The first Notion template I ever downloaded was a "Second Brain" — twenty-two interlinked databases, six dashboards, and a colour-coded productivity calendar that, within a week, made me dread opening my laptop. I deleted it on a Sunday afternoon at the kitchen table, with the window open onto the small balcony where my grandmother's potted shiso was just starting to come back. What I wanted, I realised, was not a second brain. It was a quieter version of the first one.
What follows is a roundup of the Notion templates I have actually kept — five of them, plus two I keep recommending to readers — chosen because they suit a slower kind of life. They are not productivity systems in the Silicon Valley sense. They are digital hosts for old practices: writing things down, looking at the month before it begins, noticing what one read and what one ate and what one spent. If you have read my kakeibo Notion template essay, you already know the shape of the argument. This piece extends it to the rest of the workspace.
If you would like to see the workspace I keep myself, you can try the Notion template I use here →. It is the one all of the pieces below eventually settle inside.
What "slow living" actually asks of a tool
Most of what is sold under the slow-living banner online is, frankly, an aesthetic — linen aprons, beige kitchens, a particular kind of light through a particular kind of window. I am not against any of that. But the practice underneath, the part worth borrowing, is much simpler. Slow living is the deliberate reduction of inputs and the deliberate increase of attention to what remains. It is fewer things, more carefully attended.
A Notion template suited to that life has to do something unusual for software: it has to resist growing. The default direction of a digital workspace is accretion. More databases, more views, more automations. A slow-living template has to make the empty page feel like a feature, not an oversight. The templates below all share this quality. None of them try to manage your whole life. Each one does one thing, slowly, well.
Cal Newport's recent book on Slow Productivity made the point that knowledge work has confused activity with accomplishment for at least two decades. Notion, used naively, is the worst-case version of that confusion — an infinite canvas for performative organisation. Used carefully, it can be the opposite. The difference is almost entirely in the templates one chooses.
1. The daily reset page
The single most useful page in my workspace is also the smallest. It is one page, opened every morning with coffee, with four prompts and nothing else: what is today's one thing, what am I avoiding, what would make today feel honest, and what am I grateful for. There is no database behind it. Each day overwrites the last. The previous day's answers are archived to a single rolling page I almost never re-read.
This is the template I would recommend first, to anyone, before any other. It takes less than five minutes. It is the digital equivalent of sitting at the table for a moment before standing up to begin the day. The reason it works is that it is not trying to be a journal. A journal asks you to write meaningfully; a daily reset only asks you to be honest for ninety seconds. Almost anyone can do that.
If you want a version with a little more structure, my own daily reset is built into the workspace linked above. But honestly — four headings on a blank page is enough. The template is the discipline of opening it.
2. The monthly reflection
This is the practice I borrowed wholesale from kakeibo. At the end of every month, I open one page and answer four questions in writing. For finances they are Motoko Hani's original four, which I covered in the four questions of kakeibo. For the rest of life I use a parallel set: what did I make, what did I let go of, what surprised me, and what do I want less of next month.
The Notion template is almost embarrassingly simple — a database with one entry per month, four long-text fields, and a gallery view that lets me scroll back through previous months as if flipping through a notebook. The compounding only becomes visible at month six. By month twelve, the database becomes the most valuable single artifact in my workspace. I know readers who have nothing else in Notion but this page, and they are using Notion correctly.
Why a database, not a page per month
The temptation is to make each month a standalone page. Resist it. A database lets you filter, compare, and re-read across months — which is where the practice's compounding lives. The monthly reflection is not the writing; it is the re-reading.
3. The kakeibo ledger
I have written about this one at length already, so I will be brief. The kakeibo template is the financial half of the workspace — a transaction database, four traditional categories, and a monthly reflection that mirrors the one above. If you are new to the practice, the starter guide and the template walkthrough are the right places to begin.
What I will add here, in the slow-living context: kakeibo is the template that taught me what "slow" should mean. Not slower spending, necessarily. Slower noticing. The friction of writing each purchase down is not a flaw. It is the entire mechanism. A kakeibo template that makes logging frictionless has misunderstood the practice.
4. The reading log
I read perhaps thirty books a year. For a long time I tried to be honest about that number — I would log everything in Goodreads, rate it out of five stars, contribute to whatever the algorithm wanted me to contribute to. I stopped two years ago. What replaced it is a Notion database with three fields per book: title, one sentence about why I picked it up, and one sentence about what stayed. There are no ratings. There is no public anything.
The "what stayed" field is the one that earns the template its place in my workspace. Six months after I have finished a book, what I remember of it is almost never what I underlined. It is one image, one argument, one turn of phrase. Forcing myself to name that one thing, in writing, is the difference between a book I read and a book that did anything to me.
