How to use technology to optimise every part of your life

00:00So when I turned 40 in 2008, I was 320 pounds. I was chain smoking. I was on all sorts of antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills. It was overwhelming, I'll be honest with you. And it was hard because, you know, becoming 40 and having, you know, I was relatively successful at work, but I had a lot of things that just weren't going well. And it dawned on me one day when looking through my internet history, I think I was probably clearing it so I didn't get in trouble for something. Why don't I know as much about me as my browser? So this idea came to me in 2008 that I would write a little code that would take any time I picked up my phone, logged into my browser, sent an email, wrote a document, anything I did, it would take that data and move it someplace where I could see it.

00:41So this is step one, right, to autonomy, finding yourself. You're listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast brought to you by Web Profits, a fully integrated end-to-end specialist digital marketing agency that helps challenge your brands drive extraordinary performance in a complex and fragmented digital landscape. If you like this episode, please do us a favor and share it with at least one person who you think will get value from it. And I know there's a ton of podcasts out there. So thank you for taking the time to listen to this one today. Now let's get into it. Today, we're talking with Chris Dancy, the world's most connected person.

01:20And when I say connected, I'm not talking about his personal networks. He's referred to as a mindful cyborg, and he's the author of the book, Don't Unplug. Today, we'll be talking about how to use technology to optimize every part of your life. And just quickly, before we get started, make sure to go ahead and hit that subscribe button so that you get the latest episodes as soon as they're released. Now, let's get into it. Welcome, Chris. Hi, Alex. hey um let's just jump straight in and talk about technology um because i think that's the first thing that we need to discuss right and what do you say to people say that we are too connected

01:55and i say too in um quotation marks um too connected and that we should be disconnected more you know my book is called don't unplug so i might be a little biased the reality is in 2021 2021, 2022, 2030, when you're listening to this, we're more connected than we were the year before. So there's no going back. I believe what we need to talk about when we talk about being disconnected is being autonomous. So when most people say I need time to be disconnected, I think what they

02:26really mean is I need time to be autonomous. I need time to feel like I'm making my own decisions. Okay. And I'm thinking about, no, no, no, no, no, this is good. But what about like, Like the best example is social media, right? And with social media, that seems to be the scapegoat for technology that, you know, with AI, social media, the data collection, the privacy rights, you know, that seems to be the big concern of our generation, right?

02:58Is that, you know, what is happening with social media and is this changing the world in not a good way? Yeah. Yeah. So let me share something real quick, Alex. So this is my social media intimacy stack. And basically, when I think about social media and people talking about overly being connected, oftentimes what they really mean is the way that people have access to them feels intrusive. A lot of times when they're talking about privacy. So when I meet with people, whether it's be a friend or a new acquaintance or something like that, you and I are just getting to know each other,

03:30I usually send them kind of an overview of how I like to connect. So think of being connected as dating, right? You might have a different way of dating than I do, but for me, dating looks like this. It starts off with let's hang out in some kind of ephemeral app, like a story app or something like that. It moves on to let's talk about maybe the music we listen to, maybe some of our political opinions in real time, maybe what we're doing for work, maybe the people we hang out with, types of people we date, dating circles, maybe how we treat our bodies and ultimately how we treat our genetics. So that hopefully gives you a really good idea of when I think about being overly connected

04:04to all these services, I think the services have kind of taken the place of the silos we used to put our physical lives into. But unlike our physical lives, Alex, because you and I are probably over 30, right? I know I am. Those physical silos didn't follow us into the digital world. And what people are noticing now is this pulling because they're completely accessible everywhere. and that's different than being too connected. Okay. That's a good point to start with, right? Because the other side of it is that

04:35because we're soon going to get into like the 700 apps, sensors, technologies, which you use, Airtables and all that, right? But I just wanted to really start that conversation quickly because I know that's going to be the first objection that people have, right? The second part is that when you're connected, that we're going to get to in a minute, your data is being stored in somebody else's cloud. Is that right? Like, is that a good phrase? And if so, what do you say to the privacy conversation that people might have around that?

05:08Yeah. And again, this is totally legitimate. I think if we go back again to the 80s, I was born in 1968. But if we go back to the 70s, 80s and 90s, our data was stored in a lot of systems back then too. And it took a massive legislation and countries around the world to free up patient medical records, to free up financial records, all these other sorts of things. So I personally don't subscribe to any type of digital dualism where it's different because it's online than it's offline. I do think it seems scarier now because a lot of our data is housed in these corporations that is accessible by other people.

05:43When your medical records were locked up at a hospital and your birth certificate was locked up at the court department and your bank statements are locked up at the bank, it was different. You knew where to go. You knew who to talk to and you knew what the document looked like. Okay, I need this piece of paper. It doesn't feel that way now. And we're generating so much data. So I do think that there's a legitimate concern for people to have around the concept of privacy. But often I like to say, do you really mean privacy or do you mean safety? Because if you're talking about safety, I think that's a conversation we can unpack. Privacy as a concept didn't exist before 100

06:16years ago, won't exist in 10 years. So how we function and how we communicate with each other comes back to that word I started with, autonomy. Are you autonomous in your digital spaces? And I hate to sound nuanced and creepy, but this show is about empowering people not to feel overwhelmed, empowering them to take control of their lives and empowering them to think about what is it I want that's in this digital space that I have in the physical and vice versa. And so just, could you just quickly explain what you mean by autonomous?

06:47Yeah. Because it can mean a lot of things, you know? Yes. No, and it's weird because I just recently started using that term. I mean, I've used it my whole life, but in relationship to technology, I think a lot of people right now don't feel in control of their own lives. I think they don't feel in control of their technology and they don't feel in control of their decision making. And a lot of that comes from most of the time we're making decisions within technology. The technology is kind of making the decisions for us and we don't really see it in any type of elegant way.

