Make Work-Life Balance Easier and Never Miss Fun Events!
Use free online tech tools to capture activities you want to do, gauge interest from friends, and track what activities you have done.
With more people getting vaccinated leading to COVID-19 positivity rates decreasing (at least in some parts of the country), people are able to engage in activities like going to the theater and eating at restaurants safely by following safety protocols. Finding activities for recreation is critical for maintaining a strong work-life balance and mental health. However, the return to these pre-pandemic social activities can be overwhelming to keep track of and the chance of forgetting an event you want to do is high. You don’t want to make trying to have fun become an overwhelming chore especially if you are a Type A planner who prefers planned events over spontaneous adventures.
Using the free tech tools Notion and Google Drive, you can create a system that you can:
- Keep track of activities you want to do
- Manage who is interested in attending activities with you
- Organize ticket purchases
- Document and analyze the activities you have attended
Use Notion to Create a Thought Catcher
Notion is a free tool for individuals (collaborative group use does require a paid subscription). Notion combines elements of documents, tables, and workflows to be a powerful, customizable tool. Create a thought catcher where you can quickly jot down events you want to go to.
Notion allows you to different columns, filters, and views of the data to best meet your needs. In the sample thought catcher, the user has the following columns:
- Activity- Title of the activity
- Type- What kind of activity is it (musical, play, concert, etc)
- Date
- Venue
- Website
- Status- This allows the user to see if they have notified people of this event, if a data has been selected, if tickets have been bought, etc.
- Who is interested- As people respond expressing their interest, their names go in this column so communication can be sent to this subset
The user has also created different views of the board. The default view is to remove shows that the user has attended or was unable to attend.
Track Your Data
Use a Google Sheet to track what shows you have attended. Using formulas allows you to create a summary sheet that provides quick analysis. Add columns like venue, location, rating to really make the summary sheet valuable.