The gist: How I use Notion to manage chronic illness without spending all my spoons on health admin
Having a chronic illness comes with so many extras you have to pay attention to.
When you're first diagnosed or still undiagnosed, you might not know what your body's limits are (that's where spoon theory and broken battery theory come in), what makes things better or worse, or what triggers flare-ups.
Even once you've figured out your patterns, you still need to keep track of them long-term.
And that's just the symptom side.
On top of that, there's the chronic illness admin: scheduling appointments with multiple doctors, preparing for visits, following up on what they said, managing prescriptions (and the inevitable pharmacy hiccups), sorting out billing issues, dealing with insurance...I could go on...
Trying to manage it all without a system means spending your already limited energy on tedious, draining admin.
That's why I built myself a chronic illness management hub to keep all health-related information in one place.
About my chronic illness management dashboard
When I first started managing my chronic illness seriously, I used a notebook and binder system. (Matching patterns, because I'm me. 
)
Having a dedicated space for everything spoonie-related meant I could spot patterns and find information way more easily.
I could see that certain foods triggered my IBS symptoms, or that my energy crashes always happened after specific activities. I could look back at appointment notes and remember what my gastroenterologist said three months ago.
The format doesn't really matter. It can be a notebook, a binder, or something digital. But since Notion is where most of my systems live, that's where this chronic illness dashboard is, too.
Track and manage your chronic illness symptoms
Understand your limits, learn your triggers, and manage your self-care with this Notion template to help you manage your chronic illness to reduce flare-ups and burnouts.
How I use Notion to manage my chronic illness
Here are some of the core elements of my dashboard, all designed to save me as much time and energy as possible.
Tracking symptoms & health data
My daily journal database includes a health section where I track everything like sleep, symptoms, and triggers.
This is where all my day-to-day health information goes:
- How much sleep I got
- How active I was/how many steps I took
- How much water I drank
- What symptoms I experienced
- What medications/treatments I used
- What triggers I encountered
- What moods and emotions I felt
- An overall "health rating" for the day on a scale of 1-10
Having all this data in one place lets me spot correlations between symptoms and triggers, track how frequently I'm flaring up, identify what treatments actually work, and whatever else I need the data for.
Organizing provider info
I also have a database for all the doctors, pharmacies, and specialists I'm currently seeing. It has basic info like their address and contact information, so I don't need to constantly Google them and sort through a bunch of results, but that's just the start.
It also holds less obvious information that saves me way more time and frustration.
For example, now that so many medical providers use different apps and websites for test results and scheduling appointments, I note which obscurely named app on my phone is for which doctor.
And if I can schedule with them on ZocDoc, I include a direct link to their profile, so I can book a visit quickly.
Tracking doctors appointments
That provider database connects to an appointments database, where I can see the last time I visited each provider and whether I'm overdue for a check-up.
I also use it to prep for appointments and take notes during them.
I'll jot down questions or symptoms I want to bring up beforehand, then reference those notes when I'm actually sitting in the exam room. Afterwards, I add what the doctor said, any next steps, prescriptions, etc.
With the amount of health anxiety and PTSD I'm usually experiencing at a stressful medical appointment, there's no way I could trust my brain to remember what I wanted to ask or what they said in response.
Before I started doing this, I would regularly get home from an appointment and realize I had no idea what I was supposed to do next, leading to embarrassing calls to their offices the next day going, "uh, what'd you say again?"
Managing health projects and tasks
Finally, I use the dashboard for the ongoing planning and project management side of my health.
That means:
- My goals database includes specific health goals (like goals around my average daily steps, sleep, and hydration)
- There's a "health care" project in my projects database where I dump tasks and notes to process during my weekly review
- I have recurring tasks for ongoing routines (like prescription refills - one task to call it in, another a week later to pick it up)
- I have a health-focused "Maybe/Someday" list (a la the Getting Things Done methodology) called "health mysteries to solve"
- There's tags for different symptoms and conditions in my resources database for saving research related to my diagnoses.
This way, managing my chronic illness becomes a proactive, ongoing practice built into my regular workflow.
Making chronic illness less overwhelming
Having these systems in place helps me avoid dropping the ball on all the admin work that comes with chronic illness.
If you're dealing with the same overwhelm, building your own chronic illness dashboard could help manage all that admin.
You can even download our free chronic illness tracking template to get started.
Track and manage your chronic illness symptoms
Understand your limits, learn your triggers, and manage your self-care with this Notion template to help you manage your chronic illness to reduce flare-ups and burnouts.