07:21We just know that things are suggested to us, right? You go pick up your phone, right? There is a suggestion. I like to show people, I have this little chart I drew for an event once. You know, if you think about your decision-making being the black and the artificial intelligence being the red, right now we're at about a 60-40 split with how much information and decision-making we're making if you actually were to measure it on yourself. You know, your calendar drives a lot, but your calendar sometimes will make suggestions to you. Your phone will tell you to take a break. your watch until you get up. I mean, everyone from moms to kids to business people are using

07:55their devices to kind of drive these turn by turn directions. But you have to remember, when you insert your life into technology, it takes a lot to make sure that some other system doesn't nudge you in another direction, right? Even your phone will dim if it's too dark in a room so it doesn't blind your eyes. So when I say autonomy, it's weird. I just started using that concept, but I think it's important because I think what we're feeling isn't overly connected, but underly autonomous. Got it. And so just to clarify, just for myself and hopefully the listeners as well. So by autonomy, it's like you using the technology for how you want to use it,

08:30not letting the AI algorithms for some other company that is maybe kind of optimizing on other things that are not what you want. Is that what you mean? That's a perfect way. I'll give you a really straightforward example. On Twitter, you can actually tell Twitter, show me my Twitter feed in chronological order. By default, it doesn't do that, right? It shows you to you like, what's best? You know, what's the most interesting thing you want? There's no autonomy in that, right? Jack Dorsey's running your life. Jack Dorsey's running your attention. Facebook just last week came out

09:04with tools to allow you to reorder your newsfeed because of a lot of things happening in Australia with news and starts of the world with other parts of the world with misinformation. So autonomy can be as simple as you setting your interface to show you things or as bold as you saying to your phone, I don't want you to dim. I don't want you to listen. I'm going to put tape on my camera. All these, there's a spectrum of it, but I think the way you put it was probably the most important, easiest to understand. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. I think that keyword autonomous is going to be like the foundation of this discussion, right? Because I don't want people thinking

09:36we're just going to basically upload ourselves into everybody else's cloud we're actually going to be using technology to improve our lives that's like the focus of this discussion anyway so let's go straight to your setup now right like in the intro i said that you're the most connected man on earth um and that's a quote i think from mashable because you're featured there because you're not connected through networks you're connected through technology your website talks about there's over 700 sensors, apps, applications, and so on. So can you just talk through quickly

10:07your setup? Yeah. Can I just give you a two minute background on how I ended up here in 2021 with this moniker? Yes, please. So when I turned 40 in 2008, I was 320 pounds. I was chain smoking. I was on all sorts of antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills. It was overwhelming. I'll be honest with And just for the listeners out there of the audio podcast, he is not 320 pounds anymore. He's very much in shape.

10:39Yeah, I'm very much in shape. And it was hard because, you know, becoming 40 and having, you know, I was relatively successful at work, but I had a lot of things that just weren't going well. And it dawned on me one day when looking through my internet history, I think I was probably clearing it. So I didn't get in trouble for something. Why don't I know as much about me as my browser? So this idea came to me in 2008 that I would write a little code that would take any time I picked up my phone, logged into my browser, sent an email, wrote a document, anything I did, it would take that data and move it someplace where I could see it.

11:10So this is step one, right, to autonomy, finding yourself, right? It wasn't until about 2012, 2013, I was at a conference and there was a person sitting behind me and they were a writer. I didn't know it. He saw my calendar. All these appointments were automatically being created. He was like, what is happening on your calendar? I'm like, it's a script. Anytime I do anything with technology or anytime anyone does anything to me, like someone likes something on Facebook, it updates my calendar. He said, why? I said, I need to know what's going on in my life. And you would have thought I was speaking like another language, right? And we didn't have all the tools we had today, like the screen time to tell you what you

11:44were doing. But he was fascinated by this. So literally within a month or two, I was being interviewed by Bloomberg and that was 2013. Then I was in Wired. The Mashable thing didn't happen until 2014. Cover of Business Week in 2014. It was just so rapidly what happened. And the first person ever used most anything was actually the BBC. And they called me the most surveilled person in the world. It wasn't until I think it was Mashable or someone else changed it to Connected.

12:14And then ever since then, Google's owned my life as far as my terms. But what does that mean today? All right. So is that an okay background? Yeah, that's a great background. Yeah. But just to confirm, you started by putting, create a script that anytime something happened, it updated your calendar. So I'm assuming your calendar was very busy. Thousands of appointments. And if you just Google Chris Dancy's calendar, it's thousands of appointments every single day. And at one point I color coded them so I could make more sense. So days where I had behaviors

12:45that weren't as aligned with where I wanted to be, those were in red, behaviors were in green. So, you know, it started making sense to me. And, you know, in Google, you can have multiple calendars. You can have a personal calendar. You can have a business calendar. So I just had lots of calendars on this Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like everything got put into a bucket. It made sense to me. Nowadays, when, you know, I do a lot of talks at universities, I do a lot of, I consult for a lot of big businesses, everyone from Bear to Google. People look at it and go, of course, why wouldn't you do that? And the other thing about calendars is they're universally understandable.

13:17Alex, I could share my calendar with you right now and you'd tell me exactly what type of person I am. Right. So, you know, doctors want to know how you spend your time. Well, it's in your calendar. Right. So that evolved 2012, 2013, 2014 to like sensors, like all of these different sensors, like respiration sensors, sensors that measure electricity in your arm, sensors that measure when you're talking, what you're saying, blood pressure sensors, right? sensors for actually checking your blood sugar pulse oxen right everyone's talking about pulse oxen now in the age of covid right well i've been on pulse oxen myself just hundreds and hundreds

13:51and hundreds of sensors but what i did in 2013 was i started counting how many things are watching me and i say sensors devices applications and services because they're different right you can have a device a phone with lots of sensors okay lots of sensors in there you can have an application that talks to a lot of services. Microsoft Word talks to the Microsoft service to host your documents. So right away, just using your phone to type a letter on Word, you're into eight things. Now that usually be like, what do you mean? Well, if you're talking to Word, you're talking to Word Cloud, you're using Apple, Apple's iOS.

