My boyfriend and I both work in the data realm, though in very different capacities. Our vacation planning spreadsheets are absolutely legendary thanks to our combined talents. So, when I looked at him a few weeks ago and asked if we could make a proper spreadsheet of activities we want to do this fall, things rapidly proliferated.
To give ourselves a solid foundation, we made a shared space in Notion. If you haven’t used Notion before, please immediately go to their website and discover all of that magic. The blog post can wait.
Anyway, now that you’ve been properly educated, I’ll explain what we did! First thing’s first, our initials are P and J. Obviously, we had to name our new creation PJ Party. Once it was created, we started with an activities database. Anything we thought might be fun got put down with very bare bones information to start – an easily understandable name, tags for what seasons we would feasibly be able to/want to do that activity, and a freeform tags column. Those tags are a dump spot for any notable features that might influence if or when we decide to do that activity.
That quickly led to a question, though. How do we want to note that we’ve done an activity? And what if we, say, go to Dollywood multiple times? (Hint, hint J) Some of these activities will be one time events, while others should show up as a suggested activity any time.
Thus, the calendar was born.
Each activity variable had a new stored attribute added called “scheduled”. When an activity has a scheduled date added, it’ll appear in our calendar on the scheduled day and disappear from our unscheduled activities list. We have templates for activities we do often, so that we can make a scheduled version and maintain an empty variant in our unscheduled activity list.
Of course, this again opened up more possibilities – what if we wanted to look back at an activity we’ve done? We can do that now that we’ve stored activity dates!
Censoring the faces for my boyfriend’s privacy, here’s an example of the memories page! I added cover photos to anything we got pics of and we put little notes about what we’ve done to get us started. As we do more fun stuff, the memories page will grow!
Some pages I haven’t shown are a few reference tables for various restaurants we like, recipes we’d like to try, board games we love, and movies/TV shows we want to watch! The activities DB has a reference attribute that relates to each of these tables, so that when we tag a dinner date we can include the restaurant we chose. We chose that format rather than a drop-down or tag because now we have an info sheet for each reference item including how many times it’s been referenced in activities, relevant links, pictures of menus, etc.
Another page we included was a profile subpage for both of us. This includes things you’d like your partner to know but can’t reasonably expect somebody to always remember off the top of their head – clothing sizes, comfort foods, favorite brands, links to online wishlists, etc. I am SO glad we have that going into fall! I can do my Christmas shopping early now.
Last but not least, we have the Hub.
This is our landing page with widgets linking to some of our DB views! The most important, of course, is our upcoming activities. I am SO excited for that birds of prey event we’re going to. We might get to hold an owl! But I digress. The hub also includes some cute pics of Pepper and Pesto, plus a randomized view of ten memories! Randomizing isn’t the easiest in notion, but I used this excellent walkthrough from Matthias Franke. Now, we have ten random memory photos pop up in that column every time the page reloads. It’s sweet to look at, and I know as we add more memories it’ll be a fun surprise to remember small moments from previous months!
We’re sure that as life changes and our relationship grows into new phases, we’ll have need for this database in other ways. I would love to take more time to explore available templates people recommend, or even build out new pages as I find inspiration!
Paige Cleary 