:
5 best Freelancer Templates for Notion that will make your work easier
Projects
This dashboard helps you to manage projects. I like how you can use the kanban board to visualize the status of the project.
However, it would be great if it was possible to connect the project dashboard to the task manager since most tasks are linked to a specific project.
Schedule
Schedule is a calendar view that serves as a weekly reminder for repeating events. Notion is still not really able to handle repeating tasks. Using this view can help you to stay reminded about events that happen every week like going to the gym on a specific day of the week.
Habits to Goal
Finally, this dashboard allows you to create goals and specify habits you need to do to accomplish a given goal.
The dashboard only allows you to check accomplished goals but not much more.
But in my opinion, it is really important to get daily feedback when developing new habits, therefore I would add a simple habit database for this dashboard, which would allow you to daily check your progress.
How easy is it to navigate this Notion template?
The navigation and usability of this template are pretty good. As mentioned in the beginning, I highly like the aesthetics. Some of the guides could explain the functionalities better. Still, in almost all cases it is easy to figure it out yourself.
How does the Cockpit Life OS work on Mobile?
Mobile is not the biggest strength of Notion. Still, this template works fairly well on mobile devices, also because it is not relying on overcomplicated workflows.
Aesthetics: How good is the Cockpit Life OS looking. Could the creator beautify it more?
In my opinion, the looks of this template are pretty good. As mentioned before, I love the scie-fi look of the starting page. Plus, every workspace has its own Icon. Overall this template comes with a solid minimalist look, which most people will like.
For whom is it a good Notion template?
The target group of the Life Cockpit OS are users who are fairly new to Notion and want to have a simple system that helps them organize various areas of their life.
For more advanced users some of the dashboards might be too simple. However, Nandu is probably right in keeping it easy and not making the mistake of overcomplicating his Notion dashboards.
Would I use the Notion template?
I can imagine using some parts of the template like the “Schedule†dashboard or the “Journal†area. For Note keeping and task or project management, I would stick to the systems I have created in the last year by myself.
Ratings
- Usability 4/5
- Creativity 3.5/5
- Aesthetics 4.5/5
Overall Rating for the Cockpit Life OS 4/5
Buy this Template on Gumroad
More Notion Template reviews