14:24Inside that, you've actually got the accelerometer watching when you're walking. You just got the ambient light sensor watching how bright it is. You've got the sound sensor, which is, you know, and to them watches now, you're not going to read your phone anymore, checking for these sorts of things. So when I started calculating it, God, one of the earliest numbers was like 700 things. And any day, 700 things were watching me or on me or keeping track of things, writing to my calendar. Today, that number is tens of thousands of things, right? And by the way, that's not me, that's most people. Oh, so tens of thousands of things are tracking people already. Most people every single day, right?

14:57Once you pull in- What are some examples of that just quickly? You know, so what are some examples of things that- Yeah, so let's break it down so it's easier because it's easier to put these kinds of numbers in buckets. So basically you've got biological things watching you. So there's all sensors in your phone that tracks the biology of things. The phones do sleep now by default, Android, iPhone. You've got behavioral things like screen time, simple things like that, spending, credit cards, et cetera. And then environmental things, right? Now, on top of that kind of personal stack, environmental, biological, behavioral, you've got a societal stack.

15:29So you've got things like commerce, traffic cams, civic sensors and data and demographics. And then on top of that, you've got, besides local, you've got national. And then, of course, you've got global, you know, everything from air quality to, you know, carbon emissions, right? So that kind of pyramid of data is huge. And when we think about it, a lot of times people get like, oh, my gosh, where would I even start? And I go, calm down. Like you asked for it all. So I'm gonna give you it all right now.

16:00Let's just be simple. Let's start with something simple. Your steps, that goes in a biological bucket. Your screen time, that goes in a behavioral bucket. Your spending, that goes in a behavioral bucket. You're not sleeping well. That could be the temperature and humidity, light and sound in your house. That goes in an environment bucket. So it's starting to make sense. I've got diagrams for this sort of thing too. Yeah, yeah, man. This is good. So when I teach, like, you know, I do a lot of stuff for a lot of universities. I teach a lot of doctors, actually. I teach a class to teach if you have a patient who's unresponsive and you've got a phone you can get into, how to kind of basically do an autopsy on what that phone's been doing.

16:37And people just start to get it. They start to slowly get, oh, that's my life. But remember, because it's been put together for you, like iOS and Android, they put your life together for you. They came with certain default apps. But back in the day, these default apps were simple. Like the browser was a default app. That's all you had to worry about in 1995. Which browser did you pick? Then when I was like, okay, well, which email client and which browser? Okay, which email, which client? You know what I mean? So it kind of slowed you about today, which entertainment provider, which TV provider,

17:08you know, which automobile provider. I mean, your phones are linked to our cars in full time. Tesla's nothing but a phone on wheels, right? So I think I was a little bit early to the game and figuring out how these systems work together. But for me, it just makes sense. and I try to help people understand their lives, especially when it comes to business and personal, because there's this balance. Like, well, what, you know, are you doing enough of this? Sometimes health goes out the window and then your relationships fall off the train and, you know, your business falls apart and then your friends leave, you know?

17:38So it's like, it's a lot of systems there. Okay, and we're going to get to a few of those. And there's a few comments that you post that you just said, which I'd like to unpack. But quickly, you record everything into something called the air tables, right? So could you just explain to people that don't understand actually how Airtables work, what they are and why you use them? Yeah. So historically, as we just mentioned, all my data was in my Google calendar for the longest time. But then in 2014, 2015, I moved over to an aggregator system called Gyroscope.

18:12This is a book from Gyroscope. And what it would do is it takes similar information I was put in Google, but it would literally keep it in their source. And this company is still around today and you can still get these books to see your life today. But what I found with gyroscope, again, like a lot of these problems was gyroscope was deciding what was important. So it's like Apple's deciding what's important to say. If you ever look at Apple Healthcare or Google Fits, like they're deciding what health things are important. Now, you can favorite some of them, but they're still deciding for you. For me in 2017, I was searching for a CRM.

18:45I was not trying to fix my data logging problems. Like, how do I fix my CRM? And I, as a small business owner, had invested in a lot of time into research into CRMs. And every time I found one, I kind of liked it just, you know, I had all the bells and whistles. But then again, it felt like somebody else's processes were being forced on me. This is how you would do CRM. This is not how I do CRM. So someone suggested I look at Airtable. What is Airtable? Well, that's the million dollar question. It's a $10 billion company with a million dollar question. In its essence, Airtable is a spreadsheet on steroids.

19:19That's the term they always say, right? Right, right. Ultimately, it looks like a spreadsheet, but unlike a spreadsheet, you can link to other spreadsheets. So imagine you've got three spreadsheets. You've got your household budget. You've got another spreadsheet of all the things you've ever bought for your house. You've got a third spreadsheet of all your credit cards. Airtable would allow you to link the thing you bought to like the credit card you use to where it lives in your house. Does that make sense? So each row in a spreadsheet isn't a row, it's a record. And I'll give you an example of this right now. So I started playing around with it for Airtable to build a simple CRM. And then I realized, wait a minute, Airtable is allowing me to externalize the values I have for my customers and my life. Why would I stop at my CRM?

20:04why wouldn't i do this for my home my family my belongings my health why wouldn't i do this for my planning why wouldn't i do this for my mental health why wouldn't i do this for my tasks my projects what and since they're all related that's when i thought to myself aha this isn't a business tool this is a life tool and i started working on it just okay so just with air table because i I haven't used it that much personally myself. How hard is it to get into, to start to use?