If you want a template like this, you do not need to download one. Three columns in any database tool will do. I would gently suggest using Notion specifically because the reading log lives next to the monthly reflection in a way that, eventually, starts to talk to itself — you notice that the books that "stayed" tend to cluster around what you wrote about in your reflections that month. That cross-reference is impossible to set up on purpose, and emerges naturally only when both practices live in the same workspace.
5. The garden (or kitchen) journal
This is the most idiosyncratic recommendation in the list. I keep a small Notion database for the balcony garden — what is planted, when, what worked, what didn't. Six pots of herbs, two small vegetables in season, the inherited shiso. It takes about ten minutes a month to maintain.
The point is not the data. The point is that the act of keeping a record of something living forces you to attend to it. I have killed fewer plants since I started the database, and I am under no illusion that this is because Notion has agronomic insight. It is because I look at the balcony differently when I know I will write about it on Sunday.
If you do not garden, the same template works for a kitchen log — what you cooked, what was in season, what you would do differently. My grandmother kept a small notebook of seasonal recipes alongside her kakeibo for fifty years. The Notion version is, again, just a digital host for an old practice.
6. The single inbox
One database. One field: a long-text note. One view: sorted by date, descending. Everything that arrives during the day — an idea, a quote from a book, a task I am not ready to schedule yet, a phrase I overheard on the train — goes here, briefly, and gets sorted later. Or, more often, never gets sorted, and quietly fades into irrelevance, which is also a useful outcome.
The slow-living version of an inbox is one that you trust enough to forget into. Most productivity templates make the inbox the most stressful part of the workspace, with red flags and overdue counters and "process to zero" rituals borrowed from email. The version I keep has none of that. It is a notebook page, on a desk, that I glance at when I sit down. Most of what is on it is not important. The few things that are will keep showing up, in different words, until I act on them. That is a more honest signal than a processing queue.
7. The annual review page
This is the one template I would add to any workspace that is missing it. A single Notion page, opened once a year, that pulls in all twelve monthly reflections, all twelve kakeibo summaries, the reading log for the year, and a blank text area at the top for the annual answers to the same four questions used monthly.
The annual review is where the slow-living workspace pays its compounding dividend. Reading twelve months of your own honest answers in one sitting is a different experience from reading any one of them in isolation. You see patterns that were invisible in the moment. You see the small purchases that turned out to matter and the large ones that didn't. You see the books that actually changed something. You see, often, that the year you remember and the year you wrote down are not quite the same year, and the written one is closer to the truth.
I write more about the structure of the annual review in the digital kakeibo planner guide, but the essential idea is portable: the review page should pull in, not duplicate. The whole point is that it is a window onto what you already wrote, not a fresh round of writing.
What I deliberately do not have in my workspace
For balance, a short list of things I have tried and removed.
A habit tracker. The dopamine of ticking boxes is real, but it consistently produced behaviour optimised for the tracker rather than for me. The kakeibo monthly reflection asks better questions than any habit grid I have used.
A "second brain" of clipped articles. Reading more does not make you wiser. Re-reading the same few things more carefully sometimes does. I now keep a small folder of about thirty essays I return to, and that is enough.
A daily journal database. The daily reset replaced this. The journal had pages I never re-read, and the obligation became a quiet weight. The reset has no obligation past the day itself.
A goals dashboard. I tried several variations. The monthly reflection makes goals legible without needing a separate page for them. If a goal does not survive being written about for two consecutive months, it was not a goal.
How to assemble these into one workspace without it growing
If you adopt all seven of the templates above, you will end up with five databases (monthly reflection, kakeibo transactions, reading log, garden, inbox) and two standalone pages (daily reset, annual review). That is the entire workspace. Mine has been roughly that size for two years.
The discipline is in not adding more. Every six months I do what I describe in the upcoming workspace reset essay — an end-of-year-style koromogae for the digital workspace, modeled on the Japanese seasonal wardrobe change. Anything that has not been opened in those six months gets archived. Anything I find myself maintaining out of habit rather than use gets the same treatment. The workspace stays small because I weed it, not because I am disciplined about adding.
If you would like the workspace I keep, with all seven templates already assembled, you can download it here →. It is on Notion's free plan and will stay there. I have no intention of building a paid version.
One last note on slowness
The reason I keep a Notion workspace at all, after years of resisting digital tools in favour of my grandmother's paper habits, is that Notion turned out to be the only software I have used that does not punish me for being slow. It does not send notifications. It does not gamify use. It does not, by default, surface anything I did not ask to see. That is a low bar, and almost no other tool clears it.
A slow-living workspace is built from templates that share that quality — quiet by default, useful when opened, invisible when not. The seven above are the ones I have kept. If you find one or two that fit your life, that is more than enough. I write occasional follow-ups to this essay in the Mindful Yen Substack when readers send me their own variations, and I would be glad to read yours.
Start with the daily reset. Add the monthly reflection in the second month. Add the rest only when the first two have become genuinely habitual. The workspace will assemble itself from there.