20:36So simple. I've got a couple of videos over on my website. I don't have any simple how-tos, but there's a bunch of simple how-tos. But I always tell people, if you've heard me speak and you'd like anything you heard, go to Airtable, get a free account, create one table for you, your spouse, and your business. Like there's usually three people in every relationship. You can add your dogs and kids in later, right? And then just put down everything you need to know. Your name, your address, make it like an emergency safety record. Honey, if anything ever happens to me, go to this air table.

21:06Everything is right there. Everything you need to know, all the phone numbers, emergency information, just build like a super driver's license. If you'd like it, then say, okay, now we know who we are. Let's start adding onto that. And I can give you a demonstration of kind of how I thought about that if you'd like. Well, yeah, sure. But we can get to that part. But then, so we start by creating a few air tables. We put some information in. it seems like based on what you're tracking, you've automated quite a lot of these, this information that goes into Airtables, right? What is the integration tools

21:40or kind of how did you integrate the data from all the different sources into Airtable? Like, is that through something like Zapier or is that something else? Yeah, I mean, again, you know, it's funny because people get so excited and I love your, I can feel you're excited about this because yeah, you know, if you, the biggest challenge with Airtable isn't automation or all the cool things you can do with it. It's like the biggest problem is you can do anything. And like everything in life, when you can do anything, you do nothing. That's just like life 101.

22:10If you can do anything, you will do nothing, right? It's only in constraints do we actually start to find our power and our autonomy. So I always tell people, if you build your air table, just like I said, you can just build a super record. I'll show you mine in a second. Of everything about you, you can start to add on to it. So automations, let's just keep this real simple. So let's just say you've now built a table for about Alex or Alex's business. Yep, simple one. You know, you want to build something really simple like automation. First thing I would do is build another table and I would call this table journal. Just something simple or interactions.

22:43I like interactions too. That table is not going to be anytime you send an email or schedule an appointment, it's going to automatically create a record. Now why? Let's talk about why. So we know Alex exists and we know he's sending emails and he's producing shows and he's he's got all sorts of things but those are all kind of interactions it's you talking out to the world most of the interactions we do digitally today are our calendar appointments and emails those are the two biggies right yep so when you do those two things they need to be linked to something well first we know they're

23:14linked to alex right if you let's say alex and web profits right maybe they're linked to web profits web profits it's not alex even though you could get confused at times they are separate Web Profits doesn't buy coffee, right? Alex buys coffee. They're separate things. You're feeling me, right? Yeah, yeah. But you got to think about it that way. A lot of entrepreneurs don't. You know, they'll try to like, you know, I'm my brand. Well, no, you're not Wonder Bread. You're a human who has a business. So let's keep them separate. Great. So now you've got this interactions table. So what's great about Airtable is there's a really simple, again, automation built right

23:46in. You just go in and say, I want to link my calendar to this Airtable. Then when you do it, it says anytime a calendar appointment's created, what do you want to do? So you just say the date created is the date of the interaction. The title is the title of the record. You know what I mean? So it's just simple mapping. You don't even need to use Zapier. You don't even need to use Zapier. Right away, you have an automation of every email you've sent and every calendar point you have, at least in a way you can sort it. Next thing you do, let's just go one step and we'll stop. No, no. Well, we'll see if we'll stop. Let's see what the next step is.

24:18So we know we've got a backward flow to Alex. Yep. And by the way, no one's ever asked me to explain this. So you might have like a real hit show on your hand. You've got an upward flow to things happening, right? Things that, to-do list software? Well, things, no, no, not that. I mean, things happen like emails and calendar moments. Oh, things, okay, cool. What are they happening to, right? So you might want to have a table called organizations because you usually send email and make appointments with businesses. now most people say well i send emails and things and schedule appointments with people yes yes we'll

24:55talk about people in a second right those people work for people right yeah and and those people move from creative care so so right away let's just say you've got an email that to chris dance you've got cmdf right so you've got a company called cmf cmfd that's my company yeah you've got a record out here for that you've got an email on this calendar appointment today i can show you ours you and me even though you didn't know you and i have the relationship coming back to you right now i might email you at some point in the future and say alex i loved when you told me about that coffee company down the street what was that that's nothing to do with web profits so right away

25:27that email comes in right so link cmft comes in and it's not linked to uh email but now it's like web profits it's linked to you yeah sure so right away you can see your life in your calendar and your three separate tables is that three separate exactly yeah simply now if you want to do you can add a people table. I have a people table because I do believe people are people, right? But people move from businesses, right? So now you've got us, I call it the entity table. You've got the interactions or journal, and then you've got an organization and a people table. From there,

26:02you literally, Alex, can do anything because your entire world starts to filter through there. Now, my system's a little bit different. I'll be honest with you. The thing I loved about my system was I had this entities table, right? Me, my spouse, everything. But I didn't want my entire life being connected to the world. I wanted my entire life connected to my values. We'll talk about those in a minute, right? And those values create moments in my life and those which are in a timeline. And from there, it's linked to the tasks journal,

26:32remember we talked about journal, projects and goals. And then I reach out to the organizations and people. So someone sent it to me, an email would come in through this bucket. They're either an inbox. It's something I'm going to record because I need to remember it. It's going to turn into a task. That task could be linked to a project. If it's significant enough, it's tied to a timeline. But does it get to me? Well, if it doesn't meet one of my five values, it doesn't. So we'll talk more about this in a second because I think from a business standpoint, this might be a little bit too much for some people. But I find a lot of business people today are starting to struggle with, how am I spending my time?

27:03And I always say, if you haven't said what your values are, you won't spend your time. It'll be spent for you. Yeah, no. And I think, you know, just on that point about, you know, this podcast, this podcast is about growth, right? And the biggest part of growth is to grow personally as well as professionally. And I think the hardest part of growth is personal growth because it's easy to improve skill. It's harder to improve you. So this is a really good conversation to understand who you are, right? And so I think coming back to your point before, you're putting everything into spreadsheets, sorry, into tables, right?

27:38is for the people table. Is it to see who you're interacting with the most and how you're interacting with them? Is that what it's for? That could be a perfect, what could be one of the things you could want to know? Like, and then what type of people do I interact with friends more than I interact with business associates? Do I interact with people who are local to me versus people who are remote to me? How about this? When you create an interaction, you could have a little field in there. It's just, how are you feeling right now? Who are the people that don't make me feel good when I talk to them. And, and so these tables, which you're creating

28:14around people, this is just the data. And then from that, you can create, create other tables that will pull any information out of them. And that's to your point earlier of it can do anything. And so you got to be careful because all of a sudden all you're doing is you just have a big, say for example look at a contact list that could be just as far as that is yeah taken right so so okay so is there a way which you would advise for people to maybe start to um to brainstorm

28:47the things that they want to figure out because it feels like you know the kind of person i am like i love tech software stuff i'm just gonna go i'm gonna log in on a creative table and then I'm just going to start it. And then it's just going to not get to the point potentially. But if I think about what's important to me and then I try, like, is there a process there which you can talk to about? How do you figure that out? Yeah. So I was saying I do at every conference I speak at and every business talk, we don't know how to measure what we care about. So we care

29:22about what we measure and you just nailed it. Right. And this is the thing is people don't think about what's important, right? Because we already know if everything's important, we'll never get anything done, right? And that's why mine actually has this buffer between like all the world that I deal with and my values. Because it's got like, no, I can't. Alex, I cannot spend any more time with people who don't respect and care and do the work that I care about. It's just not going to happen. I'd rather go broke. And, you know, spiritually broke is worse than financially

29:53broke. So, you know, when you get started, you know, you want to be really small in this. And I always tell people just make one process work. I wouldn't do calendar and email to companies. I would do calendar for one thing and then just get that one thing. Perfect. Just 100%. So you can understand one thing about it. Right. But right now, let's be honest, Alex, we spent all our time, like all these emails and all these appointments, you know, and then bills and then this app for this and this service for that. And where's the password for this and what's happened? I got,

30:26just got a pop up for that. And, oh, something's happening in the news and it's enough to make you feel less than autonomous. Definitely. What's interesting on that point just quickly. So I just, you're good. You're good. I don't think we're going to get to this point again, but I was really heavily advised to watch, to watch, I think, what was it called? The social experiment. um it was the netflix show about how kind of ai social the social dilemma sorry the social dilemma forgive me um the social dilemma and the one thing i got out of that at the end of it because i was

30:59like look i understand how they all work yep look i get it there's algorithms there's ads there's things the people but at the end of it i turned off all my notifications for my social media and since that point just that one little thing i've now become more autonomous right and i didn't even know how good their algorithms were until I turned it off. And I was like, wait a minute, I haven't checked Instagram for two days. Whereas before checking it every 15 minutes. So anyway, that was just a quick example of like, you know, how you can kind of just, you don't even know. You don't, you don't even, you don't, you don't. And, and I'm not a big fan of the social dilemma,

31:34you know, on Netflix. I'll be honest with you. The people who put it together, where some of the Silicon Valley's pioneers, the people who actually got us into this hot mess. And I think it's rich that we're going to give more attention to the people who stole our attention so they can sell us back more attention solutions. Yeah, that's what I was saying as well. It was so funny that this thing called Netflix, which has an algorithm that's doing the exact same thing, is telling us that the algorithms that are doing this thing that we should be concerned about. The CEO of Netflix has actually said his biggest competitor is not Disney. It's sleep. It's probably true.

32:06Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I love that you watch that show. And again, even though I'm not a fan of it, I think it's important that people watch it. The problem I find with shows like The Social Dilemma, and we'll get back in a second, is a lot of fear mongering. Not a lot of actual steps you can do. And what that creates is families who then have dinner and parents say, everybody hide your phones. We're having a real dinner. really like really how does that work mom you haven't actually had a real conversation with

32:37me in a decade you know dad hasn't actually cared about what i was doing in in months you know i mean so i think we need to have a final way to like live with technology yeah yeah that exemplifies what we care about and that's kind of my whole that's my thing that's why i like mindful cyborg instead of most connected man yeah yeah good one let's get back to your to the previous conversation about air table yeah air table yeah so we're starting with calendars we're starting with all the things that are going on um and we're choosing with the one thing and we're going to get one

33:08process and make it really simple yep yeah and i always think you know if you don't have like one process use you could use a process a little bit more complex but something everyone has to do which is bill pay right i can show you my bill basis everybody has to pay bills right you know your bills are on a calendar some of them happen automatically some of them you do manually you know they're paid with. That's a really simple system and error table to build, right? You've got the same thing. You've got your entity. You've got you. You've got your interaction. When did you pay the bill or when was the bill paid for you? But you have a new table called, and you also have your company table. Who's the bill going to? But now you've got a new table

33:41called bill. And bills have bill types. Is it a monthly bill? Is it an annual bill? Is it a reoccurring bill? Is it a one-time bill? Is it a debt? Is it a liability? Is it an expense? All those types of things, right? Now you can, I always tell people, keep your bill simple at the start. If you just do that, you'll start to see, this is pretty, pretty neat. I can kind of see my spending in a way I could never see in a spreadsheet kind of, you know, I could never see the spending through this lens. Think about it this way. When the pandemic hit, a lot of businesses took,

34:13took it on the chin, right? Where do you start cutting, right? If I told you tomorrow, Alex, I need you to cut your expenses by 50%, you know, a lot of people like, I have, what? what? Like what? Right now, someone told me, I need you, Chris, I need you to cut your expenses by $3.31. I could do it like that. I know what I use, what's the most important. So it's really about coming back and saying, what do you want to see? And I think expenses is a really fun one. I think simple CRMs, this idea of personal CRMs is fun. A lot of people struggle with

34:43maintaining friendships, right? So just using that same system, entity, right? You, right? interaction and then a people table and just, just simple things, right? It'd be really nice if you created, if you ever had to go to court, tell me what you were doing on September the 15th, 2012. You'd be like, yep, I was here and I did this and I did that. And I've got all that. I can literally pull mine up in a book. I can literally pull mine up in a book for people, but the friend CRM is really interesting. I always say friend CRMs are fun because the same table structure,

35:15but then what you would do is you'd have a birthday column, but you'd also have a second column called the anti-Facebook birthday, which would be everybody's birthday minus one day. And what you would do is you'd send everybody a message just saying, I know your birthday's tomorrow and all your fake Facebook friends are going to be messaging you. This message is from me to you because I care. So it's about autonomy. How do you wrestle yourself back from these systems so you don't get lumped in with everyone else? you're really talking about literally tracking everything literally tracking pretty much

35:48everything which you can track which which you can track i am but i don't encourage anyone to do that because that was the other part is how much time and now you spending on reviewing the data and getting insight from it to help you change behaviors spending patterns um you know improve fitness um how long are you spending reviewing the data because you know that's the other part of it, right? Because everybody just kind of has all this coming back to the CRMs. They have all this, the CRMs with all this information in them, and yet they never look at it and they never pull

36:21the reports and they never combine the data to get proper insights. So how do you do it with all this data across so many air tables? Yeah. I mean, that's a really good point. I was actually kind of pull up an example for you that might be, you know, it's interesting. I don't know. You might think, well, that's not very interesting at all. So I actually had to just today go see a cardiologist because I've been having some, some challenges. I'm getting winded really easy when I'm exercising. Don't have any idea. It started in the middle of nowhere. I'm like, where in the

36:54heck is this coming from? I'm sure, you know, everybody's probably had that thing where like something strange has happened. So to your point, I'm not one of these people that does look at the data. Like, you know, people are saying, well, you don't go back and look at the data. No, I don't. First of all, it'll stress me out. Okay. But the most important thing about all this data is you have to have it when you need it. Right? So I don't encourage people to go back and look at it. So what I did, what I had to do was this doctor wanted to see me and he had like all these forms. So what I did was I ran a report in Airtable. You're looking at it. that just pulled out my medications, what I was taking, when things happened in my life,

37:29a text history of my life, my questions for the doctor, some data about my biological behavior over the last two years, my dietary trends over the last two years, and my exercise trends over the last two years. So he could see things changing in real time. Now, I would go crazy if I had to look at this every day, but to go to a new cardiologist who's never seen me as a 53-year-old man and have him try to figure me out in the five minutes he gives me in between all these patients, it's not going to happen.

38:00I need him to see me as a life that actually is understandable. And, you know, being able to have access to the data that I just showed you, to print it out and show to someone is life-changing. Got it. My CPA, let's talk about my CPA. You're your accountant. My accountant and I, when I, you know, So I'll just be honest with you. I don't have the best relationship with my accountant. She has this problem where she can't remember that I asked her to do things or she'll ask me to do things. So what did I need to do? I had to create a system where my CPA could log in and be able to see when the last time

38:35we spoke, what I did for her, and what she's doing for me. So what you're looking at now is my CPA portal. Here's the messaging section. So I can see the last time I spoke to anyone there, color-coded by who spoke when, the documents they need to download, statements, if they have questions for me, all the transactions, right? So this allows me to create a level of accountability with that SAM data, with my CPA, with my lawyer, with my customers. Everybody gets put into a system that they have to be accountable with. If I let my life live in my inbox and live in my calendar, it's not my life.

39:10Let's jump then to the business side of things. How do you use this then from a business perspective to stay across things, you know? So it's coming out of your calendar, coming out of your emails. It's going into Airtable. Feels like Airtable needs its own separate list of things to look at Airtable for, right? So how do you- We actually have that. It's called an ERD. Yeah, it's in Airtable. It's called an ERD or an Entity Relationship Diagram. There is, you're a little bit further along than you think. Yeah, no. Well, like I've been in the productivity game for a while. I just haven't been in the Airtable game for a while.

39:41And definitely haven't been in the tracking everything in my life table. I get it. for that long. Right. But how do you like, so, okay, well, one second, let's just step back. So can you talk about the ERD? Like, is that, like, is there a central kind of air table to all the other air tables? Yeah. So the air table ERD. So this is a, this is a really simple ERD. So this is an ERD in my air table. And this probably makes a lot of sense to people who are watching the show. If you're listening, I'll describe it to you. But what I did was I took down the different tables in my air table, right? We talked about entities, that's me, right? And

40:15I've put them in logical sections. So assets, liabilities, revenue, planning, record keeping, action tables, and reflection tables. These are things every entrepreneur does instantly, right? I've got my business, right? My CRM, you'll see that in here, right? My references is a whole separate table. The way the ERD works for me is you could look at Airtable, but the problem with Airtable is it looks like a bunch of tables, right? So if I'm sitting here looking at all of these tables in our table, there's an entities table of values, table timeline, all the things

40:46we talked about. That's confusing. But an ERD gives you a top down view. So if I want to come in and look at all the companies that I'm working with, I could just click on companies that would take me into that record. If I wanted to see all my current customers, I could click on CRM. So an ERD stands for Entity Relationship Diagram, and it shows you how your life, what if I was an actual database person, I'd be how your database, but I said life because your life as a database is linked together. And I think a lot of productivity people get into saving time and not creating value. And for me, productivity is different than valutivity. And I like this

41:22concept of valutivity because I think, yeah, you can do this kind of stuff well. Like once you get your productivity game together, you end up saying, okay, well now I want my health game to be really good. And once you get your health game together, you go, okay, now I've got my health game on my productivity game. I want to get my values. I want to spend more time with my spouse. And then after you do that, you go to this thing where you say, okay, now I've done all these values. Now I really want to get my kind of, you know, world game together, be nature centered. Now, if you get that together, like, I think I'm going to bring on a Buddhist, you know, what we call basically the Jack Dorsey stack, right? So what are the domains you kind of go through in real time?

41:54And for me, being able to map that in a database so that I can say, today I'm value centered, tomorrow I'm nature centered. I meditated this morning, I was being transcendent centered. I got a bunch of work done that's productivity-centered. So from a business standpoint, if you're a business person, again, start simple. Just build a CRM. But remember that CRM could be partitioned to do some for your personal life too. And if you're married, I can't tell you how many families struggle with these same concepts. Where is the money going? Where are we spending our time? When is this appointment?

42:26My air table on a calendar looks amazing because right away we can just say, show me all the things that we did that were centered around our values, right? I keep talking about these values, right? So for me, as I've mentioned to you before, everything in my air table gets filtered through a value, right? So these are my values, right? Health is number one, right? And we actually as a family defined health, like what is health? How do we define it? And that's usually your relationship with your body and your mind. Home is number two. It's your relationship with the people that make you feel safe. It's not a physical place. Home is not a

43:00place. It's the P right. This can be your spouse. This can be your kids. It can be your pets. It can be your business partner, right? Family, family is the people you would get on a plane for, right? Usually it could be friends. It can be neighbors, but that's not traditional. This is the way I define these values. Work is what you do to create value. Financial values is what you do with the resources that come from the first four and services, what you do to kind of serve your legacy. So if you see mine right away, you can see I've got tasks, journals, and bills. So my entire life, those are kind of the three things I measure.

43:31What am I doing tasks? How are things being done to me? Journals. And then what's being generated from that? Bills and things. Now, I could show you this. I could turn on more fields. I could turn on. I could show you goals by value. I could show you projects by value. I could show you all sorts of things. But at the highest level, I just want to know this, right? So what I need people to start thinking about is when you think about all the things you're connected to and all the things you're trying to manage, if you haven't actually said, well, what are they serving? If they're just serving your bank account

44:04in an occasional vacation, you're not autonomous, right? You should be able to say my bills, my money, my money out every month goes out to health, home, family, financial, and service. You should be that simple. You don't need mortgage and expense. You can have all that, But at the top level, it's not important. My time, my tasks are going to health, home, financial, service, right? People contacting me. This podcast, right, for me is service, right? It's like something I'm doing because I want to support you, web profits, and Justin, the gentleman contacted me. So I think it's a new way of kind of looking at our lives, but I think it's one we all desperately need to start to explore.

44:47agreed um i'm just a lot of the things which which are online yeah so say for example calendar emails all that type of stuff seems to be kind of easy to connect into air tables right what about steps what about food what about like your calories what about you know like the health sort of things that are on your phone maybe on your watch it could be in the aura ring or however you say that company's name right um i try struggle too yeah but they're all in these different places right how do you get them into the air tables because this is going to be a thing which

45:21um well it's definitely a question i have you know so yeah yeah get them in like is that a manual process again so you're yeah you're back you're back where we started when we talked about biological behavioral and environmental right in the core of big buckets you're there right yeah you and i need to make a whole class on those alex i can feel it right yeah yeah so so yeah so So your biological stuff, let's give me 30 seconds and we'll come to biological in a second. Let's go to behavioral a second and do an easy one. Spending money. Okay. Spending money. We talked about bills earlier.

45:52Airtable through a couple of different services. One that I use, another one called, I think it's financial Airtable or FinTable, I think it's what they call it. I actually use something completely different. Imports all of your transactions. So you basically, just like you would with QuickBooks, you basically linked all your credits. So all your bills are coming and all your money you're spending is in. So there are ways to, again, get it in instantly. But AirTable does not connect to your Fitbit. It will not talk to your Apple Watch, right? There's a reason Tim Cook and a lot of these companies are guarding kind of the hyper-biological

46:25stuff because that's the gold, right? That's the gold. That report I just showed you, that's what everyone wants, right? Because you want to be able to walk into your doctor and say, this is what's wrong with me, right? It's different than going to your CPA or your tax account and saying, this is how I spent my money. You're saying, I'm about to die. Fix me. luckily today there are applications that will export health kit and google fit right uh i i've used two of them uh i i can i can you know share the the the titles with you but the health kit one

46:56will actually create a csv of your biological data and create a link to it so you literally could API call your, your biological data if you wanted. Yeah. So let me tell you why I wouldn't you create a lot of biological data every day. It's almost unmanageable like steps is easy. So what I always encourage people to do is just run a report once a month and get your steps weekly and just use that. You don't need your daily steps. I mean, I have my daily, I have my

47:28moment by moment steps on my moment by moment, calories, all the things you do. I've got all of it right but it all lives in android or apple and it's nice thing is it's in a nice place for you if you were to pull it in like they create it it would be too much so i just tell people just you can get these things sent to you once a month as a csv and they just import like that to air table you don't have csv being comma separated value i never know how geeky yeah i never know how geeky i'm sounding is fine yeah yeah yeah cool the sql kind of queries maybe that's a bit advanced but

47:58but um csv is fine okay so and same stuff same stuff with you know anything you can't get that way you can do through zapier zapier we'll talk to a lot of these systems and then other you know i'm not sure if you if it's popular but a lot of people use and i use ifttt uh if this than that yeah if this than that and they do a lot of home systems so the sensors around my house where we haven't even gotten to home stuff right the rain sensors the light sensors the the sonos i gotta make sure that doesn't come on here in a minute uh all these things also is data you can pull in and start to monitor them, right?

48:29Your electric bill, like how many kilowatts per month you use, how much water do you use? How much data is the internet companies saying use? Was that data tied to a month where you watched a lot of movies? Did you, did a lot of movies actually come from a service that you don't think you're getting much value from and how much family time was tied to that? Now I'm going a little fast and deep because I know- No, no, no, this is perfect. This is perfect. This is perfect. This is great. But I do want people to start to go again. For me, it's always been really important to be able to say, and look my family in the eye, look my friends in the eye. And when I'm with them and go, I am really with you because I don't need to worry about anything else.

49:03Now you can do that without all this technology, but the challenge is we live in 2021. It might not work out real well. Yeah. Tech around us. And that's why I started with tech because, you know, and I love how you, you like differentiated it, you know, with autonomy, right? Because you want to control the information. The information is powerful. But at the moment, most people have no idea what information is out there about them that other companies know a lot more than them.

49:36And so, you know, this conversation, this approach, this kind of thinking is to take that kind of to take that control back and start to really see who you are through the things which you're doing, you know, because I think a lot of people, they work on autopilot. They're not autonomous. They're on autopilot. And it's a very, very different thing. You know, Alex, you are you were slaying this. Right. And I think that's just so important for people to really understand.

50:07I mean, I'm not advocating people become cyborgs. They already are cyborgs. I'm advocating for them to become mindful cyborgs. Right. And what people don't understand about what's happening is I've got this great graphic I created is if we just take my lifespan and how much technology has changed in just this past 50 years, we've gone to from a lot of space between mainframes with card punches and physical media we had to deal with to like the 80s and 90s when it was just kind of you and maybe a keyboard

50:38and a PC to like the 2010s where it's you touching everything and that knows what you're doing and how you're feeling to the 2020s where you literally have this stuff on your body and in your ears. This is the last decade. We are living in that because by 2030, most people are wearing and having this stuff just soaking in it, their homes, their cities and everything. So, you know, I don't want to scare people, but like, get as interested in you as Mark Zuckerberg is. Get as interested in you as Tim Cook. Get as interested in you as your government,

51:13because no one is coming to save you. And the thing is, is that you don't need to be saved. you just need to know what to do to really get the data and to be able to see it and then to be able to say, okay, cool. Now what do I do with this information? You know? And again, you know, your point is to get one system. I can get it perfect. Just one. Keep it. Yeah. Right. Because like in your example of the doctor thing, like if you went to look at the data seven years later and you're like,

51:44damn it, I didn't put that one thing in that seven years of corrupted data. Right. And so if you're going to be tracking it, if you're going to be having all these sensors connected, make sure they're sending the right, correct information to the right places, because as soon as it's gone, it's gone. Right. We can even keep it simpler than the health sensors. Everybody has to see a doctor anyway. You should be logging your visits to your doctor. Most doctors have digital health care records they don't even look at. If you think you don't look at your data, it'd really shock you to know your doctor doesn't look at your data, even when he's with you. I mean, he's got access to it.

52:15I mean, a lot of this got started for me in 2004. I went to my doctor. I was really struggling. I was quite obese. You know, I was like, I'm not at my height yet. And I remember my doctor had a chart this thick. I've got pictures of it. And I'd ask him questions. I'm like, well, don't you remember a couple of years ago? He goes, yeah, I think it's here or something. And I thought to myself, what? And I remember, you remember Evernote, right? I've been on Evernote forever. I remember like 2006, 2007, I took all like 30 years of medical records at that point, had them scanned and digitized and pulled into Evernote. So when I would start to see my doctor, I would literally look up my chart why we were

52:46in meetings together. I was literally fired. Like the guy could not take me anymore. But I just thought to myself, isn't this kind of your job? Or are you just here to like to collect the copay and check my heart and tell me that my blood pressure is high and stop smoking? Because I know that. I have a wife, right? So it's like, what are you doing? you know and but i don't want people to get overwhelmed because i get excited when i talk about this especially people like you who are interested in productivity and optimization right but at the end of the day keep it simple if it's just health records when you go to the doctor at least you know does that make sense yeah it does and i think that's a fabulous point

53:18to wrap it up um so if there's one thing that's been an hour it's been an hour it's been an hour oh my gosh i told you i told you this would go quick right um but if there's one thing that you want the listeners of this podcast to do, a site to visit, a book to buy, what would you like them to do? Gosh, just take it easy on yourself. I think the world right now is really encouraging people to be more and more optimized. And this might sound like a complete paradox coming from me, but just take it easy on yourself. There's

53:50no rush to get your entire life in an air table. There's no rush to lose another 10 pounds. Just take it easy on yourself and just, you know, most importantly, like I said, measure what you value. Don't value what is measured for you. It, it, if someone hands you a measurement and tell you it's important, it's your job to question that each and every single person alive today, talk to your kids about what's important and how to measure it. Right. If you just say to them, Hey, family time is important. It's not important. You have to tell them how to measure. We think this way it's

54:21who we are, right? Don't be afraid. And if something seems unmeasurable, call me. I'll tell you how to measure it because you, you can do it. Some of it's unorthodox. I measure non linear time, right? So it can be done. And how do people get in touch with you? Oh my goodness. Well, you can always Google most connected and like any country in the world, but seriously, my website's just chrisdancy.com. I have a nice little post on there. If you go to chrisdancy.com slash how to, it gives you like the three, the three steps. The first one is measure your time. I got a nice little app for that. Next one is get on your air table. And last

54:53one is a habit store. So basically create a place where you can share habits with other people. Cause I don't think we download apps. We download habits and people at the end of the day, they don't want to be us. They want to be like us. And that means they need to have access to the tools and systems that we use. Fabulous. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was such a great conversation because it's something I'm super passionate about. And it's an area which not many people are talking about. So again, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and we'll talk soon. Thank you, Alex. Thanks for listening to the Growth Manifesto

55:23podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes. For more episodes, please visit growthmanifesto.com forward slash podcast. And if you need help driving growth for your company, please get in touch with us at webprofits.io.